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Behind the Burly Q

Page 6

by Leslie Zemeckis


  Bally Girls on the circus/carnival route

  “Carnival life . . . that was hard. No matter if you were eighteen or twelve, that was hard,” Candy Cotton said, “We did ballying between shows, out in front with the barker.”

  “They have a talker,” Dixie explained. “He goes out, ‘bally, girls, bally!’ And most of the chorus girls all have to go out and bally like this, ya know.” The girls would nod, bow, and smile to the circus attendees as their prospective audiences walked by the girls in their provocative attire.

  “And we would get up onstage and we would pretend to be these exotic dancers that were going to thrill the customers,” recalled former stripper Daphne Lake.

  “You were on your feet a lot, swollen feet and all. We used to soak them in tubs of ice,” said Candy Cotton. “One season was enough.”

  Dixie Evans agreed. “Circus life and carnival life was lucrative, but grueling. You do maybe ten to thirty shows a day. Whenever that weather is shining and the sun is out there, you do those shows,” she says. “And always there’s a little boy nine years old with a water pistol. Woo-whoop! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!”

  “When you’re through... you ride home, you just stop and get some Chinese and you soak in the bathtub, ya know. You don’t go out. You don’t smoke. You don’t drink. You don’t spend any money. When you get back to New York... boy you’re mean and lean and you got a bankroll!”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Tiny Kline

  “She was nude.”

  —Professor Janet Davis on Tiny Kline’s appearance in the cooch shows

  “Tiny had always wanted to be a big-time circus star, but she never rose to that stature.”

  —Professor Janet Davis

  Disneyland is billed as the “happiest place on earth.” Designed by Walt himself, the theme park opened in 1955. But it wasn’t until 1961 that Tinker Bell would make her dramatic live debut at the park—flying from Sleeping Beauty’s castle while fireworks exploded above her in the night sky. What the crowd below didn’t know was that Tinker Bell was, in fact, a seventy-year-old former acrobat and burlesque dancer. Her name was Tiny Kline.

  Tiny Kline was born Helen Deutsch in Hungary around 1891. She emigrated to America in 1905, when she was just fourteen. The ship’s manifest from Ellis Island has her traveling with a dance company, but makes no mention of any family members.

  Tiny lived and studied for a time in the Clara de Hirsch Home for Immigrant Girls. When she died in 1964, she left the bulk of her estate to the school in gratitude for “being my guardian when no one else in my family helped.” The school was founded by German Baroness Clara de Hirsch with the promise to “improve the mental, moral, and physical condition” of the mostly Jewish immigrant girls and women, who had no other home or families.

  Despite the school’s positive influence on her, Tiny Kline was soon dancing burlesque in Altoona, Pennsylvania. It most certainly was not what the stern-looking Baroness de Hirsch was teaching her charges, though they did stress they geared their program to “train them for self-support.”

  Tiny decided to change her name from Helen Deutsch to the more elegant and French-sounding Helen Duchee. Like many immigrants at the time, Tiny wanted her name to “sound American.” (She wouldn’t get much more American than becoming Tinker Bell). Tiny kept the new name until she was teased and called a “douche bag.”

  By 1906, her sister Fanny arrived in America and the two lived together. Fanny and the man she eventually married (a possible communist and the likely cause of a rift between the sisters) didn’t approve of Tiny’s career choices. “This was the relative who did the naughty things,” noted Davis, who edited Tiny’s memoir Circus Queen and Tinker Bell. In her will, Tiny leaves little to her sister.

  Tiny was dancing in cooch shows that were paired alongside Wild West shows in the circus in 1911. She wore a heavily fringed outfit and opened with a series of slow, languid dances that would accelerate in pace throughout the show. Then there were the high kicks. “Tiny found it was very crowded, a very frightening space in some respect. She’d be behind the curtain and hear the barker.... You could hear the crowd, you could feel the crowd. Sometimes hands would be poking behind that curtain and that would freak her out,” said Davis. Though Tiny would make it clear in her unpublished memoirs that she was not nude, Professor Davis, through her research, was assured she must have been.

