Bondage Parlor Owner Hopes for End to Uproar : North Hollywood: The establishment serves 4,000 male customers and, a spokeswoman says, ‘one of the things we provide our clients is discretion.’
After using the desk computer to figure out his employees’ commissions, minus deductions for taxes and the health plan, James Hillier began printing out and signing the payroll checks--one of the most important tasks of the small businessman’s week.
“I have a lot of people who depend on me,” Hillier said. “Just like any other normal business.”
Meanwhile, many of the 28 people who depend on Hillier for their paychecks lingered in the rooms outside his office. They were young women wearing exotic lingerie and not much else, lounging on black couches or on the floor, waiting--not for their paychecks but for customers wishing to indulge in fantasies of beating them or being beaten by them.
Welcome to the Chateau, a seemingly incongruous meeting of business and bondage located on a North Hollywood industrial street in a building that once housed a commercial bakery.
An American flag stands in one corner of Hillier’s small, windowless office. On the wall hangs a framed poster commemorating the Brooklyn Dodgers’ 1955 world championship season. There is also a certificate of appreciation for support of an anti-child abuse program and a darkly painted portrait of a nude woman in bondage.
And it’s an enterprise that is all perfectly legal--within strict guidelines. Last week, a zoning hearing officer granted Hillier’s club the first-ever conditional use permit in Los Angeles for a sadomasochist establishment.
The three-month permit process brought protests from neighboring businesses, politicians and police. But Hillier had done his zoning homework before moving to the former bakery. His permit application was ultimately granted. Now he and his employees hope that the spotlight of publicity will fade, leaving them to go about the business of discreetly serving all of their male customers--4,000 by their count.
“We are trying to get this to die down,” said a woman named Shyloh, a longtime employee of Hillier’s who acted as his spokeswoman last week. “One of the things we provide our clients is discretion.”
That may be so. But Hillier and his spokeswoman have not shied from defending what they claim is the Chateau’s needed role in society or its record as a good and law-abiding neighbor. Police acknowledge that they have gone undercover to the new Chateau location and have made no arrests, but remain skeptical of the club’s ability to establish itself in the neighborhood without a negative impact.
Hillier, 59, has operated the club for 15 years, moving it repeatedly from Hollywood-area locations when it ran into community opposition or ran afoul of zoning laws. When it finally located this year in the old Barbara Ann Bakery building on Atoll Avenue, Hillier said his business would be in North Hollywood until at least the next century.
“I plan on being here another 20 years,” he said.
‘Exchanges of Authority’
During an interview conducted before he received the conditional use permit, the gray-haired and bearded Hillier described his efforts to be a straight arrow in a business that, by its nature, automatically draws the disapproving attention of police and large segments of society.
Hillier said he has the insurmountable task of distancing his club from other sexual-encounter businesses, such as nude modeling salons, massage parlors and others that police say may act as fronts for prostitution.
“Because we are in a similar field, we are lumped together,” Hillier said. “The minute you use the words sexual encounter , people think prostitution. . . .
“This is not a front for prostitution. Our members don’t come here for that.”
What they come for, Hillier and Shyloh said, is a chance to act out fantasies involving “consensual exchanges of authority” at a rate of $100 per half-hour. The old bakery’s ovens have been removed and replaced by small “encounter” rooms furnished with pillories, leather straps and belts, even a saddle on a sawhorse. There are leg irons, whips and masks available and customers can bring their own equipment as long as it is deemed safe by the management.
Customers choose whether they want to be submissive or dominant and each is first interviewed by the woman he has chosen for the encounter to determine what kind of scenario they are interested in creating, said Shyloh, who said she worked both as a submissive and a dominatrix at the club for several years before retiring recently.
There is nudity, but sex acts or actual pain is not allowed, the club’s operators maintain. They insist that all activities at the Chateau are play-acting, despite complaints from neighbors near the prior Chateau locations about hearing cries of anguish, and past advertisements in sex-oriented publications that touted the female employees as “dedicated and truly into B & D,” a slang abbreviation for bondage and discipline/domination.
“The girls at the Chateau are not victims. I don’t know of anybody who has ever been harmed,” said Shyloh, who is in her 30s.
