While the average stripper could make a living, often a very good living, saving for the day when the net bra began to sag proved far more challenging.
Beverly Anderson said she made good money “but always owed money.” There were travel expenses, wardrobe, press agents and agents’ commissions that came out of every salary.
“I learned a lot how to survive off my salary,” Sequin said. In the beginning she made $150 a week. “Every time you went around the circuit, you got another gown and another $100 dollars.” Eventually her salary would rise to $750 a week. Considering the cost of gas in 1950 was 18 cents, the cost of a car roughly $1,500, and the average income $3,200, Sequin was doing very well.
Terry Mixon made $50 a week in the ’40s, which she said was “a good salary.”
Twenty years earlier, Betty Rowland was paid $16 a week when she started out as a chorus girl performing four shows a day. Eventually, when AGVA was formed, conditions improved. “The chorus girls would have a couple days off.”
AGVA didn’t stick up for us,” said Maria Bradley. “It was a nightclub union. They didn’t do a darn thing for us. We’d still have to rehearse without pay and if you didn’t want to rehearse, you were out of a job.”
Starting as a chorus girl in 1953, Joni Taylor would volunteer “for anything” to earn extra money. “If you can dance, they encouraged you to do a strip here and there when someone did not show up or someone became sick coming in off the road. And they also gave you bit parts like walk-ons and you got paid extra for that, and if you had to do lines, you made more for talking.... I really loved the extra money,” she said.
However, to some, it was a trap doing scenes and bits with the comics. To open one’s mouth on the stage cost the girl’s star status and a star’s salary. “If you were a good talking woman, you would never get any more money and you would never become a feature,” explained Val Valentine.
Many strippers refused to work with the comedians, striving to become the headliner and get the salary that came with it.
Al Baker Jr. said, “Comics in them days were maybe $175, $200 and some of the real, real good comics might have gotten $250.”
Renny von Muchow added, “The burlesque houses paid us $300 a week for the act and we did four shows a day for that.”
“Every six weeks you had to do a strip and you got the magnificent sum of $1.50,” said Lorraine Lee, sarcastically.
“I never was stood up for my pay either, and I know some people were and a show would close and the bosses would flee,” said Sequin.
When Lee Stuart started doing straights, he said, “I signed on for thirty-five dollars a week. Which in those days, you could get a room at the Earl Hotel for two dollars, and you could eat for a dollar a day. So I thought I was in the big time.”
“I think what kept a lot of girls in burlesque at the time was the money. Because what they were paying for scale was nothing. It was chump change. We were making money,” said Val Valentine.
“At sixteen, I had three children, and I was supporting those children,” Joni Taylor recalled. As a chorus girl she made forty dollars a week, which was enough to feed her family and then some.
Many sashayed in and out of burlesque, retiring once they married and had children, going back in when they needed the money. Tee Tee Red said, “We got in trouble financially, my husband and I. I said ‘Well, let me go back on stage and I’ll get us out of trouble.’ I booked myself for one tour and made $1,500 a week and I was out of trouble in no time.”
Like celebrities today, the women relentlessly pursued publicity by hiring press agents to keep their names in the papers. Keeping up appearances as a feature was expensive. Many spent thousands on their wardrobe and lifestyle to impress fans, agents, and club owners.
“God, [if] you don’t have a mink coat and a Cadillac, the agent’s not gonna give you any money,” Dixie Evans said. “You don’t dare go in the agent’s office with a cloth coat.” One had to dazzle the agent, who got you the work. One had to make a lasting impression, both on and off the stage.
Mimi Reed
Carole Nelson recalled her Aunt Ann Corio “walking in late to Christmas Eve mass, with the big mink coat and the jewelry and smelling of all these colognes. Just grandeur. She was larger than life. She was Auntie Mame.”
“We had the power. We had the money,” said Dixie Evans.
Lili St. Cyr blew through the thousands she earned weekly. “I always have to make money to pay for things.” Lili rarely ever took a vacation or time off. She needed to work—spiritually and financially. Many women like Lili were not supported by husbands or family. Indeed, they were doing the supporting. They made it on their own despite the turned-up noses outside the theatre.
