Maria also had admirers of the same sex. The “gay girls followed me, even though in burlesque they weren’t allowed.... They fired me because the gay girls were sitting in the front row,” she said.
One of Candy Cotton’s Stage Door Johnnies was a wrestler who would call on her mother. Another was a policeman she met backstage who sent her daughter a doll.
Joe DiMaggio drove April March around Washington, D.C., all the while drinking Dom Perignon champagne.
“The Secret Service used to come into the club I worked in and they always wanted to impress the girls,” said Alexandra the Great. “That’s how I saw the White House. I never went on a tour. I got to see the Thomas Jefferson bedroom—on my feet.”
I found among Sherry Britton’s papers the following, which she might have written: “Did you know the girls had them in categories? There were Drugstore Johnnies—those who could be counted on to buy a girl the cosmetics she needed. There were Dinner Johnnies, Nightclub Johnnies, and even, honestly, G-string Johnnies. You see, G-Strings were all handmade, elaborately beaded, and cost a small fortune. Of course, for many girls it was a game of ‘How much can I get from him before he gets too much from me?’”
Sherry had her share of gifts, including the use of a Cadillac from an admirer that she drove around New York at 4 in the morning looking for—and finding—men.
The women had wonderful adventures outside of work. “It was a great life.” And there was no shame in having the men court the girls, Alexandra the Great maintains. “I thought I was very professional. I conducted myself that way. I was treated that way. I think a lot of people have the wrong idea of what it was like.”
Lily Ann Rose was a teen when she shared a car with a young JFK.
“One of the girls said that must be Jack Kennedy. He was a handsome young man who came to the burlesque show. Sent a car for me, but when he found out I was only fourteen years old, he stopped the car and sent me home.”
Down in New Orleans, Jack came into the club, Blaze recalled. “My boss goes, ‘You gotta meet this guy, this is one of the Kennedy boys, and blah blah blah.’ Well I wasn’t interested. He didn’t appeal to me—just a young guy with a bunch of bushy hair and it looked red under the lights. So I let him buy me a fifty, sixty dollar bottle of champagne and I had a few drinks of it and I moved on.”
However, the two would run into each other again. It was at the Crossroads in Maryland. He was not yet married. Blaze was single, too. “Then I got married. I took off for six months,” she said. When she returned to work at the Crossroads, Kennedy and his crew showed up. He told her he had gotten married and she said had done the same. He said, “Now we can go out.” By the following year, Blaze had dated Kennedy a couple times.
Blaze was working in New Orleans. “I’d met Governor Earl Long, working Sho Bar. Earl was there that night, he had a table. A big club, with big balcony—everything filled up. People standing at door. JFK and Jackie came in. I thought, This can’t be. Now this cannot be. By then I was a jackie fan. I come out—they were at Earl’s table. Earl stood up. Earl told me to be nice to him, ‘He’s gonna be your next president.’ JFK shook my hand as if I’d never seen him before. He said, ‘Ms. Starr, you were very good tonight.’” She replied, “I’ve been told I’m the very best.”
Twenty minutes later, Jackie left her husband at the club. “I ain’t telling you about the rest of the night,” Blaze said.
Tempest Storm also crossed paths with—and dated—Kennedy. “His entourage marched in there one night, ‘Would you like to go out with Kennedy?’ So I dated him,” she said. “I had never said anything about it. I was on a television show in Michigan. The interview was going great, and he said, ‘I understand you slept with President Kennedy.’ And I said, ‘You certainly got my attention.’ I said, ‘Would you repeat that?’ I was stalling for an answer. I says, ‘He’s not here to defend himself.’ But [the interviewer] said, ‘Well, what did he talk about in the bedroom?’ I said, ‘It certainly wasn’t politics.’”
Of Stage Door Johnnies, Dixie Evans said, “Usually you sluff them off... You don’t know who they are. In the nightclubs you don’t go out with the customer. You want that guy to keep coming back.” The only way for the men to see the girls again was to buy another ticket, pay for another drink. As Dixie explained, “This club separates the men from the boys. They are paying for your conversation.” One time a gentleman from Wall Street told Dixie he was bringing four business associates over. But he warned Dixie, “Don’t hustle them. Get four girls. Be real nice.” Dixie handpicked the girls for the table and afterward the man from Wall Street gave her money to split with them.
