Redondo Beach Bar, Pressured by Feminists, Scraps Collage of Pinups

Faced with a boycott threat from South Bay feminists, a Redondo Beach bar has removed--for now--a controversial collage of snapshots from its weekly bikini contest.

Moose McGillycuddy’s, a King Harbor bar and restaurant that, like many beach nightspots, promotes its contests with a “wall of fame,” removed the framed collage last week after the local chapter of the National Organization for Women complained that it was exploitative, said manager Greg Gebhart.

“I can’t forecast the future, but for the time being, at least, it’s retired,” Gebhart said. He would not elaborate.

Nancy Jo Rettig, the patron whose complaints prompted NOW’s attention, said the restaurant’s decision came only after a flurry of correspondence and publicity.

“I appreciate their recognizing our plea, but I doubt I’ll ever go back (to Moose McGillycuddy’s),” Rettig said. “I think there’s a lot of dirty water under the bridge.”

At issue are the snapshots--53 by Gebhart’s count--of oiled young women dancing in string bikinis and spike heels before a mostly male audience for a cash prize. Arranged in a framed collage, the photos hung just inside the front entrance to the two-story harbor restaurant and bar.

Rettig, a counselor to battered women who regularly lunched at the bar, said she noticed the collage on her way to the bathroom one afternoon, and complained to the manager. Among other things, she charged, the collage was hung at a child’s eye level, and several of the snapshots were cropped to show the contestants only from the neck down.

But after initially agreeing to remove it, the bar management kept the collage up, Rettig said. The action prompted her to gather the signatures of 110 friends and co-workers who threatened to boycott the restaurant unless the collage was taken down. Rettig also notified NOW, which launched a letter-writing campaign of its own.

“The photos don’t portray women as people with hearts and minds. They reduce them to big breasts and bare bottoms,” Deborah Blair Porter, coordinator of the Palos Verdes-South Bay chapter of NOW, said at the time. “If they’re going to take photographs, they should do justice to these women, and portray them as whole human beings, not just body parts.”

Gebhart, meanwhile, said Rettig and NOW were singling out Moose McGillycuddy’s for something that is standard practice in bars throughout California. He said the collage was a promotion for the bar’s midweek contests and noted that until Rettig, no one had complained about it, including the women in the photographs.

Moreover, he said, only half a dozen of the snapshots failed to show the women’s faces, and only two of them had been cropped. In those two cases, he added, “the girl didn’t have a pleasant look on her face, and that’s why we cut her head off.”

But in the wake of news stories about the controversy, Gebhart did move the collage--to the wall across from the upstairs bar. In its place, he hung a framed copy of a Los Angeles Times article about Rettig’s complaint, with a caption inviting customers to come to the bar Wednesday night and “see the contest that started the controversy.”

In a letter to Rettig dated Dec. 20, Moose McGillycuddy’s president, Lee DeShong, charged that “surely there are matters that (are) of much greater importance to NOW than hassling bars that run bikini contests.”

DeShong added in a subsequent letter Jan. 3 that the collage was not removed at first because, after the controversy appeared in the local press, “we were inundated with requests to see the poster (collage) and to put it back up. So we put it back up, but upstairs, where only adults could see it. . . . Apparently, that has not satisfied you. So we are again taking down the poster from its upstairs location.”

NOW’s Blair Porter was out of town and could not be reached for comment on the restaurateur’s decision to remove the collage. But Rettig complained that DeShong and Gebhart “are just playing games.”

Rettig said she thinks they took down the collage to silence her. “They’re not taking it down because they changed their minds or even because they listened to our complaints,” she said. Moreover, she added, she doubts the poster will remain off the wall.

As evidence, she cited the closing line of DeShong’s most recent letter, which promised that the collage will stay down “unless new publicity comes out, and our customers demand to see it again.”