Hope and Romance Are Specialties of the House at Tijuana’s Club Pacifico

Johnny Kaye was working the telephone, doing business.

“It’s your lucky day!” he informed the prospective client on the other end. “I think I’ve got a girl for you. She’s just your type. You interested?”

In Kaye’s cluttered office, Mexican women in dresses and spike heels were busily peering through photo albums featuring glossy Polaroid snaps of men, mostly American, more than a few of them baldish, overweight and on the wrong side of middle age.

“Look at this guy!” a woman, aghast, asked a visitor, pointing to a photograph of a smirking man perched on a lawn chair. “Does Johnny expect me to go out with this guy? No way.”

Kaye’s reaction? “They all want Robert Redford,” he sighs.

Welcome to Johnny Kaye’s Club Pacifico, situated in an office a few blocks from the glitzy Tijuana tourist drag where disco music blares all night long and where jackasses are painted to resemble zebras.

Even in this frazzled border city, in a hectic atmosphere akin to a hawkers’ bazaar--even here, Johnny Kaye’s commodity is singular.

Johnny Kaye, car salesman-turned-border entrepreneur, self-proclaimed matchmaker and amateur psychologist, offers love and companionship. For a price.

The Club Pacifico is no place for feminists. Here, Kaye insists, Western men can meet women--homey, dedicated, non-threatening--who offer a comforting contrast to females north of the border. There are hundreds of women to choose from, Kaye boasts, directing a visitor’s gaze to his bulging albums of photos--and to the home videos of the “girls,” all filmed by his sons.

“The ideal mate of your dreams--whom you might otherwise never meet--is most likely waiting for you in our photo/video library,” a club brochure advises prospective clients. “It is therefore very important for you to take action RIGHT NOW.”

‘Love and Companionship’

The club’s motto? “Where nice people meet and fall in love.”

It is definitely NOT prostitution, Kaye is quick to point out. Nor, he insists, is the club a scheme to exploit poor Mexican women eager to marry U.S. citizens and obtain immigration documents--the much-treasured green cards--that will allow them to live and work in the United States.

“We offer love and companionship,” explains Kaye, a blue-eyed, Danish-born six-footer whose Nordic appearance would appear more at home in Copenhagen than Tijuana. “I’m trying to make people happy. When you’ve got a Mexican girl, you’ve really got someone special.”

Underlying the central theme are posters and signs on virtually every office wall extolling the virtues of true love. “Crema de Amor”-- Cream of Love--is the very pointed name of a liqueur standing strategically on Kaye’s desk.

Kaye is positioned at the edge of a singular cross-cultural phenomenon--and he’s eager to take advantage. In recent years, some American men, many of them divorced and dismayed by their experiences with U.S. women, have increasingly looked to the Third World for their “ideal” woman. Many men seek out the ladies themselves, setting up in hotel rooms in places such as Manila and Mexico City and taking out classified advertisements in local newspapers. In order to more easily facilitate such international liaisons, “dating” services such as Kaye’s have sprung up in nations such as Mexico and the Philippines.

The goal: To match Third-World women eager for security and stable homes with Western men seeking the kind of woman mama used to be, or something to that effect.

Many women may find the idea deplorable and blatantly exploitative. But that doesn’t faze Kaye. In fact, he’s talking about expanding his business to Germany, where some men are also extending their romantic horizons beyond the Rhine.

German-Born Wife

“The Germans are going off to Thailand and the Philippines to find wives,” explains Kaye, 61, who says he has been happily married to a German-born woman for 26 years. “There’s no need, with all these beautiful Mexican women. I’m planning to open an office in Hamburg.”

Kaye, who has lived in the United States for more than a decade since moving here from Germany, says he has had considerable success--although he admits to a shortage of men. He boasts that there have been 11 marriages among men and women who met at his service and that about a dozen other couples are “going steady.” (He receives $100 for each marriage resulting from a club date.) The married couples tend to forget him quickly after taking their vows, however, and he has only one wedding picture to promote his success as Tijuana’s Cupid, as one female client calls him.

“I’m trying to get some more wedding pictures,” Kaye says in slightly accented English, sounding like a rejected suitor. “But they don’t know me once they get married; they don’t want anyone to know that they met at Johnny’s place.”

