Tales of Times Square: Expanded Edition (3 page)

“But she draws,” says Kronish, with a shrug.

Al Kronish, sixty-four-year-old founder of New York’s Melody Burlesk, deals with the caprices, jealousies, phobias, menstrual cycles and successes of a whole generation of strippers, from the fringes to the forefront of the porn industry. And they all seem to adore him, like a good uncle to these girls who have known bad uncles. Ever since Kronish initiated the innovative policy of booking porn stars as strippers—which started with Jennifer Welles in the mid-Seventies—he’s attracted every big name in the industry time and time again, only too glad to work for him. And this, balanced against his main profession as a conservative accountant in Westchester, where he also happens to do the tax returns of porn stars.

Kronish was born in The Bronx in 1918, went to De Witt Clinton High, and graduated as an accountant from Pace. He served in artillery for three years during World War II, using his skills in math to direct big guns against the Nazis. He later played shortstop for a semipro army team, and then with the Bronx Shamrocks for “big money.”

Al’s earliest burlesque memories are of Minskys’ Republic and the Apollo, on 42nd Street. “My favorite was a girl named Sherry Britton, a gorgeous beauty, still around today, lives in New York. Another girl by the name of June Marsh, from Chicago. Man, she was
built
... I only tagged along when my friends went. Orchestra, chorus line, strippers, comedians. After the show was over, we’d have a drink and go home.” Kronish was nineteen at the time, and dating, even speaking, with one of those strippers seemed beyond possibility. This, in contrast with the modern-day Melody, where fans can munch out on some of the talent.

“Had a lot of hard knocks, too,” says Kronish. “Final exams were coming up when I lost my dad, while at the same time, the girl who I was going to marry leaves me. I felt like the world was coming to an end. I got another girl, obviously. My wife and I have been in love for thirty-two years.”

In his stark Melody office, Al has two phones, always on the ring. Great quantities of toilet paper and towels line the metal shelves, and a worn couch plays host to small-time Broadway hucksters and elderly Melody hangers-on who mark their racing forms here. A hard-faced stripper pokes her head in. “I’m allergic to this place,” she sneezes, sending the old OTB boys into spasms.

Tonight, Al is negotiating a delicate pet project—a three-day, marathon burlesque festival he envisions at the Palladium, a 3,500-seat crumbling rock palace in New York. Never has such an ambitious porn event taken place, and Kronish says there is only a “three percent chance I can pull it off.” He is approaching Chuck Traynor, a self-admitted pimp and now manager of Marilyn Chambers, to get her to headline, and Seka’s manager/hairdresser, Fred Mark, to acquire her as second bill. Chambers, according to Kronish, is worth “$25,000 more in ticket sales than Seka,” who rings in as second in the monstro U.S. wanker marketplace. So far, however, Fred Mark has declined second billing for Seka—”Not for a million,” he said. And Traynor has not yet bothered to return Al’s calls. Nevertheless, Kronish feels he can secure a lineup of five “top girls” like Annette Haven, Vanessa Del Rio, and Samantha Fox once Seka or Marilyn falls in. Medium-level starlets he plans to book as hostesses, usherettes.

“I’ll need to get all the girls together a day in advance to show them the theater. I need a quick turnover—eleven shows in three days. Say the live show goes from noon to one-twenty. At one-twenty you go into the lobby for an hour, rap with your favorite star, get your Polaroid and autographed picture. Each star will have a bridge table and chair. But there are still a lot of imponderables.”

Kronish also has designs for a new burlesque house in New York, one that would book porn stars with their current films. But the formula wouldn’t stray much from the Melody’s. Although he loved old-time burlesque with comics and bump-and-grind bands, he’s sure Manhattan couldn’t handle a cabaret that would revive it.

“Didn’t Ann Corio just try it across the street? I knew she would fail. She wouldn’t listen to me, she went out the door and she failed in three weeks. Old-time burlesque? Not in Times Square. People who come to Times Square, they want
raunch
. I told Ann, if you wanna do this, you go to Queens, Westchester, Nassau, get permission. You’ll make money there. Couples don’t come down here. Also, she tried to charge $25, $30. You can’t make it, and she didn’t.”

How about Broadway theaters?

“That’s different. That’s been here before we were.”

