Topless

The very word has tonnage to it. It has, in its bare three years of life, escalated from contentious fad to accepted institution, from dernier cri to de rigueur, a lasting if litigated part of the American landscape, an uncertain icon. Uncertain because topless still shocks self-appointed guardians of the public weal, outrages liquor licensers, scandalizes wives and girlfriends, sends strippers to the poorhouse. It also mesmerizes males, young or old, married or single, from Miami to Malibu. But one thing is sure: In a decade of evanescent fashions, its success remains an authentic force in shaping, for better or worse, the manners and mores of what the Eastern taste makers call--with a shadow of envy--The New Life Out There. For only along the golden littoral of the far Western reaches of the U.S. is it ogled openly and almost hourly in all its undulating, aureate glory; but then the circumpacific belt is where most of the world's earthquakes have occurred--though this one is unlikely to be recorded on the Richter scale.

All the same, the seismic waves are there; and they are, like the opulent Aphrodites who cause them, wild and wondrous things. There are San Francisco's Yvonne d'Angers and Carol Doda, reigning queens of the topless scene, galvanic purveyors of vicarious sex; Tosha and Tara, goddesses of Serpentes, who use reptiles seven feet long to enhance their art; and Gay Spiegelman, topless twirler and mother of eight--count 'em--eight children; and shy, ladylike Eugenia from the groves of academe in Berkeley; and baby-faced Paula The Tiger Lady, stalked by Alberto of the tight white leather pants; and Junoesque Negro danseuses like the voluptuous Teddy Bear; and, in both Los Angeles and San Francisco, more than a hundred bosomy bonbons who bump and sashay among urbane luncheoneers; and Jackie who digs motorcycles; and Samantha, "Queen of the Campfire Girls," who bathes her tawny limbs with fire ("a great depilatory," says a Stanford grad student); and gorgeous gold-laméed girls in the world's only "All Girl Topless Orchestra," whose repertoire can be appreciated even by the deaf; and topless freaks whose twin assets are as mismatched as Mutt and Jeff; and, for obvious reasons, the two young things who threatened to go topless at The Cat House, a shoeshine stand in San Francisco, where there's still gold in them thar hills, most notably Twin Peaks.

But to begin at the beginning and the top of the topless, there was and is now Miss Carol Doda (see The Nude Discothèque, Playboy, April 1965), who has progressed from prunepicker and grape cutter in nearby Napa Valley, and from a mere 34B cup, to topless topliner of the Bay Area's Condor Club, and--thanks to the wonders of sand-based silicone--an eye-boggling 44D. Carol's known variously as the Susan B.Anthony of Topless, Electra of the Main Stem and the Mount Rush-more of North Beach. As she puts it, "Everything is A.D.--after Doda." It is. "Topless was born June 22, 1964, at the Condor," boasts Big Davey Rosenberg, the 360-pound promoter who modestly bills himself as "The World's Greatest Press Agent." On that fateful morning, Big Davey spotted a picture in the San Francisco Chronicle of a four-and-a-half-year-old girl modeling Rudi Gernreich's new topless bathing suit. "I went to Gino del Prete and said, 'Hey, boss, how'd you like to pack your club tomorrow night? Let the Doda wear this!' Gino said, 'You're nuts, but go ahead. Business is bad. We got nothing to lose but our license.' We called the police captain to see if we could go topless. He said, 'Go ahead, and if you have any problems we'll let you know.' President Johnson came to town that day and we couldn't get any press. But Station KSFO blasted away for us and we packed 'em in." The rest is recorded history.

The next day the Off Broadway (down the hill) and Big Al's (up the street) went topless, and shortly thereafter so did some 350 bars and beaneries from Seattle to Baja. But Carol and the Condor got most of the play. "I went out and got Carol involved in anything," says Big Davey. "Anything they ever thought up in Hollywood, I topped it. I even had Carol chasing the mayor down the street. He wouldn't talk to her, but he's all right." (Mayor Shelley has indirectly befriended topless, regularly declaring that "Fun is part of our city's heritage.")

Carol drew such diverse types as Gypsy Rose Lee and Myrna Loy, publisher Nelson Doubleday, Jr., and TV's Walter Cronkite; and, during the Republican National Convention, G.O.P. hotbloods Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and Barry Goldwater, Jr. And the cry of the Condor became: "In your heart, you know she's ripe."

