Behind the Burly Q

by Leslie Zemeckis

  Carroll hired a young Herman Hover to be his general manager at The Earl Carroll theatre. In his spare time, Hover studied law. He would go on to be the owner of Ciro’s nightclub in Hollywood.

  Carroll died in a fiery plane crash in Pennsylvania with his girlfriend Beryl Wallace. (Dardy would understudy Beryl, who was heavier and shorter, squeezing herself into the costumes until Carroll finally took pity on her and ordered wardrobe for her tall, lanky figure). It was Beryl’s twenty-foot-high neon profile that adorned the Earl Carroll theatre in Los Angeles. Today a copy can be seen at Universal City Walk at Universal City.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  The Exotic Others

  “They had the most beautiful acts in burlesque. They had dog acts and acrobats.”

  —Lily Ann Rose

  “A man was the best stripper I ever saw.”

  —Vicki O’Day

  An exotic “Other.”

  Burlesque, like vaudeville, hosted a variety of novelty acts between the strips and the comics. There were jugglers, celebrity boxers, dog acts, acrobats, ventriloquists, Spanish dancers, singers.... Oftentimes, the wackier the better.

  “Harmonica acts went over nice,” said Renny von Muchow.

  “Some acts were goofy and some amateurish,” which contributes to our view of it being “innocent today,” explained Rachel Shteir.

  The Hollywood Theatre had a novelty hypnotist, The Great Alante. “He was a hairdresser and cabdriver and hypnotist all in one,” Dee Ann Johnston recalled. “Dad rented him a tux; he didn’t have one.”

  When Renny von Muchow and Rudy met in high school, they used to challenge each other to see who could do the most pull-ups off streetlights. As novelty acts were a part of burlesque at the time, they became hand balancers and joined the circuit.

  Renny wanted to make sure, like the girls with gimmicks, that they set themselves apart. He said, “Let’s keep our bodies looking as close as twins.” This would make their act visibly more impressive, he thought.

  They were as close as any two brothers.

  Like Sally Rand, Mimi Reed was a “specialty dancer” who performed in night clubs holding a giant rubber ball that she used to walk to the gas station to have the attendant fill. She was strong and lithe and would remain so all her life.

  Theatre owner Bob Johnston had a big heart and would “hire everyone down on their luck.” He hired boxer Archie Moore, another San Diego guy, to “talk to audience and sign autographs.” Jack Johnson, another boxer, worked for them. “He kept people working for a couple weeks.”

  “They never fired anyone,” said Betty Rowland.

  Many burlesque comedians, such as Milton Berle and even Jonny Carson, performed in drag on the stage, and later in television. Drag performers were not only a part of circus life (“Clowns had drag acts,” said Janet Davis.) but clearly a part of the burlesque world. Drag performances were “integral throughout . . . vaudeville, circus or burlesque.... A great number of performers were explicitly in drag.”

  The female impersonators performed in burlesque very early on, at least prior to the ’20s. The men tucked their penises into their G-strings. It wasn’t until after WWII that there were specific theatres geared toward gay and lesbian crowds.

  In 1932, the Old Howard had a show “Facts & Figures,” in which two male actors kissed and groped each other. The censors were outraged.

  “They had special shows for the female impersonators. I worked with Venus. And he was so beautiful. He was the star of the show,” said Lily Ann Rose.

  Transgender burlesque show

  “This woman looked like June Allyson. Did spectacular things with his/her body” said Vicki O’Day. “I’d never seen anybody so good. At the end of his act, he pulled off his wig and he was Asian.”

  Dee Ann Johnston had her own experience with a female impersonator at the Hollywood. “He was a paratrooper; he still looked like a paratrooper even when he was supposed to be a woman. Her name was Tamara something and she sold her book and she did a strip. So there were ... yeah, there were novelty acts.”

  “Christine Jorgenson was a young man who went to World War II.” The private with the underdeveloped privates, Jorgenson started taking hormones and had one of the first sex change operations in Scandinavia, which was “very shocking in those days,” said Steven Weinstein. Though he wasn’t the first, he was the first to go public after the operation.

