By Warren Hinckle

Marilyn Chambers, who died last week at 56, is an icon to generations of San Franciscans. The former Ivory Snow (99 & 44/100 % Pure) soap box cover girl starred in San Francisco’s Mitchell Brothers mega-porn hit movie Behind The Green Door. The following is excerpted from Warren Hinckle’s forthcoming book, Who Killed Hunter S. Thompson? to be published in May by Last Gasp of San Francisco.

“The Ivory Snow Girl arrested for prostitution in San Francisco in San Francisco. It’s awesome.” — Jim Mitchell, after Marilyn Chambers’ 1985 arrest at his O’Farrell Street Theater.

When the Mitchell Brothers O’Farrell Street Theater began presenting live acts on multiple stages — one set was built as a giant shower room — the Savonarola inside Mayor Diane Feinstein was awakened.  Now the senior U.S. Senator from California, the convent-bred Feinstein was about as hang loose as an Easter Island statue as Mayor. Her mayoralty was firm on primness. Women working in the mayor’s office were expected to wear dresses, no pants; formerly as a city Supervisor she had tinkered with ordinances attempting to regulate the commerce of sex in the famous sea port city, even unto suggesting that all the city’s sex emporiums be relocated into a single Red Light combat zone in the largely black Bayview District; she was actually taken aback when the residents didn’t cozy up to her idea. If Dianne hadn’t fallen into a career in politics — when her predecessor as Mayor, George Moscone was assassinated with Harvey Milk at City Hall, she became Mayor–she would have had an excellent future as a disinfector of public telephones.

Feinstein empowered the vice squad of the SFPD as a sort of screwball comedy Papal Swiss Guard with the sworn duty of putting the Mitchell Brothers out of business. The O’Farrell was raided the way the Allies bombed Dresden and The Brothers legal beagles were led by prominent New York attorney Michael Kennedy, who cut his legal teeth in San Francisco defending the them. The lawyers acquired stiff necks from fighting off copyright VCR infringements from the mafia and daily vice squad intrusions on the premises. Every one of the Mitchell Brothers prostitution busts–there were hundreds in the 70s and 80s–was thrown out of court, a reality but that did not deter Feinstein’s finest from continuing to hit on the O’Farrell with metronic regularity. Led by vice lieutenant Dennis Martel who paid proud to the flashlight prowess of the SFPD — he crawled about the O’Farrell’s back stairwells carrying a long black flashlight and once sent 12 officers with flashlights in search of Marilyn Chambers’ W-2 form. Flashlight-carrying cops invaded the darkened Kopenhagen Lounge, which already had a surfeit of flashlights — customers sat on overstuffed sofas while undressed ladies cavorted about in the altogether carrying red flashlights which they used to illuminate their endearing young charms.

The trials became so frequent that sometimes there were two in one week. The ending was always the same, with dismissal of the “prostitution” charges against the O’Farrell. These repeat legal performances left Feinstein open to the quip that defines insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. The proceedings jammed the city’s criminal courtrooms and became a real ass-pain to the judges. Many of the dancers occupied their daytime hours by coming to the courtroom in solidarity and just a bit curious to witness why what they did at night was criminal by day. The judges grew anxious to clear their calendars of these Feinstein-ordered absurdities and to streamline the processing to save judicial downtime wanted the size of the courtroom crowds diminished to curtail the circus atmosphere; some spectators thought the whole thing such a hoot they brought their lunches into the courtroom. Word of this cool-it-out approach apparently did not reach Hunter S. Thompson, the Mitchell Brothers’ Night Manager. One day he was passing the corridor outside the closed courtroom door dressed in his usual garb of tee shirt and Bermudas, hands occupied with two giant tumblers of Wild Turkey on the rocks, when curiosity got the best of him and he charged through the courtroom double doors to deliver a spontaneous speech demanding a motherfucking speedy trial for his friends the Brothers. Artie Mitchell begged him to please stay away from the courthouse.

The puss came to the pimple with the Marilyn Chambers bust in 1985 when she was dragged, as naked as Venus, exiting from her tub off the O’Farrell stage by a phalanx of police during a valedictory one-woman show; a total of eleven cops escorted her to her dressing room to ascertain that she didn’t conceal a weapon in some bodily orifice and more than 30 offers were eventually on the scene when backup was called because her bodyguard had a gun. “One of those cops had the nerve to ask me, ‘You don’t wear any underwear?’ ” she said when she was released from the Hall of Justice at 3 a.m.

Jim Mitchell had rousted me from the sleep of the just and said you better get down here, this is really a scene — here being his white Mercedes 500 SEL which was parked in an alley across from the Bastille. Rocky Davidson of Antioch, a cousin of the Brothers and an indispensable man in the O’Farrell operation, was pawing through the Gucci briefcase of the muscleman from Vegas who was Ms. Chambers’ bodyguard. “There’s nothing in here but cash,” he said disappointedly. The cops were holding her bodyguard for lacking a gun permit and Marilyn, who had already suffered an overlong detention in the lockup because cops and sheriff deputies were lined up to have own private Polaroid taken with her, had refused to leave without him.

“Wait a minute,”said Rocky, “I think I found it.” He pulled a little blue card out of the briefcase like a plum from a pudding. Leaves of cash fluttered all over the Mercedes back seat. Rocky took the card and went across the alley to Barrish Bail Bonds where the permit, which would give the bodyguard egress from jail, was eagerly awaited.

Marilyn came out wearing about twenty blue foxes which had been glued together into a full length coat and the bodyguard, one Bobby D’Apice, followed her wearing a designer Italian dark suit and enough gold to start a pawn shop. “They kill her, they have to kill me too,” he said, explaining his role. Jim Mitchell was sitting at the wheel of the Mercedes scratching his head underneath his Irish hunting cap. Deep into the historicity of the moment, he sighed, “The Ivory Snow Girl arrested for prostitution in San Francisco. It’s awesome.”

Ms. Chambers, before taking a career step up to porn movies, had been a model and the upper-class white-girl-next-door beautiful innocence of her face had landed her on a gazillion boxes of Ivory Snow (99 and 44/100 per cent pure) as the face of purity. When her night job was revealed Ivory Snow hastened to pull millions of boxes off supermarket shelves and destroy them.

Yes. The Ivory Snow Girl had indeed been arrested for prostitution; the gravamen of the charge was that she had bounced her boobs, free, against the head of some bald guy in the audience. That charge, after all the fuss, was quietly dismissed in court.

The Brothers proved civic-minded chaps always good for a go at the Comstocks of the San Francisco political establishment. They went to war against legislation to black out the neon nipples in Carol Doda’s big topless sign on Broadway.  Ms. Feinstein did not get through her Blitz of the O’Farrell without taking incoming. The O’Farrell marquee blazed: “Want A Good Time? Call Dianne” followed by the mayor’s unlisted home telephone number. Each time the sign went up she changed her number, and the next day a new sign would go up with the new number. Tit for tat.

@ 2009 Warren Hinckle and Last Gasp of San Francisco. From “Who Killed Hunter S. Thompson?” to be published in May.