Lady Midnight said she was paid “a hundred dollars for a few hours’ work, and in those days that was pretty good money! Plus, since we all worked together every day; we had a good time doing it.”
“We didn’t know at the time where [the films] would wind up,” said Betty Rowland. Only later did they find out the films “were to be sold in magazines.”
Taffy O’Neil shot Kiss Me Baby directed by Lillian Hunt. “You didn’t have [an] audience to respond to. When things [are] going really well, it’s like a marriage, and when it’s not going well, [it’s] like a divorce.”
Lili St. Cyr received five thousand dollars for a day’s work recreating her bathtub act (that got her arrested at Ciro’s) for the film Love Moods. Many of the films were quickie movies that the strippers and comedians recreated on stages in front of empty seats. What has been preserved is in many instances the only record of some dances and skits. Without the cries of “take it off” and live musicians pounding to the strippers’ beat, the films don’t translate. These recreations probably contribute to our confusion about why this form of entertainment was so popular. All the performers said how electric it was to perform.
“Standing behind the curtain, waiting for it to play before the curtain opened, was always very exciting to me and I would silently pray each and every show, ‘Please God, let them like me!’ That particular moment was always especially emotional to me,” said Lady Midnight.
These quickie films were also used as stag films.
As burly theatres closed, those were played in lieu of live performances and in tents in carnivals. As live burly was dying, the thought from producers was, “We’ll get into film and film them and take those around.”
The stag films were rites of passage for men—a private event where they could see women stripping. Sometimes the movies played at small country fairs, the ones that couldn’t afford to hire live performers.
“Burlesque changed,” said Lady Midnight. “We didn’t have any more chorus line in theatre. It started getting different. Then clubs started in more and more. Theatre just wrapped up.”
The Hollywood closed in 1970. Rob Johnston got up on the stage at the end of the opening and said, “You know I’d rather go out of here in a box than have this theatre close on me.” According to daughter Dee Ann he never got over it. He lived to be ninety-three.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Legendary Ladies
“A woman’s greatest asset is a man’s imagination.”
—Ann Corio
“I confess that I am a brazen hussy, if out-of-shape women want to call me that.”
—Sally Rand
They are the faces that changed burlesque. Now yellowing images in defunct magazines, they once commanded huge salaries and scores of followers. Offstage they led exciting, tumultuous lives with their share of ups and downs and adventure that kept their name in the papers.
ANN CORIO
Ann Corio made burlesque accessible to the ladies with her class act. The female audience packed her favorite theatre in Boston. Her performance showed them a burlesque show was “art,” as she claimed after she and the cast were hauled into court on trumped-up indency charges. She won the case.
Ann Corio came from a strict Italian-American, Catholic, New England family. She was one of a dozen siblings (more or less, no one had a real answer as to the amount). Ann was a classic beauty with auburn hair, green eyes, and a stunning figure.
At fifteen, Ann ran away from home. According to her third and last husband, Mike Iannucci, Ann and a girlfriend from Hartford, Connecticut, auditioned for a show opening in New York. The “two went down and all of a sudden she was in burlesque,” said Mike.
Ann’s father was always too “busy making a living.” Ann was “always mama’s girl,” and when her mama found out she went “bananas.” One night at the show, sitting in the front row, was Ann’s Italian mama. Backstage Mama told Ann the show was all right. “As long as they looka, but no touch.” In the 1930s and 1940s, it was “the looka, but no touch era.”
Ann had a refinement about her. She was poised and dignified, with a strong sense of self-worth that would carry her through a career in burlesque lasting nearly seven decades.
After six months toiling in the chorus, she became a headliner and “she was competing with Gypsy. Gypsy appealed to the more sophisticated audience, society people. Ann appealed to the truck driver and the bus driver and the mechanic. They all came to the show, with their wives,” Mike explained. “She was the darling of the burlesque aficionados.”
