All the Nudes That're Fit to Print

In 2013's "Nymphomaniac," a lengthy art house film made by Danish auteur Lars von Trier, 21-year-old Stacy Martin was cast as the younger version (aged 15 to 31) of actress Charlotte Gainsbourg's title character. Although the movie featured copious scenes of coitus - some of it, purportedly, unsimulated - Martin used a "prosthetic vagina"(?) and a "porn double" for the hardcore action. Nevertheless, her several nude scenes didn't faze her. In a 2015 interview, she maintained nudity is something she would do again "for the right reasons," if it was crucial to the character and plot. Where have we heard that before? Oh, yes, every actress ever and countless cartoon captions and joke punchlines.

Martin said, "I don't believe in gratuitous nudity. Or sexuality in a way that is discriminating to women, or even men. My body is my body, and if it's part of the story and it's justified...you have to honor what's written. But never do it if it's pointless - and a lot of it is - so you have to be very careful."

But that's exactly what we're honoring in the Moviehouse - the pointless and not-very careful - in a delirious celebration of gratuitous nudity.

Not all depictions of Eden modestly hid the First Couple's private attributes
behind fig leaves. Thanks to Peter Paul Rubens for using the leaf blower in his
early 17th century oil "Adam and Eve in Worthy Paradise" and giving curious
boys in Sunday school classes something to giggle about.

The history of gratuitous nudity - for the sake of this piece - could be traced back to Ancient Egypt, where female entertainers performed naked.

In Ancient Greece, male athletes competed nude in public sporting events, notably the Olympic Games; female spectators were barred from the events under penalty of death. On the other hand, Spartan women often appeared naked in public processions and festivals to encourage virtue while their men were away at war.

Exactly how naked Spartan women wrestling in public
encouraged civic virtue escapes us.

Although it's an unsure proposition that nudity on the stage in the late 1960s and early '70s could be considered gratuitous, one thing for sure is that those years produced controversial theater still noted and discussed for actors baring all. "Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical" (pictured below), which opened Off-Broadway in 1967 before its premiere on Broadway in 1968, contained a brief nude scene at the end of its first act.

According to Scott Miller, an author, playwright, and founder and artistic director of St. Louis' alternative theater company New Line Theatre, "Nudity was a big part of the hippie culture, both as a reflection of the sexual repression of their parents and also as a statement about naturalism, spirituality, honesty, openness, and freedom. The naked body was beautiful, something to be celebrated and appreciated, not scorned and hidden. They saw their bodies and their sexuality as gifts, not as 'dirty' things."

"Oh! Calcutta!" (pictured above) was an avant-garde revue, including scenes written by Samuel Beckett, John Lennon, Jules Feiffer, and, among others, Sam Shepard, created by British drama critic Kenneth Tynan and opening on Broadway in 1969. The production stirred up debate over extended scenes of full frontal nudity, male and female.

In 2007, 17-year-old Daniel Radcliffe, best known as the title character in the eight "Harry Potter" films produced from 2001 to 2011, took on the lead role of the stable boy with an obsession for horses in a London revival of Peter Shaffer's play "Equus," originally staged in 1973. Radcliffe took the role, which required a moment of total nudity, to Broadway in 2008.

Radcliffe said the nude scene was not "gratuitous," insisting that he should portray the character as called for by the script.

Despite director Cecil B. DeMille's pompously pious posturing in the reverent but relentlessly stodgy biblical epic "The Ten Commandments," when he made "The Sign of the Cross" in pre-censorship Hollywood of 1932 - dramatizing Emperor Nero's cruel persecution of devout Christians in Ancient Rome - he didn't shy from the prurient display of naked women bound in flowered chains sacrificed to wild crocodiles and gorillas, pretty much defining "gratuitous nudity" for generations of moviemakers to come.

In 1962, Marilyn Monroe, nine years after she was featured as Playboy magazine's first nude centerfold, performed her first onscreen nude scene in a movie the public never got to see. The film was "Something's Got to Give," a romantic comedy costarring Dean Martin. For a scene in which Martin discovers Monroe naked in a swimming pool, a body stocking had been provided for her, but she brazenly doffed it in favor of a flesh-colored bikini bottom. Despite the set being closed to all except a minimum crew, Monroe invited photographers. After the scene was filmed, she was photographed in the bikini bottom and out of it.

