Sex Files

September 15 2015

SEE NO EVIL

These two things are called eyes, and if you don't want to be offended you can do something incredible—close them.

Studio nudes of Susanne Haines have been floating around the web for a while now, and they made us curious who she is. No info was readily available, but after some digging it turns out this obscure dancer has a very interesting story. She born and raised around Sacramento, California, and spent some time in Utah, before winning the Miss Placer County beauty contest in 1963 when she was sixteen. Several years later, as an unhappily married college student, she saw an ad asking for a go-go waitress and took the job to get away from her husband. She was soon earning $72.50 a week serving drinks in a nightclub.

From there it was a short leap to the stage—and a bump in earnings to $450 a week as she peeled for male customers. In May 1969 she was performing at the Pink Pussy Kat in the Sacramento suburb of Orangevale when two sheriff’s deputies entered and found Haines and two other women serving drinks topless. When Haines took the stage and performed a dance number that ended with her completely naked, the cops arrested her along with fellow dancer Sheila Brendenson for indecent exposure and lewd and dissolute conduct. Club owner Leonard Glancy was arrested for soliciting.

That case didn’t reach court until late summer, when it landed before the bench of Judge Earl Warren, Jr., son of Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, who had just retired in June. Glancy had kept the Pink Pussy Kat open by featuring only bikini dancing, and he also cooked up an ingenious scheme of having patrons pay to watch nude dances on closed circuit television, as in the photo just below, since it was only “live” nudity that was legally dangerous.

Early in the trial, Judge Warren Jr. agreed with defense attorney Ronald Sypnicki and D.A. Kenneth Hake that, since there was no film or photos of the offending performance, the only fair thing was to allow the jurors to see it for themselves. That couldn’t happen in the courthouse, so Warren had the jury conducted to the Pink Pussy Kat, where Haines performed nude under psychedelic illumination to songs such as “Israelites” and Jimi Hendrix’s hip shaker “Foxy Lady.” Because the bar was open to regular patrons in an attempt to recreate the normal atmosphere of a nude performance, Haines received raucous applause after each of her numbers.

Asked for comment by reporters afterward, Warren deemed his decision a sound one, saying, “[They] got a better look than we could have given them with just plain oral testimony or by trying to re-create some of these things in the courtroom.” Five days later Warren proved his faith in x-rated field trips by taking another panel to another nudie club during a trial involving stripper Carol Doda. The Haines case lasted for five weeks total.

The jury was finally sent to their chambers the second day of October, and after ten hours of deliberation returned with a verdict of guilty on the indecent exposure charge, but innocent on lewd conduct. Warren explained that it had to be guilty on both or innocent on both—if the exposure was indecent the conduct was obviously lewd, or conversely neither was true—and the jury was sent back into their chambers. After another hour of deliberation, Haines and Brendenson won acquittals, as did club owner Glancy on his soliciting charge.

Brendenson quit dancing after the trial, but Haines was ready to get naked again, and Glancy was more than willing to provide a stage. The county sheriff had said he’d continue to jail dancers despite the jury’s verdict, and Haines racked up seven arrests at the Pink Pussy Kat—plus about fifteen others at various venues over the years. But she also was nationally known thanks to the trial

and won the title of Miss Nude Universe in 1972, which in turn pushed her earnings as high as $1,000—about $5,700 in today’s money. Fame didn’t deter the morals squads, though. She was arrested for indecent exposure in Oklahoma and this time lost a $5,000 judgment. Later she was arrested for larceny.

Not long after, realizing her life was going in a direction she couldn’t control, she quit show business and became an evangelical Christian. In 1978, under her married name Susanne Haines Register, she wrote an autobiography, a cautionary tale of life in the fast lane entitled—what else?—Take It All Off. She does just that in the four shots below. They were made, like the one at top, around 1969.

Utah, Sacramento, Orangevale, Pink Pussy Kat, Take It All Off, Susanne Haines, Susanne Haines Register, Sheila Brendenson, Judge Earl Warren Jr. Ronald Sypnicki, Kenneth Hake, Leonard Glancy, trial, nudity, burlesque

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

June 13

1971—First of the Pentagon Papers Are Published

The New York Times begins publication of the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret U.S. Department of Defense history of the country’s political-military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. The papers reveal that the U.S. had deliberately expanded its war with carpet bombing of Cambodia and Laos, coastal raids on North Vietnam, and Marine Corps attacks, and that four presidential administrations, from Truman to Johnson, had deliberately misled the public regarding their intentions toward Vietnam.

June 12

1978—Son of Sam Goes to Prison

David Berkowitz, the New York City serial killer known as Son of Sam, is sentenced to 365 years in prison for six killings. Berkowitz had acquired his nickname from letters addressed to the NYPD and columnist Jimmy Breslin. He is eventually caught when a chain of events beginning with a parking ticket leads to his car being searched and police discovering ammunition and maps of crime scenes.

June 11

1963—Buddhist Monk Immolates Himself

In South Vietnam, Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức burns to death after dousing himself with gasoline and lighting a match. He does it to protest the persecution of Buddhists by the Ngô Đình Diệm led government, choosing a busy Saigon intersection for his protest. An image of the monk being consumed by flames as he sits crosslegged on the pavement, shot by Malcolm Browne, wins a Pulitzer Prize and becomes one of the most shocking and recognizable photos ever published.

June 10

1935—AA Founded

In New York City, Dr. Robert Smith and William Griffith Wilson, who were both recovering alcoholics, establish the organization Alcoholics Anonymous, which pioneers a 12-step rehabilitation program that is so helpful and popular it eventually spreads to every corner of the globe.

June 10

1973—John Paul Getty III Is Kidnapped

John Paul Getty III, grandson of billionaire oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, is kidnapped in Rome, Italy. The elder Getty ignores a ransom demand for $17 million, thinking it is a joke. When John Paul’s ear later arrives in the mail along with a note promising further mutilation, he negotiates the ransom down to $2.9 million, which he pays only on the condition that John Paul repay him at four percent interest. Getty’s kidnappers are never caught.

TIT FOR TAT

Swapping literature was a major subset of midcentury publishing. Ten years ago we shared a good-sized collection of swapping paperbacks from assorted authors.

DIAL A FOR ASSASSINA