Tempest said she never felt a stigma being in burlesque. She was one of the rare few who felt this way.
“You have such nudity in motion pictures; we looked like angels. I never approved of complete nudity. That took away from burlesque. It was entertaining, sensuous, sexy numbers that you did. You left something to the imagination. Now out there they want to see your tonsils.... I’m not judging. Everybody to their own thing.”
Tempest had affairs and marriages, a personal life as turbulent as her name. She would have good publicity and troubles with the government. Like Lili St. Cyr, who was busted for not paying taxes, Tempest and her third husband, singer Herb Jeffries, were indicted on four counts of failing to file tax returns.
With Jeffries, she had a daughter, Patricia. Her daughter, whom she was reluctant to talk about, lives in Indiana and is a nurse. “She has a girl, twenty. My little granddaughter. She has autism. Tragedy. She’s smart as a whip.”
She was more willing to talk about her romantic life and her relationship with her parents. “I really don’t know what I’ve been looking for in men. I think I was looking for the father that I never had. [My parents] separated before I was born. And she never had any photos of him. My brother says, ‘Oh! Here’s a picture of your real father.’ Well, I went crazy. I walked over and said, ‘Mother who is this?’ She said, ‘I don’t know.’ I said/You better tell me who it is. Is that my father?’ ‘I don’t know!’ I said, ‘Well, I’ll ask you one more time, is that my father? If you don’t tell me the truth, you won’t have to wait to die because I’m gonna take this pillow and smother you to death.’”
More recently, Tempest lived with a man for ten years, and when they broke up, he sold all her clothes. “Another [ex] was under the care of a psychiatrist. He was in the hospital and died,” she said. His family didn’t tell her.
“My choice of men has been rotten. The last one was no better. He turned around and did the same thing. Left me with nothing. We lived like millionaires in Newport Beach,” she said.
A true legend, a true lady, someone who made a difference in her life, pulled herself up from horrible circumstances and was proud of what she did.
“I’m so classy, they don’t know what the hell to do with me.”
**
BLAZE STARR
Like Tempest Storm, Blaze was gang raped as a teenager.
The stripper’s fortunes would rise and fall over a long career. Immortalized in the film Blaze starring Paul Newman, she has a winning attitude, a sense of humor, and strong sense of self-worth. “I look after me. Cuz I’m number one,” she explained unapologetically. Blaze, too, had red hair, not quite the florescent color of Tempest’s, but a dark auburn.
Born in 1932 as Fannie Belle Fleming in the coal-mining territory of West Virginia, her father died of black lung, leaving her mama with nearly a dozen children to support.
“In West Virginia,” she explained, “there is a lot of spousal abuse. We’d walk through the hills two miles to get to school and kids would have their tales of ‘Daddy beat mommy and he blacked both eyes, broke her ribs.’” The men would get drunk, then cry and ask for forgiveness. It taught her a valuable lesson. “I never wanted to be in a position to have someone support me. I would make my way,” she said.
She explained, “Everyone was poor in those years. It was a luxury to own a cow. There were no doctors in the area; people rode horses and wagons.” Her mother was a schoolteacher in a one-room school, and “every eighteen months a baby would come.” Blaze had eleven siblings, one died at six months. She helped raise the others.
“I used to sing alto in church every Sunday. I was very close with my mom. She told me whatever I do, do it the very best and don’t let anything stop you,” she said.
Blaze quickly grew into a mature-looking teen. She was proud of her 38DDs. She sang me a song that she had written about them.
“I was working in a donut shop in Washington, D.C., and this man came in. He asked me do I sing. And I told him, ‘Yeah, I sing and yodel.’ Which I did. You know, I do. He said, ‘Well, I need a girl for my show.’ And he took me over to see his show that night. And I played some songs and sang.”
Dixie Evans remembered, “He said, ‘Oh, come on, you’ve got to go out and take something off.’ And she says ‘no.’ So she’s standing there and he said, ‘Blaze, Blaze will you, will you take off something?’ ‘No. No.’ ‘Will you take it off for America?’ And she said yes, and she took off her bra and the servicemen hollered.”
“I wanted to be a movie star at first,” Blaze said. She watched Marilyn Monroe films. Stardom of another kind was in store for the newly christened Blaze. She would become associated with the Two O’Clock Club in Baltimore. The club was located on a section known as The Block, crowded with other burlesque clubs, such as the Kit Kat, Gaiety, and the Pussycat Club (where according to author Diane Giordmaina in Sinatra and the Moll, Blaze bought interest in the club for an ex-boyfriend). The Two O’Clock was managed by Solly Goodman, who became Blaze’s manager.
She worked the theatre during the daytime and the Two O’Clock at night. “I was sixteen. Nothing but energy. I loved every minute of it. I loved the audience going wild. I loved making my new shiny gowns. It’s great if you can do something you like and earn a living.”
Blaze apparently gave them something to scream about. One news article claimed she dropped her sequin G-string down to her knees and was hauled into court and fined fifty dollars.
