Tempest complained that a prior documentary had included a comment by former seamstress Gussie Gross which incorrectly characterized Tempest as a fat boozer. “I can’t understand why she did that,” Tempest told me. “No, I didn’t weigh 170 pounds. I didn’t have my nose worked on. But I did use a quart of scotch every day. I sat in it! That’s why I have such a tight ass today!”
“I don’t smoke. I don’t drink. I don’t do drugs. So I was never introduced to that aspect. In fact, I never saw anybody do it. Now, doesn’t mean they didn’t,” said Alexandra the Great.
Sheila Rae was a former blonde, voluptuous stripper whom I spoke with at the reunion. She no longer looked anything like her blonde, curvaceous glossy photos. She sat quietly in her wheelchair, obviously ill (she had cancer of the bone and hip, possibly breast), one arm painfully swollen, with short, curly, thinning hair, wearing no makeup like a modest overweight grandmother. She may have looked that way, but she certainly didn’t act it. She was salty and fun with a great sense of humor and a scrapbook full of memories.
“I got loaded one night and I walked [it off]—I was so drunk—the stage was way up high. The bartender caught me, or I would have broke my neck. I watched myself with the drinking after that.”
Dixie Evans said, “We had big signs everywhere, ‘no alcohol no alcohol,’ but... they’d slip it into their pocketbooks and this one girl, I remember, she said, ‘Look, when you buy a pocketbook you always have tojust take a bottle and make sure ... it’s big enough to put a bottle in.’”
“We used to get these little 7-Up bottles filled with gin, and that would get us through the midnight show,” said Maria Bradley.
Owners discouraged performers from leaving the theatre between shows. Betty Rowland said, “They didn’t want you to go out, because if you went out to a restaurant or go out maybe for a little cocktail or something, you might not come back for the midnight show.”
Lorraine Lee recalled a time in Cleveland after the performers went to dinner and returned for another show. Lorraine was onstage with her husband, Dick, and they were doing a scene. “We were out for a seven-minute bit—for forty-five minutes,” she said. They were ad-libbing, waiting for the next stripper to come on.
“Some guy in the audience had a cough,” Lorraine noticed. To eat up time, Lorraine said, “Wait a minute, I’ll get you cough drops.” She went back to her dressing room and got some lozenges. Finally Lorraine found out that “the feature was drunk and they were walking her around, trying to sober her up.” One time, a clearly tipsy Maria Bradley stumbled onstage and the stage manager came back and asked her what the problem was. Maria blamed it on her shoes.
“Mom dragged someone off the stage one night,” recalled Dee Ann Johnston. The dancer was clearly drunk. “They didn’t put up with that.”
Alan Alda related how many of the comics would be drunk and get into fights. Rag Ragland got in a bar fight, protecting a dancer, and got hit over the head with bottle, then went back and did the show.
The bar next to the Follies in Los Angeles saw a lot of Gus Schilling, a top banana who would drink their between shows.
Gaby Olah was just one of many strippers who developed a dependency on alcohol. Gaby danced under the name Terry Mixon. Her father was a dancer and her mother and stepfather were both aerialists in the circus. Gaby was born in 1927.
By 1943, her parents had settled in Boston. Gaby and her mother, whose stage name was Madeline Mixon, went to the Old Howard to look for work as dancers. Her mother was by then forty-five or forty-six. Gaby had seen shows at the Old Howard where there was “nothing offensive. Girls had more on than at the beach today.” Her mother procured them both jobs, saying they were the Mixon sisters. They worked with Lily Ann Rose’s mother, Margie LaMont, and Georgia Sothern. Eventually they told management they were mother and daughter. The mother lied and said Gaby was fifteen, even though she was eighteen. Terry remembered working with Rose La Rose, who was “nice to work with.” Rose “held audience in palm of her hand.”
The old burlesque training was tough and the performers more so. Gaby contracted polio and was in the hospital in isolation. When she got out, she returned to the Old Howard. “I was dragging my right foot badly,” she said.
The stage manager told her, “You’re going back in the line.”
