Actually the club has been defunct for quite a while, yet it is still fondly remembered as one of Hollywood's glamor spots. You know, LA. Everything there is glamorous until 6 am in the morning, your head hurts like hell, it is another effing sunny day and you have to drive home squinting through the smog screened sun with throbbing temples and clogged sinus holes.
At it's heyday the club boasted "15 beautiful kittens" and like many cheap-ass strip clubs of the day featured "amateur" nights in order to avoid paying union performers by pretending to have a contest. The club owner may have even made the amateur and/or professional contestants parade on the strip with placards announcing their gyrating performances. I found a photo of it, but it might have been a still from the horrendous Bob Crane biopic, so I didn't include it here. How many "amateurs" went home with Bob? Well...I said he was a regular, and I don't think he kept going back for two drink minimum. Bob could afford top shelf!
PInup model Deliah Jones posts a picture of herself with Bob HERE.
ON the promotional mailing above, a less than comely kitten waves her washed out purple flowing gown at the camera while wearing a stripper wig, also washed out. The club mascot proudly hoists a fifth and a bra, the two most prominent features of 1960s Hollywood glamor.
Horrible B-movie actor Alan Wells owned the club until the mob swiped it from him, for a while anyway. Wells was another serial-dater. He is shown here with his latest conquest cropped out.
For a brief time, the club published a magazine (a company organ, if you will) called Classic Cat Magazine. I can't show the cover of issue number one, as the model is indeed topless...but lesser-talent rat-packer Joey Bishop appears just to the right of her g-string in an inset photo with the manager of the club. Sodden Jim Morrison, indecent singer of The Doors worked on his drinking habit there for a while, and Alice Cooper may have as well, there is a photo of him posing in front of the club in what appears to be his "case of beer a day" period. More topless trivia is provided by the website Hollywood Hangover HERE.
In a rare show of club owners and nude dancers holding hands, in 1979 they together sued the city over continuous police raids. Several years earlier crime figure "Jimmy Casino" tried to muscle in on ownership of the club. In 1969, three wise guys were indicted for using "offers best not refused" to obtain ownership, and immediately changing the club's format from topless to bottomless.
A "famous" actress who appeared on Starsky and Hutch worked there for a time...she must have had a good body and been attractive, as that is what the job requirements were according to numerous classified ads the club ran in the Los Angeles Times in the 1960s and 1970s. Remember when newspapers owned the classified ads business?
At one time, there were two Classic Cat Clubs, the Sunset Blvd. original and one on Van Nuys.
The Classic Cat premises became Tower Video when video made going out to see female anatomy while drunk passe, but that has gone too.
Remarkably, one image from the Classic Cat promotional material shows a stripper who somehow manages the impossible...she makes the expression of a dog look animated by comparison. The ads in the LA Times didn't specify intelligence after all, and I doubt they even had a typing test. You just had to make Mr. Wells smile.
Promotional postcard of The Classic Cat circa 1965 Collection Victor Minx
