Betty married again after “show business got tired of [her]” to the man who owned Dalton Lumber. A newspaper article in her scrapbooks says an “Owen S. Dalton” was in fact a restaurant man and holder of real estate interests. They were married in 1956.
Whomever Owen Dalton was, the marriage didn’t last, despite (according to Betty) his naming the development “Rowland Heights” in Los Angeles after her. She believes, though, John Rowland was given a land grant in that area in the 1800s. He also named one of the streets “Ball Road.” The two were separated by March of 1962.
Betty Rowland and “husband” Gus Schilling (second from right, and far right).
Betty would go on stripping until she became a part owner and hostess at a bar in Santa Monica, California, called Mr. B’s in the late ’60s. She sold her interest in the business, but remained working as a hostess for the renamed 217 Lounge. She was saddened over the death of actor Chris Penn, a frequent client at the bar, whose photo she kept in her apartment.
“I get to keep my clothes on,” she said of her hostess work. She eventually would claim the owners had cheated her out of her ownership of the club, and the club ultimately closed. Betty was forced to quit working in her early nineties. As Betty was growing increasingly frail and unable to take care of herself, though still mentally sharp, a friend of Betty’s moved her into an assisted living facility run by nuns. At the time of this writing, she is taken care of comfortably and kindly by the sisters, who know all about her past. And though Betty would prefer not to be there, she is making the most of it, as she always has.
DIAN
Not much is known today about the beautiful, blonde middle sister. She was advertised as “Society’s Favorite.” She looks a lot like her sister Betty, though her hair was platinum. Dian Rowland had had scarlet fever as a child, which left her with a leakage of the heart. The doctors informed the family she probably wouldn’t make it to thirty years old. One night, Dian didn’t come into the theatre where she was working. They found her dead in her apartment. She was just twenty-nine.
Diane Rowland on stage
ROZ ELLE
Born in 1917, Roz Elle was the oldest sister. She married a wealthy prince—well, actually a Baron, and went to live in a French chateau.
Also petite like her sisters, Roz Elle was quite literally the “Golden Girl.” She worked with her nude body spray-painted gold, a sometimes dangerous occupation. Many people died from the toxic paints, Lili Ann Rose said.
She was making $3.50 a day at the Irving Palace in New York. Theatre impresario Nils Thor (“Granny”) Granlund hired her for three times that amount. Granny had her nude body painted gold and stood her on a pedestal, and in slow motion she performed an acrobatic dance. It took three pails of hot water at the end of the night to remove the paint. She became known as “Goldie.”
Golden Girl Roz Elle Rowland, who performed in gold paint
In 1934, she went with the show to the Dorchester House in London, the current Dorchester Hotel. She was earning two hundred dollars a week. Roz Elle was about to meet her Baron.
Baron Jean Empain, of the Paris subway family, was a millionaire and playboy—part of the “black satin and pearls” crowd in Egypt. He and Roz Elle started going together.
When Roz Elle became pregnant with his child, he promised Roz Elle that if she had a girl, he would support the baby and her. But if she had a son, he would marry her. In 1937, Roz Elle had a boy, Edouard-Jean, nicknamed “Wado.” She was nineteen; three days later (according to one report), they were married.
For a honeymoon, the Baron took Roz Elle on a safari on the Belgian Congo. They lived for a time in a castle in Alexandria, Egypt.
She had traded her $3-a-day job posing in gold paint for her husband’s annual income of $10 million. Baron Jean Empain was the cheif stockholder of the Paris subway system, along with numerous other companies. He owned houses in Brussels, London, and Egypt; a stable of ninety race horses; ten automobiles; yachts; and even his own airplane.
They lived in a sumptuous mansion outside of Paris, and she became “quite elegant,” stripper Margie Hart’s sister Kathleen explained. “You would believe she was born into it.” Dian and Betty visited frequently, staying at their Chateau de Bouffemont. The mansion, built in the nineteenth century, was and is colossal, with gilt rooms and wide grand staircases. Today it sits over the prestigious Paris International Golf Course. Betty had scrapbooks full of photos of her in Egypt and France, living the good life with Roz Elle and the baron.
