As the more popular female sensations appeared on the stage, showing a little here and a little more there, louder became the protests from church groups and other do-gooders, which had the effect of making the burlesque shows—and the women stars—even more popular.
The element of taking off one’s clothes on the stage was added, accidentally some claim, by a performer who removed a pair of cuffs because they were dirty. Mary Dawson went by the moniker Mademoiselle Fifi (no doubt hoping the French name not only made her appear “regal,” but also disguised her true identity). This was sometime in 1925. The audience went wild; from then on, strip teasing was in demand. Burlesque had changed—many would say for the better, some would argue otherwise—again.
Another woman rumored to be the first “accidental” striptease was a Boston dancer whose strap broke during a show—and when her panties (or culottes or what have you), fell around her ankles, the audience howled their approval.
However stripping was introduced, and by whomever, once the striptease shimmied across the stage, it quickly became the lure that packed the houses. Burlesque had changed once again, evolving into what we now think of as a burly show.
Renny von Muchow, who performed with his partner Rudy for twenty-five years in burlesque as a novelty act, called the shows a “variety act with a little more spice.” Former journalist, historian of burlesque theatres, and longtime resident of Newark, New Jersey, Nat Bodian said: “Burlesque was essentially a vaudeville show with strippers. They added the strippers to keep the men from going to the movies.”
As a society, we like to judge others by what they do and often where they come from. As Dixie Evan articulated about her fellow dancers, “It’s actually who you are. It’s not what you do. It’s how you conduct your life and yourself and your values.” That’s how the strippers, in particular, and all those that worked burlesque should be judged.
The women I interviewed were survivors. They escaped many things—poverty, abuse, and limited opportunities, including the limitations that prejudice against their own good looks brought on. In response to these, they turned stripping into an opportunity.
Some stumbled into burlesque after a friend or boyfriend suggested it. Some, like Lady Midnight, said, “I just knew I was gonna be a famous movie star.” And when that didn’t work out, burlesque offered the closest thing to celebrity.
“It was a job,” Lorraine Lee said, in reference to stripping as a career. As a young girl whose father had abandoned the family, Lorraine had danced “for a dime or a quarter” with her sister at her mother’s boarding house in Texas. Her mother sold beer and Lorraine danced for Bonnie and Clyde and Pretty Boy Floyd. “You can be a lady where you want to be a lady,” her mother once told her.
“We didn’t have books,” Blaze Starr said of growing up poor. “We lived in the wilderness. No neighbors that read had any books.” Education, let alone material comforts, was not an option for many of these young girls.
Chorus girl Helen “Bingo” Bingler was raised by a “wicked” stepmother. She had four teeth knocked out by a broom handle,” explained her daughter Helen Imbrugia. “She was a showgirl. And she had an act herself where she bent over backwards on a chair and would drink water. When she worked with Abbott and Costello, they nicknamed her Bingo. I think what she wanted to do was marry and have children. But it was mainly to get out of the poor situation she was in.”
Many of the strippers made something of their lives, earning more than they could have as a secretary or waitress. They traveled, met new people, learned to take care of themselves, and provided for their families. From the beginning, even though they knew they may eventually benefit from being in burlesque shows, the first time they stripped on stage was seldom easy.
“But you get used to it,” Lady Midnight told me. She had had an abusive husband she needed to get away from. Her grandfather had been a black-face comedian, her mom was a singer and dancer, and her father a top banana of note. Her father offered her a job working in his club to escape her situation.
“Because I worked in black light,” Candy Cotton laughed, “I really truly believed they couldn’t see me.” She said she “clothed” herself in darkness.
Lorraine Lee added, “I really didn’t show anything.”
It didn’t matter.
For the audience, a burlesque show was a place to forget one’s troubles during the Depression and an escape for the troops that packed houses during World War II.
Lady Midnight started stripping at her father’s club
Like any industry, though, burlesque was economically driven. “It was a time where people couldn’t get work anywhere else,” Alan Alda explained. His father was Robert Alda, a popular straight man and singer.
