Liquor, Lust and the Law Read online

  Joe with World Heavyweight Champion Joe Louis

  Boxer Sugar Ray Robinson with Ross.

  Mac Colville, Ross, Maurice "the Rocket" Richard, and Joe, late 1950s.

  The daily newspapers’ social pages regularly made mention of which entertainers and household names had been in the Penthouse the night before. The newspaper writers themselves made a habit of drinking there, handing in hung-over copy on slow news days. Joe might have been accused of being fascinated with celebrities, who were certainly good for business. But it went deeper than that. “Joe was more at home with entertainers and celebrities because he was one himself,” recalled Ross. “He knew everybody in town, and I think he felt more at home with show business people than some of the stuffed shirts that were in Vancouver at the time. I suppose we all did.”

  In town to negotiate the sale of his yacht, Errol Flynn stopped in at the Penthouse in October 1959. He’d been in town for the better part of a week charming admirers and reporters alike. Flynn said, in what would be his last interview, of his Vancouver stay, “I love this town. The people. The mountains. The sea—I’ve traveled a lot, and I’ve lived and loved a lot— that’s what I’m expected to say isn’t it? But I’ve seldom found a country as magnificent as this. It would be a wonderful place to die.”[16] With those ominous words, a lifetime of wicked ways caught up with Flynn when he passed away the next day at a Vancouver West End apartment on Burnaby Street at the age of fifty.

  The Penthouse remained a “bottle club” without a liquor licence, forcing patrons to hide their liquor. Regular return customers had their bottles numbered and hidden behind counters to avoid confiscation during surprise visits by the police dry squad that continued to target the Penthouse.

  Mickey (front, left) and Joe (standing, third from left) having fun with friends, c. 1950s.

  Joe and Shirley ham it up with friends including Bernie Roop on upright bass, c. 1950s.

  “The police were in two or three times a week,” remembered Ross Filippone. “Not just one or two guys—more like twenty of them at a time. We used to have spotters on the roof. You couldn’t miss five or six police cars coming down the street. We’d press a buzzer and tell the waiters, who [told] the customers to hide their bottles or toss them on the floor.”[17] Increased outcry that police were too busy raiding nightclubs and not on the streets solving crimes coincided with a public appetite for looser liquor restrictions to offer patrons more than the dreary beer parlours. Joe capitalized on this by taking the opportunity to form the BC Cabaret Owners’ Association. As president, he lobbied successfully in support of a June 1952 provincial plebiscite that allowed liquor in licenced establishments. More British Columbians voted in support of relaxing liquor laws than for daylight savings time, the other proposition on the plebiscite.

  It was the right place but not yet the right time for the Penthouse. While the vote was successful, and other establishments were granted licences for their cocktail bars, the Filippones’ applications were denied for another fifteen years, and all the while the liquor raids continued.

  “They never gave us a liquor licence, but we didn’t give a damn,” said Ross. “We’d had [customers] lined up and down the street. We couldn’t make any more money if we had a liquor licence. We were getting $5.95 admission at the door and selling [soft drink] mix at fifty cents a bottle—$600 [of mix] only cost [us] fifty dollars. You don’t make that with booze!”

  At seventy-two years of age, Grant MacDonald still cuts a burly figure at six feet, four inches tall, and while he’s been retired from the department for twenty years, it’s still easy to picture him in a Vancouver police uniform. Despite a relaxed demeanour and sense of humour, he strikes you as a man you would not have wanted to be on the wrong side of. MacDonald joined the Vancouver Police Department at the age of twenty-four and likely epitomized what one current member says was the main requirement to join the VPD in the old days: “being big, tough, and Scottish.”

