TAXI DANCERS : It’s No Longer 10 Cents a Dance, But Lonely Men Can Still Hire Partners by the Minute in Dim Downtown Clubs

HE WAS 23 and as shy as they come. To hear Toni tell it, he’d fall down at the very sight of a woman. So he came to the only place he knew where the women always said “yes” when he asked them to dance: Club Flamingo. For 35 cents a minute, he could dance with the woman of his choice and not have to worry about saying something stupid or embarrassing.

“I was giving him lessons on how to talk to girls,” recalls Toni, a hostess at the Flamingo. She’s pleasant-looking, tall, with curly brown hair and brown eyes, somewhere in her late 20s or early 30s. “He came in here wanting to find a girlfriend. And I told him: ‘Go somewhere else and find yourself a nice girl.’ ”

Toni glances around the dance floor this blustery night. Most of the couples dancing match up like polka dots and plaids. Old, worn-out guys with faces like unmade beds drape themselves over 19- or 20-year-old girls. In the booths and at the tables, couples cuddle in the dim light. The girls wear short, tight, low-cut dresses. They rest their heads on the men’s shoulders, forcing blissful smiles. The men’s faces radiate a certain amount of triumph, as if they’ve won their partners over with good looks, great intellect, strength of character and charisma.

“Then he decided he was in love with me,” Toni continues. “He’d come in here and say, ‘Toni, I can’t help it. I’m in love with you.’ I said, ‘Look, you can’t be in love with me--I’m married.’ Believe me, this isn’t any place to go looking for a girlfriend.”

The signs outside usually advertise “hostess dancing,” but history has saddled the Flamingo and other clubs like it with the less delicate phrase taxi dancing . It’s an apt-enough name. When you ask a girl to dance, she rises wearily to her feet, goes to the rack, pulls out her time card and punches the clock. She hitches her purse over her shoulder as if she’s afraid someone might steal it (conceivably you), and together you go to the dance floor.

In most cases, the meter runs at 35 cents a minute, or $21 an hour. During this time, you’re entitled to complain that your wife doesn’t love you, that your girlfriend is cheating on you or that your boss is a miserable ogre and you don’t know how much longer you can take it. Or, depending on the girl and your reputation as a tipper, you may indulge in something akin to a poor man’s lambada.

Taxi dance clubs were once abundant in Chicago, New York, Detroit and San Francisco during the late teens and early 1920s. Today, however, they’re scarce to the point of extinction.

The grand exception is Los Angeles, where at least seven taxi dance clubs represent the fruition of a revival that began in the early ‘70s, fueled in part by the loosening of sexual mores and later by droves of lonely immigrant men seeking a few dollars’ worth of tender, loving care.

All of the clubs are situated within a mile of the Los Angeles Convention Center, in the kind of neighborhoods that are haunted by wailing junkies and belligerent panhandlers. The clubs bear names laden with romantic possibility--Club Paradise, Las Palmas, Roseland Roof, Danceland, Club Starlight--but the reality is a world of disorienting ambiguity, governed only by the laws of supply and demand, the language of the dollar.

LOCATED IN A RUN-DOWN BUILDING on 12th Street, the Flamingo is typical of Los Angeles taxi dance clubs. Among other things, that means down-at-the-heel, a lot of seams showing. You climb the steps to the second floor, pay $3 to the man at the door, and there they are, sitting on rows of red vinyl couches, like curios gathering dust in a junk store window: Girls wagging their crossed legs, smoking cigarettes and gabbing like women in a small-town beauty parlor. Girls with crack-of-dawn eyes, high heels and cheap perfume. Girls with sad stories. Girls, 70 or 80 of them on weekend nights, hoping you will take them away from all this.

The men, many of whom roam from club to club, sit in small, uncomfortable chairs at small, tottering tables, drinking coffee, smoking and staring with varying degrees of wistfulness, salaciousness or inscrutability. As many as 150 show up on weekend nights. Beyond the girls lies the dance floor, dark except for the spangles of light refracting from the globe overhead. A cardboard sign taped to a column admonishes COUPLES ONLY.

