by Charles Versaggi
Long before Carol Doda exposed her Twin 44s at the Condor Club and bare breasts became institutionalized, “Dolphina” was the “Girl in the Fishbowl,” the first local live nudie who swam naked for all to see—or so it seemed. Converging from different paths in their lives, two trailblazing women embraced the fantastical illusion of Bimbo’s 365 Club, owning their sexuality in the face of objectification to find personal agency and kinship.
1931 was hardly a time to open a night club when Prohibition and the Great Depression should’ve made anyone think twice about taking any business risks. Considering the massive federal infrastructure and employment projects under the New Deal, and construction of the Golden Gate Bridge and Bay Bridge among The City’s economic growth and recovery projects, Agostino Giuntoli and Arthur “Monk” Young decided the risks were worth taking.
Owned by Young and managed by Giuntoli, the 365 Club (Monk Young’s) was established on the third-floor loft of a building at 365 Market Street near the southeast corner of Fremont Street. A speakeasy with backroom gambling that survived periodic raids, it soon became the most popular illicit drinking establishment in town. In 1936, Young sold his share of the club to Giuntoli, and the joint was then called Bimbo’s 365 Club,taking Agostino’s nickname ‘Bimbo,’ the diminutive Italian word for boy.
“You’ll like the food, which is superb, because it was cooked by Bimbo. You’ll like your drinks because they were good. You’ll like the Girl in the Fishbowl because she’s very naked. You’ll like the show, because it had been imported from Hollywood, with a full quota of wild, beautiful women with long legs….” So reads the 1939 racy nightlife guide Where to Sin in San Francisco.
Among the chorus line of long-stemmed glamorous women was young Spanish dancer Margarita “Rita” Cansino, who later became Rita Hayworth, Fred Astaire’s favorite dance partner and one of the defining stars of 1940s Hollywood. Over the years, the club also showcased popular artists such as Chris Isaak, Adele, The Raconteurs, Coldplay, Robin Williams, and Lizzo, among other international headliners.
The Illusion of the Girl in the Fishbowl
Magician Steve Sheppard persuaded Bimbo’s to feature the Girl in the Fishbowl, an illusion created by projecting a mirror image of a nude woman swimming on a revolving, black- cushioned turntable from the club’s basement into an aquarium atop the club’s bar for patrons to see. When Dolphina is performing, she appears as a live woman but shrunk down to about six inches, swimming in the tank with tropical fish.
A character who’s been played by many different women, far from being racy, Dolphina has been a classy attraction to boost bar sales since the club’s inception. In 1951, Giuntoli purchased the Bal Tabarin Clubat 1025 Columbus Avenue where Dolphina and her fishbowl were relocated. The renovated club was designed by renowned Art Deco architect Timothy Pflueger.
Walking through its ornate doors, club patrons are greeted by a larger-than-life marble statue of Dolphina unabashedly straddling a giant goldfish created by Italian sculptor Cesare Viviani. On the walls hang original paintings of voluptuous showgirls and a nautical-themed mural by Julian Ritter, an American painter who, in the words of art historian Phyllis Settacase Barton, rendered unadorned women “as though he were exploring a garden—with eyes, lips, and nipples painted blue, red and pink blossoms.”
The Oldest Living Dolphina
Anna Pecorino, 92, the oldest living Dolphina, worked at Bimbo’s in the late ’50s and now lives in Austin, TX. Besides the name of a cheese made from sheep’s milk, her last name means lamb in Italian. But listening to her speak belies any association with her being demure and passive. If you heard her Texas drawl, you’d never know she was a multi-generational Italian with roots in Corleone, Sicily (of the Godfather fame). Her father and grandfather had actual ties to Black Hand Sicilian gangsters in Galveston. “My daddy’s first job was to hold the gun while they robbed box cars during Prohibition,” she said in a recent interview.
A non-stop raconteur who tells unfiltered colorful tales worthy of a Scorsese script, Pecorino is not a woman who struggled through feminist angst in her youth. And like a bullet train speeding at 200 mph, there’s no stopping her. Her Dolphinawas a flip of the middle finger to the male-dominated culture women grew up with during her youth, and the fishbowl was a portal to freedom from a time when a woman’s body existed for men who were their gatekeepers.
