Alan Alda would hang out in the alleys of the theatres with cops and horses. That was his playground. It was, Alda related, a “sense of living a life in a world different from middle class at that time.”
Comedian Eddie Lloyd’s son Harry said, “The travel and hours and amount of shows they did was a rough life. I was raised backstage. I was on trains all the time and in hotels. It was exciting. Most of the theatres were named Gaiety or Roxy.”
Each city left distinct impressions on the performers. “I loved Boston,” Blaze Starr said. “That was a burlesque town. I loved the seafood in Boston.”
In the ’50s, strippers were packing them in clubs in Havana. Just an hour flight from Miami, the sunny glamorous spot was a source of work for strippers, comedians, and novelty acts. Surprisingly, rules were more stringent there and the strippers showed even less in Cuba than back in the United States.
Mimi Reed played Havana in a show with a large cast for four months. “They had big, beautiful casinos, beautiful grounds. Birdcages filled with macaws. We loved Cuba.”
In Cuba, Betty Howard (the “Girl Who Has Everything!”) bumped to the beat of bongos. The petite, big-breasted blonde packed the clubs.
Another stripper, Bubbles Darlene (Harold Minsky named her.), caused a stir when she emerged from a cab and walked down the streets of Havana covering her outfit of a transparent raincoat and black undies. Billed “America’s Most Exciting Body,” Darlene proudly displayed her wares to the ire of the police. Her publicity stunt landed her picture on the front of the newspapers, securing many future gigs, making the arrest and subsequent fine worth it.
Dixie Evans found traveling to be a way for her and a lot of the performers to see parts of the country—and world—they would not have had an opportunity to visit with 9–5 day jobs. The discomfort and inconvenience of constant travel allowed many of the women, in particular, to broaden their horizons in ways unavailable to them otherwise. It made everything worth it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Sugar Sugar
“Out front the big sign says doors open at twelve o’clock, noon. That didn’t mean the show started at 12 o’clock noon; that meant the doors opened.”
—Dixie Evans
“Candy butchers were funnier than comics, most frustrated actors.”
—Val Valentine
Candy butchers were an integral part of the burlesque show. They were men, sometimes teenagers, who sold boxes of candy up and down the aisles of the theatres before the show and during intermission.
“The candy butchers paid for everything,” Dardy Minsky explained. “They had the concessions. They would put up the money for the shows, they put money up for the scenery, they would put money up for the security bonds for the unions, everything.”
“The concession companies are the ones that really opened the burlesque theatres because they made so much money,” added Val Valentine.
“The burlesque theatres did not own the candy concession; they leased it out to candy concessionaires,” said Nat Bodian.
Candy butchers appeared at World’s Fairs, carnivals, burlesque theatres, and even on trains. Before inventing the light bulb, Thomas Edison had a brief career hawking candy on trains. Besides candy, the pitch men also sold “naughty” pictures, books, and magazines, always with the lure of a far more risqué or valuable prize hidden in the next box of candy.
The August 1927 edition of Popular Mechanics ran an article detailing how the circus candy butchers “either bought the candy privileges outright or shared his profits with the ... owner of the show.”
Their rehearsed spiel swung from anticipated exaggeration to outrageous lies.
“In between the acts, they had this candy pitch man. He would stand up at the front of the theatre and he would hold up a box of candy,” said Nat Bodian.
Candy Butcher:
Ladies and gentleman. In each and every candy box is ten pieces of Atlantic City’s salt water taffy and in each and every box is a little pair of dice. You hold it to the light and you see little Fatima, she does her dance nude. A certain number of these boxes will have a ten dollar bill in them.
And in one box there’s a gold watch and in one box is a gold pen—
“Of course the box was worth about a nickel or dime in 1930 money and they would get about a dollar for it,” said Nat Bodian.
Dixie Evans recounted: “And one young man will jump up from the audience and yell, ‘I got the gold pen.’ Oh. And then they’ll be selling more candy boxes. ‘Oh, I got the gold watch.’ And then the candy butcher backstage, ‘Give me the watch, give me the pen. I’ll see ya next show.’”