She worked hard to be top at her profession. “She didn’t like sharing the billing with me. She wanted to be the one and only Blaze,” April March said.
Not only did Blaze make most of her gowns, handy with needle and thread, she was a girl who knew her tools. During her act, she “used candles on a little table. I lit them as soon as I started taking my clothes off. I would blow it out with my mouth, but it looked like my boob was doing it. I thought, This is good. I need some fire.”
She got her own tools and cut a foot out of the back of the couch. She wanted it to appear as if her dancing made the couch catch on fire. With the help of some stage hands, she got an empty can of peaches, got a heating “thing from [an] electrical place,” and rigged it with “some safety pins” to her couch, she said. She would plug it in and during her act, “smoke would come up. Soon as I smelled it, I’d have to turn it off. Sometimes [I’d] forget; [we] would have real fire. This is great, everyone’s going wild, because it’s unexpected. I’d done all I could do up there, wiggling around.”
About men, she was sage: “Most of em cheat. It don’t mean a thing.” One husband confessed to sleeping around. He told her, ‘"Yes, I did. It didn’t mean no more than taking a good shit.’ He confessed, so we divorced. A much-married husband. He died at fifty-two from lung cancer,” she said.
Her most famous affair was a long-term relationship with the wild Governor Earl Long.
Then the day came for her to quit burlesque. “I had a small heart problem. I didn’t want to die on the stage practically naked. I wound up going to a hospital and they did five bypasses. And ah, doctor told me I couldn’t work anymore for a couple years.”
She went rock hunting and made jewelry by hand that she sold in a mall. “I went to North Carolina and hunted for rubies and emeralds. Learned to cut ’em,” she said.
Blaze sold her club in 1975, traveled a bit, worked a couple gigs, and had a good income from savvy investments she had made over the years.
Blaze with Paul Newman briefly brought her back into the limelight. Since then, she remains mostly unseen, living in the hills where she was born, surrounded by family. She had a brother who was mentally and physically handicapped that she took care of after their mother died. She was happy watching her favorite TV show MacGyver and reading. “I haven’t been able to do that for years,” she said.
Blaze and Paul Newman on the set of the movie Blaze.
GYPSY
The most common name associated with burlesque is that of the mythical char
acter Gypsy Rose Lee, a larger-than-life invention. She wrote her memoir playing fast and loose with the truth to be remembered as she wanted to be remembered. And the myth has stuck.
Still, her story is fascinating. Gypsy is remembered for changing burlesque, for bringing it to society, for showing the world strippers could be smart, could “talk,” and could remove a little clothing, too. Her name still blazes above marquees across the country, years after her death, memorialized in the musical Gypsy. While it is largely forgotten or overlooked, the play is officially billed as Gypsy: A Musical Fable. And with good reason.
Gypsy was born in 1911, to a mother who often lied about her age. Mama Rose Hovick was an overbearing mother who made Gypsy give up her birth name of “Ellen June” to her prettier sister born two years later. The beloved June and the renamed Rose Louise toured vaudeville, where June easily outshone her darker, awkward sister. June was quickly making gobs of money, but life with Mama wasn’t easy, and at thirteen she ran away. It was left to Rose Louis to make mama proud and bring home the bacon.
Mimi Reed worked with Gypsy at Minsky’s on 42nd Street. “She was there starting, and her mother was the one that made her big. She wouldn’t let her associate with anyone unless they could further her career.”
Rose found that she could excel in burlesque by playing up the “tease” in the strip, using humor and her intelligence to make her act unique. She had found her calling. Now she would be calling the shots with Mama Rose.
She was rail thin, unlike the voluptuous strippers she employed in her act. She had bearing and grace and command of her audience and smoked heavily. When asked about Gypsy, who competed for crowds at the same time as his beloved Ann Corio, Mike Iannucci laughed and said, “She’s gone now so she can’t come after me,” before saying, “She wasn’t attractive, but she was a talker.” She had a witty banter with the audience as she peeled garter, hat, gloves.
She elevated the striptease with her sophisticated repartee. She tried Hollywood, where she would shoot several pictures under the name Louise Hovick because of her striptease reputation. She did not excel at the movies and returned to burlesque.
“Gypsy was really the only one who went from burlesque into a Broadway show, and was successful,” said Betty Rowland. “She could talk and that was something the rest of us didn’t do.”
She was the Queen of the Strippers. She was the one who garnered riches and sophisticates as fans, and the one who hobnobbed with Carson McCullers, Christopher Isherwood, and artist Max Ernst. At the pinnacle of her career in burlesque, she was referred to as “The Gyp” by her many and varied friends.
She was the stripper who made good with a gimmick. In her biography, her friend, producer Leonard Spigelgass, wrote, “Gypsy Rose Lee had no major talents. And I’m quoting her.” That didn’t mean she didn’t have the brains and the drive to parlay taking off her clothes in crappy theatres across America into a television talk show, several books, plays, and a memoir that would be turned into a perennial Broadway musical.
