Lou was the perfect example of a strong trend throughout the industry: Performers performed no matter what.
Beautiful, tall blonde Taffy O’Neil was no stranger to this idea. She was married and working in Los Angeles when she forced herself to focus on her career instead of the pain surrounding her.
“My son also got polio the year that I went to work, just before the vaccine. He was in the hospital for a year and I would get home at 2:30–3:00 in the morning and get up early and take him to Santa Monica from Torrance for his treatments,” she said.
Taffy was reserved, blonde, blue-eyed, a nice self-effacing lady who could have been anyone’s still pretty grandmother, certainly not someone who took off her clothes. Her figure when she danced had been incredible.
She would go in the pool with him. He wore a leg brace and learned to walk again. She would “nap when he could. It was a tough time, especially tough on him. Three surgeries.”
Alexandra the Great also learned to perform under pressure and heartache.
“I was getting ready to perform and the owner told me I had a phone call. And they never do that,” said Alexandra the Great. “It was Rose. There were rumors that she was not feeling well. And she told me the rumors weren’t true. We talked forty-five minutes. She told me how much she cared about me and I asked to come to see her and she said she wanted to gain some weight.... And when I got back to Hawaii, I heard that she died. So ... sad. I wasn’t ready for that.”
Alexandra regretted not being able to say goodbye to her friend. “I wish I would have gone to Toledo when she told me not to. I was so upset when I heard the news, I divorced my husband. Because he said, Gome back or I’m leaving.’ I had to come back before I was ready. I would have gone to Toledo.”
Dancers also learned to work through illnesses and injuries.
“You couldn’t say, ‘I’m sick.’ You go to work no matter what,” Dixie Evans said. During one of her first shows, she just so happened to get her period. “What am I gonna do? I’ve got to wear a big Kotex.” One of the dancers gave her a tampon. She wasn’t sure how to use it. “I shoved the whole cardboard up there. It hurt real bad.”
“It’s work,” Dardy Minksy simply said. “There is nothing glamorous about show business. The perks are: You are up at 9:30 after going to bed at 3 o’clock, doing your makeup and hair to go into a cold dirty theatre. Traveling. You never know where the hell you are.”
Alda said burlesque was a “training ground” and he “was proud of it.” But “it was tough,” he said.
Still, the strippers and comedians always rose to the occasion. Come rain or shine, they were up on that stage giving it their all.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Gossip
“She tried to, um, commit suicide three times. She got involved with someone and he was involved with some drugs. And, I think, got Lili involved.”
—Kelly DiNardo
“I heard she had her bush in rollers or something. Did you hear that? In curlers?”
—Dixie Evans
There was a lot of conjecture about what went on with these women who took their clothes off for a living, which lead to petty gossip and malicious lies—or truths.
“We were considered second-class,” said Vicki O’Day. Besides being considered prostitutes by the general public it was also assumed the burlesquers had no real talent.
“A lot of the chorus girls came into burlesque having been hookers or still were hookers or went back to that,” said Alan Alda.
In my interviews, there was one name that evoked a passionate response: Rose La Rose. Whether it was gossip or a firsthand account, they had a lot to say about Rose.
“Oh, she was raunchy,” said Lili Ann Rose. “Really raunchy.”
“Oh, you don’t dare bring up her name,” Dixie Evans warned me.
Rose La Rose was known as the bad girl of Burlesque because of her gay abandon on the stage. Born in New York’s Little Italy in 1919 as Rosina DePella, she was fourteen and working as a ticket taker for Minsky. According to Joan Arline, Rose was selling tickets in the booth when another stripper fell ill and Rose was pushed on stage. “She was very good,” Joan said.
When she performed, “nobody got to see her,” recalled Dixie Evans.
From the start, Rose liked to push the limits. She was dark-haired, heart-shaped, not busty, but beautiful and appealing. “She walked pigeon-toed,” Dixie Evans said. “But that’s kinda cute.” Rose would travel the circuit with her Mama Jennie. They “fought like cats and dogs,” according to Terry Mixon. But if Mama Jennie wasn’t on the road, Rose would call her every night.
