Charity Muscle : Beefcake Goes on the Block for a Good Cause and Premium Price

By day they were loan officers, city planners, law students. But for this one night they were screamers, hundreds of women yelling for Orange County firemen who peeled off their yellow slickers like strippers and bumped, thrust and pranced their way down a runway.

The shouts created a wall of sound that crested at the sight of bare, oiled, muscular chests and faded when the bodies were garbed in tuxedoes. Women rushed to the raised platform and thrust roses into the hands of the men who strutted before them.

Some women took it farther. They held roses in their mouths like flamenco dancers and had the prancing hunks pluck them away with their own mouths. Other women stuffed dollar bills down the front of the uniform trousers, thrust their hands over their heads in uninhibited victory cheers and boogied back to their seats.

It wasn’t Chippendales. It was charity.

Last Friday night in an Anaheim hotel, 20 firemen competed for 12 spots on next year’s “Firefox” calendar. Tickets cost $20, calendars featuring last year’s winning firemen cost $10, and dances with the firemen went for $1. The proceeds, $17,000, went to the Orange County Burn Assn., the UCI Burn Center and the Burn Survivors organization.

This past Tuesday night, the stakes were higher, the flesh was older, the screams were as loud. Again, for charity.

Women who paid anywhere from $25 to $100 per ticket crowded a Newport Beach hotel ballroom to bid for bachelors, shelling out thousands of dollars in some cases to head off to London, Madrid or Jamaica with the man of their choice. The beneficiary was the March of Dimes, which assists children with birth defects.

Were the events tacky? Tawdry? Sexual come-ons of a sort that would bring screams of outrage if it were men bidding on women? Hey, this is charity.

“The whole purpose (of the “Firefox” event) is to help the burn victims,” said Msgr. John Sammon, chaplain for county firefighters. He and the chiefs of the Anaheim and Fountain Valley fire departments were on hand “to help make sure the whole procedure is under control,” Sammon said.

“It’s not Chippendales,” where men strip way, way down to entertain women. “If it was, then we wouldn’t be here and (the firemen) wouldn’t be, either,” Sammon said.

And although the disc jockey introducing the contestants did stoop to the occasional sexual innuendo, he also asked that the women “please don’t touch the firemen.” The plea went unheeded.

Once upon a time, charities raised money with black-tie dinners and telephone and mail solicitations. Then came running, bicycling and walking events. And then came the calendars and bachelor auctions, with the auctions becoming popular enough to warrant their own episodes on television shows like “L.A. Law,” “Cheers” and last Monday night’s “Designing Women.”

Michael Wagschal, an official of the American Cancer Society’s Orange County branch, said his organization hasn’t produced bachelor auctions, but his former employer, the American Heart Assn. chapter in Montgomery County, Md., did two of them while he was there last year.

“One was a little meat marketish, a little degrading, and the other one was classy,” Wagschal said. At a classy event, typically held in a hotel ballroom with bachelors in formal wear, the man “gets up and talks about his business, hobbies, goals, what he reads.” At the other, typically held in a bar with the men less well-dressed, the men “get up there, talk about a sexual fantasy and take their shirts off in a second,” Wagschal said.

Wagschal said that at the cheaper event his group ran, they came up short on bachelors “so they threw me up on the stage. I got picked by a female postal worker, and I went on the date. I know this firsthand; she was expecting a lot for her money. . . . I wasn’t willing” to do anything but have dinner.

An official of one Orange County charity, who declined to be identified by name because she didn’t want to offend colleagues in the nonprofit field, said that some bachelor auctions “let the women drink and drink and drink so they’ll bid higher. And they just make fools of themselves.

“At one, a woman in the parking lot was crying out loud and couldn’t believe she made such a spectacle of herself,” she said, adding that often “bachelors expect to get someone young and beautiful” and are disappointed.

But Richard Kavadas, owner of a Santa Ana business form company, said he wasn’t disappointed when he went on the block last year at the March of Dimes event.

He worried that it would be “like a meat-market type of a thing and all these screaming women in the audience would like more than just company,” Kavadas said. “I just thought you’d run into all these crazy drunk women wanting more than they should.”

The event turned out to be “far superior and classier than I ever imagined it would be,” he said. He was auctioned off to “one of the neatest of the girls who bid,” but because of schedule problems they never did go on the date to Palm Springs, for which Cheryl Bouview had paid $900.

Kavadas said that so far as he knew all the other men were as happy with the event as he, except for one who “was pretty unhappy with the girl who picked him because she was pretty drunk and staggering around the party afterward. I think that woman had other things in mind.”

Last year’s March of Dimes event raised $150,000, the organization said. The take for Tuesday night’s show was $121,500, and produced a record bid, $15,000 for Mark C. Johnson, who promised the winner that “you will be picked up in my Ferrari Testarossa and taken to John Wayne Airport, where we will fly in my jet helicopter to LAX.”

Then it’s on to London on Friday, a performance of “Miss Saigon,” followed by a $1,000 shopping spree. Sunday brings a Concorde flight to New York and tickets to the play “Aspects of Love.” Johnson and date will stay at the Helmsley Palace, the tower of glitz where Leona Helmsley presides.

A teddy bearish 44-year-old with red hair, beard and mustache, Johnson said he was “exhilarated” by the size of the winning bid and “really happy for the kids” helped by the March of Dimes. Karen Elliott, owner of interior design and public relations firms in Tustin, wrote out the $15,000 check but declined to say who provided the money. (Only the difference between the bid and the cost of the trip is tax deductible.)

