Go-go dancer who started US’s topless revolution

CAROL Doda, who was widely credited with triggering a topless revolution in the US in 1964 as a 26-year-old go-go dancer, has died in San Francisco at the age of 78.

The cause was complications of kidney failure.

Doda performed a precedent-setting impromptu performance in San Francisco on June 19 1964, and delegates from the Republican National Convention flocked from the Cow Palace convention hall to the Condor Club in the North Beach neighbourhood to see her act.

As word spread, toplessness became a sensation in clubs and bars across the US.

Doda, a platinum blonde, gained particular attention for injecting her breasts with enough silicone to expand her bra size to 44DD from 34B.

The author Tom Wolfe gushed about them in his book The Pump House Gang.

Earlier this year, Doda told babyboomerdaily.com: “I was the first to go topless in 1964 and started a sexual revolution that spun as fast as twirling tassels.”

In a 2009 interview, Doda, a former secretary and cocktail waitress, said: “The minute I knew I existed in life was the night I started the Condor thing. The only thing that mattered to me was entertaining people.”

She underwent 44 surgical treatments (the number was “just a coincidence”, she said) in which emulsified silicone, the chief component of Silly Putty, was injected at a cost of about $12 000 in today’s dollars — roughly R170 000.

The procedure has since been banned, but Doda said she suffered no health complications.

Her bust was said to have been insured for $1.5-million.

The Condor was raided, but she was found not guilty of indecency according to community standards. She continued to bare her breasts nightly, eventually earning the equivalent of about $4 000 a week today.

Her example inspired Russ Meyer’s film Mondo Topless.

Doda went to further extremes, even going bottomless in 1968, until California ruled that women could not perform completely naked in clubs that served alcohol.

Carol Ann Doda was born in Solano County, in Northern California, on August 29 1937, and raised in San Francisco.

She dropped out of school and became a cocktail waitress at 14 before attending the San Francisco Art Institute. Doda never married, and there was no immediate word on survivors.

She found work singing at the Condor, where she would make a dramatic entrance dancing atop a white grand piano as it was lowered from the ceiling.

She made her topless debut after Davey Rosenberg, the club’s publicist, proffered a “monokini” swimsuit by Rudi Gernreich, the avantgarde designer, and suggested: “Try this in the act.”

Doda continued dancing topless into the ’80s. — NYTimes.com productions.

In 1951, she married Morris Awerbuch, who was from Lithuania and shared her irreverent sense of humour about being Jewish.

They wrote shows together for charity and were a formidable team until they divorced 13 years later. This was considered a disgrace in the Jewish community, but she, frankly, didn’t give a damn.

Their greatest success was What Was, Was! in the early ’60s. Written in “Yinglish”, a mixture of Yiddish and English, it was a humorous look at being Jewish in South Africa. Two history students staying in a boarding house like the one she grew up in kept up a piercing and often ribald commentary about the Yiddish-speaking characters who ended up living there after arriving from Eastern Europe.

It was meant to run for two nights but played to full houses around the country for a year, the profits going to charity. It was an extraordinary hit, and Percy Tucker, the great theatre agent and founder of Computicket, devoted a chapter to it in his autobiography, Just the Ticket, written almost 40 years later.

She then channelled her prodigious energy into Mock Wedding, after Solly and Abe Krok approached Joan Brickhill to do a razzmatazz show for charity. She got hold of Awerbuch, who wrote the script and many of the songs.

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