“I never had a birth certificate,” Sean said. Sally’s lawyer working on the adoption “went crazy and the paperwork fell through the cracks.”
Sometime much later, the birth mother tried to take him back and Sally, being the famous Sally Rand, “it was easy to track her movements down.”
When he was fifteen, Sally arranged for him to stay with a showgirl friend, Sunny Nivens. Sally came with “a wad of money,” gave it to Sunny, and said “Take Sean. Go here. Don’t open the door, even for police.”
Sean was hid several times by different showgirls as his birth mother “relentlessly tried to find him.” She also relied on chorus girls to hide and protect him.
Sally had tremendous “guts for her time. She had the women’s lib thing. Ahead of her time,” recalled Sean. She continued to perform at World’s Fairs—in 1936 at the Texas Centennial and again in 1939 in San Francisco. She was in great demand. She considered her act to be tasteful, an art form that had a purpose and meaning.
During Texas Centennial, Sally introduced Texas to her Sally Rand Nude Ranch, a sideshow attraction featuring fifteen girls posed with six shooters and hats strategically placed. The beauties lounged around with the letters SR branded to each thigh. Some sat on horses or played with a beach ball. A ticket was fifty cents. Sally herself served as hostess.
When Ann Corio produced This Was Burlesque, Sally worked the show for two weeks filling in for Ann, who was having surgery. She did her fan and “bubble dance,” working with a giant balloon or ball. Sally was a “hillbilly,” according to Mike Iannucci. Sally loved her work, and many said her balloon dance was incredible. She performed the dance to “Clair de Lune” and other classic pieces of music. “You never saw anything—if not nude, almost—but you never saw anything the way she maneuvered the fans.”
She lived a full life offstage, as well. She married four times. Jimmy Thatch was the love of her life, though she never married him. He became an admiral and retired to Coronado Island, near San Diego, California.
She married a guy named Frank when she was fifty. Frank was thirty-one and it lasted eight years. She was friends with Charles Lindberg and became an aviator herself.
Sally loved gardening and painting. Needlepoint was one of her favorite hobbies. Sean “hated yard work,” but because of his exposure to it through his mom, he ironically ended up working in the nursery business.
Without an agent and publicist, Sally took care of herself, as so many did in that era. She was tough in a little package. “She could get the four-letter words going and get in their face if they deserved it. She had to take care of herself for a lot of years,” Sean said. She worked at a time when she was paid in cash and was robbed several times.
Sally Rand onstage toward the end of her life
Towards the end of her long career she was still getting big money—$2,000 to $2,500 a week plus expenses. She saved and invested. At the end, she had money, and a house, and apartments she had for income. She didn’t have “great wealth at the end. But took care of herself,” Sean said. Sean explained his mother was never unemployed, giving her last performance just months before she died at age seventy-five.
She spent the last eight days of her life in the Glendora hospital in August of 1979. She had checked herself in. Sean got a call that his mother was in the hospital. She was in intensive care. The heart specialist told Sean, “Your mother isn’t doing well. She’s had a heart attack [within] the last two years. It did damage to 75 percent of the heart muscle.” Sean knew nothing about a heart attack. Sally was a tough old trooper and had never mentioned it. Her lungs were not in good shape, either.
She wanted Sean to take her out of Glendora Hospital and take her home. Sean asked the doctor if he could; he would do anything for his mother. Though her home was just miles away, “the doctors didn’t think she’d last to the house.”
She passed away and “everyone from the show business world called in, from Bob Hope to Frank Sinatra.... I went to pay the bill. In 1979, it was a ten thousand-dollar bill. The hospital said, ‘It’s paid.’ An anonymous person had called in and said, ‘Tell me the number and we’re gonna pay it.’”
Years passed and at a “Sally Rand night” in Glendora, someone from the hospital, an ex-administrator, got up and said, “I have something to reveal. Sammy Davis called in and paid Sally’s bill.”
Sally knew Sammy Jr.’s father from vaudeville; he had danced with Bill Robinson, “Mr. Bo jangles.” She’d given a lot of money to Sammy’s father, and Sammy Jr. remained forever grateful. This was just another example of the burly performers looking out for one another. I heard it time and again.
