Nils T. Granlund, entrepreneur and radio host in the early twentieth century, claimed that with Prohibition, the mafia infiltrating the night life was a “setup made to order for mobsters.... It took money to set up and run clubs.”
“Most of the clubs were run by Mafia,” confirmed Lily Ann Rose, “and if one of the bosses said they didn’t want you, then you were blackballed.”
Sally Rand was working a club in Chicago, teasing the crowd with her ostrich fans. One night, her son told me, rival club owner and renowned mobster Al Capone came up to her and told her, “I have bought your contract. You’re done here as of tonight. You’ll be at my club the following night.”
A smart woman, Sally she quickly agreed. “OK, sounds like a deal,” she said. She finished her work for the night, packed up everything and high-tailed it to New York, later telling her son, Sean, she figured “there was a whole different gang world in New York. Capone won’t go on New York territory.” She figured she’d be safe there. And she was.
Sally was not only quick witted, but quick thinking. She claimed to have known many girlfriends who would “overhear something and disappear in the East River” of Chicago. She was also good friends with burlesque comedian and former singer Joe E. Lewis, who barely survived his own run-in with some Capone-associated gangsters.
Joe E. Lewis was a honey-throated singer performing at the Green Mill Gardens in the Windy City. One night, some thugs knocked on his door and slit his throat. Such a reputation did Joe E. have for being a prankster that when the maid came in and found him lying there bloody, she thought it was an elaborate joke. It would take Joe E. nearly two years to recover his voice, as part of his tongue was cut off. It was a miracle he lived.
His crime? He had refused to renew his contract at the Green Mill, a club owned by one of Capone’s men.
Capone liked Joe E. and felt bad—he hadn’t ordered the assault—enough to give Joe E. ten thousand dollars and help him in any way he could.
Lewis left the singing stage and became a comedian in burlesque. He would work for years in Vegas, often sharing the bill with Lili St. Cyr at the El Rancho. He was great friends with Frank Sinatra.
“If you were in show business and you worked in a night club, the club was owned by a member of the fraternity. It was rough and it was tough. Four of my employers.... were killed.”
Lily Ann Rose said, “People can say what they want about the Mafia. But the Mafia kept things in line, like strippers and dancers. You weren’t allowed to go out with the customers. You weren’t allowed to prostitute yourself.”
“If they ever found you went out went out with a customer, you’d be fired the next day. They’re not gonna operate a club for you to get Johns,” agreed Dixie Evans.
Vicky O’Day said, “As long as you did what they wanted and kept your mouth shut and you didn’t see anything, they didn’t bother you.”
“You didn’t get in trouble,” Alexandra the Great said, “unless you looked for trouble.”
Beverly Anderson found the mobsters “fascinating.” Beverly was working a club in Atlanta that was owned by a gangster. Beverly, along with the other performers, had to pretend “we didn’t know he was the owner of the nightclub.”
One time in New York, a gangster who was going with a red-headed stripper was killed at the Park Sheraton. For years, a New York Cabaret ID Card was required of performers. “At the time, dancers had police cards in order to work. It listed the women by height, hair color, etc. and was on file with the mayor’s office,” Beverly explained. The gangster killed at the Park Sheraton was going with a red-headed stripper. So the FBI looked up redhead’s police cards and “came and interviewed me.... I thought it was exciting,” remembers Beverly. The Gambino Family mobster was Albert Anastasia and it was October 25, 1957, when he was killed in the hotel’s barber shop.
Stripper Vicki O’Day
A side note about police cards: it was said Rose La Rose was partially responsible for abolishing this offensive practice. The cards were akin to prostitutes registering with the police in Europe. Rose, ever the fighter, took it on.
Kitty West recalled the mob in New Orleans, but wanted to keep their identities to herself. “I won’t call their names,” she said. They respected her and she respected them. “They didn’t bother me. They thought that I was the greatest thing ever. They packed the house for me. They left me alone,” she said. She felt safe in their presence. “I had a security guard when I went to get something. Wherever I went, I was safe.”
