“I had been a performer myself with the Jewel Box Review. That was a huge show of female impersonators. And I was working on my own clothes. I made the stuff to last. Really, like put together with an iron. It took a beating,” said Tony Midnight.
Of the rare people allowed backstage were vendors who sold the girls G-strings and bras and jewelry. There was a man in Manhattan named Paul, and he sold to all the biggies in the ’50s: Peaches, Irma the Body, Sally Rand, Lili St. Cyr, Gypsy. He was said to have eight hundred items in his tiny store.
Suzie Cream Cheese was another designer. She made a lot of the costumes for Minsky in Las Vegas.
The more creative strippers used their wardrobes to carve out ways to be recognized. Sherry Britton wore small, sparkly crowns (which I now have and treasure beyond all measure). Betty Rowland had skirts made with a snap up the side (by Gussie) and bandeau tops. Gypsy stripped by pulling out straight pins and tossing them into the audience. Lili St Cyr was known for spending thousands on designer gowns and jewelry.
“When they were headliners, you couldn’t wear the same color gown,” Carmela explained.
Ann Corio loved the color pink. She would come on stage in a pink gown, wide-brimmed pink hat, and a pink robe. She “closed the show with her strip number A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody,’” said Mike Iannucci. “She would strip down to a pink cape and pink leotard with sequins in strategic places.” She would open the cape and then close it. “‘Oh, I can’t take that off, I’ll catch cold.’ And boom, the lights would come down.”
In This Was Burlesque, Ann Corio had twelve to fifteen gowns. White Fury said, “For every costume, I had a costume maker in Philadelphia. He would make up the show, make backgrounds and suitcases for each thing and gowns and music. I had a jungle house and leopard behind me. An Oriental one with a Chinese dragon behind me and on my dress. It was very pretty.”
Joan Arline wanted to be different than the standard stripper. “I never wore a breakaway gown. I wore a zipper and teased with one, zip it down and bring it up, drum beat is edgy and pushing. Gown comes off, corselet twenty-two hooks and eyelets. I worked every one. That was the art of burlesque. It was the art. I hate it when people make fun of it,” she said.
“I used pins and glue so it was easy to get out of,” recalls Joni Taylor.
It wasn’t just what you took off, but how.
Betty Rowland said, “Mistakes can be the best thing that happens.” She tried to make it look accidental when her clothes came off. She never stopped dancing once her act started.
“I wore big headdresses and feathers. You pull a feather and pass it by your mouth very innocently. All a tease,” said Joan Arline.
Some tricked out their wardrobe. Sally Keith weighted her tassels, as did others. Some did it with bird seed. As she aged, Sally Rand would wear a chiffon dress with fish weights to hold the dress down when she was moving. “Half way through the dance, she’d go by close to the curtains, [and a] person would reach in and pull dress and she could walk away.” Her son often helped with this. “I did it for a while—the dress remover,” he said. His best friend from high school occasionally played the part, too.
“We never threw our wardrobe; we paid a lot of money for it. We handed it. You paraded to the side and handed it to a chorus girl, whom you paid. Who made an extra five dollars a week,” Joan Arline explained. “I had fur and I wanted special attention paid. I paid her extra. Every gown at the waist had two tabs to hang so catcher could fold it over on a hanger and clothes tree with these hangers coming through the curtain.”
Some clubs and theatres had personal maids backstage. Tee Tee Red had “Gertie” in New Orleans, who wore a white uniform. “Gertie would help backstage, catch the girls’ wardrobe and hang it up. Everyone paid her salary. She was our helper.”
Lili St. Cyr’s maid would place a sheet on a table backstage so her clothes didn’t get dirty after she handed them off.
Sally Rand asserted her costume was “talcum powder.”
Sometimes there might be wardrobe malfunctions. Candy Cotton said, “One time my pastie flew off and hit a guy in the eye.” Lili St. Cyr would water down the glue on hers, as they often hurt when she took them off at the end of the night.
“In those years in burly, you had to wear pasties. You had to wear G-strings, and panels, a lot of stuff. And you could just remove so much. You could not show the nipples. Now some of the girls... they would make believe one fell off... like Janet Jackson with a [costume] failure.”
