Strippers generally deserved the high salaries they received. They were generating large sums of money for the producers. However, shows themselves were expensive to produce. By the ’50s, casts were trimmed to cut costs. Uncensored Magazine complained that this led to less talented performers and the quality of the shows diminished.
Clubs were different than the theatres. They sold alcohol, which brought a whole other aspect—mostly unwelcomed—to the strippers’ jobs.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Mixing
“I would tell them, ‘I’m not a bar girl.”’
—Carmela
“Your salary depended on who liked you the most.”
—Vicki O’Day
In the theatres, “you were away from the audience. They couldn’t touch you or get at you. You didn’t have to mix or drink,” explained Sequin.
Unlike theatres, the clubs demanded the girls not only dance, but mix with the audience.
Kelly DiNardo said, “A really big part of their job was to mingle with the crowd, to encourage champagne sales and all the girls generally got a kickback on what they sold and what they convinced people to buy.”
Mixing with the audience.
“Champagne in those days was expensive, $25 to $100 a bottle,” recalled Kitty West.
“If you made money for the house, you’d get a raise next time,” added Blaze Starr. Clearly the girls had an incentive to sell.
Stripper Vicki O’Day would collect the stir sticks from drinks and turn them in at end of the night. In Boston, her salary was five hundred dollars a week, but the drink minimum in the club was steep. If you didn’t turn in enough sticks, “they took it from your salary.” Towards the end of her career, she complained there were “so many girls working clubs [it was] almost impossible to make a living.” She was over thirty and the new girls coming in were sixteen and eighteen. She had to be clever. “I’d see some fellow across the bar and I’d say, ‘If you sit with me, I won’t charge you more than one champagne and that will keep the other girls away and you can enjoy your drink.’ And so they usually bought me a drink. So I was quite successful at the drinking game.”
In Miami, Tee Tee Red had to “mingle” with the customers. “It wasn’t easy. It was something that was part of the deal. You had to make your quota.... You had to sell a certain amount of champagne to equalize the salary you got.”
In one club, a customer asked Dixie, “When you’re pouring the champagne, do you spill a drop?’” She responded, “No. I don’t.” “Well spill it,” she was instructed. “I don’t drink,” Carmela said. “They’d fix artificial drinks. I drank a lot of orange juice all night. Most places I didn’t have to do that.”
There were girls that were hired to interact with the audience. They were referred to disparagingly as B girls.
“It is a girl who gets paid nightly. She’ll come in dressed beautifully, sitting at the bar or walking around, and a gentleman would be alone and she’ll ask him if he wants company. And he’ll buy her drinks. Say a drink is $3.00, she’ll get $1.50 at the end of the night. Called ‘hostesses,’ but they’re really not,” explained Kitty West.
Lili St. Cyr, according to her sister Dardy, made more on champagne sales at Club Samoa than her already generous salary. If a man wanted to have a word or drink with Miss St. Cyr, it was suggested by her maid, Sadie, that the gentleman order a bottle of expensive champagne. Once purchased, Miss St. Cyr would wander through the tables. Several bottles would “accidently” be knocked on the floor (and quickly reordered). Lili split the sales with the owner and from her cut split that with her maid, who worked with her both onstage and off.
Tempest took issue with a club owner wanting her to mix. She told him, “‘In my contract, it says I don’t do that.’ They kept bugging me,” she said. She picked up her wardrobe and left. She wanted to keep the mystery by separating herself from the audience.
B girls “had to sit with customers and drink and spit drink back into the glasses. It was horrible. It was unbelievable the things that would happen. Girls would go out with men for money. Men looked at a woman in this profession and never saw beyond the body.”
Besides sitting with the customer, enticing him to buy bottles of champagne, there were other ways the clubs made money. “I’d feel bad,” Dixie Evans admitted. Many times, she’d be sitting with a sailor or another customer and the cigarette girl would come along. “Would you like to buy an orchid for the lady?” she’d ask. If the customer paid, she would offer to put it in the ice box and “a half hour later, she’d be reselling the same flower to some other sucker.”
