What did her grandmother think of her stripping? “She thought I was the most beautiful and best dancer in the world.... She was proud of me.”
Lillian worked in burlesque until she was twenty-two and suffered the humiliation of being arrested. She had been working outside of Boston and it “was a time when strippers were really being hunted down. I got arrested for lewd and lascivious conduct.” Even today, fifty years later, I could see the shame in Lillian’s face at the memory. The degradation and regret washed over her. How lewd was she? She was wearing panties and a bra, covered in ruffles. “Ridiculous.”
She spent time in jail, but the judge let her go, because there was no case, no proof of lewd conduct. “I was really scared.... I promised I’d never break the law again . . . and I never did,” she said.
Lillian continued, “My mistake was going into burlesque and wanting to take my clothes off. I should have followed my dreams... to be on the stage,... to be a star.... I didn’t have to do it by taking my clothes off.”
In 1953, Margie died when she was forty-two. “She OD’d on pain killers,” according to Lillian, and was buried in Worschester, Massachusetts, alongside her last husband, Clicker Joe. “She said she was thirty-nine.. .. [Burlesquers] always lied about their age.”
“Why was he called Clicker Joe?” I asked.
“He was in an industrial accident and lost an arm.” He had a claw and, as an avid burlesque theatre-goer, instead of clapping, he had to “click” his approval. Lillian said he was crazy about Margie. They had a son together, but tragically, three months after Margie died, their baby boy, just thirty-six months old, was accidentally killed by a car.
When Lillian’s mother died, Lillian was booked into a club in Boston on either the day of Margie’s funeral or the day she died. At that point, “I never missed a show,” she said. When Lillian entered the dressing room to prepare for the show, she looked up on the wall at the lineup of names from a previous show, an old show. “And my mother’s name was on there—‘featured attraction.’ That was probably the best show that I ever did in my life . . . I wanted to do this for Margie. I think I stopped the show that night,” she said.
Lillian tells me she has no regrets. When she left burlesque, she shuttered up her old pictures and costumes and press clippings and gave them to her Aunt Lillian, who kept them for her. She married Jim Brown, a juke box man.” She didn’t tell her husband or kids about her past. “I forgot about it. For fifty years.” Then in 1996, her aunt died and she “inherited her things and that trunk. When I opened that trunk itjust popped out. I had forgotten it.”
When asked if she would do it over: “I would do it in a minute and I wouldn’t change a thing. If they said I could live my whole life . . . over again—I wouldn’t change a thing.”
**
Sequin had captured me with her voice at the Reunion. She sang a sultry song titled “Sugar” from her wheelchair. It was a rousing and sexy song. She was talented and I wanted to know more of her story. In her prime, she was amazingly beautiful, buxom, wide-hipped, with short dark hair a la Ava Gardner. She was now confined to a wheelchair, whether for health reasons or her incredible girth I didn’t know.
During her first strip, she recalled, she was “very nervous. Getting out of clothes, I didn’t know what to do. Everybody’s looking at you. It was exciting. Once or twice, then I wasn’t nervous after all. Afterwards, [I was] usually drained and thought of all the mistakes I’d made. I wasn’t much of a dancer. Some were really trained. I just moved to the music.”
Sequin became popular, posing for the cover of many pin up magazines. “I was a celebrity. I missed it from the get go.”
She had a booking agent in New York who sent her on some strange trips, she recalled. Dick Richards helped her work the Ohio circuit. “You always wound up in Buffalo or Boston at the end, then Newark and start all over again.... I’d say I was on the road forty-eight weeks out of the year. I started when I was twenty-four, retired when I was twenty-eight.”
She married Tony Tamburello, a pianist, vocal coach, and arranger who, besides a long and enduring relationship with Tony Bennett, counted Judy Garland and Jerry Vale (Rita Grable’s husband) as clients. “It was love at first sight because he knew all my keys. He arranged the last music for my farewell to burlesque at the Empire. Then he wrote me arrangements for nightclub work. A year later I married. I retired again.”
