by Tim Moore
The first so-called ‘night-clubs’ sprang up in the early twenties, catering for the new craze in cocktail drinking, denounced by medical authorities in an age before large and blackcurrant as ‘the most reprehensible form of alcoholic abuse’. People danced the Charleston; some kind soul guaranteed future generations endless trite amusement by choreographing the Black Bottom. But those early clubs had to stop serving at 10 p.m., and for the era’s unusually devoted drinkers that was many hours too early. When you bear in mind that this latter group included the Prince of Wales, Rudolph Valentino and any other number of persuasively rich notables, you will understand the temptation to bend the rules. As well as the old gin-out-of-teapots ruse, clubs organised ‘bottle parties’, ostensibly private gatherings with a notional ‘host’, whose ‘invited guests’ were in reality anyone prepared to pay . . . sorry, to ‘help out with the expenses’. Memorable features of such occasions included ‘the semi-nude cabaret and the frankly lewd song’. The rewards were prodigious but so were the penalties: Mrs Meyrick, a respectably middle-aged club-owner whose three daughters all married into the peerage, was twice convicted and spent over two years in prison – in true Monopoly style, she continued running her empire from behind bars.
Opened in 1924, the Café de Paris on Coventry Street somehow managed to tread that fine line between excitement and respectability, and trod it with such agility that it soon established itself as the dominant club of its era – the master key, no less, that unlocks the mystery of Coventry Street’s appearance on the board.
To succeed in those days it was vital to secure the patronage of the ‘Upper Three Thousand’, a group we may safely define as the stupidly rich good-time aristos who dominated the social scene much as today’s Hello!-class celebs. The Café’s Danish manager Martin Poulsen was a friend of Edward, the errant Prince of Wales, and to secure his majesty’s crucial long-term patronage packed the club with game lovelies on the night of that first royal visit. ‘Oh, God!’ said one young dancing girl on being told that the Prince wished to meet her, ‘What do I say to him?’ ‘“Yes, sir” or “No, sir”,’ said Poulsen, ‘but “Yes, sir” for preference.’
Edward came three times a month thereafter, and once the Upper Three Thousand followed so did their celebrity cohorts. Noël Coward was a regular, and Fred Astaire, Charlie Chaplin, assorted Churchills and Kennedys. Cole Porter gave ‘Miss Otis Regrets’ its first public airing on the Café de Paris’s tiny stage. Stockbrokers had phones installed by their tables so they could trade on the New York exchange after the London markets had closed; a bandleader once eavesdropped and made a fortune of his own. So generous were the tips that the Café’s doormen actually had to pay the management £10 a week to work there.
Inevitably, the high jinks at the Café were the highest and jinkiest in town. Someone would dot sugar lumps with drops of coffee and shoot craps. Huge sums were wagered on cab races down Piccadilly. Poulsen was an ex-Olympic gymnast and walked across the dance floor on his hands when he was in a good mood; the King of Spain would turn up with a butterfly net full of oranges and give them out to people he liked the look of. Edward and Mrs Simpson met there often, as indeed did the Queen Mum and her future husband: though the gossip columnists, forbidden to advertise, could only refer to it as a ‘supper restaurant in Coventry Street’, the Café’s society nickname was ‘the bower of love’.
If the Leicester Square riff-raff fancied a peek inside the Café, they could forget it. Strictly evening dress only, and no rabble was the order of the day: even Vic and Marge would have had to have smiled particularly nicely. As indeed did I, in a telephonic sense, when I’d called up the Café de Paris earlier in the day to secure a place on the guest list.
The unusual ease with which I succeeded owed much to the unshakeable conviction the duty manageress had somehow acquired during our conversation that I was out scouting locations for a new and apparently lucrative London clubland edition of Monopoly. Any determination to disabuse her of this worrisome delusion evaporated when a substantial doorman guarding the Café’s unremarkable entrance interrupted my explanatory mumblings with an eager, which is to say terrifying, beam. ‘Oh, yes indeed! Mr Mon-o-poly!’ he boomed, in the manner of an unusually strident master of ceremonies at a world title fight. Then, in a different but perhaps more unsettling voice, he bent towards me and with his bow tie almost in my mouth whispered, ‘Go on, make us Mayfair. Go on.’