Dixie wondered at all the business cards she used to get. “I had shoe boxes of presidents of corporations.... Now I’m dropping down to vice presidents and secretaries.”
Depending on the man, the publicity from dating a Stage Door Johnny could be good for the stripper; it could boost her marketability. Lili St. Cyr was always in the papers for who she dated, divorced, and dallied with. Some girls were hoping to find their prince charming among the Johnnies. It seldom occurred.
Working the Club Samoa, Beverly Anderson recalled a night that her stripper friend Lorraine Cooper, “a cut above most strippers,” was backstage with all the other girls preparing for the show. “She was blonde and beautiful and had a white leather makeup case,” which impressed Beverly. “‘Well, ladies,’ Lorraine announced one night, ‘my boyfriend is coming tonight to take me away from all this.’ She claimed he was going to take her to the French Riviera. The fantasy sounded too good to be true. The other strippers thought she was a wacko. But sure enough, there in the front row was the Aly Kahn, recently divorced or separated from Rita Hayworth. And he did take Lorraine away and she never returned to that club.”
The nightclubs were dark refuges for many celebrities. Gary Cooper and Frank Sinatra were frequent customer’s at Club Samoa on 52nd Street in New York. Stripper Pat Flannery told me how Johnny Carson frequently attended her shows, drinking quietly and politely at a club she worked in Los Angeles. Apparently he was taking everything in, as he would perform familiar burlesque routines on his show. Johnnie’s sidekick Ed McMahon was a former carnival barker and pitchman.
A lot of guys, if you worked in the theatres, they would like to wait on the back entrance in hopes that you would come out,” said Carmela. “And sometimes I would just stay in, because I was afraid. There were some towns where you had to be afraid. Detroit, I was scared to death. I had a horrible fear in Detroit.”
Kitty West had a reason to be afraid of Stage Door Johnnies and other men who were on the prowl at the clubs. “Two men grabbed me. I don’t know what they wanted. I started screaming because it scared me half to death. I had green hair and they knew who I was, but finally some stranger rescued me from that,” she recalled.
Beverly Anderson said the Stage Door Johnnies were ”tacky. I didn’t do much with them. I tried to avoid that. I had to lock my door once. Some people were trying to get in. I realized what I was doing was certainly provocative and would lead to something I would be uncomfortable with.”
Some of the fan mail from the men was awkward, pleading, or downright bizarre.
To Betty Rowland, a man wrote:
“I am a nudist yachtsman and have been thinking of getting a group of women together—to make a Nude Travel Film—that will take a three-year around-the-world trip.... Of course being a nudist I would require all aboard ship to be nude while underway ...”
Sherry Britton received an even more disturbing letter written in 1940, which she kept for more than sixty years:
“Had the pleasure of watching you perform ... you had stripped completely in the rear with just a little in front of your lovely box . . . you again came out and bared your body to the waist much to the delight of all and I don’t see how the man singer could resist squeezing and kissing your lovely gorgeous red nippled breasts... I know I would just love to kiss your lovely shapely bare ass and
your lovely box and lovely breasts and svelte navel... it’s too bad the comedians... have to fart with their mouths.”
One of the more flamboyant of the Johnnies was Louisiana’s Governor Earl Long.
Like Blaze, Tee Tee Red met Governor Earl Long when she was working New Orleans. “Blaze and I were in competition with him. They called him ‘the crazy governor,’ she said.” He would drive down the street in his limousine, throwing hundred bills out the window. He also regularly passed out food to the poor. “He didn’t care what people said. He was a lot of fun. He’d throw his money around. He could do whatever he wanted. He could buy the club out if he wanted to. He’d order champagne for everybody,” Tee Tee said.