Rita Grable said, “There was an artistry of that to itself.”
Candy butchers went out of business when theatres put concession stands in the lobby, eliminating one more unique aspect of a burlesque show.
On stage at the burlesque theatre
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Theatres
“Theatre work was hard. You were always in motion. Very hard work. I don’t see how people got into trouble. There was no time.”
—Alexandra the Great “48”
“You just keep rolling, if things are not going well.”
—Taffy O’Neil
Working in the theatres was very different than working in the clubs. Every performer had a preference.
“I liked theatres because [the audience] can’t get close to you. On the runway once in a while, they’d stand up and try and grab you. But you could back up easily,” said Lady Midnight.
Taffy O’Neil preferred supper clubs where it was mostly couples. “I didn’t care for the theatre. It was mostly men,” she said.
Lillian Hunt was running the theatre where Taffy worked. Lillian’s husband Leon was a singer who was tending bar. Taffy suffered from nerves before the show. “We went and had drinks. Finally I didn’t hear my shoes on the stage. I relaxed, had a drink. I could dance without hearing a clump clump clump.’ You are out there so alone in the theatres.”
“You get stage fright when you play the big places,” said Dixie Evans. “You’re conscious of the spotlight. Be very careful not to trip backstage. Nightclubs it’s slam bam. Theatre is different.”
“I always had opening night/day jitters. Always a nervous wreck,” said April March. “I always had a cigarette.”
A performer played differently in different cities. Some might be hometown favorites, others returning stars.
Betty Rowland’s favorite was the Follies theatre on South Main Street in Los Angeles, as well as the Gaiety in New York. In LA she became “famous,” which boosted her box office when she returned to New York.
The Dalton brothers owned the Follies. The theatre was a beautiful building built in 1910. It would be demolished in 1974. Three brothers—Pete, Roy and Frank Dalton—were “the Minskys of LA. Pete Dalton, he’d make scenery himself.” There was a rehearsal room and a scenery room backstage. Betty Rowland claims the Dalton brothers “paid to close the Burbank theatre,” which was also on Main Street. (In 1983 the Burbank was turned into a parking lot, as so many other great theatres would be.)
The theatre wasn’t only a refuge for drunks and out-of-work men, but also for girls who worked for the telephone company and had split shifts that needed to spend four hours somewhere before going back to work. Dixie Evans said they would “brown bag it and go to the burlesque shows.” It could also be refuge of another kind. “When it rained, you had a place to stay for four hours, for twenty-five cents.”
Taffy remembered, “We had women in there with their shopping bags to kill time before they went to catch their bus.”
There was a saying in Boston: “You can’t graduate from Harvard ‘til you’ve seen Ann Corio” at the Old Howard, said Mike Iannucci. Doctors would come to the matinees. It was an “elite audience.” Corio was so popular with women audiences that management had to install a ladies’ room at the theatre. “She played to 60 to 80 percent women,” Mike estimated.
“When they rung down the curtain for the last time at the Old Howard, all the stock brokers on Milk Street wore black arm bands for a week,” remembers Dixie Evans. “It was an institution; anyone who had gone to Harvard, they would have gone to the Old Howard.” Out in the California desert at a burlesque museum called Exotic World, Dixie Evans managed burlesque memorabilia. She said, “Old elderly guys would come and say, ‘I remember the Old Howard.’”
Theatres ranged from the derelict to the truly magnificent. Many had previously been major vaudeville houses, which meant dressing rooms were usually nice, the lobbies and stage beautiful. “Back East, doormen wore gold epaulets,” said Dixie Evans.
“Minsky theatres were especially nice. Wednesday afternoon was Ladies’ Days. We had to serve tea and cakes to the women. The women are saying, ‘Oh, this is what it’s like.’ They’d be laughing their sides out.”
Blaze Starr ruled the Two O’Clock Club in Baltimore, eventually buying it. The Two O’Clock was located in a section of Baltimore known as The Block that would eventually become a dangerous, seedy part of the city.