April March recalled a very real mob presence in the clubs. They were “all gentlemen.” Several were on the Minsky show in Yonkers. “I’d play gin rummy with them in the coffee shop,” she said.
Dardy Minsky said, “The mob in Chicago, the Fischetti Brothers, I mean big, on the Ten Most Wanted list, you know, these were big gangsters. And they were just wonderful guys. And one night we were in this little club; we didn’t tell anybody here we were going or what we were doing or something. And this mobster that we knew came in said, ‘So-and-so’s looking for you.’ Harold said, ‘How in the world did you know I was here?’ And he said, ‘We know everything that’s going on in Chicago.’”
The world between the Mafia, the police, and the burlesque operators was close and sometimes the worlds overlapped. N.T.G. claimed the mob had “a high code of honor. I was never gypped or given a bad deal by a gangster owner.”
Val Valentine agreed. “Actually, they were very nice to all the girls, anyone you thought was connected, a wise guy or whatever. Oh no, they were great. They were always kinda around. You know, they were like atmosphere people,” she said.
Though not directly related to her work, Vicki O’Day had a “scary as all get out” experience from a man she met working in the burly club. She was working where the “nice Italian” family owned the club. And the club had “ties to gangs.” There was a hot car gang going through Texas and Arizona. Vicki “knew nothing about this” until one night a man asked her out for a date. He asked if they could stop by his house before going out to a restaurant. When they walked in “they were hauling what was left of someone ... throwing him in the car.... There was blood all over... and it was a white carpet, white walls and there was splattering,” she said. “I didn’t realize the human body could have so much blood. What had happened was the one being beaten up had snitched on them, and they were taking care of him, which was kinda fun—for them—and the man doing the beating sort of lost it, I think. We ended up huddled in the bedroom, a bunch of us, with the door barricaded with this man going wild.”
As urban sprawl increased and once middle-class neighbors fell derelict, many of the burlesque houses were located in the middle of increasingly unsafe neighborhoods. The nightclubs, run mostly by the Mafia, often created dangerous situations the performers were unwittingly caught up in—perhaps seeing something, or hearing something, they shouldn’t.
GUNPLAY IN THE STRIP JOINT screamed the headlines from True Detective Magazine.
“It wasn’t my fault,” April March demurred. The night she performed resulted in two deaths in the club.
On stage at Leon & Eddie’s nightclub
April was headlining at the Place Pigalle in Miami Beach in September. A Korean, Kun-Wha Yoo, was drinking with two other pals, according to the magazine. April and another exotic, Sharon Sutton, the “Upside Down Girl,” drank champagne at the trio’s table.
“The Korean and his buddy kept ordering all kinds of bottles of champagne. They presented him with the bill and I guess he didn’t like what the bill said,” April said. “He ran out of the club.”
The bill was seventy-four dollars. Yoo returned to his nearby hotel room, loaded a .38 gun, and then returned to the club.
“I did my performance, got dressed,” April said. She was having a cup of coffee, sitting in a white dress at the table.
Yoo returned. He shot Tony D’Arcy, the club’s baritone singer, outside. Dead. Next, Yoo shot the doorman Dave Goodman, who tried p
reventing Yoo from reentering the club. Goodman was shot twice in the legs.
“All of a sudden everybody started screaming and in came this Korean. And I hear, ‘bam bam.’ It sounded like a car backfiring and here I was under the spotlight. I couldn’t move. I guess he was gonna kill me and he was looking right at me. He was like right there. He’s shooting up the place,” she said. Her friend Sharon was “drunk. She didn’t pay any attention to the Korean with the guns. I screamed. I remember he turned around, looked right at me, aimed the gun. I guess I blacked out. Sharon came over and got in front.... She caught the bullets instead of me.”
The bongo player took a large bongo drum and knocked Yoo out. “I guess I went into shock because when I awoke I was at an agent’s apartment and everybody tried keeping the newspapers and everything away from me.... So here anyway True Detective Magazine called me a femme fatale.’ It wasn’t my fault at all.”
