Lady Midnight told the group, “My stepmother said, ‘Go to the Follies and introduce yourself and he’ll put you to work.’ I went there with my daughter under one arm and my sewing machine under the other arm.”
“I started in a chorus line in [the] carnival. I was on All American Carnival for two years. Started at 18,” related Candy Cotton. “[The chorus girls] thought they were going to the fair to be on a big stage.” Needless to say, when they got a look at it, it wasn’t what they expected—small and cramped. “A couple broke down and cried, but they put their feathers on and danced.”
Sunny Dare told the group, “I was born on the carnival. My mother took care of snakes and my father broke horses so I sorta fell into this business very easily. I worked all over the world.”
“I started in the carnival. I ran away from home and joined the circus. I did that when I was sixteen. Worked for a sideshow for four years, started out as a knife thrower’s target, quit after a week when I got nicked and I realized the knife thrower had a bit of a drinking problem,” said former stripper Daphne Lake.
“We rehearsed between shows Saturday and all day Sunday. We hated it.” Joni Taylor said, while discussing work with the chorus.
After three days of interviews, Sheri and I realized we had much more to cover. The stories were so rich, these oral histories so untapped—we couldn’t stop after a weekend. And so began our mission to recover every living memory of burlesque that we could.
CHAPTER THREE
Six Feet of Spice
“I was embarrassed and humiliated about my past.”
“If I had a daughter in burlesque, I’d be upset.”
—Beverly Anderson
Stripper Beverly Arlynne
Beverly Anderson was in her mid-seventies when I met her in May of 2006—a beautiful, statuesque redhead with long legs, a forthright manner, and gorgeous alabaster skin. She was running a theatrical talent agency, booking actors gigs out of a small office in Midtown Manhattan. It had taken some time to set up the interview through her son Fred, as he told me that her health was precarious.
The interview was set for a Saturday, so the phones were quiet, the hallways deserted. On her wall was a huge, poster-sized photo of her younger self—looking not much different from the woman seated before me, tastefully dressed in pants and a simple green turtleneck, her green eyes bright, her laugh quick and easy. Beverly was impeccably made up. If she was ill, she didn’t look it.
In the photo above us, she wore elbow-length gloves, a modest bikini top, and a skimpy G-string with a sheer panel flowing from it. Later she told me she had the bikini top painted in because she had been self-conscious about her clients seeing her covering her breasts with only her gloved hands. Not many of her actors ever made the connection between the stripper in the photo and their agent sitting behind the desk.
She quit stripping when she was thirty years old and decided she needed the poster, which was originally pasted to the wall of a theatre in Canada, as a memento. “I saw what happened to the girls. Rough life. I wanted a poster as a reminder it would be fun later in life.” She asked someone to soak it off the wall of the theatre. She rolled it up. At customs they “demanded I unroll it.” Her seminude picture was “embarrassing” and seemed to amuse the customs officers.
And here, in her office, hung the same poster, a copy of which now hangs on my wall at home.
Beverly Anderson had been born in the “waspy, upper-middle-class town of Burlingame, California,” outside of San Francisco. She came from a “careful,” conservative household. From an early age, Beverly was determined to get into show business; her eye was on the stage. Like so many others before her, she wanted to be a star.
Since childhood, Beverly had suffered from rheumatoid arthritis. Her fingers were bent and twisted. “Most struggling actresses,” she said, “worked as waitresses, or typists, while they were trying to get [an acting] job. I could do neither. But I could wear gloves and shoes and work as a stripper.” This was a very interesting conclusion for a well-to-do small town girl who had never seen a strip show or traveled outside of California.
Beverly started as a showgirl working in the chorus line, dancing for Harold Minksy in Chicago. Harold was the adopted son of famed theatre owner Abe Minsky, who, along with his three brothers, essentially monopolized the burlesque world, owning and running various theatres. It didn’t take long for Beverly to decide she wanted out of the chorus line—she wanted to be a headliner. She knew she had the looks and the determination to succeed.
While learning her trade in the chorus line and to earn an extra fifteen dollars, Beverly used to “catch the wardrobe” of famous stripper Georgia Sothern. She’d stand behind the curtains at the theatre and, as Georgia stripped, Beverly caught her clothes as they were flung through the curtains and hung them up. Georgia had been stripping since she was thirteen (for another Minsky brother named Billy). Her act was fast paced as she flung her body forward and back to the popular ragtime tune “Hold that Tiger.” The act was electric. Georgia was a big star when Beverly worked with her, and to deter other strippers from seeing her act and stealing it, Georgia had the curtains pinned together, allowing only enough room for the gown to slip through.
“I peeked,” Beverly said about watching Georgia. And “eventually I stole her act.” By watching Georgia night after night, along with the other headliners, the young girl from Burlingame learned how to disrobe elegantly. Beverly would sing during her strip act. She admitted she “wasn’t a very good dancer.” And she had “a terrible voice,” but “if they wanted to see my body, they had to listen to me,” she laughed.