Sequin
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
On the Road Again
“New Orleans was a city of glamour.”
—Kitty West
“In theatres it’s a seven-day week, close Saturday, drive or fly to the next performance and you open again on Sunday.”
—Alexandra the Great “48”
Train travel could be long and difficult. Ricki Covette (far right) and others.
“Burlesque life, like circus life, was largely based on travel,” explained Professor Janet Davis. “It was a hard life, but an addictive one.”
Every major city had at least one burlesque theatre. Working the circuit meant months on the road away from family and home. When performers pulled into a new city, they were rushed to prepare for the next show. More often than not, they had mere hours to even get to the next city and the next theatre, gather music and props, throw on wardrobe, rehearse and be ready for the 1 o’clock show.
“First time I worked St Louis,” said Alexandra the Great, “when I got my schedule it said ‘Buffalo, NY.’ It didn’t look that far on the map. But I drove all night in a snow storm.”
Sequin had similar experiences. “Agent would book me from one end of the state to the other.”
“I was booked two years in advance. And all the other girls, too.” said Dixie.
If you were a feature attraction, you would “come in at noon, maybe on at 2, maybe no rehearsal,” said Betty Rowland. Those were the traveling features. “Stock players stay at one theatre all the time. Chorus girls are stock. Principals travel. Sometimes a local stripper, a ‘favorites of the neighborhoods’ would come in and do a strip.” That favorite might only be a hit in her hometown. It was a short, thrilling dip into burlesque for many local girls.
Sequin would frequently stay in “housekeeping rooms with kitchen privileges. One show person would tell another what would be the best place to stay. Everyone knew where to send you. Usually nice and clean,” she said.
There was this thing called the wheel in burlesque. In the 1900s, there was the Columbia Wheel. There would be the American, the Empire, and the Mutual. Burlesque theatre owners formed circuits where a company of performers toured for forty weeks, going around like a wheel from one theatre to the next as a group. This went on for nearly thirty years, which was why many stayed so long in the business. It provided constant income for the players.
There were forty shows touring on the wheel in the early part of the 1900s, according to Burlesque by Sobel. By 1905, there were seventy shows playing and touring the circuit with huge casts of chorus girls, comedians, novelty acts, and strippers.
Competing wheels kept popping up, striving to outdo one another. According to Martin Collyer, however, “the cleanliness would rise and fall.”
These traveling shows brought a bit of Broadway to middle America. Mike Iannucci explained, “Burlesque was the poor man’s musical comedy. The Ziegfeld Follies was the major show on Broadway. Burlesque was like the step below them. It was always a good entertainment.”
Shows had dialogue, comedy, dancing, strips, and singing. They played four or five times a day. To keep the audiences coming back, they needed to rotate the comedians and strippers weekly.
The wheels spun fast and furious. Betty Rowland said, “There would be a dress rehearsal the night before you opened. After show another dress rehearsal. Then 11 the next day, the show would go on.... The pace was crazy: ‘Here’s your costume, move it.’”
At the Hollywood, they rehearsed Thursday and Friday mornings, threw a dress rehearsal Friday afternoon
, just before the 3:30 matinee, then they were off till the 8 show. It was an exhausting schedule.
Sally Rand claimed to have performed in all fifty states.
“It’s an extremely disciplined business. You have to be there when the theatre curtain goes up or somebody else will be there next show,” said Betty Rowland.
A burlesque show had “no stage waits. That show moved. It was wonderful. It was a theatrical show. Everything entertaining but had a flair, crazy and gaudy,” said Dixie Evans.
“Scramble and stumble, backstage, quick changing,” remembered White Fury.
Sequin traveled the Ohio circuit, which included Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Buffalo up to Boston, ending at Newark to “start all over again.” It was stressful making the next gig. “Sometimes, you’d have not a lot of time,” she said. As her show was prop heavy, she drove with a trailer loaded with furniture, wardrobe, and her “kitchen stuff” so she didn’t have to spend time and money eating in restaurants. She traversed the country this way for years. “I loved it. It was fun,” she said. She often slept in her car.