In Toledo, Ohio, there was The New Empire, where Danny Thomas got his start in burlesque selling candy in the 1920s. The theatre was renamed the Town Hall in 1945. The Queen of Toledo, however, was Rose La Rose, who purchased the Town Hall in 1958. In Woodward Avenue by author Robert Genat, he claimed the guy at the door taking tickets was “seedy” and the old theatre smelled “musty.” In fairness, the theatre was already more than one hundred years old when Rose took it on and did a rousing business.
Rose ran a tight ship (“She was strict,” remembers Dixie Evans.) and the theatre was well maintained and clean, with strippers such as Sally the Shape; Yum Yum the Bon Bon Girl; Lola “Whatever Lola Wants, Lola Has"; and Paper Doll. Rose would do many battles with the city council, which was constantly trying to shut her down.
Strippers and friends Val Valentine and “naughty” Rose La Rose
“Roses’s was the most fun of all. She always came down. When you work a theatre long enough, you start to know guys who come in. I got to know a lot of college kids,” said Alexandra the Great. “Once off the Philadelphia turnpike, I picked up a hitchhiker and it was a guy that was in the front row. He’s a doctor now.”
The Empire Theatre was in downtown Newark. The Empire opened in 1912, boasting one thousand seats. Seats cost more in the downstairs orchestra.
In San Diego, the only burlesque house was the Hollywood, formerly the Liberty Theatre. Bob Johnston was the owner for about fifty years. He was a former candy butcher born in Ireland who immigrated to Canada, then down to San Diego. A former vaudeville performer himself, how he got the theatre is a little “sketchy,” said his daughter, Dee Ann Johnston.
Johnston started as either a part or full owner of the theatre. Dee Ann’s mother, Fanny, was also in vaudeville, and in 1928 she came to San Diego and was booked into the Hollywood. She overslept and showed up late to the theatre, where Bob told her, “You’re late. I can’t use you.” The two were married in 1930 and remained married for sixty years. She was a choreographer and eventually “passed the torch” to Dee Ann. Fanny helped light the shows; “she knew everything,” Dee Ann said.
The Hollywood had 425 seats, a balcony, and a fly loft. There were four live shows a day and on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday they showed movies in between shows. It took a while for the theatre to do well. Dee Ann’s parents were “eating pork and beans out of cans.”
Once the war started, “The Navy made [business] good.... You couldn’t even get a seat in there,” said Dee Ann. After Pearl Harbor, with the Navy in San Diego, “business became a real business. They worked hard.” The audience was 90 percent men and Johnston also owned the bar next door. Her dad “never missed a show.”
“He always had union orchestra and hands. Four guys in band. Big organ. Drummer on stage right, sax, clarinet, trumpet player, Seven days a week. A grind,” Dee Ann described.
Dixie Evans commented, the “bigger the theatre, the better the band.”
They did full productions that changed every month with sometimes thirty people on the stage—and it was a “small stage.”
“Mom broke Lili [St. Cyr] in. Fired Dardy. She thought she was terrible,” Dee Ann said. Years after her start in San Diego, Lili St. Cyr was a headliner and returned with her third husband, Paul Valentine. They did a number that included the head of John the Baptist.
“These girls were performers; they could dance.” There was a stock group in San Diego of chorus girls, strippers, and comedians, although Johnston would bring in headliners such as Betty Rowland and Tempest Storm.
Bobby “Texas” Roberts was eighteen and started working there as a dancer after high school, and became one of the “stars of the Hollywood.”
Jane Cafera was simply called “Irish.” She came into the Hollywood as a feature and stayed in San Diego, marrying the company singer, Larry Kane. Irish was a popular local and worked for the Hollywood for years.
Jimmy Stein and “Say No More Jo” Claude Mathis worked comedy there. Mathis “was a San Diego guy. His wife was a stripper til she got too old, then she sold tickets,” recalled Dee Ann.
I asked Dee Ann if she ever felt a stigma attached to being daughter of a burlesque theatre owner. “Never really bad,” she said. She attended a private school when she was growing up.
Toward the end of the Hollywood, go-go bars were taking over downtown and pornography was taking over old theatres. “They didn’t do completes’—total nudity. Once that happened elsewhere, guys went elsewhere. Business [became] iffy.” Shows began to run only on weekends. The show dropped from a cast of thirty down to ten or twelve.
