Chippendales founder Steve Banerjee subscribed to the old adage that no publicity is bad publicity.
When he first established the male striptease shows in 1979 — a novelty at the time — he used every method at his disposal to promote it, according to his former employees and associates featured in A&E’s new series Secrets of the Chippendales Murders. Even, or especially, if it meant making his business, which was first run out of a club in Los Angeles, look scandalous.
“In order to get free press, he would call up some of the local churches anonymously and say, you know, I heard that these guys are gonna be dancing over at this place, and they’re actually naked,” former dancer Hodari Sababu says in the first of four episodes. “You’d have the church ladies [picketing] with their signs, then you’d have the media covering it.”
Of course, then Banerjee would be interviewed and deny that nudity was happening. It wasn’t. The men wore collars and cuffs inspired by the accessories worn by the famous Playboy bunnies.
A vintage news clip shows a male reporter asking him how much do the men take off.
“It comes up to their briefs,” Banerjee happily explained, “so we do not have any nudity of any sort. And they all shout ‘Take it off, take it off.’ And we just tell them, ‘No, this is it. That’s all we can do.'”
He was having the “greatest time,” Sababu says of the revue, which continues to offer performances in Las Vegas — Jersey Shore’s Vinny Guagagnino stars this month — and throughout the world. “It put us on the map.”
Bruce Nahin, a former attorney for Banerjee, said he would call the L.A. Fire Department to report overcrowding, even when they weren’t. When they were, he’d report that too.
In one local news interview, Banerjee is asked, “What do you think’s behind this?”
He answers, “I wonder. I will definitely talk to the police commission to make sure that I do not violate the law in any way.”
Another former dancer, Eddie Prevot, said the free publicity was an essential part of Banerjee’s business strategy.
“The state liquor authority in California was coming in to shut it down,” Prevot explains. “So now it’s hitting the news, and he built his business on negative publicity. They think they’re shutting Steve down. They’re doing just the opposite.”
Still, there actually were things going down at the club that neighbors and church ladies would disapprove of. Sex was happening throughout the club. Even outside of it, one former employee says.
In one scene, someone unfortunate enough to live behind that original Chippendales location tells a TV reporter, “We’ve had people having sex relations on the lawn.”
There was a lot worse than that going on at Chippendales, and Banerjee was behind much of it. He was later convicted of hiring someone to kill his former business partner. He died by suicide in 1994, hours before he was supposed to be sentenced.
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Secrets of the Chippendales Murders premieres Monday, March 14 at 10 p.m. on A&E.