She responded, “You’re crazy; I can’t dance.”
The manager repeated, “I’ll put you in the back of the line.” He set up a dressing room right offstage so she wouldn’t have to use the stairs.
“After a week he had me go up and back down the stairs.” He had learned it would strengthen her leg. And it did. “You can’t tell today, only if I get very tired,” she said of her weak leg.
In 1948, Gaby had a child and was growing tired of four shows a day’s worth of stripping and chorus girls. Once the baby was born, her husband asked her to stop working.
“I had a drinking problem,” Terry said. She was trying to quit, but had “no control of it. I blamed burlesque, because of traveling, without my mom or anyone on the road, no husband,” she said. She was lonely. “And where do you go at 11:30 at night when you don’t know anyone?”
Well, as we have learned, there is always a convenient bar next to the burlesque theatre.
“I didn’t know it was a disease. . . . [I had] bad drinking times,” she said. Comedians Mike Sachs and Irving Benson would pour her on and off trains. However, “I could do a scene-even in a blackout.”
She joined a circus and became “a drunken aerialist.”
She had an epiphany about her drinking at a show in Toledo. “I climbed up rope thirty feet in the air.... I felt if I let go, I could fly. I realized I was insane and drinking had gotten to me.”
She decided to do something. She went to rehab and AA and detoxed in 1965 or ‘66. After one relapse, she had her last drink in 1971. Sober, she married again. Together the couple raised seven kids. She realized with that responsibility, she couldn’t “afford to drink.”
One of the children was a “retarded boy,” she said. She grew comfortable with his disability as it meant she’d never have to be alone. Her marriage had started out as a “business deal.” He needed a mother for his children and she needed a father for hers. Eventually, she “fell in love with that man, [even though it was] selfish reasons why I married him.”
Surprisingly, even with the number of performers who liked to drink, there were few accidents on stage. Still, smart performers would check the stage, especially in an unfamiliar theatre, before going on. If they had time.
“[Stages] are all different,” Tee Tee Red explained. There would always be “something wrong with them” somewhere. She tried making a habit of checking out the stage prior to her shows. It wasn’t always possible. One night, she caught the heel of shoe in a hole as she was doing a spin. She was thrown up in the air and “landed between the whiskey bottles. It was a stage with a runway and it ballooned in the middle and I flew out upside down, bottles along the stage. Didn’t get scratched up. Bruises. Back up on stage and started all over again; the show must go on. Audience laughing, they thought it part of act.”
On another stage with no time prior to the show, Tee Tee Red (who performed acrobatics) was doing walkovers. The stage had a slant, which she didn’t notice until the momentum of the raked stage caused her to go over the stage and into the audience. She managed to land on her feet, hopped back up onstage, and continued dancing.
Sequin was all too familiar with accidents on stage. “I had a big giant hammock that screwed into the stage floor and I would swing on it, actually swing on it. And it was kind of a nice thing. One time it broke. Itjust collapsed right down on the floor. I didn’t fall too far, but my dignity was ruffled a bit.”
One time in Canada, Betty Rowland was working and a there was a substitute man who came in to take care of the theatre floor with linseed oil. She “fell three times. Went from one powder box to another.” The management thought she “couldn’t dance be
cause she spent her time on the floor, falling.”
“One time as a chorus girl, I was on a swing,” Joan Arline recalled. “I slid off and landed in the audience. Had to get up, brush myself off. So embarrassing.” There were also accidents of a more serious nature. Once in Montreal, a fire escape, or an inner staircase, collapsed and killed several audience members during a packed Lili St. Cyr show. Supposedly, the owners, not wanting to disturb their star, kept the news from her and she didn’t find out about it until much later.
In Philadelphia, Sequin set off the smoke alarms. She had black powder and a pan and her boyfriend wanted a flash before she came on. She would dance around a fire. “He must have used too much black powder” because during the Ravel music, “it got very smoky,” she said. The fire department was called.
Whether on or offstage, the girls faced problems in the real world just like everyone else. Sally Rand, for example, was robbed in her dressing room in 1957. Since the strippers were typically paid in cash, the robber was able to get away with quite a bit.
