By Meredith Brody
(March 25, 2024)
You can go see Carol Doda Topless at the Condor expecting to see a lot of naked flesh, even without knowing the story of the blonde gogo dancer who danced the Frug in Rudi Gernreich’s topless swimsuit on top of a piano in a nightclub.
But you’ll see a lot more: a deep allusive dive into a fascinating place during an time of tumult and protest; a bildungsroman of an ambitious woman using her assets – a quick wit as well as a body she was willing to expose and modify – to make her way in the world; an interesting cast of characters reflecting on the lives they lived.
They all came ot visit Carol. (Courtesy S.F. Examiner by Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez)
Famous people drop in and out of Doda’s story – boyfriend Frank Sinatra, artist/icon Andy Warhol, presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, singer Sly Stone – but it’s the unknown friends and colleagues from Doda’s North Beach days that touch you as they talk about their lives as well as their memories of Doda. See the second woman ever to go topless after Carol as she dances with her seven-foot snake and diaper-wearing monkey! Thrill to the gyrations of hot singers George and Teddy and their integrated band, who deserved greater fame!
Carol Doda dances The Swim dance (song written by Sly Stone) atop the piano at The Condor Club. (Photo Credit: The San Francisco Examiner)
Wonder at the death of a Condor employee, found expired on top of his understandably upset but still living paramour on the same famed white piano on which Doda performed!
Things began to bust out all over North Beach after a victory of the bare bosom in battle with city officials. Carol Doda, she of the “Topless-Jerk” shows off the headlines in front of the Condor where she performs. She then climbed out of this chaste costume and out of her performing clothes and again things on North Beach were back to normal. (Photo Credit: Getty)
No wonder co-director Jonathan Parker wanted to base a film script on her. Parker met Doda when she opened her lingerie store Champagne and Lace, after her dancing career was over. The fiction film about her life didn’t happen. But decades later co-director Marlo McKenzie revived the idea with Parker. Fleshing out the idea (!) involved filming many additional interviews with the survivors of that time, as well as doing research into San Francisco and North Beach of the Sixties and beyond. Hence this artfully assembled documentary, which may serve as a calling card for a possible multi-part and eminently castable miniseries eventually arriving at a streaming service near you.
But in the meantime don’t miss this delightful and surprising movie on the big screen. It is playingf nationwide starting March 29th.. Try to see it on the big screen. Doda was larger than life.
December 3, 1966 – San Francisco, California, United States: Topless entertainer Carol Doda in front of the Condor club in San Francisco’s North Beach district. (Max A. Guttierez / San Francisco Chronicle / Polaris)
If ever a documentary was more than the sum of its parts, Carol Doda Topless at the Condor is it. Prescient observer Tom Wolfe wrote an essay about Carol Doda as the first avatar of the “Put-Together Girl,” the self-created woman who uses modern technology – hair dye, silicone – to recreate herself decades before Bravo housewives and smoothed-out newsreaders and scarily ageless movie stars made the unsurgically-altered face look strange to us. (And feel strange. Remember when Steve Martin tells Sarah Jessica Parker in L.A. Story that her breasts feel weird to him? “Oh,” she says knowingly, “that’s ‘cause they’re real’.” ) Faces strange to us even when we just glance in the mirror.
See where the movie is playing here.
Timeline and fun facts on the official site.
Herb Caen made Carol Doda a fixture in his column
Dave Rosenberg, Gino Del Prete, Carol Doda and Herb Caen at the Condor club I on Oct 22 1965 (photo courtesy SF Chronicle)
Photos © Picturehouse 2024
Exotic dancer Carol Doda held up by Peter Tork of The Monkees, and surrounded by the rest of the band (Davy Jones, far left, Michael Nesmith, left back, and Micky Dolenz, right) in 1968
Meredith Brody, a graduate of both the Paris Cordon Bleu cooking school and USC film school, has been the restaurant critic for, among others, the Village Voice, LA Weekly, and SF Weekly, and has written for countless film magazines and websites including Cahiers du Cinema, Film Comment, and Indiewire. Her writings on books, theater, television, and travel have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Interview. She also contributes to EatDrinkFilms including her“Meals with Meredith,” where she talks about food and film with filmmakers at restaurants in northern California, writes about vintage cocktails and where she eats during film festivals at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco. A selection of her EDF pieces are found here.
One could describe Meredith as “hooked on cinema” as she attends four-five films a day at many bay area and international festivals each year. Somebody has to do it. Read about her journey back to festivals after two years in pandemic mode.
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