Chorus girls rehearsing downstairs at a burlesque theatre
Stripping, working in burlesque, was a way for these young girls to make something of their lives. And, though now what little we know of so many of them comes from yellowing pictures in old magazines, they were someone in their time.
CHAPTER TEN
It’s a Mad, Mad World
“The comics were the main thing in burlesque. Not the woman.”
—Joan Arline
“You could see the sweat flying off them.”
—Alan Alda on standing backstage
Comedians on stage
Straight: Too bad about Molly losing her youth.
Comic: Why, has she found another one?
Straight woman: I wonder if Jack still loves me.
Next straight woman: Of course, sweetie, why should he make you an exception? (Uncensored Magazine)
A burlesque show was the “best school for the comedians,” touted author Sobel.
According to Chris Costello, “Burlesque people are different; you show them, you talk about the old skits, you talk about the circuit and they come alive. It was the training ground. There is no training ground today. The circuit honed their craft.”
Early burlesque would have two or three top bananas. “Top banana meant you were the comic that carried the whole show,” explained Mike Iannucci. Every comic would have a straight man. “Between strips, the comics would come out. There would be a second banana (or a feature comedian) on the bill with his partner, or he would do bits with the talking women.”
If any of the comedians didn’t go over well, the audience would scream “bring on the girls,” remembers Harry Lloyd. “That was part of the fun of a show.”
Dixie Evans said many of the comics started in little Jewish vaudeville houses and then joined burlesque shows. Although this was the way many comics made their living, the majority of comics denied being involved in burlesque.
“[There was] always competition on the stage. You always want the best spot, etc.” said Alan Alda. There was as much rivalry between the comedians as between the strippers. In H.M. Alexander’s Strip Tease, the author noted how “comics would rehearse new bits in a corner so rivals in the same show won’t copy it.”
Harry Lloyd, who grew up on the circuit watching his father, Eddie, perform his comedy, said that this was a very frequent occurrence. “They all claimed they wrote every scene. A young comic, long time ago, he’d have ten scenes. Others would steal it and adapt to that scene and claim it was theirs. They would bitch about it. ‘I did that scene fifty years ago.’”
Straight man Lee Stuart agreed with Harry. “They all had a different style, [but there were] a lot of copycats. Everyone’s doing everyone’s material.”
Milton Berle was one man who was so notorious for stealing material, he made it a part of his act.
“They took old comedy skits and found a way to present it in a fresh manner that kept them and the audience alive,” remembered Alan Alda.
This list of names that staggered through burlesque is impressive. Will Rogers, W. C. Fields, Ed Wynn, Phil Silvers, and Red Skelton (son of a circus clown) were just a few. Bobby Clark was known for his round “glasses,” which were thick black rings of paint drawn around his eyes. Danny Kaye toured with Sally Rand and Joe Yule (Mickey Rooney’s pop) worked the circuit for years. There was Jimmy Durante and Fatty Arbuckle, who performed with the Merry Maidens Burlesque. Joe DeRita, who took the original Curly’s place in the Three Stooges, trained in burlesque. Jerry Lewis’s dad started as a burlesque comedian. Jackie Gleason was the feature comic at the Empire Theatre in Newark at an impressive 260 pounds.
In the 1890s, a young W. C. Fields joined a traveling burlesque company as a juggler. As so many of the comedians would, he met his future wife on the job.
In 1903, Al Jolson got his start at the age of fifteen with the Dainty Duchess Burlesquers. Unfortunately not all names are remembered today. Joey Faye, though he worked for more than sixty years with Gypsy Rose Lee and Abbott and Costello and counted Phil Silvers and Rags Ragland among his contemporaries, is largely forgotten. So, too, is Irving Benson. Names like Stinky Fields and Boob McManus mean little today.
Eddie Lloyd recalled one man who many no longer connect with the world of burlesque. “Jess Mack was a straight man who became an agent, he booked you.” Jess Mack was also a publisher for Cavalcade of Burlesque Magazine, which promoted stories about his clients, most of which were a bunch of fake stories simply written to promote the performers.
