Bare Market

PUBS & CLUBS

If Lady Godiva had cantered through Soho last week, she would have been too late. A stripper on horseback has already been signed to work London's "Naughty Mile." The district heaves with a surfeit of female flesh. After years of popularity abroad, the English nude has at last come into her own at home.

What held the British back for so many years was a sort of inverse-Galatea law which insisted that nightclub nudes stand like statues and never come to life. The law is still in force, but the strip joints are run as private clubs. Collectively, the clubs--some 150 in all, employing nearly a thousand girls--have swiftly acquired at least 500,000 card-carrying members (at 1 guinea or $2.95 for life membership). One club, reported the Spectator last week, includes among its members "ten M.P.s, eight millionaires, more than 60 knights, 35 peers, and enough businessmen and captains of industry to drain dry the Stock Exchange and the Savoy Grill."

Tassels & Snakes. The tonier places present lavish shows that are far more suggestive than anything legally staged in the U.S., more intimate and lively than Paris' Lido. Audiences sit in respectful silence as side-stage pianos strike Westminster-sized chords, lights evanesce, and wardrobes migrate to the floor (seldom, even in the lower-class establishments, is the air besmirched with pleas to "tyke it awff").

Skilled secretaries drawing $28 a week become unskilled strippers at $42 to start, make as much as $300 weekly after acquiring such special skills as tassel twirling and snake charming.

Fluffles & Bells. More exotic appetites are fed with flagellation (at the Raymond Revuebar. a fierce buccaneer regularly whips a featured nude) and deviation (the star of one act at Freddy's Peeperama is billed as "Mr. Fifty-Fifty"). But most members prefer their artistry straightforward. Last week Fluffles the Tassler and Countess Carolin von Sirowitz (the names change quickly) made members forget such recently faded princesses as Peaches Page and Melodic Bubbles. And all across London, clubmen were impatiently awaiting the promised arrival of Bonnie Bell the Ding-Dong Girl, whose entire wardrobe consists of three bells.

London police, themselves known as "peelers" 100 years ago,* are keeping an absorbed eye on the clubs, earnestly looking for violations of the law. But as the law works now, managers need only register their clubs with a clerk who has no authority to refuse them the right to operate. Aware of a lot of outcry at Soho's seamy skin mills, Home Secretary R. A. Butler has proposed a new licensing bill that may put the strippers out of business. Meanwhile, the clubs go on grossing nearly $6,000,000 a year. The bare market has never been so bullish.

* After Sir Robert Peel, who created the police force, is otherwise remembered in the name bobby.

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