TENDING THE BEACH TENDERLOIN
Miami Herald, The (FL) - October 18, 1984
Author: IRENE LACHER Herald Staff Writer
Deep into the vice night, the market prevails over men and women. Everyone is a buyer or a seller, and all the world’s a store.
They take in the temperate breezes on Ocean Drive and gobble nut mixes at the bars of world-famous hotels. They find each other behind theater walls of mammoth cardboard women south of 23rd Street and Collins Avenue, where warnings tempt: "If you blush easily, if you embarass (sic) easily, if you are not 18, This show is not for you."
Girls seek the money and kindness of strangers on the street, calling out to them from second-story windows and hotel porches, plunging into new laps at dark bars where they issue breathless invitations.
There are girls who dance exotic through the night only to be locked behind club doors until dawn, nothing extracurricular allowed. There are peep show dancers who punch holes in the walls between them and their customers in a ruthless search for tips.
This is a place that harbors no outsiders, that ultimately changes even its adversaries. The vice night can scramble reality for cops who linger in it too long, making them forget that sex exists outside the marketplace.
But a few certainties remain.
This world is cash only, sorry Mr. Taxman, and the men -- bosses, customers, lovers -- pay the bills. Men ply the night streets in slow black Cadillacs and girls are girls forever, until they are suddenly old women.
THE STRIPPER
She flirted with the idea of becoming a cop, but getting that far seemed too complicated so she became Luscious Laura, the newest young thing at the Gayety Burlesque.
She once sold magazines in Pennsylvania and newspaper subscriptions in New Jersey. She made pizza, served cocktails as a Playboy bunny in Atlantic City and ushered diners to their tables in a restaurant that hadn’t changed its menu for 54 years.
She was 20 years old and a newlywed.
"New marriage, new career," she said and laughed.
Laura Garcia was new in town two months ago, fresh from New York where a coin toss had determined where she would begin life as a wife. She had spent those first days answering want ads for waitresses and such, but that wasn’t working. And so she found herself in a 20th Street office off Collins Avenue, one flight below a peep show, listening to a man ask if she had ever taken off her clothes in public and if she happened to own a G-string.
"If it were up to me, I’d walk around naked 24 hours a day. I hate clothes," she said boldly. She told him she would have to buy the G-string.
When Laura Garcia visited a peep show for the first time ever later that day, she went as one of Leroy’s girls. Leroy Griffith, who also owns the Gayety Burlesque Theatre around the corner, guided her past a Coke machine and display case with whips and vibrators to one of 16 booths lining a round arena the
size of a boxing ring.
"All you have to do is dance, but you have to be nude to do it," he said.
Griffith slid a golden token through a slot below a window. A light bulb dimmed behind the glass, and the shadowy figure in the ring came into focus.
Griffith began stuffing bills through another slot and the dancer came to their window, swinging her hips faster as the money piled up.
Laura stared at the woman. "When I first saw her, I was like, whoa, she was stark naked, nude, I mean completely. He said, ’Do you think you can do it?’
"I said, ’Leroy, there isn’t much I can’t do.’ "
Laura was given 10 minutes in the arena, the time marked by a bell that would signal six shift changes an hour. The idea was to amuse the patrons with variety, encouraging them to feed$1, $5 and $10 dollar tips or, at the very least, the 50-cent tokens that bought those in the booth little more than a minute of darkness.
All plumpness and blue eyes, Laura entered the ring. She began to dance and wiggle at the circle of booths that were empty except for one. The man in the shadows began to tip her, first slipping her a $5 bill, then a $10, then a couple of ones.
She later learned that her first customer was her boss, Leroy Griffith.
That night Laura went home with $60, tax free. "I know women who work in factories, breaking their backs for $30 a day. I said, ’I don’t want to be like that.’ "
She is careful about certain things. She once threatened to call the cops on a bunch of boys crammed into a booth, breaking the house rule of one man, one booth. She won’t be as adamant as some of the girls who demand tips from their customers, knocking on the windows, even punching holes in the walls for the extra money.
"You can’t be a beggar with a gun," she says.
Not long ago Laura graduated to the theater downstairs, where the girls are on salaries ranging from $250 to $400 for seven hours of dancing spread over a seven-day week. On Halloween, her new husband Pete, 24, will be part of the act. He will dress as an executioner in a black cape and release his bride from a cage.
At first Pete was bothered by his wife’s line of work, but no more.
"I don’t get jealous because I know she loves me and she won’t go with anybody else," Pete said. "And sometimes I feel that other guys fantasize on my wife and they can’t have her and I can."
THE VICE COPS
Charlie Reed was too much of a workaholic to let an opportunity pass, even this once. He and Tony Holt had spent years of nights hunting for prostitutes, piling up some 300 arrests a year. But this night they were supposed to be toasting goodbye to all that. A new supervisor had taken over their unit and they were going back to patrol.
