My Ears Are Bent

by Joseph Mitchell

  The burlesque girl is proud of her tricks. A girl who can accomplish an unusual grind is respected. Dressing-room conversation is largely shop talk although they gab a lot about men and clothes, like all women. If Margie Hart comes out with a new way of wearing her red hair the kids will crowd into the wings, whispering, “Look at Margie’s hair. Do you like it that way? She’s a fool to change.”

  The girls hang out together; they are overworked and underpaid, but they like the life and they are companions in misery. In this respect they resemble nurses and newspaper reporters. They frequent the same restaurants. If they don’t have boyfriends waiting to buy their dinners, a mob of them goes to the same restaurant or delicatessen. Just before the finale on the 3:30 show they begin talking about where they will eat.

  “Where you going to eat?” one will yell.

  “Anywhere but the fish place. I’m sick of that joint.”

  “Let’s go to the chow mein place tonight.”

  “Okie doke, baby. Hey, Woodsy, you wanna get some chow mein?”

  At the restaurant they talk about the business. If a comedian stuck a new line into his bit during the last show they appraise it. For example, if the comic judge in the court scene says “We got to take this to a higher court” and puts his chair on the bench and sits up there during the rest of the scene, the girls decide whether it is O.K. or lousy. What they really love, however, is a comedian who makes cracks about a rival burlesque house during a show. Most of these cracks have to do with the antiquity of the girls in the other show.

  “Geeze,” said one the other night, over her bowl of chicken chow mein, “Joey Fay got off a good one last week in Philly. He took Rosemary out to the lights and he introduced her. He said, ‘I want all you nice people to give this little girl a big hand because her mother just had a terrible accident. Her mother just fell off the running board over at the Star and Garter.’”

  A “running board” is the runway extending out into the audience on which the chorus prances. They are not permitted in New York City any more.

  The Women’s League Against Everything thinks they are awful.

  2. NUDE, DEFINITELY NUDE

  When anything gets as popular as the strip-tease act someone always comes along and tries to do the reverse of it. One morning Mr. Samuel J. Burger telephoned my office that he had just begun to manage “a Chicago dame, and my God, she’s so unusual she’s got me nuts.” I did not feel well that morning, so I was sent up to interview her. Mr. Burger is a thin, inspired, wax-mustached Broadway promoter who books for vaudeville such spectacles as the juries of murder trials, the relatives of murdered criminals, bubble dancers and Indian mind readers.

  His latest attraction turned out to be a shy young woman with a business school education, a giggle and a pair of hosiery-ad gams. She was nineteen years old and her name was Jan Marsh. We met her in a theatrical hotel, and she demonstrated her act.

  “I may be nuts.” she said, slipping out of her dress, “but I think I have an act which will ruin the strip-tease racket.”

  She tossed her dress on the arm of a chair, and then she took off her shoes and stockings. Then she took off an assortment of black lace undergarments.

  “Now look,” she said, unnecessarily. “This is the way I start my act. I begin where the strip-tease ends. I am nude, definitely nude. Oh, definitely. I come out in front of the audience in that condition. I slip on my black lace panties. Then I put on a garter belt. Then I slip on my black net stockings. Black is such a fascinating color. Then I get into my shoes. Then I get into my dress, a zipper dress, the kind of dress they call a taxicab dress. Then I pin on a corsage of flowers, orchids maybe. Then I put on my coat and hat. Then I put on another coat, maybe two or three coats. I just keep on getting into clothes until the audience begins to moan. I put on maybe a ton of clothes. I may be nuts, definitely nuts, but I think my act will ruin the strip-tease racket, which I think would be a great service to my country.”

  Miss Marsh grinned. Then she executed a few dance steps.

  “Of course,” she said, “when I begin the act I am as nude as any tease stripper. Definitely.”

  “She does it all for art,” said Mr. Burger.

  “That is right,” said Miss Marsh. “I do it for art and I don’t mean I have a boy friend by the name of Art. I have seen the enormous success of these voluptuous strip-tease women, but I do not think the public is really interested in that kind of thing. I am a sweet, natural girl. I am not like those bouncy women. I think that when I do the reverse of the strip-tease it will be enormously popular and will start a new movement. I don’t smoke or drink. Of course, if I liked the way it tasted I would, but I think whiskey is horrible. I am a good swimmer. I am just a natural American girl, and I think the public would prefer that to one of those bouncy women.”

