Ivar Stands in Stark Contrast : A Library and Bump ‘n’ Grind, Back to Back

It is not long past midday. The green and white neon lights of the Ivar Theatre marquee won’t be crackling on in the smoggy Hollywood twilight for several hours yet. But inside the murky coolness of the Ivar, it is already show time.

Honey has just scooped up her discarded clothes and a few dollars in tips from the lighted runway, and, buck-naked, she scurries backstage to a splatter of applause. There aren’t many men here yet, and most of them are older gents. The senior citizens discount at the box office is only $1 off the regular $7 price, and $1 does not go far.

But for Honey, the plump blonde who just went offstage--a sweet-faced girl who has spent half of her 23 years on the streets of Hollywood and who gets flustered when people ask her multiplication questions and things she didn’t stay in school to learn--the dollars she gathers up from 20 minutes of nude dancing are a better afternoon’s wage than she could make any way but dishonestly. She has tried other jobs, even fast-food joints, but at one the manager made sly insinuations, and at the other, she could not make tacos fast enough. And so she is back, dancing at the Ivar, where every day, except when they close for the day of the Hollywood Christmas Parade and half a day on Christmas Eve, girls dance in the nude.

Through the television monitor in the cashier’s booth up front, manager Bonnie Godoyo can gaze around the interior of the Ivar Theatre. What she sees on the screen in black and white is hardly less true to life than the drab theater itself: The spongy red carpets darkened to gray, the shadow-shrouded seats, the tall velvet stage drapes made velvetier by years of gray dust.

Thirty and 40 years ago, it offended no one that the Ivar stood next door to the literate bustle of the Hollywood Library, because back then, the Ivar presented real theater. The stage curtains opened and closed with a dramatic sweep to the martini-dry wit of Noel Coward plays, the Southern household tragedies of Tennessee Williams and years later, musicals such as “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown” and “Godspell.” By the 1970s, the burlesque cuties and comics had taken over. There were randy gags, light songs and ornate stripteases by girls dressed as Cleopatra or Marie Antoinette with her own balsa-wood guillotine.

Then in 1978, Lee Witten, the impresario who had run the Ivar with great verve--”Mr. Showmanship,” Bonnie calls him--died in a helicopter crash. The Ivar went into other hands, and business drifted; the curtains faded and grew furred with dust, and finally they ceased to open at all. Now, a few shreds of silvery tinsel, propelled by a small fan, have been hung in the narrow open space between the drapes.

20-Minute Show

A woman steps through the fluttering silver--tall and lean, in a pale blue negligee, long rhinestone earrings and high heels. The flesh-colored G-string she stepped into in her dressing room--a bit of paraphernalia the younger girls don’t use--will not be revealed for a while yet. Every show here is a 20-minute show, and the veteran dancers know how to make it last.

“All right, gents,” Bonnie breathes into the microphone, “we have a lovely lady--let’s have a round of applause for Miss Penny Lane.” As an afterthought, she reminds the house: “Also, please do not put any part of your anatomy on the runway.”

Bonnie slides a cassette tape into the sound system with the ease of habit, and music billows into the theater--the theme from “Fame!” Penny Lane twirls the blue negligee in the spotlight, smiling at the men who sit decorously alongside the runway.

Bonnie watches the monitor for a few moments more; she will glance at it every few seconds through the day, the way a good driver uses a rear-view mirror. There is rarely any trouble here, but if there is, a Louisville Slugger leans in the corner. At night, the cops stroll through two or three times.

Nude-Dancing Hall

The Ivar, once a legitimate theater, is now a cavernous nude-dancing hall, where any one of the 14 regular girls--for so they call themselves--earn $7 for a 20-minute show, plus tips, which can be lavish or sparse. The shows, all live, are no more or less grittily blatant than similar nude spots around town, and the patrons no more or less raucous--perhaps less, since the only refreshment the Ivar offers is from the water fountain.

The Ivar Theatre building is a surviving, intact theater, a rarity in Los Angeles. “It was a perfect little theater,” said Stan Seiden, who leased it for a while in the early 1950s. He supervised some of the top-notch theater productions then, and when he toured it not long ago, “it kind of broke my heart.”

There is still an orchestra pit, covered for the dancers’ runway, and a bona fide haunted dressing room. The room was boarded up and painted over after its resident poltergeist threw makeup around, banged garbage cans and rattled teacups--and the performers. A second ghost, the Red Lady, is the spirit, Bonnie said, of an understudy who hanged herself after an aging, jealous leading lady rose from her sickbed to thwart the girl’s dreams. Bonnie said she has seen the Red Lady once or twice, twirling slowly onstage on quiet mornings.

Next Door to Library

There is even a stage trapdoor, where the ghost-king in “Hamlet” could drop eerily from sight.