Baroness Roz Elle and her stripper sister Dian with Roz Elle’s beloved dogs-eaten by the, she claimed.
Roz Elle’s happiness was short-lived, however.
During WWII, the baron fought but was captured in German-occupied Belgium. Wounded on the battlefield, he was taken into prison by the Nazis while Roz Elle was living in the south of France. Their French mansion was occupied by the Nazis. Betty said the Nazis shot and ate the couple’s beloved St. Bernard dogs. They “made a mess of the chateau,” she said.
According to newspaper accounts from the time, Betty was without word from her sister for three years, unsure if she was alive.
When the baron died in 1946, Roz Elle married his cousin Eduard Empain. She would remain the Baroness Empain.
Roz Elle had a second child, a daughter Diane, with her second husband. But according to Betty, she wasn’t the baron’s daughter. “She’s fathered by a fellow who worked with the horses on the estate,” she said. Diane, in turn, Betty claimed, would have an illegitimate child that their Aunt Lorraine raised back in Columbus, Ohio.
Roz Elle’s son, Wado—one of the world’s ten richest men—was kidnapped in Paris in 1978 at the age of forty-one and held for ransom for sixty-three days. He was kept in chains to a bed, hooded and treated “with the utmost savagery,” she said. He was forced to stand bent over, and his little pinky was cut off and mailed to the family. According to Betty, Wado was never the same after that.
Betty had a final story about her sister. I have repeated it here as best as I can. It is a mystery that might never be solved.
From her apartment in Los Angeles, Betty would speak every Sunday to Roz Elle in France. Roz Elle, in her late eighties, became ill and her daughter Diane and son Wado placed her in a nursing home outside of Paris. According to Betty, Roz Elle didn’t want to go. One day, Betty received a call from the family. Betty was told Roz Elle had placed a table on top of another table under a window and jumped out, killing herself. Betty was devastated. This wasn’t the sister she knew. Roz Elle was petite, Betty’s size, and frail and sick. How could she stack a table on top of another one and then climb on top? She asked Roz Elle’s children to explain, but there was no explanation forthcoming.
At first, Roz Elle’s children kept in contact. But that soon changed. Betty says Roz Elle had always promised to take care of Betty, monetarily. In fact, she had regularly been helping her out. But Betty never received further monies or communication from Roz Elle’s children. For years, the sisters had made plans to move Betty to France to live with Roz Elle. And now her sister was gone and Betty was truly alone.
Betty wrote a poem honoring her sister:
Until you get back, I’ll turn out the starish night,
reserve such light, just for the sight of you ...
Until you get back, I’ll turn off the dew each dawn
No flowers are born until they’re worn by you
I’ll miss you. I’ll miss you. Must you go?
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
You Gotta Have a Gimmick
“A gimmick was a snake or a bird or something.”
—Betty Rowland
“Breast size.”
—Alexandra, on her own gimmick
“Each girl stamped [her] trademark on her act. Each girl had a little bit of something different,” said Dixie Evans. “Each girl wanted to be known for something no one else was doing.”
Stripping was more than disrobing for many. It was an oppor
tunity to add humor and artistry to their time on stage. For some, it was an act, an event, a story.
Though she never worked with her, Joan Arline praised Gypsy’s mastery of the tease. “She was wonderful at it,” Joan said. One of Gypsy’s gimmicks was “she would take her things off and dress a girl.”
On stage, Gypsy in an evening gown would introduce a chorus of scantily dressed strippers. She would then begin to drape and dress them with long swatches of fabric while she stripped down to a corset. This was her “reverse strip.” Gypsy herself never took off much, but what she took off seemed to take forever. She challenged and controlled her audience.
“I take offense at that,” Betty Rowland said when I asked what her gimmick had been. “You don’t have to have a gimmick. Not everyone had a gimmick. Not Margie Hart.” If anything, she “kept going” and that was her gimmick, she said.
As far back as burlesque began, girls were coming up with their “brand,” some way of performing that fans would associate with them. Say “Lydia Thompson” and one thought “tights.” Mention Billy Watson’s Beef Trust, in the 1870s, and one thought of the girls who weighed an average two hundred pounds.
