Steady as She Goes

The law in all its majesty seems to have found the dividing line between permissible and impermissible exposure of female breasts. The topless-bathing-suit caper may be finally resolved--at least in California.

In 1964 Jeanne and Harlan Davis tangled with police at a boite they ran called the Golden Nugget in suburban Los Angeles. There, the cops spied ex-Dancer Jeanne, 36, modeling the lower half of a leopardskin bikini without the upper half. Distressed, they arrested the Davises for violating Section 650 1/2 of the state penal code, a catchall law for moral suasion that forbids any act "which openly outrages public decency." Fined $276 and put on three years' probation, the Davises carried their case to a three-judge panel of California's Second District Court of Appeal, which last week issued a learned 47-page opinion voiding Section 650 1/2's lingo as unconstitutionally vague.

While rejecting the appellants' contention that Mrs. Davis' "conduct is today's norm," Associate Justice Otto Kaus declared that even today's "family magazines, which no one would think of hiding from the children, have for years played peekaboo with the female breast." In such a society, reasoned Kaus, the court cannot rationally rule "that a woman who exposes her bust for a brief period, without suggestive movements, before a limited group of adults of both sexes, outrages public decency by any and all definitions of that term."

The operative phrase seems to be "suggestive movements." In short, by harking back to what is actually a rather old measure of lewdness, the court ruled that topless female dancers are legal, at least if they don't wiggle.

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