Exhausted by the ensuing exchange of false laughter I stumbled down the steps and into the club’s hot, loud darkness. ‘Busy night tonight,’ bellowed a freckled man with a New-World accent and a curly plastic wire sticking out of a device in his ear. He said my name, and then his, which I couldn’t quite hear as we shook hands. We were at the open end of a horseshoe balcony curved snugly around and above a dance floor half-filled with tables; an eclectic assortment of hearty revellers were eating, and a lot more were jiggling energetically about in front of an iron-throated songstress at the low stage before them. Her backing band abruptly climaxed and in the following seconds of calm we had our conversation.
‘Busy night,’ I repeated.
‘Yeah,’ he confirmed, scanning the crowd beneath with a practised eye. ‘I reckon about 450 out of a seven-one-five capacity.’
‘Not bad for a Thursday.’
‘Well, you know,’ he said, in what I took as a wry tone, ‘Thursday is the new Friday.’
As soon as the theatrical chortle warbled idiotically out of my mouth I realised this had not been a joke. ‘Yes!’ I said, failing to mould counterfeit amusement into genuine enthusiasm. ‘That’s exactly what . . . what has happened. To Thursday. In relation to Friday.’
He directed a short, sharp look at my face, then at my tie, before continuing more circumspectly. ‘Yeah . . . Friday is a bit . . . east goes west.’ Actually, I’m not sure if he did say precisely that, because halfway through his sentence the band struck mightily up once more. Just as well, as craning uncertainly towards his moving mouth I could just detect little wisps of compromising banter, a ‘prestige spot on the board’ here and a ‘licensing deal’ there. I nodded a lot, letting my lower lip sag into an expression of benign confusion that I somehow hoped would say, ‘Though of obscure but pivotal importance in regards to this clubland Monopoly venture, I’m both a bit stupid and spinelessly corruptible.’ You may imagine how this expression developed when I found myself, a short number of seconds later, sitting at a table for one on the VIP balcony, the Prince of Wales balcony, watching froth subside in the champagne flute before me. Bring on the semi-nude cabaret; let the frankly lewd songs commence.
From here it was simple to imagine the Café in its heyday – almost impossible not to. There were still chandeliers; still champagne. And velvet sofas, white linen and live music, and an audience that blended the Upper Three Thousand with the middling millions. The PA was squawking on about medical students and a twenty-first birthday; alongside me, a family of four I’d seen emerging from a spanking new Roller out front were having the time of their lives, the dad drinking Veuve Clicquot straight from the bottle while his wife and twentyish sons linked arms and did the cancan. I don’t think I have ever seen so many people having such fun on a Thursday – certainly not since Frank Dobson tried to pick a fight with Ken Livingstone on Question Time.
Ol’ iron-throat made way for a fashionably cheesy medley of seventies TV theme tunes and Shirley Bassey numbers, and I sat back in my armchair, velvet sliding softly against velvet, glass tilted suavely towards lips. My trousers felt at home, and so at last did I. Only then did I look up and realise something important about where I was sitting.
The outbreak of war hardly checked the Café’s debonair stride. Poulsen bought 25,000 bottles of champagne as an indication of his confidence, and even in 1940 was able to offer his patrons oysters and caviar. His nightclub advertised itself as ‘the safest and gayest restaurant – twenty feet below ground’, and when the air-raid sirens started the Upper Three Thousand ran in:
it was their equivalent of sheltering in the Tube.
I have to say, however, that my research revealed an establishment which even in its early days had seemed marinaded in ill fate. Café regulars were always overdosing in toilets or fatally involving themselves in unlikely boating accidents. Car crashes, plane crashes, hotel fires . . . one pissed-up millionaire was kicked out of the Café after throwing plates off the balcony and shot himself when he got home. And it wasn’t just the human toll. How’s this for an account of contemporary priorities: ‘A terrible accident . . . almost £80,000-worth of jewellery scattered all over the road, much of it never being recovered. Prince Mdivani was killed.’