Mike continued, “Gypsy was a sophisticate.... She talked her way. Ann didn’t have to talk; all she had to do was walk on the stage and everyone went, ‘Wow.’”
Ann ruled from the stage of The Old Howard in Boston, a former church and later a vaudeville theatre.
Ann’s first husband was Emmet Callahan, who discovered her when she was young and helped guide her career. He was (variously and allegedly) an executive of a chain of burlesque theatres, manager of the Apollo Theatre, and a theatrical agent. He was older and became her mentor. They were secretly married (according to newspaper accounts) on Christmas Day 1934. In one column written by Walter Winchell, who often related the burly queen’s comings and goings, he noted Ann and Emmet, though separated for two years, continued to dine out together, and he continued to manager her and buy her jewelry. When she did divorce him, she accused him of “deserting her and discoloring her eye and bruising her leg.”
In 1942 Ann quit burlesque to star in B pictures in Hollywood. Her movies weren’t “released,” she would claim; they “escaped.”
They cranked them out fast. “They didn’t want them good; they wanted them Tuesday,” Mike Iannucci recalled.
She never considered herself a good actress. She did it because she needed to work. It was a way to keep going and have a living because she didn’t have children. She continued in burlesque between pictures for “special occasions.”
Her next husband, Bob Williams, was a nightclub comedian with a dog act. He appeared frequently on The Ed Sullivan Show. “He was a real evil guy,” Mike said.
She became pregnant with twins but miscarried. “He treated her just awful.”
When trying to have her divorce decree set aside, one paper claimed Ann said Williams only wanted to get divorced to help his career. They lived in Malibu on a ranch Ann had bought. According to her niece, Carole Nelson, Ann had turned all her properties over to him so she lost everything in the divorce. Ann was devastated. Williams’s attorney was so appalled, he even apologized to Ann after the hearing, saying, “This shouldn’t be the way it ended up.”
Ann moved in with a sister and was not involved in burlesque during the 1950s. It wasn’t until Mike came along and convinced her to put together a burlesque show honoring the golden days of burlesque that Ann revitalized her fame and fortune.
Mike was a handsome, stocky, well-built football player of Irish-Mediterranean descent who had played ball for twenty-three years. He played for the Pittsburgh Steelers from 1945 to 1962. “I knew nothing about show business,” Mike said. “A friend of mine on the team got involved in [a] stock [theatre] company and got me involved. And I hired Ann in Bristol, Pennsylvania.” Despite their age differences—he was almost twenty years younger—it was love at first sight. “We were together since we met. We hit it off the first day we met and that was it.”
Stripper Ann Corio and much younger husband Mike Iannucci
Mike had never seen a burlesque show. “I came up with the idea—why don’t we do a show depicting the history of burlesque as it was in its finer days?” Mike had trouble convincing investors to put up the money. However, the investors eventually made “a ton of money back. They believed in the show,” he said. Ann hired comics and strippers she had worked with and she was the director. Mike produced. This Was Burlesque debuted on Broadway in 1961.
How did Mike and Ann get burlesque back in New York and on Broadway after LaGuardia had banned
it? Mike said, “It wasn’t a law that was legislated. I researched it and did the show. I had no trouble. The censors came by and saw the show.” LaGuardia was long gone by then. “No one else fought the law until I came along.”
Burlesque had changed since Ann’s reign. “It had generated to strictly stripping and the bad type.” When they ran the show, Ann was tough.
“We emphasize comedy,” Ann explained at the time. “We are not offensive.”
Ann would stand backstage and listen. “She’d listen to comics from a speaker in her room and wouldn’t stand for bad words and swearing. She was a flag-waving American,” according to niece Carole Nelson. She was strict and she was known to have a temper that matched her fiery red hair.
Ann put a lot of the comedians back to work that had been unemployed when the strippers bumped them off the stage. “They had almost no work. They loved it when we came along. We gave them steady work doing what they loved to do.” They employed Steve Mills, Dexter Maitland, and Claude Mathis (who was eighty-one in 1981 and still with the show). Most were old men.