  Kline means “small” in Yiddish and in German. Tiny Kline stood only four feet eleven inches tall. She thought of herself as unattractive. Her body was compact and muscular. Tiny was told she looked too “ethnic” and too “Jewish.” Although in her daily life she felt ugly, the cooch show gave her a sense of being desirable. Like others in burlesque, she found the whistles and howls of the men addicting. Hearing them, she could believe someone desired her. Audiences were vocal in their appreciation for her and her body.

  Tiny refused to change much about her natural appearance when she was on stage, though she did agree to wear a platinum wig and pancake makeup to lighten her skin, which was “ruddy” like a farmer’s completion. What she lacked in height, she made up for in determination and grit.

  In 1913, she met the love of her life, rodeo trick horse rider Otto Kline. They met in the dining car. Otto Kline was a big shot with the Barnum and Bailey Circus, whose show involved vaulting from side to side over the back of his horse as it galloped at full speed. Tiny was still small time with the Cracker Jack Burlesque in Pittsburgh. They married two years later.

  According to Haunted Naperville by Diane A. Ladley, they both claimed on their marriage documents they were American-born because Otto was German and at the time America was at war with Germany.

  Just five weeks after the wedding, Tiny was back on the road with the Cracker Jack Burlesquers. The other women teased Tiny, telling her she should be knitting baby booties. During her last performance, the manager handed her an unexpected telegram: HUSBAND DIED IN RIDING ACCIDENT PLEASE ADVISE ON REMAINS.

  In front of five thousand spectators at Madison Square Garden, the handsome, twenty-eight-year-old Otto had been riding his horse Kitty. The pair circled twice around the arena with the horse progressively running faster. Otto grabbed the front of his saddle. He began, like he always did, to swing over his horse, his feet tapping the ground on either side of Kitty. Otto’s body didn’t touch the saddle with each successive leap. Then, Otto lost his grip and flew head first, slamming his skull against the wooden sides of the arena. The sickening sound as his head struck the boards was heard “all over the Garden,” according to the New York Times’ coverage of the incident.

  Otto’s faithful horse Kitty stopped and stood by her motionless rider. He lived for only a few hours after the accident and died at Bellevue Hospital.

  Tiny was grief stricken. On the train to New York, she was comforted by a minister’s wife. At the morgue, she slipped off her young husband’s wedding band and a handkerchief and kept them with her forever.

  Several days after Otto’s death, Tiny received a letter from him. He had posted it from Baltimore the day of his accident. Otto explained he had cut his hand while cleaning his saddle—a pick had jabbed into his hand. He said, “it shouldn’t matter when I’m riding this afternoon. See you tonight.” Tiny knew then that she had solved the mystery of why one of the best trick riders in the world had perished so violently, but it was of little comfort to her.

  Months after her husband’s death, Tiny decided to visit the show ground of Barnum’s circus and saw another cowboy rider with her husband’s horse, Kitty. Impulsively, Tiny threw her arms around the horse. By the end of the trip, Barnum managers hired her to ride in the parade, which didn’t involve much. She worked a statue act, where women and some men performers wore grease paint and little else. They assumed a pose of classical statuary, usually wearing white or silver reflective paint. It was legal as long as they didn’t move. Tiny performed in this way during her first year at Barnum’s.

  The circus was a very hierarchical grou
p. The statues were on the lowest end of the scale. Their dressing room, such as it was, was in an isolated part of a crowded dressing tent, near the flaps. Occasionally stray men from the local town would try and peak their heads in for a free preview.

  When the circus wintered, Tiny returned to burlesque. She found burlesque to be good, reliable work and obviously had no hang-ups about appearing in the “all together,” though she denied she was. It was a steady source of income for her for thirty years.

  Next, fearless Tiny did Roman riding—her feet straddling a pair of horses as they circled the arena at high speeds. She seemed to find her passion when she tried her hand at aerialist work. She worked with rings until Lillian Litzel told her, “You have a square neck and strong body; you should do the iron jaw.” Lillian was the leading aerialist of the circus; she had a temper and the star power to have all her demands met (including her own private Pullman car). Tiny took Lillian’s advice.