Currently, Kaye says he has signed up slightly more than 300 women, a mix of singles and divorcees, who pay $10 each for the privilege of having their names, ages, marital and parental statuses--and photographs--displayed in Kaye’s albums, or in video. The average age of women is between 28 and 32, Kaye says, although some are 60 or more.

“The men all want younger women,” Kaye confides.

Kaye says he has signed up about 80 men, most of them divorced, average age about 40. They pay a flat fee of $200, which allows “unlimited” dates, and, for $15 extra a month, they can receive “special services”--periodic updates, telephone message relay service, etc.

Language Difficulties

No woman or man is forced to take a date, says Kaye, who likens his concern to a personalized version of an American dating service. A major problem, of course, is language; several couples spoke of awkward dates in which most of their time was spent in futile hand gestures or looking up words in dictionaries.

Lucina Hernandez, a divorced 26-year-old, said her one experience at the service was not exactly ideal. “We couldn’t understand each other,” said the dark-haired Hernandez, who speaks only Spanish.

There are some other cross-cultural problems. Mexican women occasionally show up with chaperones; one came to a date with her brother-in-law.

Kaye’s way of doing business is an unlikely mix of salesmanship and relationship-counseling. His approach doesn’t appear high-pressure, but he isn’t shy about passing on his advice.

“I told one guy, ‘Don’t marry that girl. She’s after money,’ ” Kaye recalled of one client. “But he didn’t listen. They got married; three weeks later they got separated. I told him.”

Kaye maintains that such women are the exception. “We got a few gold-diggers,” he says, sipping on a German beer in his small office, where he also dabbles in real estate, “but I screen them out pretty quick.”

Of another couple, Kaye says confidentially, “I hope she doesn’t marry that guy; there’s something wrong with him. I’m not sure what it is; he’s too jumpy.”

A rule with Kaye is that all first dates take place in his office. “This way the tenseness is lessened and the ice will be broken,” Kaye advises in his literature. “After that you are, of course, on your own to go to lunch, dinner, jai alai, bullfight, Rosarito, Puerto Nuevo, Ensenada, etc., etc.”

Kaye, who says he moved to San Diego a year ago from Florida, started the business in February after noticing advertisements placed in Mexican newspapers by American men seeking to meet “Mexicanas.” These days, Kaye places his own ads in San Diego newspapers, seeking to attract clients by promising Western men “girl friend or wife unlimited dates.” He also advertises for interested women in Mexican newspapers.

The men’s motivations seem fairly uniform. A number of men interviewed said they had soured on their experiences with American women, who they generally described as being too independent.

‘Too Many Games’

“American women play too many games,” said Don, a divorced engineer from Chula Vista who was found at Johnny’s place on a recent afternoon. “I was married to a Cuban woman once. She was good for a while, but then she became like an American. She’s a fashion designer in New York now.”

He, meantime, is in Tijuana looking for a date. “This is a lot better than trying to meet someone at a bar,” said Don, 46, as he sipped a can of beer in a makeshift patio outside Kaye’s office. “I hear there’s some great women in Costa Rica, too. I may go down there.”

Added another male client: “I like the homey, motherly type, which you have more of in Mexico.”

Although Kaye is eager for more male clients, he says he’s not interested in married men looking for someone on the side. “I call the men at home; if a woman answers the phone they better have a good answer.”

The women at Club Pacifico are a mixed lot, from poor mothers desperate for a quick marriage and improved financial prospects to independent, confident women eager to meet someone new. In traditional Mexico, being divorced and/or a single parent can be a severe handicap for women.

Laura G. Rojo, manager of a Tijuana restaurant, said she was intrigued by the idea of meeting some non-Mexican men.

“Mexican men are too macho; they put women down,” said Rojo, 31, a single parent who said she worked for two years as an undocumented laborer in a kitchen in the Los Angeles area. “Women are often superior to men; Mexican men don’t realize that.”

For two months, Rojo said, she has been going out with one American man, a divorced resident of San Clemente who has two children. She said she may be willing to marry him; she said she would comply if he didn’t want her to work.

“He has been very much the caballero (gentleman),” Rojo said.

But another woman, a 28-year-old single mother who asked that her name not be used, said she was disappointed by her date. First, he said he wasn’t interested in a woman with children. Then, after dinner, she said, he suggested that they go to a hotel.

“I wouldn’t do something like that,” she said.

Then she added, “If he doesn’t call me this weekend I’ll get his phone number from Johnny and call him,” she said.