As she spoke, I fell in love, as so, so many before me had.
Sherry became a dear friend. At the end of the interview, we drove to her doctor’s appointment with the nurse who shared an apartment with her. I would call and write Sherry. She had an enthusiasm in her voice that I always found to be uplifting.
Young Edie had a crushingly hard childhood. She was born in England to a mother who first tried to abort her with a twelve-inch hat pin, then later abandoned her when she was two. Sherry’s father started “cavorting with different people.” She would live in fifteen foster homes and a couple orphan asylums.
At ten, when she was back with her mother and her mother’s new husband, the husband “performed oral sex” on her, she said.
At fourteen, she moved in with her aunt. However, Sherry was becoming a voluptuous young beauty and her aunt had a “young, handsome husband” with a wandering eye. Another uncle raped Sherry. “And so [my aunt] felt that I might now be attractive to her husband, so she threw me out. I was homeless, sleeping in people’s cars, parks, the subway,” she said. But not before her aunt beat up the young teenager. After a year on the streets, she met a guy who asked her to marry him. Unbeknownst to the naïve girl, he was already married, but pretended to go through a ceremony. “It was a phony marriage.... He put a ring on my finger. And I thought I was married,” she said. She had no idea what getting married even was. She believed him and assumed she was. “And I was pregnant four times that year. And he beat the shit out of me. It was terrible. Horrible,” she said. Her pregnancies ended in abortions. She always wanted a baby and likely would have been a lovely mother. She was nurturing, as testified by her cousin, Melaine, whom she helped raise when she was born.
Sherry was trapped in the relationship. “My aunt helped me get away from him. He found me, got on his knees, and begged me to come back. I didn’t. His wife found us and I found out we weren’t married. He was twenty-eight.”
The same aunt introduced Sherry to a life of dancing and stripping. “Bobbie got me into burlesque and so I was in burlesque, which I despised for six years. It was so weird for me.” Through all my hours of discussion with Sherry that would grow more intimate and broad over the months, she was blunt and fearless. Despite her tough exterior, she was full of love and wonder for everything.
“It was disgusting to me. I could see the men masturbating and knew that I was part of that. And realized that that was probably all over the theatre—each theatre. And the only thing that I enjoyed was making my costumes and the beautiful music.” She stripped to classical music. “All kinds of music that had nothing to do with burlesque—I enjoyed those two things.” She couldn’t understand that those around her had no self-respect or respect for one another. She survived beatings at the hands of jealous strippers backstage. “I was so young and became a star immediately. And so they were very resentful.”
Sherry stood apart from the other strippers for many reasons. “I was the only one who didn’t take off my G-string. Everyone else took off their G-string. Yuck. I got fired a couple times until they realized people came back hoping to see the forbidden fruit, so they stopped firing me,” she said. Bizarrely, she would balance a glass of water on her “fifteen-year-old breasts” and walk across the stage.
“My father showed up and he said, ‘My daughter is in burlesque?’ I said, ‘Where were you. Where were you? What was I supposed to do?’” she said. She faced him square, knowing he hadn’t been there for her, hadn’t protected her from abandonment, hunger, rape, humiliation, and sadness.
Even though she “hated burlesque,” it didn’t mean she did not like working in the nightclubs stripping. She did. But the clubs were very different than the theatres.
Sherry moved into nightclubs, appearing at Leon & Eddies on 52nd Street for six or seven years straight, starting at the age of sixteen and breaking all attendance records. Nightclubs had “vaudeville acts and I sang and danced and did have to strip down to as much as I did in burlesque.”
She enjoyed singing. “I felt that [stripping] had its place at that time in burlesque with the scenes with men, the girls, and production numbers, so that I felt that it was a legitimate showing, but what I’ve seen the last few years... there is no comedy and production numbers.”