Throughout the years, several places and people have claimed to be in possession of Sally’s original fans. Alexandra the Great claimed she “bought fans from Sally Rand when she was in Toledo.”
In the 1960s at a dedication ceremony, Sally turned over a pair of fans to the Chicago Historical Society, the very ones she had used at the World’s Fair of 1933, she declared.
After the ceremony in the cab, Sean asked his mother, “‘Those were the very fans?’” He knew how her fans took a beating—after all, he had been on the road with her for two decades. “She looked at me and says, ‘No, dummy, those aren’t the fans, but that’s what they wanted to hear today. Those fans were gone six months after the show.’”
Sally was the consummate showman. She spent her career giving the people what they wanted.
**
GEORGIA SOTHERN
Georgia Sothern was known as a “hot” performer. She was a vivacious, red-headed (and sometimes blonde) powerhouse who literally flung her body about the stage to the tune of “Hold that Tiger.” She was an uneducated, unattractive woman who came from nothing but gained much notoriety on the burlesque stage. She was hugely admired by fellow performers and fans alike. She created an act that worked for her. It was fast paced, frantic, and orgasmic. She worked with stocky legs, a flat chest, and still created an illusion of glamour and beauty.
An ad for Georgia Sothern
What she lacked in appearance, Georgia made up for in energy. “Georgia had something. She wasn’t an attractive woman,” Maria Bradley recalled. Photos of her later in life reveal perhaps one or two nose jobs. “She electrified audiences,” Bradley said.
Georgia did an athletic strip. As the orchestra blasted, she tossed her body, flipping it forward and back, cranking her neck high and low. She was fast.
She was born poor in Atlanta, Georgia. Her real name was Hazel. “She couldn’t even spell southern.’ She left out a couple letters,” said Dixie. “She was only twelve, thirteen years old and she traveled with her uncle, who was in vaudeville. And he died of pneumonia. So all these others strippers and chorus girls were in the hotel and knew about the old man dying, so they said, ‘What are you gonna do?’ She said ‘I don’t know.’ ‘OK here, put some makeup on and do this and do that.’ And they took her to Minsky’s.” They hired her. Georgia quickly became a star stripper.’
“She was little,” said Maria Bradley, “but she did something on that stage, that it was like magical, you know. She . . . if I can use the word ‘humped’... the scenery and the curtain ... they howled because they loved it.”
“She wasn’t a dancer,” said Rita Grable.
Because she was the feature and traveled from theatre to theatre, “you could steal her act and she wouldn’t know the difference,” Beverly Anderson explained. Beverly herself copied Georgia by spying on her offstage though the slit in the curtain while getting paid to catch her clothes. “I used another song; I watched her very carefully. I got from Georgia how to move as a stripper.” In 1957, Georgia claimed the strip teasers that tried to steal her act were “still in the hospital.”
Rita thought “she was dynamic” with her flaming hair, talking to the audience as she raced across the stage. “She was helpful to me. When I first started, she’d say, ‘Put some rouge in your cleavage. Put two little white dots in the corners of y
our eyes to open your eyes.’ She taught me a lot about makeup, and how to do certain things with your body, how to be a little more provocative. I would think, I don’t know what I’m doing. She’d say, ‘You’re gonna be OK.’ Sure enough, it was. I made a lot of money.”
Georgia was a scrappy defender of burlesque who declared to reporters she would fight the ban on burlesque in New York. She noted that the regulars who had been attending burly shows for years didn’t show any signs of their morales being hurt. If burlesque was banned it would make “bread-liners” out of all the thousands of burlesque performers instead of “breadwinners,” as she told the Salt Lake Tribune in 1942. In a later interview, however, she scornfully remembered the men in the audience looking like they’d escaped from the “zoo.”
Her life would be filled with danger and intrigue. As a teen, she accidentally witnessed a murder. She dated mobsters and one husband was a drunk who, in a rage, shot her with a prop gun. In 1949, she filed for bankruptcy, saying she had only seven dollars in cash. In 1957, she complained about a hundred-dollar hospital bill.
