The Fillies of Crazy Horse

This is What Paris is supposed to be about. The girls are stunningly beautiful. The show they put on at the Crazy Horse Saloon is full of the gaiety and excitement with which Paris is traditionally synonymous. But the precision mechanics going on backstage could lead you to believe you were watching the assembly of a Mercedes-Benz, rather than what connoisseurs of the genre regard as the most artistically exciting nude show in the world.

When the 18 girls arrive for the first of two nightly shows (three on Saturdays), one of them activates a 40-minute countdown clock in the corridor leading to the dressing rooms. In a show formula that has been polished and honed in some 12,000 performances since May 1951, nothing is left to chance. The girls are expected to conform to what producer-director Alain Bernardin calls "le format Crazy": They should stand 1.68 meters (5'51/2") tall and weigh 52 kilos (115 pounds). Even their pubic triangles have specific dimensions: either 10 x 10 x 10 centimeters (4" x 4" x 4") or 12 x 12 x 12 cm. (4-3/4" x 4-3/4" x 4-3/4")—the latter known as the maxi-mouchi-mouchi. Blondes and redheads do not get a chance to prove that their hair color is real. The Crazy insists on Coty eyebrow pencil Number Seven for all pubic patches, which leaves them uniformly black. Bernardin is equally strict about body complexion. He achieves conformity of skin tone by special body make-up and then bathes the girls onstage in lighting that covers them in patterns of stripes, stars and polka dots.

"I dress the girls in light," he says, "because I don't like a body that looks like it's just come out of a shower. Only one woman in 10,000 has a body good enough to stand up to total realism."

The Crazy Horse Saloon, he adds with utter seriousness, "is not in the business of reality; it's poetry, sculpture." And his quest for poetry and sculpture is pursued with almost military discipline. To get the perfectly shaped breasts he wants—"not (concluded on page 158)Crazy Horse(continued from page 107) too high, with a natural well-rounded slope; no silicone at the Crazy"—he has the girls exercise by walking around on crutches. Their nipples are appropriately erect onstage because the temperature out there is kept 18 degrees cooler than in the dressing rooms. In summer, sunbathing is permitted but only au naturel; the zebra and polka-dot lighting can't combat bikini patches.

Bernardin's small miracle is in transforming the solemnity of his technique into the joy and high spirits that accompany the highly stylized show. In the early postwar years, Bernardin, then in his mid-20s, was fascinated by everything American and decided a burlesque show of his own might be "an exciting little adventure." Although Paris was world-famous for its Folies-Bergère, Casino de Paris and Lido floorshows, it had never really had a nude vaudeville spectacle in the American style.

"Nudes were not allowed to move onstage then," recalls Bernardin. "I wanted my girls to move, but I didn't want to have anything to do with the striptease. The Crazy has never been a striptease show. My girls start without clothes."

Bernardin was also determined that his show would not be associated with the tacky, tawdry red-light district of Pigalle, where many other girlie shows were. He set up shop on the plush Avenue George V, down the street from the deluxe George V and Prince de Galles hotels, where well-heeled American, German and Japanese tourists could go without fearing they'd be fleeced. (Some might consider that the Crazy's minimum two-drink charge of $32 per person, or $65 for two for a bottle of champagne, is fleecing of a sort, but the high-powered two-hour show has packed them in, up to 300 each time, so that in the past 27 years, an estimated 2,500,000 people have seen the show. Bernardin's little adventure grosses him $5,000,000 a year.)

The Crazy Horse Saloon got its name from Bernardin's love for the folklore of America's wild West. "It was that or Sitting Bull," he says. "Somebody told me Sitting Bull was not such a good idea."

At any rate, the lobby of the low-ceilinged basement club ("The low ceiling makes my girls look taller") is festooned with tributes to the great Indian chief and newspaper accounts of Custer's Last Stand. Customers may be puzzled by the doormen dressed in the uniform of Royal Canadian Mounties, but remember, this is France. Don't expect a logical explanation. As it happened, a lunatic aristocratic wastrel from Normandy appeared at Bernardin's door one day in a scarlet Mountie's uniform and asked if he could be a doorman. "Why not?" said Bernardin, and when he disappeared one day, Bernardin replaced him with two more "Mounties."