Holt and Reed were with a few other officers last month, drinking their goodbyes at the Fontainebleau Hilton Hotel’s Poodle Lounge, when Reed caught the eye of a blond woman at the bar. They exchanged smiles. Reed went over to her.
Minutes later in room 1022, provided gratis by the hotel for undercover work, Sgt. Reed had made an arrest, 24-year-old Kristi Lynn Gables. Then he dared Tony Holt to do the same.
Two hours passed and Holt spotted another blond chatting with men at the bar. Holt struck up a conversation. The woman told him she went with men to help with her rent. Holt asked her how much help she needed. She said it ranged from $200 to $300.
"That’s a lot of help," he said.
They went upstairs and talked some more. The woman had to specify what she would do for the money before Holt could arrest her. As they negotiated, Holt heard Reed’s beeper go off in the hallway outside the door.
Holt began tapping his watch furiously. "Must be something wrong," he mumbled, but he managed to consummate the arrest of 22-year-old Beate Palmowski anyway.
"She was from Germany," Holt said later. "She didn’t know what was going on."
It’s all in the hustle, the banter that goes into an arrest. Take them by surprise. Dissemble at all costs.
The officers amuse themselves with their own pretense. They pose at whim as a tire store owner from Tennessee, a maritime attorney, a retired landowner, a pig farmer from Ocala, a tobacco warehouse operator from North Carolina with money to burn.
"I told one I was a plastic surgeon," Holt recalled. "She wanted to know how much it cost to fix a scar on her face. So I examined her face."
New identities don’t always do the trick, especially after a few arrests. You look like Tony, the girls say. No, I don’t, Tony says. Sometimes they fall for it. Sometimes they don’t.
One prostitute named her price even though she recognized Holt from prior arrests.
"I said, ’What are you doing? We’ve arrested you several times.’ She said, ’Hey, I was greedy.’ "
The women work the bars at conventions, Visitor and Convention Authority schedules tucked in their purses. They walk Collins Avenue between Fifth and 23rd streets, bankrolling a taste for cocaine.
They tempt vicious odds. There was Michelle Orfino, whose arrest was interrupted when she went into labor and had to be rushed to Jackson Memorial Hospital. There was 61-year-old Suzanne Gerny who promised the experience of a lifetime because she had a lifetime of experience. Failing that, she offered a refund. There was Karen Bush, who, only months before her death, answered a judge’s query as to her guilt or innocence by pulling up her shirt.
In one of Bush’s last arrests, she lamented the injustice of it all. She talked about the customer who gave her $500 to squat in a chair and bark like a dog while he masturbated.
Then she made her case: "Why are you arresting me? You should arrest him. He’s crazy."
THE MEN OF BURLESQUE
Business stinks.
Used to be that Harry Ridge’s place would draw the likes of Frank Sinatra and Eddie Fisher. Art Carney would come by the Place Pigalle and drink like crazy. In its busier days, the club at 22nd Street off Collins Avenue drew a dynamite bomber, an angry Korean who came in blasting two revolvers and Vietnam vets in wheelchairs who would sling back drinks on Harry.
Harry’s place isn’t busy anymore. The problem, he figures, is go go girls. When bawdy comedianne Pearl Williams retired six months ago, Ridge decided the 29-year-old club needed a new image. He changed the club name from Place Pigalle to Go Go 22. He painted his club front a disconcertingly deep shade of blue, bleu celeste. All he got was a headache.
"Go go brings in bad types. They want to give you trouble," Harry said.
Harry wants to put more class into his club. He told the city he wants to rename it Club 22. The city told him to lighten up and paint the club front prairie sky.
A few of Harry’s people are making progress. There’s Luigi, a piano player with tendonitis and three layers of gloves, who spent 28 years entertaining the 5 a.m. crowd. Then a couple of months ago, he was "discovered" playing tunes in the Fontainebleu lobby. "Now I’m a celebrity at the Eden Roc," Luigi burbles.
Still, Harry Ridge thinks that at the age of 76 he should probably get out of the business.
"With me, the age is wrong. The nightclub business is wrong... We have a lot of people working here for years. It’s not good. Show business needs young people. I don’t belong in it. Some of the showgirls don’t belong in it."
Things aren’t much better at Leroy Griffith’s Gayety down the street. Griffith still operates his notorious Pussycat Theater on Biscayne Boulevard, but he shut down the Paris Theater on Washington Avenue less than five years ago and his plan to convert it into condominiums never materialized. Business on the Beach isn’t what it was when Griffith set up shop here in 1960.
One day, says theater manager Bud Luther, the Collins Avenue corridor of adult entertainment will all be gone.