The stags are also barred from the TV room, where a half-dozen couches allow couples to snuggle and become better acquainted. Between the dance floor and the TV room, there’s a snack bar that serves soft drinks and fruit juices and fills the air with the acrid smell of microwave popcorn--a staple of the girls’ diets. The clubs are prohibited from serving alcohol. “The ones who dance with me keep coming back because they like talking to me,” says Toni, the hostess at the Flamingo. “I’m the one they tell their problems to.” She lives in a downtown hotel with her husband and 3-month-old son, pays her rent week to week and claims that she has made a $17,000 deal to become a surrogate mother. She also unspools a confusing personal history involving the Mafia, multiple personalities numbering in the double digits, a pregnancy by rape and her flight to the West Coast because her father wanted to sell the baby. If half of it is true, there is no God.

Toni, a former stripper who now aspires to be a flight attendant, came here 10 months earlier from her native New Jersey, and she’s been dancing for four months. She figures she can last another two, until the surrogate deal comes through. “I can’t wait to get out of here,” she says.

Most of the taxi dancers, who must be 18 to work in the clubs, say they would rather be doing something else. The majority of those who try dancing don’t make it past the first week, and it’s rare to find anyone who’s worked longer than six months. Sometimes dancing is their sole means of support. The girls earn minimum wage and a commission based on how much they dance. The real money is in the tips. On a good night at the Flamingo, a girl can take home $100.

Tuela, a dancer at Roseland on Spring Street (before it was temporarily closed last month), gets minimum wage, only a $75 commission for each 1,000 minutes she dances, and the tips aren’t very good. She wants to quit, but she’s stuck working nights because during the day she looks after the children of her brother and sister. Carolina, from Guatemala, cuts hair during the day and works at Club Paradise on Olympic at night.

At Club Starlight on Broadway, frequented mostly by wealthy Asian men, aspiring models and actresses try to keep their days free for auditions. Most of them are blond, in their early 20s and range from attractive to beautiful. Ritzier than most of the other clubs, the Starlight has valets who rarely go the night without parking a Rolls or two. The girls, decked out in slinky but generally tasteful dresses, wait behind a glass partition. Janine, a 20-year-old would-be model, sits in a booth and sips a cafe au lait that seemed to appear out of nowhere and would wind up on her customer’s tab.

“Some of these girls support boyfriends. Some support children. Some support drug habits,” she says.

Janine’s pretty, with chestnut hair, though her eyes seem somehow vacant. She might be a model yet. But she overslept yesterday, missed an interview with an agency and hasn’t done much lately to advance her career.

“I’ve just got to get motivated,” she says mopishly.

She started out dancing at the Flamingo and remembers her first night vividly. “I locked myself up in the manager’s office and wouldn’t come out for three hours. I was scared to death.”

She turns her head to watch her colleague, a blonde wearing a tight black skirt, a black blazer and a pink halter top, tug the venerable Ed to the dance floor. Suddenly, the music shifts from a dreamy ballad to hyperpaced rhythm and blues, worthy of an aerobics class. The dancer wiggles her hips, arches back her shoulders and kicks up her heels. All for the benefit of Ed, who the girls say is 78. He tries to jump start his feet, but the best he can do is zigzag them across the floor. He wears a gray cardigan, a white sport shirt and gray slacks and is bald as an egg.

He is also known to be a good tipper.

WERE IT NOT FOR the fragility of the male ego, taxi dance clubs might never have been invented. “I’d say about 80% of the men who come here are single guys who don’t like being rejected,” says Larry Jones, a 55-year-old electronics salesman who is single. “Here, your ego doesn’t get hurt.” Jones can be found at the Flamingo or one of the other clubs about four nights a week, a custom he’s been observing for nearly 10 years. He comes by himself, and he pulls up a chair close to one of the benches where the girls wait for dance partners.

“It’s just something to do, a way to get out of the TV rut,” Jones says with a shrug. He’s a bald, friendly man who favors shorts and white socks under leather shoes. He sits there most of the night with his arms folded, head cocked, occasionally striking up a conversation with one of the girls or another customer.

