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  • Liquor, Lust, and the Law: The Story of Vancouver’s Legendary Penthouse Nightclub by Aaron Chapman
  • Becki L. Ross
Liquor, Lust, and the Law: The Story of Vancouver’s Legendary Penthouse Nightclub. aaron chapman. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 2012. Pp. 160, $24.95

Liquor, Lust, and the Law is community historian Aaron Chapman’s rollicking tale of Vancouver’s Penthouse nightclub, which opened as an after-hours speakeasy on Seymour Street in 1947. In 2014, it is the longest-running strip club in Canada. Owned by an immigrant Italian family, the Filippones, the Penthouse developed a prosperous niche in Vancouver’s service industry and added to the family’s courier, trucking, and taxi operations. Run by four brothers and a sister, with Joe, “the playboy,” and Ross, the “business manager,” at the helm, the Penthouse thrived, argues Chapman, because family members were hard-working, risk-taking, visionary, inventive, and wellconnected. The Filippones’ most enduring commodity wasn’t top-drawer actors, comedians, or musicians on the cabaret stage, or food or liquor sales. Instead, it was exotic dancing, which has sustained the club, and the lusty appetites of customers, over myriad rough patches for nearly seven decades.

Sumptuously and suitably graphic, Chapman’s oversized book is enhanced by 155 black and white images, including news articles and [End Page 661] photographs from the daily papers, family photographs, ticket stubs, exotic dancers’ promotional shots, and police records. There is even Nana Filippone’s recipe for “Spaghetti and Meatballs”! The imagery – much of it newly unearthed from a secret hollow compartment in the club’s office – intensifies the already mythical lore about the city’s “oldest stationary funhouse.” However, fine-grained visual analysis is in short supply. For instance, what additional clues might this unusually robust visual archive supply? How does the sheer size of the news archive confirm journalists’ (and readers’) obsessive fascination with tales of illegal alcohol, obscene flesh, and corrupted morals? In collaborating with Chapman, how much power did the Filippones exercise over selecting some visuals while excluding others?

The book is enriched by Chapman’s interviews with retired Vancouver police constables, former cab drivers, club staff, an ex-dancer, the club’s lawyers, and the children of the original Filippone siblings. And yet, only hinted at were answers to why intimate relationships for workers at an “infamous” strip club were so hard to maintain, not only for the headlining dancers but for Joe, “the bachelor,” and for Ross, whose marriage to showgirl Penny Marks cracked under the pressure of late nights. In different ways, club staff must have experienced elements of what dancers have called the “stripper stigma.” In interviews with me for Burlesque West (University of Toronto Press, 2009), Ross Filippone spoke about the terrible toll that running a strip club took on his family, including his children. African-American performers became fixtures at the Penthouse, including Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Sammy Davis Jr., the Ink Spots, Harry Belafonte, Oscar Peterson, and Louis Armstrong. But what accounted for the Filippones’ solidarity with black entertainers (beyond the profit motive) in a largely white settler city rife with racist policies and practices? By contrast, Chapman might have probed the Filippone brothers’ antiunion sentiments and actions, as dancers sought, unsuccessfully, to organize for better wages and working conditions from the mid-1960s on.

Notwithstanding the impressive legacy of the Filippones’ labour, the Penthouse is also a story about women’s work as dancers, cigarette girls, coat checks, cooks, waitresses, and sex workers. (I found it frustrating that some of these women appear in photographs, yet most are unidentified. Even Florence Filippone, sister of Joe, Ross, Mickey, and Jimmy, who worked for decades as the club’s bookkeeper, is a shadowy figure.) Chapman would do well to note that men, as patrons, paid to play, and in so doing, exercised their patriarchal right to leisure and to the company of other men. Beyond the unequal heterosexual and [End Page 662] gendered relations negotiated inside (and outside) the club, how might what Chapman calls “the full history” of the nightclub be expanded by the recollections of queers, trans* folks, dancers, performers and customers of colour, “ladies of the night” and their “marks...

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