A few words with Ed Norwick, GM of Scores Gentlemen’s Club

Last weekend, I had the chance to speak with Ed Norwick, general manager of the legendary Scores gentlemen’s club (‘strip’ is a dirty word, as Mr. Norwick quickly pointed out to me), based in New York City. What follows is easily the most unique and interesting interview I’ve done in my (so far) short stint as a journalist. Enjoy!

MVRemix: What’s the history of Scores? Why do we care about it?

Ed Norwick: [deep laughter] Are you a man, Daniel?

MVRemix: Indeed I am.

Ed Norwick: Okay, then you have to care about Scores. Scores is the top of the mountain in terms of gentleman’s clubs in this country. Most gentleman’s clubs – and this is not a criticism, it’s just the reality – are still caught in the 70s and 80s. They don’t realize that men are different; sophisticated men are different, and men in general are different. They’re much more style-conscious, so from a decor standpoint, Scores is different. From a logistical standpoint: the layout of the club, the ceiling height, the acoustics. For a gentleman’s club it’s extremely intimate, but also extremely dynamic, just in design. We have the hottest girls from all over the country in the club; we have Robert’s Restaurant, which is comparable or better than any restaurant in New York. There must be over 15,000 restaurants in Manhattan – Robert’s is comparable or better than any of them. We only have the best alcohol products available: Belvedere, Absolut, Grey Goose vodkas, Johnny Walker Blacks scotch. When you put all of that together; the best steak in New York with a gorgeous woman dancing topless for you, drinking the best alcohol you can get, watching your favourite team on a plasma screen TV. This is the ultimate man-cave, kid.

MVRemix: I take it business has been good recently then?

Ed Norwick: Business is always good.

MVRemix: I hear there was a bit of turbulence a couple years ago when they switched ownership?

Ed Norwick: Well, here’s what happened. Scores has a great name – from marketing, from publicity, from people who supported the club. They fell on some hard times; bad for them but really good for us. We came in and took over the company. We bought the corporate identity, bought the name, took the building on 28^th street – there’s only one Scores in New York, on 28^th, between 10^th and 11^th avenue – and in May it will be the two-year anniversary of the resurrected Scores.

MVRemix: Scores has been a bit of an institution since the 90s; have you found it difficult to stay relevant at all?

Ed Norwick: The intriguing part is, you have to be like a shark. A shark either swims or dies. As we were talking about before, most clubs tend not to be relevant. They tend to be caught up with – and I never use this term but I’m gonna use it now in quotation marks – the term “back in the day”. And that doesn’t mean you forget history; men in general, we’re genetically inferior. We’re really all 13 or 14 boys at heart. We walk around and giggle when we see boobies! You don’t forget that; the smartest of us realize it and do everything to overcome it, but even we fall into that trap now and again. It’s not hard to stay relevant as long as you realize that you learn from history, but everything starts now. Everything is now, and you can modify it continuously to stay with today’s tastes and changes. Now is very different from the 90s, which was very different from the 70s, which was very different from the 50s.

MVRemix: You mentioned you’ve got some good marketing; who are some of the people –

Ed Norwick: Well it wasn’t that; we were talking about how Scores had developed a name as the “mecca of”. We have a wonderful marketing team, everything here is extremely professional. I do interviews with many of the major publications and major radio stations. We do promotions, all kinds of things. In terms of celebrities talking, we try to be very discreet – that’s also up with the times. Name-dropping is not something that we do. I don’t think it benefits a club to do that – we want people to feel really really comfortable here. It’s got to be an oasis, a home away from home, so we tend not to namedrop. But in less than two years, we’ve resurrected the brand. I’m very proud of what we’ve done. And we’re just scratching the surface; we’re just getting started.

MVRemix: With all this talk about change, what does your clientele look like these days?