"How can you sell tickets in a theater when they’re selling that sort of thing on cable? You can’t resist change. The past and 35 cents will get you a cup of coffee at McDonald’s."
They take in the temperate breezes on Ocean Drive and gobble nut mixes at the bars of world-famous hotels. They find each other behind theater walls of mammoth cardboard women south of 23rd Street and Collins Avenue, where warnings tempt: "If you blush easily, if you embarass (sic) easily, if you are not 18, This show is not for you."
Girls seek the money and kindness of strangers on the street, calling out to them from second-story windows and hotel porches, plunging into new laps at dark bars where they issue breathless invitations.
There are girls who dance exotic through the night only to be locked behind club doors until dawn, nothing extracurricular allowed. There are peep show dancers who punch holes in the walls between them and their customers in a ruthless search for tips.
This is a place that harbors no outsiders, that ultimately changes even its adversaries. The vice night can scramble reality for cops who linger in it too long, making them forget that sex exists outside the marketplace.
But a few certainties remain.
This world is cash only, sorry Mr. Taxman, and the men -- bosses, customers, lovers -- pay the bills. Men ply the night streets in slow black Cadillacs and girls are girls forever, until they are suddenly old women.
THE STRIPPER
She flirted with the idea of becoming a cop, but getting that far seemed too complicated so she became Luscious Laura, the newest young thing at the Gayety Burlesque.
She once sold magazines in Pennsylvania and newspaper subscriptions in New Jersey. She made pizza, served cocktails as a Playboy bunny in Atlantic City and ushered diners to their tables in a restaurant that hadn’t changed its menu for 54 years.
She was 20 years old and a newlywed.
"New marriage, new career," she said and laughed.
Laura Garcia was new in town two months ago, fresh from New York where a coin toss had determined where she would begin life as a wife. She had spent those first days answering want ads for waitresses and such, but that wasn’t working. And so she found herself in a 20th Street office off Collins Avenue, one flight below a peep show, listening to a man ask if she had ever taken off her clothes in public and if she happened to own a G-string.
"If it were up to me, I’d walk around naked 24 hours a day. I hate clothes," she said boldly. She told him she would have to buy the G-string.
When Laura Garcia visited a peep show for the first time ever later that day, she went as one of Leroy’s girls. Leroy Griffith, who also owns the Gayety Burlesque Theatre around the corner, guided her past a Coke machine and display case with whips and vibrators to one of 16 booths lining a round arena the
size of a boxing ring.
"All you have to do is dance, but you have to be nude to do it," he said.
Griffith slid a golden token through a slot below a window. A light bulb dimmed behind the glass, and the shadowy figure in the ring came into focus.
Griffith began stuffing bills through another slot and the dancer came to their window, swinging her hips faster as the money piled up.
Laura stared at the woman. "When I first saw her, I was like, whoa, she was stark naked, nude, I mean completely. He said, ’Do you think you can do it?’
"I said, ’Leroy, there isn’t much I can’t do.’ "
Laura was given 10 minutes in the arena, the time marked by a bell that would signal six shift changes an hour. The idea was to amuse the patrons with variety, encouraging them to feed$1, $5 and $10 dollar tips or, at the very least, the 50-cent tokens that bought those in the booth little more than a minute of darkness.
All plumpness and blue eyes, Laura entered the ring. She began to dance and wiggle at the circle of booths that were empty except for one. The man in the shadows began to tip her, first slipping her a $5 bill, then a $10, then a couple of ones.
She later learned that her first customer was her boss, Leroy Griffith.
That night Laura went home with $60, tax free. "I know women who work in factories, breaking their backs for $30 a day. I said, ’I don’t want to be like that.’ "
She is careful about certain things. She once threatened to call the cops on a bunch of boys crammed into a booth, breaking the house rule of one man, one booth. She won’t be as adamant as some of the girls who demand tips from their customers, knocking on the windows, even punching holes in the walls for the extra money.
"You can’t be a beggar with a gun," she says.
Not long ago Laura graduated to the theater downstairs, where the girls are on salaries ranging from $250 to $400 for seven hours of dancing spread over a seven-day week. On Halloween, her new husband Pete, 24, will be part of the act. He will dress as an executioner in a black cape and release his bride from a cage.
At first Pete was bothered by his wife’s line of work, but no more.
"I don’t get jealous because I know she loves me and she won’t go with anybody else," Pete said. "And sometimes I feel that other guys fantasize on my wife and they can’t have her and I can."
THE VICE COPS
Charlie Reed was too much of a workaholic to let an opportunity pass, even this once. He and Tony Holt had spent years of nights hunting for prostitutes, piling up some 300 arrests a year. But this night they were supposed to be toasting goodbye to all that. A new supervisor had taken over their unit and they were going back to patrol.