Most performers worked hard, but seldom grew rich. Some headliners (the star strippers) like Lili St. Cyr commanded as much as $5,000 a week in 1950 (before dying broke and in obscurity). But the majority never earned anywhere near that.
Still stripping in her seventies, Tempest Storm boasted that burlesque brought her the ability to travel and a lifetime of “minks, sables, big homes, big cars, Rolls Royces. I have no complaints.” She was still able to earn thousands of dollars performing when I interviewed her in 2006.
“It was called the poor man’s musical comedy,” producer of This Was Burlesque Mike Iannucci told me, fresh off dialysis. I interviewed Mike in the New Jersey apartment that he had shared with his late wife and legendary burly queen Ann Corio.
Mike was my toughest interview. He was very ill in 2006, but had graciously agreed to speak with me. I later discovered Mike was a controversial producer—some vehemently despised him, claiming he took advantage of the performers in his show. There was no denying, however, that he was an expert on burlesque and that he loved and missed his “Annie.” During our conversation, he would sometimes stare longingly toward a portrait of his wife by Alberto Vargas, the Peruvian “pinup painter.” Mike died two years after our interview.
Two comedians backstage
“During the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s burlesque was king,” said Mike. “At its height, burlesque was the most popular form of entertainment offered across the country. Men and women went to the shows. During the Depression, there was no other affordable entertainment for working-class people.”
“It was a clean show,” Mike emphasized. Burlesque employed thousands, entertained more, and brought in enough money to keep Broadway alive. When I asked Betty Rowland, the “Ball of Fire,” former stripper, and one of the last surviving “Queens,” if there had been a stigma when she worked, she said “No. Because everyone was working in it.”
“It was fabulous,... gaudy,” said Dixie Evans. When the average man went to a burly show, “he could laugh. And let me tell you, there was nothing to laugh about in the ’30s. But to fall into one of those shows...”
Alexandra the Great “48,” a stripper, said, “There was a time when you could fill an opera house with two thousand people, beautifully dressed.” Couples and women alone went to the burly houses. Dixie recalled Wednesday afternoons when the strippers had to serve tea to the ladies in the audience.
“Early burlesque was a family entertainment. That’s hard to believe, but it was,” recalled Alan Alda.
In the 1930s, burlesque branched out into nightclubs and cafès “because of the shutdown [by LaGuardia],” said Rachel Shteir.
Shows were filled with an extravaganza of beauties, fresh-faced showgirls in barely-there costumes. They featured excellent singers, talented comedians, specialty acts, an emcee, and musicians. The large casts sometimes performed as many as four shows a day, seven days a week. “I don’t remember a day off,” said Alexandra the Great.
“If we have a day off, we’re washing our costumes,” Betty Rowland added.
They were a group of entertainers who spent the majority of the year traveling together by train. “They were a bunch of people who loved trooping around with each other and making people laugh, making one another laugh,” sa
id Alda.
What did a burlesque show consist of? Everyone told me a little bit different version, but the main elements were as follows:
There was an opening act. Usually around fifteen chorus girls of all different shapes and sizes. And there was a “tit singer.”
“And that was an official title,” Robert Alda’s son told me. “I don’t know if you had to get a special degree for that or what. But he would sing while the chorus girls would come out, usually with not too many clothes on.”
After that, a comic and a straight man would come on.
Then the first stripteaser came on. And mixed in would be novelty acts.
Then another skit by the comedian and straight man, possibly with a talking woman (usually one of the chorus girls making a couple extra bucks).
Then a song or a dance number.
Then there was the middle production, which they called the Picture Act. This was another huge number that lasted ten minutes.
And then the co-feature (another stripper) came on.
And “if there was a chorus line, they usually did a nice build up for the feature,” former stripper and talking woman Joni Taylor told me.
Then the headliner or star stripper came out. These were the Betty Rowlands, the Tempest Storms, and the Sherry Brittons—the names that had men and women alike lined up outside the theatre before the doors even opened.
