On 7 December 1980, the Observer went behind the scenes at the Crazy Horse glossy erotic revue in Paris: ‘A sex machine designed to give pleasure without guilt or embarrassment’; a place, one punter said, ‘Not so sexy that you’ll get a carpeting back at the office for putting it on your expense account.’
It was far from access all areas to the legendary basement club just off the Champs-Elysées. Sinister-sounding proprietor Alain Bernardin, who ran the place with paternalistic rigidity and compared his creation to the Louvre, ‘hovered’, concerned that the journalist might steal all his secrets and open his own club. He doesn’t sound remotely tempted, though, highlighting ‘the relentless erasing of each girl’s specialness to create a single image’ and a ‘faintly sadistic quality’ to Bernadin’s aesthetic: ‘A woman’s body is there for a man to rearrange, distort, even tear apart.’
The dancers impress him, though, with their professionalism and pride in their craft, as they support the ‘teenage amateurs from the sticks’ auditioning, and trade war stories of frequent back injuries. ‘They are artist-athletes surviving in a fiercely competitive business run by a man who may not even like women very much.’
Crazy Horse sounds joyless, unsexy and frankly unpleasant, but some of the details are intriguing. The first two rows of every show must be filled with married couples, the £200 boots that the girls wear are sized to ensure they all appear the same height on stage; the dancers earn enough ‘To buy a house in Neuilly’ (an extremely chic Parisian suburb), and Bernardin also retains 20% of their salary in an account they could not touch until they left.
Then there are the stage names: Texa Meteor, Vodka Samovar, Polly Underground and Usha Starlight all sound suitably glamorous, if silly, but I’m left wondering who on earth came up with ‘Brandy Proforma’.