Despairing over current strippers’ lack of wardrobe, Rita Grable remembered: “The girls wore beautiful costumes and furs when I worked.”
So many of the women gave or threw away their costumes when they retired. The costumes held little value when they quit the business. Margie Hart gave hers away to a drag queen. Taffy O’Neil gave hers to another exotic dancer who in turn sold them to a cross-dresser.
Tee Tee Red with maid Gertie, who helped all the girls with their costumes
Jennie Lee was a tassel twirler with the moniker “The Bazoom Girl.” The sailors used to say she was “built like a brick shit house,” said her friend Dixie Evans. Net bras, noted some of the women, were surprisingly supportive of big bosoms. Jennie was a force to be reckoned with at five feet nine inches and a very healthy 42–8-40. The Kansas City native did a Mae West number and was said to be very smart. She collected “everything,” long before the current thirst for vintage costumes, which could be quite elaborate, distinctive, and expensive with delicate, yet durable material, very often studded with rhinestones and beads. Jennie had a bar in San Pedro called the Sassy Lassy where many ex-strippers used to congregate, often leaving their stuff behind. Jennie kept it all and eventually showed it in a tiny storefront next to the bar. When she moved to a former goat farm out in the Mojave Desert, she took her growing collection of burlesque memorabilia, always intending to open a museum.
She lived in a trailer and with the help of her husband turned her moldering memorabilia into a museum of sorts. Some down-on-their-luck strippers lived there for a time. Both Tempest and Dixie moved out there for years.
Dixie Evans took care of Jennie as she grew sick. Jennie eventually died of breast cancer in 1989, at age sixty-one. When Jennie’s husband Charlie died, Dixie inherited “Exotic World,” which she turned into a nonprofit organization. She put together annual reunions and stripping contests, trying to draw attention and donations to the aging population of burlesque strippers who needed help in their old age. Dixie wanted an organization for exotic dancers, past and present. “Because we don’t have anything. We’re excluded from everything. They want to be a part of something,” she said.
It was due to Jennie Lee, then to Dixie’s efforts (and amazing recall on the entire history of burlesque) that the resurgence of burlesque with the neo-burlesque scene emerged in the 1990s. A whole generation of young women took an avid interest in the exotic dancers of the past and patterned new acts based on old, classic strips. It is a scene that has grown around the world, even in cultures that had no burlesque history. (When our film premiered in the Dublin Film Festival, we were astounded by the amount of burlesque troops performing in Ireland.)
Neo-burlesque no longer “fills a need” like the burlesque houses did during the war and the Depression. It’s no longer a ritual and is certainly not the only place to see nudity. The circuit is long over. There are no theatres that have shows three times a day, six days a week, forty weeks a year. It’s different. True burlesque was of its time.
Surprisingly, not once during any of my interviews did any of the former strippers disparage their bodies. They had come in all sizes and shapes, some flat-chested, others big-hipped, some bordered on fat. They never worried about weight or their breast size or flab. Some of the dancers had bodies in their youth that were sheer perfection, but not many. They knew they were a hot commodity just the way they were.
Cries of “Take it off!” validated their beauty and their “power” such as it
was—maybe just to entice for minutes—over the men in the audience. They were magnificent. Variety in looks and shapes and style was admired.
Kitty West said, “I was a sixteen-year-old girl with a gorgeous body and I didn’t know I had a gorgeous body. I didn’t know I was good lookin’. I knew nothing.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The Burly Beat
“It is the musician’s fault if you don’t go over.”
—Dixie Evans
“Musicians were always trying to hit on you, but that was par for the course.”
—Joan Arline
“The blues and the jazz are what the stripteasers used. The St. Louis Blues and the jazz that came from that Deep South; that’s original, American music. And that’s what the burlesque entertainers used,” Dixie Evans said.
Like their gimmicks and their costumes, the headliners were proprietary about their music. “You couldn’t use any music that was even similar to theirs,” Carmela said.