  She got into burlesque as a novelty strip act. It was by all accounts a “beautiful act,” said Rita Grable. “I worked with her at the Tick Tock in St. Louis. She was wonderful. She looked like a girl. She sang, talked, and took off her gown. She was dressed like me, with pasties, etc.” Rita listed her qualities, besides being brave: “sweet, calm, very feminine.” They worked together, hung out, and went to dinner together. “People looked at her like she was a freak. She had a hard time. People would recognize her on the street, and point and say things. People are cruel sometimes.”

  The world easily lumped together strippers and transsexuals, equating them with sideshow freaks. Daisy and Violet Hilton started as “freak” performers in carnival sideshows and rose to incredible fame on the vaudeville circuit. Siamese twins, they were connected near the base of their spine. When it became unseemly to pay money to see “freaks” on display and vaudeville died, the Hilton Sisters descended from the heights of sold-out crowds, in beautiful theatres to land reluctantly in a smoke-filled nightclub with leering men who preferred to see Evelyn West and her Million-Dollar Chest. From my research, I was unable to determine how far down they stripped, but presumably not all the way. They were sensitive about showing where they were connected at the back by “a ribbon of flesh,” according to Dean Jensen. Unfortunately, they were hooted off the stage.

  In their youth, in the ’20s and ’30s, the twins had a “winning act” as little girls who played musical instruments, dancing and singing. They were one of the top-grossing acts of vaudeville. They were the stars on the same bill with Bob Hope (a virtual unknown when he started dancing with the sisters), Burns and Allen, and Sophie Tucker. Everyone in America knew the conjoined twins with the ringlets in their hair and large, outsized bows on their heads.

  Siamese twins Daisy and Violet Hilton, briefly and miserably in burlesque

  From their abusive and Dickensian childhood on display in sideshows, they went on to huge fame. Vaudeville died and the sisters aged; they took what they could, working, among other places, at The Hollywood Theatre in San Diego, where “they stayed drunk the entire time,” Dee Ann recalled her father saying. Stripper Val Valentine remembered the sisters’ fights in the dressing room next to her.

  “Vaudeville didn’t exist in the ’40s and these people still needed a job, and I guess maybe they were a draw. They were always in the Palace Bar on the bar stool. They died of the influenza in 1969,” Dee Ann said.

  April March worked with the Strong Brothers, who were midgets. “They were the comics on one of the shows in Washington, D.C. They were English,” she said. One of the brothers asked her if she would be embarrassed to go to dinner with him. She said she would love to go. They went to Trader Vic’s and April said her date asked for a booster seat.

  In burlesque, there were also the “exotic others,” who were usually Asian and African American.

  In the 1920s and ’30s, there were a cabaret club at the Hotel Douglas in San Diego, which claimed to be the “Harlem of the West.” The club featured the Creole Cuties Chorus, a group of beautiful black girls. And though not advertised as a “burlesque” club, the Creole Palace had a plethora of similarly clad beauties. The club was black-owned and thrived for more than thirty years, with big-name entertainers such as Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday.

  While burlesque shows were strictly segregated, the Creole Palace had a mixed audience, perhaps getting away with it because the girls didn’t disrobe. According to Jaye Furlonger, who wrote about the history of San Diego burlesque, there was a “strict racial segregation of the national b
urlesque industry.”

  In 1925, the “world’s only all-colored musical burlesque” show called 7–11 toured the country.

  There had been women of color performing onstage since as early as 1890 in musicals such as The Creole Show, but it wasn’t burlesque. That was a minstrel-type show. Burlesque incorporated the three-part act of a minstrel show. (Minstrel shows were a popular form of entertainment for the middle-class and made fun of not only stereotypical blacks, but also country-bumpkin types.)

  There were black performers in vaudeville, like Ada (sometimes Aida) Overton. She appeared in vaudeville and was considered to be one of the best dancers in her day (she died at thirty-four).

  In the 1940s and 1950s, there was an African American strip circuit. “It didn’t last for very long,” said Rachel Shteir. “Those women never could achieve any level of economic success the way a Gypsy Rose Lee could.”

  Sadly, so much of this history either wasn’t chronicled at the time, or has been lost. Today we know so little about these performers. Jet Magazine in the mid-1950s did highlight African American women, but their press was far less than their white contemporaries.