If the film had been completed, it would have been the first major Hollywood release of the modern era to feature a mainstream star in the nude. As it turned out, that distinction went to Monroe's sometime rival, Jayne Mansfield, in 1963's "Promises! Promises!"

Many are unaware that blonde bombshell Jayne Mansfield's
daughter is Mariska Hargitay, the Emmy Award- and Golden
Globe Award-winning star of "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit."

On June 8, 1962, after a series of no-shows caused by a string of hypochondriatic ailments that dragged the production behind schedule and drove it over budget, Monroe was fired from the movie. Two weeks later, Life magazine featured Monroe, clad in only a terrycloth robe for the pool scene, with a headline reading, "A Skinny-Dip You'll Never See on the Screen." The studio overhauled the entire production in 1963 as the Doris Day-James Garner comedy "Move Over, Darling." Doris did not reprise Marilyn's skinny dip.

On August 3, 1962, Marilyn Monroe gave interviews for Life, Cosmopolitan, and Vogue magazines, declaring, "Fame is fickle...Fame will go by, and so long, I've had you, fame. If it goes by, I've always known it was fickle. So, at least it's something I've experienced, but that's not where I live." Two days later, she was dead.

The Moviehouse admits that for a time we thought British actress Caroline Munro had changed her name to make it similar in sound to Marilyn Monroe. Beyond the fact that they were both popular pinups, however, similarities between the platinum blonde sex symbol and the brunette cult star are virtually nonexistent.

Munro gained a cult following with roles in "The Abominable Dr. Phibes" (as Vincent Price's dead wife), "The Golden Voyage of Sinbad," "Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter," and "The Spy Who Loved Me" (pictured below). She was the only performer signed to a long-term contract by Hammer Films - the British production company known for its Gothic horror pictures featuring much blooddletting and heaving bosoms - a singular distinction not even shared by the acting backbone of the studio, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.

Caroline Munro turned down the opportunity to play Ursa, the
Kryptonian super villainess and General Zod's girl Friday in the
Christopher Reeve "Superman" movies, to portray Naomi, the
helicopter assassin in the 007 flick "The Spy Who Loved Me."

The daughter of a legal solicitor, educated at a private Catholic convent school, and a pleasant voice in the church choir, Caroline Munro turned down lead roles in Hammer's "Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde" and "Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell" because they required nudity. Allegedly, she turned down a lucrative offer to pose naked in Playboy. And yet her wardrobe in a number of fan favorites was often nothing short of provocative...

"The Golden Voyage of Sinbad" (1973), the second of the trilogy of "Sinbad" pictures supervised by stop-motion animation maestro Ray Harryhausen, gave Munro her breakthrough role as Margiana the slave girl. Today, Munro is a trustee of the Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation, which looks after the special-effects giant's extensive collection of artifacts and furthers the art of stop-motion animation.

OK, so in "At the Earth's Core" (1976) Munro played another slave girl, but this time, she was also a princess, and a heavily armed one at that.

Possibly Caroline Munro's most popular film among her fans is "Starcrash" (1979), a cheesy Italian rip-off of "Star Wars" from the director of the awful "Hercules" cheapies in the '80s starring Lou Ferrigno. Munro portrayed barely dressed space smuggler and astro-pilot Stella Star in an eclectic cast that included evangelist-turned-preacher Marjoe Gortner, pre-"Knight Rider" David Hasselhoff, "The Godfather" Mafia "button" Joe Spinnell, Charles Bronson's "Hard Times" punching bag Robert Tessier, and the venerable Christopher Plummer, who smirked all the way to the bank in a one-day shoot as the all-powerful emperor of the galaxy.

Caroline Munro was supposed to sport a skimpy leather bikini
throughout the picture, but American studio execs insisted she
wear less revealing outfits in anticipation of future broadcasts
on U.S. television. Asked about her costumes, Munro said, "What
costumes? The Stella Star outfits were, to say the least, quite
miniscule. After I got over the initial shock of putting one on
and after a couple days wearing them...I got on with the job."

In 1977, Caroline Munro steamed up TV screens with a racy ad for Noxzema Shave Cream, promising "Great Balls o' Comfort."