On the road, Beverly went out as the first or second strip, not the feature (the star given the final strip of the show). Her first night in a small Ohio town, Beverly read the local newspaper advertising her act alongside “Barbara with her boa constrictor.” The two would be expected to share a dressing room, “and I thought, my God, I’m petrified of snakes,” she said.
But then something happened to Barbara. She was bitten by her snake and was in the hospital. The little old lady who was the theatre owner told Beverly, “You have to be the star.” Beverly readily accepted the role. “I was glad because I didn’t want to dress with a snake,” she said.
As the “star,” the little old lady informed Beverly that she would be expected to “flash.” To flash was a burlesque term for showing a woman’s “bottom region,” Beverly explained. “The farmers in Ohio would come at six, seven, eight in the morning [to the theatre] and stand in line because the star would flash.”
Beverly was upset when the theatre owner gave her the assignment. “I’d never done that,” she said. Being told to flash was devastating to her. “I thought that’s just terrible. My mother would have a stroke. She didn’t know what I was doing anyway.” But it was Ohio and her mother was in California, so what choice did she have?
Beverly went back to her hotel. Next to the hotel was a fur shop. Hanging in the window were second-hand fur jackets and coats. A red fox-fur jacket caught her eye. She went into the little fur shop and explained she couldn’t afford much. “I said, ‘Do you have any little pieces of fur that I could buy?’ They sold me a little fur piece.” Red fox fur.
Back in her room, she sewed it into a triangle and put it on invisible elastic. “All the while I was thinking, ‘Well, it’s gonna get a big laugh, and everyone’s gonna think it’s funny.’” She was certain she would be fired, but at least she’d go out with a laugh.
She did her number. And there was a blackout. And a drum roll. The lights came on. A pin spot hit the fur piece. “There was deathly silence for about two minutes. And then there were screams and howls and yells,” Beverly recalled. From offstage, she could see the comics backstage laughing. From their vantage point, they could see her “flash” was nothing but a fake. But to the audience, the fur piece looked completely real. There were resounding cheers bouncing around the theatre. “Bravo!” the men yelled. Beverly left
the stage and climbed the stairs, crying, waiting to be fired.
Pretty soon the little old lady came running up to Beverly and said, “Honey, that’s the best flash I’ve ever seen, but can you trim yourself down a little?”
Once she’d become a headliner, Beverly gave herself the stage name Beverly Arlynne—spelled variously as Arlene, Arline and Arlenne. (Combing through numerous scrapbooks, archives, and newspapers, it’s astonishing how the spelling of the strippers’ monikers varied from publication to publication—either club owners were lazy or newspapers were careless.) Beverly chose the name Arlynne because she loved 1950s film star Arlene Dahl. Later, Dahl actually became a client of Beverly’s at her agency. Beverly never told her she’d been the inspiration for her stripper name.
Beverly was also variously billed as “Six Feet of Spice,” “Towering Spice,” and “Spicy Towers.” She eventually worked with other burlesque greats, including Blaze Starr and Lili St. Cyr, and was good friends with Dixie Evans. Making friends with the other girls was a rarity for Beverly. The women, she admitted, were women she wouldn’t have befriended back home in California. Most of them were into drugs and alcohol. “It was depressing,” she said. She added that, to her, those habits were not a good way to make a living. “I saw too many of the women going down the hill.” Beverly looked off, sad. She admitted it was a less than desirable existence.
“It was a seedy life,” she said, admitting that there were many times when she was on stage and was able to see “guys jerkin’ off in the balcony.” In addition to the men from town, Beverly also recalled various male celebrities stopping in to see the show as there were “dark little hideaways” where it was easy for the men to come and drink with the girls.
“After a while it eats you up. I wasn’t meant to be eaten up by burlesque,” she said. She knew she had to quit.
Sitting in her office, I marveled at Beverly Anderson, the innocent girl from an upper-class family. She had come a long way and had performed in many venues, as a showgirl in “legit” shows and vaudeville-type shows with comedians Smith and Dale. Her name was even listed on the same bill as Judy Garland at the Palace Theatre. Out of burlesque, she became the youngest female theatrical agent in New York, representing two Tony winners and an Academy Award nominee. “I bet I’m the only stripper who became an agent,” she said proudly.
Was there a stigma attached? It was a question I asked everyone. “Definitely,” she said. “I knew I’d come to no good end if I continued in it.” And so she got out. She didn’t want to be a stripper at thirty.
Later on, I asked her about this resurgence with neo-burlesque troops all over, especially in New York. She said it was “tacky” and she was “shocked people would be interested. If I had a daughter in burlesque I’d be upset.” Her family never knew she was a stripper. Her mother died, never suspecting. “My husband only found out the week before we were married.”
Her then-fiancé, Leonard Traube, was a press agent for Broadway shows and films and went to the papers to have them write a story on Beverly, who by then was a theatrical agent. The angle of the story would be how a former Latin Quarter showgirl became the youngest female agent in New York. Leonard approached the Daily News.
The reporter at the Daily News told her unsuspecting fiancé that he knew who Beverly was. She was “the one who used to be a stripper,” the reporter said.