The pace on the circuit was demanding and the lifestyle was often unhealthy. Many comedians, though already old, looked decades older after working in burlesque. Author Martin Collyer recalls comedian Joe E. Lewis doing twenty shows a day. There was “a lot of drinking, smoking, gambling, cursing,” Alda recalled.
Rags Ragland was a notorious boozer. He joked that “burlesque was just a way to pay for his drinks.”
The routines were old, tired, and familiar almost from the beginning. When Red Buttons started in television, the skits he used had the audience in stitches. But they had been playing in burlesque theatres for over fifty years. The bits were familiar enough that the audience expected and enjoyed them. Johnny Carson reintroduced another generation to standards such as “crazy house” and the “school room” scene on The Tonight Show.
Rita Grable said that “Johnny Carson did it several times in his show, people running in and out, doors opening and closing, girls coming in.”
The Crazy House was classic and known for its crossovers. A comic would be in bed, a girl would walk by. Another comic would come out from somewhere. Comics would be going crazy trying to figure what was going on. In the school room scene, Ann Corio played the teacher and the comics were the students. Ann was good friends with Johnny Carson. “He loved the burlesque comedy and did some of the crossovers and sketches with us. Johnny loved Ann,” said Mike Iannucci.
“People would laugh their sides out at these silly skits,” recalled Dixie Evans.
“They created illusion to be seen from the front,” Alda said, recalling how he would watch them work from the sides and from his vantage, he could see them work and he could see them thinking. But from the front, all appeared flawless.
Morton Minksy wrote that by 1919, the bits were stale. But “ritual was ingrained” in the humor. Frequent targets of the gags were homosexuals and the mentally ill, as well as various ethnic groups.
Red Buttons bookended a certain era of burlesque, starting as a sixteen year old with Robert Alda as his straight man on the circuit. He ended his long run in 1942 when he was raided on the stage of Minsky’s Wine, Women, and Song. It was the last burlesque show in New York. Mayor LaGuardia had finally succeeded in booting bare burlesque bosoms off Broadway.
Buttons found his first wife in burlesque, a stripper named Roxanne.
He had his own show in 1952, The Red Buttons Show, which would boast among its writers Neil Simon. Three years later when the show was canceled he was considered a has-been, though only thirty-six and rich. He continued in nightclubs and films, later winning an Academy Award for the 1957 film Sayonara, in which he played opposite Marlon Brando.
The comics’ bits were slightly naughty and absurd. It’s hard to image laughing at many of them today. For example, this is a sketch Harry Lloyd recited to me:
Straight: Hello there bud.
Comic: ‘Bud?’ Do I know you?
Straight: No, sir.
Comic: Do you know me?
Straight: No, sir.
Comic: Well, let’s keep that way.
Straight: Alright, fella.
Comic: ‘Fella?’
Not that the audiences always laughed. Sometimes the baggy-pants were simply a painful prelude while waiting for the exotics to transform the stage with their tantalizing flesh. The men in the audience would holler “bring on the girls.” (And in turn, the girls heard their fair share of, “take it off.”)
Judge Oliver
Wendell Holmes used to come weekly to the Gaiety theatre with an armload of newspapers. He read them when the comics were on, waiting patiently for the strippers.
“You know why, why would people come to see a burlesque show at noon? Are they really coming to see the comics at noon? My guess is some of those matinee performances were deadly and then the comics would really be entertaining one another rather than the audience. No wonder they drank. They were skilled artists, and imagine getting up doing this amazing thing, and there’s someone saying, ‘Where are the girls?’ It wasn’t always wonderful for the performers,” said Alan Alda.
Joan Arline added, “It was the satire of life. That was what every bit was.” Renny von Muchow, however, said “the humor was great and simple.”
Largely based on broad physical humor, one didn’t need to have a PhD to understand what it meant when a pretty girl walked by and the comedian’s tie would rise up. All manner of props could elevate in the room of a pair of baggy britches that were the uniform of the top bananas. It was humor with a common denominator for the working class crowd. It wasn’t elitist. It wasn’t pretending to be witty and sophisticated. It was raw, basic laugh-out-loud gags.
