The Ladies Who Really Mattered

There was no mistaking the Seventh Veil. A tiny pink box of a place on Sunset Boulevard, it was marked with a battery of huge neon signs. “Live Nudes. Girls. Girls. Girls,” panted the most prominent. “Totally Nude,” flashed another. A black curtain covered the door. I pulled it back and met Krystal. She was not totally nude, but close. She wore a negligee and talked freely about herself, a 22-year-old high school dropout with dreams. Her problem this Election Day was that she had not been allowed to vote.

“I thought I was registered,” she said. “But they said I wasn’t. I thought it was sort of automatic if you had ever voted before.”

Somehow, I doubt the political pundits had Krystal in mind when they proclaimed 1992 the Year of the Woman, but I had come to the Seventh Veil on Tuesday with a thesis: When all is said and done, this friendly little strip joint and its lineup of nude, totally nude dancers will have played the pivotal role in the election of a U.S. Senator from California.

Totally weird.

*

The battle between Barbara Boxer and Bruce Herschensohn did not begin as an epic of sleaze. It had been billed as a defining moment in California politics, a test of the electorate’s split personality. It pitted a Northern California Democrat of the far political left against a Southern California television commentator of the far right. Boxer started with a huge lead, but late in the campaign Herschensohn began to attack her congressional record and surged, pulling even in final pre-election polls.

Then the Seventh Veil dropped. On Friday, a top operative in the state Democratic Party turned up at a Herschensohn event in Chico and accused the candidate of frequenting the Seventh Veil and a newsstand that sells girlie magazines. Photos were produced. Herschensohn, admitting he had visited the nudie joint once on a lark, spent the campaign’s crucial last hours protesting he was not a pervert--not the preferred strategy for finishing a political race.

By Election Day, the Herschensohn affair had become a sore subject at the Seventh Veil.

“Leave the f------ guy alone,” one dancer scolded. “It’s just a f------ strip joint.”

“I have something important to say,” said another. Then she belched. End of comment.

Krystal said she had never seen Herschensohn at the place. Asked if visiting the Seventh Veil should disqualify anyone for Senate, Krystal peered off into the bad lighting and considered. She was considering still when the call came to take a turn on stage.

The dancers perform at the center of a rectangular counter, and on this afternoon most of the chairs were empty. Six men watched Krystal sullenly, betraying no emotion, as she stripped to the beat of some bad ‘70ish rock. As Krystal “performed,” the man who dispenses juice at the nonalcoholic bar--he identified himself as Charley--took a stab at political sagacity.

“People care about the economy,” Charley said. “Who cares about some guy watching nude dancers?”

*

Well, Charley, it is now Tuesday night. The early returns suggest that Herschensohn is going to lose. Question: Would it have been different if he had spent the last 72 hours talking about Boxer’s bounced checks instead of the Seventh Veil’s nude dancers? You better believe it.

Love him or hate him, what can be said with certainty is that Herschensohn was hit hard by one of the most effective dirty tricks in modern California politics. The Democratic version of the affair is hard to swallow--that a top official just happened to be at Herschensohn’s event, just happened to possess a photograph of the Seventh Veil, just happened to lose control listening to the Republican’s standard stump speech, just happened to do so within earshot of reporters.

Also, the timing--three days before the election--couldn’t have been better for the flagging Boxer campaign. The press had adequate time to report the allegation and dutifully record Herschensohn’s confused responses--but not enough time to explore what forces conspired to bring the episode to light. Finally, it is troubling that a week before the story broke, rumors of the Seventh Veil bombshell already were in circulation among Democratic insiders.

In the end, what the nudie follies might well represent is the last-minute taking of a U.S. Senate seat. The temptation will be for reporters and other election watchdogs to let the matter slide, to write it off to politics as usual. I would suggest they might want to keep digging--to find out, for instance, just how the Democrats came to know that Herschensohn ever visited the Seventh Veil in the first place.

I asked Krystal, and she didn’t have a clue.