During WWII, the fellas would crowd into the clubs first thing—“as soon as they got their pay,” said Dixie Evans, who did her share of mixing. “A very bad idea.”
One time, a man at a bar told her that ship announcements often warned the sailors to “stay away from Dixie Evans.” “That’s how famous I was. They were trying to warn the service men.... [The clubs] had to generate the money. You treat that customer right and if that man sees you’re playing in some club, you build up a fan [base]. The nightclubs did a lot of PR. If they see your name on the marquee and they’re in town, they’ll come to the club.”
Mingling did not go on in the theatres. “In theatres, you’re getting paid for a show.... You’re getting paid for a performance,” Dixie said.
Despite the different hardships of working in the theatres (long hours) and clubs (mixing and drinking), it still “allowed some women to transform their circumstance in ways they wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. Allowed some financial stability,” noted Rachel Shteir. It was a way to see the country and sometimes other parts of the world.
Girls also made tips in the clubs. “Made a lot,” Vicki O’Day remembered.
Delta Dawn was a stripper who was horribly disfigured by a scar running down her face. “She had to work in black light. Drank booze all the time,” Dixie recalled. She advised Dixie on how to avoid turning her tips over to the club owners: “Stick fifty dollars in your cold creamjar to hide money.” In New York, Dixie and the other dancers would roll up the money and put it between their breasts. But at the end of the night, all the strippers would be “crawling around the floor, looking for money, cause it flew all over” when they got undressed, she said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Interlude Before Evening
The word interlude is defined as “a short, dramatic piece of a light or farcical nature.” Farce being the defining characteristic of burlesque.
She was the beautiful blonde who rose to fame by taking off her clothes. At one time, she was the highest-paid stripteaser in America. He was the highest-paid attorney in America. Hers was a body men lusted over. His was a brilliant mind that defended Hollywood’s brightest and most scandalous, from Charlie Chaplin and Earl Flynn to the oft-married platinum goddesses Lana Turner and Zsa Zsa Gabor. He was a gentleman that was soft-spoken and polite, with a sterling reputation as hardworking and ethical. She got her start in seedy, smoke-filled nightclubs and burlesque theatres where the men hid their desires under the newspapers that covered their laps.
They were an odd couple: The Body and The Brains. She was thirty-two. He was thirty years her senior. They were as American as apple pie and baseball. Both rose from humble backgrounds to the top of their professionals: the lawyer and the ecdysiast.
She had been born Marie Van Schaack, but took the name Lili St. Cyr like a boudoir-fueled wet-dream fantasy and rode it to the top of a B career that still garners legions of fans and imitators today, some fifty years after she tossed her jewel-encrusted G-string for the last time.
He had been born Harold Lee Giesler, but found Jerry suited him better. He was as smart and tenacious as he was homely. He would go to any lengths to win his clients’ cases.
They both loved beautiful, well-made clothes. He dressed elegantly in double-breasted suits and wore flamboyant colored ties. She wore diaphanous designer gowns. She was the cold blonde danci
ng under a violet spot light. She had cornered the market on Elizabeth Taylor-esque tabloid headlines (men, divorces, suicides) before Taylor. They both appreciated the finer things in life, which they could now afford.
Lili would have six marriages, six divorces, and three documented suicide attempts. She would spend her fortune and end her days out of the public eye, largely forgotten by an industry that had died out, a recluse who wouldn’t even open her door to delivery men.
Her trial generated columns of press across the country, and Hollywood followed eagerly, thirsty to see the outcome of the scandalous stripper accused of corrupting the morals of the public. She hated the hypocrisy. “If one has morals, they can’t be taken away by me or anyone else.”
Some thought, because of her profession, she wasn’t very smart—just a dumb broad who took off her clothes. Yet the “dumb blonde” was smart enough to know who should be the first person she should call after being arrested for indecent exposure at the popular nightclub Ciro’s. Lili hired the most successful attorney in Los Angeles, perhaps in all the country.