“Scurvy [Miller] would get a little silly. He’d pour from a bottle down by his penis. You learned timing,” said Joan Arline. “And to hold pose as [the liquid] peaks and comes down then you could say your next line. You couldn’t cut his laugh, he’d kill you.”
She added that “Scurvy Miller ... was an elegant guy, really a very sweet nice man, and then he’d take his teeth out.”
Stripper Joan Arline doing a bit with comedian Scurvy Miller
“Billy Boob Reed would come out and have this beautiful girl at the table and ‘Sure, have a little drink honey.’ And he’d be getting her drunk. Then he’d hold a bottle and that was a burlesque trick, you hold a bottle up and you spit it out about five feet while you’re doing it.” Or he’d be “getting sloppy drunk, she’d have to carry him off,” stated Renny von Muchow.
He added, “Peanuts Bohn had a funny long coat and a funny hat and someone would poke fun at him and he’d go, ‘What the hey.’ Never say ‘hell.’ But they got around that. And Billy Boob Reed would say ‘You god daaa’ and he’d never say the word goddamn’ or something like that.”
“You go past the comics’ room and they’d always have a big piece of wax paper on their trunk, a big raw onion and a big piece of limburger cheese. Oh boy. And a picture of Red Skelton,” said Dixie Evans.
Betty Rowland recalled, “They had fun teasing the girls. ‘Cuz they had to follow the girls.”
According to Joan Arline, “Harry Clexx was one of the funny ones. [He’d turn to you with] his eyes crossed and he’s saying, ‘Oh my God, my little pecker’s hanging out,’ to you quietly, and you’re supposed to not smile. He’d do everything he could to break you up. But God help you if you broke up.”
“Comedians would blackout their teeth to break you up. They were always trying to take you out, you know, a comedian’s a comedian. What they are on stage, they are off stage,” said Maria Bradley.
Betty Rowland said, “People loved the comics. A lot made it. Some went into Broadway then into burlesque, then TV, then legit shows.”
Through the years, burlesque would continue to poke fun at ethnic stereotypes, with the humor becoming broader. Because burlesque humor was obvious and universally appealing, the movies began to borrow from it, including the Keystone Cops who stole their slapstick style directly from burlesque.
Actor Alan Alda, son of straight man Robert Alda, recalled how often he would be thrust into a scene. Red Button and others “would take me on stage when I was six months old and I would pee on them and they’d have stories to tell for the rest of their lives.”
He was also part of the schoolroom sketch, sitting in a high chair with a bell that he rang. The comics played students. “They did private jokes. Because the audience hadn’t come to see them, they’d come to see the strippers. They told me, Phil Silvers and Rags Ragland, I was ringing the bell on all their punch lines. They thought that was hilarious. It didn’t matter about the audience.”
Another time a couple comics decided to play a trick on Robert Alda’s partner, Hank Henry, while he was performing a solo sketch. He was a drunk in a bar that was going to rob a safe, but he was so drunk he could barely make it over to the safe. “They put me inside the safe,” Alda recalled. “I’m watching through a crack. I can remember. I can still see the light coming through the crack. It’s a three- or four-minute silent pantomime of the skit. My heart is racing. I’m three! The comics said to me, Step out and say ‘father’—another joke I don’t get. He [Henry] gets over, he opens it, I step out in this little squeaky voice and say ‘father.’ He breaks up, everyone else breaks up. The audience is completely confused....
“Afterwards, here comes the company manager.” Egged on by the same comedians, they told little Alan to ask for ten cents for being in the scene.” I go up and say, ‘Can I have ten cents for today’s show?’ ‘No, you can’t kid.’”
Rags Ragland, born in 1905, was a legendary burlesque comedian, known both for his formidable talent and his antics off stage. He was only forty years old when he died after years of abusing alcohol. At the time of his death, he looked at least a decade older. Well respected and admired, he counted among his friends Frank Sinatra, Phil Silvers, and Orson Welles. Rags was a former boxer who became a house comedian with Harold Minsky, who cannily signed him to a contract for several years. He towered at six feet five inches and was a notorious ladies’ man. Rags was good pals with Georgia Sothern (whom he pursued romantically, but she wasn’t interested) and discouraged her from dating Errol Flynn, though she didn’t listen.