The girls have divided most of the patrons into several neat categories. First, there are the “looky-loos,” who sit there rubbernecking without ever paying for a dance. Almost nightly at the Flamingo, three old men dock their considerable girths into the uncertain harbors of three spindly chairs and chomp cigars that they wave like batons whenever a pretty--or at least voluptuous--girl walks by.

Then there are the “grabbers,” whose offending behavior is self-evident, though it may be that a tip of sufficient size can mitigate the offense. The antics of the fetish mongers are better left to the imagination. One, however, has become a legend. The girls call him “The Foot Doctor.” He peels out $20 bills for the privilege of massaging a girl’s foot--generally back in the TV room where there’s more privacy--while muttering obscure biblical quotations. Most highly regarded are the “dates,” the men who clock a girl out for an hour or two at a time, sit and talk with her and tip her generously.

Certainly, married men are no strangers to these clubs. “The first thing they do is tell you they’re married,” complains Tanya, a dancer at Club Paradise. She’s 19, a tall, strapping blonde in a denim skirt, a red sweater and red cowboy boots. “It’s like they need to confess. Stuff like, ‘My wife and I don’t love each other anymore.’ And you always have to hear about their sleeping arrangements: ‘Yeah, we’re sleeping in twin beds now, or separate rooms.’ ”

Tanya left a small Oregon town two months ago with vague hopes of attending college. If you ask her why she chose Los Angeles, she answers, “Big City?” as if she’s not sure.

Sometimes I think I’ve found my hero

but it’s a queer romance

all that you need is a ticket

Come on, big boy

Ten cents a dance

--”Ten Cents a Dance”

Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart

IN THE WEST, taxi dance clubs were the direct descendants of San Francisco’s notoriously lusty Barbary Coast, or “ ‘49” dance halls, where dancing was the drawing card and women earned their keep by enticing men to buy drinks. But the Barbary Coast’s picaresque revelry ultimately aroused the indignation of the city’s more stalwart citizens, who had the dance halls shut down in 1913. The void left by the halls’ closure was swiftly filled by “closed halls”--ones where the only women admitted were those working. There, dancing and drinking were separate enterprises. Dancers were introduced to the ticket-a-dance system, and women earned revenue based on the number of tickets they accrued.

Meanwhile, in Chicago, legitimate public ballrooms, along with dancing schools or academies, were having a rough time staying afloat. Those in declining neighborhoods were forced to adopt the ticket-a-dance system, with proprietors reasoning that patrons would shell out more money in the long run at 10 cents a dance than for a flat $1 admission. Tickets sold for 10 cents each; the girls kept a nickel.

The businesses were known also as “dime-a-dance halls,” “monkeyhops,” “stag dances.” And as the system evolved, catering increasingly to the socially isolated, it didn’t take long for them to acquire a shady reputation. “Shimmying” was the nomenclature of the day assigned to the slow, grinding dance still performed today.

“The taxi dance halls are organized to exploit, for a profit, a situation of promiscuity,” noted a special agent for Chicago’s Juvenile Protective Agency in 1925. “It is a mercenary and silent world. Feminine society is for sale, and at a neat price. The dwarfed, the maimed, even the pockmarked, all find social acceptance there. Together with the other variegated types, they make, of the institution, a picturesque and rather pathetic revelation of human nature and city life.”

But Los Angeles attorney Ben Fenton, 81, remembers a more jovial atmosphere, with prominent local businessmen, sports figures and politicians in attendance. Fenton is a former owner of Roseland, Los Angeles’ oldest hostess-dance ballroom. Fenton and his brother, Edward, acquired it in 1943 and ran it until 1980, when they leased out the operation. He says the ballroom has been operating since the 1920s.

“It was a fairly nice group of people,” Fenton recalls. “A lot of business people. There were some lonesome people; some of them wanted to be away from their wives.”

A six-piece band provided music. Neckties, part of the dress code, were sold at the door for 10 cents, which was what a dance cost until Fenton installed the time-clock system after seeing it in a Honolulu dance hall. The Fentons also operated Dreamland, the only other hall in town until the early 1950s.

In those days, the halls were regulated by the Juvenile Protection Agency. Hostesses, who had to be 21, were licensed, fingerprinted and photographed. “We never had a single arrest,” Fenton claims.

