He was one of the last connections to the golden era of 1950s Vancouver nightclubs
John Mackie
Sun
Ross Filippone, late Penthouse owner
Vancouver nightclub legend Ross Filippone has died. He was 84.
Filippone was one of the last connections to the golden era of Vancouver nightclubs in the 1950s. Together with his older brother Joe, he owned and operated The Penthouse Cabaret, a fixture at 1019 Seymour since 1947.
The Penthouse started out as an after-hours speakeasy, became a semi-legal cabaret in 1950, and has been one of Vancouver’s top strip clubs for the past three decades. In its heyday, it was the city’s premier after-hours hangout, the place where stars like Errol Flynn, Gary Cooper and Louis Armstrong would hang out ’til the wee small hours. At the end of a 1957 show, Frank Sinatra announced from the Orpheum stage that he would “see you all at The Penthouse,” and the line to get in snaked around the block.
And Ross Filippone was the guy who oversaw it all, greeting everyone in his trademark tuxedo. The Penthouse was his life: for many years, he even lived next door to the club in the old Filippone family home.
He was born in Extension, a small mining town near Nanaimo. His father was a coal miner, but in 1929, the family moved to Vancouver. In 1933, their father bought a house on Seymour Street, only two doors down from the site of the Penthouse. Ross would live there until he married in 1961, when he bought a stylish modern house in Oakridge.
The Filippones were a classic rags-to-riches story. Joe Philliponi (his name was spelled wrong by an immigration officer when Joe arrived in Canada from Italy) started off as a bicycle courier in the Depression and branched out into the taxi and trucking business. At the end of the Second World War, Joe and Ross decided to start their own nightclub.
Liquor licences were hard to come by, so the Penthouse operated as a “bottle club,” where people would bring in their own booze in brown bags and the Filippones would sell them mix. The advantage of this was the club could stay open ’til five or six in the morning; the disadvantage was the police did raids.
“The police would come in 20 or 30 strong two or three times a week,” Filippone recalled in a 2001 interview.
“We used to have spotters on the roof. You couldn’t miss five or six police cars coming down the street. We’d press a buzzer and tell the waiters, who’d tell the customers [to put their bottles on the floor]. It was a joke, a joke, a joke.”
In the early days, the Penthouse also operated as a restaurant, and Filippone boasted of importing the first pizza oven into Canada about 1957.
In 1965, Filippone brought in go-go girls, an attraction that evolved into the exotic dancers of today. In 1968, the Penthouse finally got a liquor licence, which forced it to close at 2 a.m.
Prostitutes also started frequenting the club. In 1975, Ross and Joe were charged with living off the avails of prostitution. The brothers were initially convicted and faced fines of $50,000 each and 60 days in jail. They were cleared of all charges on appeal, but not before they had spent three years in the courts, plus $1 million in lawyer’s fees and lost income (the club was closed throughout the trial).
On a personal note, Filippone made a big lifestyle change at the age of 50, when he quit drinking and smoking and put his energy into athletics.
“He was a Damon Runyan character,” said his long-time friend Tevie Smith.
“He was a rounder about town, a drinker and a partier and a great fun guy, and then all of a sudden he became a marathoner. He totally changed his life around.”
Joe was killed in a robbery at the Penthouse in 1983. Ross ran the club by himself for several years before handing over the day-to-day management to his son Danny. In recent years, Filippone played racquetball four days a week at the Jewish Community Centre, and travelled around North America and Europe to tournaments.
Danny Filippone said his father had some health problems in recent years, but was still fit and active. Ross Filippone had just returned from a trip to New York to see his beloved Yankees play baseball, and played his usual game of racquetball Friday. But he fell ill on the weekend and died in an ambulance on the way to hospital Sunday.
“He was absolutely full on,” said Danny Filippone. “And I know in my heart that’s exactly the way he wanted to go out.”
A memorial service will be held at 1 p.m. Friday at the Italian Cultural Centre in Vancouver. Ross Filippone is survived by his 85-year-old brother Jimmy, his three children, Danny, Joey and Maria, and his long-time companion Crystal. He was predeceased by his brothers Joe and Mickey and sister Florence.
© The Vancouver Sun 2007