Author Collyer called Rose a “savage undresser.” It would take a full, unheard of thirty minutes for her to finish her strip. Most stripped in less than fifteen minutes. Rose loved the spotlight and the screaming. She was small—five feet four inches—and she did a strip in reverse. “The act had her begin with no more covering than a newspaper. She folded it until it got smaller and smaller. Only then did she get in to her gown.”
Rose taunted her audience. “I like to hear the audience gasping,” she once said.
Her popularity was undeniable. “Rose was always the biggest seller. People would wait around the block to see her. She was a magnificent performer and she had a dynamic personality. And I thought she was very funny,” said Alexandra the Great “48”.
“I saw Rose at sixteen with a friend in St. Louis at the Opera House. All I remember is the curtain opened and she looked lovely. She walked back and forth. She turned around and now I understand why her name was ‘Bare Assy.’ She was.”
There was the mixed feeling that because of performers like Rose, who tested the limits of nudity, burlesque developed a bad reputation. But there were those that admired her fiery, rebellious ways, too.
“Rose was known for doing things she wasn’t supposed to. She was a character. Very mischievous. She loved to laugh and get on you. She’d chase you around the theatre calling you all kinds of names.”
Rose told club owner Leroy Griffith that a young Sammy Davis Jr. (three or four at the time), working the circuit with his dad and uncle as a tap dancer, would stand in the wings and watch (presumably Rose stripping). One day she went into his dressing room and nailed his dance shoes to the floor as payback.
Rose was a smart businesswoman and knew how to get a raise, as she related to Alexandra. “She was playing the Grand and she went downstairs to check the house. There was a line around the block. She didn’t think her salary matched that line. She said she became very ill over that and had a problem getting out of bed. And wasn’t able to get out of bed until they increased her revenue. Rose always taught me to check the house out. She’d call when I was in different cities. ‘How’s the house?’ She negotiated my salary. I learned from her when to get sick or when to be well,” Alexandra said.
Rose eventually had her own theatre, the Town Hall in Cleveland.
Rose La Rose
Friday nights, the college boys came to the show. One night Alexandra convinced Rose to join her and some college boys after the show at a party. It got so wild the two had to sneak out a bathroom window.
“There were stories of her on safari in Africa, [that] she killed a bear. She was a big, big name,” according to Dixie.
“She used to like taking off her clothes,” said Alan Alda. As a neophyte actor of sixteen, he performed in the play White Cargo with Rose. She would come onstage with a towel. “Backstage she’d be walking around chastely holding a silk cloth over her chest, you know, while she’s waiting to go, and every once in a while she’d drop it for the stagehands. She just couldn’t get enough of showing herself off. So it must have been an illness she had,” Alda mused. “Perhaps she had a form of ‘naked-osis.’”
One former exotic told me how Rose would throw wild parties with her “flunky Tommy,” who would eventually take over the Town Hall. Tommy was big—six feet five inches—and “dumb as an ox.” At parties, she would “have him perfo
rm. He had a twelve-inch thing. He was the star of the show at Rose’s parties.”
Rose La Rose died of cancer at the very young age of fifty-nine in July 1972.
Industry gossip didn’t stop with Rose’s death, however. There was always plenty to go around.
Bud Abbott had epilepsy, for example. “He had it under control,” but would instruct Lou if “he started to tense up, to punch him as hard as possible in the gut.” And of course Lou would do it. “It would [look] like he was angry,” which contributed to the rumors that the two didn’t like each other, though Chris Costello insists there was no lasting rift. Bud was scared of his epilepsy and would start drinking to control it.
Alexandra said, “I met my share of people in Washington, D.C., including Gerald Ford, [who] was carried out of that club stoned.”
There was another famous stripper whose name got a strong reaction during my interviews.