Not unlike Caroline Munro, contemporary actress Jessica Alba, who starred in the science-fiction TV series "Dark Angel," has a no-nudity clause in her contract. (We know this is a tribute to gratuitous nudity, but sometimes the antitheses are worth mentioning.) She stayed true to her convictions for her shower scene in 2010's "Machete," an all-star action romp featuring the inimitable Danny Trejo, when the filmmakers allowed her to perform in her underwear with the intention of digitally removing the undies in post-production.

Much to the dismay of fantasizing adolescent males everywhere and their equally wistful fathers, '60s and '70s sex symbol Raquel Welch (born Jo Raquel Tejada to a Bolivian father), who was recently voted in a survey as possessing the best bikini body of all time, never did a nude scene, apparently out of respect for her padre.

Seen here in "Fathom" (1967), Raquel Welch was recently selected in a survey
as possessing the best bikini body of all time.

"I am my father's daughter and that's just not the way you behave," Welch said. "You don't do that if you are a certain kind of woman and that's the kind of woman I was raised to be. There were times when I disliked him quite a lot but at the same time I had enormous respect for him. I really did want to please him."

Of course, one way a number of actresses have dealt with either their convictions or just plain camera-shyness when it comes to disrobing before the lens is the employment of a body double. No nudity was involved, but the most famous use of a body double was when French actress-dancer Marine Jahan performed screen newcomer Jennifer Beals' dance routines in 1983's "Flashdance." Jahan was shielded from the press because the filmmakers didn't want to spoil the illusion.

Is it Beals or is it Jahan?

The slow-motion leap through the air in Beals' audition scene was done by professional gymnast Sharon Shapiro, while Beals' sidewalk breakdancing was performed by b-boy Crazy Legs of the Rock Steady Crew.

In one of the most talked-about instances of the use of a body double, for Angie Dickinson's steam-infused opening shower scene in director Brian De Palma's "Dressed to Kill" (1980), 1977 Penthouse magazine Pet of the Year Victoria Lynn Johnson, markedly several years younger than the 49-year-old actress, stepped into the shower for the more revealing shots.

(Incidentally, in his early films - "Sisters," "Obsession," "Blow Out," "Body Double" - De Palma unabashedly lifted story and style elements from the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock. When Hitchcock was told that De Palma intended "Dressed to Kill" as an homage to his movies. Hitchcock replied, "You mean fromage.")

During the filming of the 2007 comedy "Wedding Crashers," starring Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn, actress Isla Fisher, who played an obsessive, possessive nymphomaniac (pictured below, with Vince Vaughn), opted to use a body double for a nude scene. She explained, "I feel like if you have a female comic character and then you see her nipples...she is no longer funny."

In May 2016, "Game of Thrones" costar Emilia Clarke proudly asserted that she did not use a body double for her recent nude scene as Daenerys Tagaryen in season six of the popular HBO series, "I'd like to remind people the last time I took my clothes off was season three," the 30-ish actress (pictured below) declared. "That was a while ago...But this is all me, all proud, all strong. I'm just feeling genuinely happy I said yes. There ain't no body double."

And that brings us back to performers we admire for their penchant for misbehaving. Like Jane Fonda, who, in an attempt to break away from lighthearted fluff like "Sunday in New York," "Cat Ballou," and "Barefoot in the Park," did a "weightless" striptease during the opening titles for "Barbarella" (1968), a kinky space opera based on an erotic French comic strip. Like the best gratuitous nudity, the sequence had nothing to do with plot exposition or character development.

That's right, the same Dino De Laurentiis who gave us the campy Bicentennial
version of "King Kong" ("No one cry when Jaws die, but when the monkey die,
people gonna cry"), starring Jeff Bridges and introducing Jessica Lange.

"Barbarella" was directed by French filmmaker Roger Vadim, Fonda's husband, who also worked with his wife on "Spirits of the Dead" (1968), an artsy anthology picture based on tales by Edgar Allan Poe. The Vadim-Fonda segment implied a romantic attraction between Jane and her cousin, portrayed by her brother, Peter Fonda.

Well, of course this is what medieval countesses threw on for evening wear
...Jane Fonda hears things that go bump in the night in "Spirits of the Dead."