The forty-fifth Governor of Louisiana was colorful, charismatic, and a compelling speaker. Because of his erratic behavior—he blatantly flaunted his many dalliances with strippers—his wife Blanche had him committed to a state hospital. (Hell hath no fury than a wife publicly humiliated.) However, there was no law that said he couldn’t run the state from a mental hospital. And so he did. There has been speculation Long was either bipolar or suffering from dementia. He endured strokes and heart attacks that contributed to his declining mental health. He was irascible and unkempt, erratic in speech. In 1959 he famously said on the floor of the State Legislature: “I’m not nuts. If I’m nuts, I’ve been nuts all my life. Thank ya, and God bless ya.” Governor Long was a regular at the Sho Bar. He would see Blaze until he died in 1960 of a heart attack. Blaze refused money he had left for her in his will.
Another Stage Door Johnny that didn’t turn out so well for Blaze was a young man whose father was wealthy and influential. He was “a big politician” and he “tried to buy me off to not date his son. That was a downer,” she said. Blaze told him, “You don’t have to buy me. I’m not looking to marry your son.” The father sent his son on a trip around the world to get him away from Blaze. The son called her, but it was too late. “I never loved him after that cause he was a wimp. I got on my knees and prayed, ‘Let me get over this man without too much heartache.’”
According to Blaze, the son “ended up marrying a prostitute. The father never knew his wife was a call girl.”
Club owner Nils T. Grundland described the girls in that business to be “subjected to more temptation in a day than most other women encounter in a lifetime.” How the women dealt with it was revealing.
“You would be surprised how small this country is and you could meet people all over,” Carmela told me. “I didn’t ever want anyone to go to my kids and say ‘Hey, your mom’s a hooker.’”
So, though the temptations were great, most enjoyed the attention and gifts and remained true to themselves. Their careers and reputations were too important to jeopardize.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Money
“Hunger is a good motivation.”
—Beverly Anderson
“Wherever you’re working and making money, you’re happy.
—Dixie Evans
“I became a stripper because you got paid more,” said Candy Cotton. One time at the theatre where she was working, a stripper didn’t show up and she was husded onstage as the replacement. She earned more stripping than as a talking woman. “You got paid five dollars more a week. It seemed worth it to me. As I was in black light, it didn’t bother me as much because I really and truly believed you couldn’t see me. Then I learned you really could.” She shrugged. “By then, the nerves went away.”
Beverly Anderson “made good money but always owed money. Not a good way to make a living.”
“Every six weeks you had to do a strip and you got the magnificent sum of $1.50,” added Lorraine Lee.
“I learned a lot about how to survive off my salary,” Sequin said. In the beginning, she earned $150 a week. Every time she went around the circuit, she got another gown and made another $100 dollars. Eventually her salary rose to $750. Considering the average rent was $85 a month in 1954, and the average income $3,960, Sequin, like a lot of the ladies, was doing very well. “If you filled the house, they realized you deserved that raise.”
Dixie Evans added, “We did have money in those days.”
“There was a 60/40 cut” between the comic and the straight man, Chris Costello explained. “The straight man usually got 60 percent.” Some partners, like Lou and Bud Costello, would split it 50/50.
“My father never made money, in burlesque, theatre, or movies,” noted Alan Alda.
Besides getting by and paying bills, some strippers made a great living, like Ann Corio. Mike Iannucci explained, “Every year her salary would go up.” When theatre owners balked at her demands, she bargained. “I’ll come in and work on a percentage,” she said. One manager had offered her $3,000 a week but with the percentage, “she ended up making $12,000 for that week.” She was popular enough to know the theatre would be filled. “She was a shrewd businesswoman,” Mike acknowledged.
For many, it was a living—a very good living. Very few girls, such as Lili St. Cyr, Sally Rand, and Gypsy Rose Lee, earned thousands a week. Sally Rand made $6,000 a week during the 1933 World’s Fair. It was riches they wouldn’t otherwise have seen as a secretary or clerk, yet many remained in debt or lived paycheck to paycheck.
