Andrée Deissenberg, general manager of the Crazy Horse Saloon, knows exactly
what it takes to become one of the 20 regular dancers at Paris’s original
nude cabaret – right down to the last centimetre. Generations of celebrities
have flocked, with paparazzi in tow, to this upmarket girlie show near the
Champs Elysées: Maurice Chevalier, Salvador Dali and Graham Greene in the
1950s, and more recently Eddie Murphy, Madonna and Kylie Minogue. But it’s
doubtful if any of them has ever guessed just how meticulously baited is the
erotic hook that draws them to the place.
Deissenberg, an energetic middle-aged blonde, spells it out. “The girls must
all be between 1m 68cm and 1m 72cm tall. No more than 27cm between the
nipples, with the breasts not too big because when they dance that is not,
aah, aesthetic. From the belly button to the pubis, only 13cm – which is
relatively short but gives more outward-going buttocks.” I confess that
Deissenberg has lost me here. “The larger the distance, the more droopy the
butt,” she explains.
Here in the cramped, 10-metre-square basement of 12 Avenue George V – the only
home of the Crazy Horse Saloon since it opened in 1951 – rules are rules,
and there’s a lot of them. Before starting work, the showgirls must adopt
one of two bizarre stage names supplied by Deissenberg and the show manager.
This will in time be inscribed on a large plaque on the club wall next to
the tiny stage which lists, for posterity, everybody who has ever stripped
off at Le Crazy: take a bow Foxy Crescendo, Vanity Obelisk, Bertha von
Paraboum, Vicky Toboggan and around 300 others.
Because skinniness is as alien to the saloon’s precise specifications as flab,
dancers are weighed every week. If their weight has gone up or down by more
than a kilo, they are required to take immediate action (either a diet or a
controlled weight-gaining programme) or face the sack.
Tattoos and silicon implants are banned. This is now restricting the club’s
traditional international recruitment policy, Deissenberg explains, because
the British girls who used to make up about half of the Crazy Horse’s roster
tend nowadays to have had something inked into some part of their body. No
Brits currently feature in the Paris show, which is largely staffed by
French former ballet dancers. When the Crazy Horse sends an export version
of itself over to the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, it can’t take on any local
dancers, because they’ve all had cosmetic surgery.
Also not allowed: drinking during working hours and consorting with the
clientele. “It’s important that these women remain completely inaccessible,”
says Deissenberg. The rule that decrees absolutely no males in the Crazy
Horse’s minuscule dressing room definitely applies to me, but exceptions
have been made, I notice later, when I come across a 1970s shot of Mick
Jagger looking exceptionally pleased with himself. Deissenberg insists,
however, that she intercepts any gifts sent to the dressing room by your
average punter. “I take out the card, so the girls won’t know who it’s from.
The Crazy Horse is almost like a convent.”
This view is endorsed by those members of staff whose job it is to dance
nearly naked in the twice nightly Forever Crazy revue. Sex is never
mentioned, and the universal view is that the show is concerned with
everything but.
Psykko Tico – “I’m not allowed to tell you my real name” – is one of the
troupe’s many former ballet dancers. She used to work at the Moulin Rouge
but prefers the Crazy Horse because “What we do here is more like acting –
it’s about your personality.” At 35, Ms Tico is the oldest of the current
cast and she fears for her future. “When I have to stop it will be
difficult, because I love to do my job.”
Volga Moscowskaya – or Isabella as she was known back in her native Poland –
explains that “we don’t really feel naked on stage. We feel covered in
make-up and lights, and we must always take a long time to find a good
position”. She demonstrates a provocative pelvic thrust – “like that is
vulgar” – and then finds her good position. “If I stand like this, close my
legs and push my back, it’s what I call ‘nice naked’. I can invite my
mother.”
Women have made up a significant slice of the club’s audience for the past 56
years. Erotica rather than pornography is the house style, and an
idiosyncratic sort of erotica it is too. From the weird nomenclature of its
dancers to the blizzard of lighting cues that turns their bodies into
kinetic canvases, the Crazy Horse adheres to an elaborate formula devised by
its founder. The show was, and largely still is, the work of the late Alain
Bernardin, an eccentric former restaurateur who started the club, so the
story goes, at the suggestion of his acquaintance Bing Crosby.
