HUNKS ON PARADE : It's Dark and Sweaty Work, but Someone Has to Give Women Someone to Scream At

By DIANNE KLEIN

April 23, 1988 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

These are sensitive guys.

They’re tired of explaining to those ignoramuses out there that this is a class act, that some of them even have college degrees, professions to fall back on when their muscles start to sag, when the tanning salons start taking their toll in tiny little lines around their eyes.

Even the tawdry lingo of the trade itself conspires against them. They are dancers, actors, entertainers, fulfillers of fantasies. Stripping is seedy.

“People don’t understand it,” says Al Pranno, 24, a strapping male specimen with an earring stuck through his earlobe and curls cascading off his crown. “They want to believe the stereotype. When people hear a different story, they aren’t sure that it’s quite right. But I like to shatter the myth that we are muscle-bound airheads.”

Pranno, instead, is a muscle-bound French horn player. He has a degree in accounting. Maybe, he says, he’ll go to law school and then open an Italian restaurant on the side--with mom in the kitchen.

But when Pranno and the other gorgeous hunks at the Chippendales Los Angeles nightclub aren’t talking, they’re showing. Almost everything. They take it off at the club, on the road and around the world.

“I didn’t have a problem at all,” Pranno says of that night in Denver some three years ago when he first unencumbered himself of everything but the skimpiest G-string before a crowd of awe-struck women.

“Now, if you have a mental problem about taking your clothes off in front of 200 women, then maybe you should review your career choice.”

The lights in Anaheim’s Century Theater are dimming. The audience of about 1,000 women, and maybe about four men, is giddy with anticipation.

They have already bought dozens of $7 Chippendales calendars, hawked on stage before the show and signed by some of the same topless bods featured therein. They have sat through the opening act, a rock group distinguished by loud noise and lewd dancing.

They have even made their way past a motley group of protesters outside the theater who, while carrying signs urging sinners to repent, harangue them for plotting a lascivious night out for ladies.

“Shame on you for what you do!” is a favorite chant.

Of course, nobody has done anything quite yet, although more than a few members of the audience look ready. There are a lot of tight and tiny minis, spandex dresses, spike heels and cleavage pushed up and out.

And, now, almost an hour later, when that disco beat begins bouncing off the walls, these party animals turn their heads along with everyone else to watch for The Men of Chippendales come stampeding down the aisles like wild stallions.

But first comes the fake fog. It engulfs the stage. The spotlights change colors. The women hoot and holler. Some dance in their seats, shimmying their shoulders.

When the men do make their dash for the circular stage, a few women manage to grab at some rear ends.

The evening has begun.

Steve Banerjee, owner and creator of Chippendales, wishes he could have gotten his hands on CBS anchorman Dan Rather maybe 20 years ago, before distinguished but after adolescence.

“If he didn’t have his job, I would talk him into taking this job,” Banerjee says, unsmiling, in all seriousness, between puffs on a cigarette.

Rather, he says, has the rugged good looks that Banerjee says he learned to sell after reading “The Selling of the President,” Joe McGinnis’ 1968 book that chronicled the second presidential campaign of Richard M. Nixon.

But Banerjee says he focused instead on John F. Kennedy, about how he translated his sex appeal into votes from the women of America.

“It’s just like that,” he says. “In order to make money, you have to go to the mass market. So I package these beautiful, stunning guys with a touch of Ivy League. They have an elegant look about them.”

Banerjee, a native of Bombay, India, compares himself to a diamond dealer or a real estate developer. He says he has an eye for quality raw material and, most of the time, knows how to shape it.

“I get them a good stylist. I get them good photographs,” he says. “I package them. I can package anything.”

But Banerjee stresses that the formula works only if followed to the letter. It boils down to an imprecise yet exacting blend of classic American good looks, a prototype honed after years of watching women watch men.

Square jaws, broad shoulders and tight little behinds are a must. Muscles, too, are required, but then again, not too many muscles. Height helps. Gay, no matter how gorgeous, is out. Banerjee says women can always tell.

“It’s a science,” he says. “If you don’t follow your formula all the way, your bottom line won’t be right. It’s capitalism, blatant, you might call it.”

Hence, the stripping. Hence, the “kiss and tip.” Hence, the lack of any pretense of subtlety.