"Actually," says Carol, "I'm schizophrenic. I've got all kinds of problems--but I'm not nervous and the problem isn't sexual with me." Does this mean she has men to match her mountains? Not at all, says Carol. "I don't have time for sex. And I don't take silicone shots with the horse needle anymore--I kicked the habit." A pause, a wry crinkling of white-frosted lips, then: "Just say I'm going through a change of life." As she talks, tart-tongued and vinegary-voiced, Carol tends to maul the king's English; but for her, Britannia would surely waive the rules.

Last winter Carol attempted a change of pace, too. She opened bare and Brobdingnagian at the Silver Slipper in Las Vegas and went home in three days. "Who needs it?" she says, piqued at the desert spa for failing to appreciate both reasons for her being there. "They've got bosoms on top of bosoms in that town. There they are stripping, and I come on stripped. But San Francisco is still the best. In L.A. they wear pasties and call it topless. And in New York--even in Sacramento!--it's illegal."

When topless legality was first challenged in San Francisco, in the spring of 1965, both the Condor and the Off Broadway were raided. In court, the clubs' proprietors were accused of operating a "lewd and obscene exhibition" and of "conduct outraging public decency." But Melvin Belli, counsel for the Off Broadway, requested and won dismissal on the unique grounds that the girls had been made to incriminate themselves because they weren't told they could refuse to have their pictures taken in the clothes they were barely wearing at the time. The judge further ruled that the undraped chest, in and of itself, is not lewd, lascivious or obscene. The jury returned a verdict of not guilty. "But the courts," sighs the still-beleaguered Belli, "have discovered the human breast."

Carol's defense counsel, Harry Wainwright, no less uniquely cited the U.S. Supreme Court's decision on a case involving the Danish film A Stranger Knocks: that acts of sexual intercourse partially depicted on screen were not necessarily obscene. He also insisted that the First Àmendment (freedom of expression) applied also to conduct--to most anything, in fact, but "hard-core pornography." The judge agreed that Miss Doda's performance, "applying contemporary community standards" of the average person, was "not of prurient interest... did not violate community standards of decency," and directed the jury to acquit. In retrospect, Carol has but one complaint: "The prosecuting attorney asked if I moved my pelvis during my act. I mean, what's the use of having a pelvis if you can't move it?"

Carol has moved it in many and wondrous ways since. When the city held its first annual Crab Race on Fisherman's Wharf, she was barred from entering. Carol staged her own Crab Race at a nearby restaurant, jiggled a little, and drew more press and people than the all-wool article. But she got bounced out of Enrico's, a Paris-style café in the heart of North Beach, though she wasn't bouncing at all; and the pelvis was at parade rest. Amelio's, a front-rank Italian eatery, more agreeably asked her to put on a coat or stuff her cleavage with a napkin. "I wasn't hanging out all over the place there either," says Carol, making a moue with her Monroe mouth, as she does on stage. "I just had this low-cut dress on, you know? I mean, I got in Ernie's in a topless evening gown, and I went to a place Sinatra was singing topless, too." (Carol, not Frank.) At a recent Lions Club luncheon, one member rose recklessly to ask Carol, the guest of honor: "What's your measurements?" Carol rose, too, and before some 100 well-dressed businessmen, replied sweetly: "What's your measurement, mister?" The chairman stammered: "I th-th-think you'd better dance now, Miss Doda."

Carol has received some 10,000 letters from the boys in Vietnam and plans to answer every one--with a pulchritudinous photo, of course; and she has been voted the "Girl Most Desirable" by the First Marine Aircraft Wing, which invited her over to Danang. But, says Carol, "I don't think it would be a good idea to do topless over there. I've never had to go up against the Army, Navy or Marines." Instead, they come to her, in battalions. Said one on-leave leatherneck after catching her act: "Here, at least, there's a definite front and a definite rear."