Burlesque had its unique rhythm with bongos and drums. Each stripper had her favorite songs. “A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody” was the anthem for dozens of strippers, including Ann Corio and Betty Rowland.
Vicki O’Day loved “Green Onions.”
“Everyone liked ‘Night Train,’” said Dixie Evans. Parts of “Night Train” were composed as early as 1940 by Duke Ellington and Johnny Hodges. “Strippers would fight over ‘Night Train,’” she said.
Georgia Sothern was identified with the frenetic “Hold that Tiger.”
“Georgia Sothern had vitality—she’d throw her hair around. Set the place on fire. She was great,” musician John Perilli exclaimed.
John Perilli, a handsome older gentleman in a sports coat with a thick New Jersey accent, said, “Having to work as a musician in burlesque, they were looked down upon. It was probably one of the least [prestigious] endeavors you could possibly get into musically.” He had received a panicked call from a conductor at The Empire in New Jersey. “He had a problem with the drummer and he said if he didn’t get a drummer, he was gonna lose his job. So I said to him, ‘I don’t know anything from strippers; I never played strippers before,’” he said.
John had been to a burlesque show before, a Minsky show in Chicago, and he thought the drummer was fantastic. “I was twenty one. To see these chicks start stripping, it was quite an experience. The comics blew my head off. They were marvelous.”
Perilli helped his friend out and found himself in the pit of The Empire, having a rocky start with the feature, Dixie Evans. “She was a great dancer but she was rough on drummers, right. And she gave me a terrible time. Finally we got together, became friends, and worked it out.”
“They had problems with me,” Dixie Evans repeated. “And the only reason I found that out? I look and it says, ‘To the drummer: God help you if you can catch this girl’s act.’ Every place that played, they’d pencil little notes in about me. I thought, My God, I didn’t know they thought that bad about me”
Understandably, it was difficult getting used to a different band every week.
“The show opens Friday, so you’ve got to struggle through the weekend. But by Wednesday you’re moving with the band, then it’s time to go,” Dixie recalled.
Taffy O’Neil said, “Most bands were wonderful.” Her manager told her to “never complain to the band about the music. ‘It can only get worse.’ You learn to work with all that,” she said.
During rehearsal, neophyte John Perilli asked the manger, “Do I play the chart or the chicks?” The manager told him to play the chart.
From deep in the pit, the drummer especially had to see the stripper to match her bumps, which was not always possible. This often led to conflicts between dancer and musician.
“If the musicians thought the stripper was going to the front of the house and complaining,” Dixie Evans said,"they would and could intentionally screw up the girl’s numbers.”
The girls traditionally did three numbers, or “trailers.” The music changed with each song. “They’d bring in their own charts. They were pros,” remembers Dee Ann Johnston.
Maria Bradley would start “out very demure. ‘I’m the Girl with the Natural Curl’ and ‘I’m the Girl with the Toni’ and bump.” The next song would be a “little bit wilder. Then the end would be very wild. Leave ’em that way.”
Dancing in French-speaking Canada, Tee Tee Red handed the musicians her music, who couldn’t read the cues she had written in English. “It didn’t turn out OK.”
Joan Arline said, ‘All the drummers didn’t like Tempest Storm because she couldn’t keep time.”
“Oh God, she’d screech and scream at the band,” remembered Dixie Evans.
Joan continued, ‘And [Tempest would] be so mad ‘cause they didn’t catch her bumps. Well, she would never bump, I mean it was at random.” Tempest did have a unique style of dancing, throwing her head back and forth and bending her knees deeply. It wasn’t elegant; it was raw and exciting and blatantly sexual. She wasn’t the slow, sensuous Lili St. Cyr. She was a new generation of ’50s strippers who laid it all out there. She was raucous, even awkward, but the audience loved it and that style made her and Blaze Starr famous. Blaze and Tempest bumped, grinded, and worked with the curtains, which the audience loved.
