There was “Sally and her Monkey,” recalled Sequin. Sally would chain it to the radiator in the dressing room so it would stay warm. “That carries an unpleasant stench,” Sequin remembered.
Starting out, Blaze Starr admitted, “I first saw Gypsy and I thought, Well you gotta have a gimmick, something people remember ya by. Everything had been used.”
She thought “animals.” She got an ocelot and dyed it black. “I didn’t have sense enough to know; it got sick and died. It wasn’t big enough.”
So next she bought a Samoa leopard. “Got it through an animal company in New York who found it from a zoo.... [Again] I didn’t have sense. You can’t ever train a cat, couldn’t travel with them. I wasn’t scared of them. They were babies. It swallowed a rubber ball and died. Then I got a puma, a mountain lion they’re called. Big and dangerous. Had it declawed. Died during surgery.”
Her bad luck with cats continued, but she hadn’t given up yet. “I paid $1,100 for a baby black panther. I’d get it raw steak, just warmed.”
Blaze Starr worked with many cats on stage until it got too dangerous
Blaze and her panther were in a hotel in New York and Blaze went out shopping, leaving the panther inside—something she was used to doing. Although she’d leave it in the cage when the maid came, “[The maid] didn’t come in and clean. She’d give me clean sheets.” While Blaze was shopping, “it got in the shower, turned on the hot water. I come back, the cops and firemen are there. It had flooded a wing of the hotel. No one could go in the room, it was screaming. Weighed one hundred pounds.” Blaze went in the room. “It jumped on my back and laid its head on my shoulder, and scratched my brow, I thought it was going for my jugular vein. I knew then. This ... is scary. I sold it back for five hundred dollars.”
A statuesque blonde, still in her seventies, Joan Arline also performed with animals—two Russian wolfhounds. They were a part of her act for many years. “They made me a lot of money. They lay on a pink fur rug on the floor on command.” She bought them when they were three and a half months old and it took her eight months to train them. Their names were Anna and Alisha; she named them after famous ballerinas. They laid there and watched Joan strip ... and also watched the audience.
Joan Arline performed with two Russian wolfhounds
One night in Syracuse, New York, “a very inebriated customer was whistling,” Joan related. Joan was on an elevated floor, and the man was 10 to 12 feet from her. “I was on a pink chaise lounge.... [The drunk] threw a steak bone out on the floor. And he was whistling, Aye! Aye!’”
Joan continued, “I cut the band. I was looking for the maître d’. He was off somewhere.... I went to the mic and I said, ‘Sir, at least there are two dogs in the house that know their place. Obviously, you’ve noticed that they are very beautiful females. But give up! They’re not in heat!’” The audience applauded. And she continued with her act while the maître d’ ushered out the jokester.
Joan’s Russian wolfhounds were highly strung. Once, her six-month-old daughter was playing with them at home and Joan heard a growl. “I bent down quickly to pick my daughter up,” she said, but she wasn’t quick enough and the dog nipped her daughter’s face. “I had my husband take them that night,” she said. The dogs were put down.
In addition to stripping with snakes, Zorita was known for her half-woman, half-man costume. Her snake dance, she said, was the consummation of the wedding of the snake.
Sherry Britton used her costumes as gimmicks. She peeled off long chiffon evening gowns to the strains of Tchaikovsky.
Helen Bingler “had an act herself where she bent over backwards on a chair and would drink water,” remembered her daughter, Helen Imburgia.
Others became names because of who they resembled. There was a Jane Russell lookalike. Ann Perri was the Parisian Jane Russell. Harold Minsky named Dixie Evans the Marilyn Monroe of Burlesque (though it caused Dixie some legal troubles). She was sued by the screen goddess.
The Marilyn Monroe of Burlesque —Dixie Evans
“I got a letter. They said I’m using her name without permission.... We answered three threatening letters,” she said. One day a car pulled up to her agent’s office. It was someone from the newspapers who told Dixie they were on her side.
One night Dixie saw Marilyn on the television being taken on a stretcher going to the hospital. “My heart sunk. I sent her a telegram. I don’t know what I said. Two weeks later, ‘MY DEAR DEAR DIXIE EVANS OF MY MANY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE WORLD, YOUR TELEGRAM WAS OF THE GREATEST COMFORT TO ME AT THIS TIME, MARILYN MONROE MILLER.’”