The Wheels started petering out but the Hirst remained, regularly booking acts into the 1950s, though there were far fewer theatres to perform in. By then, most of the performers drove their own cars; train travel didn’t make sense.
“I traveled to nightclubs and drove myself in a big white station wagon with the big white dogs. I made an entrance,” said Joan Arline.
Alexandra the Great said, “I traveled all the time alone. I was always traveling from one city to the next by car and I was always worried about breaking down so I did have a pistol in my coat. I didn’t have anything in it, but I had a gun.”
“On tour was pretty hard,” said Kitty West. “You’d meet strangers, rehearse with different bands, different owners and all. We had to drive in those days. I had to go with my whole entourage. I couldn’t fly with an oyster shell and trunks of wardrobe.”
Once the cast pulled into town and checked into the hotel, they would search out a place for cheap eats. There was always a bar next door to the theatre where they would meet for drinks, sometimes before the show, often between shows, and inevitably after the show.
One of Alan Alda’s earliest memories was “walking down the aisle on the train while the company was playing cards and drinking, joking. They called a long train trip a two-bottle jump.” As a young boy, Alan would sleep on top of some seats jammed together. The humor on the trains was “raw, mostly not meanspirited. But there would be fights.”
Al Baker Jr. said, “You traveled with like twenty-two chorus girls, you traveled with wardrobe. You had your own car on the train where it would go from place to place. Your trunks, one trunk would be in the hotel for you and the other trunk would be at the theatre ... and it was, you know, it was show business.’”
“The burlesque theatres used to pay your freight from town to town and you could take trains,” explained Carmela. “I didn’t like that so much because sometimes you had cockroaches on those trains.”
Beverly Anderson recalled one incident when she needed to move quickly between towns, going from one show to the next. “One time [a musician in the company] was going to drive to Canada. He said there was no room for me in the car. He could have squeezed me in.” She was not going to be daunted. “I hired a cab driver to stand in the wings and catch my wardrobe for me as I threw it off in the wings. He threw it in a bag and then got me in the taxi and went to the train. But I had to ride all night long sitting in a G-string and net bra with a coat over me.” She got there on time.
“I worked all the time,” said Alexandra the Great. Jess Mack was her agent. He would call her and say, ‘"You need a vacation.’ So he’d send me someplace to work and I always thought I was on vacation. [He] sent me to Hawaii.” She was held over in Hawaii for three months and ended up living there six years. “I rarely took time off. I worked 90 percent of the time.” So did most of the headliners.
Joni Taylor was on the road from 1953–56. During the summers, she came home when the burlesque theatres closed. Then she’d travel to Atlantic City and work the Globe on the Boardwalk.
Holidays didn’t close the shows. “Every holiday was a big spectacular,” said Dixie Evans.
Maria Bradley remembered, “Christmas we had to work.” But she had no regrets about the missed holiday. “I wish I was young and right back there where I started.”
They worked every holiday no matter what the season. “Fourth of July, Minsky put sparklers on you coming upstairs, blacked house, flag unrolls. Audience used to whistle and stomp and scream,” said Dixie Evans.
In San Diego, the Hollywood Theatre was a family. “The performers came to Thanksgiving dinner,” said Dee Ann Johnston. “We still do the same. For any out-of-work actor.”
“They traveled around the country together pulling into Toronto in the middle of a snow storm and piling into the theatre, living in a crappy hotel with green wooden walls,” remembered Alan Alda. They were gypsies in the long tradition of roving performers. The entertainers did the best they could making homes away from home.
“We used to travel with two shopping bags, right? What was in those shopping bags? A coffee pot, three dishes, three knives, three spoons,” recalled Al Baker Jr. “You ate in the room. In every hotel when you checked in, it says, ‘No cooking in the rooms.’ But in the morning by nine-thirty or ten, you’d smell that coffee brewing.”