Sherry knew she was beautiful and desirable to many men. She had her nose shaved and made less slimmer on three separate occasions. She loved to dance and sing. She was innately classy. She knew her worth as a person and a performer, though she would repeatedly run into trouble due to her stubbornness. She held off men that loved her; she was suspicious and could be cold.
“I wouldn’t get married. I just wouldn’t. I was alright being engaged, but when it came to being pushed into marriage, I couldn’t do it. When it’s something the other person doesn’t want, they want it. These men all wanted to get married. They had a woman they could take to grandma and not be ashamed of and still have a garden full of all kinds of lovely things men would treasure. I lived with several men,” she said.
She began a stint cruising the streets of New York, picking up men and bringing them back to her apartment for sex. She wouldn’t allow them to spend what remained of the night.
“I had a lot of one-nighters. And I didn’t realize it was hurting their egos not to be invited back again. One of them was [Academy Award–winner] José Ferrer. Ferrer never admitted we were together.”
She continued, “I was engaged fifteen times, but rejected each fiancé before he could reject me. I liked being engaged.”
She had great, tumultuous romances with men, both married and not. Her beaus included Harry Belafonte and composer Richard Rodgers, and she had an affair with at least one woman. David Susskind was a fiancé. She dated “exhilarating” actor Rex Harrison. “The most romantic man of all was Jackie Gleason,” she said. She’s mentioned in a biography (a copy of which she kept, with the page marked, in her apartment) of “sweet” actor Gig Young, with whom she had a love affair and who killed himself, though thankfully not because of her.
She said she had a horrible, “demeaning, and disgusting experience” with the “oversized” Frank Sinatra. Sinatra courted Sherry, and they spent one “disastrous night in bed.” ”How could he resist touching this body?” she said. She was astounded. “It amazed me. No kisses, nothing.”
It started in Miami Beach when she was invited to a party the crooner was giving in his suite at the Fontainebleau Hotel. The party lasted into the night and every time she tried to leave, she was persuaded to stay by “Mr. Crew Cut, Joe Fischer” (really one of the Fischetti brothers, as in FBI’s Ten Most Wanted). Eventually Sinatra got Sherry into his bedroom and immediately unzipped his pants. She contemplated what to do and decided to get into bed.
A story I’m not proud to repeat, but it happened.” To her it was a “mystery how Sinatra managed to snare such lovely women . . . outsized Frank Sinatra.” With no foreplay whatsoever, he “mounted” the shocked Sherry Britton. She said she “felt like a pound of hamburger.”
She left before anything happened.
Afterwards, she felt guilty, knowing Sinatra could not sleep alone and she called to apologize. He wouldn’t speak with her. “You’re on his shit list,” his people said. Sherry didn’t much care. “Spectacular bust as a suitor. No sweet talk. No career, just zip.”
She got married at age thirty-seven to Buddy Boylan, stage name “Mark Reddy,” a singer and half of a comedy team. “I tricked my way into it,” she said. “By that, I mean everybody was saying to me, ‘You ought to be married,’ and there were two of us at the time, well known that weren’t married. Laverne Andrews, one of the Andrew Sisters, and me. Laverne was sweet and nice but so completely dull. I got married to Buddy, big gorgeous hunk, and we were walking along Fifth Avenue,” where they ran into Laverne, who was with her new husband.
To Sherry, Laverne asked, “‘How come you got married?’
Sherry responded, “I married the first man who didn’t try and drag me to
bed.”
Laverne replied, “I married the first one who did.”
Sherry and Buddy’s marriage lasted two years. She said he was “impossible. Really emotionally a mess. And people said, ‘If you knew that before, why did you marry him?’ Because I was nuttier than he was. And I was,” she explained. “He didn’t pursue me and everybody else did. So I went after him.”
