With rumors of their marriage pending, “a columnist called me.... He said, ‘I’m gonna talk to you like a father: Don’t do it. He’s a has-been,’” she said. Tempest did not like being told what to do. “The more people told me not to do it—I did it. Which was stupid, detrimental to myself.” Jeffries would direct Tempest in the film Mundos Depravados, billed as a “sex murder mystery.” The fifteen-years-younger Tempest played Tango, the dancer. Jeffries and Tempest eventually divorced, to no one’s surprise.
Like Tempest, too many of the women in burlesque supported husbands with their hard-earned salaries.
Straight man Robert Alda’s wife understood he worked nightly with a bevy of half-clad strippers running to and fro backstage. Sometimes it was too much for the stay-at-home mother. “One night she accused him of having an affair. When he denied it, she tried to stab him with a paring knife,” recalled Alan, who was six at the time and witnessed the struggle. She was “paranoid,” he recalled. But “sometimes paranoid people are right,” he said.
Robert Alda, his wife Joan, and son Alan
Photo courtesy of Alan Alda
Barry Siegfried, son of stripper Mara Gaye, attended a show with his father. “[He] took me to a show that my mother was doing. When we sat down and the show started, my mother came on stage and I said to my father in a not-so-quiet voice, ‘What’s mommy doing up there without her clothes?’ ... I had wonderful parents. They taught me values of being independent, using my brain and not following the masses. I grew up as an honest person. They didn’t hide anything from me,” he said. But it didn’t mean they were as open with the neighbors. “The burlesque part of my mom’s showbiz career was kept quiet,” he said.
“When you start to have children and they’re in school, you have to be careful who you tell,” explained White Fury. “A lot of people didn’t approve because they didn’t know. They thought it was a bad thing. Or girls that were dancers were bad people.”
April March said of her daughter, “I sent her to Catholic School and she took my 8x10 photo to school. And I had to go see the Mother Superior. She said ‘I would appreciate it if you didn’t give your daughter your 8x10s.’”
Most of the strippers did not take their children on the road, except sometimes during the summers when the kids were out of school. Most were left behind.
Once Tempest divorced Jeffries, he raised their daughter. “My daughter traveled with me when she was small. At seven, she went with her father. We thought it best because I was traveling so much.” Tempest admitted the separation was hard. “And she kinda resented me and we were estranged for about ten years . . . until four years ago. We became very close.” Tempest’s daughter danced for a couple of years, too. She called Tempest once and asked, “Do you have any costumes?”
Lady Midnight had no choice but to have her daughter backstage at the Follies in Los Angeles. She was single and needed to work. “She loved going downstairs to the rehearsal room to watch us practice. She was also sometimes allowed in the wings when the show was running.” The comics would watch her three-year-old daughter. “They got a big kick out of her and guarded her as if she were a precious diamond.”
As a child, I was standing in the wings. And no one thought that that was weird.” Alan Alda shook his head.
Candy Cotton’s daughter would visit her during the summer. Once when working in Toledo, “she walked across stage one day to get to me.” Candy Cotton said her daughter stayed at her mother’s in New York during the school year. Sometimes it was the housekeeper who was left to watch her son and daughter. She hesitated when I asked if she was close with her children. “Closer with my son than daughter,” she responded. The separations seemed to be harder and more unforgiving for daughters. Candy Cotton’s stint in burlesque didn’t seem to faze her son, she said. For her daughter, it was another matter.
Carmela, the Sophia Loren of Burlesque, was living alone in Las Vegas when I met her. We had many conversations on the phone during the last months of her life. She said she started dancing young. At age five, she would run to her “mother’s bookie and he’d say, ‘Tap for me,’ and give me a nickel and a bag of chips.”