Some women’s “gimmicks” were their physicality. Lois de Fee stood six feet four inches, or nearly that, and was billed as the “Amazon” when she was discovered by Harold Minsky. He lured her away from her “bouncer” job at Leon & Eddies nightclub on “Stripty Street,” 52nd in New York. (Stripper Sherry Britton worked Leon & Eddies, and Lili St. Cyr headlined for years down the street at Club Samoa.)
In the early 1950s, Ricki Covette was another “Amazon” strip, billed as “the world’s tallest strip.” Her number had a couch. It was a “sexy type of number that everyone tried to copy.” She too was billed as the world’s tallest exotic performer. “I had the stamina to carry all the props,” she admitted.
Ricki, like so many, “wanted to get away from [her] home and everything.” She was raised in Alberta, Canada, by normal-sized parents and was determined to get out. “I’m gonna do something when I graduate,” she swore.
She started on a carnival doing Gypsy’s show, then went to Chicago for Harold Minsky. Dave Cohen, a big burlesque agent at the time, took her on. She told him, “I refuse to take my clothes off,” until he mentioned the salary. She became a headliner.
As a publicity stunt, Lois De Fee wed a three-foot tall midget. Both Lois and Ricki were working 42nd Street. Ricki recalled that Lois “came marching in—in all of her glory—looked up at me and turned around and walked out. I was taller.”
Ricki was somewhat masculine looking. When Christine Jorgenson, formerly George Jorgenson, got her sex change, she said, “[everyone] thought I was a sex change. Even the agent who knew me told club owners that. It got so that I couldn’t handle it anymore.” She quit burlesque.
“Bust size was very big in those days. Everything revolved around that,” said Alexandra the Great “48.” “It was rare. I came along at an opportune time. Rose [La Rose] took advantage of my measurements.”
Sunny Dare had blue hair, Kitty West green—after all, she was supposed to be emerging from under the sea in her oyster shell after one hundred years submerged.
There were a plethora of cat and jungle girl acts.
Tee Tee Red did handstands. “I’d wrap my legs around my neck, if you can imagine that.” (I didn’t have to. I saw the pictures.)
Some sang.
Tee Tee Red doing yoga onstage
Faith Bacon used fans, but before that she danced with a fake swan. (The dancer’s arm was the swan, and her hand the head. It is by all accounts a very sensual dance.) Lili St. Cyr stole her swan act and someone else stole it from her, and on and on. Today we see, in the neo-burlesque movement, the result of years of well-crafted acts.
Props were integral to many of the women’s acts. Lili St. Cyr was known not only for her bathtub, but elaborate sets with vanities, mirrors, and hat racks. She variously performed as Cinderella, a matador, a Salome, a bride, a suicide, Cleopatra, and Dorian Gray.
Sequin was the girl in the red velvet swing. Maria Bradley said, “I was in awe. I was catching her wardrobe so I could watch her. She was a beautiful girl.” The hammock had silver fringe and she’d screw it into the stage floor. She had a palm tree made and she’d swing in the hammock, singing “I’ve Got an Island in the Pacific.”
She explained her gimmick: “You start with a lovely opening number, then slower, then finally blues, because it was slow and sensuous, and you were down to your bare necessities, lights brought down. F
ast, medium, and slow.”
Sequin’s approach was unusual. Most ended their set with a fast song, leaving the audience stirred.
Others turned their time onstage into scenes, or playlets. Dixie Evans decided to do a clever story about what a girl has to go through to get a job in Hollywood. She performed as if she was auditioning in a producer’s office. She made a velvet couch and set up a camera and a producer’s chair. She would stroll on the stage, say a little patter about getting a job in the movies. She feigned being chased around the room. Then she’d run to the producer’s chair and do an act. Eventually she’d end up on the couch, kicking her legs in the air.
When I met White Fury, she was still wearing her platinum hair and false eyelashes, as she had in the 1960s. Her gimmick was lighting her tassels on fire. “I had gas. A little can of gas and I had long, long tassels and I would dunk ’em into the gas and then light them and turn around. When they came up, I put my head back like this and they came up about this far and went poof, you know, and burned the whole front of my hair. I didn’t stop, no. I just put those out.”