Sherry Britton backstage
During WWII, she toured hospitals and sang and met the wounded soldiers. In Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, there was a cosmetic reconstruction hospital. She sang to boys with “empty eye sockets.” There were so many “boys without faces.... And I looked across and I said to the boy who was guiding me—he had two dimples and no teeth, a bullet had gone through him—‘If that boy comes over to me, I’ll die.’ He did. This poor boy’s face was inside out. He had a sense of humor, and he had a delightful personality, started telling me where the different places on his face came from—like twenty-seven operations—and finally he said, ‘They just made me an eyelid and the only comparable flesh is on a man’s penis. So forever more I’ll be cockeyed.’”
For her work in the hospitals, she was told she was to be honored with the rank of Brigadier General. But she didn’t go to Washington for the ceremony where she would have met the president. “I was an idiot! I didn’t go.” They sent three military men to New York who presented it to her on stage at her beloved Leon & Eddies.
Despite love affairs, adoring fans, and nonstop work, Sherry “fell apart and wound up in the psychiatric [ward] of NYU. It was horrible. They put me on Librium and I was on Librium for thirty years.”
In 1969, she was out of burlesque due to an injury in a dimly lit club. She approached legitimate theatres. “I starred in fifty-three Broadway shows. And at fifty-three, I married Bob. I stopped working. And he wanted me to become a lawyer, so at sixty-three, I graduated from Fordham University Magna Cum Laude. I’d never had high school. It was really a miracle.” She also claimed to speak five languages.
Bob Gross, three years younger, was the love of her life, and her last husband was by her own account an “ugly man.” But he made Sherry laugh. He was the wealthy owner of Astra Aircraft. The two married in 1971 after many hard years (for Sherry) seeing each other on and off.
“I married late. Too late given, too soon taken.” They discovered that Bob had lung cancer. Because of a surgeon’s negligence, she nursed Bob for seven years. When he was ensconced at Mt. Sinai Hospital, she spent her nights on a cot by his side for months on end.
She did her last strip at sixty-three at the Players Club. “I did my whole show. I had written it and that was the last time.”
She adored her family, kept in touch with a wide circle of friends, played cards, and rarely drank. She had wanted children, but settled for being a good aunt and family woman. She had been blessed with amazing genes. “I looked twenty years younger than I was without cosmetic surgery,” she said. Though she did admit to having a peel around her lips, and when it got rid of the wrinkles, Bob’s family was disgusted with her.
Sherry Britton backstage
Bob was a “Voluptuary. He liked doing things, not seeing things.” They went to see a stripper on 42nd Street. Bob wanted to leave. When the girl finally came on that they had come to see, she was “beautiful but she stripped down to nothing and she was shaven,” she said. The couple behind Sherry and Bob said, “She looks like Kojak.” According to Sherry, Bob said it was worth going to the show just for that line.
Witty and self-assured, when she was once asked what she thought of when she stripped, she replied, “Men.”
Another time, on meeting someone, the woman Sherry was introduced to said, “Honey, you should change your name, there is a stripper with the same name.” Sherry was amused.
Sherry had her share of heartbreaks and heartaches. But she also had an indefatigable spirit and a sense of wonder about the world and people.
“In burlesque, I felt that there were two of me. One on the stage, and one watching me undress for all the morons in the audience.... It’s incredible to me that anyone could have lived that life and survived with any sense of self-respect or any compassion or any love for humanity at all. It amazes me. But thank goodness I remained a decent, loving person.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Birds of a Feather
“I said, ‘You might be a baroness, but I’m the queen of burlesque.‘”
—Betty Rowland
“Rose Zell went to work at the Paradise in New York, and Dian was working one burlesque show called the Eltinge, so she was a star there. And I was working for Minsky. We had it all tied up.”
—Betty Rowland
They were three beautiful sisters: the oldest Roz Elle (variously Rose-Elle and Roselle), a middle sister Dian, and the youngest Betty Jane born in 1916, in Columbus, Ohio. The three sisters started dancing together in vaudeville. An older sister, Lorraine, would remain in Columbus, out of show business. Their mother was Ida. Their father, Alvah, was a probation officer.