  I worked the Hastings Street beat in the mid-to late-’60s, and every Friday or Saturday they’d pull a few of us off various beats to do liquor raids. You’d do a tour of the bottle clubs. You had to go to the Penthouse. I don’t think I ever seized a bottle in all those raids. Even if I did find something by this point, you were rarely charging people. You’d go into a club and find a bottle on the floor and ask the guy next to it if it was his. He might say, “Yeah, it is!” And I’d ask him, “Are you sure? I don’t think it is. You know it’s a fifty-dollar fine that you have to pay immediately,” and he’d suddenly change his mind and say, “Oh, I’ve never seen that before in my life!” It became a waste of time. We only really charged people as a tool, when we needed to get somebody out of there or charge some of the characters on Hastings Street who we were already dealing with. But overall, especially when you consider they were pulling all of us from real work on other beats, the raids were a waste of time.

  Grant MacDonald, 2012. Photo: Rebecca Blissett.

  IV. Life is a Cabaret

  Penny Marks in the dressing room at the Cave, early 1960s.

  Police were not the only threat to the nightclub business in the 1960s. Their customers were going out less, preferring to stay home and stare at the flickering black-and-white shadows on television. “When you stay at home and watch the Ed Sullivan Show, seeing the most amazing shows for free, we had to give [people] something they hadn’t seen before,” said Ross, “something that they couldn’t get at home.”

  To lure the gin-and-sin generation back to the Penthouse, the Filippones went from booking jazz bands and stand-up comedians to presenting elaborate stage shows of chorus girls wearing pasties and G-strings like those that Joe and Ross had seen on their trips to Las Vegas. And as time went by, burlesque and go-go dancing girls progressed to acts with increasingly risqué “exotic dancing.”

  In the beginning, the girls were only topless. In 1967, Dee Dee Special, an East Coast striptease dancer, first played the Gold Room at the Penthouse, bumping in time to a nine-piece jazz orchestra. Burlesque dancers such as Tempest Storm and Miss Lovie began to acquire celebrity status in the Penthouse’s “World of Girls,” and the club became a premiere stop for a circuit of burlesque entertainers.

  The party at the Penthouse continued through the 1960s. Every night, the Cadillacs lined up outside, chrome sparkling on the street that never slept, with Diamond Cabs three-deep, dropping off and picking up both men and women alike. Inside, the club was full and there was lively music; patrons drank, laughed, and whispered, canoodling at corner tables, as striptease dancers, singers, emcees, and comics in a variety-style revue show performed. Just about everyone had a cigarette in hand, and a blue haze of tobacco smoke coiled and drifted above the seductive tinkling of a cocktail piano. Husbands brought their wives—or somebody else’s—to the bar with the growing reputation. Young couples came in to spot the who’s-who of visiting celebrities that might show up on any given night to mix with local politicians, lawyers, judges, labour leaders, stockbrokers, businessmen, and sports figures, in addition to the hustlers, cheats, bad girls, or anyone else who paid the $2.50 cover. All were welcome. The Filippones had come a long way from the coal mines of Vancouver Island.

  If you drove down Seymour Street at night, Ross Filippone seemed a permanent fixture at the front door—dressed in a tuxedo. “I wore a tux for thirty-five years. When I was in the club, I had my tux. If I was coming from somewhere else and couldn’t stop in at home to change, I had an extra one at the Penthouse office, and I’d change before I [went to work].” Ross kept a close watch over the whole operation. While Joe and Mickey were the convivial hosts, Ross’s eye for the business aspects of the club led some people to regard him as cold. “I didn’t like Ross,” says Edna Randle. “If he saw something or someone he didn’t like, he really glared at them.”

  Ross with Victor Borge, 1950.

  Ross with football player Jackie Parker, 1950s.

  Jim Backus, one of the club's glamorous dancers, and Ross, 1
968.

  Joe, on the other hand, was the leader of the family and fit the popular conception of a nightclub owner perfectly. It was as if central casting had created him. With a twinkle in his eye and an unruly head of hair that had been grey for years, he would move about the club giving everyone a triple greeting, saying everything three times: “How are ya, how are ya, how are ya?” or “Whaddya hear, whaddya hear, whaddya hear?” in a voice that Vancouver Sun columnist Denny Boyd described as having “the texture of an old army blanket … He wasn’t much more than five feet tall and layered his dumpy little body with a combination of checked suits, striped shirts, and flowered ties that made him look like a ransacked closet.”[18]

  Joe and Tony Pisani (next to Joe) are greeted by management at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, c.1970, on a talent-scouting trip.