“The stripping I put in there because it sells,” Banerjee says. “I cannot do a (George) Bernard Shaw play when people are drinking. . . . It’s prime-time television. It’s like a joke with a laugh track in it. We got to have the mass appeal. I’d rather be K mart than Gucci and just be in Beverly Hills.”

But Banerjee adds that he’s not the only one mining Chippendales gold. What with spinoff modeling assignments and other appearences, he says a few of his dancers can make up to $100,000 a year. Most make well above their more traditionally employed friends.

It was a slow seduction for Al Ross, 26, world-class athlete, business major, actor, aspiring fireman and resident Chippendales stud.

He has moral qualms. He’s modest. He’s a nice guy.

“I like to think of myself as a Clark Gable type,” he says. “I like to dress up and smell nice.”

But Ross hasn’t had much of a chance to dress up for the past 2 1/2 years that he’s been at Chippendales. Mostly it’s been a slow peel.

“I’ve been able to block it out,” he says of the unseemly implications of his trade. “Originally, I wouldn’t strip. I took small steps to that. In the old show, I started off as a lifeguard and went down to a Speedo (a skimpy spandex swimsuit). And I had a problem with that. Then I would pull down my Speedo when the light was fading.

“I’ve resisted pressure to strip. I went to shorts, to a Speedo, to a T-back in the dark and eventually just to the T-back. It was one step at a time.”

Today Ross is a little upset about the interview he has just undergone as part of his effort to become a firefighter. Chippendales is on the top of his resume.

“I felt a little uncomfortable,” he says. “They looked at that and automatically snickered.”

Ross says when his examiners asked a standard question about whether he would mind sharing close quarters with people of other races or the opposite sex, he answered that he had roomed with fellow track athletes from around the world.

“And I told them that I wouldn’t feel uncomfortable with women because I dance in front of women every night,” he says.

“They didn’t like that. It seemed like they had something against me from the start.”

But Ross’ attributes are wildly appreciated at Chippendales, where he is a “kiss and tip” favorite, one of the lads who scurries around the stage clad only in a G-string that would make even Tarzan blush.

He’ll kiss anybody for a buck. On a good night, Ross says he might pick up a quick $100 or so for one “kiss and tip” round.

“We’re very distant,” Pranno adds. “It’s not that big of a deal to kiss 50 women. We do what we have been trained to do. Yes, you’re going to get trash. You’re going to get fat people in jeans. (But) we treat everybody alike. It doesn’t matter.”

Emcee Read Scott is warming up his captives at the Anaheim show. They have just seen the Chippendales troupe, fully clothed, do a little opening dance number in the midst of the fake fog.

They swirled, they posed, they gazed come-hither. They did not smile. Smiling studs are not Chippendales sexy.

“Are you ready to party!” Scott screams into his hand-held microphone.

The audience appears to be ready.

“Tonight is the night, ladies, that all your dreams will come true,” Scott says. “Tonight is the night that we are going to make you forget all those little (he pauses for effect) inadequacies!”

The audience giggles.

“We’re going to lock those doors,” he says with a sweeping motion toward the theater exits, “and nobody gets out of here unsatisfied!”

Then Scott introduces the bare-chested men with the black spandex pants and white tuxedo collars, the ones who will later wait in the aisles to collect discarded clothing and who, at the Los Angeles club, serve as “hosts.” All of the Chippendales strippers start out as hosts.

Scott describes one of these trainees as a newcomer, another as an up-and-coming rock star and another as hailing from Texas. But the intros get a little bit more specific, naughty but not quite nasty. Some of those in the crowd may be blushing, but it’s too dark to tell.

Steve Merritt, choreographer and director, says when he first saw the Chippendales show two years ago he was “just mortified.”

He recalls men dressed as Conan the Barbarian stripping down to G-strings that would light up in the dark.

“That’s why I insisted on creative control,” he says of his agreement with Banerjee to choreograph all shows at the Chippendales clubs in Los Angeles and New York, as well as the road tours.

“Basically, before working here, I never saw a male exotic show,” Merritt says. “When I told my friends about it, they told me, ‘You can’t do anything with those airheads.’ Well, I showed them that you can. I took it on as a dare.”