The girls' gear is less fanciful—in fact, less, period. They start out wearing a specially designed set of satin-leatherette thongs that quickly disappear into the smallest G string ever designed. These "costumes," plus high-heeled shoes, cost, we have been assured, $700 each.

The girls who get into these outfits each night come from all over Europe—rarely from America. "American girls are scared by the idea of France," Bernardin claims. "The best-looking girls come from Germany. Their civilization has always been at the crossroads of Latin, Slavic and Nordic migration and the mixture produces beautiful, healthy, exciting girls. Polish girls are good, too, high-spirited. But I find the Scandinavians dull."

Three times a year, Bernardin travels across Europe in his earnest search for the "right" kind of beauty. He can talk for hours about the perfect thigh, buttock or breast. When he spots what he wants, he sends the girl his business card. If their first meeting is a success, he gives her a plane ticket to Paris and a six-month trial contract.

"They all want to dance at the Crazy," he says proudly. "It's the top of the tree. They think of it as a great chance to get into films, be discovered by a great producer. Of course, it never happens, but they like to believe that it does."

Meanwhile, they earn good money—$800 a week for the top featured dancers. Bernardin puts 20 percent of their wages away in a savings account, which is held for them until they leave the Crazy. Nobody stays beyond the age of 30.

When she starts working at the Crazy, each girl is given a stage name, chosen to fit her personality as perceived by Bernardin. Current examples are Lova Moor, Lily Paramount, Polly Underground, Trucula Bonbon, Vanilla Banana, Kiki Zanzibar and Greta Fahrenheit.

Bernardin has his own pantheon of favorites, whom he recalls with misty sentimentality: Bertha von Paraboum, vintage 1964, the girl who went on wearing black boots, black gloves, a feather boa and a G string in the shape of a swastika. Instead of projecting stripes or polka dots on her, Bernardin had her bathed in more swastikas. "She was sensational," he says. "We got protest letters from old Nazis. It was terrific!" Trucula Bonbon—"She makes you want to bite, and I've been looking at girls for 27 years. And she does it all for her invalid sister." Franca Germanicus—"Flaming red hair, alabaster skin; she drove a NATO officer crazy!"

The Crazy's policy about customers is very strict: no admirers allowed around the dressing rooms. One girl caught with a Lebanese businessman was immediately fired. At the same time, Bernardin (himself a classical French family man with three children, a wife and a mistress, who accept each other's existence philosophically) is nostalgic for the gallantry of the belle époque. "My girls would be delighted if someone sent them a bouquet, a little note, an invitation to dinner, the way they used to. But that no longer happens. Men aren't what they used to be.

"But thank God the women are," he adds, rhapsodizing about the beauty of the girls he works with. "Look at those breasts, that skin, the mouth, the eyes!"

The girls themselves, three of them sitting around his office, smile indulgently at his enthusiasm. What's their feeling about working at the Crazy? "It beats boarding school," says Norma Piccadilly.

"Mmm," is Kiki Zanzibar's appraisal.

The secret of the Crazy's continuing success may be that it has consistently represented the personal taste of one man—whose fantasies seem to be shared by at least 2,500,000 paying customers.

"I do everything to please myself," says Bernardin. "People tell me they love our theme music—We're the Girls of the Crazy—for instance, and that I should never change it. But I'm here every night and I'm sick of it. I want to hear something new. So the customers will, too."

Bernardin has also avoided the trap of expanding too far. For the past 25 years, Las Vegas has been trying to get him to send over a version of the Crazy, but he has resisted. He has made a movie, Crazy Horse Paris-France, which was shown at Cannes. It cost him a little over $1,000,000. Now his dream is a Broadway musical, for which he is already working on the music and the choreography. None of this means giving up the Saloon—though it may soon move to more opulent, but still low-ceilinged, premises. The neighbors have been complaining of the noise. A retired French colonel, Jean Hercisse, sued Bernardin for $50,000 for lost sleep in the apartment above the club—and collected $2000 when lawyers dug up expert testimony that the Crazy produced more noise than the Concorde.

The girls of the Crazy, we'll wager, would have a lot less trouble getting landing rights. —Jack Altman

"Sun-bathing is permitted but only au naturel; the polka-dot lighting can't combat bikini patches."