The three sisters toured in a five-girl dance act. When the act broke up, the sisters decided to remain on the road. They were soon in burlesque (without their parents’ knowledge) and in New York, where they were being chaperoned by another girl’s mother. The sisters would say “we’ll go home next week. We never did.” Soon the parents came to New York and found them. The father got a job working in a hotel and the family was together again.
By 1935, they were squarely in burlesque. Nils Grunland, in his book Blondes, Brunettes, and Redheads, says the sisters and mother were living at “a drab theatrical hotel.” He had discovered Rose-Zelle (his spelling) working at the Irving Palace Theatre on 14th Street and said her “beauty was startling.” She was sixteen. Betty Jane was thirteen.
In no time, the three separately made names for themselves. Roz Elle was working the Paradise, Dian was the star at the Eltinge, and Betty was with Minsky. The sisters were close and continued to live together.
Betty often describes her work as “The Three D’s,” for dancing, dollars, and dishes. Because of the sagging economy during the Depression, she sometimes earned “dishes” instead of cash.
Money wasn’t the only problem. The worries about being shut down by the authorities were real. Rowland said she was fined $250 in 1939 after a trial in which a police officer described and imitated her burlesque act on the witness stand.
Betty, a contemporary of Sherry Britton’s and also one of the last “queens,” would soon be the only surviving sister, and when I interviewed her, she was in her nineties. Betty knew everything about burlesque, a form of entertainment she had enjoyed and in which found much success, if not financial reward. She was a star during its Golden Age, billed as “The Ball of Fire,” both for her red hair and fiery strip. She was petite and buxom, fresh-faced and wholesome looking.
“They enjoyed talent at that time, and then Rose-Elle left me by myself and I started stripping because I didn’t have her anymore,” she said.
Betty worked when there “was no stigma,” she explained. There was a lot of talent in the burlesque theatres.
Betty Rowland
The first time she stripped, she forgot to take her clothes off. She “didn’t do too well the first time.”
She began to work her way up in a show by experimenting. When a stage manager suggested she start stripping, she piled on hat, gloves, and much more. Betty admitted the “costume was a bit much. Not enough music to get it all off.” She eliminated some clothes and did more dancing.
Though she enjoyed steady work, it wasn’t until she went to California that audiences appreciated her, (Vicki O’Day explained the rivalry between the coasts: “We on the West Coast were snobbish. We were a tad cleaner than the East Coast.”) When Betty returned to New York, they appreciated her more, she said. She soon went to work for Minsky.
“The dance directors helped you, would look for special music,” she said. She was smart enough to get help. “
I tried to help one girl with doing floor work.” The girl’s feet were dirty and Betty said, “Let’s start with your feet.” The stripper became insulted and “never spoke to [Betty] again.” Betty still shakes her head. “It didn’t look good with dirty feet. Distracting.”
Betty explained, “A typical show had a chorus line, and the dancers were usually short girls, tap dancing. Burlesque was coming out of its cocoon, because vaudeville was going into it. Burlesque was adding comics and others who couldn’t work in Broadway shows....
“We had the advantage of beautiful theatres, musicians, and talent,” she said. She worked with Abbott and Costello, Red Skelton, and Red Buttons. They were “topping the other with talent.”
“Stripping wasn’t the big thing, but got to be that way because of competition,” she said. But there was a difference in the talent. “A lot just took off their clothes and said, ‘Look at me.’” Betty’s act “was nonstop. No one could ever copy it.” At the time, there wasn’t too much copying of acts. “It’s you when you strip. When you try someone else’s act, the audience is thinking of them.”
Betty would carry on a long-term affair with burlesque comedian, actor, and Orson Welles protégé Gus Schilling, who she lived with (although some publications stated erroneously that they were married). Gus had a drinking problem and was married to someone else. “It was just easier to tell people we were married,” Betty explained.
She did an act with Gus, a recognizable one in burlesque where Gus was downstage singing. Betty was behind him, stripping to wild applause.
Behind the Burly Q Page 22