  Miss Marsh said she was born in South Amboy, New Jersey, but that the family moved to Chicago when she was a child. Her mother and her father are divorced. She said her mother knows that she came to New York City to ruin the strip-tease racket and does not mind. She said she went to Chicago High School, then to Drake’s Business College. Then she got a job as a secretary to a woman who worked for the city.

  “She was in the tax department, or something,” said Miss Marsh.

  The young woman said that when she was younger she used to pose for artists.

  “I like to pose for artists,” she said. “They are so serious. You stand in front of them nude for hours, but they do not take any interest in you except from an artistic standpoint, which I like. You are just an inspiration to them. I am not a wild girl. I do not even approve of necking.”

  Miss Marsh smiled.

  “She is the society type,” said Mr. Burger. “Yes,” said Miss Marsh.

  She said that recently she saved up some money and decided to come to New York City and go on the stage.

  “I had this idea about reversing the strip-tease,” she said, “and people told me I was crazy. Then I heard about Mr. Burger, and I decided he must have the same kind of mind I have. I went to see him and I found he had.”

  “Great minds run in the same channel,” said Mr. Burger, flicking some cigarette ashes out of the white carnation in the lapel of his overcoat.

  3. TANYA

  At one time or another I have talked with several of the lovely young women who hope to become the Sally Rand of the New York World’s Fair of 1939 and I know how ambitious they are. I hope none of them felt thwarted when they read that Mr. Grover A. Whalen had decided to ban “all amusements of the fan-dance type” from the Fair’s 280-acre Midway. I hope they will pay no attention to Mr. Whalen and will keep right on trying to invent a new dance, something to take the place of those exposition favorites—the muscle dance, the hootchy-kootchy, the fan dance, the butterfly dance, the bubble or balloon dance, and the swan dance, all of which are rather old-fashioned now.

  Mr. Whalen is president of the New York World’s Fair Corporation and it is only natural that he should want to ban such artistry, but it surprised me when he took the bit in his teeth and also banned that good sound American word “Midway.” He appears to prefer the pompous phrase “Amusement Area.” Speaking about the carnival section of the Fair, Mr. Whalen said, “It has been definitely decided not to call it a “Midway.” The word seems to have a connotation of evil to Mr. Whalen, although every state and county fair, and nearly every amusement park, has a Midway and the word is recognized in the dictionaries. I don’t believe Mr. Whalen’s ban on “amusements of the fan-dance type” will be enforced; in fact, I believe the Flushing Meadows will practically crawl with nude wrigglers of one sort or another in 1939. I also believe that most visitors to the Fair will call the carnival section the Midway; the headline-writers on the newspapers will see to that.

  Mr. Whalen’s outburst of euphemism is unusual, but his decision to ban wriggle dancers is not. The making of this decision is one of the routine duties of exposition executives. Mr. Rufus C. Dawes made the decision whe
n the Century of Progress Exposition was being planned in Chicago in 1929. Mr. Dawes was the president, and he said, “No entertainment of the Little Egypt type will be permitted at the Exposition.” Mr. Dawes is probably sitting somewhere at this moment staring at a ceiling and mumbling those words over to himself, dully; by the time his Exposition was dismantled, Sally Rand was a national figure, and there still are millions of Americans who have never even heard of Mr. Rufus C. Dawes.Mr. Whalen practically duplicated the Dawes decision. He said, “No entertainment of the Sally Rand type will be permitted at the Fair.” After the Fair gets under way, Mr. Whalen will certainly be surprised when the newspapers start paying more attention to the inevitable nude wriggler than they do to him, or even to George Washington, whose inaugural as the first President of the United States the Fair is supposed to commemorate. Mr. Whalen is an idealist and he thinks his trylon and his perisphere are more important than sideshows. He can’t be blamed for hoping that visitors will be less interested in the Midway dancers than in such educational exhibits as “The Arts and the Basic Industries.” Exactly the reverse of this, however, has been the traditional fate of American expositions, and there is no reason the New York World’s Fair of 1939 should escape.

