Peter Stringfellow, London clubland's legendary striptease pioneer, loves spending Valentines Day in Paris, but this year he has more than just romance on his mind.
The man who persuaded Britain's staid licensing magistrates to allow naked table-dancing and sparked a fashion for in-your-face floor shows is about to open up his first nightclub in Paris, the capital of the can-can.
"I'm absolutely in awe at the idea of opening up a club in what is my favorite romantic city," Stringfellow said from his London headquarters.
"I've spent about eight Valentines Days in Paris, with five different girlfriends. Last year we had dinner at the Eiffel Tower, which was a lovely experience."
The 61-year-old millionaire was hoping to bring his latest twentysomething love to Paris again this year -- "she adores the Ritz hotel" -- but instead he was kept back by business in Britain.
France will not have long to wait for his next appearance, however, as he plans to be back by the end of March when, if all goes according to plan, he will open Stringfellow's Cabaret of Angels, the Paris branch.
Stringfellow opened his famous London club in 1980 but only began providing what he calls "adult entertainment" in 1996. In his early days battling with prudish British ways he looked to Paris as an example of what could be done.
"We often looked to Paris with great envy," he said. "Whenever you went to Paris you of course went to the Moulin Rouge. We'd go to the Lido and the Crazy Horse Saloon, which was one of my favorites. We had nothing like that."
The London strip scene which developed in the 1950s and 1960's in Soho was dominated by seedy basement dives with untalented performers, Stringfellow explained. "In Paris it was high glamor," he remembers wistfully.
But London's best known club-owner is proud to be bringing his act to Paris and confident that thanks to lessons learned in the US, the British club-scene has a lot to teach its better known cross-Channel rival.
"Paris was and always has been more liberal-minded when it comes to the idea of very beautiful girls being entertaining to customers in nightclubs," he says.
"Now, because of my constant efforts to change this, here we are. We've jumped over the Moulin Rouge and the Lido, and left them standing as somewhat archaic.
"The idea of what I'm talking about is clubs that are more modernistic in their attitude, where the male species gets to sit much closer and see the girl an awful lot closer. Taking her clothes off," he explains.
When the Cabaret of Angels opens on Avenue Niel just north of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris' plush 17th arrondissement it will be a victory in a decade-long campaign to educate European audiences to the delights of table-dancing.
At the start of the 1990s Stringfellow was a successful nightclub owner on both sides of the Atlantic, with clones of his London club -- known simply as Stringfellow's -- in New York, Miami and Beverly Hills.
"It was the forerunner of what was to become the classic nightclub, which means a cocktail bar, piano stage, high class top-line restaurant and discotheque. I had a glass dancefloor and all the whizzing lights," he says.
But with the advent of recession in the early 1990s the public's taste for expensive entertainment waned, and Stringfellow had to start looking for a way to keep his dream alive. He found it in Miami and Houston.
"I discovered a new kind of entertainment which was thriving in Florida and Texas, which was known as adult entertainment clubs," he remembers.
"Clubs where beautiful girls went round on stages, poles and tables at the invitation of guys for what was, in those days, ten dollars to take their clothes off."
He quickly converted his New York nightspot to incorporate topless dancers and it quickly became his most profitable club.
It was not enough to save the US side of his operation, however, and he returned to London determined to make striptease work. Almost immediately, however, he ran into trouble with the authorities.
"The police couldn't envisage how 350, sometimes 500, males could sit nicely together with untold numbers of beautiful girls circling them on stages and tables and not have a problem," he sighs.
"In their experience girls taking their clothes off in front of men who had alcohol meant chaos, Until I'd seen it in Florida I wouldn't have believed it would work either."
But he persisted and after persuading the police and magistrates that he would employ strict rules -- no-one touches the dancers or gets to leave with them -- he finally won permission to take his club topless in 1996.
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