The owners of Voyeur, the celebrity-oriented, lesbian bondage-themed night spot in West Hollywood should be ecstatic. The “big spender” scandal rocking the Republican Party is generating the sort of publicity money cannot buy.

And yet when a New York Times reporter dropped by for a daytime visit on Monday, she found “a few random fellows who said they were the owner and managers — young, good-looking and a little cranky — lolling on a velvet couch.”

You’d think the club owners might rouse themselves off the couch to speak with a New York Times reporter. Nah. They let their director of special events, Sarah Waldman, set the Times straight.

“We are most certainly not a strip club,” Waldman said. “We cater to a high-end, A-list clientele with live art installations with a voyeuristic theme.”

Keith Olbermann and Michael Musto had fun with that highfalutin formulation on “Countdown” Tuesday night. “[The] live art …” Olbermann said, “includes the installation of a half-naked girl hanging from a net across the ceiling.”

“I feel sorry for Annette, the girl she’s hanging from,” said Musto.

“Does this place match your definition of an art club, and therefore is the GOP supporting the arts?” asked Olbermann.

“Yeah,” Musto replied, “but then again I think Planet Hollywood is a museum.”

Obviously nude lesbian bondage performance art is in the eye of the beholder.

Voyeur’s owners may be ambivalent about the publicity, but from a historical perspective, the club’s current notoriety is part of a continuum of such goings-on going back nearly 60 years.

The first club that occupied the building was the Seville, a jazz joint that featured “Mr. Bongo,” Jack Costanza, and his orchestra. The Seville never caught on, possibly because Mr. Bongo wasn’t a big enough draw, or maybe because the club was located a block or two too far from the action on the Strip.

Not long after the Seville closed in the spring of 1958, one of its owners, Clifford Rue, 34, was arrested for murdering his bookie, Maurice “Goldie” Goldsworth, 52, over a debt of $4,200 — equivalent to about $29,000 today. In his confession, Rue said he became enraged after Goldsworth refused his offer to pay $200 on the debt. When Goldsworth pulled a gun on him and demanded the rest of the money, Rue bashed his head with a hammer and then shot him with his own gun. He stuffed Goldworth into the bookie’s car and drove off toward the desert, where he intended to dump the body. Unfortunately, he got lost on a dead-end road in the Valley, decided to abandon the car and hike back toward home on foot.

A few days later, a cop noticed blood dripping from the trunk of Goldsworth’s car and discovered the body. Investigators tracked down Rue, who confessed during interrogation. In jail that night, he attempted suicide by slicing his neck with a metal strip he’d smuggled in somehow. The wounds were superficial, however, and Rue was eventually convicted of second-degree murder.

The building was purchased that year by Harry and Alice Schiller, a Beverly Hills couple in the their mid-forties. They reopened the Seville as a jazz club but never made a go of it either. A year or two later, Harry Schiller was casting about for a new approach when he hit upon a novel idea. They would open a strip club, but not a sleazy joint — a high-class venue where gentlemen could even bring their wives. They would make a mint.

Alice Schiller, who had been raised in an Orthodox Jewish family, was shocked by her husband’s plans at first. But the financials were appealing, and she liked the idea of opening a classy establishment, and was soon onboard. They named it the Pink Pussycat.

Harry was right. The Pink Pussycat was a huge success. Alice died just three months ago at age 95. Here’s an excerpt about the club from her obituary in the New York Times:

Mrs. Schiller, who by her niece’s account never drank or smoked or swore, had not set out to own a supper club in which performers left the stage vastly lighter than when they came on. But for nearly two decades, from the early 1960s to the late 1970s, she reigned gamely as a doyenne of the diaphanous, owning and operating the Pink Pussycat with her husband, Harry.

Located near the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, the club was a popular destination of tourists and locals alike, known for its glittering stage shows and equally glittering celebrity clientele.

It was a favorite watering hole of the Rat Pack, and for good reason. Mrs. Schiller shrewdly gave her dancers stage names like Fran Sinatra, Samya Davis Jr., Deena Martin and Peeler Lawford, and the originals soon showed up to inspect their namesakes.

The club was also internationally famous for its attached institution of higher learning, the Pink Pussycat College of Strip Tease, familiarly called the Navel Academy of the West…

The Pink Pussycat was not the only American strip club to have an adult-education division, but it undoubtedly had the most distinguished faculty: Sally Marr, the noted striptease artist, was for many years its de facto chancellor, provost, dean and sole professor. (Ms. Marr’s son, the comic Lenny Bruce, sometimes appeared on the Pink Pussycat’s stage.)

(This would have been near the end of Bruce’s career. He died of a drug overdose in his home above the Strip, not far from the Pink Pussycat, in August 1966.)

The Schillers became local celebrities who were seen driving around town in their pink cars, a Cadillac and a Rolls-Royce, with bumperstickers that said “Follow Us to the Pink Pussycat.” Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty appointed Alice as an official city hostess.

The Pink Pussycat had a good ride, but by the late 1970s, nude dancing was in and striptease was out. The Schillers, now in their sixties, converted the club to a discotheque called Peanuts that was popular with gay women.

When Harry Schiller died in 1982, Alice’s young nephew, Josh Feld, took over operations. It 1989, Feld fought off an attempt to revoke the club’s business license over neighbor complaints about late-night noise. At a hearing, fans of the club spoke on its behalf, including drag superstar RuPaul, who may have actually been less than helpful to the case when she suggested that the angry neighbors should expect noise since they chose to live near nightclubs, and if they didn’t like it, perhaps they’d be “happier living on ‘Walton’s Mountain.’”

