Zorita “was tough with a good heart. She didn’t take no nonsense.” Was she misunderstood? “Yes.” Was she making up for a tough, unloved childhood? “Yes.”
Before Zorita retired for good, she and Tee Tee traveled together as a team.
Zorita was the feature and Tee Tee the co-feature. “I would go on just before her. The star always goes on last,” Tee Tee said. Tee Tee was announced as “Zorita’s Extra Added Attraction.”
Tee Tee came up with a gimmick of sorts. “I would take a bra and use it like a sling shot and aim it at people. Miss them right side their head, or hang it on pasties and twirl it around.”
Suddenly Tee Tee’s eyes darted to the side and in a sharp tone she reprimanded. “Joseph, I’m gonna get angry with you.” Her grandson had been about to or had touched our lights. No problem except to himself. They were very hot and he could burn himself. “I’m very strict,” Tee Tee explained. “Now get up there and sit down... come on, be a gentleman... don’t make a fool of yourself.” Joseph started to tear up and hide his face. Her voice softened. “He’s embarrassed now.” She assured him she loved him. There was pain in her eyes. She said she wanted him to do well in school. She was compensating for her absent daughter. I wondered how absent Tee Tee had been from her daughter’s life when she had been on the road.
Tee Tee worked New Orleans the same time as Blaze Starr on Bourbon Street. They were both features in New Orleans at the same time, but worked opposite sides of the street. Blaze at the Sho Bar, Tee Tee at the 500 Club.
According to Tee Tee, Blaze had been Zorita’s first protégé in Baltimore. Tee Tee said Blaze and herself were in “competition” for Governor Earl Long. Tee Tee called him a “dirty old man.”
Tee Tee loved working the 500 Club. The owners would bus the audience in for the show. It was always a full house. The other entertainment around her was good. She remembered Allouette, who twirled tassels on her boobs and on her rear. There were famous singers. She couldn’t remember all the names.
There was a “peep show” on top of the 500 Club. It was a small room where the girls would take turns dancing by themselves. There was a small window and the men would sit on stools and watch the dancers through the window as the girls gyrated to records in the middle of the room. They couldn’t see the customers. The girls would dance for twenty minutes.
Our interview with Tee Tee kept returning to Zorita.
“Zorita was my manager and had me under contract,” she said. In Baltimore some Vegas people “wanted me for their show. I didn’t want to go. I was afraid to go. I didn’t know what was on the other side. I was happy what I was doing,” she said. Was the small-town girl afraid of the big leap? Many burlesquers had a hard time straying from what was familiar, the money they knew they could earn, and their fans. They might want to “be a star” in Hollywood, but very few made any steps in that direction, preferring to stay on the circuit year after year, til most opportunities had passed them by. Surprisingly, very few were bitter.
Tee Tee was proud she had been in the Jerry Lewis picture The Bellboy, but “never got the break that [she] needed.”
She answered every question and laughed easily, if not exactly carefree. Her past seemed to be filtered through many troubles, whether current or old I couldn’t tell. She didn’t seem particularly eager to talk, but she didn’t hesitate, and as she warmed up she began to float more freely from memory to memory. Her eyes began to sparkle a little.
Tee Tee always checked out the stage wherever she went prior to a show, so there would be no surprises. One night she didn’t have time. During her act, the heel of her shoe caught in a tiny hole on stage and Tee Tee “landed in the whiskey bottles.” It was a runway stage that went out into the audience. She just flew out over the audience and landed upside down.
Tee Tee “worked until go-go came in.” Most of the nightclubs were gone by then and the stage was so tiny, “the strippers couldn’t have costumes, not an elegant long gown or cape to strip out of. So the girls came on without any costumes. ... Towards the end I started doing yoga on the stage.”
She told me she mostly retired after she married and had her children, going back in if she needed the money. “I ended up being the breadwinner.” I looked over at Joseph. Tee Tee was still the breadwinner.
She was a little vague whenever the subject of her children came up, saying she didn’t work much when they were little, yet moments later saying she didn’t retire until she was nearly fifty. It sounded like she was in and out of burlesque, working clubs at various times. Her mother came and went, helping Tee Tee with the kids between marriages.