In 1951, le striptease was an import from America, more daring than the
high-kicking kitsch of French burlesque. Bernardin loved American popular
culture, loved women, and seems to have particularly liked the way their
naked bodies were rendered in an almost abstract fashion by surrealist
artists such as Magritte. An amateur artist and friend of Marcel Duchamp,
Bernardin was, in his own way, a dirty old Dada-ist, applying an arty
European gloss to a product of the fleshpots of America.
In his Western-themed basement, Bernardin devised a peculiar routine in which
a woman called Miss Fortunia stripped down to her knickers while ostensibly
scratching for fleas – it was erotic comedy but not as we know it. In
between her solo performances, singers would do a turn, comedians told
jokes, and visiting artists and celebs revelled in the bohemian novelty of
the place.
Salvador Dali was such a fan that he donated one of his classic “lips” sofas.
For many years this sexy item of furniture featured as a prop in the show.
Today the sofa sits in Andrée Deissenberg’s office.
In the 1960s, the Crazy Horse cabaret evolved into the erotic entertainment
that survives, with only slight modification, today. After a visit to New
York’s Radio City Music Hall in 1962, when he was blown away by a
choreographed routine involving 50 dancers, Bernardin decided that
all-singing,
all-dancing ensemble nudity was the way forward. He successfully petitioned
the Parisian authorities to lift the ban on baring all in public, and came
up with an idea that remains one of the Crazy Horse’s greatest hits. Every
night the show opens with God Save Our Bareskin, a high-camp, satirical
takeoff of the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace performed by a
dozen women in Busbies and not much else. Bernardin, who didn’t care much
for British culture, was nevertheless keen to employ our girls. “They are
shy but professional,” he said. “French girls have personality but sometimes
they are late. English girls have great energy.”
Bernardin’s other big discovery of the 1960s was psychedelic lighting effects.
Unlike imitators such as London’s Raymond Revue Bar, which Bernardin
dismissed as “a dirty copy of what I did”, the Crazy Horse aimed to
stimulate only the imagination. “There is no show that is more
dream-like than a magic show,” Bernardin once said. “And what we do with the
girls is magic, because they aren’t as beautiful as you see them onstage.
These are my dreams that I put onstage.”
Some of these dreams went on to become Bernardin’s wives. There were rumours,
reported at the time, that the third wife, Lova Moor, drove him to suicide
with her infidelities and pursuit of a TV career. Other factors that might
have led to Bernardin locking himself in his office one night and shooting
himself in the heart include the possible onset of dementia, disappointment
at his declining virility and a dramatic drop-off in business that hit the
Crazy Horse hard in the wake of the first Gulf war.
The latter was only the symptom of a larger problem: what had started as a hip
hang-out had turned, by the mid-1990s, into a tired tourist attraction. The
decline continued after the club’s ownership passed to Bernardin’s three
children, who lost interest in it. “By the time they sold it, it felt
dusty,” says Deissenberg, who was headhunted from the Cirque du Soleil – a
renowned “new” circus that eschews performing animals in favour of
death-defying acrobatics – by the new owners, a Belgian media company.
According to its current boss, the Crazy Horse’s recovery over the past 18
months has been dramatic. Box-office receipts are up by 40%, but more
importantly, the Crazy Horse has rekindled the interest of locals thanks to
the booking of some big-name guest performers, notably the burlesque artiste
Dita Von Teese. This year Kylie Minogue gave the club a boost by using its
dancers in a video. The fashion designer Jean-Paul Gaultier is a regular.
The film director David Lynch has spent time here recently, photographing
one particular blonde in spiky heels.
On the international front, there was a blip in January when the licensees of
a Crazy Horse show in Singapore went bust, but Deissenberg doesn’t seem
bothered: “If the women don’t sit in their laps, they’re not interested.”
Interest elsewhere is growing. “The Russians are running after us like
crazy. For them the Crazy Horse is a luxury brand.”
Maybe; but back at HQ in Paris, this luxury product comes with highly
personalised packaging. Everywhere you turn, you bump into Bernardin’s
curious sense of humour. One of the cubicles in the ladies’ loo houses a
double toilet, “because he thought that women always like to chat when they
go to the bathroom, so why not make it easier for them”. Deissenberg points
out the triangular patterns on the club’s red carpet designed as a tribute
to female genitalia, “although nobody ever sees it”.
In an age where there’s a lap-dancing club on every street, the
choreographed routines of the Crazy Horse feel closer to a variety show or a
historical pageant than an X-rated parade. By way of confirmation, the
biggest cheer of the night goes to a comic tap-dancing duo. The fact that
they are both fully clothed, and male, probably says it all.