These situations didn’t happen all the time, but more than one stripper had memories similar to April March’s. Sheila Rae recalled a different gun battle in the club where she worked. “Guy came in and shot his wife during the show. She was onstage.” Why did he shoot her? “She was playing around,” Sheila said. Another time a woman shot her ex-convict of a husband in the club.
In 1954, at the New Follies in Los Angeles, ardent fan Roger Whittier died onstage clutching Loretta Miller’s photos after being shot by police. He had burst into the club, gun in hand, vowing to get the red-headed stripper lots of publicity.
By the nature of who they associated with and where they performed, danger often was a very real threat for the dancers.
“I worked in Pueblo, Colorado,” Vicki recalled, “and something was going on there at night.” She had a hotel room next to the club that had no lock on the door. “I moved furniture in front of door. All night long I could hear trucks outside. I knew if I looked out that curtain, I was dead.”
Her agent’s secretary called her with advice. “You’ve got to get out of there. Tell them you’re a witness in a car wreck and you have to be back up in Denver.” She tried to use this excuse, but the owner of the club was became angry. Vicki’s agent then sent protection.
A “four-foot-tall cowboy. I thought he’s gonna protect me?” She then went back to the club to retrieve her wardrobe, but half of it was gone. She went storming to the thug behind the bar and demanded her clothes. “He went back and brought a gun, pointed it right at my nose. ‘Get what you got and get the f—out of here.’ So I got the f—out of there with my little two-foot-tall cowboy and went to Denver.”
But the threat wasn’t over. The owner of the new club told her two men wanted to buy her a drink one night. One was silent; one was good looking. The attractive one said, “I heard you worked in Pueblo.”
Vicki played dumb—or smart. “‘Pueblo? Where’s that.”
This went on for several nights. Vicki continued to act clueless. The last night, the guy said, ‘"You’re OK, Vicki. We’ll leave you alone.’ To this day, I don’t know what the heck was going on. Pueblo is where government printing is done. Anyway... I hope he doesn’t see this.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Texas Justice
“Dallas in the ’50s at Abe’s colony club, they remember Candy Barr.”
—Steven Weinstein
“I was taken, done, and that was it.”
—Candy Barr (Oui Magazine)
While most strippers were arrested at least once in their career, police made an example out of Candy Barr.
“Candy Barr blew the top off of burlesque,” Steven Weinstein said. His father Abe nurtured her career as a star stripper at his Colony Club in Dallas. Candy Barr looked like your average 1950s girl next door: petite, sweet, and voluptuous with dyed blonde hair. She was born with the decidedly unglamorous name of Juanita Slusher in Texas. Her childhood was far from the elegant surroundings she would work in at the height of her career.
Born poor with four siblings in the tiny town of Edna, Texas (the town boasts only a 3.9-square-mile radius, mostly farmland and oak trees), her mother died when she was nine. Juanita was sexually abused when she was a young teen. She ran away from home at thirteen to Dallas, where she fell in with a crowd that forced her into prostitution, keeping her a virtual prisoner.
The young teen did whatever she had to in order to survive. The talk was she worked as a maid in a hotel by day and a prostitute at the very same place at night. She was forced into selling her body to eat and have a place to sleep. She was a kid without family, with no protection. Candy would vary her stories, playing loose with the truth and the painful memories, but it was not an easy time for her.
Married briefly at fourteen, she worked as a cocktail waitress. At sixteen, she said, she was drugged and forced to participate in a hardcore porno film called Smart Alec in 1951. It was graphic and seedy, involving a traveling salesman, a hotel room, and a threesome with another girl. Candy would later say because she had only seven cents in her purse at the time, she did the film. She was a kid who was broke and hungry. The shame would haunt her and stay with her forever. Smart Alec would become the first hugely popular stag film widely circulated and made Candy well known for her enthusiastic performance and her lush young body, measuring 38–24-35.
As a teenager, Candy met Jack Ruby through his sister. It was said he was infatuated with her. Their paths would cross again years later.