Soon after becoming pregnant at 16 from her childhood sweetheart and giving the baby up for adoption, Pecorino was persuaded by her sister to marry an evangelical preacher to keep her pregnancy secret. Before coming to San Francisco, the couple toured the country holding revivals and singing together as she played piano. “I never had a date with him. I didn’t even know the guy!”
After a major car accident in Galveston that had slammed her through the windshield and hurtled her and her husband to the ground nearly killing them, they went to San Francisco and started holding revivals again. But the pay wasn’t enough. Since she had some experience as a clothing model, she answered an ad for a modeling agency.
“Well, it was nude modeling—cheesecake, pinup for tourists who rented cameras to photograph naked girls. It wasn’t porn, and it wasn’t soft porn. You had to be shaved, you couldn’t straddle a chair, and you couldn’t do anything vulgar,” Pecorino explained.
The agency got a call looking for a girl in the fishbowl. “I had no idea what it was. I’d never been in any real nightclub,” she said. “None of the other girls wanted the job. He tried to explain it.… Okay, I’ll take it!”
She had an appointment with Bimbo, who asked how long she could hold her head underwater. “Hell, I couldn’t even swim! He was very Italian,” she mimicked in a Marlon Brando, Godfather voice. “I naively said, 10 minutes. He laughed and said come with me. He took me down in the basement and showed me what the Girl in the Fishbowl had to do. I said, ‘I’ll do it!’”
“It was so much money. I didn’t mind having a bunch of people looking at me, even though I could hear the bartender say ‘Spread your legs! We got a full house!’ I didn’t know what I was doing.”
She is one of the few fishbowl performers who knew Bimbo personally. In between her performances, he would invite her to dine with personal friends. “Bimbo would say ‘I want you to have dinner with a couple tonight.’ He loved me so much. He was such a sweet, sweet man…all those people, we were like family.”
“You have to understand there were shows—three big nightly shows, high-class like Vegas,” she drawled. “Being so green, I dressed up. I guess that’s why he asked me to have dinner with customers. Every show I sat in my little chair between the kitchen and the basement steps that go to the revolving stage. That’s how I learned so much about performing. I had been a standup singer, but I had never been a performer like that.”
Bimbo gave Anna two weeks off while the club needed to service the fishbowl’s revolving bed. When she returned from Galveston to the club, her husband met her at San Francisco International Airport with a packed car ready to drive back to Texas. He called the club and said she quit her job. She refused to return and moved in with a girlfriend, ending her five-year marriage. “It was an exciting time. I didn’t want to go back to Texas.”
Pecorino was hardly the beguiling femme fatale, and men were attracted to her fearless free spirit and unabashed sexuality rather than her glamorous presence. When she was unattached, she dated many local celebrities, including Bay Area radio and TV host Don Sherwood, Tommy Smothers of the Smothers Brothers, and Bob Shane of The Kingston Trio. She was good friends with Count Basie and North Beach impresario Enrico Banducci, who introduced her to comedian Professor Irwin Corey with whom she remained a lifelong friend.
The Heartbeat of a Drum
“You know who the greatest man in my life was?” She paused in retrospect and sang a few lines of a 1940s standard: “I remember you, you’re the one who made my dreams come true…The greatest man in my life was Buddy Rich, the world’s greatest drummer. I loooved that man so much!” she gushed.
After she went back to Texas, she and her sister went to hear Big Band music at a concert in Houston. She was attracted to the renowned drummer and sat near him during the show and at a rehearsal the next day. “When they took a break, I went backstage,” she explained. “I knocked on his dressing room door. When it opened, I saw him wearing a beautiful white terry cloth robe sitting next to two other men seated around him.”
Buddy Rich looked at her and asked, “What do you want from me?”
“I want your energy,” she responded boldly. “He pointed at me and said, ‘It’s yours!’ And that was the beginning of a beauuutiful, beautiful relationship. That man was so kind, gentle, and sweet.” Although he was married, they were close friends for some 17 years till his death from a brain tumor in 1987.
After her time at Bimbo’s, she remarried a judge in Texas, had four children, divorced him in 1974 after nearly 15 years, never to marry again. Aspiring to be a singer-comedian, she worked as an executive secretary and sang country music and jazz standards at local clubs and social events in Austin, where she now resides.