BEGINNINGS
Lili was born June 3, 1917, in Minnesota, Minneapolis, to twenty-year-old Idella Peaseau. Upon learning of his wife’s pregnancy, Lili’s father Edward promptly fled the scene.
Lili was raised by her maternal grandparents Benjamin and Alice Klarquist, who, though strict and nondemonstrative, loved the beautiful girl. The Klarquists moved to Pasadena, California. At fifteen, Lily married for the first time.
Cordy Milne, an international motorcycle racer and celebrity four years her senior, gave Lili her first taste of screaming crowds and fame. They married in England in front of a huge crowd of his fans. The marriage lasted only a few months, but it left Lili with a taste of fame. Having her face and name in the papers was exciting. She was someone.
By the time she was twenty-three in 1940, Lili was drifting. The lifestyle she sought had eluded her. Her career as a showgirl started accidentally enough. Her two younger half-sisters, Barbara and fifteen-year-old Dardy, were auditioning for a spot at the Florentine Gardens on Hollywood Boulevard. Lili, who was sitting off to the side supervising her sisters, was noticed. Dardy was rejected for being too young, but would soon go on to her own burlesque career as a stripper. Barbara and Lili were promptly hired. Lili was earning $27.50 a week as a showgirl.
She married husband number two, a waiter at the Florentine Garden, in a quickie ceremony in Tiajuana.
Realizing she’d have to reveal more than long legs to make headlines and more money, Lili worked her way into the burlesque circuit, becoming the Girl of the Hour at the Music Box in San Francisco. Every hour she came out with one less item of clothing until she was nude except for her G-string.
Lili appeared at the Hollywood in San Diego, where she hooked fishing wire to her G-string and, at the last second of her act, it would go sailing off before the lights dimmed. Husband number two quickly disappeared.
Lili worked hard and conquered the night clubs of New York, landing in the papers as much for her act as for the various men who escorted her. She had shed a couple husbands by the time she’d become a headliner and conquered Montreal’s burlesque scene.
MONTREAL’S SWEETHEART
In 1944, Montreal was a beautiful city teeming with nightclubs. Canada’s largest and richest city, it was teeming with corruption, vice, and a sprawling entertainment community. The French-speaking city gave Lili a lifelong love of things French. She decorated her home with French regency furniture. Giesler, too, had French regency decor in his home.
At twenty-six, Lili stepped on to the stage at the Gaiety Theatre in Montreal. She proved to be an original performer. She dressed as an expectant bride and as an “Indian maiden,” in full headdress. She packed the club and Montreal fell in love with the elegant stripper who changed the face of burlesque. She would hold a deep love of the city for the rest of her life. The feeling was mutual. She would return over and over again, playing to standing-room-only crowds of devoted men and making thousands of dollars.
Husband number three was just around the corner. He was Paul Valentine. Born Valia Valentinoff, he danced as Val Valentine and Paul Valentine. For a while, the married couple worked together (he choreographed some shows), but they divorced after a few short years.
Lili preferred quiet dinner parties at home with her friends instead of nightclubs. She was a very good cook and loved to read books. She didn’t bother keeping up with current news, shunning the radio and, later, television, preferring silence. She would spend time in a multitude of dressing rooms either reading or sewing before she went onstage.
She didn’t have many friends. Cast members said Lili rarely spoke with them; she wasn’t rude, she just stayed in her dressing room, never mingling. She once said her “dressing room was [her] home.”
Lili knew her beauty, like all things, had an expiration date. She knew she owed her career to her looks and those were mercurial at the end of the day. She told a fan she believed a woman should “go Garboesque” and disappear at her height to be remembered as she was. She was afraid of growing old.
In 1951, she was thirty-two and already on a fourth marriage that was shaky.