Gypsy seemed to hang onto her money. In 1940 she purchased a townhome on East 63rd Street in Manhattan. The fairly stripped exterior belied the lush interior. There was a private courtyard, twenty-six bedrooms and seven baths. Gypsy had gold monograms applied to the doors.
Others, like Sally Rand, invested in property. Blaze saved and bought the Two O’ Clock nightclub in Baltimore. Ann Corio made a living during her heyday, lost it in a divorce, and earned it again and then some with the success of her show This Was Burlesque, which ran almost thirty years.
Tassel twirler Sally Keith “had a half a million dollars here and thousands there and her furs and her jewels,” claimed her niece Susan Weiss.
By contrast, the everyday working comedian and straight just made a living. Alan Alda declared his father never made money to boast of—not in burlesque or in movies, where he had a studio contract, or in the nightclubs. Burlesque was steady income. And when it was over, one could take a job in a piano bar (Alda) or sell hot dogs (Al Baker Sr.)
Alexandra the Great had a deal with Rose La Rose, her mentor. “She coached me. I worked her theatre five months while she prepared me to go on the road. I always went back to Rose. That was my agreement with her. I worked for Rose three or four times a year at the Town Hall. I would always work there at a certain price. Elsewhere my price was different,” she said.
“I knew that there would be a day I’d quit, but I really didn’t prepare for it financially,” remembered Vicki O’Day.
Many never organized for the day burlesque and the big salaries would vanish. It was a slow death, yet unexpected to those who were blind to its imminent demise. As their looks faded and their bodies were no longer desirable, the strippers couldn’t compete with the women coming into the stripping profession—for surely it wasn’t burlesque any more, no matter what the marquee outside called it. As early as 1930, Sobel was complaining: “Teens were flooding the market, knocking out the older burlesque women.” It was nothing compared to the competition that arrived in the 1950s and beyond.
“All the girls were much younger. I was starting to hear about age. That would be the first question they’d ask me,” said Tee Tee Red. “I didn’t want to retire.”
In the beginning, the strippers were “experienced. Towards [the] end [if you were] young, walking and breathing? Walk to time? You’re in,” remembered Dee Ann Johnston.
“You think, ‘Oh this gravy train’s gonna run forever.’” April March looked wistfully away, full of thoughts of the day when she was being courted by princes and getting paid for it.
The other cost was the continued discrimination and attitude towards the strippers, in addition to having to deal with arrests and fines. They were stuck with what they were doing. They couldn’t move up the show business ladder.
“Few crossed over. Gypsy was the closest. Other women crossed over in small ways. Mostly, no,” said Rachel Shteir.
The fact of rising costs both with unions and the greed of the theatre owners changed the landscape of the burlesque show. Eventually the size of the orchestra was reduced, one union musician at a time, until eventually live music vanished from the pits and the payroll. They were replaced by tape. Comedians were slashed, novelty acts dropped.
“Our careers
in show business ended when flesh acts were not in demand anymore,” said Renny von Muchow.
Val Valentine said, “The unions closed a lot of the theatres because they couldn’t keep up with the salaries.”
“Unions were terrible,” Dardy Minsky agreed. “They would put you out of business. They told you what to do. It was all crooked.”
When Lee Stuart started in 1947 there were six to eight girls in the line. When he quit ten years later, they were down to four or five. “They cheapened it by taking personnel out of it. They kept cutting down the personnel. And then the chorus girls started stripping.”
“So it got down to comics and strips,” said Val Valentine.
The entire chorus was soon abolished. The large opening number, middle picture number, and the grand finale dropped. All the while, the feature strippers asked for bigger and bigger salaries, which helped push out the smaller acts.
Uncensored Magazine compared the costs of producing a show: In 1935 the average salary of a chorus girl was $21 a week. Other salaries were: the straight man, $50; the house singer or the juvenile (Bud Abbot’s starting career), $35; the feature stripper, $125; musicians, $60. A producer’s salary was $125.