A Chance Encounter
In 2012, Pecorino came across a New York Times article about Celeste Knickerbocker who was performing as Dolphina at the time. The story also profiled Donna Powers who worked in the fishbowl for 25 years from 1969 to New Year’s Eve 1994. Powers was also a member of Richmond, California’s City Council and was responsible for leading the establishment of Rosie the Riveter Park there. Although some citizens tried to oust her for moonlighting naked, the initiative backfired, and she served on the Council for eight years.
“Anna submitted a comment online to the article, saying she was a Dolphina in the ’50s,” Knickerbocker explained in a recent phone interview. “I happened to come across her comment, and we exchanged emails and phone numbers.” After Knickerbocker coincidentally moved to Austin, they met and the two have remained good friends for some 13 years.
Knickerbocker, 51, was a Dolphinafrom December 2011 to New Year’s 2015—her last shift. “When I moved to San Francisco in 1999, while studying to be a physical therapist, I worked briefly as an exotic dancer at various clubs on Broadway,” she said. “I thought it’d be an easy way to pay for school. It was not. In fact, it showed me a lot about the seedier side of men and women.”
Ten years later, after working in marketing at an architectural firm, Knickerbocker completed her training to become a prominent Bay Area Pilates instructor. Her love for dancing led to an ancillary job with a local San Francisco burlesque troupe. When a friend asked her if she’d be interested in taking her side job at Bimbo’s, “I was like—Oh yes! In my mind, it was this iconic thing. I was really excited to do it.”
She met with Gino Cerchiai, Giuntoli’s son-in-law who managed the club. “When we opened the door to the fish tank, I saw those concrete stairs leading down into a dark basement. He flipped on a light switch and I said to myself, ‘Ohhhh—this is interesting!’”
“We got to the bottom of the stairs, flipped on another light, and it lit up the first hundred yards of narrow tunnels…I was scared. We turned a corner and flipped another light switch, and we go down another 100 yards of tunnel…turn another corner, and another light switch, and finally, after going through this maze of tunnels, you arrive at the area where you perform. Off to the side of that, down another hallway, is a tiny dressing room. Whoahhh! This is not what I was expecting.”
She was paid $125 an hour for a three-hour shift, 10 minutes at a time with a 20-minute break in between her nude performances. All by herself in this room under the bowels of the club, she’s aware people are watching from above, no one clapping for her. “You can hear people say things. I remember one time I could hear these two guys discussing the size of my breasts and how one was bigger than the other.”
Her experience in those early days led to her becoming an active member of the National Organization for Women. In 2013, Knickerbocker wrote an introspective account of her Bimbo’s experience entitled, “Who is Dolphina?” The article was published in Whore!, a print quarterly (no longer in publication) that focused on women’s issues aimed at provoking intelligent conversations about sexuality, gender, and identity.
In her article, Knickerbocker explains Dolphina is a dichotomy reflecting an era steeped in misogyny and objectification, and one in which women were finally beginning to own their sexuality outright.
“Who is Dolphina? She is me. She is every woman who revels in the knowledge that she is being watched, admired, and lusted after by many a nameless individual…a woman comfortable in her skin and who isn’t afraid of her sensuality…a woman who views herself and her body as her own, expressing a beauty that needn’t be hidden from the world…a reminder not only of how far we’ve come but of how far we may still have to go.”
During the ’50s and ’60s, Bimbo’s was a popular dinner club for high school proms where a teenager could learn how to wear a tux and carefully pin a gardenia on his date’s low-cut dress. If you had a front row table ogling the scantily clad showgirls, your waiter might whisper, “Be careful, you’re liable to get a bust in the mouth.” It was a place where adolescent innocence was lost.
The late ’60s saw a decline in the nightlife scene. Giuntoli retired in 1969 and died in 1992 at the age of 88. The club was mostly closed from 1970 through 1988, serving largely as a private event space. Managed by Giuntoli’s son-in-law Graziano Cerchiai, and his two grandsons Michael and Gino Cerchiai, today Bimbo’s 365 Club has become a time capsule of North Beach’s legacy as the center of San Francisco’s once thriving night club district, mirroring The City’s evolving attitudes toward sexuality.
“There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be gazed at and desired, but that doesn’t mean you’re presenting yourself for anyone’s pleasure. Remind yourself that you have the right to say when it is and is not OK.” Ginger Murray, former Editor-in-Chief, Whore!