Elliott said the event was “a good cause” and she hadn’t met Johnson beforehand, though for an hour before the auction the more than two dozen tuxedoed bachelors gathered in another ballroom to meet bidders, most of them decked out in their finest cocktail dresses.

The written instructions to the bachelors warned: “Do not give out your business card! Do not take anyone’s business card! Do not drink alcohol! Do be pleasant and try to talk to as many women as you can about your package. This will increase your bidding!”

The men were also warned they would be disqualified for drinking alcohol or “removing an article of clothing on stage.”

Robin Huffman did meet the man she bid on at the mingling session beforehand. She said Paul Driskell, 47-year-old chief executive officer of a leasing corporation and the only bachelor sporting an earring, was “extremely personable” and was dubbed “a nice man” by the spotters in the audience helping the auctioneer determine who was bidding.

Huffman said she had attended the auction before, but didn’t bid then because “I thought there were a lot of wealthy women” waving for the auctioneer’s attention. Then she learned that many women solicit donations. She said she had 80 checks from friends and clients of her interior design firm to help pay the $1,500 bid for a trip to San Francisco and environs.

A lot of the folks inside clearly were moneyed. Outside, at the entrance to the hotel, the Mercedes lined up snout to snout looked like a Frankfurt car lot. Women bidders received $300 Gucci watches over and above the excursions promised by the bachelors.

Bill Johnson, co-chairman of the March of Dimes event, said a major advantage that a function such as a bachelor auction has over a formal dinner is the lesser cost to the nonprofit group to stage the affair.

With so much competition among charities for donors’ dollars in Orange County, people who “spend $50, $100, $150 on events want to know they’re done nicely,” Johnson said. They read the labels of the wines that are served. They remember the souvenirs the charity provides.

What do they remember about the bachelor auctions, though? Do the organizers get questions about the sexual overtones of the evening?

“We get it constantly,” Johnson said. “We can’t ignore it, because of the fact that it’s exactly the image or the ambience that’s in the air.” Johnson said the bachelors are warned not to shed any clothing or dance erotically, and to “try to keep this above board.”

“We know it’s there, it has to be there, otherwise some of the jazz isn’t in the event. . . . (But) if there are any sexual overtones, it’s in the mind of whomever is looking onto the stage,” he said.

Ruth Ko, publisher of Orange Coast magazine, was one of the judges at Friday’s “Firefox” event and was co-chairwoman of Tuesday’s bachelors’ bid.

“We as fund-raisers have to look for creative fund-raising, and we have to go for what the public wants,” Ko said in explaining why charities sponsor events that some people criticize for being tacky.

“You’ll always have critics,” Ko said. “If we sold pencils, they’d say we were taking money from the blind.” She did say that after attending her first Firefox event, “I was a little shocked at some of what went on” and “a little embarrassed” by the firemen stripping. “But apparently the firemen think it’s fine.”

Gloria Allred, an attorney who has filed numerous lawsuits on behalf of women’s rights and is an outspoken and prominent feminist, said that she sees nothing wrong with bachelor auctions, so long as it’s men who are on the block.

“I don’t feel it forces (men) into any kind of a subordinated role,” Allred said. “I don’t think it affects their image as a group. I do think it has an impact on women and their image and their status if they’re portrayed as slaves or objects of property, because historically we were considered to be the property of men. Men were never considered as a matter of law to be the property of women.”

“I also know as a practical point of view that it’s difficult for charities to raise funds and this is a possible way to do it,” Allred said. “I also know it’s difficult for single women to meet men, and I’m loathe to deprive them of any chances.”

Allred said a friend dragged her to a bachelor auction one time and she won a date with a football player, whose name she couldn’t remember. “It was kind of a joke. We never connected to go out. The point was to make the donation” to charity, she said.

As with the auction in Newport Beach on Tuesday night, the one Allred attended had a crowd made up largely of “working women, businesswomen,” she said, all of whom “looked like they were having a wonderful time.”

Also having a wonderful time last Friday were the firemen competing to get on the calendar. The dressing room had the ambience of a high-school football team’s locker room, with hootin’ and hollerin’ and quick shuffle steps by contestants trying to remember what the choreographer had taught them during the all-day preparations for the event.

Outside, 21-year-old Vicki Lesch of Anaheim Hills said she was at the event “to have fun, check it out.” Inside, as the parade up and down the runway hit full stride, Lesch was one of the women growing more enthusiastic. By the event’s end, she had stuffed six one-dollar bills into the trousers of her favorite firemen.

“It’s totally fun, totally awesome,” Lesch said. Would it be as much fun if the firemen stayed fully clothed? “Oh yeah,” she said at first. But egged on by her friends, she laughingly admitted, “taking it off is better. Less is better. It’s about time we have men doing it.”

The most jarring event of the evening came after three and a half hours of firemen prancing and dancing, when two burn victims were introduced.

One was Vinnie Tanis, dressed in a tuxedo, who was one year old in 1979 when he was badly burned in a house fire. The other was Krystin Olson, 22, who in June of 1989 was in a car struck by a man fleeing police. The car exploded and she spent two months in the hospital, receiving treatment and skin grafts. She still faces three to five years of plastic surgery, she said, “but I’m just happy to be alive.”

The crowd, reminded by the master of ceremonies that helping burn victims was “the one reason that we’re here tonight,” applauded loudly for both survivors.

After that 10-minute interlude, it was back to the firemen, stripped and dancing. “Come on guys, I want to hear the ladies scream,” the MC urged. “Wiggle it, wiggle it.”

As the firemen went down the runway yet again, two women shoved dollar bills between their breasts, approached the platform and let firemen lean down and pluck the bills with their teeth.

All for charity.