When you design your club as an exact copy of the restaurant on the Lusitania you should probably expect trouble, and at 9.50 on 8 March 1941 it came. The bomb dropped in through the plaster and glass above and glanced off the first balcony table on the left – my table, in fact – before exploding. The club was packed and eighty-four people, including Poulsen, were killed in what was to be one of the West End’s most devastating Blitz tragedies. But accounts of the immediate aftermath offer an interesting insight in the Blitz spirit: let into the Café at last, the riff-raff exacted a rather unsavoury revenge by stripping the dead and wounded of their valuables. One man had £60 looted from his blood-soaked trousers; the cufflinks were pinched off Poulsen’s corpse. Taxi drivers commandeered to ferry the wounded to hospital berated their prone passengers for bleeding on the seats, and survivors reported a man kneeling down by the heads of the dying and hissing ‘Are you prepared to meet your God?’ in their ears.
Eventually patched together the Café reopened after the war – the Goons, Tony Hancock and Shirley Bassey honed their acts on its tiny stage – but all clubs fall out of fashion, and with that dicky-bow dress code still in place it was never going to make it to the sixties. The Queen chose it for her coming-out party, and so very nearly did Liberace, who in 1956 almost had his trousers pulled off by students in the street outside, but in 1957 they bowed to the inevitable and mothballed the Café as a part-time venue for private functions.
As you will have gathered, however, it is now reopened, and I can recommend you include a visit to the Café de Paris on the Monopoly tour of London you’ve no doubt already begun to plan. I’ve no idea how much it costs to get in or what a drink will set you back, but that doesn’t matter – there’s got to be some mileage in the Clubland Cluedo gambit.
They were playing the Wonder Woman theme when a waitress who I’d noticed examining me for some time marched confidently up. I raised my empty champagne glass and jiggled it promptingly; her facial response indicated this to be an inappropriate course of action. ‘Sorry,’ she said, sounding anything but, ‘all these tables are reserved.’
Almost managing not to bleat in panic I told her that it was absolutely fine, a statement she inevitably found wanting. ‘But I’m a corporate guest on a courtesy fact-finding visit,’ I elaborated. ‘One of your senior colleagues invited me to this table.’
‘Which one?’ she asked, and fruitlessly scanning the dark sea of heads for one to point at I knew the game was up.
‘Some Australian bloke with wires coming out of his ears.’
Stubbornly unintrigued, she raised her eyebrows at someone in the purply gloom beyond. It would have been about this time that I recalled how the Café de Paris waiters effected their ‘flying wedge’ expulsion technique: an irresistible phalanx of half a dozen propelling obstreperous guests smartly across the balcony floor and down a secret rear staircase.
The waitress motioned to the door, and with my powers of resistance conspicuously sapped by this recollection I cravenly collected my belongings. What were the options? Dig myself deeper into the already echoingly cavernous Clubland Monopoly hole I’d excavated, or take this opportunity to be forcibly hauled out of it?
Perhaps it was for the best, in any case. Despite the unwieldy gob-full of chewable stimulants I had been steadily accumulating, the sofa was beginning to feel rather too comfortable for a man only halfway through his mission: Cole Porter, I thought, probably wouldn’t have complained about getting no kick from guarana.
I sloped up the stairs followed by wisps of dry ice, slipped past the bouncer and with my ears as confused by the sudden hissy silence as my eyes had been coming out of the cinema I gave the rest of Coventry Street a wistful once-over. It didn’t take long. The Prince of Wales Theatre’s streaky, portholed superstructure imparted the look of a recently raised shipwreck; what had been the Civil Service Co-Operative Society was now a TGI Friday, and looking at my watch I saw that the phrase behind those cursed initials had indeed applied for over an hour and a half.
A Starbucks, an Aberdeen Steak House, a KFC – the only catering establishment that didn’t have its chairs on the tables was McDonald’s, and only then because they were bolted to the floor. A bureau de change (actually there were two, but you have a go at the plural); Churchill Souvenirs; a Sock Shop. I’ve never understood why Sock Shops exist at all, and especially why they did so with such bewildering ubiquity during the chain’s mid-eighties boom. I’m as well acquainted as anyone with lurid tabloid tales of ruinous yuppie excess, but can’t seem to recall any sordid confessionals headlined ‘My Novelty Anklewear Hell’.
