Voyeur – Site of RNC ‘Big Spender’ Scandal – Has Storied Past, Was Home to Rat Pack Strip Joint Pink Pussycat, a 1980s Gay Disco and Later a Venue for Transgender Entertainment

Club 7969 and the Eddie Murphy Scandal

When Harry Schiller died in 1982, Alice’s young nephew, Josh Feld, took over operations. It 1989, Feld found himself fending off complaints from neighbors about late-night noise. At a hearing, fans of the club spoke on its behalf, including drag superstar RuPaul, who asserted that people who choose to live near nightclubs should expect noise and that if Peanuts’ neighbors didn’t like it, they might be “happier living on ‘Walton’s Mountain.'”

Under the Schiller/Feld family ownership, the club changed names — it was Grandville in the 1990s and Club 7969 until recently. As the latter, it was a venue for hire for a variety of club nights. One of the better known of these was a male strip night that was popular with bachelorette parties for suburban brides.

For many years, Monday nights at Club 7969 were devoted to “Illusions,” a club featuring transgender performers. In 1997, Shalimar Seiuli, a Samoa-born transgender woman, was unofficially named Illusions’ “House Madam” after her brush with international infamy. She was the sidewalk hostess in the car with Eddie Murphy when he was pulled over not far from the club in the wee hours of May 2, 1997:

Murphy’s exotic passenger gave the following account of her brief interaction with the 36-year-old superstar to a reporter:

“[Eddie Murphy] put two $100 bills on my leg and said, ‘Here’s $200. He asked me if I did this for a living, being a transsexual prostitute. I said yes.

“Eddie said, ‘Do you like to wear lingerie?’ I said yes. He said, ‘Can I see you in lingerie?’ I told him, ‘Whenever I have the time.’ He said, ‘I’ll make the time.’

“Then he asked me, ‘What type of sex do you like?’ I said I was into everything.”

Before anything else could transpire, a police spotlight zeroed in on Murphy’s vehicle-and two officers from the LA Sheriff’s Department pulled him over.

When the cops approached, Eddie claimed that he was just giving his friend a ride home. According to Shalimar, the cops chuckled and said, “Yeah, right!” They then spent some thirty minutes talking amiably to the man who’d played a cop in the hit film “48 Hours.”

Not surprisingly, the officers wound up letting Murphy go without pressing charges. Shalimar’s fate was another story. After running a computer check, the cops found that she had an outstanding warrant for violating probation on an earlier prostitution charge. Before hauling Shalimar off to jail, the cops smiled and shook hands with Murphy.

But if Murphy thought he’d dodged a bullet that night, he was wrong. A magazine photographer with a well-deserved reputation for sniffing out a hot story had videotaped the entire incident. Had that video not existed, it is unlikely the Sheriff’s Department would have acknowledged that Murphy had been stopped that night. The release of the video put Murphy and his PR team into crisis mode.

One of Murphy’s publicists insisted that Murphy had simply been acting as a good Samaritan, who’d offered a downtrodden prostitute a ride home. “Nothing happened at all, the publicist claimed, “but Eddie said he will never do this again.”

Josh Feld passed away in the mid-1990s, but the club stayed in the Schiller/Feld family until it was sold to the present owners last fall.

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