Holt and Reed were with a few other officers last month, drinking their goodbyes at the Fontainebleau Hilton Hotel’s Poodle Lounge, when Reed caught the eye of a blond woman at the bar. They exchanged smiles. Reed went over to her.
Minutes later in room 1022, provided gratis by the hotel for undercover work, Sgt. Reed had made an arrest, 24-year-old Kristi Lynn Gables. Then he dared Tony Holt to do the same.
Two hours passed and Holt spotted another blond chatting with men at the bar. Holt struck up a conversation. The woman told him she went with men to help with her rent. Holt asked her how much help she needed. She said it ranged from $200 to $300.
"That’s a lot of help," he said.
They went upstairs and talked some more. The woman had to specify what she would do for the money before Holt could arrest her. As they negotiated, Holt heard Reed’s beeper go off in the hallway outside the door.
Holt began tapping his watch furiously. "Must be something wrong," he mumbled, but he managed to consummate the arrest of 22-year-old Beate Palmowski anyway.
"She was from Germany," Holt said later. "She didn’t know what was going on."
It’s all in the hustle, the banter that goes into an arrest. Take them by surprise. Dissemble at all costs.
The officers amuse themselves with their own pretense. They pose at whim as a tire store owner from Tennessee, a maritime attorney, a retired landowner, a pig farmer from Ocala, a tobacco warehouse operator from North Carolina with money to burn.
"I told one I was a plastic surgeon," Holt recalled. "She wanted to know how much it cost to fix a scar on her face. So I examined her face."
New identities don’t always do the trick, especially after a few arrests. You look like Tony, the girls say. No, I don’t, Tony says. Sometimes they fall for it. Sometimes they don’t.
One prostitute named her price even though she recognized Holt from prior arrests.
"I said, ’What are you doing? We’ve arrested you several times.’ She said, ’Hey, I was greedy.’ "
The women work the bars at conventions, Visitor and Convention Authority schedules tucked in their purses. They walk Collins Avenue between Fifth and 23rd streets, bankrolling a taste for cocaine.
They tempt vicious odds. There was Michelle Orfino, whose arrest was interrupted when she went into labor and had to be rushed to Jackson Memorial Hospital. There was 61-year-old Suzanne Gerny who promised the experience of a lifetime because she had a lifetime of experience. Failing that, she offered a refund. There was Karen Bush, who, only months before her death, answered a judge’s query as to her guilt or innocence by pulling up her shirt.
In one of Bush’s last arrests, she lamented the injustice of it all. She talked about the customer who gave her $500 to squat in a chair and bark like a dog while he masturbated.
Then she made her case: "Why are you arresting me? You should arrest him. He’s crazy."
THE MEN OF BURLESQUE
Business stinks.
Used to be that Harry Ridge’s place would draw the likes of Frank Sinatra and Eddie Fisher. Art Carney would come by the Place Pigalle and drink like crazy. In its busier days, the club at 22nd Street off Collins Avenue drew a dynamite bomber, an angry Korean who came in blasting two revolvers and Vietnam vets in wheelchairs who would sling back drinks on Harry.
Harry’s place isn’t busy anymore. The problem, he figures, is go go girls. When bawdy comedianne Pearl Williams retired six months ago, Ridge decided the 29-year-old club needed a new image. He changed the club name from Place Pigalle to Go Go 22. He painted his club front a disconcertingly deep shade of blue, bleu celeste. All he got was a headache.
"Go go brings in bad types. They want to give you trouble," Harry said.
Harry wants to put more class into his club. He told the city he wants to rename it Club 22. The city told him to lighten up and paint the club front prairie sky.
A few of Harry’s people are making progress. There’s Luigi, a piano player with tendonitis and three layers of gloves, who spent 28 years entertaining the 5 a.m. crowd. Then a couple of months ago, he was "discovered" playing tunes in the Fontainebleu lobby. "Now I’m a celebrity at the Eden Roc," Luigi burbles.
Still, Harry Ridge thinks that at the age of 76 he should probably get out of the business.
"With me, the age is wrong. The nightclub business is wrong... We have a lot of people working here for years. It’s not good. Show business needs young people. I don’t belong in it. Some of the showgirls don’t belong in it."
Things aren’t much better at Leroy Griffith’s Gayety down the street. Griffith still operates his notorious Pussycat Theater on Biscayne Boulevard, but he shut down the Paris Theater on Washington Avenue less than five years ago and his plan to convert it into condominiums never materialized. Business on the Beach isn’t what it was when Griffith set up shop here in 1960.
One day, says theater manager Bud Luther, the Collins Avenue corridor of adult entertainment will all be gone.
"How can you sell tickets in a theater when they’re selling that sort of thing on cable? You can’t resist change. The past and 35 cents will get you a cup of coffee at McDonald’s."
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