Sock Shop occupied part of what had been Scott’s restaurant, but next door a far grimmer mutation had taken place. Consulting my directory with a sigh so loud it caused a street sweeper to look up from his broom, I noted that what had once been the world’s largest restaurant, the acceptable face of fast food, the first Lyons Corner House was now – and what spittled loathing this still causes me – Planet Hollywood. I would draw the attention of those unfamiliar with Planet Hollywood to the following nouns: ‘Sylvester Stallone’; ‘buffalo wings’. I don’t really have the stomach, nor in fact the libel insurance, to explain in further detail why Planet Hollywood might easily be the very worst thing in the world.
I’d banked on emerging from the Café de Paris, elegantly wasted, at around 3 a.m., but even though I was a couple of hours early Coventry Street had already gone to bed. A limo driver was polishing his windscreen; blokes with Stanley knives were kneeling in front of newsstands cutting open bundles of tomorrow’s – today’s – papers. People who’d drunk their fares home were queuing outside the banks down Haymarket, and for the first time I appreciated how the cashpoint has revolutionised late-night urban culture.
But every silver lining has a cloud, and of the unrightful beneficiaries of this revolution none is more disagreeably irksome than the pirate minicab. By the time I’d made it to the drunks shuffling about Eros I had already been hailed by half a dozen deftly subtle toots and whistles and small inquiring yelps, each delivered with such innocence that I was invariably lured over to see what the kerb-crawling driver wanted. Directions? The time? Hot water and towels? But no. What they always wanted, of course, was up to £50 of my money in return for a circumlocutory tour of the western suburbs in an uninsured Toyota Corolla with one headlight and a leaking sack of chickpeas on the back seat. If I had – let’s see – shaved the head of every driver who beckoned me in this infuriating fashion in the ensuing weeks I could have, I don’t know, made St Paul’s a wig.
The pace picked up as the street flared out into Piccadilly Circus. As I fumbled and flapped my notebook into a pocket a cocky gaggle of Asian girls passed. ‘Working at this time of night?’ chirped the nearest, and though it didn’t seem a devastating one-liner they all giggled like Barbara Windsor. I nodded indulgently; a second wind was blowing me towards the neon signs.
Though I shouldn’t really have dawdled at Piccadilly Circus, a separate entity to Piccadilly and strictly speaking peripheral to my journey, it seemed the best bet for some night-on-the-tiles action. A bloke in a Huggy Bear hat was sidling up to passers-by and hissing a suggestion their reactions betrayed as comically risqué, and while wondering if I wanted to hear what it was two beardily Orwellian men of the road, one with bare and blackened fe
et, invited me to share a bottle that had at some earlier stage in its life contained Lilt. ‘Go on, you handsome devil,’ drawled the one with shoes on, winking laboriously. And yet even as I backed swiftly away towards the buffed and bleached French Renaissance edifice of the Criterion theatre and restaurant, it was already becoming clear that the Piccadilly Circus of today no longer offered the reckless revelry which once defined it.
‘Man and girl begin to undress in front of Eros statue, man has taken off his shirt and girl pulled up dress when police stop them,’ wrote a thwarted Mass Observer on that night in 1937; later on, surrendering to a boisterous crowd, a policeman with a megaphone shouted, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the Circus is yours.’ Despite being relentlessly circled by buses and Bentleys – these days it’s only half a roundabout – Eros was where you went by day for a bunch of roses from the famously grumpy old flower sellers, and by night for the company of the more accommodating women who made Piccadilly Circus a focal point of pre-war London whoredom. ‘THE CENTRE OF THE WORLD’ screamed the banner slung across the London Pavilion, taking its cue from the only slightly less ambitious slogans flashing around it.
‘A monstrous exhibition of vulgarity,’ scolded the Architects’ Journal in 1924 with reference to the circus, ‘yet country cousins come and gawp with astonishment and even admiration at this degrading spectacle.’ Our friend Harold Clunn was no less strident ten years later: ‘A reproach to the metropolis,’ he called it, ‘which would not be tolerated, for instance, in Berlin.’ Anything that’s not tolerated in Berlin, you might think – especially in the 1930s – has got to be worth encouraging. Particularly because the phenomenon under discussion was not compulsory public masturbation or pro-celebrity badger baiting, but illuminated advertisements.