Three years after collaborating on the lurid thriller "Basic Instinct," writer Joe Eszterhas and director Paul Verhoeven - a pair of filmmakers who enjoy pushing the envelope just to see how far it can be pushed - reunited to crank out "Showgirls" (1995), a brain-freezing confection about a street-smart drifter from nowhere who blows into Las Vegas to climb the slippery ladder from ham-and-egger stripper to headlining showgirl.

Cast as the maverick in this "Top Gun" of pole-dancing, Elizabeth Berkley was previously best known to TV viewers as Jessie Spano, the blonde brain on four seasons of "Saved by the Bell." She ended up winning two Golden Raspberry Awards (which honor the worst in cinema) as Worst Actress and Worst New Star. At least Roger Ebert, who deemed the picture "a waste of a perfectly good NC-17 rating," praised the starlet for her "fierce energy that's always interesting," but he dismissed the whole enterprise as "a sleazefest" that delivers "Joe Eszterhas' masturbatory fantasies." Even costar Kyle McLachlan admitted that when he first watched the film, "I said, 'This is horrible. Horrible!'"

In a 2013 interview in Variety, Elizabeth Berkley said it was humiliating to experience all the strident bashing her performance elicited. She astutely surmised that perhaps the picture's essence was too edgy for audiences at the time. "I had the most extraordinary experience making the film," Berkley recalled. "When a dream is happening, it's unlike anything you can ever imagine. Which is why, when the movie came out, it was more painful than anything you can imagine." (Huh?) Undaunted, she pressed on, "1995 was such a different time, where taking risks like that were not embraced. They were laughed at. They were shamed publicly. To be a young girl in the center of that was something that was quite difficult. But I found my own resiliency and my power and my confidence."

What she didn't find, apparently, was a wealth of substantial film offers. She did appear in supporting roles in the major releases "The First Wives Club," Oliver Stone's "Any Given Sunday," and Woody Allen's "The Curse of the Jade Scorpion," but her most popular role to date was in a "Saved by the Bell" reunion sketch on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" in February 2015 (pictured below).

One wonders what Demi Moore was trying to prove to audiences, or to herself, when she starred in "Striptease" (1996), inserted in her filmography between providing voice performances in Disney's animated "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" and in the anarchic slacker cartoon "Beavis and Butt-Head Do America." It had been suggested that she wanted to show off the results of rumored breast augmentation.

Unsure if it wants to be a satire or a melodrama, "Striptease" was written and directed by Andrew Bergman. For God's sake, this is "The Unknown King of Comedy" (according to a 1985 article in New York magazine) who scripted "The In-Laws" (the funny one with Alan Arkin and Peter Falk) and "Fletch" and wrote and directed "The Freshman," starring Marlon Brando and Matthew Broderick.

For the record, "Striptease" is the sixth movie in which Demi Moore bared her breasts. Her paycheck (not counting tips slipped her in her G-string) of $12.5 million set a record for an actress. Her seven-year-old, Rumer Willis, played her onscreen daughter, which entailed watching her mother dancing topless. "We don't shame the body," Demi declared defiantly, "we encourage the body as something beautiful and natural, and my children bathe with me, and I walk around naked."

She also posed naked for magazine covers. In August 1991, she brazenly bared her seven months-pregnant figure for a popular Vanity Fair cover photographed by Annie Leibovitz.

One year later, Moore dropped 'em again, posing naked for a body paint job by Sport Illustrated Swimsuit Issue artist Joanne Gair.

Real-life Vegas showgirl and sometime actress Angelique Pettyjohn is revered by Trekkers as Shahna, the "drill thrall" (gladiator trainer) with the mountain of green hair, in the second season episode of "Star Trek" titled "The Gamesters of Triskelion."

In the 1970s, after several bit parts in movies and TV series, including the role of master-of-disguise CONTROL Agent Charlie Watkins on a couple of "Get Smart" episodes (pictured below), Pettyjohn (born Dorothy Lee Perrin) worked as a burlesque dancer.

During the early 1980s, Pettyjohn put her buxom bod to use in hardcore adult films, utilizing the names Angel St. John, Heaven St. John, and simply Angelique. Not surprisingly, at "Star Trek" fan shows and comic conventions, she peddled posters of herself almost wearing her costume as drill thrall Shahna.

