Max Collins - Ask Not

Welcome to downtown Dallas, where nobody lived except conventioneers, businessmen on the road, and other lonely, horny men. When the Dallas working day was done, the rush was on to bedroom communities — executives heading north to the Park Cities, lesser white-collar types to far north Dallas and select neighborhoods in Oak Cliff and Lakewood, while the labor force took buses south. No stadiums for sports to bring them back, either, and only a few movie theaters, the Capri, the Palace, the Majestic.

That meant the primary entertainment options were the girlie clubs — Abe Weinstein’s Colony and his brother Barney’s Theater Lounge. Jack Ruby’s Carousel, I noticed, on the other side of that parking ramp, was shuttered, a casualty of history.

Might seem funny that one of the classiest, most famous hotels in Dallas was right across the street from its biggest strip joint, but the twenty-two-story, Beaux Arts — style Adolphus depended on conventioneers, too. I crossed Commerce Street, dodging only light one-way traffic, figuring to eat in the Century Room.

I would eventually join the other out-of-town males at the Colony Club, if for no other reason than I had spent a couple of memorable nights with the exotic dancer named Jada (actually Janet Adams) when she played Chicago last year. But I had learned long ago not to eat at strip clubs, since food was never the attraction and when you got a hair in your soup, it had unfortunate resonance. Add to that the possibility that Mac Wallace might be dining at the restaurant in his hotel, and the Century Room it was.

Once upon a time the Century Room had been the “Hawaiian” Century, with bamboo and native bark on the walls, palm trees with coconuts, and an animated mural of volcanoes, mountains, and breaking surf tied in with a tropical rainstorm effect. Now it was space-age modern, brown and gold, looking like a high-class Denny’s. Too bad. At least the Planked Gulf Trout Adolphus hadn’t changed with the times, except for the price — a buck twenty-five after the war, two-fifty now.

What the Century Room didn’t serve me up was Mac Wallace, even though I lingered through my meal and went through two vodka gimlets. The weeknight diners at the Century Room consisted of married couples celebrating a birthday or an anniversary, couples who might have been married but probably not to each other, and lonely men-about-town. None of the latter were the pitch-and-putt slayer.

Traffic hadn’t picked up any when I crossed Commerce again into the neon fog of the sidewalk under the Colony Club’s looming sign. For all that sleazy grandeur, the address was 1322½, meaning the nitery was one floor up, the glass-brick entry a modest recession between a liquor store and the parking ramp. Under a rounded canopy, glassed-in showcases at right and left presented racy posters and photos of Colony girls past and present, with an emphasis on Candy Barr, who’d got her start (and her name) here. Through the door with its porthole window, I went up thickly red-carpeted stairs to a small landing where an overly made-up attractive blonde in a low-cut red gown sat behind a semicircular black-leather-upholstered counter trimmed in silver. She wanted two dollars and I gave it to her.

There was a time when two dollars got you more from a blonde like that.

The club room was impressively large, dominated by a performance stage with an Art Moderne look that had really been something in the ’40s. In those days, you would see the likes of Louis Armstrong and George Gobel here, and Bob Hope would hop up on the stage when he was in town, to do a free bit. The strippers were just part of the show.

Now they were the show. When I’d been here maybe ten years ago, the featured musical group was the popular George Shearing Quintet. The combo onstage tonight was Bill Peck and His Peckers. Somehow I didn’t think Johnny Carson would be booking them on The Tonight Show.

Still, the place had remnants of class — the formidable stage, maybe twenty-five by thirty, was elevated, with a shiny black metal rail to keep horny patrons from getting too friendly with the exotics, as strippers liked to call themselves these days. Black-leather-upholstered booths and chairs, linen tablecloths, plush carpeting, and flickering candlelight added up to a dreamy ambiance.

I’d already had those two gimlets across the street, so from my ringside seat I just ordered a Coke from a smiling, busty black-haired waitress in a tuxedo jacket and black mesh hose. The waitresses pushed champagne, which was how you got them to sit with you. You shared a bottle with them, but they didn’t drink much if any, utilizing a trick of pouring the champagne from their glasses into the ice bucket. My perky dark-haired doll tried hard, but I didn’t want her company or the champagne.

That and wine and beer were the extent of alcoholic beverages that could be legally sold in a nightclub in Dallas. That was why there was a liquor store downstairs, and a cover charge outside. You brought a bottle in a brown bag and ordered setups.

Getting desperate, the waitress pointed out a doorway in the back corner. “I give private dances in the VIP room upstairs. You’d love it, there’s these dark-blue mirrors and velvet couches. Real intimate and sexy. If I’m not your type, sweetie, some of the dancers are available. Just let me know...”

The lights came down, and I sat rather glumly through the MC, a guy named Breck Wall who used to be Jack Ruby’s man, doing a painful comedy routine with a guy in old-lady drag, a bad version of Jonathan Winters’s Maude Frickert (“My living bra just died”). The first stripper was a pretty, stacked brunette called Peggy Steele, who according to MC Wall was “The I-Don’t-Care Girl,” and she didn’t. As the Peckers played “Blue Skies,” she moved listlessly around in a dark-blue strapless gown with a glittering bodice and gradually peeled to pasties and a small rhinestone-studded bikini bottom. Then a corny comic in a red derby accompanied his tired song parodies (“How dry I am, how wet I’ll be, if I don’t find the bathroom key”) with a banjo and I decided Bob Hope probably wasn’t going to show up tonight.

Blonde Chris Colt was next, with her “forty-fives,” a description that did not refer to the toy six-guns on her hips. To “I’m an Old Cowhand,” she pranced in a rhinestone-studded Western pants outfit that zipped off until she was wearing just two sheriff’s-badge pasties, a skimpy G-string that exposed a little tumbleweed, and white boots. This cowgirl was usually the headliner, but not with Jack Ruby’s headline stripper, Jada, on the bill — suddenly famous in the wake of the assassination.

And Miss.45’s applause had not died down when Jada came strutting out to the Peckers singing, a capella, “ Ja-da, Ja-da, Ja-da Ja-da jing jing jing. ”

She was an amazing-looking woman — though she was only five-foot-five or — six, her tower of flaming red hair, which somehow also reached her shoulders, conspired with high heels to make her seem larger than life. Flesh that had been creamy white in Chicago was now a dark-berry tan, her lipstick bright red, her full lips constantly flashing a wide, white Marilyn-esque smile; her wide-set blue eyes with the long fake lashes and curving eyebrows gave her the overemphasized glamour of a female impersonator, only she was definitely female.

Her spangly, feathery white evening gown with long white gloves didn’t last long before she was down to red pasties and a half corset that showed off her full, shapely bottom. Her hourglass figure made the pert breasts seem larger than they were, and the lushness of her curvy figure was matched by a charismatic command of the stage, a laughing mastery she held over all the men in the audience.