Everything they needed to improve their acts cost money. Tee Tee Red’s wardrobe cost her thousands of dollars. “My wardrobe was very expensive” she remembers. Besides beaded gowns, there were sequined G-strings and pasties, capes, furs, panels, shoes, gloves, purses, hats, and props.
April March’s salary “went up to $200 when [she] went to Houston. That was big money at the time,” she said. However, she didn’t keep it all. In addition to paying for transportation, hotels, and seamstresses, she had to pay 10 percent commission to her agent and costumes. “[The money] went. I can’t even sew a button on. Cost me a lot of money on wardrobe,” she said.
Joni Taylor noted, “When you were a chorus girl... you made forty dollars a week. That was a lot of money. At sixteen, I already had three children. I was supporting them. I had to make enough money to feed my family.” No one could say it was an easy paycheck. As a chorus girl, her stage call was a half hour before the show, where the feature just had to be in her spot a half hour before she went on. The chorus girls opened the show. Joni earned an additional ten dollars a month extra to catch the wardrobe of the strippers.
Backstage waiting to perform
Joni would eventually become the captain of the chorus, the one in charge of the dancers. She worked it out, giving each woman an opportunity to make more money than her normal salary, by rotating which girl worked with the comics, which girls caught wardrobes, etc. “Talking women were paid ten dollars extra. I alternated everyone so they could make money. We worked from 11 to 5, dinner break, back by 7, show started 7:30, done by 11,” she said. It was a long day of dancing and entertaining.
“Chorus girl[s] in 1953 made seventy-five dollars a week.” That was for three shows a night, three numbers a show, seven nights a week, which “broke down to a dollar a dance.” They cleared sixty-three dollars a week in burlesque.
During the Depression, “there was no affordable entertainment for working-class people,” recalled Dixie Evans. Tickets were cheap; attendance was high.
The price of a ticket varied from 10 cents during the thirties to $4.50 (a ”big ticket”) in 1960, when Leroy Griffith had a New York theatre. Tempest and Tee Tee Red packed the theatres to the brims. Leroy had Billy Rose’s old Diamond Horseshoe club, which seated four hundred and was located downstairs in the Paramount Hotel in Times Square. Despite the steep price, audiences lined up for the three shows a day.
Tempest was earning $2,500 a week at that point.
When Al Baker Jr. ran a theatre, he had Blaze Starr on the marquee and she was earning $2,000 a week. Blaze managed to invest and hang on to her money after she got out. “I’d saved. Mr. Goodman was Jewish and he always explained to me, ‘You must save some now for later years, because when you get old a
nd uh, wrinkled and sick and ugly, no man’s gonna want you then. There won’t be anybody bringing you goodies.’”
Keeping up appearances was important. Girls wore furs, rode in fancy cars, and carried all the accoutrements of being stars. Lili St. Cyr spent thousands dragging expensive bathtubs and beds and other ornate props (mostly real antiques) across the country. When the theatres began to change and stagehands and owners didn’t seem to give a damn, it became impossible for her to set up her show herself. She pared down and relied on her Dance of the Seven Veils. It was easier for the now-fifty-year-old stripper to travel with scarves and not wait for anyone else’s help backstage—because there was no help.
In 1961, when Ann Corio and her husband Mike Iannucci revived interest in burlesque with the production of their show This Was Burlesque, they introduced the same corny sketches to a new generation. “The show became an instant hit,” said Mike Iannucci. It opened in New York. “Nine reviews. We had seven fantastic; one wishy-washy review, New York Times looked down their nose at it. When I tried to raise money—everyone said you’ll be closed down—you have to do it to conform with his [LaGuard’s though long dead] restrictions. Two days after we opened, I turned down half a million dollars. People who wanted to invest. It ran five years in New York, toured for twenty-six years. For thirty-one years, the show ran all over the country in major theatres; we gained that respectability. We made a lot of money and kept people happy,” he said. Some of the comedians they hired were Mory Amsterdam and Frank Fontaine and even “comics that hadn’t been in burlesque; [Ann] taught them to punch a line in.”
Behind the Burly Q Page 25