The Weekly Screed (#631)

“Crazy,” like a mad scientist
By David Benjamin

PARIS — The Crazy Horse de Paris has changed.

It remains the only tasteful and truly startling nude dance “spectacle” just about anywhere. But the version I saw last month, after quite a few years away from the cozy cabaret on avenue George V, lacks the acid that, once, scorched the edges of every number in the show and left the audience feeling a little singed and puzzled as they climbed the stairs to the quiet street in the wee hours.

The reason the Crazy’s less crazy is that it’s too long now since the death of Alain Bernardin. The club’s founder, who literally re-animated the corpse of burlesque, gave it an unprecedented dignity and created one of Paris’ most extraordinary cabaret shows in a grand history of cabaret shows, walked into his office late on a night in 1994 and inexplicably put a bullet in his head.

The next day in California, I received a fax in French, written a little shakily by Ivan Kraus, a brilliant puppeteer who performed at the Crazy Horse and who literally owed his life to Bernardin. The fax was just four words, “The master is dead.”

A master, yes. Bernardin turned the raunchy and ribald but moribund American burlesque show into a Parisian work of art. This required a unique, very personal blend of aesthetic genius and artistic frustration, plus a wicked and transgressive sense of humor, a strenuous concept of choreography, a revolutionary vision of stage lighting, an “algorithm” defining the perfect female body, a love of things American and a reverent passion for beautiful women. It took, above all, the mind and the persistence of an inventor.

The first time I went to the Crazy Horse, it was mainly to take a bite of forbidden fruit. But once I’d seen the show, I found myself more curious about the well-dressed man behind the scenes than the naked girls on stage. A year or so later, hoping to sell a magazine article, I wangled an interview with Bernardin.

My wife and I met the maestro backstage a little after midnight. We were there ‘til dawn. While we plied Bernardin with questions, he would suddenly leap from his seat, excuse himself and fly off to an urgent errand or a 3 a.m. phone call. But we were never alone for long. When Bernardin, in a voice seductively intimate, was not reminiscing disjointedly through the history of the Crazy Horse (launched in 1949 as a “Western” bar), he sent us other people. We interviewed two dancers, Friday Trampoline, an American, and Akky Masterpiece, a Dutch beauty who outgrew ballet (at 5’ 11”) and eventually got her law degree. We talked to his office chief Polly Harper (known as Polly Underground when she was a Crazy girl), and we got to know Nadya Munzarova and Ivan, the “Blackwits,” whose wry and magical puppet act was a show-stopper.

It was Ivan and Nadya whose history expanded my portrait of Bernardin beyond his artistic and inventive selves. In 1968, Ivan and Nadya were members of a puppet troupe in Czechoslovakia, facing reprisals from the Soviet KGB after the collapse of the student uprising called Prague Spring. The satirical puppeteers needed a way out, anywhere— fast. One of them, out of sheer deperation, suggested a letter to Bernardin, who was then one of Europe’s most famous impresarios. So they wrote to him, boldly asking that he send them a bogus booking at the Crazy Horse — the precious paper that might get them across the border to safety.

Without asking for explanation, Bernardin immediately dispatched a signed contract, which neither he nor they intended to honor. It delivered Ivan, Nadya and their troupe from Prague — alive. When, years later, the Blackwits auditioned in Paris for Bernardin, he admitted no recollection of sending a fake job offer to a bunch of Czech puppeteers.

Throughout our interview with Bernardin, he revealed a fanatic attention to every petty detail in his show. Polly told us that the maestro would travel overseas to find the perfect shoes for a particular soloist in a certain dance number, because the shoes available in Paris did not quite match the tone of her skin or the shape of her derriere (as if anyone in the audience ever noticed the girls’ shoes!). Bernardin did all this nitpicking by himself. He trusted no one and tinkered constantly. No number in the show remained exactly the same for long.

I recognized all this obsessive behavior because, a few years before, I had taken part in an exhaustive and expensive investigation into the sources of invention. Writing for a consulting company, I had interviewed some of the 20th century’s most successful and eccentric inventors. Bernardin, I realized, was a showman, an artist, a consummate lady’s man, and a little mad. But, above all, he had the soul of an inventor — one who cannot forsake his brainchild, leave it alone, or depend on anyone else for more than a minute or so.

His devotion to his creation was expressed in the way he treated his dancers. He was meticulously demanding. Every Crazy girl had to be robust, beautiful, as close as possible to his physical ideal and in perfect shape. With his choreographer, Sofia Palladium, he worked the girls almost ruthlessly. But, regardless of context, he was jealously protective of their dignity. He never placed his dancers in a position of submission or degradation. On stage, he bathed them in light that transformed their nudity into a living, liquid canvas, paying unexpected homage to painters that ranged from Renoir to Jackson Pollack (with shades, at times, of Edward Gorey or Art Speigelman). He gave his girls madcap noms de plume that spoofed the stage names of old burlesque stars: Franca Torpedo, Vanilla Banana, Miko Miku, Betty Buttocks, Lova Moore. And he designed the sort of kick-on-the-chin dance numbers that turned the woman stage into a giant and the customers in the audience into gaping dwarfs.

And nobody in that audience ever got close to one of Bernardin’s Crazy girls. The dancers were naked, but they were inviolate. The maestro built a separate exit for his performers and made sure that each went home in a personal taxi. He spent his life watching over them, staying in touch with each girl after she had left the show, proud of their achievements, their careers, their marriages and families.

Bernardin created a spectacle that bore, indelibly, his personal mark. But, in its fifth decade, he was nearing his 80th birthday. His dancers were growing restive and his finances — which he neglected for the sake of his show — were a growing headache. Worst of all, his once worldly clientele were shifting to more fashionable amusements. The tourists who began to dominate his clientele were eager for the sort of gyno-erotic excess common in the strip joints of L.A. and Vegas. In 1994, on the morning he died, the master knew that he was losing grip of his realm.

The “new” Crazy Horse show we saw last month was smooth and technically more complex than much of the Bernardin version. The choreography was even more demanding and athletic. The girls — slim, tall, supple and sportive —would have pleased Bernardin. But the updated, somehow homogenized Crazy lacked Bernardin’s wit and that subtle hint of anger that lurked behind the maestro’s charm. In the past, it almost seemed as though each Crazy girl had a chip — placed there by the boss — on her shoulder.

Worst of all, today’s audience contains few Parisians. Among the tourists in the velvet red cabaret, too many are noisy voyeurs and Hungry Joe skirt-peepers, whooping pudendophiles who roar at the drop of a g-string but who, in the end, go away grumbling about what they didn’t see.

The Crazy Horse has survived Bernardin’s death. The new impresarios have found a new formula for success, and the show lives on in an impressive and still-classy reincarnation (despite the slobs in the peanut gallery). But it’s not the same. It never can be.

Typical of the change is the show’s finale. Under Bernardin, and years afterward, the last number of the show was a a brazen riot of rock ‘n’ roll flirtation called “You Turn Me On,” whose secret thrill was to look not at the girls’ wonderful bodies but to look them — if you dared — in the eye. Today, instead, the finale is an ensemble of scantily glad campfire girls singing an insipid Crazy Horse anthem in chorus, without solos, without spirit, without fire, and…

…suddenly the curtain closes. The show’s over. Not with a bang but a thud.

After the anticlimax, it came clear to me with a sad finality that I’lI feel whenever I think of the enigmatic mad scientist who invented the Crazy Horse:

“Le maestro est mort.”