Unlike any other porn establishment in Times Square, the Melody has its own fraternal order. Warming the seats on any given night we might see the likes of someone’s Uncle Jack, a contingent of elevator operators, a randy row of young gas-pump jocks from Queens, a drooling paraplegic procession up front, shifty-eyed attorneys, and then, of course, the real royalty—crusty old cadavers brought back to life by the scent of a young, demented girl. The Melody is a living museum for these boys, the only place they’ll see ‘em.

“A typical Melody fella?” ponders Al. “Far be it for me to try and figure out why they’re here... lonely people. They may be old men that never could relate with a woman. They find this is an outlet for what they lacked when they were young. He likes to see a pretty woman, beautiful body, naked, dancing, that’s all.”

Top stripper and Russ Meyer vixen Raven De La Croix, who headlines the Melody Burlesk twice a year, confirms this theory. She sees the audience as “Guys who just don’t seem to be getting any.” Especially the legions Who show for “Mardi Gras,” the notorious weekend program in which up to twenty dollar-a-lick girls cascade through the audience serving economy-priced “box lunch,” tit feels, and dry humps. This heavenly, though risky, innovation was begun by Al’s partner, Bob Anthony, in 1978.

“I’m sort of astonished at how some of these girls think,” quoth the Raven, backstage during her last smash appearance. “Like, it’s all right to go out there and serve lunch for a dollar, but the bastard stuck his finger up her butt, ya know? They’re out there layin’ on those guys like hogs in mud, and their values are hilarious, but it’s sad. A lot of them are heavy junkies, real confused. They’re broke, they come in, make a couple hundred bucks, get a fix, come back. You know how many guys you gotta hug, bump, and scrub for that money? How many old mouths you gotta kiss? It’s heavy. Handi-Wipe city.”

“We get a lot of junkies,” admits Kronish, who personally books most of the headline acts and hires many of the fifty Mardi Gras girls who work in shifts each week. “You can always recognize a girl who’s on something, it’s obvious. And when she is, we fire her. But not forever, just until she cools off, for a week, two weeks, maybe a month. When you come back, if you wanna work, you gotta be straight.”

About a half-dozen girls associated with the Melody died in its first eight years, according to Kronish. One jumped out of a window, another committed suicide, but none on the theater’s premises. One was porn pioneer Tina Russell, who drank herself out. She was, remarkably, the only X-rated star to become completely totaled in the first dozen years of an industry where many live on the edge.

“She and I were very close. She used to call me at home once a week, sometimes just to speak with my wife. We were heartbroken.”

Aside from being caught with needles in their rooms, other taboos girls must break to get fired are smoking in the rear, which the fire department bans; habitually coming late or not showing; and attempting to turn a trick on premises. Hiring girls, on the other hand, would seem like your Easy Street dream, but the continual turnover of downhill women becomes monotonous for the personnel department.

“Steve and I,” says Al, referring to another in management, “do about ninety-five percent of the bookings, whether they be housegirls or stars.” About fifty housegirls do Mardi Gras, working for tips, and some of them are booked as strippers, every eight weeks. Seven or eight different strippers are booked on stage each week, including the star; most stars appear twice a year. Strippers receive a fee, with individual contracts. “Actually, an unlimited number of women come in during Mardi Gras periods,” says Al. “If we have, say, forty customers, we’ll send about six girls out. If it’s a full house, a hundred twenty or more, we’ll send out a minimum of fifteen girls.... A lot of girls go on vacations, they work in Europe, Canada, which leaves openings for new girls coming round. But they can come back whenever they want and get booked.”

Kronish, in all his admiration for women, is bemused by the instability of the stripping profession: “Even if you have contracts, what are you gonna do if they don’t show up? Who you gonna sue?”

Big-chested Raven De La Croix, on the other hand, remembers seeing fierce dedication to the craft that she’ll never forget: “It’s wild. A girl was sitting around having a miscarriage. She was dragging herself across the stairs, and I asked, ‘What the hell’s wrong?’ I thought she was about to OD. She said, ‘I’m losing my baby, I’m losing my baby.’ Her doctor ordered her to stay in bed and do nothing, or she’d lose it. Then she stopped hemorrhaging. So she comes to the Melody, pregnant, beboppin’ around with all the guys, probably on drugs. I said, ‘Why the hell aren’t you in bed?’ But she insisted she felt good enough to work. Meanwhile, she was trying to get her pants down, bleeding all over the place, ya know? This other chick started screaming, so I told her to get lost. Then I had somebody call her husband in New Jersey, who took her to the hospital.”