Lillian Hunt trained Tempest and Blaze Starr to “walk in tempo to the drums.” This felt a little too “set” for Sequin; it wasn’t to her taste. She admired Lili St. Cyr, who appeared to wander and drift across the stage. In watching some of Lili’s acts that have survived on film, in some she doesn’t even dance much. Hers is pantomime, stretching, acting. She doesn’t immerse herself in wild music, she’d not be overtaken. She’s in charge of her audience and of her own emotion. She didn’t let herself get carried away by the beat. Everything was carefully choreographed, whereas Tempest seems caught up in the savage.
“Lili St. Cyr, the most fascinating chick that I met,” said John Perilli. “She did a number that wasn’t percussive. She did a thing on Salome and the Seven Veils. She came rolling down the staircase, one step at a time, doing her thing. She got together with me in dressing room, explained what she was gonna do. Subtle playing. That was the best art form of burlesque I ever experienced. The rest of the chicks were straight-ahead percussive. Loud and as busy as you could play.”
Rose La Rose came out in a long dress and the song “Who Will Kiss My Oo-la-la?” to which she frequently slapped her “ooh la la” fanny. When she turned around, the back of her dress was cut in the shape of a heart. “With a bunch of snaps,” recalled Dixie Evans.
Alexandra said she could never understand how she got out of all of them.
Steven Weinstein said, “Exotic dancers were working at a craft, at a trade.” The girls in his father’s Colony Club in Dallas were “educated” and “beautiful,” he said. They “would come out to a live band, in custom-made costumes.” It soon “digressed into a bump and grind; in the beginning it wasn’t—but music had an exotic nature, with a certain beat a woman could dance to it and take off clothing,” he said.
In its heyday, burlesque productions had full orchestras.
The music was improvised. The strippers had their own arrangements, which they paid for, but their routine wasn’t marked. “Drummers had to become imaginative. While working with strippers, they had to constantly be cognizant of what was going on musically,” said John Perilli.
Lili St. Cyr often traveled with her own violinist—at her expense.
“Amber Halliday carried her own bongo player—fantastic,” said Terry Mixon.
Kitty West traveled with her own drummer.
“One time, I was doing Marilyn,” Dixie Evans remembers, “to Shake, Rattle, and Roll on my finale. Shake Marilyn Monroe.” The stage hands started motioning her to get off the stage, but she was receiving encores. Dixie remained longer onstage than normal. The owner told her, “You just cost me a lot of money.” He explained that if musicians played beyond their agreed upon time they we
re paid time and a half. If six minutes, it’s time and a half. “When they give you a signal to cut, you’d better cut. Front of house, they run the show. They can drop the screen on you [that showed the films between live shows]. you’d better get out of the way. You learn respect for working people. And how to conduct yourself with other people.”
Steven Weinstein’s dad owned the Colony Club in Dallas. “[In] 1949 or 1950, the business was changing. The trend of music went from the big-band era of a Glen Miller sound to more of the Elvis, with one individual singer and a small combo.”
Abe Weinstein was looking for a new concept for his club. “He’d heard of burlesque clubs in California with exotic dancers.” Abe went to California to learn what the clubs there were doing. And he returned to Dallas with a new format. It was a “high-class joint with beautifully dressed couples.”
As musicians were slowly expunged from clubs and theatres, many girls complained that dancing to records was “shoddy,” said Betty Rowland. She missed the orchestra and the “spontaneity” that it brought. With a “record, it’s the same every time,” she said.
Kitty West complained they had to start dancing to juke boxes or tapes when the musicians were cut from shows. “That was not for me. So important to dance with a band. I couldn’t imagine myself dancing to video.”
In the 1950s, “burlesque was fading down enough that rather than a live band, we had taped music, which was a little nice in a way because it was so dependable. You know... the tape didn’t drink,” Taffy O’Neil said slyly.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
The Mob
“In Cincinnati, there was a great mob influence . . . but I will not name names.”
—Kitty West
“Gangsters didn’t bother you. You’re making money for them.”
—Dixie Evans
Clearly the Mafia had their fingers in the burlesque pie from at least the 1920s. Author Rachel Shteir believed that in the later years of burlesque in the night clubs, strippers had to give a cut of their salaries to the mob.
Behind the Burly Q Page 29