  Joe was always selling: “You gotta see this next act. This girl can really play the violin. She could be in the symphony. No, I’m serious,” or bending a customer’s ear chatting about his family, the house next door, or his mother.

  Jimmy remained behind the scenes, running the Diamond Cab business, and was less well-known to the public. “It’s funny that some people thought there were only three brothers,” says Jimmy’s daughter, JoAnne Filippone. “My father was a quiet guy, and sometimes people mistook his quiet nature, but I suppose anybody would be considered less flashy in comparison to the other three—especially Joe and Mickey! [Jimmy] was more at home with the blue-collar people, talking with the beer delivery guys and maintenance guys he always dealt with.”

  Jimmy, Max Baer, Joe, and Ross, 1952.

  Mickey Filippone took after Ross’s sharper style. Always dressed in a coloured pinstripe suit, he seemed to be the living reincarnation of Nathan Detroit. Shaking hands and greeting customers as maître d’— without the responsibility for the paperwork details of the business that Joe and Ross covered—he was left to socialize and interact with customers. Mickey had the liveliest sense of humour in the family. He always had a joke or a funny story, and many nightclub patrons liked Mickey the best among the Filippone brothers.

  Mickey (left), Victor Borge, and Sandy DeSantis at the Penthouse, late 1950s.

  Penny Marks was a pretty, young, short-haired blonde dancer at the Cave who immigrated to Canada from England in 1960. Despite the rules preventing dancers from fraternizing with customers, she caught Ross Filippone’s eye one night, and they later met at the Penthouse, where many of the city’s exotic dancers dropped by after their shows. “My dancer friends told me to forget him as he was ‘part of the mafia,’ but they had no proof [that] he was a gangster. It just seemed they said it because he was Italian and ran a club,” she recalls.

  Despite the fifteen-year age difference—Ross was thirty-seven and she was twenty-two—the pair began to date. “It wasn’t easy. Men were forbidden at my all-girls rooming apartment, and Ross still lived with his mother in the house next door to the Penthouse, and he didn’t want to have to run the gauntlet sneaking me in! I fell very much in love with Ross, but we had to meet in hotels!”

  Penny and Ross Filippone, late 1960s.

  After dating a for few months, Ross asked her to join him at a family barbecue. Penny, who was from a prim British background, was still getting used to living in Canada, and the barbecue gave her a fish-out- of-water experience at her first encounter with a large Italian family. “It was a warm summer evening,” she remembers.

  We went into the house next door to the Penthouse through a side door and into a huge kitchen with a courtyard out back. There seemed to be so many people and children all talking loudly and staring at me as I was introduced to Ross’s brothers and sister, cousins, and all their spouses and children.

  Everyone seemed to talk at once, mostly in English but also in pidgin Italian. Ross’s mother Maria Rosa—“Nana,” they called her—kept saying “mangia, mangia” and bustling about back and forth from the kitchen where pasta was boiling. There were huge bowls of fresh peas and fava beans, enormous loaves of crusty brown bread, bottles of homemade red wine, along with water and milk on the table. Nana came out with a platter of cooked meats, then a tomato and onion salad, then another green salad with oil and vinegar dressing. A platter of fresh peaches and nectarines showed up delivered by friends from the Okanagan, and lastly, at the end of the table, was my pathetic little angel food cake that I brought to contribute! Nana only finally sat down and ate while everyone else was eating dessert. Nana’s English was minimal, and she spoke in a strong Italian accent. She sat with me and just said, “So, you lika my boy? He’s a good boy,” while smiling at me in a friendly way.

  Ross (left) and Joe with their mother Maria Rosa.