But the ladies of the Ivar are not Hamlet; they are not even Sally Rand, as Hollywood officials are well aware. While nude spots a few blocks away exist cheek by jowl with equally raunchy X-rated peep shows, the Ivar happens to be right next to the glittering new Hollywood Library. And with Hollywood in a renovating mood, there has been talk of closing the Ivar down, perhaps to convert it to a children’s theater.

The disheveled Ivar didn’t look so bad before the first library burned down. But this new library, with its glossy planes and sleek cubes, has made the contrast painfully proximate.

There have been touchups: the huge NUDE GIRLS sign on the building’s north side--the one that made city officials wince during the new library’s ribbon-cutting in June--was painted out.

Children Walk By

The Ivar also has been painted white and celestial blue, to match it to the library’s blue and white-tiled slickness. But children with their storybooks still walk to the library past the Ivar’s sidewalk shadow-box, a painted nude silhouette of a brunette with stars on her breasts.

“It’s really a lovely, lovely little theater,” said David Haft, president of the Center Theatre Group, and one of the people asked by Councilman Michael Woo to look into creating children’s theater in Los Angeles, with the possibility of returning the Ivar to its original state and purpose.

Converting the Ivar, Haft said, “. . . washes a couple of hands. Not that we’re taking dead aim on porno houses--it’s there, it’s next to a children’s library, which is unfortunate, and there’s a big need for children’s theater.”

But for years, the old library and the Ivar coexisted rather peaceably. Bonnie got her job one day almost 10 years ago as she walked to the library to return some books, and saw the sign: Part-time cashier wanted.

‘Business Has Gone Down’

Whatever it looks like on the outside, on the inside the Ivar has much in common with any small business struggling against the competition: Other nude night spots, peep shows, fleshpot video-cassettes and cable.

“The business has gone down, the theater has gotten run down,” Penny Lane enumerated in the “star” dressing room, the lilac-painted one. “It was more fun when there were more customers and the shows were more professional.”

Daisy Delight, a redheaded trouper who has been on the road with her own show for years, and whose tastes run to lavish feather boas and false eyelashes with the wingspan of a Baltimore oriole, has been here only a few months. Sometimes, her lavish costumes, like her hot pink “Singing in the Rain” parasol and dress, made by one of the best tailors in Vegas, are not in keeping with the grittier tastes of some of the Ivar clientele.

‘Still Do a Class Act’

“I know a lot of burlesque has gone downhill, but a lot of girls still do a class act,” she said. She loves dancing, and it hurts her to say this, but nowadays “it’s kind of like a meat market.”

“The stripper is a dying art,” Bonnie pronounced. “We’d have girls come in with space capsule acts, bubble bath, they’d do an actual show, not just take off their clothes and say, ‘Look.’ You don’t just take off your clothes--that’s boring.” In the old days, a girl would only whip off her G-string at the very end; “they could keep a guy entertained for a whole 20 minutes.”

Penny Lane, who finds the dancing “an interesting art form,” had “a Spanish show that was very popular, with castanets--that’s up here on my shelf gathering dust. I got one request for it this year. Now, it’s all floor work and spreads; there’s no tease. The tease has been taken out of striptease.”

‘An Absolute Fortune’

Customers once liked costumes. Then, “any naked lady would do.” Then it was teen-agers, “18, 19 years old, can come in off the street, no acting, no music, no costumes, no shoes, drunk, stoned, rank amateurs, and go out there and make an absolute fortune--$50 in 20 minutes.” She shakes her head, and her blonde hair whips around her shoulders. “Those of us ‘over the hill’ are seeing a pronounced decline in our income.”

Lou, the 20-year veteran doorman (who is also Lou the bouncer, Lou the major-domo, Lou the tidying-up fellow, and Lou the claque on nights when the audience is slow to applaud), faults the dancers, not the customers. Not enough new girls to draw a new and bigger crowd. “If you were 18 years old,” Lou groused, “would you like to see your grandmother up there?”

None of that is any reason to close the place, the girls say. “There’s really nothing wrong with it. At least guys come here, and they won’t go out there to get some (illicit) sex,” said Honey, who suggested that painting over another sign or two could “make it look more discreet.” Even when she stops working--as she really wants to, to regain custody of her 7-month-old daughter--”I don’t think they should close it down; other girls can use it so they don’t have to go out on the street.”

Parade of Inspectors

Lou grumbled that the city is already trying to dry up the trade, sending around an unrelenting parade of inspectors for this and inspectors for that, and making a point of slapping $28 parking tickets on customers’ cars one minute after the 2 a.m. “no parking” curfew.

Sure, the girls take off their clothes here, but in some ways, the place is an office like any other, with the gossip about clothes and food, customers, boyfriends, husbands and sugar-daddies.