  In the 1950s, there was mention of an Elizabeth “China Doll” Dickerson, who covered her costume in balloons. The men seated close popped them until she was nude—or nearly so.

  Jean Idelle was one of the only black fan dancers. According to the magazine, so “torrid” was her act, she was forced to lock her dressing room to prevent the Stage Door Johnnies from busting in.

  Billed as the “Sepia Sally Rand,” Idelle supposedly was the first performer to integrate with the white dancers. She performed at Minsky’s Rialto Theatre in Chicago. Retiring after having children, she was called back at age eighty-two to lift her fans again for the Burlesque Hall of Fame weekend.

  Vida de Soir was advertised as the “Red Hot Sex Queen.”

  Besides Idelle, these women couldn’t work in first-rate clubs. Latter-day strippers entering the business in the ’60s such as Toni Elling, achieved more recognition, though they worked in a very different burlesque. By the ’60s it was mainly a strip show.

  There were also the “Oriental” performers, the most famous being Noel Toy, who was known as the “Chinese Sally Rand” and performed at the Forbidden City, a San Francisco nightclub, in in the 1930s with her fan-and-bubble act. Forbidden City was the first and only Chinese nightclub at the time. Noel’s fame would outgrow the place and she would move on to bigger and better fare: Leon & Eddies, the Stork Club in New York, and Lou Walter’s Latin Quarter. Here, she said, “old ladies would come and [they] loved me.” She showed her breasts and wore a fringed panty.

  In an interview she gave when she was eighty-two, the trim and still gorgeous Toy showed the only thing raunchy about her was her laugh. She explained she started as a nude model at Treasure Island at the San Francisco World’s Fair of 1939. The owner of the Forbidden City enticed her to work for him. His club was “dying on the vine,” according to her, but business picked up when the nude fan dancer hit the floor. She was the only Chinese nude model at the time.

  She went on to play minor rules in film and television, and died of a stroke at age eighty-four.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Pasties and More

  “They had crepe-paper costumes on, crepe-paper bras and crape-paper skirts. She said, ‘I’m not wearing those costumes.”’

  —Dee Ann Johnston

  “You don’t have to take everything off to be beautiful.”

  —Kitty West

  Wild costumes on stage at Earl Carroll’s in Hollywood

  But what you did take off had to be beautiful. Wardrobe was important and a vital investment.

  “I became Vicki O’Day in layers,” said the stripper.

  Half the fun of stripping was the many pieces one put on prior to taking them off. Costumes were gorgeous, elaborate, sturdy, beaded, heavy, silky—some designer, some sewn by the strippers themselves. The fabrics shone, rippled and floated. They were fantasy outfits that helped create the illusion of the different characters the women pretended to be.

  Chorus girls were given their wardrobe, Maria Bradley explained. Strippers had to pay for their own. Many, including Blaze Starr, spent time in the dressing room, sewing. “I sewed my first gown by hand. And that’s why I have the most beautiful gowns,” she said.

  “Blaze was very crafty,” Rita Grable verified. “She would make all of her costumes by hand.”

  Gown sewn by Blaze Starr (in author’s collection) made by hand

  Lili St. Cyr made some of her own costumes, even after she was a star. They were expertly sewn and have held up some sixty to seventy years later.

  Lily Ann Rose recalled sitting backstage, “smoking and sewing” with all the girls in the dressing room. “Beads and sequins were needed to make the costumes shine and stand out on the opening parade numbers. Most of the girls could not afford a two- or three-hundred-dollar costume while making twenty-five or thirty-five dollars a week. So we all just beaded our own. After all, we had hours sitting backstage just talking or waiting.”

  Dardy added, “Between shows you have nothing to do. Backstage everyone is cutting and sewing. On Sundays, on Halsted Street in Chicago, carts would come with bolts of fabric and girls would go there and buy fabric.”

  Carmela made a lot of her own costumes. She used “plastic beads instead of crystal because crystal cuts the thread,” she said.

