This 19-year-old dancer bared it all, then her obscenity trial made her a star
Prosecutors tried to intimidate and shame Carol Doda, but she wasn’t having it
In April of 1965, San Francisco cops raided the Condor Club, a North Beach night club, to bust its performers for dancing nude. A year earlier, the Condor had reportedly become the first topless bar in the world with a show featuring a 19-year-old named Carol Doda. (Similar clubs even in major cities like New York and Los Angeles still required performers to wear pasties.) Other San Francisco clubs followed suit and soon the promise of breasts proliferated throughout the neighborhood. “Almost overnight, San Francisco has become the topless capital of the world,” said the city’s mayor Joseph Alioto in 1969.
Soon after, as archival footage shows, clubs all along North Beach’s main thoroughfares bore signs advertising attractions like “topless and bottomless waitresses and revues.”
“Thoroughly Naked Milly, Bottomless,” read the marquis at Pierre’s. The Condor itself boasted a “bottomless sexorama.”
Doda was a bleach blonde California native who’d been cocktail waitressing since the age of 14. She was also one of the first female performers to artificially enhance her bust with a series of silicone injections, which jumped her bra-size up by 8 sizes. The result was overwhelming.
Of the performer’s ample bosom, American novelist Tom Wolfe once wrote, “Carol Doda’s Breasts are up there the way one imagines Electra’s should have been, two incredible mammiform protrusions, no mere pliable mass of feminine tissues and fats there but living arterial sculpture…great blown-up aureate morning glories.”
After the bar raid and subsequent indecency trial, Doda became an international celebrity and the most requested pin-up among soldiers fighting in Vietnam. Prosecutors tried to intimidate and shame Doda and the other dancers who’d been arrested, Kay Star, Euraine Heimberg and Yvonne d’Angers. (Their male bosses were charged only with aiding and abetting.) But the dancers’ attorneys, including Melvin Belli (who famously represented Jack Ruby following the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald) weren’t having it.
Neither was the judge. “This is the first time in my five years on the bench that I have advised the jury to bring in an acquittal,” San Francisco Superior Court Judge Leland Lazarus told members of the jury. They took his advice.
The trial didn’t get Doda in any real trouble—in fact, it made her a celebrity. In 1972, when the Supreme Court upheld a decision to ban nude dancing, dancers were forced to put a couple inches of fabric back on. But topless performing was here to stay. Doda remained a dancer into the 1980s and acted as an outspoken believer in the rights of topless performers. She also later played in a band called The Lucky Stiffs.
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