Six-year-old Alan was sent to a boarding school while his parents traveled the circuit. “I hated that pig,” he admitted. When they ditched the pig act, Alan rejoined joined his traveling parents.
Alda’s mother had won a beauty contest that led to a tour in a vaudeville show. “The whole act was a bunch of young women in bathing suits. That was the act. That was unusual in those days. She didn’t have any talent of any kind. She was very loving in spite of the fact that she was schizophrenic and paranoid,” Alan said. And though her symptoms didn’t manifest until he was eight or nine, he still remembers it as being a difficult childhood.
It was hard on her husband. “He didn’t complain or talk about it. Both suffered from it, but didn’t say anything. No one talked about mental illness; it was a real shame. In the same way you didn’t talk about cancer or calamities. It seemed to bring discredit to the family.”
Soon Hollywood called and Robert was offered a contract. His first movie would be a biography of Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blues. It was a huge hit.
“Because of my mother’s growing mental illness,” Alan said, “it was difficult for him to climb up the Hollywood ladder, socially—that’s how they did business then. They never went to parties where he would meet people to advance his career.” Instead, every Sunday night Robert’s old burlesque buddies would come by the house. Some of the comedians had gone into writing or acting for the movies, some were still in burlesque, and they would do sketches for one another.
There was a small area in the house the old friends used as a stage, two steps up from the living room. As Alan explained, the old corny sketches that had been repeated for decades in burlesque were trotted out. And even though everyone had seen them over and over, the “audience” would laugh.
That was Alan’s “education of show business.” The professionals were so skilled at what they did. “There was an appreciation of the improvisational moment when you take something that everyone knows and make it fresh.” He grew up watching his father’s friends, who had that skill of doing the “same old thing the way it’s never been done before.”
Robert would go on to star on Broadway’s Guys and Dolls, originating the role Marlon Brando would perform in the film.
When Alan was eighteen, his mother was finally institutionalized. They were in Amsterdam when it happened. Robert was working. “No one took her to a doctor. She drank, to medicate herself.”
Alan watched his dad on stage from the wings. “He’d make a banana curve” to the microphone at center of the stage. Alan dismissed it as his father playing at a “movie star, and it [seemed] phony.” He realized much later it was the kind of movie star entrance “the audience wanted. They don’t use a fourth wall. It’s direct communion with audience. It’s impossible to do on film.”
In later years, Robert suffered strokes and still “wanted to perform up to the end . . . but couldn’t say much.” Alan’s father died the same year as his mother. They had been divorced for twenty-five years. “Neither one knew the other was dying across town in different hospitals. I would shuttle back and forth,” Alan remembered.
Robert was “proud of his background,” Alan said. “I think it was a badge of having lived through a training ground and tough work. It was hard work. And you learned a lot. You could stick him out on a stage and he’d take over. He could emcee any kind of show.”
Years before his father’s death, Alan cast his father on M*A*S*H*. “Here we were, father and son playing this scene, and we actually have to figure out how to do this sewing maneuver. And so now father and son, just like the two characters, actually have to learn how to cooperate. And if it weren’t for this background that he had in burlesque of writing corny sketches, I wouldn’t have to have been put into this corny situation, where I actually had to cooperate physically, mentally, emotionally, intellectually with my father. It was a wonderful moment in our lives.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
From A to C
“By chance he happened to meet Bud Abbott, who was the most sought-after straight man.”
—Chris Costello
“What the guy didn’t know is that those pies were being thrown into people’s faces through the course of the shooting day.”
—Chris Costello
Abbott and Costello were the most famous comedian team to emerge from burlesque. Everyone had a story about the pair, each proud to have shared the stage with the talented and legendary duo.
Lou Costello was introduced to burlesque through the Ann Corio show, explained his daughter Chris Costello. He was a “dancing juvenile,” who came out before the top banana and warmed up the audience—only he would get the laughs. Ann Corio took an interest in Lou and started to groom him. “Ann loved my dad,” Chris remembered.
Bud Abbott with Ann Corio.
Chris Costello
Ann Corio introduced him to his future wife, one of the ponies (the short chorus girl on the end) on her show.
The story goes that Lou was so struck by stripper Anne Battler that he clumsily knocked over a prop on stage, which in turn hit her—and knocked her out.
Lou pursued Anne despite the accident. Anne complained to her friend Ann Corio, “Why do I want to date a burlesque comic? If I want to starve I can starve on my own.”
“Cut to five years later,” Chris laughed, “and Anne and Lou are living in a twenty-two-room home South of Ventura with a swimming pool, maids, butlers—the whole nine yards.”
One day at the house, Corio turned to her friend. “Well, Anne, what’s it like to starve? This is amazing for starving.”
From the Corio show, Lou Costello soon got a partner and started on the circuit, “which wasn’t the blue circuit,” said Chris. This was a term I never heard anyone else mention in all the interviews I conducted. Chris claimed whatever circuit her father was playing wasn’t as “dirty” as some of the others. He only believed in doing the “clean circuit.”
Soon thereafter he shared the bill with the older-by-ten-years straight man Bud Abbott, whom “everyone wanted to work with.”