Gypsy Rose Lee invited Carol to appear on her local TV show, and when Carol remarked, as casually as if she were talking of the weather, that she had paid nearly $1000 for her silicone injections, fellow guest Imogene Coca was speechless, but finally managed to observe philosophically: "Well, that's better than buying a new hat." Riposted Gypsy, glomming Carol's glories: "With those, you don't need a new hat. By the way," she added, "I know a girl so phony that when somebody accidentally bumps into her falsies she says, 'Ouch!'" But true to her fashion, Carol had the last word: "I wouldn't even wear pasties. That's not me. When I dance this way, I'm me. I feel it's all me. I express myself." The show, incidentally, was banned in L.A.

The undergraduates at Berkeley went into agonies and ecstasies when Carol appeared last spring--"strictly for charity"--on the steps of Sproul Hall and, bosom abob under a Batman T-shirt and hips wrestling with each other under (Cont. on page 187) Topless (continued from page 166) skintight capris, drew 20,000 goggle-eyes and the wrath of morals watchers. "A new low in spiritual degeneracy," said one. "It's satanic," cried evangelist Hubert Linsey. "It's against Scripture." But neither the students nor their tutors concurred. "I am chagrined that I wasn't able to attend the affair," said a professor of psychology. "At the time I was engaged in a fist fight with another professor over who was going to be Miss Doda's area advisor." One student fell out of an oak tree, another off a balcony, both to huzzas. "There are two things that interest people," philosophized one student, "freedom and knockers, and the most important is knockers." To prevent a stampede, Carol was hustled to a second-floor balcony, where her torso-tossing spectacle drew cheers and but one blasphemous oath: "Holy cow!"

Thus, by some voodoo known only to Doda and her "Doodabs," as columnist Herb Caen calls them, Carol gives guys the red-hots whether she is accoutered in everything or practically nothing, breakfasting at New Joe's at three a.m. in Eton jacket and Beatle haircut or up on the Condor's airborne Baldwin piano in one of her five wigs, mink lashes from I. Magnin's, $1000 topless chinchilla swimsuit, addressing her inguinal tremors and other upheavals to the swim, the jerk, the frug, the watusi, the mashed potato, the monkey, the duck and These Boots Are Made for Walkin'. Says Big Davey: "When Nancy Sinatra recorded that, I don't think she knew Carol was gonna dance to it"--any more than the conservative Baldwin Piano Company of Cincinnati knew that it would be danced on by Doda. Says Baldwin president Lucien Wulsin, with a hint of rue and resignation: "Miss Doda's performing on the Baldwin is by this time a matter of history."

If Carol belongs to the ages, she is proprietary about her perch. Her big, soft, tourmaline eyes glaze, and her doll-baby lips freeze at any mention of her chief competitor, 21-year-old Yvonne d'Angers, 44-21-36, of the Off Broadway, just a bra's throw from the Condor. Six days a week, at luncheon, dinner and supper, Yvonne--who named herself after her parents' home town of Angers, France--slips out of chic, self-made clothes into a flesh-colored crotchpiece ("A G string," she points out, "is sequined"), slithers across a backdrop of white bricks and drapes her undraped and sensuously swinging limbs onto a furry cerise chaise practically in the patrons' laps. She clearly loves her work.

"Just look," she whispers. "Don't touch," and she writhes seductively on the fur--"Did you ever slide on fur?"--and lures a ringside customer, midway through his Crab Louis, out of what is known locally as The Hot Seat, the most sought-after spot in town. "Worried about your reputation? Uh-uh, not too close." But lured by her come-hither look and crooked forefinger, he moves stealthily closer, eyes fastened on what surely must be the most amiably composed globes in the Western Hemisphere. "Take your time," sighs Yvonne, "easy." Closer still. But, miracle of miracles, he gets embarrassed, frightened even; his eyes are raised now to the level of hers and, though she puckers her lips in invitational fervor, his own come to a surprised halt a hairbreadth away, and he freezes under the spotlight. For a breathless moment, she holds him hypnotically; then she's gone, out of reach. He comes to, dazed but happy, and gets a color Polaroid picture of this tumescent toplass signed "Love Always, Yvonne." The commentator says, superfluously: "That's something you can't catch on the late show."

