On 7 December 1980, the Observer went behind the scenes at the Crazy Horse glossy erotic revue in Paris: ‘A sex machine designed to give pleasure without guilt or embarrassment’; a place, one punter said, ‘Not so sexy that you’ll get a carpeting back at the office for putting it on your expense account.’
It was far from access all areas to the legendary basement club just off the Champs-Elysées. Sinister-sounding proprietor Alain Bernardin, who ran the place with paternalistic rigidity and compared his creation to the Louvre, ‘hovered’, concerned that the journalist might steal all his secrets and open his own club. He doesn’t sound remotely tempted, though, highlighting ‘the relentless erasing of each girl’s specialness to create a single image’ and a ‘faintly sadistic quality’ to Bernadin’s aesthetic: ‘A woman’s body is there for a man to rearrange, distort, even tear apart.’