Sequin had similar experiences. “I learned how to make spaghetti sauce in an electric percolator,” she boasted.
Stripper Lorraine Lee and her husband Dick Richards had a system to make their life on the road comfortable. “We carried a big suitcase with a set of dishes bought in Las Vegas for five dollars. We carried pots and pans. He was a great cook. We just lived out of that,” she said. They carried a bedspread with them and “Dick would tear pictures of Modigliani paintings” from books and they would tape them around their room. “He would put scarves over lamps.” When they arrived at a town, usually as early as 7 a.m., they would rush to a hotel with their suitcases. Lorraine would carry on to the theatre and unload their wardrobe. They’d rehearse and “by 12, we were operating fine. He stayed in the apartment and grocery shopped.” Closing night, the curtain would fall by 11 and by 11:30, “we’d be in the car on way to next town.” They did that for years. “It was . . . you know, it was a home away from home. Wherever we were.”
“It was an adventure for me,” said Vicki O’Day. “Some hotels were awful. The funniest was in Denver called the Friendly Frontier. They had women wrestlers and dwarf wrestlers and strippers and truck drivers there. They had Sunday prayer meetings. We all went down to that, which was booze and music. A 250-pound waitress fell in love with a dwarf wrestler and he’d sit on her lap. It was a crazy thing.”
Some girls traveled with their managers or manager/husbands, like Tempest Storm. Others traveled on their own.
“Working the road is very difficult,” said Alexandra the Great. Even though she was only onstage an hour out of the whole day, she said, “You’re ready and there all day. It gets lonely. You have a lot of time, but then again you don’t. An hour between shows. You always have to be close. You can’t get too far from the theatre.”
Tee Tee traveled all over the country. To keep her from being lonely, Zorita gave her a little Pomeranian she named Stripper. In the winter, Tee Tee would wear her mink coat that “someone gave [her],” and she would put Stripper in her sleeve when it was snowing or if she traveled by plane to keep the puppy warm and safe.
In Phoenix, Sequin acquired a medium-sized puppy she took on the road with her. “It grew and grew and chewed up many pairs of shoes. They let you have a dog in most of these places. She gave birth to eight puppies in one of these little houses in Ohio. I’d come home between shows to see how many puppies had been born. She had them on the bed.”
April March said raising a daughter long-distance was challenging. “I never went on the road more than six weeks
at a time. I had her stay with some people. I called every night. Of course I spoiled her to death . . . right?” She looked at her daughter during our interview when she said this. “Right? I always called her before she went to bed.” Her daughter didn’t see her mother perform until she was twenty-one. “Ann [Corio] brought her in wings, once, and I was so mad. I danced to the side. Ann said, ‘Catch your mothers’ gloves.’ I said, ‘Take her away. Take her away. I don’t allow her to see me perform.’ Ann said, “There’s nothing wrong.’”
April March
Betty Rowland would book a three-month contract. There wasn’t “much of life outside of theatre. With four shows a day, five on Saturday, the social life was usually with people in the theatre.” It was an insular group. They stayed together.
Local towns on the circuit considered the features “celebrities. Mom-and-pop places were tickled to death to have us,” said Dixie Evans. She recalled one restaurant, Captain Joe’s in Newark, a swanky place that sent her a note: “‘Come eat on me, bring autographed photo.’ We were looked up to in most places.”
A stripper with her gimmick —a snake
The closeness of traveling and performing together week after week led to pranks and hijinks. Maria Bradley recalled one particular night: “Freddy, a big gal. She didn’t like us, we didn’t like her. You know those marshmallow cookies? We put eyelash adhesive between the two cookies, hoping . . . I don’t remember what that outcome was. Or a long pony tail, we’d hang it on the back of a costume before a girl went on stage.”
Behind the Burly Q Page 18