  I don’t really believe many people will take Mr. Whalen seriously. I know a girl who is all prepared to become the Sally Rand of the Fair, and if she read about his ban, I am sure it made her giggle. Of the several girls, similarly prepared, whom I have talked to, she is my favorite. Her name is Florence Cubitt, and she was the Queen of the Nudists at the California Pacific International Exposition at San Diego in 1936. The nudists—twenty girls and five bearded men—were segregated behind a fence in a big field, and the customers paid forty cents to go in and watch from a distance while they played games. Her Exposition name was Tanya Cubitt, she told me, because “Tanya sounds more sexy than Florence.” I met her on St. Patrick’s Day in 1936, and I spent several hours of a rainy afternoon listening to her talk in her room at the Hotel New Yorker.

  Miss Cubitt was sent here to get some publicity for the San Diego Exposition. It is this fact, as much as any other, that makes me think Mr. Whalen’s stern statement would cause her to giggle. The officials of the San Diego fair, which was supposed to “tell the story of mankind’s restless urge toward achievement,” also said they would ban “all but the highest type of concession,” but when customers stayed away by the million, they decided that Miss Cubitt’s nudist concession was of an extraordinarily high type. More than one American exposition has been saved from bankruptcy by uninhibited young women.

  The newspaper for which I work sent me up to interview Miss Cubitt the day after she arrived in New York. A photographer went along with me. I saved all my notes, and I want to tell you about Miss Cubitt because I think she will be one of the sensations of the Midway at Mr. Whalen’s Fair.

  We were met at the door of Miss Cubitt’s room by one of the Exposition’s press agents, a brisk young man named Jack Adams. We went in and sat down, and he said the Queen—he called her the Queen every time he referred to her—would be out in a minute. I had a bad cold that day and did not particularly like the assignment. I liked it even less when Mr. Adams began telling me about the Queen. He said she did not approve of the girls in the New York night-club shows because she felt they besmirched the cause of nudism. He said she ate uncooked carrots, took an orange-juice bath about once a week and lived almost entirely off raw herbs.

  He was telling about the Queen’s dietary habits when she came in. She was naked. It was the first time a woman I had been sent to interview ever came into the room naked, and I was shocked. I say she was naked. Actually, she had a blue G-string on, but I have never seen anything look so naked in my life as she did when she walked into that room. She didn’t even have any shoes on. She was a tall girl with a cheerful baby face. She had long golden hair and hazel eyes. The photographer was bending over his camera case, screwing a bulb into his flashpan, when she came in. As soon as he saw her, he abruptly stood erect.

  “My God!” he said.

  Mr. Adams introduced the Queen, and she shook hands with me and smiled. Then she shook hands with the photographer.

  “Pleased to meet you,” said the photographer.

  “Likewise,” said Miss Cubitt, smiling.

  She went over and sat down in one of the hotel’s overstuffed chairs and said she hoped we wouldn’t mind if she didn’t put anything on, and we shook our heads in unison. The telephone rang and Mr. Adams answered it. When he got through with the telephone, he said he would have to beat it, that he had an appointment with an advertising agency, and he said goodbye. The rain was beating against the windows, and when Mr. Adams got to the door, Miss Cubitt yelled, “You better wear your rubbers.” The photographer was still standing in the middle of the floor with his flashpan in his hand, staring open-mouthed at the young woman. I didn’t know how to begin the interview.

  “Well, Miss Cubitt,” I said, tentatively, “Mr. Adams just told me you eat a lot of raw carrots.”

  “Why,” she said, sitting upright in the overstuffed chair, “I never ate a raw carrot in my life. I eat like anybody else. My mother cooks me great big old steaks and French-fried potatoes. That’s what I eat. In the nudist colony, the men nudists eat a lot of that stuff. The men nudists are a bunch of nuts. Why, they eat peas right out of the pod. They squeeze the juice out of vegetables and drink it, and they don’t eat salt. Also, they have long beards. They don’t have any ambition. They just want to be nudists all their lives. I want to be a dancer, myself. I’m going to come to the New York World’s Fair with my dance, and I bet it will make me a reputation.”