Florida was always Tee Tee’s home base. She always came back to Miami.
When she wasn’t on stage, there was enough drama in her life to keep her busy. Once, she’d gotten in an auto accident and drove through a brick wall of a church. “They didn’t appreciate that,” she said. Her Lincoln Continental windshield dissolved into powder, she claimed. She banged up her knees pretty badly and couldn’t work for a while. She went to Leroy Griffiths and he gave her a job. Since starting this project, I have continually heard stories of burlesque people looking out for each other, sticking together in difficult times.
The car accident wasn’t the only event that ever threatened her ability to work. “I got mugged. I was almost killed. The man beat me to a pulp,” she said. Tee Tee had pulled into a local gas station about 10 o’clock at night. She filled her car up and, as she was getting back in, someone grabbed her by her neck, “slammed” her to the ground, and started beating her up. He broke her arm in three places. “Before that, I could work circles around anyone my age,” she claimed.
Even though it was nighttime, the gas station had been “lit up like a Christmas tree.” There were witnesses and, fortunately for Tee Tee, a cop drove up during the attack. The mugger had just gotten out of jail and wanted a car. “He mugged me December 12th. He’d gotten out December 1st.” Tee Tee said she never really recovered from the incident.
Where did this happen? Tee Tee pointed across the street to where I had just come from buying batteries.
Tee Tee, the dynamite stripper with the all-American looks, had been pummeled, the zest taken from her figuratively and literally. She ended up in the hospital, her body broken, her dreams shattered. She had never really saved any money.
As the months passed, she became desperate. A doctor friend gave her a job, the same doctor she was working for now. What did this former glamour girl with the attention of governors and a wardrobe that included minks think about her life in this dismal doctor’s office with the cheap paneling and her six-year-old grandson in her charge? I think it had become a daily struggle for Tee Tee to hang on. But she was doing it. She wasn’t giving up, though there would be even more heartbreak in store for her.
A year later, I called Tee Tee. She was crying. Her daughter “had been dumped under a tree like garbage” in the neighborhood where I had interviewed her. She was dead. Tee Tee’s long struggle with her daughter’s addiction finally came to a desperate conclusion. Tee Tee said she would continue to raise her grandson Joseph.
**
Lillian Kiernan Brown is an erudite and energetic woman not afraid to tell it like it is. Charming and well-spoken, she wasn’t earthy like some of the other women I interviewed who had stripped. She was refined, self-educated, and held herself in high esteem. She had a loving husband and children. I think the only thing missing for her was being back in the limelight. She very much missed being on the stage and the center of attention, adored by many admirers.
She was still tall and beautiful, with sharp blue eyes and short, cropped blonde-red hair. She lit up the screen. She told a story in an entertaining way. And she had many to tell.
Lillian had a great sense of humor and intelligence. She searched carefully for the right words. Besides her book Banned in Boston about her time in burlesque, she had been writing for various newspaper columns since 1966. While in Morocco, married to her f
irst husband, who was a navy chief, she started working for the base newspaper and had her own show on the Armed Forces Radio.
Lillian’s current husband, Jim, was tall, handsome, and gentlemanly, though slightly deaf and not in good health. He retired to the den while we conducted the interview with the TV on full blast, shuffling in every now and again to her annoyance and gentle reprimands. She would remind him this was her interview, please he quiet. She did not want anything taking away from her moment.
Lillian—also known as Lily Ann Rose, Lloma Rhodes, Shadow and Statute—had an intriguing story. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she had wanted to be in burlesque since she was three years old. Ann Corio (a big star at the Old Howard at the time) would come for dinner at Lillian’s grandmother’s house because she had worked with Lillian’s mother and aunts. Corio, the burlesque queen, and Lillian’s grandmother, Josephine, were both Italian. “I wanted to be just like her. I came out and started doing a strip.” Her grandmother stopped her before she could remove her diaper.
