Carol Doda: Stripper who introduced topless entertainment to San Francisco and was profiled by Tom Wolfe

Carol Doda was a San Francisco stripper whose act helped introduce topless entertainment to the city more than 50 years ago. Her fame spread beyond the burlesque: she played the part of Sally Silicone in Head, Bob Rafelson’s 1968 film that constituted the Monkees’ two-finger salute to stardom, and she was profiled in Tom Wolfe’s exploration of Sixties counterculture, The Pump House Gang.

She first went topless in 1964 at the Condor Club, a move that transformed every nightspot on bustling Broadway in San Francisco. During its heyday in the early 1970s, the street in North Beach buzzed with more than two dozen clubs where carnival-like barkers beckoned passers-by to watch bare-breasted dancers.

“When the beatniks were handing the torch to the hippies, a girl named Carol Doda changed the world from a pole at the corner of Columbus Avenue and Broadway,” Doda’s friend, the publicist Lee Housekeeper, said. “In a funny way, Carol’s impact on the history of that era was as great as Lenny Bruce.”

Doda would take to the stage on top of a piano on a platform debuting her act on the same day President Lyndon B Johnson drew half a million people during a visit to San Francisco. It wasn’t long before the big news in town wasn’t the leader of the free world but “The Girl on the Piano”. Doda became a legend and the Condor Club had an illuminated sign carrying her likeness. As her fame grew, so did her bust line, which she enlarged with silicone injections, her 44in breasts popularly referred to as “the new Twin Peaks of San Francisco”.

Doda grew up in the city and dropped out of school in the eighth grade. She became a cocktail waitress at 14 before dancing at the Condor. She was not the first stripper to go completely bare-breasted, but was the first to do so in a US venue where it was legally sanctioned, according to the Condor’s assistant manager, Mike Rickson. He said she obtained a special permit from the city to dance topless. The San Francisco Chronicle called hers “the first topless dancing act of widespread note in America.” Doda took the phenomenon a step further in 1972, when she began going bottomless as well, Rickson said.

Doda was arrested once, during a police raid on the Condor in 1965, but was acquitted and continued to dance at the club until 1985. She went on to start a rock band, the Lucky Stiffs, and later opened a San Francisco shop, Carol Doda’s Champagne and Lace Lingerie Boutique. Doda, who never married, died from complications of kidney failure.

Carol Ann Doda, stripper: born San Francisco 29 August 1937; died San Francisco 9 November 2015.