So Merritt has banished the Neanderthals, shown some of the hunks how to dance and added three non-stripping professional dancers to round things out.

“And I talk to women to find out what they like,” Merritt says. “Basically they are saying that they want real life. I take off on what happens in real life.”

From such research, he says, have come men pretending to be everything from rock stars to jilted lovers to boxers to naval cadets. They all take it off to hoots and catcalls.

“With AIDS and all that, everybody is dealing in fantasy,” Merritt says. “So now sensuality is a big deal.”

DeAnna Uston, 24, of Huntington Beach is psyched. She has defied her boyfriend, grabbed a girlfriend and headed to Anaheim to see stripping studs.

The reason, she says, “is the sex of it all.”

“It’s safe sex. It’s exciting to me.”

Uston and her friend, Stacy, 22, who doesn’t want to see her last name in print, are sitting maybe 8 feet from the stage, well within what the box-office attendant calls “G-string range.”

But that’s not good enough. Stacy has tried, unsuccessfully, to pay six different women $20 each to change seats with her. The holdouts are sitting in free-standing chairs positioned at the edge of the stage.

Soon it becomes apparent why Stacy was so eager to move. The second before he bounds on stage, a Chippendales dancer dressed in mean black leather literally throws himself on a woman sitting a couple of arm lengths from the stage.

But Stacy, too, gets her special moment.

One of the bare-chested trainees happens to find himself standing just in front of her. She shoots him a shy smile. He grabs her hand. She pulls it over her shoulder. He kisses the top of her teased hair.

It may have been the only freebie of the evening.

Debbie Keeney, 19, of Santa Ana had to pay for her brush with Chippendale lips. It came after one of the dancers, pretending to be some sort of sex-crazed animal, slithered and writhed on stage to the strains of George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex.”

Keeney, a fresh-faced brunette who surely would have to pay no man for a kiss, hesitated too long on the last “kiss and tip” round. But now, with her friends pushing her shoulders to urge her on, she stands in line with the others, dollar bill in hand.

“Oh, it was incredible,” she says after returning to her seat. A naughty glow spreads over her face.

“He’s a hunk. Up close is best,” she says, making an A-OK sign with her fingers. “And he even said thank you!”

Gary Sylvia, 26, is what Chippendales owner Banerjee calls “top of the line,” as in ultimate stud. He’s been on the cover of the Chippendales calender two years running. He has the dark Ratheresque good looks that send women into a heated frenzy.

But there is a problem.

Sylvia, a Rhode Island native with a degree in chemical engineering, won’t strip. Not really strip, that is. Boxer shorts are his limit.

And he won’t “kiss and tip.” He says he doesn’t even like to watch it.

“I believe you shouldn’t do what is uncomfortable to you,” he says. “I’m not judging anybody else, but I couldn’t make myself do it. You have an inner knowledge of what’s right and wrong.”

So choreographer Merritt has worked around that. Sylvia can’t dance, so he walks. He won’t strip, so he teases.

“I’m like the innocent boy next door,” Sylvia says of his contribution to the Chippendales show. “It adds more of a gentleman quality.”

But Banerjee’s patience has run out. Sylvia just got word that he will be featured less prominently in the show.

“They want five leads who will kiss and tip,” Sylvia says. “I don’t kiss women or go down to a G-string. They’ve been getting comments that they (the women) would like to see more of me.”

That gives Sylvia more free time, and less money, on his hands. He says he’s ready to forget about chemical engineering almost entirely and make the big move to acting.

But Chippendales, Sylvia says, has been good to him. He’s been tested, but ultimately strengthened, by the temptations of the fast life.

“L.A. is the best place to test your morality, to test right or wrong,” he says. “If you don’t stick to what is right, you are going to be swayed by what is wrong.”

But there has been at least one sour note: women.

“After having worked here, it makes it a little harder to trust,” he says. “Many girls who are getting married next week come in here and behave in a way that I wouldn’t want my future wife to behave. Some who have boyfriends are looking to have a good time.

“I always had a bit of a naive view of women,” he confesses. “So this makes you a little more hesitant.”

Oh, and by the way, ladies, if you’re looking to change Sylvia’s mind, don’t get too involved in your careers, and don’t count on meeting him at Chippendales.

He says the woman of his dreams will stay home with the children and away from Chippendales.