  I saw that the young woman was articulate, and that I wouldn’t have to ask a lot of questions. When I said I had a bad cold, she said, “You poor man,” and telephoned room service to send up whiskey. At the same time she ordered some sandwiches, some corned-beef sandwiches, saying, “I’m so hungry I could eat the flowers off the plate.” While she was holding the telephone in her hand, waiting for room service to answer, she said she was only nineteen years old and that she had eight sisters, four of whom had been working with her in the nudist colony. Their names, she told me, were Ruthie, Bobbie, Lucille and Diane. She said her mother was glad they were working in the colony.

  “It keeps us out in the open,” said Miss Cubitt. “It doesn’t keep us out late at night, and we have a healthy atmosphere to work in. My girl friends think we have orgies and all, but I never had an orgy yet. Sometimes when the sun is hot, nudism is hard work.”

  She was a pretty girl. Her skin was ivory-colored and she had freckles on her cheeks, like Myrna Loy. In fact, she looked a little like Myrna Loy. She was obviously healthy, and she said she played a lot of tennis and handball. She said she sometimes posed for artists. “Once one of them told me I looked like a Madonna,” she said, “and I said, ‘O.K.’” I think she was the least inhibited person I ever saw. She reminded me of Reri, the Polynesian girl Florenz Ziegfeld brought to New York in 1931. Reri’s feet were always dirty, because she insisted on walking about the theater barefooted, and she used to sit in her dressing room at the “Follies” reading a movie magazine and wearing nothing but a pair of men’s trunks.

  “Mr. Adams told me you don’t approve of the dancers in night clubs here,” I said when she sat down again, “because you feel they besmirch the cause of nudism.”

  Miss Cubitt giggled.

  “Well,” she said, “you can put that in the paper if you want to, but I went to a night club last night and I thought the girls were real sweet. I would like to get a job in one. I sure do like New York. I’ve had lobsters every meal since I got here, and last night I had some real French champagne.”

  After the photographer had been introduced to the Queen, he had slumped into a chair and had remained there, staring. Now he roused himself and said he wanted to make some shots in a hurry, because he had to leave and cover the St. Patrick’s Day parade. The young woman enjoyed posing a
nd seemed to be sorry when the photographer finished, although he made about five times as many pictures as we needed. A few minutes after he left, a waiter, bringing the whiskey and the corned-beef sandwiches, knocked on the door. The waiter was either extremely sophisticated or had waited on the Queen before, because he did not seem to notice that she was not wearing anything. His eyes were respectfully averted, but he acted as if all the young women he waited on were nudists. When he had arranged his plates and glasses on a table, he handed Miss Cubitt the check. She signed it, and he bowed and left.

  While we were eating the sandwiches, she told me of the dance she was working on, saying she called it the Tiger Lily dance. Why she called it that was a secret, she said.

  “A World’s Fair,” the Queen remarked, “is a good place for a girl to make a reputation. When you get a reputation, you are fixed. Look at Sally Rand. What’s she got I haven’t got? I’ve seen her, and she’s no world-beater. Look at Rosita Royce and her butterfly dance. Look at Toto La Verne and her swan dance. They’re all World’s Fair girls. If I can put my Tiger Lily over at the World’s Fair, I’ll be fixed.”

  I warned her that she might live to regret a World’s Fair reputation, and mentioned the career of Mrs. Frieda Spyropolous, the Syrian girl whose dance as Little Egypt at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 attracted more attention than the seventy-ton telescope or any of the other educational exhibits. I told her how this Little Egypt had married the respectable Mr. Andrew Spyropolous, a Greek restaurant proprietor, not long after the Columbian Exposition closed, expecting to settle down to a peaceful way of life, and how the scandalous behavior of the hundreds of other Little Egypts who began doing her dance in low places all over the country had caused her acute anguish the rest of her life.

  “Oh, I won’t regret it,” said the Queen, chewing on her sandwich. “I won’t do anything unless it’s artistic. Why, out at San Diego they even wanted me to do a Lady Godiva on a big white horse. I didn’t do it because my boy friend made me mad. He said to go ahead and be Lady Godiva. He said he would sure pay forty cents to see me do it, because it had been years and years since he’d seen a horse.”