Her shocked fiancé could only say, “What?” She said he was surprised because she was so “straight-laced.” Apparently it didn’t deter Leonard from marrying her and having two sons with her.
She didn’t tell her sons until they were 41 and 38, the year before I interviewed her. “I was ashamed of my background.... It was a tawdry way to earn a living,” she said. However, she admitted that the industry and the experiences taught her a lot. Coming from a cloistered, sheltered existence, she saw parts of the world she wouldn’t otherwise have seen. What she had known about New York back then, she had only read about in books.
Not all memories were painful. She had fond memories of the comedian and Johnny Carson regular Don Rickles who worked the burlesque houses. “They used to throw pennies at him,” Beverly recalled. He was afraid the audience was going to blind him.
One night, the two were sharing the bill in Louisville, Kentucky, during the Kentucky Derby. “It was a hot, hot time.” The nightclub was small and the tables were crammed tightly together, practically on top of one another, very close to the stage. She was doing a jungle act. She was backstage, running late, and heard the overture warning her she was about to go on. Because of the deformity of her hands caused by the arthritis, she “always wore gloves. I was the only stripper who never took off her gloves.”
It was difficult to get the gloves on because the heat made her sweat, which made her bent fingers uncooperative. That night, she ran on stage, gloveless, and did her act. A man from the audience later went up to the owner and complained. “How dare you hire a crippled stripper,” he said. She was immediately fired without pay.
With no money and clearly “desperate” for any help she could get, Don Rickles lent her enough money for airfare back to New York. Later, she went to The American Guild of Variety Artists (AGVA), the union for nightclub and variety performers, and got her money.
But that night, she was devastated. “I remember standing in the airport waiting for the plane to take me away and looking up at the sky and thinking, ‘Gee, is there anyone for me? Is anyone on my side?’ I was crushed. What’s gonna become of me? I’ve got crippled hands. What the hell am I gonna do?” she said.
Ironically, Beverly Anderson’s first job after she quit stripping was playing a stripper on the 1950s sitcom The Phil Silvers Show. Eventually, Beverly came to peace with her past. She no longer regretted her early career choice; it no longer hurt her to think about or discuss. She was no longer a scared and lonely girl, self-conscious about her crippled hands. She’d married a man she loved and had two children. I think she got a kick out of knowing she’d had a “scandalous” start.
As Beverly looked back at her time in burlesque, there was a light in her eyes that I’ll remember always. “I think it was a great adventure,” she said. “Thank God I survived. I don’t remember the pain as much as I remember the good times.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Don’t Tell Mama (Or the Kids)
“Even my husband... when I said one time to someone I was a stripper, he said, ‘You weren’t a stripper, you were in burlesque.’ I said, ‘Well, honey, what do you think I did in burlesque? I mean, I didn’t play the piano.’”
—Joan Arline
“My mother always wished that I had taken up some other form of work.”
—Candy Cotton
For many strippers, there was reluctance, if not an outright avoidance, to tell their parents what they had gotten into. The stigma associated with burlesque was hard to overcome.
Kitty West, the stripper who’d lost almost everything due to Hurricane Katrina, told me her mother and baby brother had seen her perform. “Mother thought it was beautiful and saw that I wasn’t doing anything wrong, and she came to grips with herself,” she said.
Though April March’s daughter knew how her mother made a living, she was proud of her mother. April would not allow her daughter to watch her performances, as April did “strip all the way, most places.”
For many who had a relative already in burlesque, life was admittedly easier. Former stripper Val Valentine grew up backstage. She, like a few others, slid easily into burlesque with nothing to hide. Her mother’s best friend had been a stripper and eventually would teach Val the ropes.
Lily Ann Rose, who got into stripping when she was fourteen, said she had forgotten all about her burlesque career and never talked about it with her children until one day, fifty years after quitting, she opened an old trunk and all the memories came flooding back.
Rita Grable, a buxom blonde from Brooklyn, invited her father to her show. She thought, “How am I gonna tell h
im what I’m doing?” She had been working in New Jersey, there were ads in the papers, and she was on the cover of many magazines. One day, she decided to just tell him. “‘I’m working in New Jersey and would you like to see me?’ He came. I didn’t think I was gonna get through it. He said, ‘You know you were the best one there.’ I was so thrilled that he didn’t reprimand me,” she said. She was one of the lucky few.
Sequin, the former stripper, said her family never mentioned anything to her about her stripping. They knew, “but they never saw it either.” She would send them cast off costumes and jewelry. “They’d brag about me,” she said.
The performers weren’t immune to the judgment of others. “You knew about the stigma,” Dixie Evans said, shrugging, “but we’re in a group all by ourselves. We were considered celebrities.” Local places were thrilled to have the traveling headliners, even if they did stay in “third-rate places.” And, because the women had money and spent it on minks and Cadillacs, “people would look at you and know you were in burlesque,” she said.
When they stepped out of their circle, it was a different story. The women would get dirty looks, especially if they still wore their stage makeup and false eyelashes, as Dixie Evans often did. “At Saks we’d get humiliated. They meant to put you down,” she said.
Behind the Burly Q Page 4