Margie Hart—the one that got burlesque banned from New York
“Margie Hart? Oh boy, you don’t dare mention her name much. She’s the one that closed New York. It was rumored that on New Year’s Eve in New York at this theatre, Margie was gonna take it all off,” said Dixie Evans.
“The reason LaGuardia was so vehement about shutting down striptease was because Margie Hart flashed her pubic hair or she wore a G-string with fake pubic hair on it and flashed that,” said Shteir.
After Margie reportedly flashing her pubic hair, Dixie Evans remembers, “the police came in and closed the theatre down and I think they took [Margie] to jail and they all got booked.” This was not exactly an infrequent occurrence, as we have learned.
Many believed that Margie alone was responsible for the ban on burlesque in New York. It wasn’t just the flashing that was the problem, however; it was also the “competition.” Broadway owners didn’t want burlesque biting into their apple and they were looking for an excuse to close it. Of course, it just moved across the bay to New Jersey.
Sherry Britton vehemently expressed her belief that it was Margie’s fault that burlesque was kicked out of New York. Sherry claimed Margie was the first to go without her G-string.
I interviewed Margie’s elegant sister, Kathleen, and Margie’s daughter, Morgan.
“We called her Maggie,” Kathleen said, sitting in her mansion in West Palm Beach—an old Spanish home built in the 1920s on the water, with a large portrait of her former husband hanging behind her on the wall of her current husband’s home.
Margaret Bridget “Margie” Cox came from a family of nine siblings. “Our family ran from a nun to a priest to a lady of burlesque.” Kathleen was the youngest: “Age is something you never talk about in my family. It’s on no one’s tombstone. We don’t do that.” Maggie was somewhere in the middle. Her father was a minor executive with the Singer Sewing Company. They were an Irish Catholic family.
Maggie ran away at sixteen or seventeen to join a show in Chicago. Her father found her and dragged her back. Then, a few months later, Maggie did it again. “They let her,” Kathleen Ross said. Their parents were shocked but got used to it. “Girls wear less at the beach today,” she said.
Maggie changed her last name to Hart, which was her mother’s maiden name. She was red-headed, five feet seven inches, and slender, with a cute upturned nose, surgically modified.
Maggie had beautiful costumes, net bras, pasties, fringy G-strings, beaded and feathered. “Made by the best.” She started in the chorus, but “they plucked her out to make her a star.” She was so gorgeous. And she was a big name in burlesque in the 1930s and ’40s. She was in it for “maybe ten years.”
Kathleen remembered standing backstage of her much older (by at least sixteen years) sister, catching her wardrobe. She commented there were “nice girls in burlesque” and Lili St. Cyr was “one of the nicest and prettiest.”
Morton Minsky contends Margie copied Rose’s act and carried a bible under her arm on stage, playing up her All-American appeal. He claims, “She always had us worried” because of the amount she showed.
Collier’s magazine claimed Margie worked a mere four minutes in a ninety-minute production. Lili St. Cyr would say she worked thirty-eight minutes a day out of four shows.
“To be a feature, you had to work ten minutes,” Joan Arline explained.
Margie was the first stripper to hire a press agent and invested her earnings in real estate. She had a two-floor, swanky apartment on 25 Central Park West with French antiques, and Kathleen recalled parties with the Marx Brothers and Red Buttons in attendance.
A professional, she had “zipper rehearsals” beause she was so fearful of having her disrobing snagged, said Morton Minsky. She seldom drank and didn’t run around to nightclubs.
She was married several times. One husband was a comedy writer and her press agent, Seaman BlockJacobs; another had a gambling club; one “strange man who didn’t last long"; and finally the “love of her life,” John Ferarro, a Los Angeles councilman. “She worshiped him.” They lived in a Bel Air home and entertained often.
She had a stroke in her seventies and her last few years were bad. But her spirit was strong. “You couldn’t get her down,” Kathleen remembers. Maggie died in 2000.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Women Who Changed Burlesque
“You weren’t allowed to pose with nude boobs. I wish you could.”
—Blaze Starr
“Somehow this wild redhead and the running up and down and the boobs and bumping and grinding—somehow, it changed the course of stardom.”