There were also occasionally issues with the audience members. Most audiences were respectful, but every now and then an odd incident occurred.
Joan Arline said she was once performing and at “ringside was a drunk woman, whispering louder and louder things like ‘whore’ and slut.’ People around her were ‘shhhing.’ I stopped my act and said, ‘You know, Madame, it’s women like you that make men go with me.’ She left.”
Joan, like many of the strippers, could take care of herself. Her act, her time under the violet spotlight, was precious and she didn’t want anything ruining it.
Customers could and did get too close. One customer bit Sally Rand on her derriere. Sally screamed and the man ran out. Years later, he came up to her and told her he had done it. She swore he broke the skin.
“I consider this an act of God: I was complaining about getting out of the business,” began Alexandra the Great. “Someone threw a bomb in this club. Thank God it was not a big one, but I was not having a good night before this happened. I went to Dallas and decided to change careers. The business had changed and I was no longer comfortable.”
If it wasn’t the customers that were raunchy, it may have been the venues. When Robert Alda was working the People’s Theatre in the Bowery, both the theatre and the surrounding neighborhood were run down, with rats running freely backstage. Alda shook his head and told Uncensored Magazine that “the best booking I get is in a joint like this.”
Sherry Britton felt the same way about the People’s Theatre, where tickets were only ten cents. “[This is] the home port of the city’s alcoholics. The soggy peepers staggered into my view.”
Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club had a reputation of being low rent, as well. And the pudgy man himself was known to have a nasty temper: violent and vitriolic. Sally Rand once worked for Ruby at one of his clubs and said, “He wasn’t a nice guy.” She thought he shot Oswald because he was “selfish and had nothing to lose, as he was terminally sick,” her son recalled.
Ruby’s club had a two-dollar cover charge, and the club was square, with dark red carpeting and black plastic booths. The stage was said to be no bigger than a boxing ring. Ruby’s “dancers,” it was rumored, were often hookers.
Jack Ruby’s reputation as a “bad guy” with a bad temper drew a harder kind of stripper. The Carousel Club was “not a high-class place.” Girls didn’t like to admit they had worked there after Kennedy was shot, according to Steven Weinstein.
Ruby was jealous of Abe Weinstein and his classy joint up the street, the Colony Club. “Jack was trying to take my father’s entertainers away from him. Enticing them to come work for him. It was not a couples’ place. Jack Ruby loved the policemen, anything that had to do with police department.... He let [the policemen] know they could come in for free, and drink for free.”
Kennedy was shot on a Friday afternoon. Jack Ruby went to the newspapers and placed an ad stating the Carousel Club would be closed. It “made Ruby look good. My father was a business man. It’s Friday. It’s the weekend. It’s the nightclub business. My father didn’t close. We were all so distressed. Things like this happen. People still want to go out. They want to drink. They want to keep their mind out of it,” said Steven Weinstein.
Well, Ruby came into the Colony “before midnight,” Weinstein said. “He confronts my dad, ‘you so-and-so,’ cussing him out. ‘You lousy no good . . . how could you be open? Our president’s dead!’”
By this time, the club’s bouncer, Tex, a hulking six-foot-seven-inch big guy “notices Ruby coming in, hears the argument. Abe is explaining why he’s open and Ruby takes a swing. Tex stands there between and takes it in the chest. Grabs Ruby in an arm lock and moves him out of the club.”
As burlesque moved into the 1940s and ’50s, some seedier clubs sprung up hoping to earn some of the burlesque dollars. In some places like Calumet City, outside Chicago, where the strip clubs were rough, the girls bordered on prostitution. The clubs were difficult and grungy, and only those down on their luck worked there.
According to an article in Billboard in 1952, the AGVA lost jurisdiction in Cal City after a strike and things got worse for the girls. One performer claimed she had to “hustle drinks.”
“I was protected from some of the harder drinking, some of the bad spirit between some of [the strippers]. Some were rough with one another. [That includes] physical violence,” said Alan Alda.
“‘Easy?’ It wasn’t easy being a stripper.” Vicki O’Day said.
