The owners of Voyeur, the celebrity-oriented, lesbian bondage-themed night spot in West Hollywood, should be ecstatic. The “big spender” scandal rocking the Republican Party is generating the sort of publicity money cannot buy.
And yet when a New York Times reporter dropped by for a daytime visit on Monday, she found “a few random fellows who said they were the owner and managers — young, good-looking and a little cranky — lolling on a velvet couch.”
Did the club owners rouse themselves and chat with the New York Times reporter? Nah. They let their director of special events, Sarah Waldman, set the Times straight.
“We are most certainly not a strip club. We cater to a high-end, A-list clientele with live art installations with a voyeuristic theme.”
“We are most certainly not a strip club,” Waldman said. “We cater to a high-end, A-list clientele with live art installations with a voyeuristic theme.”
On MSNBC Tuesday night, Keith Olbermann and Michael Musto had fun with Voyeur’s highfalutin pretensions.
OLBERMANN: [The] live art … includes the installation of a half-naked girl hanging from a net across the ceiling.
MUSTO: I feel sorry for Annette, the girl she’s hanging from.
OLBERMANN: Does this place match your definition of an art club, and therefore is the GOP supporting the arts?
MUSTO: Yeah, but then again I think Planet Hollywood is a museum.
Obviously nude lesbian bondage performance art is in the eye of the beholder.
Voyeur’s owners may be ambivalent about the publicity but in the 60-plus year history of the venue, at 7966 Santa Monica Blvd., its current brush with notoriety is nothing new.
The Seville
The first club to occupy the space was the Seville, a jazz club, which opened in the late 1950s, but never caught on — possibly because of its location on then-downscale Santa Monica Blvd., a few blocks too far south of the Sunset Strip. The Seville’s closing in the spring of 1958 bankrupted Clifford Rue, 34, one of the club’s employees. Unfortunately, Rue had run up a $4,200 tab, equivalent to $29,000 today, with his bookie, Maurice “Goldie” Goldsworth, 52.
The bookie suggested that Rue should bring the money to him at a shop he was renovating on Ventura Boulevard. At the store that day Rue announced he was broke, and — apparently being a bit fuzzy on how bookies operated — offered instead to make a down payment of $200 (about $1,400 today).
As the two men argued, Cliff Rue became increasingly hostile and and aggressive. When Goldsworth pulled his gun, Rue picked up a hammer and bashed the bookie in the head, grabbed his gun and shot him. Panicked, Rue dragged Goldsworth’s body outside. He searched the dead man’s pockets and found his car keys, opened the trunk of his car, stuffed the body into it and drove off toward the desert. Rue got hopelessly lost in the Valley, however, and eventually parked the car on a dead-end road and left the scene on foot.
A few days later a patrol officer noticed blood dripping from the trunk of Goldsworth’s car. After the body in the trunk was identified, the investigation led to Rue, who confessed to the murder after a lengthy interrogation. Cliff Rue was eventually convicted of second-degree murder — only after surviving a suicide attempt in jail.
A few months after Rue’s arrest, Harry and Alice Schiller, a Beverly Hills couple, purchased the building and reopened the Seville. Business at the Seville was better for the Schillers than the previous owners, but after bumping along for a year or two, Harry Schiller proposed a new approach to his wife. He suggested they open a strip club — not a sleazy joint, but a high-class venue where gentlemen could take their wives.