And then there was the finale with most of the cast.
The entire show lasted about an hour and a half.
“It was essentially a dressed-up vaudeville show with bare bosoms and a chorus,” said Nat Bodian. “It was a pleasant afternoon.” He smiled.
As America changed, so did the format of the shows. Hollywood films showed more and women’s hem lines rose. To compete, the burlesque houses kept adding more strippers and the stars demanded bigger salaries. To save costs, owners cut back on musicians and comedians until eventually they canned music and featured one tired, old, baggy-pants comedian barely making it through his routine, with shouts of “bring on the girls” hurled at him. What had started out as a family show had degenerated into a show for mostly working-class men who came for the nudity, as much of it as could be gotten away with. The women “danced erotically to arouse the men. And the men got aroused, right there in the front row,” said Alda.
Beautiful dancer Sherry Britton, who started as a stripper in her teens and rose to the top of the marquee, spoke of looking out at the audience as the men masturbated behind their newspapers. “I was a part of that,” she said with shame and disdain.
Did things get out of hand in the audience? Rarely. “Guys would be jerking off in the balcony and girls would say ‘watch out for the guy with the hat and the over coat.’ You expected some seediness,” explained Dixie Evans.
By the time musician John Perilli got a call from a conductor friend begging him to fill in for a recently fired drummer, burlesque was not well thought of. The musicians were looked down upon. “It wasn’t considered a great art form,” said Perilli.
As Alda mentioned, he suspected the men weren’t there “to see the comedians” or hear the band. It was girls, and legs, and bosoms. The audience wanted to see how far and how much the girls dared to show. And some dared a lot.
Once known as a burlesque performer, it was not so easy to get out, move on, or move up to a more “respected” role in show business. A lot of the comedians could move from burlesque into radio, film, and television. There were no young comedians coming up from the ranks to replace them. The old baggy-pants were getting older and began to die out, or were pushed out as the audience demanded more girls.
Expectations placed on the dancers changed, also. In the clubs, they were required to sit with the clients and drink. They had champagne quotas to make. Many developed problems with alcohol.
The quality of the dances changed, as well. There were fewer “acts.” The women simply came on stage, stripped as much as they could get away with, and then left. The tease vanished. Stripping no longer poked fun at sex; it was now about sex. Women in bikinis were showing up on beaches. Playboy Magazine launched. A burly show was no longer the only place to see naked women.
When burlesque died, it cast out thousands of performers with no place to go. Most of them drifted away, abandoning stage names, covering up their past. Many of the men and women couldn’t cross over into “legitimate” entertainment. They got into whatever work they could find—factory work, real estate, sales.
Performers down on their luck packed up their G-strings and their sequins, or their worn, tired sketches and props, and went back to “real” names and found whatever kind of jobs they could. For many, nothing would be as fulfilling as being on the stage. Others tried to forget burlesque; many denied it. Some buried their pasts so well that husbands and children never knew their mothers had stripped or danced in the chorus. Some had a hard time and never found “anything else to get interested in,” recalled Renny von Muchow.
Why is burlesque still misunderstood? Is it because we don’t have the original shows on tape to analyze, enjoy, and dissect? Is it because the performers themselves didn’t continue talk about it?
“I don’t usually tell people I was in the business,” said Alexandra the Great.
“I was more embarrassed—I have a son—I didn’t brag about it,” recalled former stripper Maria Bradley.
Burlesque saw a huge number of talented performers come and go through its ranks. There was Fanny Brice, Jimmy Durante, Milton Berle, Jackie Gleason, Bert Lahr (the Cowardly Lion), and hundreds more.
Our comedy today came out of burlesque. Early radio shows consisted of performers such as Abbott and Costello, Red Skelton, Jack Benny, and Fred Allen, all recreating the same skits they had performed and refined hundreds of times on the burlesque circuit. Remember Bob Hope and all the beautiful women and comedians that flew across the world to entertain the troops? Pure burlesque. Variety shows followed the burlesque format with singing, beautiful women, sketches, and parodies of current topics and politics.