—Dixie Evans
Tempest Storm
TEMPEST STORM
Born Annie Blanche Banks in 1928 in rural Georgia, Tempest Storm had a typical hardscrabble childhood during the Great Depression. “I picked cotton, chopped cotton. And I said, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to get out of this poor environment that I’m in,’” she said.
Back-breaking work was the least of Annie’s worries. “I was pulled up into the hills by five guys and raped one by one when I was fourteen.” An uncle also tried to rape her. She left home early, marrying a man for twenty-four hours (it was later annulled) to get out of the house. Her stepfather was “a mean man,” but her husband scared her worse and she returned home.
Determined to leave Georgia behind her, the fifteen-year-old married husband number two, a salesman, after knowing him a week. He brought her to California. The marriage lasted six months. “I was brave enough to go with him,” she said. Tempest got herself a job as a car hop. After work, she’d go out for coffee with the other girls until sometimes four in the morning. One night, “I got home at 4:30 a.m. and he had come home unexpected and accused me with going with all kinds of men. I knew he had a gun. He said, ‘I’m gonna kill you.’ So he threw me down on the bed and he’s trying to put his fist down my throat. I kicked him off me and started to run out the door, he picked up the gun and I heard it click. That was the last time I ever saw him,” she said.
When I met Tempest in 2006, she was living in an immaculate, but small, apartment in Las Vegas in a terrible part of town. (When we drove up to her building, the gang members in the parking lot had what looked to be a hot stereo, freshly ripped, with wires asunder.)
Tempest had just gotten out of the hospital and was rail thin. Dixie told me she was anorexic. Tempest herself admitted she would only eat diet food. She was tall with a regal bearing. She sat ramrod straight and her thick red mane of hair flowed over her shoulders. Her makeup was flawless, her skin glowing.
Despite her starvation diet, she took pride in the fact that she took care of herself. She was warm and funny and forthright, even though her reputation had always been that of a difficult diva.
“I wanted to make something of myself,” she explained. Her work ethic contributed to her reputation of being temperamental, she said. She cared deeply about her performance and her appearance.
The 1950s were ready to shed the Lili St. Cyrs with their demure, ladylike scenes, and embrace Elvis Presley and rock n’
roll and the new breed of burlesque woman who embodied the changes happening in the country.
“When Tempest came along, it changed the course of stardom. A different style. Wild,” said Dixie Evans. Tempest drove a red Cadillac convertible swathed in mink.
Her mentor, former stripper, teacher, and Follies Theatre owner Lillian Hunt, gave Annie Blanche Banks her new name.
One day, Lillian declared, “We have to change your name.”
“What do you have in mind?” She said, “What about Sunny Day?”
Annie replied, “I really don’t feel like a Sunny Day. Gimme another one.”
Lillian tried again. “How’ bout Tempest Storm?”
“I’ll take it!” And that was that.
Tempest was one of the only strippers who legally changed her name to her moniker. She said she half regretted it. “I can’t go anywhere,” she said.
Though she co-wrote her autobiography with a former reporter, Tempest felt it didn’t do her justice and wasn’t entirely accurate.
Tempest was known for her “million-dollar chest,” the way she tossed her long red hair on stage as she bent forward and back, knees spread, thighs strong. Her moves were often bombastic, full-throttle sex—she convulsed, she crouched, she bent, she twisted. Her act was often accompanied by simulated thunder and rain. Her measurements were rumored to be anywhere from 41DD to 48DD. Tempest herself says she is a modest 40.
“I remember paying Tempest in those days $1,800 a week, and $1,800 a week in those days was good money. She completely sold out the house and it was like, 1,400 seats,” remembered Leroy Griffith.
“I just got $10,000 in San Francisco last year,” Tempest said. Unfortunately, she later fell and broke her hip in Las Vegas performing on stage in 2010, truly ending her days on the stage. She possibly ties Ann Corio for the stripper who worked the longest.
Behind the Burly Q Page 32