A Club of One's Own

Topless has gone Vegas. It's a Bugsy Siegel vision of its former self. What was once just déclassé raunch began to step up in style around 1988. Today the average upscale topless outlet will feature 20 to 30 women you wouldn't mind splicing genes with. And it comes with valet parking, with sound systems so thunderous and sophisticated they would reach the cheap seats in the Sky Dome, with three-star food and with someone you gotta tip in the john. As the clubs go for the top of the market--Miami, Atlanta, Detroit, Houston, New York--they're becoming investment-grade businesses. Even in the recession, topless is a go-go stock--more than just respectable, expensive (Visa and Master Card accepted). I predicted this makeover, by the way, while doing research for my novel Topless. Since 1982 I've interviewed about 400 of the roughly (text concluded on page 130) 68,000 topless dancers in this country. I have been to topless what Toulouse-Lautrec was to cancan (only I'm a little shorter), so listen up out there.

Stringfellow's in New York is a good example of what I'm talking about. The club, which was formerly a snobzoned downtown disco, is now un cabaret de la femme. (It's done over in a style known as Euro-Vegas, which sounds like something you might take penicillin for.) Nowhere in its print advertising is the blue-collar word topless mentioned. Women at Stringfellow's are, you understand, "partially nude"--and beautiful enough to short your pacemaker. They remind me of Keats' poem, Ode on a Couple of Grecian Urns.

In December 1991 Peter Stringfellow licensed the Pure Platinum topless format from Michael J. Peter, the Ray Kroc of go-go. Peter owns or operates 30 top-seeded breast emporiums from Florida to Minneapolis to Honolulu. Recently, he took over the El Morocco in New York. His employees cross-pollinate: A dancer at Stringfellow's might work at the El Morocco location. Next month she could be escaping her costume in Myrtle Beach.

As one would expect, your less well-endowed topless establishments have to compete against Peter with feature acts: Heidi Hooters, Bobbie Balloons, Candy Cantalopes and, my favorite, Letha Weapons--all 100DDD cup size or bigger. Since mid-1990 or so, New York has been, as they say, pushing the envelope.

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Topless chic began with Cabarét Royale in Dallas--an $8 million establishment that could remind you of the British Museum done over to look like Darth Vader's harem. Upscale go-go had existed before--particularly at the stunning (and all nude) Cheetah Club in Atlanta. But with Cabarét Royale and, later, the Men's Club of Houston (now also of Dallas), you get something only America could whip together: a topless shopping mall.

At one joint or the other, or both, you'd find: an aerobic gym, a swimming pool, a fashion boutique, a unisex hair salon, a tanning bed, massage therapy, terrific dining, a conference room, a fax machine, a photocopier--also a seamstress, a laundry, a makeup person and pedicurist for those 90 to 100 women who dance each night.

You may sniff at the topless game, but it is probably funding welfare for a medium-sized town somewhere in Texas. Between them, these two companies sold nearly $12 million in liquor alone last year. As Teri Jo Nicholson, persuasive marketing director for the Men's Club, told me, "We offer a unique concept, a resort-style club. You just can't spend the night."

All that feels a long way from what I once knew as go-go, not just in rich appointment and fine amenity. Take a look outside the Men's Club door, for instance. Instead of a 400-pound sumo reject wearing his best Chris Mullin gym rat T-shirt and some sociopathic attitudes, you'll find a polite, trim host in black tie.

From the host on up, the topless playbook has been rewritten. Dancer-owner and dancer-client relationships are in flux. In classic topless, two or three women perform a set onstage--most often one half hour--for G-string tip money. When offstage, the dancer must be fully (if provocatively) clothed. Management will encourage her to socialize with clientele between onstage sets--no groping allowed. And, except for tourist traps (where battery-water "champagne" can cost $125), Pandora or Gretchen or Xema will spend the entire down set with you for the price of a $5 tip and one three-buck Bud. In classic topless, many women are local--students, actresses, moonlighting office personnel--with B-plus bodies and youth to squander. Most important: Each dancer is a temp employee, receiving some kind of guaranteed nut ($8 to $10 per set) from management, whether or not you stuff green in her underwear.

With the current incarnation of topless, by contrast, stage time (one song, maybe two) merely constitutes the teaser. Serious business will be taken care of down below. The new topless has refurbished and made acceptable the "table" dance--once confined largely to Canada. For $20 (more if you're feeling generous), that redhead you just saw on stage--she who could fill a car bra--will bathe you in long orange hair, then dance so close you might easily drink shooters from her navel. A real vasoconstrictor, that.

Of course, go-go protocol changes at the state line. Chicago, for instance, is toplessless. In Detroit, though, one gorgeous pop tart began to climb me like her kitchen stepladder. Then she took both church kneeler--size breasts and, using them as a cymbal set, made my ears go boinnng! In some sleazy subbasement? No, at B.T.'s, after I had eaten filet mignon off china and linen. This variation is called "lap" or "couch" dancing. Lap women are referred to affectionately as "zipper polishers."

Club topless is, moreover, a free-market enterprise. Your redheaded friend will receive no minimum take-home pay from management. Hell, most likely she laid out $30 or even $50 for the privilege of stripping off cheek to cheek for 19 salivating customers per night. She must maximize volume and turnover in her table-dance trade. So must her competition. One result is positive: Only women radiant enough to distract a heat-seeking missile will survive and prosper.

The down side is, well, Robochick. At first leer, disco topless would seem to be much more intimate than classic topless. After all--look--this spectacular hardbody is grinding away so close to my chair I wanna put on a lobster bib. Yet look again. That dance will most probably be an effective but mechanical event: the generic brand of sex. And small talk means downtime, lost profits, an opening for competition.

In the old days, women were constantly admonished to be sociable. Management was well aware of the built-in tension between good finance and friendliness. But Robochick signed up as a mercenary. Often, she's on tour, under contract to some topless chain, just passing through. She's not that kid from SUNY--New Paltz who will dance for textbook money and knew your old neighborhood. As a male--female experience, New Age topless is, given the tab, somewhat less engaging.

Then again, maybe men prefer it that way. I suspect that this latest topless craze is, in part, an oblique response to the radical feminist agenda. Women have liberated virtually all significant male sanctums. But they cannot liberate Cabarét Royale because it is already full of entrepreneurial women. I'd reckon that men have come to cherish a venue where the rules are understood up front. Where they can exert control: For $20 I can make any woman in this room take off her clothing. That's good to know. And if I admire her body, in look or in language, she will accept my male response and won't call a lawyer.

Classic topless couldn't serve this purpose because it was always outside the culture: underground, proscribed by social convention, not respectable. Men who went there were rogue males, unfit for breeding. Yet I confess nostalgia for the uncouth. And I rather resent having respectable sexual habits. The charm of classic topless lay in its social, not its sensual, intimacy. Where some young woman with maybe cellulite, maybe an asymmetrical bust, would update me on her life. And treat me, in passing, as more than just the gross extension of my wallet.

But let not my yearning for traditional values spoil your fun. We live in la belle époque of topless. Investigate it, and bring along your wife or girlfriend. You won't want to miss the great American bust boom.