As the men and women of the burly show shared with me their memories, the stories were often contradictory. It was clean; it was naughty. There were kids backstage; there was never any family around. It was fun; it was degrading. You never really showed anything; women were flashing their “lower regions” all the time. The comedians were the worst and couldn’t get jobs anywhere else; the comedians were brilliant. It was a hard living; it was the best time of their lives.
Sherry Britton said, “I was the only one who ever admitted they hated burlesque.”
Some have argued that the burlesque strippers were early feminists. We perceive of them as such and call them pioneers. We say they were women who used their sexuality as empowerment. It’s a false viewing. Generally, they got into burlesque because it was sometimes the only thing they could do. Not one woman I interviewed spoke of trying to prove a point or of being empowered by their sexuality.
Author Kelly DiNardo comments: “I don’t think people know where to put strippers in their own mind. Are these women that we should respect and admire for what they can do? Or are these women the dregs of society, or are they something in between? And I think when you don’t know the answers to those questions, it’s really easy to misunderstand their motivations [for] what they’re doing. And the only [one] who can speak to their motivations are the women themselves.”
These, then, are their stories.
CHAPTER TWO
The Reunion
“My mother found out I was working the burlesque theatre, told them I was fourteen. They let me go.”
—Joni Taylor
“I’m not gonna do too long, because I know everyone wants to go out and get a drink.”
—Sunny Dare
(from left to right) April March, unidentified woman, Alexandra the Great “48”, Leslie Zemeckis, Val Valentine (seated) and Sunny Dare at the Stardust in Las Vegas for a burlesque reunion in 2006
May 2006, Las Vegas, Nevad
a. The Stardust Resort and Casino.
What we thought would be a long weekend interviewing former burlesque performers turned into a four-year journey. Grabbing our video camera, Sheri and I headed to Vegas.
I wasn’t sure what to expect. I had financed the reunion, but another woman had coordinated the event, inviting the former performers, securing the rooms, etc. The individuals that showed up were by and large former strippers, but there was also a straight man, chorus girls, several talking women, a costumer—about seventyfive performers in all. Many brought along their children and spouses.
For the sake of simplicity for the reader, I will refer to the performers by their stage names. On the second day of the Reunion, back in the convention room, we were treated to our own burlesque show with a rousing burlesque-styled band, various singers—including Sequin, singing from her wheelchair, and Sunny Dare, in the early stages of Alzheimer’s—and a handful of the women stripped.
There was much camaraderie between the performers, most of whom had never met but knew of each other. The feature performers did not work together—they followed each other on the circuit. However, some of the performers, like April March and Alexandra the Great “48,” had been friends for decades. Burlesque had been an insular world. The performers stuck together, traveling on trains, piling into hotel rooms near the theatres, drinking at the local bars—year after year.
“Most of us were not too catty. And supportive,” former stripper Vicki O’Day explained about the past. “We don’t all look great, but there’s a common bond and a friendship.”
True, most did not look like their former glossy photos; many looked like they were probably grandmothers.
One afternoon, former stripper and talking woman Joni Taylor led an enthusiastic “pass the mic” in which the ladies and men introduced themselves and gave short summaries of their time in burlesque. As performer after performer spoke into the microphone, I became increasingly more intrigued.
Stripper Lorraine Lee “broke into show business in 1937.” She was sixteen. Her mom worked with legendary performers such as Sophie Tucker and Al Jolson. Her father was an organist. “I went to a theatre and asked people there ... if I could go to work. They said sure. I worked first week for nothing, second made fifty cents. I was making ten dollars a week after a while. I couldn’t go home for lunch or dinner. I’d take tickets, sold popcorn, and helped paint the set,” she said. She finally quit school. “I was falling asleep in class” with the schedule of four shows a week in addition to all the behind-the-scenes work, she said. She would earn her GED thirty years later.
Behind the Burly Q Page 3