By the early ’60s, the girls were “doing more than they should have done,” but still always wore a G-string, Dee Ann said. And though the vice squad was in there a lot, they had no trouble. “He ran a clean ship,” she said.
Dee Ann explained there were always bouncers in the theatre. There were two aisles. Her father would take the stage during the overture “Beyond the Blue Horizon.” He would then announce, “Remove your hats, feet off chairs, this is a stage show, not a stag show.” Then the two big bouncers would stand at the front of the theatre facing the audience. “There wasn’t any trouble,” Dee Ann confirmed.
The theatre closed in 1970 and is now a parking garage on the corner of 3rd and F Street in downtown San Diego.
Some of the strippers coming into the business in the late 1950s and ’60s, when shows no longer resembled early burlesque and many theatres had closed, took the show off in some unusual places.
Vicki O’Day’s first job was working in an old “brothel in Arizona at an old mining town.” The building was built in the 1800s and lined with walled-off rooms on the second floor. Vicki danced in a back bar.
In Minneapolis, stripper Sheila Rae danced on a “stage” on the bar, which she complained was the size of a “cutting board. You could only make about two or three steps, bartenders serving drinks under you.”
“New Orleans was fantastic,” claimed Kitty West. “You’d run in between shows and get Chinese food.... Carrie Finnel and Kelley Smith and Sally Rand would visit between shows.... In those days, it was a town of glamour. You wore furs. You didn’t go in tennis shoes like I do now. You dressed. Always gloves. Suits during the daytime—and furs.”
“New Orleans had jazz bands and all the different nightclubs up Bourbon Street. New Orleans [was] all burlesque,” remembered Tee Tee Red. “Theatres you could only stay two weeks at time. They had to keep rotating the shows because there was no alcohol. Cokes and popcorn [were] sold, and hot dogs. And you could hear the barkers selling it up and down the aisles.” Outside the 500 Club where she was working, a man would yell her name all night. “Come see. Come one, come all.”
Lili St. Cyr was purportedly the first stripper to play a big resort in Las Vegas in 1950 when the town was still “quaint,” as she called it. It was a remote desert resort not yet filled with
the high rises and Disney-like amusements that we know today.
Lili performed at the El Rancho, where a big neon windmill beckoned visitors from afar, promising a classy show along with gambling. As a wedding present (for one of her six marriages), owner Beldon Katleman gave her a six-year contract. She brought enormous attention to the club. First lady Eleanor Roosevelt attended one of her shows and posed for a picture with Lili, who looked elegant in a long black satin gown.
Dardy recalled the club owners in Vegas as being “all ex-hoodlums from Cleveland.... We’d call them pineapple growers from Cleveland.’”
On the road, Dixie learned respect for both her profession and those working behind the scenes. In Pittsburgh, she once bought some small props from a local dime store and went to the theatre and placed them on her set. The union stage hands didn’t like it and at her next show, when she went on the stage, it was bare. Nothing was set up for her. She ran off crying. A stage hand told her there was “no union stamp on that.” After that, she made sure her props had the union label otherwise they’d “throw your stuff off stage.”
“Stage hands had a strong union,” said Sequin. “They wouldn’t let my boyfriend on stage. They set up the swing and it broke. Down I went.”
With the gradual decline of the theatres, the burlesque industry turned to film to boost revenue—but nothing can approximate a show with the audience participating with whooping and hollering, and hot musicians pounding it out.
“Most of us who were performing,” Lady Midnight wrote me, “at the theatre [Follies] were approached to be in [This Was Burlesque], doing a show just as we did every day. It was put together exactly like a regular burlesque show, with an opening production number which was choreographed by our resident theatre choreographer, Lillian Hunt, and with the same skits we did on stage.... We were given some special instructions we had to follow, one being that we had to keep our movements very mild. Try doing a bump without much motion! The corny music was dubbed in during the editing, and I have to say it was far different from the music we used at the theatre.”
Behind the Burly Q Page 19