Another time, her gimmick was painting herself to a song.
The comedians, too, had their trademark gags, costumes, or way of talking and walking. Pinky Lee had his tiny bowler hat and his lisp. W. C. Fields pretended to be drunk and hate children. Bert Lahr had a rubbery face and mugged. Ed Wynn wore hats and was called the Perfect Fool. Will Rogers did a trick rope act. Jimmy Durante had that schnoz and that raspy voice. Buster Keaton was deadpan. Sliding Billy Watson made an entrance by sliding center stage. Mike Sachs, before and after he went blind, would move one eye back and forth.
Whatever the gimmick, Betty Rowland believed that “it’s a question of being yourself. Sell yourself or your gimmick. Don’t overanalyze it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The Swinging G-String
“At the end of your act, you back up and the lights dim, and the curtains close, and you reach down and you unhook and let the G-string fall.”
—April March
“She’d show things that she wasn’t supposed to show.”
—Dardy Minsky
Zorita—a gold-digging bisexual who danced with snakes
Just as the invention of the striptease was the lifesaver for burlesque in the 1920s, flashing would lead to its demise.
In burlesque there were fast acts and slow acts, strips to jazz music and strips to Dixie music. And then there were flash acts.
“I didn’t even know what the hell they were talking about. ‘Flash,’ what?” Maria Bradley said. “Pulling your G-string aside. It would be so instantaneous. I don’t know if anyone saw it anyway. That’s why burlesque got a bad reputation—but in a fun way.”
Author David Kruh related a story of how the girls would paste Brillo pads on the front of their G-strings just before the blackout. The audience “thought they got a flash of something. There is a certain innocence to it. It was about sex, seeing something you weren’t supposed to see, but in fact you weren’t seeing it. It was theatre of the mind.”
Or was it?
Alexandra talked about her mentor Rose La Rose, who was notorious for flashing, and it was not a Brillo pad she flashed. “When I first saw her, you weren’t allowed to flash. She had this little gimmick, she wore a ‘flapper’ and certain ways she moved would announce her presence, to say the least. I was dumbfounded. I had never seen anything like that. It wasn’t supposed to be done at all. But Rose was famous for doing things she wasn’t supposed to do. I just never forgot that. I wasn’t prepared to see the Countess in all her loveliness. I was shocked... and I’m sure the police would have been, too.”
“Of course, Rose went with the chief of police,” Dixie Evans reminded me, so she didn’t have to worry on that account.
“I didn’t like it on the road because you had to flash. We considered ourselves dancers and performers,” said Lady Midnight.
“Rose put me on the flash circuit,” said Alexandra. “That means you show a little hair, which I shaved into a heart, which I put a bow on top of. And everybody got a present every night.”
“Certain girls . . . as much as they’d tell them not to do it, they’d pack the house.” Dixie Evans cited Blaze Fury and the resulting chaos as an example. “Front of house screaming, phone backstage is ringing, but she’s packing the house. Certain ones... that’s just the way it was.”
Those I heard accused of flashing included Betty Rowland, Irma the Body, and Margie Hart.
It was dangerous and ultimately led to the closing of the burlesque theatres by LaGuaradia. “Strippers got into flashing. Nobody wanted them to do it on a show. Just before the blackout, they would drop something for an instant. I remember my father was dead set against it. They felt it wasn’t necessary. They were afraid they’d get busted,” said Harry Lloyd.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Stage Door Johnnies
“I had a lot of roses.”
—Joan Arline
“I felt like a star. All these people waiting for me.”
—Maria Bradley
With the invasion of the British Blondes on American soil came the Stage Door Johnnies. According to author Bernard Sobel, they arrived “in such force in the alley behind the theatre, the police were called in.” Maybe it had to do with all that blonde hair, though in later years, red hair would dominate (Tempest, Blaze, Georgia, Ann Corio, Betty Rowland, Tee Tee Red). Maybe redheads eventually dominated the field because they were presumed to be “fiery . . . highly sexed creatures.”
“Hell, I got so many roses, I used to bring the roses home to my mother,” remembered Maria Bradley.
“We had a big field to pick from,” Vicki O’Day agreed.