Yvonne undulates down the aisle and disappears into her tiny dressing room. "She walks through a thousand times and they lean away from her," says Chris Boreta, who co-bosses the boite. "Like she was a goddess. And by the time the shock wears off, she's gone. Fellows are even afraid to look up at her until she's past. Even our topless waitresses have trouble hearing what they want--they're so choked up. If a mistake is made on the drink, they don't even notice it; and if they do, they couldn't care less. They apologize."

Yvonne feels she has the answer. "When men can't have something, they're wild and fight," she says, the little-girl whisper broken by near-Oriental parenthetic titters. "But when they're this close, they melt. They're like little children. They just get scared and deessolve. Even men very strong and weeth lot of pride, you can make feel like a little monkey on a leash you can play however you want to." How does Yvonne like playing trainer? "I love it. In the beginning, I'd never been naked in front of a camera--even when I modeled for photographers, in studios and hotrod magazines--or for an audience. I was embarrassed. Now it's sort of a compliment when they stare. Because I believe people don't want to look at something ugly--though it might sound selfish coming from me. But I always look forward to it. If there's a day I say, 'Oh God, I can't go through weeth it anymore,' that's the day I should be retired."

The tweeds-and-martini set make bets they can touch her; and when one of them gets close, he pleads: "Please give me a kiss, Yvonne. I'll lose a hundred dollars if you don't." But she never does; and if they get threateningly close, Yvonne has a winning way of tipping her head back by putting one finger under her chin and rolling over, breaking the spell. Yvonne teases even during what passes for her fashion show at the club: Her beach outfit is simply see-through gossamer--"to keep the mosquitoes away and give you a tan all over." A sheer black net is "for the pass-away of the tenth husband." A Grecian chiffon, open at the chest, is "for a very modest goddess." An outfit that looks like a sexy Christmas tree evokes the P.A. announcement: "Have a ball--or two." Nobody buys, of course, but the women sometimes give her a hard time. When the commentator asked one gentleman, "See something there you like, sir?" and he replied, "Yeah, two of them," his wife led him to the door. When another man left The Hot Seat at Yvonne's beckoning, his wife screamed, "Sit down, sit down. If you get up there with that creature, I'll show the picture to our children." He got up. And one woman told her: "Your title as Miss Topless means you have no head." Yvonne just laughed her little-girl laugh.

"Why, this is a gal you'd bring home to mother," says Melvin Belli, an Off Broadway regular. "She sat down with the [brother of the] Shah of Persia here the other day and talked Persian with him and an entourage of twelve. She's got a herculean schedule, but she handles it like an angel. You have to have a French upbringing to do it as gracefully as she does." So gracefully does she do it that she has not once been molested, nor has any thorax in the place been pawed. "This place has never had a laying on of hands," says Belli. "There has been more boisterous activity at Grace Cathedral on Easter morn during the sermon on the Resurrection than here. You don't have the lady with lace drawers and dose of clap and the gentleman with handle-bar mustache peering from behind the potted palm. Look at those beautiful areolas in the spotlight--it's clean, and the human body is healthy. Even Bishop Pike says God's works should not be hidden."

But the Alcoholic Beverage Control czars do not agree; and Belli leads the continuing fight for the sartorial freedom of topless waitresses, which the ABC hopes to obliterate state-wide. "The liquor people claim the power to regulate our morals," says Belli in his gin-smooth regulation growl. "They say further that topless makes you drink more. Well, I'm going to ask the judge if seeing the chest drives his nose into the Jim Beam or Inglenook Chardonnay. I think not."

Besides, "You're safer with your clothes off," says a topless tootsie at Off Broadway, a divorcée with two children and a degree in sociology from Brooklyn College. "I set up barriers from the beginning. For instance, I call the customer 'sir.' You can't do that and expect him not to act anything but a gentleman. Most men are very nice. When they stare in their funny way or even in a nice way, it doesn't bother me. I laugh. I feel better without clothes, because the customers can't get as close--I mean, they're not as likely to. Most men don't even look when you're looking at them--they get very embarrassed when they get caught." It is an observation that is echoed interminably through all the raffish rooms in the wonderful world of topless.