She was a cocktail waitress when a woman named Lola Beaver came in and taught dancing. And “this club owner thought I’d be a good stripper,” she said. “They talked me into being a stripper. I can’t learn from anyone else. I have to do my own thing. What a disaster. [The audience] made fun of me. The stage was tiny. I was trying to put my wardrobe down and a guy reached up and grabbed me. I lasted a week there. Went to another place. I had to learn to relax and that I was on the stage for a purpose. Took me two months. I started doing splits and yoga and back bends.”
She told me she was the proud mother of two children. Her son was an ordained minister. Her daughter sold real estate. From our conversations, I had the distinct feeling that as proud of them as she might be, they were not an active part of her life.
“I had a wonderful Filipino neighbor and his wife. They were great with my two children, and they used to take care of them. And I used to call them every night and I laid the law down, and I said, ‘I expect you to abide by my wishes and you will check in with Six Toe and his wife,’ which was the Philipino man.”
April March said she spoiled her daughter Cyrese, who was left with grandparents, as often as she could. All my boyfriends used to come over to the house. They wanted to see my mom. They thought she was beautiful,” explained April’s daughter Cyrese. April had Cyrese when she was eighteen. Cyrese explained, her voice shaky and teary-eyed, that “sometimes it wasn’t so pretty growing up. I didn’t fit into the social groups. That was really hard. I was shunned. I remember going to a girlfriend’s home. She was on the floor with her siblings. Her mother answered the door. This is really sad. I still remember this and it breaks my heart. Her mother said, ‘Oh, my daughter’s not home.’ ‘She’s sitting right on the floor.’ ‘She’s not home to you.’”
Vicki O’Day’s daughter told her years later that it was difficult having a very pretty mother.
After one interview with a former stripper, whose name I will not print to protect her and her daughter, her daughter broke down and confessed she had been abused as a child one of the times her mother had left her behind. The daughter had spent years hating her mother.
Tee Tee Red didn’t speak much about her three children at all.
Sean Rand said, “When I was first in school when I was younger, people would come over and say, ‘Your mother does this dance, or whatever, and then she takes her clothes off.’ And I was a little bit embarrassed.... She picked up on that and sitting down explained to me what the dance symbolized: two herons flying over a moonlit lake in the Ozarks of Missouri.”
Some strippers that didn’t have children traveled with their mothers. Rose La Rose traveled with her Italian mother. Dixie Evan’s mother spent a majority of her time, once they reconciled backstage, on the road. Her mother would “babysit the star’s poodle or baby.” Her mom was “tickled to death.” Dixie said her mother “loved those girls,” and the old comedians would sit and talk to her all day.
Gypsy’s son, Erik Preminger, was hauled around both in the carnival and theatres. He would never quite move out from under the dominating shadow of her astounding success. He writes books about her, gives interviews, and does much to keep her memory alive.
Gypsy would ban her own troublesome mother from backstage. And her memoirs would cause a rift with her sister, actress June Havoc, who thought the recollections of Mama Rose portrayed her too endearingly. June wrote two autobiographies that told a a different story. She believed her mother was mentally disturbed. June also wasn’t happy with the way she was portrayed in her sister’s memoirs, as she was the one supporting Gypsy and their mother. Wherein Dainty June in Gypsy elopes, and as she exits the curtain her story is over. In reality, June had a harder time. After she ran away from Mama Rose, she was oftentimes destitute as a teenage bride, living on bus stops, while Gyps
y began to make her own, very good, living. June remembered her sister as “ruthless” and her mother as “lethal.” She said they were really “the same person.”
It was easier for the comedians to travel with family. Usually, if the mother wasn’t working in the show, she took care of the kids, providing some semblance of routine and normalcy despite the hardships.
Harry Lloyd said, “I wanted a model train set. We had no place. We never lived in a place where I could have it.”
Al Baker Jr. openly adored his parents. Raised on the circuit, he too would eventually get into burlesque, owning and operating theatres. In 1947 the whole family traveled to California when Al Jr. was thirteen to work the Burbank Theatre. They drove out in Al Sr.’s 1942 Buick and stayed at Lou Costello’s house. “Bud and Lou were big at Universal. They were king,” he said. Al Sr.’s friends, other comedians in burlesque, “begged” Al Sr. to come to California and try and break into films. But “he was conservative, he knew he was the best in the business and could work fifty-two weeks if he wanted. And that’s what he liked. Never got into movies,” said Al Jr.