By 1954, the chorus had dropped from twenty-six girls to sixteen at $75 a dancer per week; straight men were up to $175; a feature stripper anywhere from $350 to $4,000—or more for the big marquee names.
Due to the rising cost, some theatres were down to less than a dozen performers for a two-and-a-half hour show. In 1954, the average price for a ticket was still only $1 or $1.50. Uncensored claimed Minsky’s still prodigious show cost $12,000 a week to produce, but it was, of course, a more elaborate affair and drew the majority of the crowds lining up to see the Lili St. Cyrs and Tempest Storms. By then, dozens of burlesque houses were closing.
Since AGVA had been representing the strippers, and all acts in burlesque, minimum salaries were enforced, which wasn’t without controversy within the union itself. In 1951, Gypsy Rose Lee was an AGVA official. In 1953, there was a move to throw out the strippers, as they were believed to be giving the entire profession a bad name.
Jack Ruby so detested the competition down the strip at Weinstein’s Colony Club with its popular “amateur stripping nights” that he tried to break AGVA of its policy to allow “amateur” strippers to perform in the union houses for less pay. Ruby (mirroring the growing resentment across America) was jealous of the continued success of burlesque in such class places as Weinstein’s. He despised their success. Ruby, like the mayors and councilmen and church groups, was a pot about to boil over.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Family Life
“I married a piano player—and that was the thing to do.”
—Joan Arline
“My family was very proud ... not like some ...
‘Oh, you cannot go there.’ What striptease?
I just show my bum, nobody touches me.”
—La Savona
Some girls were introduced to stripping through boyfriends and husbands. When Joan Arline’s husband suggested she join a burlesque show, she was deeply offended and wouldn’t speak to him for weeks. “We didn’t have burlesque in Connecticut. If you knew what it was, you didn’t admit it.” Joan, who died in 2011 at age seventy-eight, didn’t stay offended for long. She loved her chosen profession. Her husband Don might have gotten her into peeling for a living, but she would strip herself of that marriage and go on to another three.
Stripper Kay Hanna said her husband had taken her to a burlesque show. She thought “Gee, anyone can do that.” When her husband got hurt and was unable to work, she “had to make money.” She found an agent and started making club dates in Philadelphia.
The first time she stripped, she couldn’t believe she was actually doing it. “Wow,” she said. “I was horrified to think I had to do this. But you get through things.” Her husband then started promoting her. They didn’t stay married much longer. She divorced him and left. “It was too difficult. We were in these clubs, both of us drinking too much.”
Her ex-husband called the authorities several times and had her arrested at work. “He was mad at me so he was going to make it difficult for me, so he complained about me,” she said. Eventually she quit the business because it was “getting a little too rough.” She retired and did clerical work.
Sequin used to ride with her father, a bootlegger running liquor up Highway 1 in California. They would stop in honky-tonk places “and I’d get up and I’d sing. He’d be behind the bar doing whatever he was doing with bootleg whisky.”
As a young woman, there were few singing jobs available, so when her boyfriend Ted suggested she become a stripper she didn’t so much as flinch. Her boyfriend took her to a few clubs in Los Angeles to see how they did it and ended up booking her into Strip City in 1954.
Lillian Hunt would eventually train her. Sequin was influenced by Lili St. Cyr, who worked with fancy props and sashayed ladylike across the stage. Sequin liked that concept: “the lady, but the tease.” Sequin would meet her future husband and love of her life at Minsky’s Adams Theatre in Newark. Tony Tamburello was Tony Bennett’s coach and musical director of forty years. It was love at first sight. She was one of the lucky ones.
“Married life didn’t work. You were there, he was there,” said Val Valentine.
Blaze was a hopeless romantic with her affairs, always believing “my man’s gonna come along,” she said. “He never did. Oh God, I’ve been in love about five times.”
Sally Rand told her son, “I married the man I shouldn’t have and vice versa.” Sean thought she had four husbands, but “Sally only talked about three.” He read about a supposed husband named Gray when he was young. “She had lots of boyfriends,” he remembered.
