The Chippendales loom large and lurid in 70’s and 80’s pop culture but it's what went on behind the scenes that will cause most shock. I expected debauchery but not all the sordid details in podcast Welcome to Your Fantasy. You wouldn’t find me anywhere near a buff oiled-up Adonis, but instinct told me to press play because you can't build an empire like that without someone getting burned. Or worse.
Owner Somen ‘Steve’ Banerjee is the (main) villain here – or is he? – and what a curious figure. Oh, you didn’t know? That’s right, the guy who started The Chippendales was a Bengali immigrant who used to pump gas and dreamed of being an unholy cross between Walt Disney and Hugh Hefner.
He bought a club in LA called the Round Robin and, together with co-founder Bruce Nahin, turned it into a disco called Destiny II, using anything from backgammon to mud wrestling to pull in the punters. It was only when business associate Paul Snider suggested strippers, after seeing a gay male review, that the vision started to take shape.
Banerjee wanted to place “women in the driver's seat”. It was their gaze that the show would serve (but some might say this was a cynical gesture). So in 1979, a "Male Exotic Dance Night For Ladies Only" was born, named after the 18th-century brand of furniture in the club.
The Chippendales v1.0 was hardly Magic Mike Live and it took the talent of a guy called Nick DeNoia, an Emmy Award-winning producer of a much-loved TV show called Unicorn Tales, to give it style, structure, a little theatricality. He knew how to present a fantasy to women. He added rigour and professionalism to the meat market.
By 1982, 15,000 women were attending The Chippendales shows each month. Banerjee was also savvy when it came to merchandising and their calendars were selling in more than 4,000 stores. Then came the hugely successful tours, even exercise videos. The Chippendales empire soared to around $8 million a year. But DeNoia was becoming the face of its success and that enraged you know who.
So in one corner you have a ruthlessly ambitious businessman, a control freak who thinks everyone's out to get him. In the other, a creative dynamo who has transformed the business but also has dictator tendencies and likes to get his own way. Classic power struggle. And it would end in murder.
This tale of greed and lust takes many twists and turns over decades, which will have you scrambling from one episode to the next. The podcast is two years in the making – the team interviewing more than 60 "investigators, co-conspirators, former dancers and the women who loved them" – and features a fascinating cast of characters. From former attorney and stalwart associate producer Candace Mayeron to The Perfect Man, Michael Rapp.
One on level, Welcome to Your Fantasy is a true-crime thriller that gets us to examine flawed characters through the recollections/observations of others and ask, why? But we are also able to look back on this period through a very peculiar lens and see how society functioned (or not) in myriad ways, from labour and sex to primitive attitudes on race, class, gender, success and age.
Big shout out to cultural historian and host Natalia Petrzela, who tells the tale with great intrigue, pizzazz and a little girly mischief. Here she is explaining the value of stories like this, the ones we think we know and take at face value. I am full of respect for anyone who puts in the work and takes time to find this nuance.
Oh and check @chippendalesrevealed for some incredible archive footage and memorabilia.
Postscript
It turns out that the Banerjee story has been percolating on the internet and in Hollywood for decades. Where was I? You had The Chippendales Murder in 2000, a TV movie starring Naveen Andrews as the entrepreneur.
It was reported in 2009 that Tony Scott (Top Gun, True Romance) was in talks to direct for the big screen. That would have been wild.
More recently, there is an Amazon documentary series called Curse of The Chippendales. Hulu is making a drama called Immigrant, featuring Kumail Nanjian and Murray Bartlett (aka Armond from The White Lotus) as DeNoia. And Dev Patel – who else? – is set to play Banerjee in a biopic directed by Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya).
Final thought: Banerjee’s son Christian is a stripper and he’s trying to launch his own show called … Strippendales. Thank you and goodnight.