  Working a few minutes at a time over several weeks, Tiny would hold in her mouth a thick leather strap and hang by her teeth. She noted in her unpublished autobiography that “once the neck gets use to taking the weight of the body, it’s a difficult breaking-in process. It’s great once the first couple months pass.”

  Tiny excelled at what was known as the Slide for Life. Many died attempting to perform the same feat she did daily. She would climb a rope to a tiny platform high above the crowd, and then put the strap in her mouth and slide, held only by her mouth, on a steel cable down to the bottom of the arena in mere seconds. She loved it.

  The diminutive widow would continue both with burlesque and her aerial thrill act. Over the Steel Pier in Atlantic City, New Jersey, she would hang from a blimp ten feet in the air.

  The year 1938 would be her last with the circus. Ringling Brothers was disrupted by a union strike and later joined forces with another circus. Many of the personnel were downgraded or displaced. Tiny wasn’t allowed to do her iron jaw act and she retired, deciding she would rather not work at all if she couldn’t do the thing she loved. She was in her forties.

  Tiny had lived frugally and saved her money. She bought a house in Inglewood, California (Tiny would be buried at Inglewood Park, where coincidentally Lillian Litzel and Gypsy Rose Lee are buried). The neighborhood children were alternatively “terrified and fascinated by this incredibly fit woman who wore shorts and blouses tied at her waist and was always gardening.” The woman who had performed hanging by her mouth without a net at great heights was terrified of cars and wouldn’t drive. She bicycled everywhere.

  In 1958, at the Los Angeles Coliseum, Tiny was doing her Slide for Life when Walt Disney saw the show. He thought Tiny would make the perfect Tinker Bell for his new theme park. He had wanted to incorporate the magical fairy into the park for some time and now saw the perfect opportunity.

  Three years later, Tiny Kline began her nightly climb up the interior steps of the Matterhorn. Once at the top, she would get into a leather harness and attach herself to a cable. Davis relates that “when signaled she would let go and slide 168 feet above the ground to Sleeping Beauty’s Castle. She would tap her wand in the air and a grand firework display would begin. She was seventy years old.” Tiny Kline became Tinker Bell every night for the next three years until she quit mere months before succumbing to stomach cancer.

  By this time, Tiny’s hair was completely white. Perhaps this is what gave rise to the urban legend that Marilyn Monroe was the model for the petite fairy.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Those Marvelous Minskys

  “The Minskys at best were crafty, ingenious producers; at worst’ flesh peddlers.’”

  —Rachel Shteir

  “... The climate of that community has gone lower and lower ever since the night they closed Minsky’s and tried to take our name away from us.”

  —Morton Minsky, Minsky’s Burlesque

  Ann Corio at the Winter Garden Theatre

  The name is legendary in burlesque circles.

  April 20, 1925, was immortalized first in book form and then in the 1968 film The Night They Raided Minsky’s. The film was a mostly fictionalized version, based on a true incident involving stripper Mary Dawson (who danced as Mademoiselle Fifi) and the raid of a Minsky theatre that resulted in it later being shut down.

  Interviewed about the film in the Charleston Gazette in 1975, Dawson claimed her character in the film differed from her in that she was never a stripper (she was an “exotic dancing Venus”) and that her real-life father, who was depicted shutting down the club in the film, was actually a Quaker who had nothing to do with why Minksy’s was shut down. Her father did make Mary quit the business several times, but finally gave up when he realized burlesque was in her blood.

  In Morton Minsky’s book about the family business, Minsky’s Burlesque, Morton claims Mademoiselle Fifi stripped to her waist before entering the stage. She was a tableau artist (which was legal) and could pose nude as long as she didn’t so much as wiggle an eyelash. If she moved something, she’d be promptly arrested.

  At eighty-five, Mary Dawson was proudly teaching her twelve-year-old granddaughter her routine and boasting “I can still move every part of my body” as she twirled a green snake around her neck and shoulders.

  The Minsky family came into the business in the early 1900s. Louis Minsky had four ambitious sons: Billy, Herbert, Morton, and Abe. The eldest son Abe started showing racy films in a Nickelodeon theatre on the Lower East Side. When Louis found out, he quickly shut him down, buying New York’s National Winter Garden, where he allowed his precocious youngster to take over the sixth floor. If his son was going into the “naughty” business, he might have thought, he should at least go bigger and make some money.