Ed Norwick: It’s an amalgam. In terms of demographics, that really doesn’t change. We are a very upscale gentlemen’s club. It’s not an inexpensive place to entertain. That doesn’t mean we’re prohibitive or exclusive – we’re very non-exclusionary, that’s important. You have to be at least 21 to get in the club, of course; the entertainers have to be a minimum age of 21 to work in the club. The demographic really goes from mid-to-late 20s to 60s. Income-wise, it’s the difference between driving a Yugo and a Bentley – they’ll both take you, if you’re lucky, to the same place, but it’s a lot more fun driving the Bentley. We’re the Bentley.

MVRemix: Do you see a lot of females in the club?

Ed Norwick: It’s a trend. We’ve made it into a very gender-friendly facility, because women have also become more sophisticated. We get couples and single women. We do a lot of bachelorette parties, we do striptease classes for groups of girls. We do it on Mondays and Fridays; they get to go into one of our private rooms with one of the entertainers, and learn how to dance provocatively for their significant others, which is really kind of cool. They giggle, they laugh, they have a great time! I mean, this is how you stay ahead. At one time in this industry, women couldn’t even get into clubs, but at one time women couldn’t vote; doesn’t mean it was right, and you modify it based on sociological changes.

MVRemix: I want to talk about you a little bit; how did you get into the business?

Ed Norwick: I sort of flowed into it. I’d been in the hospitality industry at a lot of different levels. I knew some people in the business and I just gravitated to it! It sounded kind of fun, it sounded like a challenge, it sounded like something new; it turned out to be that there isn’t a man in this country who doesn’t want my job. So I don’t think I’ve made a mistake! There are times in life when you try to figure out how this happened, and look for one specific occurrence and you can’t find it. So I think it was just God pointing me in the right direction.

MVRemix: What’s a typical day like for you?

Ed Norwick: [deep laughter] I’m already at the club. I left the club – god, it was about twenty to 5 in the morning, and I got to the club today at a quarter to 3. So I got home at about 5 o’clock, had a quick bite to eat, was on the phones dealing with a few things. I got to sleep at about 8, got up at 10:30, made a pot of coffee and….dealt with things! I came in because I knew I had to talk to you, and I had a few things to go over. The interesting part is, everybody thinks the job is only when the club is open; during the week it’s open from 5 to 4 in the morning. Well, it’s not! You have to love what you do – in anything in life you have to really be passionate about and love what you do, but in this business you really have to do it, because I work when everybody works and I work when everybody’s off. But it’s exciting, it’s fun, it’s intriguing; you get to be a bit of a psychiatrist, you get to be a businessman, you get to use your education, you get to be a father and a husband and all the other wacky things, tied into one thing. I’ll give you a weird analogy: my Blackberry had crashed – they do that every now and then – about a year ago. I went into a place to get a new Blackberry, and they gave me a new one, it wasn’t a problem. And the woman behind the counter asked if she could download my contacts; I said “cool, get it done” because like all of us I’m lost without my Blackberry. She started to download it and she looked at me and said “Mr. Norwick, you have 1800 named contacts on your Blackberry!” It’s weird; you get jaded after a while, you don’t even think about it. And my response was “of course I do!” I thought about it and to me it’s normal day-to-day existence, but these are people I talk to on a regular basis. My customers aren’t really my customers; they become your friends. These are people you interact with on a very, very regular basis, and it’s people from all over the country and all over the world. Even on that level, it’s really fun because it’s people in all segments of society; from the music business, from theater, acting, from business and law. Every aspect of society becomes your friend on a very high level, which is cool. Demographically, I have really close friends who are in their 20s and really good friends who are in their 70s. A lot more of them are in their 20s and 30s – and trust me I’m not in my 20s or 30s! When you sit down and think about it, it really is cool – I’m lucky.

MVRemix: So you go in everyday? Hands-on about it?

Ed Norwick: My partner and I are very hands-on about it. I try to take some time off – everybody should during the week – but you still have your Blackberry with you, you’re always accessible. The only time I don’t answer my phone – which, when you think about it, is a very sad commentary on my life – is when I’m on my Harley, because I tried it once and it blew out of my hand. So the only time I don’t answer the phone is when I’m on the motorcycle. You do this because you love it; you do this because you find it necessary, and my partner and I are very hands on.

MVRemix: Do you have a family?

