Playboy Tours the Hottest Spots in Paris

Paris is a lady with a wicked past. Toulouse-Lautrec knew her in a gayer day. His inspired posters and paintings captured the color and excitement of the Moulin Rouge, Casino de Paris, and Folies Begére.

She's a more respectable lady now, but at night, in the gay places Lautrec knew and loved, she still raises her skirts and kicks her heels in a very naughty dance.

The Bold paintings and posters of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec keep alive the after-dark places of Paris in the 1800s. He knew them well. A twisted dwarf of a man, Lautrec lived by night, losing himself in the gaiety of the dance halls, the sensual pleasures of the houses of sin. His art is filled with the entertainers, the prostitutes, and the patrons of these places. Lautrec is most famous for his brilliant lithographs of the Moulin Rouge and Folies Begére. The commercial posters of sixty years ago are fine art today.

No camera can hope to capture the spirit of the city as Lautrec's paintings did. These photographs do offer some of the flavor of present-day Paris, however, and serve to contrast the old with the new.

Paris is still a naughty city. Though the houses of prostitution are now legally closed, sex still walks her streets. And if the night spots seem more conservative, there are compensations. The shows are far more imaginative and the girls are displayed in far less than was possible in Lautrec's time. In fact, a strategically placed flower or two is all that is reqiured to appease Paris propriety and the gendarmes.

Nudity is really the biggest feature of the modern Paris night club. Sometimes it's displayed in very fancy feathers -- the Folies Begére actually hangs a girl from the ceiling in a giant bird cage; sometimes it's displayed on a tiny stage surrounded by tables, very much like an American show lounge.

A club called Adam and Eve headlines an intimate dance with near-nude members of both sexes -- strictly taboo in the U.S.

Le Ciel displays undressed angels in surroundings supposed to represent heaven; Bal Tabarin offers a rather unbiblical tableau of Eve, the serpent, and the apple (Adam doesn't even rate an appearance in this version).

You can actually have your nakedness in almost any setting: the El Djazair is arabian, with belly dancers inviting customers to tuck money into their costumes; Le Gypsy, a Left Bank cabaret, offers a gypsy motif; a spot called The Crazy Horse Saloon features western music and nude cowgirls.

The most famous night club in Paris is still the Folies Begére and here the spectacular staging, the beautiful costumes and imaginative scenerey might be expected to overshadow mere nakedness.

But the souvenirs at the Folies Begére are tiny nude dolls and all the spectacular splendor, the props, the lights, the sets, are simply used to make the naked female figure more attractive and exciting. Voluptuous beauties turn into candelabra, brightly plumed birds, trees, and sea nymphs.

The annual production costs for the Folies shows run to hundreds of thousands of dollars, but the most popular attraction is a single, dusky skinned beauty named Yvonne Menard, billed simply, and quite correctly, as "The most beautiful nude in Paris."

The Folies Begere is as famous today as it was in the time of Toulouse-Lautrec, but it has an attraction now that would put its 1800 girls to shame. Her name is Yvonne Menard and she is really something to see.

Sometimes she appears on stage in a feathered headdress, sometimes an elaborate chandelier effect made of glass, and in one number she wears a full-length pair of jodhpurs. But the costume the paying customers like best is in the Borgia bath number, where she has nothing on at all -- fore or aft -- except a tiny, diamond-shaped patch of beads.

It takes more than mere nakedness, though, to explain the terrific hold Yvonne exerts over her audiences. As song writer Georges Tabet puts it, "Yvonne is the crystallization of Paris. She's got a 'petit quelque chose' -- a little 'something' -- that you have to be born with. Chevalier, he has it in his smile. Edith Piaf has it in her voice. This one -- she has it all over!"