Sally’s engagement to one of her husbands, Turk Greenough, garnered headlines. A Helen Greenough claimed she was still Turk’s current wife. “How can he marry that fan dancer if he’s married to me?” she had asked. According to Mrs. Greenough, Sally met Turk at a rodeo in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1935. When Turk took the prize, Sally ran up to him for his autograph. Mrs. Greenough claimed Sally was just the type of “society woman” that would turn her bronco buck’s head.
Sally did turn his head so sufficiently that he untied himself from his wife and the two were married in 1942. However, Turk left for the army in ‘43 and the two never had the chance to live together. They eventually divorced.
In 1950, at age forty-six, she married her manager Harry Finkelstein. This was a more manageable, and common, relationship.
“Usually you had maybe three talking women and they were married to the comics or the straight man or something like that,” said Al Baker Jr. “It was a family thing.”
Lorraine Lee met her future husband Dick Richards backstage in St. Louis. “I saw a pair of white sneakers, no socks, seersucker shirt, Irish face, no hair. He throws his arms around the singer, says, ‘Benny, have you been true to me since I’ve been gone?’ Now Benny’s a big guy and he says, ‘Oh, Dickie bird.’ I found out later, he had asked everyone who could best do the scenes. I got elected. I worked with him upteen years.” They were together thirty-five years. “I told my mother when I met him, ‘He’s Jewish.’ ‘Well, does he treat you nice?’ ‘Yes. “If he treats you good, that’s it.’”
Comedian Dick Richards was married three times, twice to strippers. Lorraine Lee, a former stripper (who looked anything but in our interview with her grey bob, glasses, plaid shirt, and silver horse earrings) was his last wife.
“Dick was a comic Romeo. Funny guy and friendly,” said Sequin. “He wanted to go out with everybody. A sweetheart, though. He was married to a talking woman, always taking the girls out.”
Richards claimed he hated the early years of burlesque because the shows were so grueling, but the benefit was the girls.
Lady Midnight admitted that she had gotten married because she didn’t want to go on the circuit alone. “Jimmy Matthews said, ‘Oh well, let’s go,
we can share a room.’ So we married in April on stage of the Follies Theatre.” Lady Midnight knew that Jimmy was in love with her, but the feelings weren’t mutual. She wasn’t attracted to him: “He said he was 45. He could have been in his sixties... he barely made it to my shoulders.”
“Once we were on the road for about two weeks, [and] he decided to try to get into bed with me and I pushed him away and got my own room. After about three weeks I decided I didn’t want to do what was demanded of me [which meant getting completely nude at some of the clubs. ‘Something we didn’t do in LA.’] So I called it quits and went back to the Follies. We were divorced in May.” She admitted the marriage “was also a plus in the publicity factor... I never got to see him again.”
Vicki O’Day said, “I was married to four different men, but husband number three I married three times, so he was three, four, and five. And then number six lasted about five minutes.”
“I got married in Hawaii when I was thirty and then I married four times after that, but I forget the times,” said Alexandra the Great.
April March also shared her experiences with love on the road. “I never found a man that I didn’t fall in love with. When I fell in love, I felt it was right to be married. I was terrible.” She looked sheepishly at her daughter, who was sitting next to her while we talked. “I had too many of them. Liz Taylor and I have the same amount.”
Kitty West was an exception to most of the strippers’ marriages. “I was married fifty-two years. And he was my greatest fan.”
Some husbands would be jealous of wives who made money popping pasties for other men. Lili St. Cyr complained of this often.
One of Tee Tee Red’s husbands “couldn’t handle it. The marriage didn’t last long,” she said. She had met him when he was bartending and he knew of her work. She earned more money than him. “I was the breadwinner,” she said. That rubbed him the wrong way.
“My last husband said, ‘You’re in a degenerate business,’” Tempest recalled. “It shocked me. Yet, here he was living off my earnings.” This was the African American singer Herb Jeffries. “It’s the business I was in when you met me. You drive big cars and go on cruises. You’re spending my money,” she said she told him. Jeffries, a former actor, was known as the Bronze Buckaroo for his low-budget cowboy flicks. “He was a great singer, but he was lazy,” Tempest said.
Behind the Burly Q Page 14