By the time she appeared on the David Susskind show in 1962 with a panel of strippers, including Zorita, Sherry Britton, and Hope Diamond, Georgia was much diminished in size and vibrancy. She worked until just a few years before her death of cancer in 1981 at the age of seventy-two.
SALLY KEITH
“Sally Keith was the greatest tassel twirler that ever lived. One would go one way, one would go the other. She could make those things sing.”
—Lily Ann Rose, her protégé.
“She was just amazingly popular.”
—David Kruh
Stella Katz was born in 1913, the fifth of ten children, eight of them boys. It was a “very observant Jewish family,” recalled Susan Weiss, Sally’s niece. Her father was Sally’s brother, the second-youngest in the line. The family home for Sally and her siblings was a crowded two-bedroom apartment in Chicago. It was a “difficult life,” Weiss said.
“As a kid, she’d take the tassels off the window shades and play with them,” Weiss said. An auspicious beginning for a woman who would become hugely popular by swinging her tassels for sold-out crowds in Boston.
At fifteen or sixteen, Sally got her start by entering beauty contests. And how could she not win, with her platinum hair and big blue eyes? Sally was gorgeous. Soon someone discovered Sally and took her to the East Coast, where she developed an act, got an agent, and made a name for herself despite her lack of education. Susan thought she started to perform in 1930 or 1931.
Sally could twirl her four tassels in opposite directions, a tassel on each bra cup and one on each butt cheek. She’d start one, then a second, then a third. And they would all be going in different directions. She sang and danced. She always had an orchestra. She invested in custom-made costumes, changing often throughout the show. Sally would wear tap pants and little boots. Sometimes she sported big majorette-type hats with feathers in them.
Sally Keith
She toured London and Paris and New York. She lived in Boston in the Hotel Lennox while performing at the Crawford House Theatre. The Hotel Lennox was on infamous Scollay Square, home to the Old Howard and other burlesque theatres and clubs. She worked with Abbott and Costello, Jimmy Durante, and even shared the bill with conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton. Sally partied with Jackie Gleason and was mentioned by Johnny Carson on his show when she died. Ed McMahon, who had performed at the Crawford House, had been a friend and fan. Sally was Boston’s own local treasure.
“The act was unique. But there was something about her look, her genuineness” that David Kruh attributed to her success. “She was a generous woman. When Father Curly’s son [Curly was a parish priest] had a fundraiser, Sally always did her part.” She gave shows to local army camps. She even offered Father Curly her tassels to sell for charity. He kindly declined.
After a famous fire destroyed much of the Crawford House in 1948, Sally’s supposed items that were lost were staggering and included mink, fox and ermine; a wardrobe worth thousands; tassels; and jewelry.
Sally knew how to capitalize on her larger-than-life stature. She was glamorous and colorful. When she was in the room, everyone stared at her. She was affected and eccentric. She wore big jewels and fox furs with claws dangling down her chest. She was extravagant, but a warm, sweet person. She made piles of money and enjoyed her expensive lifestyle. She had a Cadillac with leopard-print seats that she didn’t know how to drive. Others would drive it, like a young Lily Ann Rose.
Her good nature was taken advantage of by many, including her first husband, agent Jack Parr. He tried to control her life. He took advantage of her financially. She divorced him when she was only twenty-two.
Publicity was a big thing for the girls. The more times your name was in the paper, the more popular you were—and the more money you could demand. Many girls “did” their own publicity, including numerous “stunts.” Lili St. Cyr was an expert at it for years—her tricks included the staging of a fight between a husband and “lover” in view of a photographer who also happened to be a friend.
Susan Weiss claimed Sally’s most notorious publicity stunt was being robbed at the Crawford House. The headline in the paper screamed in big, bold print Sally Keith ROBBED BEATEN.
“That I know was a publicity stunt, because I remember my parents talking . . . about how they had to get the makeup on her legs just right, the black and blue marks.”
Many stories were created for publicity’s sake. And indeed in the photograph of Sally showing her bruised legs, she does seem cheerful.
Sally Keith showing off her bruises after her alleged robbery
There were other harmless inventions, including the claim she sent money home to her father who was a Chicago policeman. In reality, he painted houses.