Texas Lee, “the original Mother Earth,” Bonnie calls her fondly, who has danced here for years, likes to make sure that everyone has a place to go for Thanksgiving or Easter dinner. If a girl is having problems, she will read the Tarot cards for her, for free. Texas is a homebody; she usually dances only early evenings, when her husband is home with their little boy. “She can make $25,” Bonnie said, “and be back home to watch TV with the hubby by 8 p.m.”

‘A Real Gentleman’

The regular customers know the girls’ birthdays, too, and will occasionally slip onto the lighted runway, amid the litter of dollar bills, a greeting card or a gift certificate from Frederick’s of Hollywood. One girl has a fan who has been known to toss fur jackets or jeweled rings onto the runway for her, or to lay out $20s like a hand of solitaire. A little thrill runs backstage when this rare specimen comes in “with a big bag like Santa Claus,” Bonnie said, but “what we like is that he’s a real gentleman.”

This is not Sunnybrook Farm; it is not even the Folies Bergere. But it is a living.

“This is my profession--I undress for success!” said Blondi, a strapping 22-year-old with well-kohled eyes, who has been here for four years. Sure, it worries her that this place may not last. “I’ve had dreams, I came here and all the doors are locked. I feel so comfortable at this place, and I know everybody.”

The Ivar is seductively comfortable, the kind of place where you work temporarily--forever.

It offers free time so Laura can pursue nursing, and Bonnie can study for a graduate degree in archeology and cultural anthropology, and Penny can use her real estate license and keep reading philosophy. “This is a very small part of my life,” Penny said. “I hadn’t intended to stay this long, but I found it was free time--so flexible.”

Easy Money

And it is easy money for girls who haven’t the education for anything else. The taco stand taught Honey that she prefers the Ivar, for now. “I couldn’t do anything if it weren’t for this place--I don’t have the experience,” she said.

Wildflower has danced here almost eight years, and since she lost weight, people have told her she looks like a thin Pia Zadora, which annoys her. Backstage she keeps a Dr. Spock baby book, and a volume of children’s names. She wants four, all boys, and she and her husband are trying to save up for them.

“I love working here. At a regular cocktail place you have to be on your feet eight or nine hours, the customers grab you and touch you. Here they just watch you, and you do your work.”

“Amen!” another dancer, Zulmar, said fervently.

Subtler Force

There is another, subtler force at work at the Ivar:

True, the backstage mirrors are splintered and the carpet squares are mossy-damp underfoot, but this is Hollywood, and it is acting when you go out there and purr and slink when sometimes you’d rather be doing something else. That immortal sidewalk with the stars in it is only a few paces north.

The stage names are not all just personal camouflage. It is part of the fantasy of Hollywood to change one’s name: A short girl with a New York accent chose “Burning Flame.” Debbie Star (Deborah Davidsohn, a new girl) has her own record label all ready and her songs are floating around town. She is 25 and confident. “I’m just waiting for CBS or RCA to come through. . . . It’s humiliating sometimes, getting naked and all. I couldn’t see my kids doing this, but it won’t last long.”

Honey has spent 11 years living on Hollywood’s rough edges. She knows the deceptive lure of its glamour, and tearfully remembers the early death of one of her three babies, dwarfed and stunted, she said, by Honey’s now-renounced drugs and drink. But even she enjoys the opiate of an audience. “I like performing. I get up there, it feels like I’m on stage.”

Sometimes--not enough to be reliable, but too often to discourage them--it comes true. The miracle that everyone dreams of--that a bored talent agent with half an hour to kill drops by the Ivar. It happened to Daisy. She has done some modeling, and once made the cover of an electronics ad supplement. And a week ago, a woman came by, and within an hour, had whisked Daisy off to the set of a new Tom Hulce movie, “Slam Dance,” for a very quick walk-on as a dance hall hostess.

“It can happen,” she trilled, swirling in a $400, custom-made red-feathered negligee. “Right here in this theater!”

Wednesday is Fantasy Night, and Debbie Starr does not disappoint. She wraps her feet in cotton, and slips on ballet toe-shoes. “Don’t expect too much,” she warned. “I gotta make it sexy.”

She walks out between the tinsel and the curtain folds, in red lace underwear and gloves, a blue chiffon overskirt--and with a broom. This is Fantasy Night. Her music is from the Nutcracker Suite, and her fantasy is Cinderella. As she begins to dance to the Tchaikovsky melody, a man outside, ready to plunk down his $7 at the box office, is startled. “Hey,” called Lou to his friend, Bear, “there’s a guy out front that doesn’t wanna come in because he hears this music!”

As Deborah dances, a customer surreptitiously pulls his $1 tip off the runway.

Then the music changes. She puts down her broom, and, to rock ‘n’ roll of her own making--”David Lee,” a riotous love song to singer David Lee Roth--pulls off her chiffon Cinderella apron and bends over, swiveling her hips and pouting smiles at the men below.

And the man slides his dollar bill back on the stage.