However, her true claim-to-fame in the cinema of gratuitous nudity came in her performance as the Singapore-based stripper-girlfriend of the bland Vietnam vet-millionaire journalist-discotheque owner-soldier of fortune hero in "The G.I. Executioner" (also known as "Wit's End," also known as "Dragon Lady"), directed by Joel M. Reed, the grade-Z auteur who made the sleazy cult favorite "Blood Sucking Freaks." The climax of the turgid non-action action flick throws the completely naked but pistol-packing Pettyjohn into a waterfront shootout.

Unable to cull a picture of Angelique Pettyjohn's bare-ass bullet ballet in "The
G.I.Executioner," the staff gleaned this image of the tireless actress from her
provocative performance as a scientist (having difficulty being contained by
her scientist bra) in the bargain-basement sci-fi chiller  "Biohazard," directed
by another grade-Z auteur, Fred Olen Ray ("Beverly Hills Vamp," "Hollywood
Chainsaw Hookers," "Bad Girls from Mars"). In early 1992, Pettyjohn died of
cervical cancer in Vegas, age 48.

Speaking of characters who walk through a movie nekkid for no good reason whatsoever, that brings us to Naja, the latter half in the title "The Warrior and the Sorceress" (1984), a sci-fi twist on "A Fistful of Dollars" starring David Carradine as a wandering sword-for-hire who finds himself on a desert planet dominated by rival warlords.

Written by comic book artist and fantasy illustrator William Stout, the picture seldom airs on television because Argentine actress Maria Socas portrayed rebel leader Naja topless throughout the entire film. (The picture also features an exotic dance performed by an alien woman with four double-decker breasts.) When executive producer Roger Corman wanted to title the picture "The Warrior and the Sorceress," writer Stout countered, "There's no sorceress in the movie!" "That's OK," Corman replied, "the object of the title is to get butts into seats. Once they've paid their money and their butts are in those seats, it doesn't matter if the film's got a sorceress or not. Plus that title means we can put a scantily clad sorceress on the movie's poster."

In possibly the most blatant case of mercenary nudity, Halle Berry, on top of her initial salary of $2 million for her role in 2001's "Swordfish," a flashy but empty-headed action flick featuring John Travolta, Hugh Jackman, and Don Cheadle, consented to do a topless scene for an additional $500,000 - or, as some wits put it, $250,000 per boob. She didn't do it for the money, though. She wanted to overcome her fear of doing nude scenes.

This was the same year she starred opposite Billy Bob Thornton in "Monster's Ball," a film that garnered her an Academy Award, making her the first African-American to win the Oscar for Best Actress. In her acceptance speech, Berry fought back tears as she proclaimed, "This moment is so much bigger than me. This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll. It's for everynameless, faceless woman of color that now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened." And then she slipped into skintight, no-secrets-hidden catsuits (literally) to star in what has been widely regarded as the worst superhero movie ever made, "Catwoman."

Accepting in person the Razzie Award for Worst Actress for "Catwoman," Berry famously said, "First of all, I want to thank Warner Brothers. Thank you for putting me in a piece of shit, God-awful movie...It was just what my career needed."

In the spirit of equal rights - and the Moviehouse is nothing if not fair - we'd like to take a moment, if mercifully short, to acknowledge male gratuitous nudity in the movies. On the website Creative Loafing Tampa Bay, the Sex and Love Editor noted, "Each big screen penis breaks new ground, bringing us one step closer to a world in which men can flaunt their sexuality as openly as women display their cleavage."

The site went on to cite such great moments in male frontal nudity as Robin Williams in "The Fisher King" (1991) and "The World's Greatest Dad" (2009); Jaye Davidson in "The Crying Game" (1992); Ewan McGregor in "Trainspotting" (1996), "The Pillow Book" (1996), "Velvet Goldmine" (1998), and "Young Adam" (2003); Mark Wahlberg (or, at least his prosthetic unit) in "Boogie Nights" (1997); Kevin Bacon in "Wild Things" (1998); Jason Segel in "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" (2008); and Sacha Baron Cohen in "Bruno" (2009).