The Melody management, however, according to one ex-housegirl, is supportive of those women working their way through art college, or trying to enter brokerage firms or become traveling cosmetics executives, which Some do. “I was one of their favorites,” the ex-housegirl says, her face showing some mileage when she speaks of the Melody. “So they took an interest in how my college was going, and were real pleased when I graduated. They like to see girls make it on the outside in a straight career.”

She worked there two years and spent half of her $800 a week on coke. Her worst experiences occurred when, she claims, a psychotic patron would show up in the first row when she came out onstage. He would glare and flash a gun, quietly conveying that he wanted to get her. She declined the management’s requests that she point out the idiot so they could “take care of him,” for fear of reprisal. Finally, he stopped coming—until the day of her college graduation exercise, when he showed up in the audience, sitting near her parents.

“I freaked out and figured it was time to leave for good.” But leaving was like breaking an addiction. Now, a year later, the prospect of a mere visit seems frightful. “They’d all come up to me, say ‘Hey, where ya been,’ crack jokes. I couldn’t handle it, I just wanna keep away.”

Last May, four girls were busted on “prostitution” charges, for not wearing panties. Mardi Gras personnel were, for the time being, instructed to dust off their G-strings and put them back on. Marc Lammers, the tall, husky fellow who mans the box office at night, was in the middle: “They put four of us on a chain when they led us out. Then the cops kept me in handcuffs for three and a half hours at Midtown North. They tried to get me on obscenity, but the judge lowered me to disorderly conduct. The system’s fucked up. We had to be in court at nine-thirty in the morning. black-ass judge comes in at eleven-thirty then breaks for lunch. We were the last case, at five.”

“The safest day at the Melody is St. Paddy’s,” adds another Mardi Gras girl. “All the cops are out vomiting at the parade.”

One of the toughest predicaments from which the Melody seems to have emerged victorious was a sales-tax case brought against them by the state. By law, theaters presenting a drama or comedy must charge sales tax on the ticket; but musical performances are exempt. At stake was a quarter-mil in back taxes.

“The guys at the audit said, You’re not musical performances, you’re pornography,’” explains Kronish. “I said, ‘This is the Melody—we can’t operate without music, so what the hell do you call it?’ I says, ‘Who are you to say this is porn, you’re a sales-tax man, you can’t decide what’s naughty or nice.’”

The court decided the major portion of the case in the Melody’s favor, due in part to Kronish’s expertise in tax law, his profession. He spends most of the workaday week at his accountant’s office in Westchester. His clients’ first names become familiar when listed together, though he reveals them hesitantly: “I’ve done tax returns for Veronica, Samantha, Candida, Gloria, Desiree. . . .”

And what do porn stars get to write off? Handi-Wipes?

“Never thought of that, but yeah, Handi-Wipes, if they’re dancing. The nature of their deductions are mainly costumes, maintenance of costumes, Cosmetics, agents’ fees, advertising, taxi fares to work, travel accommodations when they’re out of town. It adds up.”

Is there anything unique about a porn star’s tax form?

“It’s a Schedule C. Everyone has to file a 1040 or 1040-A, but in addition to this, since they’re self-employed people, they file Schedule C, which indicates gross income and business deductions, winding up with a net profit or a net loss. They have to pay social security on whatever their profit is, which in 1981 was 9.3 percent. They file the same way an unincorporated candy-store owner would.”

Anna Turner is completing her last set of the night, and Al Kronish goes out to watch. “What a great ass,” he notes, beaming at her performance from the back aisle. Anna practically turns it inside out, leaving the ol’ fellers quite breathless. Al stops before a lobby billboard with naked color pix of past strippers.

“You see this girl here? Her parents came from Long Island one night and grabbed her right out of porn. She’d done two films, really liked the business. If a girl is from Long Island, she should go to the Coast to do porn.”

Anna crosses over to Bernard’s with Al, and God help Kandi Barbour if she gets in Anna’s way. “She don’t know who she’s fuckin’ with,” warns Anna, like an outlaw gunning for tail. “I’ll put her down before the first round.” Al decides to enter thirty seconds after Anna. But when he enters the restaurant, the two are chatting amiably, like bosom buddies. The dramatic switch doesn’t seem to phase him, he’s seen this before. Both girls embrace him, smearing lipstick on his forehead and flirting with his trousers. “Please,” Kronish begs off, “my doctor tells me I got only one fuck left in me.”