  In July 1961, Ross gave Penny a one-and-a-half-carat engagement ring. Vancouver Sun columnist and friend of the Filippones Jack Wasserman wrote in his talk-of- the-town column, “Showgirl Penny Marks is sporting such a big diamond ring that she can barely lift her hand.” Their wedding was a decidedly Filippone affair. With few close friends or family in Vancouver, the bride was almost a spectator at her own wedding. The guests were a broad mix of Vancouver’s who’s-who, along with many old family friends, cousins, and significant members of the Italian community. Penny’s old boss Ken Stauffer, manager at the Cave, gave her away at a packed wedding at Holy Rosary Cathedral (Marks, an Episcopalian, had converted to Catholicism). At a reception after the wedding, telegrams from her family in England wishing her well were read aloud. “A couple of them ended with ‘love from all the gang,’” she laughs, remembering that this drew surprised looks from “some of the Italians, who had a different understanding of the word!”

  Within a couple of years, Ross and Penny had two sons, Joey and Danny, and then a daughter named Maria. When she got married, Penny quit her life as a showgirl; the duties of taking care of three small children became her full-time job. Ross’s work hours at the Penthouse continued to be late and long, and this put inevitable strains on the marriage. “We never used to stop,” said Ross. “I used to work until six in the morning. I’d get up a noon and get things organized, have dinner, have a couple of hours sleep, then head back at ten at night.”

  In the autumn of 1968, the Penthouse finally got its liquor licence. Joe was ecstatic. After twenty years, the dry squad raids were finally over. The Filippones closed the club briefly to renovate, then reopened on December 15, 1968 as the New Penthouse. Vancouver Sun Leisure Section editor Alex MacGillivray heralded the opening in his column, noting that “the city’s oldest stationary funhouse appears to be going all out in an honest try now that it has a new interior and that all-important liquor licence from Victoria. Creating the right image is important to the Filippones because they realize that they are just one of about twenty-five city cabarets and that the competition is rough for the customer ’s dollar. But they do have an advantage—they’ve outlasted just about everybody and the club is well known.”

  Ross with Penthouse wait staff. Photo: Vancouver Sun Archives.

  An accompanying photo shows brothers Joe, Mickey, and Ross behind a well-stocked bar with liquor now right out in the open. Mickey smiles, standing behind a bartender, while Joe looks curiously at a liquor bottle like it’s the first he’s ever seen. Behind them, Ross playfully holds his hands to his ears, perhaps thinking of the ringing of the cash register. The Penthouse had reached the age of twenty-one, and it was finally legal. The Filippones saw this as a great start to a new decade, and they looked forward to the promise of 1970s.

  Joe, Mickey, and Ross get the bar ready, after finally getting a license, 1968. Photo: Vancouver Sun Archives.

  V. Dollars and Sex

  Early 1970s Penthouse exterior.

  By the beginning of the 1970s, the golden age of Vegas, which the Penthouse had mirrored, was fading. The black-and-white 1960s of men stepping out of Cadillacs in tuxes with cummerbunds accompanied by women in satin dresses with mink stoles were gone; now, businessmen in orange-and-brown checkerboard slacks and wide, patterned ties parked the
ir Fleetwood Broughams in front of the club. The music had changed too. There was less bebop jazz and more bump-and-grind as dancers stripped to songs such as “Pass the Hatchet Part II” by Roger the Gypsies. If the Penthouse of the 1950s and ’60s was a restrained cocktail party, the changing times brought an anything-goes ambience where, in fact, everything went.

  When the Vancouver Sun first wrote about Philliponi’s new Eagle Time building in the 1940s, Joe was quoted as saying: “By maintaining always cordial relations with the public, we are able to develop our business continually, and here in this new plant we have facilities that will enable us to give even better service.” Thirty years later, the owners of the Penthouse had found themselves serving the public in a different way.

  Mid-1970s Penthouse ad.

  While prostitution in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver had long been a problem, the higher end call-girl business generally didn’t take place on the streets but in hotels and nightclubs. While it was not the only club in which this occurred, the Penthouse had become a flourishing focal point of high-class prostitution in Vancouver at night. This wasn’t a totally new development, but one that had grown over time.

  Edna Randle remembers regularly seeing a woman named “Madame Sandra” in the club, even in the late 1950s. “She had all these beautiful girls around her. Maybe I just didn’t get it, but then I figured the reason they called her ‘Madame’ was because she was French!”