Silicone City
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No two products were more interdependent than Rick’s and the implant. Today, the former attorney and Touche Ross tax consultant—crisp, clean, and handsome in his white button-down and khakis—
can ponder his role in the community like any other concerned entrepreneur, grousing about the lack of convention business as he soft-pedals the possibly objectionable aspects of his establishment. “It’s not a horrifying thing for someone to say they’ve been at Rick’s,” Watters says lightly. “There’s a playful innocence about it.” But innocence or no, the club wouldn’t exist if cash-bearing men hadn’t come from all over the world to get a look at the beautiful women with the big breasts at Rick’s. Just as some fashion emanates from the street, and some can be traced to the eccentric thriftiness of the upper class, the eighties image of the perfect breast—when the ideal shifted from the merely big to round, erect, and very big—was disseminated through one particular club in Houston. Implant manufacturers could not have invented a better marketing campaign than the one Rick’s provided free of charge.
Rick’s opened in 1983, a nightmarish economic year for Houston, as the oil bust settled in. It wasn’t founded by Watters but by a reclusive, heavyset man named Dallas Fontenot, a Bellaire High School dropout who had made a name for himself running old-fashioned Houston topless bars like Hiphuggers. It was Fontenot who leased Trumps, a faltering disco, from an oil trader named Salah Izzedin, with whom he subsequently formed a partnership. Fontenot also brought in his attorney, Watters, a Canadian with a degree from the London School of Economics. Trumps was located just off Richmond, a block or so from the street’s revolving club scene and, more important, a mile or so from the international sophistication of the Galleria.
It was sophistication that would distinguish this new gentleman’s club from a conventional tittie bar. The partners turned down the music, so that people could talk, and turned up the lights. They hired architects and decorators to convert the club into an ersatz mansion, complete with fountains, chandeliers, and hidden rooms with even more-hidden balconies. The standard sandwich and chips were replaced with a real menu that included everything from burgers to lobster, steaks, and pasta. Customers could even buy corporate memberships, just like a real private club (“We’ll do everything in our power to make your next business deal your best business deal,” says the brochure). The idea was to make the club respectable and, in the process, make the patrons feel like, well, gentleman.
Rick’s was different in another crucial way: The women who worked there didn’t look like old-fashioned strippers. The partners presented the Playboy mythology in 3-D—the Rick’s dancer was someone a man might actually consider dating. She might be, in the words of a prospectus for a subsequent Rick’s imitator, “the college girl up the street, your office’s receptionist, and the young single mother who…drives a new Corvette.” One newspaper reported that Rick’s dancers who brought in their class schedules could arrange their work around their course loads.
But a Rick’s dancer was also more glamorous than any student, thanks to her pair of silicone-gel implants. The average bust size at Rick’s was a 38D, a proportion rarely found in nature. Better yet, the customer could get a good look at those breasts: For $20 plus tip, the likes of Anna Nicole Smith would dance right at a customer’s table. With the AIDS epidemic in high gear, Rick’s provided the safest, most glamorous sexual experience around.
The message of Rick’s was clear: Outside, Houston might be steeped in economic misery, but inside, the party was still going strong. Valets parked the Porsches, Mercedes, and Jaguars out front, while guys like Jon Bon Jovi, Michael Caine, George Strait, O.J. Simpson, President Bush’s secret service men, and multiethnic, multinational multitudes of wannabes anted up for table dances. Robin Leach deemed Rick’s “the place to find your champagne wishes and caviar dreams.” The club’s billboards became an in-joke: “More fun than the law allows,” said one, which did not endear the club to the vice squad. When Houston Civic Center Director Jordy Tollett explained why he spent several thousand dollars in taxpayers’ money escorting visitors to Rick’s, “They wanted to go there” became the quote on another billboard. Tollett’s public reprimand from the mayor led to what may have been the apogee of Rick’s public acceptance, a Houston Chronicle editorial that declared, “As a city trying to attract convention business, we must spend money to make money, and if Tollett was bowing to the demands of clients to go to topless bars, we probably shouldn’t fault him too much.” The ongoing publicity drew the kind of regular customer all successful businesses require. In the mid-late eighties, it was the average tab of $200—not the occasional $10,000 one—that kept Rick’s first on the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission’s Houston revenue list time and again. The club was also, for the same period, American Express’ best charge customer. Rick’s had become a brilliant example of economic diversification, one of Houston’s first post-bust business triumphs—pun intended.
One of the secrets of Rick’s success was that the club appealed as much to the fantasies of the women who worked there as to the men who patronized it. “I get to go in there for eight hours and feel desired and feel pretty and get money thrown at me,” says one topless dancer. The clubs offered women without education or connections access to an otherwise closed world of wealth and power. Like news of the Gold Rush, word spread through Houston that a pretty women could make a minimum of $600 a night dancing at Rick’s. Women believed that with implants, they could make even more. They might catch the eye of someone who was exceptionally solvent—an 89-year-old multimillionaire oilman, in the case of Anna Nicole Smith—or, perhaps, a scout from Playboy or Penthouse.
This happened just enough to legitimize the fantasy: In the space of a few years, more centerfolds—22 of them—came from Rick’s than from any other club in the U.S. And as clones of the club proliferated around the country, so too did clones of the women who worked there. By the end of the eighties, thanks to the clubs, the magazines, and the men who supported them, the Rick’s ideal had become the American ideal: a girl next door with firm, grapefruit-size breasts.
Soon, ordinary women wanted the same kind of boobs. It wasn’t unusual for a patient to enter the office of a Houston cosmetic surgeon bearing a picture of a centerfold that same doctor had augmented. No one seemed to notice Anna Nicole Smith’s surgery scars in the erotic videos she made for Playboy; no one seemed to care that Franklin Rose had given Lynn Johnson the spectacular proportions that won her the role of Penthouse Pet for that magazine’s twentieth-anniversary issue in 1991, along with $600,000 in prizes. Augmentation had become just another form of self-improvement. An ancient biological truth had acquired an economic veneer: Women with attractive breasts—whether they were topless dancers or corporate lawyers—attracted powerful men. Then, too, ordinary women discovered in their implants what topless dancers had always felt: Big breasts felt sexy.
Houston women bought lots of new breasts during the boom, but their buying actually increased during hard times, giving new meaning to the term “bust years.” Nationally, Texas ranked third behind California and Florida in the number of breast augmentations, with Houston serving as the state’s implant central. One theory holds that breasts are more important in the Sunbelt, where they are exposed more often. Another is that because the implant was invented in Houston, it was marketed more heavily there. Whatever the reason, the delight of patients went a long way toward lifting the pall that had settled over the city.
The surgery had become the pick-me-up of choice for the newly divorced and a boon for boudoir photographers and retailers who sold figure-enhancing attire. No woman thought it rude to open her blouse in public and show off her new additions. The Galleria’s North Beach Leather, once a haven for the sexually assured, became a magnet for the newly augmented; many were even referred by their plastic surgeons. “Most of the women wanted to look sexy,” says store manager Alton Causey. “The biggest thing was ladies in their thirties who had never looked that way. The tighter, the shorter, the deeper, the better.” Causey had to ask one woman to stop trying on feather halter tops in front of the store window because of the hooting crowd that had gathered outside.