Above all, he says, “the girls had to be good conversationalists. People didn’t care that much about dancing. They mostly wanted someone to talk to.”

Whatever the criteria for successful taxi dancers, today’s clubowners find that just keeping enough girls around is a full-time job in itself. Although there seems to be no shortage of newcomers for the job.

“Some of the girls are new in town, living in cars, and they’re just trying to get the money together to go home,” says Josephine Walker, blowing a plume of cigarette smoke toward the dance floor at the Flamingo. She and her husband, Marty, have owned and operated the club for eight years since they moved here from Hawaii. “Some aren’t very well-educated. Lots of aspiring actresses. Some part-time college students. A certain percentage are married.”

On the average, the girls last about two weeks, which creates a constant demand for others to fill the dance shoes of those who’ve waltzed out of whatever misfortune drove them there in the first place. The club’s principal form of recruitment is through the classified ads, which, Marty grumbles, cost him $2,300 a week.

But it’s not all gloom and desperation, Josephine says. The Walkers know of at least three marriages that have bloomed from the interminglings of hostesses and patrons.

Marty presides over the operation from a cluttered office equipped with a surveillance system that includes a TV monitor overlooking the dance floor and audio monitors in the restrooms that enable him to interrupt any unseemly monkey business. “We run as straight a club as we can, considering how many people come in here,” he says.

He claims that the proclivity for taxi dancing is passed from grandfather to father to son. “Once you’ve been in three times, it’s in your blood.” What draws men into the clubs, he says, is “the thrill of the chase. Guys want to see if their lines still work. This is fantasyland.”

Now acquiring Roseland, which was owned by former Los Angeles police officer Dave Brewer, operator of other taxi dance halls, the Walkers say business is so good that they’re considering a twist on the theme: a club where women would pay to dance with men.

The taxi dance business is considerably more vigorous than it was a few years ago, when the clubs nearly died out. By the late 1960s, there were only four in Los Angeles, but they began to rally in the early ‘70s, doubling in number. Sociologists chalk up the initial resurgence to the sexual revolution, with its free-for-all attitude toward sex and seduction. Larry K. Hong, professor of sociology at Cal State L.A., conducted an intensive, four-year study of the clubs during their revival. In those days, the clubs seemed to develop a social club atmosphere, sort of a Playboy Club-in-training. With most of the clubs in decaying parts of downtown, however, they were soon reclaimed by their original denizens: lonely men looking for a little sympathy or a cheap thrill.

Gentrification thwarted, Los Angeles clubs found eager patrons in the city’s booming immigrant population, which provides a steady supply of the socially estranged. The clubs now tend to cater to one ethnic group or another, with the bulk of the clubs--such as El Gaucho, Danceland and Savoy--employing Latina dancers for Latino customers. Others, such as the Flamingo and the Paradise, feature a mix of white, Latina and Asian girls, a fair number of them immigrants themselves, for a more diverse clientele.

“The two biggest immigrant populations in Los Angeles are Asian and Hispanic, and those are who the clubs cater to,” says Hong, who pointed out in a 1976 article about his findings that “taxi dance halls offer special attraction to foreign-born males because they have difficulty finding female companionship in the natural setting. Being new to this country, they have not yet mastered the skills and strategies of the American dating-courtship game. Consequently, they find it convenient to go to the taxi dance halls where essentially the same goals could be achieved with minimum efforts.”

A recent visit to several clubs, however, revealed to Hong a more regimented environment. In the ‘70s, he says, the halls were places where men would gather with friends. “The girls were encouraged to interact more informally with the customers,” he says. “The customers were younger. Often, they’d bring candy and flowers to the girls. There would be buffets, and they’d even have Christmas dinner.” The problem apparently was that all that friendliness wasn’t profitable.

Hong pauses, trying to remember something. “Oh, yes. And there used to be a very strange character who went around to all of the clubs. They called him The Foot Doctor.”

THE “DANGER ZONE.” That’s what the girls at the Flamingo call a mirror-lined nook off the dance floor. It is haven to the inextricably intertwined. It’s where the heavy necking and petting take place. Sometimes the men lead the women back there, hoping that they’ll prove affectionate. Sometimes the women are the initiators--a ploy for good tips. To make things even more interesting, asserts one dancer, “a lot of those girls don’t even wear underwear.”