Under the Schiller/Feld family ownership, the club changed names — it was Grandville in the 1990s and Club 7969 until recently. As the latter, it was a venue for hire for a variety of club nights. One of the better known of these was a male strip night that was popular with bachelorette parties for suburban brides.

For many years, Monday nights at Club 7969 were devoted to “Illusions,” a club featuring transgender performers. In 1997, Shalimar Seiuli, a Samoa-born transgender woman, was unofficially named Illusions’ “House Madam” after her brush with international infamy. She was the sidewalk hostess in the car with Eddie Murphy when he was pulled over not far from the club in the wee hours of May 2, 1997:

Murphy’s exotic passenger gave the following account of her brief interaction with the 36-year-old superstar to a reporter:

“[Eddie Murphy] put two $100 bills on my leg and said, ‘Here’s $200. He asked me if I did this for a living, being a transsexual prostitute. I said yes.

“Eddie said, ‘Do you like to wear lingerie?’ I said yes. He said, ‘Can I see you in lingerie?’ I told him, ‘Whenever I have the time.’ He said, ‘I’ll make the time.’

“Then he asked me, ‘What type of sex do you like?’ I said I was into everything.”

Before anything else could transpire, a police spotlight zeroed in on Murphy’s vehicle-and two officers from the LA Sheriff’s Department pulled him over.

When the cops approached, Eddie claimed that he was just giving his friend a ride home. According to Shalimar, the cops chuckled and said, “Yeah, right!” They then spent some thirty minutes talking amiably to the man who’d played a cop in the hit film “48 Hours.”

Not surprisingly, the officers wound up letting Murphy go without pressing charges. Shalimar was another story. After running a computer check, the cops found that there was a warrant out for the he/she hooker for violating probation on an earlier prostitution charge. Before hauling Shalimar off to jail, the cops smiled and shook hands with Murphy, who must have figured he’d dodged another bullet. Not this time!

A magazine photographer with a well-deserved reputation for sniffing out a hot story had videotaped the entire incident. Without that tape, I have no doubt that the sheriff’s department would have denied all knowledge of this incident, but now there was tangible proof of what had been swept under the rug for so long. Time for Eddie Murphy and his spin doctors to do their version of the Hollywood Shuffle.

One of Murphy’s publicists insisted that his client was a good Samaritan, who’d simply offered a downtrodden prostitute a ride home. “Nothing happened at all, the publicist claimed, “but Eddie said he will never do this again.”

Josh Feld passed away in the mid-1990s, but the club stayed in the Schiller/Feld family until it was sold to the present owners last fall. Voyeur opened in October with a big splash. The partner-owners, David Koral and Matt Bendik, seemed happy enough to speak to a reporter from the Los Angeles Times back then:

Night-life entrepreneurs routinely fixate on the details of their new clubs — the lighting, the furniture, the vibe. But for the team behind new West Hollywood nightspot Voyeur, the details became something of an obsession. Take, for example, the uniforms worn by the club’s cocktail waitresses.

“We thought it would be cool to have them all dressed like Natalie Portman from the movie ‘Closer,’ ” said David Koral, a partner behind Voyeur. Dressed, meaning mostly undressed…

“David and I had just seen the movie ‘Eyes Wide Shut,’ and it all just kind of started clicking together,” added partner Matt Bendik, formerly at the Las Vegas hospitality company the Light Group.

On the club’s opening night, Oct. 8, that vision swam into view. The dark, leather-heavy interior is reminiscent of the masked orgy scene from the movie. The reference is taken a step further with impromptu bondage and S&M “scenes” being played out on an elevated platform by scantily clad performers throughout the night — not presented as “shows,” like they are in clubs such as Playhouse Hollywood. There is also a heavy net suspended above the club’s lounge area where performers writhe above the heads of clubgoers. Even more provocative scenes are played out in an enclosed glass booth area adjacent to the club’s dance floor area.

“It’s pretty . . . intense,” clubgoer Lee Stone admitted on opening night as one female performer with a horse’s bit in her mouth was being strapped to the wall by another just behind the booth he was sharing with friends. His friend was more intrigued by the action. “I wonder if I would get in trouble for joining them?” she joked…

The concept has definitely caught Hollywood’s attention. An unusual cavalcade of celebrities bypassed the rope on opening night, including music impresario Rick Rubin with actor Vincent Gallo in tow. Reality personality Jack Osbourne, Alice in Chains guitarist Jerry Cantrell and actor Gerard Butler also made the scene.

But that was then. Just this week, the publicity generated by the RNC spending scandal has transformed Voyeur from an under-the-radar celebrity hotspot to one of the most famous nightclubs in the world. And yet its management seem either underwhelmed by the attention, totally unprepared for it, or both.

After the scandal broke, they changed the message on the sign atop the building used by Club 7969 to announce upcoming events to read: “No Photos.” (See our photo of the “No Photos” sign at the top of this article.)

The management’s display of crankiness, sniffing about “art” and the posting of the “No Photos” sign suggest that, unlike every other club in Hollywood, they sought to avoid publicity — that their business plan was to maintain a low profile, to make the club an X-rated celebrity refuge. If so, that ship has sailed.

In Washington, the question is, will the scandal cost RNC Chairman Michael Steele his job. In Los Angeles, the question might be, will notoriety kill Voyeur.