Candy’s ascent in burlesque was rapid, though sadly, her decline even more so. She began her transformation by dying her dark hair platinum. She was flamboyant and outspoken, with a pneumatic body men went crazy for.
She worked for Abe Weinstein at his Colony Club, becoming something of a protégé and friend of the club owner. She became a popular headliner with the new name of Candy Barr because of her sweet tooth and love of candy bars. She wore a cowboy hat, boots, and six-shooter holster.
With “ties to local gangsters and Mickey Cohen,” according to Steven Weinstein, Candy was caught with marijuana and sent to jail. Abe got her out. She then shot her second husband (who survived) in self-defense. Again she was lucky and got off.
But Dallas law had it in for the buxom, green-eyed temptress. She had a seedy reputation with law enforcement, who became obsessed with bringing down the popular stripper. There were unproven rumors of the many pornos she continued to star in, though they were untrue. Dallas believed it and went after her.
According to the 1986 Texas Monthly, the cops kept a constant surveillance on her apartment and tapped her phone. Eventually busted by a room full of cops, the five-foot-three-inch stripper (who was clearly dangerous) was caught with a small amount of marijuana in her apartment (supposedly belonging to another stripper). Candy’s sweet luck had finally soured. She was sentenced to fifteen years in Huntsville State Penitentiary in 1957, although she filed an appeal. Her real crime was she was a woman who took her clothes off.
While the case dragged on, her fame grew and she continued to perform at the Sho Bar in New Orleans, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. Mickey Cohen met her around then, fell in love, tried to protect her, and lavished her with gifts and cash. She famously slugged him in the mouth. As her appeal was about to be denied, Cohen decided to spirit her off to Mexico. For the trip, they disguised her by having her hair dyed by hairdresser Jack Sahakian, whom she promptly fell in love with. The two ended up getting married in 1959.
Finally, her appeals ran out, and in 1959, after marrying yet again, she was hauled off to prison, leaving a small daughter behind.
Steven Weinstein remembers accompanying his parents for a visit with Candy Barr in the pen for two hours every other Sunday. “I had to be at that time eight or nine years old. Why in the world they would take a kid?” She made art in prison that she would give to his parents. She would also begin to write poetry.
She was sprung after three years and went back to dancing. Abe rehired her. But “she was very difficult to get along with. Dad stopped putting up with her stuff.”
Following a friend, she moved to Brownwood, Texas. Purportedly, Jack Ruby helped her out, if giving her two purebred dogs could be called “helping out.” He thought she could breed them.
She posed nude when she was fifty years old for Oui Magazine, gradually fading into obscurity. She died at age seventy, in 2006, no longer the headline-making star. Steven Weinstein recalled, “She didn’t age well...”
Candy Barr
CHAPTER FORTY
And a Grind
“A gyration of the hips, clockwise or anti-clockwise, and is slightly faster than the hula-hula hip movement. It ends up with a bump.”
—Uncensored
“To bear down on harshly; crush.”
—Webster’s New World Dictionary
In 1954, according to a Miami newspaper, stripper Pat “Amber” Halliday petitioned the court to release her from a particularly onerous contract with her manager. Her contract called for a 50/50 split, but she told the judge she rarely saw even half of the five hundred dollars she earned weekly. Amber claimed to be a reluctant stripteaser, wanting only to be a housewife. The manager also beat her. The judged released Halliday from her contract, saying she’d “sold herself down the river.” As late as 1959, the supposedly reluctant stripper was still fully in the business of shedding her clothes.
There were many downsides to the business of burlesque, including divorce, loneliness, drinking, rough conditions on the road, mixing with the men in clubs. Travel kept the girls away from husbands, and kids grew up resenting mothers away for long stretches. Loneliness made for bad decisions; drinking was convenient. In every sense of the word, working in burlesque could be a torturous grind. For some.
“A career carousing around at night and drinking does not mix. And you make your choice,” said Tempest.
Behind the Burly Q Page 30