The address on the Avenue Georges V is among the best in Paris, but once a customer goes down the flight of red concrete steps and through the swinging doors, another world surrounds him. Staring flintily out over the dance floor is a large, yellowed portrait of Chief Crazy Horse of the Sioux nation, and near the black bar are protruding long-handled steer horns. And on the minuscule stage are some of the most majuscule nudes in the world.
This is Le Crazy Horse Saloon, a Paris landmark now celebrating its tenth anniversary as a strip joint. The place nightly draws 250 eager customers—better than half of them foreigners—who with mixed emotions gradually discover that they have come to a place that refuses to take seriously either sex, itself, or its customers. Everything about the place is parody except the prices: the first drink costs $7, the second $3.
Bertha, Bettina & Dodo. It is owned and operated by Alain Bernardin, a successful restaurateur who decided to branch out into the nightclub business and wanted a Wild West décor. Although he had never visited the U.S., he went to see a dozen western films, all of them by Universal Pictures. "They always had saloons in those films, and since they always had the same set, it was always the same saloon," he recalls. "I copied it for mine." But business dragged, so Bernardin decided to enliven it with striptease. Again he haunted the cinema and found all the pointers he needed in a 42nd Street special called Dancers of Desire.
Today Bernardin scouts all Europe for talent, preferring Poles above all others, and he rechristens each one in his own high style. His present girls include Neferzouzou, Bertha von Paraboum, Bettina Uranium, Nadia Safari, Victoria Nankin, Natasha von Turmanov, Coral Lazuli and Sofia Palladium. Among the alumnae are Lili Lapudeur, Rapha Temporel and Bernardin's alltime favorite, a Polish-German named Dodo d'Hambourg.
As Bernardin has choreographed their acts, there is not much actual stripping at Le Crazy (as Parisians call it), since most of the girls appear already bare. Nadia Safari, for example, wears a widely spaced net sarong and lies in a hammock under streaked gold and black lighting that is supposed to suggest the primordial jungle. Crazy Horse girls are, in the main, above bumping and grinding. Lighting is everything, and Bernardin refers to his dozens of tiny spotlights collectively as "my brush."
Middle Line-Bumpers. "I suppress eroticism," he says. "I treat the nude as optical art." Alluding to the Son et Lumiere spectacles that are held in summer at many of France's châteaux, he says, "That's essentially what we have here, but instead of illuminating Chambord or Chenonceaux, we play lights on Neferzouzou and Bertha von Paraboum."