Born William Abbott, “Bud” was born into the burlesque circuit; his father was an advance man. Bud had been working for at least a decade prior to meeting Lou Costello. Lou’s straight man was sick and Bud filled in. The rest, as they say, is history. They worked all the burlesque theatres for a few years: New York, New Jersey, Chicago, Philadelphia, and so on.
They would know phenomenal success, their routines etched in American history. As the burlesque houses were closing, Lou wanted to get to Hollywood and get into movies. “Bud would have been happy to stay in burlesque,” said Chris.
The two appeared on the Kate Smith radio show, which was burlesque-oriented, as were all early radio and television shows. Lou wanted to do their “Who’s on First?” routine, knowing it was their ticket. But the manager of the Kate Smith program wouldn’t allow it. He told them to do anything but that “silly baseball thing.”
Lou threatened to leave, saying, “We have no material,” which forced the manager to let them do the routine, catapulting the two into stardom.
“His roots were burlesque,” Chris explained. He loved it. Most of their routines are still familiar—and funny—today. They came out of what they perfected on the burlesque stages.
In radio, Bud raised his voice and created the “whine” so their voices wouldn’t be identical. His high-pitched voice differentiated the two on the air.
“There was a 60/40 cut. The straight man usually got 60 percent. Then when they came out to Hollywood, Dad said to Bud, ‘I think let’s change it. Now let’s do 50/50.’”
While making movies, “they would bring their stooges on the set. Pie throwing. Matchsticks, you know, in the shoes. There was a little Italian baker that baked all these fresh pies every morning. And dad would go in on his way to work. And he would buy up twenty, thirty pies. And this baker was so thrilled to think that Lou Costello loved all of his pies. What the guy didn’t know is that those pies were being
thrown into people’s faces, you know, through the course of the shooting day.”
Chris continued, “They were always in competition. If Bud Abbot put a pool in and it was so many feet, my dad would have to put his pool in and extend it a few more feet longer. They were like brothers.... But God help someone if they said anything derogatory about the other.”
Chris admitted that they loved each other, but they fought sometimes, too. “One of our maids left to work for the Abbot family. That was it. There was no talking to Bud Abbot for like six months.”
Bud and Lou split up in 1957—“amicably,” Chris confirmed. Comedy was changing. “It was slowing down. They were slowing down. [Lou] wanted to get into dramatic acting. That’s all he wanted to do. Bud wanted to stay part of Abbott and Costello.”
Lou had developed rheumatic fever during the War Bond tour. “Every five to seven years, fluid would build up around his heart.” Chris believes had he lived even six more months, there would have been viable medical treatment for his heart condition.
Lou died in March of 1959. Like his deceased son Lou Jr. who was buried on his first birthday, Lou was buried on his birthday. He would have been fifty-three.
“It stunned Bud. Bud never got over that. He kept saying, ‘I lost my best friend.’”
Abbott and Costello onstage.
Chris Costello
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Backstage
“Chorus girls would go home and do laundry between shows.”
—Taffy O’Neil
“Backstage was always very lonely.”
—Alexandra the Great “48”
Backstage at the Follies with stripper Betty Rowland the Ball of Fire
The chorus girls were already on stage for the opening number. Twenty-two pairs of feet slapped across the stage. The musicians in the pit were wailing loud and fast and hard. The house singer with his slicked-back hair and dark suit was singing a song to the full audience. From the wings, the comedian and his straight man checked props in their pockets. Backstage, the air was thick with the smell of tobacco, and clouds of smoke billowed over the heads of the comics and chorus girls. The place smelled like a combination of deli food—sour and meaty from the town’s Chinese restaurant where the cast dined between shows.
There was a quick blackout, applause, and a scramble as girls poured off the stage, feathered hair-dresses bouncing, and a novelty act moved in front of the curtain to juggle.
It was continuous motion backstage as a couple hefty stagehands lugged props. Strippers and novelty acts rushed up and down the stairs to the green room and the communal dressing room at the top of the stairs. Three older comedians sat around a table smoking cigars and playing cards. They stole sips of contraband whiskey and kept half an ear out for how the first team was doing on stage. So far, no cries of “bring on the girls!” The routine must be going over well.
In her dressing room, neither big nor lavish, but private with a tiny sink screwed to the wall, the feature stripper sat melting dark makeup in a flattened spoon over a lit candle. With a steady and practiced hand, she began to bead her eyelashes. She applied a tiny drop of molten black makeup to the end of a couple lashes. Beading made the eyes pop. The stripper already had on her opera hose, G-string, net panties, pasties, and net bra and was about to shimmy into her aqua silk gown that fell to her feet. A rhinestone necklace adorned her neck. The room smelled heavily of powder and perfume. There were scattered vases of flowers from admirers. A silk robe and a couple other dresses were tossed over a chair. On a red velvet chaise were a variety of gloves, hats, and shoes. Her suit, prim and proper, that she would wear back to her hotel was hanging on a wardrobe rack. Makeup bottles and jars were neatly assembled in front of the mirror along with cards from boyfriends taped to the mirror.