Having a parent in burlesque often led to unconventional lifestyles. Barry Siegfried said, “I grew up as a nudist because they went to the nudist club in the late 1940s. I spent every summer of my life at this place. In the 1950s you didn’t talk about things you did as a family that other families did not do. I was raised an outdoor nudist, but when it came to being in the apartment at home, my parents would say, ‘Now you don’t walk in front of the window without any clothes on.’ But this was a time when you could lose jobs over this kind of information,” he said. His parents were also into bondage and discipline, using restraints and ties. It was “lighter than S&M,” though, he said.
Barry’s mother was a dark-haired stripper named Mara Gaye. She and her husband, who managed her career, were free spirits. They were “into everything,” he said. When Mara died, Barry went through closets and found tons of magazines, porn, and S&M material.
“I wouldn’t change my childhood for anything, because that’s the childhood I had and that’s what I work from,” said Alan Alda, “but it was a form of abuse to not protect the kid from some of the stuff that the kid would see.”
Tee Tee Red
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
All You Need Is Love
“What kind of a person would work in burlesque?”
—Maria Bradley
“I couldn’t sing or dance or do anything, but I was bound or determined to get into show business.”
—Dixie Evans
Mimi Reed wasn’t remotely interested in being interviewed by me or anyone else. However, I persisted and I’m grateful. At ninety-seven, Mimi claimed she couldn’t remember anything about her time in burlesque starting from the 1930s, when she was a specialty dancer.
Six months earlier, her partner, friend, and lover of sixty years, Thareen Aurora, had died. Mimi was despondent.
I kept up a correspondence and phone calls for nearly six months. Finally Mimi agreed I could stop by her house and chat.
When I walked into her garden on a sunny Los Angeles day, there was a stiletto-thin red-headed sprite with close-cropped hair determinedly banging on a picture frame with a hammer.
Mimi had clear and brilliant blue eyes, a sharp nose, and she wore a colorful housecoat down to her ankles. She was trying to extract a picture of her and Thareen. She seemed no older than someone in her seventies.
When she had time to sit with me, everything poured out. She recalled with great detail everything about her years in burlesque working with Abbott and Costello, Robert Alda, Joey Yuel, Georgia Sothern, Margie Hart, and Betty Rowland.
One of Mimi’s specialty dances was performed with a giant rubber ball like Sally Rand. In 1944, at the Hollywood Casino, Billboard called her singing “warbling,” but said her Afro dance was “lovely.”
The dressing room in her house, next to her bedroom, was covered with 11x14 black-and-white photographs of her and Thareen. They had had side-by-side dressing tables with big light bulbs surrounding each mirror. They had performed together in theatres for years.
Specialty dancer Mimi Reed
There was a picture of “Allie” Alda at three or four years old holding his dog, looking exactly like the seventy-one-year-old man I had interviewed.
Mimi, at the height of her beauty, looked like Rita Hayworth with big red lips and a svelte figure. She had been gorgeous. Thareen was shorter, almost stocky with dark eyes and hair. Mimi and Thareen billed themselves as Reed and Aurora, “Nutty but Nice.”
Mimi brought out a stack of scrapbooks and photo albums and we spent a few hours flipping through them. She had toured in the carnivals, in nightclubs, even going to Cuba with Thareen, who was an opera singer. Mimi had been in burlesque, circuses, then legit theatres. The pair had been on the road a lot.
Born in Connecticut, Mimi started dancing when she was a child. She performed with her sister, another gorgeous dancer who looked just like her. They billed themselves as the Reed Twins. They danced in movies in the chorus line in Los Angeles. “Betty Grable was with us,” she said.