Lily Ann Rose, however, would beg to differ. “She was robbed. And she was paranoid.” She deposited most of her jewels in the bank after the robbery except for two diamond necklaces. Sally and Lily each wore one to keep it safe. “She was paranoid about being robbed again. She had a drinking problem. She reminded me a lot of my mother. You know, she would drink and then she couldn’t function,” Lily said. Sally was “addicted, like my mother to Stingers,” she said. Stingers was a syrupy-sounding drink of brandy and creme de menthe.
At fifty, Sally married her second and last husband Arthur Brandt. They moved from Florida to New York. In 1967, Sally died of cirrhosis of the liver. She was only fifty-four. “It was shocking,” Susan said. “No one knew how bad her problem was.” Shiva was at Susan’s parents’ house.
SHERRY BRITTON
The girl with the curtain of long black hair that hung down to her waist was born in New Jersey as Edith (Edie) Zack. She told me she had taken her stage name from a liquor store on a bottle of Harvey’s Bristol Cream. Sherry was “well respected and established in New York,” remembers Dixie Evans.
Star stripper Sherry Britton died an honorary brigadier. The title was given to her for her work entertaining the boys during WWII. She stood a mere five-feet three inches, but was a giant among strippers in the 1930s and ’40s. She was tough, sweet, smart, enthusiastic, cherished, wild, fierce, sexy, tasteful. And a fighter. She would proclaim herself “the queen of the small claims court,” as she was always taking someone to court. Perhaps that is why her last husband encouraged her to get her law degree from Fordham University. She would graduate magna cum laude, at the age of sixty-three—an accomplishment she was very proud of.
When I first spoke with her, her voice over the phone was shaky and weak. She had recently been released from months in the hospital after a terrible fall, wherein she tangled with her dog’s leash. She had been on “death’s door,” she related. She was frail and had a nurse living with her.
She begged off meeting me. She had been burned recently in another documentary she “despised” and was wary of being involved in another. I promised her this experience would be different. Sherry had been one of th
e biggest stars of burlesque. I had to have her story. She was one of maybe four “greats” still alive when I began my interviews. She was eighty-seven in 2006.
“Whatever beauty I had is gone,” the frail voice deferred. “I was gorgeous. I had an eighteen-inch waist.” She didn’t want to be photographed.
“I won’t put you on camera then,” I promised. Can I at least come and record your stories? Without her, my efforts would be meaningless. Over the next several months, as she slowly recovered, whenever I flew to New York, I would call and try and see her. She usually wasn’t feeling well enough, but we started a phone friendship and slowly she began to trust me. I’m not feeling well enough to put on my makeup, she told me, and I never am seen without it. Then I won’t wear any, I told her. She laughed.
I spent months talking to Sherry, hoping she would grow strong enough and would change her mind about being interviewed. Finally, she agreed I could audio record her.
She had a lovely apartment overlooking Gramercy Park. Knocking on the door, I wasn’t sure what to expect. The pictures I had seen of Sherry showed a raven-haired beauty. Her figure was a ravishing hour-glass. She had dark eyebrows and eyes. In photos of her from the 1940s, she was at the peak of her beauty and fame.
I was shocked when she opened the door. She was still gorgeous, but unexpectedly short, barely reaching to my shoulders. In pictures, she was not only regal, but statuesque. I never imagined her so tiny. She had dark, curly hair. She wore red lipstick and her brows and liner were in place. She wore red elastic pants and a flowered top. She was stunning.
“You’re beautiful,” I gasped. And she was. She wasn’t the twenty-year-old beauty I’d seen pictures of. I knew her story of being oft-engaged, a femme fatale. And she was eighty-seven years old, but she seemed decades younger. She had a wit and vibrancy about her even in her declining health. She acted and talked like a contemporary. She invited me into her immaculately kept apartment, bright and yellow. Paintings of her hung over her dining table. A table was covered with the handwritten chapters of her unpublished biography From Stripper to Brigadier General. Unfinished, it remains unpublished and a whopper of a good story. I even tried to have my literary agent (at the time) take it on.
Behind the Burly Q Page 21