Stags for Fun and Profit

Men, is your club, lodge or fraternity treasury low? Is the rent overdue? The liquor bill unpaid? Do you have to loot the Sick and Welfare Fund to buy clean pinochle decks? Or borrow from the Burial Account to get all the brothers in the burlesque on Friday nights?

To ask such a question is to answer it. The treasury is even lower than Billy Graham's opinion of King Farouk.

Of course, there are the usual methods of raising money. You can increase the dues, but this won't help immediately (in fact, never) because all the members are in arrears and intend to stay that way. You can throw a dance, but with the hundred bucks for the band and all, you won't clear much. You can put on a bingo or a bridge party. You can raffle off a turkey. Or, like the old White-chapel Club in Chicago, you can run a candidate for mayor and solicit campaign funds.

Pretty small potatoes, fellows. In fact, no potatoes at all – peanuts.

Now listen – you want a sure-fire money-maker, one that combines maximum pleasure, maximum profit, and low, low overhead? All right – throw a stag party!

Stag parties, commonly known as "Stags," are get-togethers designed to appeal to red-blooded men. Women are generally excluded from them, at least as spectators, although some sneaky, unprincipled females have been known to dress up in men's clothes and crash the gate.

Now, there is a mistaken impression that Stags are somehow low-down, boorish, and vulgar. Not at all. The institution of the Stag is older than the Daughters of the American Revolution and more cultural than Rimsky-Korsakov or the Venerable Bede. Indeed, the very name "Stag" is of classical derivation, coming from the hirco-cervus, or goat-stag of the Dionysian Mysteries. The Roman festival of the Saturnalia, held at the completion of the spring sowing, was a big stag party, involving wine, wild dancing, "flying" ("coarse and indecent chaff") and various orgiastic rites intended to propitiate the Priapic gods.

The anthropologists point out that the stag party is found in every culture from the most primitive to the most highly developed. Among the Tarahumares of southern Mexico, the men are too bashful to enforce their matrimonial rights without the stimulation of a stag party plus tesvino (corn liquor), so without the Stags there would be no Tarahumares.

Obviously, the Stag has such a distinguished lineage that it should be presented only in public libraries and museums of natural history, but most police officers are too illiterate to realize this.

There are many different varieties of stag parties, appealing to all types of masculine taste, but in general they fall into four classifications:

1. The runabout-four cylinder-forty-miles-to-the-gallon-Volkswagen Stag. Otherwise known as The Smoker, this is a perfectly legal little fraud to which you can invite your Sunday School teacher, philosophy professor, or shop steward. You soak everybody a buck and don't give 'em a damn thing, not even a cigarette. They bring their own smokes and provide their own entertainment, grouping around the piano and bellowing male-type songs about the tables down at Morey's, the sweethearts of Sigma Chi, and the halls of Montezuma. Late in the evening, when the strong cigars are beginning to work, some of the boys may swap Liberace jokes and the singers will probably tee off on the smell above Cayuga's waters and how they took the ice off the corpse and put it on the beer. The older men will remember the mademoiselle from Armentieres for a few verses. Some cut-up may pass around a couple of those little cartoon books featuring Tillie the Toiler or Maggie and Jiggs in unusual but agreeable situations. And that's all. No refreshments. No nothing. Get fifty or a (continued on page 51) Stags For Fun (continued from page 17) hundred guys to a Smoker and you got fifty or a hundred bucks, clear as a Muggsy Spanier high-D.

2. The six cylinder-club-sedan-that-won-the-Mobilgas-Economy-Run Stag. A money-maker favored by the less exclusive clubs and fraternities, this old reliable is really a big poker or dice game with the house copping every fourth pot, plus an "exotic" movie. This latter may feature a bevy of bare bags lumbering over the rocks in the Hollywood Hills and looking coy, or it may be one of the new-type burlesque movies like "French Peep Show" or "Striporama" that are allowed to run in skidrow scratch-houses in states untroubled by movie censorship. You can lease one of these epics for fifteen dollars a night from most any film rental outfit. There are dozens of them listed in the classified sections of the photography magazines. With this job you charge two dollars a head and provide beer and sandwiches. The film is just a come-on; you make it on the gambling. Good profit but don't invite your pastor.

3.The six cylinder-sports-convertible-with-nylon-top-foglights-white-sidewall-tires-and-overdrive Stag. A real winner, and illegal as hell so don't get caught. A class item. By invitation only, at three to five dollars per head. You put up the blackout curtains for this one. A couple of slot machines brought in by your local crime syndicate representative on a percentage basis catch stray quarters and are fixed so the jackpots won't come down if you hit them with a battery of bazookas.

But the big feature of this snazzy number is the entertainment, the show. You don't book this out of the back of any photography magazine. You go to one of those seedy theatrical agencies in the low-rent district, run by a guy in a checked suit whose office is in his hat and whose hat is on his head at all times. This character books strippers, exotics and talking women for the burly wheels and peel joints. You tell him what you want and he picks up the phone, dials a number and says: "Hello, Ida? Honey, you wanna work a Stag out in Meadville next Saturday?" If Ida says yes, he also calls Toots, Millie, Brandy, Choo-Choo and Gert. That's your show – six femmes who start where Lily St. Cyr leaves off, plus a union piano-player. An hour of wiggle and waggle by Ida, Toots, Millie, Brandy, Choo-Choo and Gert in the altogether and sex has been set back a hundred years. But the customers enjoy it, the gals are twenty-five dollars richer (less the agent's ten percent) and your treasury is able to sit up and take a little nourishment. Toots, Ida and company have absorbed a few playful pinches and pats, but their hides are protected by Jergen's lotion and Workmen's Compensation and they don't give a damn anyway. By one A.M. they are taking the bus back to hubby and kids and your House Committee is able to play the horses again. A ten-spot to the cop on the beat is usually derigueur in this type of Stag, and it's also good policy to have your alderman present.