However, the hands-down, er make that pants-down winners in this category have to be the fearless Ken Jeong in the "Hangover" trilogy (pictured above) and the shameless Harvey Keitel, who kept forgetting his wardrobe in, to name but a handful, "The Men's Club" (1986), "Bad Lieutenant" (1992), "The Piano" (1993), and "Ulysses' Gaze" (1995). In a 2005 interview for Premiere magazine, Keitel insisted, "I've done no nudity in my career." Instead, he maintained, "An actor plays an event and tells a story."

Harvey Keitel tells one of his stories in "Bad Lieutenant."

Getting back to the distaff disrobers, when it came to the crossover of adult film starlets into mainstream movies, gratuitous nudity was not only accepted but expected. And here we're talking specifically about Kitten Natividad and Uschi Digard, two performers whose ample assets were a mainstay in the cinema of Russ Meyer, the bosom-obsessed "King of the Nudies."

"All right, everybody, this is a bust!"
"No, this is a bust!"

Natividad popped up in cameos in a number of aboveboard features, including the bawdy comedy "Night Patrol" (pictured above), featuring Linda Blair, Murray Langston (aka The Unknown Comic), Pat Paulsen, and Billy Barty, as well as "Airplane!" (pictured below) and its unauthorized sequel, "Airplane II."

"Kentucky Fried Movie," an earlier comedy from the creative team that made "Airplane!" - Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker - featured a memorable appearance by Uschi Digard (pictured below).

In the mid-1970s, some guy named I. Robert Levy who edited a handful of "Emergency!" and "The Rockford Files" episodes produced and directed a pair of low-budget sketch comedy films titled "If You Don't Stop It...You'll Go Blind" and "Can I Do It Till I Need Glasses," both of which amounted to nothing more than skits based on sex jokes told by your grandfather ("We can save your wife, but the cowboy's a goner") strung together pell-mell. "Can I Do It" (1975) featured the screen debut of Robin Williams, while "If You Don't Stop It" (1974) included several appearances by Uschi Digard. 

In this scene from "If You Don't Stop It...You'll Go Blind," Uschi Digard is, for
no reason at all, the only one in the assembly naked. Now that's gratuity!

Speaking of stringing things together pell-mell, from the 1950s into the '70s, the perennially popular TV series "Candid Camera" strung together hidden-camera practical jokes. The show was created and hosted by the loquacious, ever mirthful Alan Funt (pictured below). There was always a leering underlay to Funt's ebullient banter, as if he secretly wanted to bust through the small-tube restrictions of the Federal Communications Commission's jurisdiction and show some really revealing pranks.

The legacy of "Candid Camera" influenced several hidden-camera programs,
including "Totally Hidden," "Punk'd," and "The Jamie Kennedy Experiment."

Funt got his wish with the 1970 big screen release of "What Do You Say to a Naked Lady?" which secretly filmed unsuspecting people's reactions to unexpected nudity or overt displays of sexuality in everyday situations. One of the onscreen performers, depicting half of an interracial couple, was actor Richard Roundtree, one year before his breakout title role in "Shaft."

Although Funt tried to give the picture some sociological validity by conducting on-camera interviews with people about sexual mores, the movie was originally rated X for adults only. An edited R-rated version was released in 1982.

Afterthought: And Now for Something Completely Different

Finally, a word or two about public television - and no, we're not talking about documentaries about Third World societies that present National Geographic-al footage of topless locals. For many in our generation, it was the local public TV affiliate which gave us our first exposure in the mid-1970s to the irreverent, iconoclastic, off-the-wall comedy of "Monty Python's Flying Circus." Premiering on the British telly in 1969, the surreal sketch comedy series started airing on American public television in 1974.

Speaking of exposure, one could almost hear the sound of the jaws of adolescent boys across the country collectively drop when this was shown, uncut, on basic cable...

In the sketch "The Dull Life of a City Stockbroker," Michael Palin played the clueless bean counter, oblivious to his neighbor speared by an African tribesman, a queue at the bus stop attacked by the Frankenstein Monster, a troop of armed soldiers on the public transport suddenly pitched into an urban battle, and a newsstand clerk who happens to be completely naked.

The clerk, unnamed in the closing credits, was Eric Idle's
girlfriend at the time, who happened to be a stripper.