Ed Norwick: I’m divorced; I have a 22-year old daughter who graduated from college this past May.

MVRemix: Gotcha. When did you tell your daughter that you ran a gentlemen’s club?

Ed Norwick: My daughter has known all along what I do. There’s nothing to be ashamed or embarrassed of; we’ve talked about it and the question, like anything else, is: how would I feel if she wanted to come into the business? And my response was, done in the right way and for the right reasons that would be fine with me. I asked her if she would want to, and she said that no, she’d wants to own the place; it’s always better to be the owner! That was when she was about 14 years old. She’s over 21 now, she’s back in New York – she went to school in Miami – working and living in Manhattan, and she comes in with her friends, so there’s no surprise. It’s cool to be the cool dad! I’m the guy who has this business, I’m the guy with the contacts for night clubs, celebrities, whatever. So to her friends, I’m the cool dad that rides the Harley. She’s never had a real problem with it at all. The context is that it’s a gentlemen’s club – when the average person thinks about gentlemen’s clubs, and they think about the “S word” ['strip'], they think about the silliness that they see on TV. The ridiculous stuff that they see on Springer or the clubs from The Sopranos, and that’s not the gig.

MVRemix: What’s the etiquette like at Scores, between the dancers and the customers? Is it different than anywhere else in New York?

Ed Norwick: Part of is that at it’s core, it’s like what I said before about the Yugo and the Bentley – you open the door, you start the ignition and you drive. So at it’s core the etiquette is the same. But because of what we have available, the opportunities are different; the feel is different. Here, there’s nobody pushing anybody to do something. My clients don’t feel like somebody’s got their hands in their pockets: I’ve got guys who come in, have a drink, watch a ball game and go home; I have guys who come in and go to the other extreme; and I have people in between. There’s never any pressure to go in one direction or the other. At the core, you really try to develop something that is a gentlemen’s club, where people feel comfortable. In terms of the entertainers – a dance is a dance. It’s one song, and depending on what city and state you’re in, the etiquette changes in terms of what kind of contact, what kind of interaction. That varies from state to state; being in the state of New York, we’re very conscious of following what they dictate the etiquette is in terms of contact, which is very minimal. When we hire girls, a good portion of it, because we’re in the entertainment business, is about the facade. You want 10s and 12s – it sounds kind of shallow to categorize, but that’s my business – but you also want girls who can talk to people, who are up to date. Think about it – no matter how successful you are in your daily life, you have problems with your clients or customers at work and at home you’re dealing with the everyday problems and situations of life. And it’s nice to be able to come in and have a bright, beautiful woman laugh at your jokes, listen to you, and converse with you, without pressure. I mean, that’s the ultimate fantasy – hot girls thinking you’re intelligent, thinking you’re clever, thinking you earn. You’re not saying “did we make the mortgage payment this month?” or “We gotta pay for braces” or “the next shipment didn’t go out” – whatever it is. It’s a place where you can feel comfortable, safe and secure, and then go home and relax.

MVRemix: Do you think Scores is a dying breed of gentlemen’s club, or do you think we’re going to see a re-emergence of what you guys are doing?

Ed Norwick: I can’t speak for anybody else. There are some wonderful clubs all over the country and I’m not trying to take away from anybody else. We have Scores in Chicago, Baltimore, New Orleans and Tampa, and we’re looking to open more Scores throughout the country. Just relating to us, there’s a continuation of the Scores mentality. We’re always looking for clubs across the country and we will be expanding. We have licensees that meet a certain criteria. We’re also looking to open more “company stores”. So just for us, there will be a resurgence.

MVRemix: You’ve already gone into it a little bit, but is there anything else you’re going to be doing in the future that you want to tell us about?

Ed Norwick: Again, we’re looking to open more clubs. We have a media company that’s looking into some reality TV shows; some other media situations, more website stuff and internet stuff that we’ll be coming out with. The market is wide open to expand the brand. The name is a phenomenal name, and we’re looking to optimize it. So there will be things on television relatively soon – we have a media company that’s working on that in terms of television, in terms of radio, the internet. From a lot of different vantage points, we’re looking to expand the branch.