Lillian’s mother, Margie, and her Aunt Lillian worked in vaudeville as part of the Patent Leather Girls, traveling in vaudeville shows during the 1920s. When vaudeville died, her Aunt Lillian retired from the stage and raised young Lillian while Margie dove into burlesque, variously, as a talking woman, chorus girl, and stripper. Lillian’s younger aunt Karen worked burlesque also, but didn’t start until the 1930s.
Lillian’s father was long gone. “I never did find my father. He was what they called an auctioneer in vaudeville and burlesque and a talking man on the circuit and in carnivals. His stage name was Joe Rose but his real name was Herman Mendelsohn,” she said.
His parents escaped from Russia before Hitler got in to power, and came to the U.S. as immigrants to make a better life.
Grandma Josephine was an extraordinary woman for her time. She loved the “risqué” shows and was not ashamed her daughters were a part of them. She marched for women’s rights, telling Lillian, “Don’t ever let anybody tell you [that] you can’t do something because you’re a woman.”
At the time, women were not allowed to go to the movies unescorted unless they were “ladies of the evening.” So Lillian’s determined grandmother dressed up like a prostitute so she could see her five-cent movies.
Margaret LaManna, stage name Margie LaMont, lived on and off with her dreamy-eyed daughter, Lillian, perhaps teaching her a dance step or two or a phrase from a popular song. Married four times, “always to the wrong person,” Margie had “a lot of problems. Mental. She was not a drunk,” Lillian said, possibly not fully comprehending the definition of alcoholism. “She wouldn’t drink every day, but when she did drink, she’d disappear and she’d be gone three, four, five months.” When the beautiful Margie resurfaced in her young daughter’s life, she would always be remarried and pregnant. It was a “trend,” and then she’d sober up and “give the baby away,” leaving it with her newly estranged husband’s family. Margie knew she “wasn’t able to take care of it,” Lillian said.
An old newspaper article Lillian had in her possession showed a wide-eyed blonde Margie with the caption begging, “Identify Amnesia Victim.”
One of Lillian’s half-sisters was kidnapped when she was just six months old by her father and hidden for years because Margie was so “unstable,” Lillian said. Margie searched for her, but would die without ever finding her daughter. When Lillian was eighteen, the half-sisters found each other and have been close ever since.
Lillian believes her mother had multiple personalities, which would explain her strange behavior and long disappearances.
Margie worked mainly at Boston’s famous Old Howard theatre, which had once been a church and a vaudeville house. It had seen the likes of Sarah Bernhardt, Fanny Brice, Fred Allen, and John Wilkes Booth trod the boards there.
Lillian herself got into burlesque proper when she was fourteen. It was 1947. “It was summer vacation and school was out,” Lillian said. She went to The Casino in Boston to try out as a chorus girl. Naively, she didn’t think her mother, who was performing down the street at the Old Howard, would find out.
“I wanted to be up there,” Lillian said emphatically. “I had to show my legs.” (Which I could see during our interview were still long and shapely.) Lillian explained she didn’t look fourteen, as she had been wearing makeup since she was three or four and was always “glammed” up. Photos of the buxom beauty confirm this. She was beautiful and mature-looking for her age.
A teenage stripper Lili Ann Rose
Photo courtesy of Kathleen Fries
Lillian, of course, was hired, at twenty-five dollars a week for three shows a day. It wasn’t until five days later that her mother discovered her daughter’s new profession. Between shows, the performers used to go eat at Joe & Nemo’s, a restaurant in Scollay Square where burlesque thrived in downtown Boston. Lillian was there and so was her mother. Margie sat her daughter down and gave her a lecture, telling her if she worked the chorus line, that’s where she’d remain for the rest of her life. Margie told Lillian she should finish school in the fall. Contradictorily, Margie also suggested Lillian go to Sally Keith’s and try out for her new review. Sally was looking for girls.
Who was Sally Keith?
“Sally Keith,” Lillian explained, “was the greatest tassel dancer that ever lived.” The fabulously well-liked Sally dazzled crowds at the Crawford House. She was a jean Harlow look-alike who was loaded with diamonds and furs.