One of the snazzier San Francisco rooms, the Galaxie, where the swim first breast-stroked into popularity, features great waves of bosoms, a veritable sea of mammary tsunamis engulfing the customers--yet, at the same time, artfully displayed on gilded eyries tantalizingly out of reach. Confections of nature if not perfections of art, bumping, grinding, gyrating to the desperate aspirates of "wa-ha-ha-halkin' the dog" and "ha-ha-hang on, Sloopy, hang on." Ditto at the Roaring Twenties, more fin de siècle than Twenties, but nonetheless a gorgeous, Tiffany-glassed, panel-and-plush encampment of high camp, where men roar at the topless models and willowy, billowy blondes admit to getting airsick on the red-velvet swings. And then there's Pierre's, where the bikinied waitresses are mostly Berkeley baccalaureates and the star of the show, 21-year-old Eugenia Greno, is as shy as she is sacrosciatic. In her fourth year as an art-scholarship student at Berkeley, and dating a journalism major who "has never seen the act, because he can't afford it," "Genie" uncovered to cover some debts because her job at the Cal library paid so little; and she can sit on her long dark hair when not watusiing on stage.

Genie's only problem vis-à-vis topless has been wrestling with febrile fellows when occasionally she has to hitchhike to work. Otherwise, it's just "lack of sleep. I go to school at eight, six days a week, work until two A.M. five days a week. My friends think it's funny, my going topless. They think it's great, too, because of the money. But my professors comment on my sort of slumping in class." Comments one visiting professor ogling Genie's endowments at Pierre's: "Empathy plays the key Freudian role. We project our fantasies on the girls, who become symbols of defiance and freedom."

Last June, towering Tara (40-24-37), who dances with three boa constrictors and two black indigos in what she calls "The Garden of Sin," sued to collect half a million dollars in damages from tiny Tosha (32-19-30), whom she accuses of "plagiarism, mimicry and imitation" of her snake act. Claims Tosha: "She got her snake act in San Francisco first, but I started first in San Diego." Says Tara: "The judge dismissed the suit. The bailiffs were so busy looking at us they forgot to arrest us. When we got out there on the fourth floor of City Hall [where the Superior Courts are located] and went into our acts, one of 'em said: 'Do it again!'" Aside from the fang fight, the salient fact about these two snake-sleek attractions is: Tosha's once-famed bottomless act has been banned. "I prefer bottomless," says Tosha plaintively, "because I'm real shy and you don't have to see what's going on behind you. But I'm a coward and I'm not going to get those silicone shots. I'd rather be flat and happy." In the marble corridors of City Hall, where the girls stood topless, boa-constricted and debating their lawsuit, Tosha shouted: "I got my talent from God--you got yours from silicone." "But I've got talent!" returned Tara.

Tosha, who is 22 and Chinese-Korean, yet owns the improbable real name of Pat McDonald, claims she launched topless in Portland and Sacramento. "The police were at every show checking my pasties. I made them myself. If one falls off, you get arrested; they arrested me in Sacramento. In Portland, you can't go topless now. The snakes were sort of my steppingstone out of towns like that. I'd like to see how far I can take the snakes. They are my babies. I call them my glo-worms."

Six nights a week, Tosha The Glo-Girl and Her Glo-Worms fondle one another at the Peppermint Tree, where recently Allen Case, co-star of TV's Jesse James, wandered in only to be pressed into action as judge of the nightly Amateur Topless Contest. The winner, chesty Caroline Fields, asked for Allen's autograph; but, alas, there appeared to be no paper handy, so Allen gallantly signed on what one wag called "one of the two reasons she won"--happily, with a felt pen.

It was at this same club that professional topless tootsies paraded in the upper buff recently to protest amateurs acing them out; they claimed the proprietor of the Peppermint was firing pros earning $150 and up to make room for femmes stripping free of charge. The public likes the amateurs, contends owner Al Dunbar. "The club would prefer to see us any time," contends one of the topless placard bearers. And so the fray goes on.