The highlight of his life, he claimed, was dining with President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House with his buddies, restaurateur Toots Shore and Frank Sinatra.
His act was playing a “professional dumb guy.” However, he was noted for his intelligence and he was, in real life, a gentleman.
According to New York journalist Jack O’Brian, Rags knew he was going to die and did so bravely (in 1946) after lying in a coma for days due to kidney failure. Sinatra would sing at his service in Hollywood.
“Dick Richards was a comic Romeo,” Maria Bradley remembered. Richards was married to stripper and talking woman Lorraine Lee. “Funny guy, and friendly. He wanted to go out with everybody. A sweetheart though. He was married to a talking woman, always taking the girls out,” Bradley said. Richards was described as gnome-like in a black derby and oversized overcoat.
Dick was born Richard Gluck. He, like so many who didn’t have a “big name,” worked more than thirty years, starting in 1939 in burlesque, never moving on like some of his contemporaries. He started at the Eltinge Theatre in New York on 42nd Street. He considered burlesque a stepping stone to greater things, though nothing more ever happened. His wife Lorraine said they had never retired; they just moved into dinner theatre and kept on performing. His income in burlesque never kept him flush—between gigs he would play the piano in nightclubs—but he loved it.
Gus Schilling was a rubbery faced comedian—think Jim Carrey. Schilling was a hard drinker and smoker, a protégé of Orson Wells who cast him in Citizen Kane. In the burlesque houses, he played nervous and confused characters. Gus and stripper Betty Rowland lived together and claimed to be married, although they weren’t. Betty says he was married to someone else. His drinking would cause her to eventually leave him. Schilling died of a heart attack just short of his forty-ninth birthday, his face marred by years of hard living.
Bert Lahr was quoted in Uncensored as saying, “I still credit everything to my training in burlesque.” Ironically, he was performing in a Broadway musical titled Burlesque when Hollywood came calling. His co-star was P. S. Ruby, whom the same talent scouts said lacked ability. P. S. Ruby would change her name and go on to an enormously long and successful career as Barbara Stanwyck. Stanwyck, even more ironically, wo
uld go on to star in Samuel Goldwyn’s Ball of Fire, stealing Betty Rowland’s act, costumes, and name. Betty sued, unsuccessfully, though it made for good publicity.
Former boxer Billy Hagan was known as “Cheese n’ Crackers” because that is the line he would shout when a beautiful dame sashayed onstage. His father, said to be a religious man, used the expression instead of cursing. It made Hagan a star. He would play with his vocal pitch, squeaking his lines out in a high voice, then suddenly dropping it to somewhere below his solar plexus when a girl entered the scene. He worked in burlesque until he was an old man, dying at age ninety-seven.
Happy Hyatt (Herman Hyatt) was a fat guy—over 300 pounds—who wore a derby, rolled his eyes and spoke with a gravelling voice. He sang loudly backstage. He retired after an infection in his foot caused his leg to be amputated.
Lady Midnight’s father was a well-respected comedian by the name of Monkey Kirkland. “He started as a dramatic actor. He was a very handsome man and a ladies’ man. He started out as a chorus girl—nobody knew he wasn’t a girl.” Lady Midnight sometimes was his talking woman.
“I did straights for Monkey,” Lee Stuart said. “Monkey was one of the funniest I ever worked with. Monkey had a saying that everybody stole. The straight man would be chasing him around and Monkey would stop all of a sudden [and say,] just be careful; I’m gonna flick a booger on you.’” The humor, though juvenile, never failed to garner laughs. Monkey would drop a pinto bean on the stage then step on it making a fart sound. He “was a good singer; he did moan and low,” Stuart said.
Monkey worked up until his death in a car accident. He ran a stop sign and was hit by an oncoming car. “People had to pull him out,” said his daughter, Lady Midnight. (Lady Midnight would suffer her own devastating car accident in 1969, where she broke most of her bones including a savage break of her left hip.)
Eddie Lloyd was a typical lifer. He performed his entire professional life as a second banana. The “best second banana,” bragged his son, Harry.
Behind the Burly Q Page 9