Accidents weren’t the only challenges strippers occasionally faced onstage. The competition between strippers often led to trouble, too. Alexandra recalled one amateur night where the local girl was getting such a big hand that Alexandra, who was set to go on next, couldn’t go. “I was annoyed. They just wouldn’t stop clapping for her. I was supposed to come out.... Ego got the best of me and I told them to turn the spotlight on. I had a white robe [that was] transparent. I took everything off [except that] and I walked on stage.”
The spotlight hit her in all her nudity. “And I stood there for a second. There was dead silence. Because I didn’t have anything on.” She walked the runway and “they went crazy. They grabbed my robe,” she said. And Alexandra was pulled into the crowd.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
The Show Must Go On
“From the front you’d never know how old she was. Body still good. Still good breasts. She took good care of herself.”
—Al Baker Jr. on a seventy-something Tempest Storm still stripping
“When it’s time to go on, you go on.”
—Alexandra the Great “48”
On the road and in the theatres, the hours were long. Week after week, month on end, performers worked, sacrificing time spent with children and families to put on a show. They were entertainers at heart and nothing kept them from getting up to perform.
If someone was flaky, and Betty Rowland said not many were, “they fell by the wayside.”
I found the performers’ spirits to truly be indomitable despite personal and professional setbacks. “So American, the will to keep going, despite the adversity,” noted Shteir.
“How did you know about that?” Dixie Evans asked me. “I don’t talk about that.” The pain in Dixie’s eyes even so many years later was heart-wrenching. Had anyone before me brought up the subject of the baby she gave up for adoption in 1926?
“Me? It was me that had a daughter up for adoption? Well, no, what happened was I’d signed the adoption papers in the hospital and, uh, then I quick called my girlfriend and I said, ‘I’m not going through with this’ and I got out of the bed and we’re running down the hall and we get in the car and the police are after us. Yeah. Oh yeah. The daughter was adopted by the State Senator of Nevada. Someone from the sherriff’s office came. They said, ‘Don’t you ever put your foot in the State of Nevada.... we’ll frame you and put you in jail and everything. And don’t ever come back.’ Yeah. That scared me. I didn’t
play Nevada for a long time. I told a girl up there in Reno to find out her address where she lives. I was just gonna ring the doorbell and say ‘Avon Lady,’ you know, but my girlfriend went and talked to [my daughter], and she said/No, she didn’t want me, so I don’t want her.’”
Dixie, as strong as she was on the outside, was still clearly wounded by this decision. “I would have felt the same way as her. I didn’t resent her. I’m proud she married well and all of that,” she said.
“Gave me a good excuse to drink a bottle of scotch that night.... For years every Wednesday and Sunday, I’d wake up and pillow would be wet, tears would start and couldn’t stop. You grow up, or become callous, or accept the fact,” she said.
Dixie would marry boxer Harry Bridle. “Fifth-ranking contender for middle-weight championship for the world.” They were married only briefly. She never had any other children.
**
Lou Costello and his wife Anne had three children, including Lou Jr., who was almost a year old when tragedy struck. Chris Costello, Lou’s daughter, explained that Lou “had asked my mother to keep the baby up that night to see if he would be able to recognize his voice on the air. And my mother went out to get something for the baby’s first birthday and there were people there in the home. He was put out in his playpen.”
“It was an Indian summer day and he managed to loosen a slat from the playpen, go through and then out through a courtyard into the pool. By the time my mother found him, it was too late. So they brought my father home.
“He said, ‘I’m going back to do the show.’
“His sister Marie said, ‘Lou, how? How can you go back?’
‘“Because I promised that baby that he would hear my voice tonight and wherever God has taken my son, I want him to know he can still hear me.’”
Chris continued. “He loved children.... He related to children. He was relating to himself.”
Lou Costello went on to perform that night, although he never would get over the loss of his son. He had a bracelet made with the baby’s name on it that he always wore. It was camouflaged in his films. “He never ever took it off,” Chris said. “The light went out in him.”
Behind the Burly Q Page 31