  Sequin’s boyfriend Ted, who got her into burlesque, “had a stripper friend and she taught Sequin how to make G-strings and net bras.” She bought a sewing machine and Ted designed the clothing. But her first time out, she had to work with what she had. “The only gown that I really had to work on was my high school prom dress. Of course the zipper got stuck. And one of the customers had to reach up and help me unstick the zipper,” she said.

  “The one I started out with was an old dress from being a maid of honor,” said Taffy O’Neil. Her husband helped her modify it.

  Girls starting out who didn’t have costumes had to keep that fact a secret. “You don’t let the boss know you don’t have wardrobe,” Dixie Evans said. “Just fake it in the theatre, ‘Oh, my trunk’s lost.’” Dixie borrowed her outfit from a San Francisco girl. (“San Francisco girls—wonderful,” she claimed.)

  In the 1870s, the Rentz-Santley Burlesque Company displayed women in one-piece leotards and tights as they sang. Their star, Mabel Santz, was arrested for indecent exposure in 1879 when she lifted her skirts and showed, gasp, an ankle.

  By the turn of the century, bare midriffs were on display.

  “Back then, you couldn’t see flesh. You didn’t see it until 1962 or ‘64,” said Dixie.

  In 1926, Josephine Baker was doing her banana act in Paris at the Folies Bergere wearing nothing but rubber bananas around her waist. She flashed more than Rose La Rose would be accused of doing thirty years in the future.

  Those naughty French cancan girls were rumored to be pantyless when they high-kicked above the audiences’ heads in musical halls, though this has been disputed, as “drawers” weren’t the method of underwear at the time.

  For a profession that involved taking off clothes, it sure meant a full trunk of costumes. Packed into those trunks were bras, net panties, G-strings, sheer gowns, panels, sequins, leotards, feathers, headbands, stockings, shoes, garters, nylon hose and mesh, and opera hose, which were longer and reached to the top of the thigh, right below the buttock. Longer by at least three or four inches, opera hose gave a seriously uninterrupted look to the stripper’s leg. Then there were tassels, baubles, tiaras, crowns, capes, hats, gloves, jewelry, props, and makeup. Not to mention the animals and their carriers.

  Getting one’s wardrobe to the next town was always an ordeal. There never seemed to be enough time.

  “You came off the stage,” Joan Arline said, “of the last show. The wardrobe would be hung and the trunk taken by railway express in the afternoon. So you kept [the] garment you wore, w
hich you wore all week.” She would collect her music from the musicians “because the trunk wasn’t delivered till next day at 3, 3:30, but you’ve already done the 1 o’clock show.”

  Sequin added, “Everything had its place. I was organized. Robes to wear afterwards to get off stage and upstairs. A lot of wardrobe.” She traveled with six gowns.

  Lady Midnight made her own costumes and bought more elaborate ones from Gussie Gross. “I had beautiful wardrobe to go on the road. It was very exciting. Every week, you’d change a gown. If you did two numbers, you had two different gowns. I did different numbers—did a Batman number, wore a bat cape. Street number like a cancan girl. I didn’t like doing the same old thing all the time. I wanted to entertain. I always came up with something different. I didn’t want to bore them. And I didn’t want to be bored.”

  Gowns had to be made well to last on the road. “It was an expensive game,” Dixie Evans said. Furs were de rigueur, as were expensive cars, perfume, and all the trappings of success. A successful stripper was expected to “walk in with expensive perfume. It’s a matter of prestige. I couldn’t afford to do all those things they used to tell me,” Dixie Evans said.

  There were dozens of costumers who made incredible outfits for the strippers. There was Gussie Gross, who was married to a policeman; Bill White made costumes in New Orleans; BB Hughes was known on the West Coast. She made Taffy O’Neil’s net pants and bras.

  Ann Corio “went for a regular person’s wardrobe,” Mike Iannucci said. Her preferred costumer for many years was Stella Wilner. Later, Ann and Mike got into a high-fashion business and had Ann’s gowns made in Italy. He “sold one of her beaded dresses for $31,000.”

  Kitty West wore “French bikini-type bottoms, and a full bra. Richard Simmons’s father used to make some of my wardrobe. His mother was a singer, in the French quarter.”

  Val Valentine recalled that “there was a costumer that made gorgeous wardrobe.” His name was Tony Midnight.