Possibly the woman who started the whole gimmick business wasn’t Gypsy, but a Midwestern stripper named Carrie Finnell. Carrie Lee Finnell was born in 1893 in Covington, Kentucky. She was one of six children. She started there in burlesque at fourteen, and though we would consider her to be “hefty” by today’s standards, she stripped well into her fifties—weighing an impressive three hundred pounds all the while. She would began on the Columbia Wheel. By 1916, Finnell was in a Ziegfeld chorus line. By the 1920s, she was firmly settled in burlesque.
In the early days, her act was a fifty-two-week strip. She would go on stage and take off one item of clothing a week. Unbelievably, this entertained the audience that returned glove by glove, week by week. She was a huge hit and became a star. She worked for Minsky in the 1920s. She worked for Mike Todd and performed at the 1939 World’s Fair.
Carrie did something that was integral to burlesque. She brought humor to the strip. She twirled tassels and, though not beautiful—not even remotely sexy—she packed houses for close to twenty years. Though her girth grew and her looks diminished, this didn’t stop her popularity. Her pectoral muscles were billed as “educated muscles.” They could march in time to music. She could make her breasts move north, south, east, and west, clockwise and counterclockwise. Her act was billed as the “Most Unusual Act in Show Business.” When asked about her breasts, she said, “I make mine work for me.”
In a 1936 advertisement, she was billed as the “the highest-paid burly star” (although many would make that same claim). Sometimes she was billed as “The Remote Control Girl,” because her boobs seemed to function independently without help from the rest of her body.
“She could make her breasts jump out of her gown. And jump back in again,” said Renny von Muchow.
She was the “grandmother of stripteasers,” confirmed Rachel Shteir.
Described as a “fat, jolly woman,” she died of a heart attack at the age of seventy-six in Fayetteville, Ohio, in 1963, mere days before JFK was assassinated—and two weeks after her husband also died of a heart attack.
Throughout burlesque’s history, tassel twirling was a popular gimmick. Tassels were stuck on breasts and bottoms. Some had buckshot loaded into the ends to weigh them.
Some strippers carried fishing poles with candy attached and would fish out to the audience. In burlesque, there was plenty of audience participation.
Maria Bradley remembered, “We’d have baskets with country clothes . . . powder puffs like peaches and pass them out to the audience.... There was a number called ‘Powder My Back.’ All the chorus girls, we’d all go down into the audience, and like, powder people, you know... (singing) ‘Powder my back every morning.’ And we’d all be out there with our powder puffs. And I stopped short because there was my next-door neighbor, cheating on his wife. And like, he was lost for words. And I was lost for words. So I just powdered the next guy.”
Candy Cotton would have a candy box and candy tree on stage. She would take pieces of wrapped candy and ask the audience, “Do you want a piece of candy?” and then toss it to them.
Some performers rode bikes onstage or played instruments.
One performer tap danced while taking her clothes off.
Peaches was a stripper who could make her muscles quiver up and down her body, which was much harder than it might sound. Muscle work was difficult, Dixie Evans said. “I always say if you think the strippers don’t have any brains, [well] they have a lot of brains to keep those muscles going.”
Peaches let Lily Ann Rose catch her wardrobe and watch her number. “She was so beautiful and so clever and really the queen of shake. No one was allowed to watch her because she said, “They will steal my act.’ She trusted this girl. And I still remember her singing to the audience as she teased in her lovely costumes: If I can’t sell it, I’ll sit on it, I ain’t givin’ nothin’ away. Then Peaches would begin to shake from her shoulders down to her thighs,” Lily said.
“JFK had a crush on Peaches,” said David Kruh. “He was head over heels for her. His family had other plans for JFK.”
As a chorus girl, Lily Ann Rose would ride the subway to the Casino Theatre. One of her dearest memories was sharing the ride with the headliner Peaches Queen of Shake. “There I was, this teenage wannabe burlesque star working the chorus of the Casino Theatre, and befriended and coached by burlesque’s biggest and most beautiful star. Peaches, who was dressed as tailored as a schoolteacher, went unrecognized as just another passenger and we talked and bonded each day on our trip to our respective homes between shows.”