This Was Burlesque had a couple strippers (though most shows by then had six or eight), four or five comedians, and two straight men (all but banished from burlesque in the 1960s) and a chorus line. “Later burlesque, they never had a chorus line again,” Mike said.
They put “a little chubby girl out of step in the chorus, next to the tree-toppers. The little chubby girl, it was a comedy relief. We had all different sized girls. They opened show, did two or three numbers, then did a finale parade out with beautiful costumes.”
Carole remembered her aunt cutting costumes on her dining room table and recalled Ann being very motherly towards her. Ann told her she “was the daughter [she] was meant to have.” Carole in fact lives with the suspicion that she might be her “aunt’s” daughter, as so often times happened in those days.
Ann’s strippers were all “clean.” At that time, strippers in New Jersey “could do almost anything.... Ann never took them.” The strippers in Ann’s show had to work according to how Ann wanted it.
Like so many of the strippers told me, Ann never exercised besides dancing in the show. Carole said she had a “great sense of humor and loved animals.” Bozo the Cat was the mascot of This Was Burlesque. The cat would occasionally walk on the stage during the performance. There were numerous pictures of Bozo in Mike’s apartment. The cat was born in a theatre in New York. “Bozo was the pet of all the comics.”
One June 24, 1981, the New York Times reviewed a revival of This Was Burlesque: “Miss Corio, who looks radiant, does it all by the book and, whether you like the book or not, it is to her credit that she catches the flavor of the old burlesque with little attempt to ennoble or elevate it. This is close to the real thing.”
Ann closed the show with her strip. Ann’s act was only six or seven minutes. “She didn’t have to do any more. That was her act throughout her entire burlesque career.”
When This Was Burlesque was no longer running in theatres, Ann would take segments of the show on the road. Eventually Ann and Mike invested in dinner theatres and their pace of travel and work slowed down. One of Ann’s last appearances on the stage was in Los Angeles in 1985.
Her health was poor the last three or four years of her life. There was a rumor, told to me, that Mike would tie her in her wheelchair and leave her while he went to gamble. He supposedly lost their beloved home in Connecticut to gambling debts.
She began “fading from us in life,” her niece noted. Ann had dementia and had a difficult time speaking. “The last day I saw her, she just stared across the table at my mother [her sister] as if she did not know her.”
Carole said, “Her last show that I saw, she was about eighty. And she was tired.”
“Ann got sick in the early 1990s; she passed away in 1999. That was the end of the show.... Without her the show really lost most of its luster,” said Mike.
Ann always closely guarded her age. The family celebrated her birthday on November 9. “We didn’t do birthdays,” Carole said. “It has been reported she died in her eighties, but she was ninety.”
“We were together twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for like thirty years,” Mike said.
Those who worked for Anne loved and respected and feared her. And though there was mixed reaction from the burlesquers to Mike himself, from downright “awful” to being a generally “bad guy,” there was no doubt he loved her.
“I’m pushing seventy-six. I want to take it easy and hope that someday people say, ‘He did a good job,’” Mike said.
**
SALLY RAND
After Gypsy Rose Lee, Helen Gould Beck—aka Sally Rand—is arguably the most recognizable name associated with burlesque.
Sally Rand
Sally’s act consisted of dancing nude, or nearly so depending on the venue, concealed by two, five-foot long ostrich fans, and, later, shielded by an opaque rubber ball. She would play peek-a-boo with her body by manipulating her fans in front and behind her, like a winged bird as she swooped and twirled on the stage, usually to “Clair de Lune.”
She was amazingly graceful given how heavy the fans were. She did not strip, but she did tease, flashing a hint of flesh as her fans swooshed and soared.
“She was a little different. She might have had a little bit of controversy here and there because she was totally nude,” said Dixie Evans.