Back at Big Al's, where owner Victor Albert Falgiano mauls giant cigars, wears white suits with superwide lapels and carries a loaded pearl-handled gun, there are four "Gun Molls," including Stacey the Girl Girl, Gina the Bat Girl (who flaps about in the world's only topless cape) and, first and foremost, there is the embattled Tara Topless, "Originator of The Topless Snake Dance," who admits to a real name of Judith Mamou, German-Cherokee on one side, Apache-French on the other. "I don't drink; I don't smoke at work," says Tara primly. "I have two boys who go to Bible school back in Oklahoma and who live with my mother, who would have a stroke if she walked in here." Less primly, she continues: "Carol Doda and I wear the same size bra and I think silicone is great. But best of all is sex. People ask me things I like, I say sex. I like sex and sex and sex. My favorite indoor sport is sex, and I enjoy taking my clothes off in public because I think it's something the public needs. I love it and I feel it is necessary. Better to see it in real life than buy all those mags."

The only other tongue to tangle with talk like that Down Mammary Lane belongs to Sassy Sophie, the incredible limbo dancer at El Cid, also home of Gay Spiegelman, the "Topless Mother of Eight." Sophie comes on in a zebra-striped bikini and declaims: "I'll dance faster and you guys can sit there playing with yourselves and hope one will fly out." "Which one?" asks a Mod-dressed rebel from City College of San Francisco. "What the hell do you care," snarls Sophie, "they're both the same--big." And they are. It is why Sophie claims her lowest limbo is seven inches and "the world's record is six, and it's held by a man."

They make 'em tart in Los Angeles, too, where another toplassie, 23-year-old Jackie Miller of Chicago, dyed her black hair red, because "men associate red with fire and sex. It's a hot-blooded color. And it goes with my temper. I'm a Gemini. I become very evil if someone rides me." Jackie rides motorcycles.

But in L.A., the performers cannot talk to the customers, which in the case of Miss Miller at The Losers Club (nights) and The Ball (days), is definitely best for the customers. "If a guy comes on very rank, you know, heckling me, I say, 'Keep your fuckin' hands off!' But I have to angle myself and be very cool about it. I find women heckle me more. Women don't like me. I have to admit it: I have a huge bust [39] and women have a tendency to cringe when their husbands show admiration. I'm just overdeveloped, so they're jealous; it's natural."

In the beginning, says Jackie, "I was embarrassed to death. I'd cringe and hunch my shoulders and the boss jumped on me for my terrible posture. He said, 'Be proud of what you own.' If I'd buried my boobs any more I'd be hunched. Now I feel the woman's body is very beautiful. I have a soul in me that comes out in my dancing."

At The Losers, sometime comic John Barbour says: "For a while I wondered why a guy brought his wife in here. Now I know: to punish her." Then he introduces the first dancer: "Alvenia has a 39-inch bust and is six feet, one. Would you believe 32? How about a couple of prominent ribs?" Actually, she is Gargantuan. "Very style-conscious, too," adds an underwriter with a prominent brokerage house, and a Losers habitué. "Her pasties match her G string."

Just up La Cienega (L. A.'s"restaurant row") from The Losers is The Sunset Strip, where the signal topless attraction is The Phone Booth, which was disconnected by the ABC for a while this summer but somehow manages to keep its hot-lines open. A burnt-umber Nubian princess serves salads in the bosomy buff, and a pneumatic blonde in the near-raw carves the roast beef rare. So far as anyone knows, The Phone Booth is the only emporium in the country where a man can savor both his bloody mary and his waitresses sans pasties, which has earned it such encomiums from the ABC as "the most flagrant topless violator" and "Public Enemy Number One." Still, like the Off Broadway and lesser hash houses that offer topless lunches with pasties, it has not once had to ring up the police to cart an overheated patron off to the cooler. "For one thing," says boss Walt Robson, "I don't admit beatniks, who have invaded the Strip with their motorcycles and long hair. I cater to the coat-and-tie businessman. But I've never had to forcibly eject anybody. They're mostly big docile kids, polite and taken aback by topless."

The Phone Booth's hostess is hazel-eyed, anhydrous-headed Irene Ziemer, 24, who modeled nude for college art classes before opening the Pussy Cat à Go-Go in Harbor City, just south of L. A. and gave her pasties to a city attorney "the day he told us we didn't have to wear them anymore. He hung them proudly in his office." To Irene, the customers don't back off out of fear, "but from respect." She claims she was "pinched more as a cocktail waitress in clothes" than as a topless hostess; and the kickiest part of her job is eying female customers. "You never ever catch one of them looking at you while you're waiting on them or even talking to their men. But the minute you turn your back, they stare from head to toe. I've noticed also that when women leave, their postures are so erect, as if they're pushing those things out. Well, they didn't walk in that way."

