“The Mind of Goya”

For the London-based but Montmartie-minded your Penthouse guide puts you on the right track for an evening of dazzling spectacle and replete enjoyment. Dress optional, but leave your inhibitions at the cloakroom.

STEALING the lust-light from Paris niteries has become something of a London pastime—not by collective and conscientious efforts to outclass and outstrip the continentals but by a more subtle process of professional evolution. Ever since the emancipation of British bosoms and the subsequent scramble to press nightclub nudity to its most lucrative level, the law of natural selection came into force.

Clubs offering something more than the blatant pitter-pat of flagging breasts contributed to an inevitable public demand for more imaginative and tasteful showmanship. Professionalism replaced the merely permissive, and nightclubs like the Eve—pictured in these pages—poured more into the costuming and staging of nude productions than the girls were permitted to pour out. It was the sextrava-ganza with all the trappings and trimmings of an MGM musical, rather than the maudlin and repetitious bump’n’grind strip solo, that drew generations of tourists, business men and random pleasure-seekers to Paris—where it was once thought that something unique in the Gallic character and tradition guaranteed the French a monopoly in the artistic presentation of the nude.

That is, quite apart from the contrasting liberality of the republic’s laws, which made a creditable stab at providing liberty even if they never quite came across with egality and fraternity. The Swinging Sixties brought with them a sombre de Gaulle in Gay Paree and a sex explosion in puritan London.

Evening With Eve

The Gaming Act, the Profumo-Ward case, Christine Keeler, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Mary Quant, Jean Shrimpton and the Liverpool Sound all had their desired effect, and the centre of the liberal world tilted and became London. Today, instead of crossing the Channel, you only have to cross Regent Street for the full Montmartre flavour. The Eve, typical of London’s better-class clubs, offers an evening’s scintillescent escapism in the best purist tradition.

The food is continental and good, the decor is South Seas, and the cabaret is probably the most imaginatively staged and costumed in town. In a particularly extravagant piece of production entitled “The Mind of Goya”, leggy showgirls bedecked in mantillas and G-strings alternate with energetic Spanish dancers in a kaleidoscopic recreation of the dominant obsessions of Spain’s master artist—sadism, eroticism, mystery, women and darkness.

The pre-eminent effect is one of flesh and fetish, a fanciful mixture which, taken as a whole, gives Eve’s evening an incubatic and surrealistic air. Jimmy O’Brien, proprietor and entrepreneur extraordinary, founded the establishment along with his attractive dancer wife, Helen Archer, as long as 13 years ago. Together they run it with an in-exhaustible sense of novelty that keeps the customers loyal—a guessing. (Penthouse magazine, December 1966)