“One of the big things, she didn’t like being referred to as a stripper,” her son Sean explained. Sally would say, “I’m not up there stripping to tease anyone.”
Born dirt poor in 1904, in Elkton, Missouri, in the Ozarks, her father was a rough rider with Teddy Roosevelt and she remembered sitting on the future president’s lap.
She was blonde, beautiful, and at 105 lbs., stood no taller than five feet. Dixie once offered to help Sally pick up her things backstage. Sally told her, “No, that’s how I get my exercise.” She was respected and beloved by scores of fans for decades. “I thought a girl who went on the stage without stockings was a hussy,” Sally once said. Boy, how she changed her tune.
Sally Rand started, as so many did, in the chorus when she was just fifteen or sixteen in New York City. At the time, she had a lisp. She had no money. To survive, she would go to restaurants or diners, wait until patrons finished, and steal the leftovers.
Sally would claim to be the inventor of the fan dance, performing it one year prior to the start of the Great Depression. She remembered seeing people jump out of windows. In 1927, she was a “deb star,” her son said, and “a WAMPUS Baby Star.” (WAMPUS was the Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers in the United States, an organization that promoted young women as potential stars.)
Her lisp and her Ozarks accent, however, weren’t what Hollywood was looking for, though the film director Cecile B. DeMille would later give her a new name. He chose “Rand” from the maps and she picked Sally because she figured the large S would look good in lights.
Sally’s fame started for earnest in 1931 at the Chicago World’s Fair. “She saved Chicago,” Dixie declared. Sally got a job dancing in the Streets of Paris concessions, owned by the city fathers. (The Fair’s various pavilions and exhibits were owned by a variety of corporations and organizations.)
The fair suffered from poor attendance, with not nearly enough paying customers to support the millions of dollars poured into it. That is, until Sally did a Lady Godiva down the midway.
Sally had heard Mrs. Hearst was going to have a Milk Fund Ball at one hundred dollars a plate. In Depression-era 1932, one hundred dollars a plate was beyond decadent. Much of the country was starving. As a child of poverty, Sally was “offended,” Sean said.
So she got an idea. She thought, “I can get a horse, put him on a boat and bring him in through Soldier’s Field.” She wore no clothes except for a long blonde wig and sat astride a rubber-shoed horse named “Mike” and rode into the Milk Fund Ball. Sally claimed the stunt was a stab at society ladies
who were spending thousands on their gowns while those around them went hungry. To top it off, the next day she rode Mike down the midway.
And all of a sudden clippity clop . . . what is this coming down the promenade? Right in front of all the people is a big prancing horse with a nude Sally Rand,” laughed Dixie Evans. Sally went home, went to bed, and the next day a “girlfriend called, ‘Sally you’re on the front page of every newspaper.’” Although there were later reports that she’d in fact been wearing a nude body stocking, Rand’s fame was cemented from that day forward.
The Century of Progress World’s Fair had cost $38 million and it “was going down the drain for lack of visitors.” Sally pulled the fair out of the red. “It was the only concession that made a lot of money,” said Dixie Evans.
A couple years later, Sally was still trying to break into Hollywood and starred in a movie with George Raft and Carole Lombard. She performed in nightclubs and returned to the 1934 World’s Fair doing a bubble dance using a large weather balloon as a sort of encore to the previous year’s fair. She was earning upwards of ten thousand dollars a week, Sean claimed, and acted as her own agent, publicist, and costumer.
“My mother adopted me in 1948. I grew up backstage,” he said. Sally was forty-four and it was long before adoption was the popular thing to do. It would have been difficult for a single mother, especially one who worked naked, to adopt. But she did. Sean traveled with her, though eventually Sally’s parents took care of Sean while she was on the road.
Sean was born in Florida. His birth mother had given him up after her husband in the Navy died. When his gun backfired, he wasn’t wearing asbestos and he “disintegrated.” The woman gave birth when Sally was in the room and she took custody of him shortly thereafter.
Behind the Burly Q Page 20