A rap on the door by the stage manager, an old man named Charlie who had been with theatre for nearly forty years, let her know her cue was coming up. Applause wafted down from the audience. They sounded well-behaved. She hoped to change that with her bumps and her forward thrusts. Her dance was on fire.
The click of shoe taps thundered past her closed door, disappearing at the green room down the hall where an acrobatic duo warmed up their muscular bodies with lunges and a few contortions. Propped against some furniture, a tired chorus girl caught a nap. She was hung over.
One of the older talking women, married to the comic, was ironing her dress, worn and well starched.
The club owner’s teenage son was running the spotlight. He dropped in a lavender gel and switched to a blue light for the co-feature.
Upstairs, the chorus girls were jammed into a crowded room, vying for space in front of the mirrors. It was hot and humid with no way to breathe anything but perspiration, thick makeup, and cheap perfume. G-strings, washed and drying, hung from light bulbs around mirrors. Girls stole makeup for one another, tried hiding valuables, and had petty arguments, always with a cigarette in hand. Bottles of Stage White, a makeup that made the girls’ skin look like satin, were in use.
While the comics were on stage, the house singer gargled, adjusting his bow tie, a cigarette dangling from his mouth.
The choreographer and the backstage manager were arguing. The manager checked his watch; the co-feature was taking too long. If she stayed any longer on the stage, she would drive the union musicians into overtime. “Wrap it up,” he yelled from backstage. The G-string seller slunk by with a box of sparkly panties, hoping to lure more sales than his competition, who had come the week before.
While the performers sweated it out under hot lights in a stifling theatre with rows and rows of men applauding, yawning, and hollering, a candy butcher and bouncer kept their eye on things. Backstage was its own chaotic caldron to get the show on and get it on timely and right.
Come behind the curtain to witness the whirl of nonstop activity that made a burly show.
**
“Shows had to go fast. A lot of mothers came to make sure their daughters were dressed well in the show. It was survival, actually,” said Betty Rowland.
In 1947, Lily Ann Rose was fourteen and working at the Casino Burlesque Theatre in Boston. Backstage, other girls stood around talking and smoking heavily. And it wasn’t always cigarettes the girls were smoking. “I remember once [in Chicago], standing in line to use the bathroom and the girls in front of me were passing a lighted butt around. I did not know what it was, but when it came to me I smelled it and it smelled horrible. One of the girls said go ahead, puff on it.’ I smelled it again, made an awful face and said no thanks,’ and passed it to the girl behind me.”
Backstage preparing
Betty Rowland backstage
The theatre was not only permeated with the smell of cigars, cigarettes, and pot, but also some food. Joan Arline recalled, “Sammy Price, every Saturday, would come into the theatre with rye bread, limburger cheese, and onion. And every Sunday it smelled like someone had left a pile of you know what. . . . Oh, how we looked forward to the limburger. We’d have it for supper between shows. We were asphyxiating each other on the stage because we stunk. God, it was good.”
“There was a smell in the theatre, mold or something,” Alan Alda also recalled. Joni Taylor said, “Backstage had a life of its own. Always a green room for waiting and listening for cues and once in a while, the stage hands ran in and out to get something.”
Dardy Minsky remembered being so tired, she’d frequently fall asleep on the props backstage and wake just in time to hear her overture.
One time, as the chorus girls were dressing, “we all decided something was wrong,” said Joni Taylor. “A lot of our net panties were missing and a lot had been fumbled with and were wet, if you get what I mean. We had high rafters in that theatre.... Our stage manager was Maddy Mixon [stripper Terry Mixon’s mother, also a stripper] and she had her own dressing room near the chorus room and we all heard her say, ‘What are you doing up there?’ and then she started yelling for the stage hands for help and here was this g
uy in the rafters.” The offender would use the rafters to go from room to room. “He jumped from the rafters and ran to the entrance door and jumped out over about twenty steps. The stagehands got him and called the police and they found he had broken both of his legs on that jump. We all decided the crotch of our chorus pants must have been worth it.”
Another time in New York, Blaze Starr was the feature strip. She often performed with dangerous cats, including a baby black panther. Blaze and Joni were upstairs in their dressing rooms when all of a sudden they heard screaming downstairs. “Blaze went running down and her panther had chased Solly [a stagehand] up the entire curtain. The audience was already in the theatre and waiting for the first show to start,” Taylor said. They thought it was part of the show “and we all got a great laugh from that.”
The chorus girls shared a crowded, smoky, hot dressing room. The feature stripper had her own room. Dardy Minsky recalled the chorus girls hanging their G-strings around the lights of their mirrors to dry after hand-washing them.
Joan Arline declared, “Some dressing rooms [were] terrible.” Crowded, smelly, dirty. But they made do. In Detroit, when she worked the Gaiety, the theatre “had a leaning board [a board where performers could lean on their back at an angle so as to be able to rest while wearing tight and elaborate costumes]. They were passe then, but it had one. It was wonderful,” she said.
Sherry Britton backstage
The competition and the pressure to excel led to fights. Sherry Britton claimed to have been beaten up nineteen times by other strippers.
Behind the Burly Q Page 11