This was a perfect opportunity for Lillian, who piled on the makeup and beat it down to the club. At the audition, waiting her turn, was Lillian’s Aunt Eleanor, whose stage name was Karin. Karin occasionally worked the Casino and Old Howard and was jealous of her voluptuous teenage niece. Karin told the attention-getting teenager that if she auditioned, then Karin would have no chance and would go home.
“You know how much I need this job,” her aunt told her. Karin could easily manipulate the teenager. “She did financially. I said, ‘Okay I won’t try out.’ I sat in a corner and watched.” After the auditions, Sally noticed the pretty teenager and asked her what she was doing there. Thinking quick, Lillian told her she was looking for a job. What could she do, Sally wanted to know.
“I’m a secretary.” Sally thought about it and said “that’s just what I need,” and tossed Lillian her clipboard and pencil. Lillian spent the next year and a half following the vivacious blonde on tour and in her beloved Boston, where Sally packed them in.
“I learned how to produce a show,” Lillian said. The Sally Keith Review was filled with dancers, comedians, and singers. Lillian had to learn about lights, costumes, and talent.
Sally was “good to me,” Lillian said. Lillian wrote Sally’s PR. By learning to write, Lillian learned something that took her beyond burlesque and through the rest of her life.
But Sally had her demons. “She reminded me of my mother,” Lillian said. Sally drank too much. Lillian, though underage, was responsible for driving Sally’s gold Cadillac when Sally couldn’t, or didn’t, drive. “I was a big help to her,” especially when the hard-partying Sally got drunk and “couldn’t function,” Lillian said.
After a couple months playing “Secretary,” as Sally addressed her, Sally enlisted Lillian to help her pick out new costumes for the showgirls. Lillian tried on four or five different outfits. Finally Sally finally turned to Secretary and asked, “With a body like that, why do you want to be a secretary?”
Lillian was honest. “Sally, I have to tell you the truth. I don’t want to be a secretary. I want to be a stripper.”
Quickly Sally had the dance captain put a number together for Lillian. She was the girl in gold for a statue act. “In those days, if you were scantily dressed you couldn’t move.” Barely clad beauties would pose on the stage as frozen statutes in tableau. Lillian was covered head to toe in toxic gold paint. It was a popular “outfit” at the time and performers only had a short period of time to be covered in the paint, then they would have to get
out of it. “You could die from it. In fact, a lot of performers did die.”
Lillian also did a shadow act, dancing behind Sally to Me and My Shadow.
The first time she stripped, Sally dressed Lillian in a scarf covering her breasts. Lillian had a parasol and was supposed to swing it in front of her then remove the scarf behind the parasol, keeping the parasol in place.
Tassel twirler Sally Keith
“But I was so excited that I just threw the parasol. And I let it all hang out... and almost got the show closed.” The censors and police threatened to immediately close the show if Lillian performed again. From then on, clever Sally disguised the young girl or had her perform under a strobe light so she wouldn’t be recognized by the censors.
After so many months spent away from her grandmother, Lillian got homesick and went back to Boston and got herself an agent. She would go on to strip without the guidance and protection of Sally.
The glamorous Lily Ann Rose, as she was billed, made a lot of new friends, including the notorious bank robber Teddy Green, who was responsible for one of the largest robberies in Massachusetts’s history. A frequent guest at grandma Josephine’s house, Lillian’s grandmother thought the nice gentleman was a Laterene Coffee salesman, as he always brought cans of the coffee as a gift when he visited. Caught and sentenced, he spent time on Alcatraz where he studied law. Eventually, Green would get his conviction overturned.
One night driving together on the way to the theatre, comedian Teddy English played a powerful joke on Lillian. He was teasing her relentlessly, saying she would be expected to show her “little fur cap” that night. He kept teasing her until finally she was a “nervous wreck. I didn’t know what he was talking about,” she said. However, at the theatre a chorus girl quickly told her what Teddy was referring to. “So, I said, ‘well, I’m not gonna show my fur cap.’ So I went in and I got my razor ... and I shaved my little fur cap. Then I flashed it that night because I thought I had to.”
Behind the Burly Q Page 17