  The National Winter Garden was in an ethnic neighborhood. Abe began to produce burlesque shows after failing at showing films. Burlesque seemed to do the trick with the neighborhood’s large immigrant population, and soon the Winter Garden was a hit. Brothers Billy and Herbert joined in the fun and profit.

  Borrowing from what he saw at the Folies Bergère in Paris, Abe introduced the runway. The girls shook and shimmied among the sweating masses, invitingly an arms-length away.

  The Winter Garden drew a large working-class crowd. (Ann Corio would later become the queen of the working class—perhaps she learned how to relate to the masses after her stint at the Winter Garden.)

  At the time, there was nowhere else for immigrants to go for cheap entertainment that didn’t require language skills they hadn’t yet acquired. Barely clad girls were easily understood. The comedians with their broad physical humor were perfect for the menagerie of languages in the neighborhood. Legendary funny man Red Buttons (his straight man was Robert Alda) claimed that, for a comedian, graduating from Minsky’s was like graduating from Harvard. It was a fertile training ground for the top rate—and not so top rate—comedians. Morton figures the reason audiences loved the comedians was that the material was already familiar (and this was in the 1930s). The audience didn’t want new material. They were comfortable with the tried and true.

  Burlesque, and Minsky burlesque, was made for the masses, the blue-collar crowd, the average Joe—and Jane, at least for a time—who wanted to be amused. Broadway was too expensive and didn’t cater to their needs or tastes. Nowhere else did, except for burlesque.

  To please Father Minksy, the brothers tried to keep their burlesque “clean;” however, they had to sell tickets and give their audience what they wanted.

  “Theatres at that time were going broke,” said stripper Betty Rowland. One-reeler movies were shown between the live show. “That’s how they found out the stage show; Girls shows were a big hit.”

  It was brother Billy who introduced nudity into burlesque in 1925. Billy Minsky didn’t invent strip. He just brought it out from the back room.

  The youngest brother Morton soon joined the expanding enterprise. Between the four, they independently owned and operated dozens of theatres in New York, down to Fl
orida, up to Chicago, over to Boston and Newark, and in many cities in between.

  Because of the competition among the brothers, they kept pushing the nudity. “It was a competition to who could take off the most,” recalled Betty Rowland.

  The brothers Minsky were known for producing “stock” shows instead of being a part of the wheels operating at the time (Columbia Wheel, the American Wheel, and the Mutual Wheel) that traveled from theatre to theatre. The brothers created their own wheel: They figured how to turn out highly entertaining shows while drawing large audiences.

  By the 1930s, Bernard Sobel was complaining Billy’s girls were “grinding” on the floor along with the now “requisite bumps” expected in such a show. In the “old days,” Sobel explained, the “hootch number” played right before the curtain came down. Now every other act was “filler-in for the strip numbers.”

  The Minskys transitioned burlesque from “an immigrant thing to being something of a must-see event. They drew in the literati. They advertised in New York. They were relentless promoters and self-promoters. They were responsible for making it an American form of entertainment.”

  In 1937, the Minskys appealed to Congress before the House Immigration Committee, with Herbert Minsky arguing that stripping should be “kept entirely American.” There was a bill at the time to restrict foreign talent from invading American shores. Herbert told the committee that there were “100 to 150 burlesque theatres in this country doing their part employing vaudeville performers. We pledge ourselves not to employ foreign strip-tease artists in our cradle of American burlesque.”

  There had been nude women in Paris and throughout Europe, and American burlesque certainly borrowed from that. But what American burlesque had that nowhere else had was the actual removal of clothes. (Morton Minksy claims Josephine Baker copied Mae Dix’s banana costume. Dix would peel the bananas off her skirt while she sang “Take a Look at This.” Baker’s act would make her a certifiable star when she exported her bananas to Paris.) Disrobing in front of the audience was an intimate act not seen before and done in a way obviously meant to titillate, which is what made the concept so shocking to some.

 

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