“I had a waist like this, hair down to here and ‘bunnies’ out to here,” said Carmela.
Besides love notes, flowers, bottles of champagne, and, of course, dates, there were the gifts.
Alexandra the Great said, “Someone anonymous had sent me the pair of earrings with a black stone and diamonds around it and it was for pierced ears and I didn’t have pierced ears. So one of the girls said, “That’s one of the most beautiful pair of earrings I’ve ever seen.’ And I gave them to her. And I found out later they were black opals, real black opals. I looked more carefully the next time someone sent something back.”
Maria Bradley remembered receiving envelopes backstage. “And it would be money.” With a note: “We placed a bet for you today, we’re the boys in Box B.”
“Everyone had groupies,” said Rita Grable. “I had a gentleman that was in the pie business. A very big company. Everywhere I opened, I’d get three or four pies, humungous.” Rita would go on to marry Sintra contemporary singer Jerry Vale.
“We had fans that would do things for us—buy us cigarettes, clothes, jewelry, and things,” said Vicki O’Day. One of her husbands would go to Trader Vics and have big boxes of food made up and the doormen would deliver it. “We’d all dive in.”
“An admirer from the Hudson Theatre after sixty-something years, to this day, he calls every birthday, every Christmas,” said Maria Bradley. “It was fulfilling.”
Stage Door Johnnies would send “a big birthday cake and all the little glasses to have a glass of champagne for the chorus girls.”
Alexandra the Great said, “We would [even] have dinner on aircraft carriers. All that was just a matter of fact. Very exciting times.” April March, billed “the First Lady of Burlesque” because of her resemblance to Jackie Kennedy, saw her fair share of Stage Door Johnnies. There were “many, many, many.” And yet, “they came and they went,” she said. One of her more remarkable suitors was King Saud of Saudi Arabia.
April was working a place in West Palm Beach when two of King Saud’s sons came into the club. Two “out of his hundreds of sons,” joked April. She and Blaze Starr were performing. “They didn’t like Blaze. They invited me to their table.” The next day the princes sent a car for April to have lunch. “I’m figuring that would b
e good publicity.” The next night, the king’s people got in touch with April. He wanted to meet her. A fellow from the State Department in the meantime contacted April and gave her a letter. He instructed her to slip it secretly to the king. “The government was trying to get something to the king. So they used me as a go-between.” April then met the king. “I took Sy, a press agent,” she said. After April gave the king the letter, “he went storming out the door. I had no idea to this day what was in that letter.” But the fellow that brought her to the king was named Abraham and he “was later beheaded.” Meanwhile, April said she realized, “I can’t use this publicity. I did all this for nothing.”
Maria Bradley recalled that “so many people [were] waiting for us at stage door. We’d make so many promiscuous dates, that we used to ask if we could go out of the front of the theatre. Or we’d put on a mask, and make our way through crowd. Once, this guy out there dressed so nice, I was impressed with him. I talked to him, then he said he was an undertaker.”
Maria loved her years in burlesque. She started out being a chorus girl. She said those were the “most wonderful days of my life. We had so much fun.” She used to get one day off every two weeks. Maria would ask if she could work that day, too. She was told she wouldn’t be paid, but she didn’t mind. And even though she got into stripping, it was the chorus she loved the most. “Those old days at the Hudson burlesque are especially soft in my heart,” she said.
She had known her dear friend Joan Torino since they were twelve. They began dancing in the chorus together when they were sixteen, pretending to be eighteen. “I loved those days,” she said.
Their choreographer came up with the idea of a twin strip. Maria asked a Stage Door Johnny, a textile manufacturer, for help with the matching costumes. “I said to him, ‘We need material for gowns.’ He got us fabric, ice blue from his warehouse. He had costumes made. Joan was tall and had red hair. I made all the changes. We started to rehearse to ‘Hold that Tiger’ (Georgia Sothern’s signature piece). We did that for maybe six to eight weeks. They wanted us to go on the road. I had another Stage Door Johnny get me a trunk. I was ready.... Then Joan said, ‘I can’t go, Mo, I don’t want to leave my grandmother,’ so that was the end of the Toni twins.” But it wasn’t the end of Maria’s career in burlesque.
Behind the Burly Q Page 24