4. The eight cylinder-overhead-valve deluxe-synchro-mesh-drive-with-panther-skin-upholstery-and-built-in-bar Stag. This is the most. It's too powerful for your own premises; you have to hire a hall, preferably one over or behind a saloon in the industrial district. Usually your Stag will attract so many customers to the saloon that the proprietor will let you have the hall for free. With this deluxe job you give the boys both live entertainment and movies. And what live entertainment! What movies! The guests won't know whether it's a show or a nervous breakdown. It's so subversive you book it through your local cell of the Communist Party.

This super-duper number starts where the other models end. It features talented performers of both sexes and generally kicks off with half an hour of movies that were filmed with a good deal of somebody's imagination, but leave nothing to yours. These films, so hot they practically melt the emulsion, present 57 varieties of boudoir activity in clinical detail with the damnedest camera angles you ever saw. The manufacture of such peppy productions is a $300,000,000-a-year business in Hollywood and New York. One of the best of them stars a now-famous movie queen who garnered her early dramatic experience in this vigorous medium. Her present, well-heeled boy friend is offering large sums of money for the film, trying to get it out of circulation. Another popular series was torn off in a hurry by a star witness in the Jelke case to take advantage of the newspaper publicity. It features the lady and a West 49th Street bartender.

When the movies are finished, the live talent takes over. These flesh-and-blood thespians go through much of the same activity that has just been enjoyed on the silver screen, but they have the added in-person appeal that has always prompted the discriminating to prefer legitimate theatre to film fare. In addition, they often offer an innovation made popular by television, audience participation.

This model stag party is admittedly hazardous. In the first place, it's as illegal as nude bathing in Rockefeller Center. In the second place, you'll need a physician in attendance for the customers with weak tickers.

For a look at this job, plus a chance to live dangerously, you soak the guests anywhere from five to twenty – enough to cover bribes, bail bonds, and doctor's bills. But you still make a mint.

Note: This type Stag is not recommended for lodges or fraternal organizations without insurance benefits. It may send some of the customers into psychoanalysis.

In addition to the classical and modern varieties of Stags, there are many in-between types that are not easy to classify. Back in March, 1902, for instance, one of the most aristocratic Stags in history was staged at the old Everleigh Club in Chicago. It was (concluded on page 59) Stags for fun (continued from page 51) thrown in honor of Prince Henry of Prussia. The prince had come to this country to get away from the prim Prussian court and raise a little discreet hell. The committee in charge of the prince's visit got wind of his real reason for coming to this country, so they arranged this wing-ding in Chicago from which the press was barred. The Everleigh Club, run by two sisters, Minna and Ida Everleigh, was the most elaborate bordello in the world; it had an art gallery, a library, a grand ball room, and fountains that spouted perfume, plus two orchestras for dancing and mood music, and a kitchen staff of twenty-five. Each room had a $650 gold spittoon, and the beds were inlaid with marble and fitted with specially-built mattresses and springs. Its phone number, Calumet 412, was known the world over. It was the unofficial Chicago Press Club, and more often than not the unofficial Chicago City Hall. Its presence in Chicago was responsible for the initiation of a special 17-hour train service between New York and the Windy City.

The Everleigh sisters went all out for the royal visitor, putting on a banquet and show that featured girls in fawnskins celebrating the rites of Dionysius-Zagreus, tearing at a paper bull with their teeth and devouring hunks of raw meat. During the uproar a coryphee lost her slipper and a man promptly found it, filled it with champagne, and drank from it, thus initiating a custom that was to symbolize mutual affection and respect between the sexes everywhere.

A contemporary Stag of classical proportions took place not long ago in Las Vegas. There, the opening of a glittering new casino on the Strip was celebrated publicly with the usual hoopla speeches by politicos, eyelash-fluttering by noted film beauties, and the blare of big name bands. But the real celebration, held at midnight before an allmale audience of international gamblers, Nevada politicians and other pillars of society, was a no-holds-barred Stag staged by a famous New York and Hollywood nightclub impresario and starring another blonde movie queen who is famous for her madcap antics. She was "supported" by a flock of starlets and a couple of Hollywood stuntmen. Unlike most Stags, this one was beautifully staged and costumed and the performance was accompanied by an orchestra. Every erotic nuance in the lexicon of love was explored; the orgy lasted all night.

Wholesome as all this may sound to any healthy, right-thinking citizen, there are still some among us whose view of such things is decidedly dim. As one example out of many, let us consider the blazing Stag that was tossed in a hall upstairs over a Milwaukee tavern recently and drew about five hundred cash customers at $5.00 a head. This was a professional job put on by guys who make stag shows their business, and it had both pix and live entertainment. But a sore-head competitor tipped the cops and they hit the place – thirty sheriff's police, five FBI men, seven Morals Squad officers, and two city detectives. Twenty-one arrests were made and 247 writs issued charging patronage of a disorderly house. Also, several guys got banged up diving out of windows. One of the dolls working the show was shoved into the paddy-wagon wearing only a necklace. Since many of those in attendance were prominent citizens (lawyers, businessmen, etc.) there was a lot of sweating going on until it was decided not to print the names of those receiving writs in the local press.

So there it is, men. If your organization has no money for such indispensables as new Sauter-Finegan records or a house subscription to Playboy, why fool around? Why not take the time tested, traditional, fool-proof way? Why not throw a Stag?

On second thought, better try selling garden seeds.