1951
In Montreal she was denounced by the Catholic clergy—a Canadian Jesuit Priest, Marie-Joseph d’Anjou, tried to have her thrown out of Montreal for that oft-repeated indictment leveled at burlesque artists: “offending public morals.” Perhaps d’Anjou’s morals were the ones that had been strained. He wouldn’t be the first man to fall under her spell. Lili bravely sat through her Canadian trial, which was conducted entirely in French, a language she didn’t understand. In the end, she was found not guilty.
Back in Los Angeles, just a few short months later, Lili was arrested once again in a case that would fill the papers and grip the nation. Many readers had no idea exactly what a stripper did on the stage; everyone wanted to hear the salacious tidbits.
The defendant was fearful of doing jail time and having her career ruined. But in fact the trial sent her career rocketing into the stratosphere.
GET ME GIESLER
Henry, aka Jerry, Giesler was born in 1886. By the time he met Lili, he had already successfully defended Charlie Chaplin against charges of violating the Mann Act, when the actor purportedly transported and paid for twenty-two-year-old actress Joan Berry to travel across state lines to have sex with him.
He reportedly earned upwards of $100,000 for his brilliant defense of the Little Tramp, who had a penchant for underage leading ladies. Giesler won the case. Never an elitist, Giesler refused to charge a caller for talking to him on the phone and had an open-door policy, available night and day for anyone. He was more interested in defending the rights of clients that were persecuted, not just prosecuted.
In 1943, Giesler fought against Errol Flynn’s already tainted womanizer reputation after two nubile young cuties accused the actor of statutory rape. Geisler won. The married Robert Mitchum hired Giesler after he was set up and arrested for smoking marijuana with a young starlet in 1948. On Giesler’s advice, Mitchum did sixty days of public service, and his career didn’t suffer. Mitchum’s long-suffering wife, Dorothy (this author’s neighbor), publicly forgave him his trespasses.
Giesler had been practicing law since 1910. First, he was a lowly clerk for famed defense attorney Earl Rogers, after whom Earl Stanley Gardner patterned the fictional Perry Mason. Giesler made his name while Rogers was defending Clarence Darrow, who was accused of bribing a jury. Henry, as Jerry was known then, was asked to research a point of law. When he turned in a hefty thirty-something page report, his boss was impressed. When Darrow was acquitted, Giesler was promoted.
The diminutive, unattractive boy from Ohio with a squeaky voice was often ill as a child. As a teen, he left his family and moved to California, where he took night classes studying law at USC while he worked during the day at whatever job he could find. He went on to make his mark practicing law in Hollywood for more than fifty years
, becoming as well-known as his infamous clients.
People would demand, “Get me Giesler!” after 1957 brought the acquittal of screen goddess Lana Turner’s daughter Cheryl, who was accused of plunging a ten-inch knife into the hairy stomach of her mother’s grease-ball mobster lover, Johnny Stompanato, in the bedroom of Lana’s all-white Beverly Hills boudoir. This occurred after a particularly nasty argument the fourteen-year-old overheard, having crept to her mother’s door while the argument escalated. Much of the gossip that circulated about the case involved a story in which Lana was the real killer.
Giesler (who had his name in the phone book under both Giesler and Geisler, in case anyone spelled it wrong) was available for each and every call that came into his Broadway and Fifth office in downtown Los Angeles. Clients didn’t have to be as famous as the Hollywood elite that generated the headlines. It was a lucrative, demanding practice and his second wife tolerated his late-night preparations for his cases in which he stayed up pouring over stacks of documents. Giesler had a reputation for his meticulous preparatory work. He interviewed witnesses oftentimes even before the police.
Once hired by Lili after her arrest, Giesler became ever-present in the stripper’s life, trailing after her. He could be seen in photos hovering protectively close by. With Giesler, nothing was left to chance. It was the image he wanted to perpetuate, deference to her statuesque beauty. He referred to her as an “artist.” He spent innumerable hours at Lili’s house, preparing her for court. He became her number one protector.
Behind the Burly Q Page 26