The job of maintaining the appearance of propriety falls to the sex police. Every 10 minutes or so, a behemoth guard dressed in a militaristic black uniform muscles his way into the Danger Zone for a close look. The large flashlight he carries could double as a nightstick. “Hey, you two back there. Cut that out! I mean it now.” Management has a vested interest in making sure that the fun, if not altogether good and clean, doesn’t stray too far below the belt.

Although prostitution has always been at the periphery of taxi dancing, law enforcement is difficult because almost all the prostitution occurs after hours, at other locations. Girls are not allowed to leave the club with a customer during work hours.

“Our arrests are minimal compared to what’s going on out there,” says Detective John W. Grogan of the Los Angeles Police administrative vice division, which patrols the clubs. “Less than one a week. We just don’t have the resources to deal with it in depth.” In fact, Grogan can’t think of a single case where a club’s management was prosecuted for prostitution. And, Grogan says, club managers don’t necessarily discourage prostitution because it’s good for business.

What do taxi dance clubs have to offer that brothels don’t? In a taxi dance hall, money is more an instrument of ingratiation than negotiation. The key perhaps is the thin veneer of romance, however artificial. On the other hand, sometimes it’s more basic than that.

“(Certain guys) are nasty, they never tip and they start grabbing right away,” says Marilyn, 30, who figures her three years as a taxi dancer make her the senior member at the Flamingo. “Once they start grabbing, we ask for the tip.”

Marilyn, who emigrated from the Philippines in 1986, says taxi dancing has its advantages--mainly that she can come and go as she pleases. She takes trips to Las Vegas and San Francisco. During the day, she works at swap meets. With the two incomes, she has managed to buy a condominium. For her, it’s a living.

The secret, Marilyn says, is to “dance not too tight, not too loose. If you dance too tight, they lose interest. If somebody asks for a date or to go to bed, I say, ‘Maybe later, but first I have to know you better.’ That keeps them coming back.”

So, deprived of the usual benefits of natural selection, the men narrow their circles, craftily (or so they think) instilling in the girls a burgeoning sense of obligation with tips.

Meanwhile, the dancer, having convinced her suitor that there just might be a special place in her heart for a gentleman of sufficient means and proper sensitivities, finds herself walking the razor’s edge, working to keep expectations high while deferring delivery.

“You get to know the girls pretty well,” says Jones, the electronics salesman. He himself dances rarely, if ever. “I’m real nice to the girls. If you treat ‘em real nice, then they’re nice to you. Most of these guys are jerks. They treat ‘em like hookers.”

Not everyone comports himself in such a chivalrous fashion. For instance, there is the hulking, chain-laden Winnebago of a man who has dragged his friend to the clubs for the third time this week. Asked about the proprieties of tipping taxi dancers, the hulk’s eyes sweep the floor disdainfully, seeming to see a room filled with women who don’t live up to his qualifications. “A couple of bucks, man--if I’m feeling generous!” he boasts. “Hey, if she don’t satisfy your needs, don’t tip her!”

His friend, meanwhile, has been sizing up the room like a property tax evaluator. “The ones with the bodies are over there, man. Look at that one!” He eyes a long-legged blonde in a tight, nearly see-through skirt.

“Then there’s the ones who aren’t so hot,” the friend goes on, “like those two over there.” He points to two women distractedly munching microwave popcorn on a bench away from the flock. “I don’t see how they make any money. They sit over there all night, and nobody asks them to dance. It makes you kind of feel sorry for them.”

Outside, the homeless have parked their shopping carts and settled in for the night, leaving only the junkies to browbeat passers-by for spare change and cigarettes. Somewhere out there, The Foot Doctor is playing piggly wiggly with another perfect pedicure. Although the girls all said the parking lots would be full of action once closing time rolled around at 2 a.m., it is early yet and the cars are all empty.

And from the Flamingo to the Paradise, from the Starlight to Danceland, the dingy signs of the taxi dance clubs still beckon to the lonely men and desperate women like false hearths in the ash-colored buildings of downtown Los Angeles.