‘It’s been so long since I made love,
l can’t even remember who gets tied up.’
Joan Rivers
THE EVE CLUB
In the 1960s, the Eve club in Soho was one of the few places in town where you could see an erotic floor show. This featured ‘the most beautiful showgirls in London’, although full nudity was forbidden and les girls’ movements on stage were restricted in line with the morality of the time. John Profumo had his stag night there, the Bishop of Southwell’s wife was a former hostess and stars like Frank Sinatra and Errol Flynn used to drop by to ‘relax’, along with government ministers, peers of the realm, diplomats, MI5 operatives and other spies. Sex might have been available, but it was never on the club’s official menu as the 1962 brochure made clear in describing a star turn: ‘Her attractions are stunning, her talent is extraordinary and her telephone number, sir, is none of your business.’ By the 1990s, the Eve Club was old hat and closed down. A revived Eve Club opened round the comer in 2003, a pale shadow of its former self.
‘Chastity — the most unnatural of all the
sexual perversions.’ Aldous Huxley