Emergency Code Words
Still, precautions are taken. There are no locks on the encounter room doors, and each room has an intercom connected to the club’s office that is always on, Shyloh said. The women are given code words to yell if an encounter turns painful, or a customer demands sex or wants to use drugs. The code words allow other employees to determine the difference between a real emergency and play-acting cries of pain, she said.
“If a girl used a code word, the entire staff would be in there in a second,” Shyloh said. But in her seven years, she said, no one has shouted a code word to alert the staff.
Shyloh said staff members usually come to the Chateau after hearing of it by word-of-mouth, though the club does occasionally run want ads in sexually oriented publications.
“These are girls who are already in the scene or are curious about it,” she said.
The women are paid by commission, receiving a “high percentage” of the money paid by customers for their sessions, and also accept tips, Shyloh said. She would not specify the exact percentage, but said some women make several hundred dollars a week and some make very little, depending on how many sessions they do.
Customers who are interested in real pain or sex are asked to leave the club, and their $10 memberships are canceled, Shyloh said.
“Our ladies are not allowed to discuss sex,” Shyloh said. “They have a standard response; ‘I am sorry, sir, I am not even allowed to discuss it.’
“Sex is something quite ordinary and can be found on every street corner. We offer something extraordinary. People don’t come here for sex.”
Hillier said the club provides its clients a healthy release of daily tensions and frustrations through the “psychodrama” the encounter sessions provide. He said his client list includes men from all professions who want to indulge their fantasies in a clean and discreet atmosphere.
“This is just another alternative lifestyle,” Shyloh said. “This is a very real need for some people. We are not trying to convince society of anything. We just want to work here quietly and provide a needed service.”
Experts in sexual behavior generally agree that bondage most often involves fantasy and no injury and, although it is sexual in nature, acts of sexual intercourse are not always intrinsic to such sessions.
“Bondage with consent is not harmful,” said Wardell Pomeroy, a retired sexologist and co-author of the pioneering Kinsey reports on sexual behavior published in 1948 and 1953.
Debora Phillips, a behavior therapist who is co-director of USC’s anxiety disorder clinic, said adult sadomasochistic desires can come from many childhood experiences, ranging from being spanked by an adult, to being chastised by a beautiful teacher, to games in which one child is dominant over another.
“This is a conditioned sexual behavior,” Phillips said. “It’s much more commonly practiced than the average person believes. As long as it is voluntary, we believe it is perfectly normal behavior.”
The Black Door
To keep the low profile his customers wish, Hillier has tried to make the Chateau unnoticeable on Atoll Street north of Sherman Way. The Barbara Ann Bakery signs have been painted over; a steel fence surrounds most of the property. “Club Chateau” only appears on a black door at the club’s entrance, a door to the bakery’s old loading dock.
Hillier said his business practices include random drug testing of employees and making drug use or engaging in sexual acts firing offenses. He said he is cooperative with vice officers and has no problem with their undercover visits to the club.
Lt. Paul Marks, head of the Hollywood vice unit, declined to confirm or deny Hillier’s claim that there were no arrests in Chateau’s Hollywood locations.
However, Marks did describe the club as controversial in the months before it moved to the San Fernando Valley because members of the Guardian Angels picketed its location, claiming that it drew drug use and prostitution to the neighborhood.
Sgt. Ron Marbrey, head of the Valley vice unit that polices the Chateau in its new location, said last month that undercover officers have investigated the club but there have been no illegal activities or arrests.
Nevertheless, Marbrey appeared at last month’s zoning hearing and opposed the club’s permit, agreeing with nearby business operators who said the bondage parlor would degrade the area--no matter how low a profile it had.
“I am very concerned,” said Renee Dorion, who owns a nearby costume shop. “I don’t know how in the world it can be classified as anything other than prostitution. I don’t think there is any difference between that place and a whorehouse.”
But community protests failed to derail Hillier’s request for a permit because he located in one of the few spots in the city where industrial zoning also allows for so-called “sexual encounter establishments.”
The permit requires Hillier to operate under a set of 19 regulations. Among them are requirements that he provide security guards on the premises, that only members and employees be allowed inside, that all activities be conducted inside and not be heard from outside the building, and that the Chateau not create any “police problems.”