Irene's boss heads up a dead-serious society known as POT, the Preservation of Topless, which hires top attorneys to defend topless bars and beaneries in their endless struggle to stay that way. In Los Angeles alone, there are today some 40 cases pending in municipal courts, and probably 100 in the entire state of California, where "Topless Pizza" and "Topless Barbecue" and "Topless Beer" is touted from Pismo Beach to Palo Alto (where, incidentally, last summer a Condoresque establishment opened topless, cheek by chest to Doris Day's Cabana Resort Motor Motel).

Surprisingly, and parenthetically, there is still little topless about neighboring Las Vegas other than the chorines in the big, brassy, Gallic-spiced shows--though early last spring rumors were afloat that the Silver Nugget in North Las Vegas, five miles from the fabled Strip and third largest city in Nevada, was going topless with a different sort of talent: the lady blackjack dealers. In actual fact, the dealers wore semi-transparent nylon blouses (with pasties), more decorous than the new décolletage out of high-fashion France. But the topless rumors continued to sprout faster and thornier than a desert flower; agents of the Nevada Gaming Commission made clucking noises, and Major Riddle, owner of the Nugget as well as the Strip's colossal Dunes Hotel, finally reverted to the standard Vegas costume for female dealers--black skirt and white blouse--"to avoid an issue."

"If the word hadn't got out that there would be topless dealers, which was a complete misinterpretation of what Major Riddle intended," says a Nugget spokesman, "there would have been no fuss at all over the mildly sensual costumes they actually wore. Riddle even brought the city commissioners in to see them. He wasn't about to have girls with their breasts hanging out all over the place dealing 21 to goggle-eyed guys. Besides, there's a city ordinance in North Las Vegas banning the bare bosom."

Not so in France, the undisputed citadel of the feminine physique. Long topless in clubs, films, theaters and on certain beaches (such as St.-Tropez' no-kinied nudity), the jeunes filles of France now can reveal their true selves in public places like Cannes, than which there is nothing more public. Last year, with typical Gallic abandon, a young baigneur created something of a succès de scandal there by modeling a monokini with impunity. A French provincial court of appeals subsequently decreed that while all Gaul was still divided into three consequential parts, only one of them--the south-central region, anatomically speaking--need be camouflaged.

The latest effort to repress such frisky exhibitionism in California, moreover, ended disastrously for the city attorney of Los Angeles, who supported a suburban case against a leopardskinned, monokinied model accused of "openly outraging public decency" in the Golden Nugget of Hawthorne. In a far-reaching decision, the Second District Court of Appeal recently declared that this portion of the California Penal Code was too old (1903) and muzzy to classify any sort of allegedly criminal act. In what is no doubt the most scholarly decision ever devoted to topless, Justice Otto Kaus wrote: "We cannot say that in a society in which family magazines, which no one would think of hiding from the children, have for years played peekaboo with the female breast, it is plain as a pikestaff that a woman who exposes her bust for a brief period, without suggestive movements, before a limited group of adults of both sexes, outrages public decency by any and all definitions of that term." The court added, however, that it could not accept the defendant's contention that her behavior "is today's norm... nor--as is argued--do we say that she was artistically expressing in the flesh what Botticelli put on canvas."

In addition, sunny Santa Monica saw its first topless trial go the way of all flesh last year, when a local secretary was brought before the bench for having appeared on a public beach in the latest of bare-bosomed styles for sun bathers and subsequently had the charges against her dropped as the proceedings produced a hung jury. Accepting the prosecutor's opinion that a second trial would also fail to bring a conviction, the judge exonerated the adventuresome girl Friday with a warning that "we aren't going to have women running around our beaches in topless bathing suits."

Nevertheless, things are looking up--thoracically speaking, of course. Topless barmaids do not presume to beat out Botticelli; only their barristers argue that way. And no phenomena would ever become enshrined as institutions if they concerned themselves with "today's norm." Like all luminaries, in the heavens or on earth, they have their separate spectra, and they seem quite determined to stay around and shine. So it is with the constellation Taurus, with Shirley Temple and with topless.