Eventually Mimi’s sister quit the business, married, and moved to Santa Barbara. Mimi moved back East and worked for Minsky. When I asked her if she had ever stripped, she stated, “I should have. I would have made a lot of money. That’s my regret. I would have done a lovely job.”
Besides dancing with her balloon, she did comedic dances. She went to the dance director and told him what she wanted. “He gave me the foundation, to which I added. I did a voodoo death ritual. I carried a real skull. And one night it slipped off the tray and crashed. Teeth all over. Oh, it was a mess.... [A friend] had skulls sitting around his office. He sent me another one.”
Mimi had once been married to a straight man named Ray Parsons, who was a “big Crosby-type singer.” Mimi was also a talking woman. “Sometimes I had to make a fast change.” She would do her solo acrobatic dance then run upstairs and change. “I had a split second to change for my entrance. If I didn’t make it, they would just ad lib ‘til I got there. During intermission, we’d rehearse. I was valuable as a talking woman and dancer.”
She also danced in the big production numbers. “The pay was low compared to what a stripper made. Sometimes it got very tiring.”
Thareen’s grandson, Stewart Edward Allen, told me “Mimi and Thareen were both playing at the Burbank and they met backstage and Thareen just knew, it just clicked—T want to spend the rest of the life with this woman.’ And I don’t think Mimi’s marriage was a great one and I certainly know that Thareen’s was not a really satisfying relationship.... They were obviously a couple. They obviously adored each other.” They ditched their spouses and moved in together.
Mimi Reed and partner Thareen Aurora
When Mimi met Thareen, they started an act that featured a stray cat they had found. The cat was named Minette and they trained her to jump through hoops.
They bought their LA house together in 1948, where they enjoyed life after show business. When Mimi retired, she worked for an architectural firm. Thareen stayed at home taking care of their pets and the garden, and they would share afternoon cocktails around the bar in their living room with neighbors and friends.
Mimi was grief-stricken by the loss of her soul mate. I spent afternoons at her house, listening to her stories, sitting with her on her bed, trying to get her out of her funk. Her depression was much deeper than that. After several months, she grasped my hand and told me she didn’t want to live. It broke my heart. She would lay in bed, half listening to the television. The spirit had slipped out of Mimi like air from the balloon she had once danced with.
Mimi died in 2007. Stewart said her cancer had gotten her, her days ending painfully. But she died in her own home, in the bed she had shared with the love of her life, Thareen.
**
A love story of another kind was the enduring friendship of Rudy and Renny. I interviewed a nearly blind for
mer acrobat Renny von Muchow in his Yonkers home with his wife Dorothy von Muchow, who used to belly dance and worked Wild West shows.
Renny had met Rudy when he was fourteen and Rudy was thirteen. “They had a contest in school to see who the strongest boy in school was. And sure enough, Rudy and I came out to be on top. And we liked it so much, and we gained such a reputation for our strength in school. So we became hand balancers. Burlesque shows at that time showed novelty acts. And some of them were acrobatic and we said, ‘Oh, we can do that. Why don’t we do an act that no one else can do because they’re not strong enough to do it?’ And we developed the act called Renald and Rudy, which kept us together for twenty-five years.”
Their act was seven to eight-and-a-half minutes. Occasionally they would do a single trick, like they did on the Phil Silver’s show, such as a high handstand.
They balanced one above the other, gripping arms, or cantilevered side by side. Their strength was applause-inspiring. Renny suggested they keep their bodies looking as much alike as possible, and in photos it is difficult to tell the two apart. Amazingly muscular and tan, they wore tight white shorts, or pants, and usually no shirts.
They also had a glass floor made. “It would come up with us posing on a gold rock. We’d break pose, go hand to hand, sitting around us were nude girls, quite a distraction for two guys with their hormones running.”
Novelty act Renald and Rudy
No one seemed to love burlesque or his part in it as much as Renny. He lit up when he talked about it, reliving all the characters. “Georgia Sothern would set the place on fire when she’d come out,” he remembered.
Behind the Burly Q Page 15