Mitzi Doree, the Cuban Bombshell, was known for her shimmy and shake.
Some did comedic strips, like Pat Flannery, who was awkward and funny and wore a sailor outfit. Lily White (there was an inordinate amount of Lilys and Lilis in the profession) “lampooned” herself. Lisa Bell stripped out of a two-piece longjohn.
Princess Lahoma was billed as an exotic “Indian” dancer with a white teepee.
There were many American Indian dancers with full headdresses and veil dancers. Della Carroll did a dance of the pearls, with her wrists, head, waist, and bosom draped in strings of long pearls.
Alexandra’s gimmick was stripping to “The Flight of the Bumble Bee.” She would rotate muscles with bows on certain parts of body in black light. “I was classic,” she said. “I wasn’t wild. But I wasn’t conservative either. And I had a bang-up ending. Unwrapping the ribbons.”
Betty Rowland recalled one stripper in a baby doll outfit singing to “She Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby.”
Alexandra the Great “48”
Some strippers talked to the audience, like Gypsy. They’d make fun of the audiences. That was their gimmick.
Mimi Reed, though never a stripper (she was a novelty dancer) would “pick a guy from audience and put a cancan skirt on him.” He would try and follow her as she danced.
Lili St. Cyr was known for her bubble baths—onstage. “In those days, they didn’t have bubble machines. And she’d hired one of the chorus girls to lay down in back of the bathtub and blow the bubbles,” said Dardy Minsky.
“She would get out and get dressed again,” recounted Kelly DiNardo, author of Gilded Lili. “And all of this was to get around laws that said you couldn’t leave the stage with anything less than what you started with.”
There would be much appropriating of each other’s acts—if one wanted to see Lili St. Cyr’s bathtub act and she wasn’t playing Cincinnati, audiences could see a Pepper Powell at their local theatre or any of the other half a dozen imitators scrub-a-dub-dubbing.
Betty Rowland admitted to going to other burlesque shows to check out the competition. “We all did,” she said. And others watched to see what “The Red Headed Ball of Fire” was doing.
White Fury said, “I stood in the wings and watc
hed every show.”
“I didn’t consider myself competition for anyone,” said Kitty West.
Harold Minksy had an idea for a gimmick for Rita Grable. “You did have to have a gimmick,” she said. “He had a humungous champagne glass made all out of wood.” The front of it would open and stairs would come down. “It was really beautiful. I was in the glass. So when the curtain opened, you just saw this big glass and music playing, ah, ‘You Go To My Head,’ or whatever, I forgot.” The stairs opened up and she stood up in a “beautiful orange beaded gown and orange fox stole.” She would then walk down the stairs. She was billed as the Girl in the Champagne Glass.
Modern-day stripper Dita Von Teese has revitalized the champagne glass act, done many times in the past, both in glass and wood. Lili St. Cyr did it too, but Grable was one of the first.
There were girls with birds. Rosita Royce had her white doves that fluttered around her, barely concealing her nudity. Yvette Dare performed with parrots that were trained to pluck the clothes off her body.
Dardy developed a young girl with an act with a parrot. The stripper would oil herself and then the bird would climb down from a prop tree set on the stage. The stripper was so slippery from the oil that occasionally the bird would slip off. The stripper put meat in her G-string and the bird dived towards it. “She’s laying there doing leg work. The parrot’s coming down the tree, over to the drum, beak on rope and pulled self-straight for her rhinestones on G-string. Wings all out. It was something.”
Strippers were also identified by their monikers. There was Evelyn West and her Million-Dollar Chest (a respectable size thirty nine and a half inches). Walter Winchell dubbed Margie Hart “The Poor Man’s Garbo.” Lynne O’Neill was the “Garter Girl,” and Joan Arline the “Sexquire Girl.”
Besides birds, girls worked with monkeys, snakes, even a bear.
Sequin recalled a stripper who worked with a horse. “It would be in the alley. She’d ride the horse around the stage doing tricks on it, leaning off its side. She called herself Lady Godiva. The horse was trained to do his business in a bucket.”
Behind the Burly Q Page 23