She worked with boyfriend and producer Mike Todd on Streets of Paris and Star and Garter on Broadway, which many other burlesque acts joined. According to Collyer, Todd didn’t have many nice things to say about his former love. When Gypsy and her Chihuahua passed him one day, he was overheard saying, “There goes the two greatest no-talent queens in the show business.”
Married three times, Gypsy had a son, Erik, with director Otto Preminger, but refused to tell Erik his father’s identity until he was in his twenties, claiming it wasn’t any of his business who she slept with. She traveled with Erik, who she kept in the shadow of her legend, and had him help her with her act.
Oftentimes billed as “America’s Leading Literary Figure,” Gypsy made $100,000 with her Royal American Beauties on the circus tour. She did a reverse strip, dressing the lovely ladies. It was 1949 and she was thirty-eight years old.
The show was enormously successful. She claimed to love traveling in her own trailer and working eight to fifteen shows a day for a magnificent sum of $10,000 a week. Occasionally she would toss her fishing pole over her shoulder and go out and catch dinner.
Gypsy lived in a grand twenty-six room townhome on the Upper East Side (East 63rd—it still stands today) in Manhattan and had an elaborately decorated home in Beverly Hills.
There was another side to Gypsy—one that those behind the scenes were privy to.
“She was an impossible woman,” Dardy Minsky said.
Gypsy was on the stage in New Orleans doing her number when Erik’s nurse came to Harold Minksy and told him “the boy had swallowed a pin.” Without hesitating, Harold threw the boy in a cab and off they went to a local hospital. Fortunately the pin hadn’t gone very far down his throat and it was removed. The boy was fine and they returned to the theatre. And when Gypsy heard that [Harold] didn’t stop [her number] to go get her off stage . . . she was so furious, she walked out of the theatre. And never came back.”
“She was very ungrateful,” Dardy said. “She had no talent. She couldn’t sing, she couldn’t dance. She had a very bad body. She was smart as a whip. Physically—nothing going for her.”
Ann was way above her as far as earning money and as far as pleasing the people. Gypsy had a way about her,” Mike admitted. “She made a heck of a living.”
Gypsy’s winning act was “silly, playful, and corny,” Rachel Shteir explained. But it was also a glamorous one. “She dressed up and then withheld from them, leaving them wanting more than they saw or could ever have seen. Gypsy used a line Ann Corio teased with to close her act. “I can’t take that off, I’d catch cold,” she’d say. Lili St. Cyr would also use a version of this parting line before dancing off stage, leaving the crowds hollering.
In 1962, Janet Savoy was a former Property Mistress of the North Shore Theatre in Maryland. The company was producing the play Mame. Gypsy Rose Lee sailed into town to star in the title role. “We eagerly awaited the arrival of Gypsy Rose Lee. The first day of rehearsal, this woman shlogs onto the lot, terrible saggy old housedress with clearly no underwear. Somebody said, ‘That’s Gypsy Rose Lee,’” Janet said.
Erik would often speak of how his mother wore old, stained clothes, spilled with either coffee or tea and cigarette ash, when she traveled.
Morton Minsky recalls her downing glasses of brandy.
“Once the pressure was on in rehearsal, her whole attitude changed greatly and I think she was panicked “Janet remembered. “She would refer to herself in the third person. She always talked about herself as ‘Gypsy.’ She had that strange overbite. And she’d talk about ‘Oh Gypsy didn’t mean that.’ And every other word was’ Jesus Christ God all fucking mighty.’ It seemed to have been important to her to appear very legitimate even though she’d been a big burlesque star. It was my impression that most nights she was drinking. One of the actors in the cast kinda looked out for her and it was sad.”
Did her name bring people to the theatre? “The name did bring people. I don’t know if they were thrilled when they saw her. She wasn’t up to the material,” Janet said. “Backstage during the fast changes, Gypsy would say loud enough for audience to hear, ‘Jesus Christ, don’t look at Gypsy. Gypsy’s naked.’ Then everyone would turn around to see what the commotion was instead of watching the scene.”
It was a shame that as big of a star as Gypsy was, she was unable to peel off the stigma of burlesque. Perhaps she still felt herself in the shadow of her sister Baby Jane, never able to live up to Mama Rose’s impossible standards, no matter how much success she achieved.
Gypsy died of lung cancer in 1970. The world of popular burlesque owes much to her for the barriers she broke, the society she forced to embrace her, for her having lived a truly original life. Gypsy enjoyed her fame and the luxury it brought and she will forever be remembered fondly as “The Gyp.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
A Leap of Faith
“Try to get yourself arrested as much as possible.”
&nb
sp; —Faith Bacon on how to get publicity
“I would like to come to Harvard.”
—Faith Bacon (The Harvard Crimson)
The original fan dancer Faith Bacon
Faith Bacon was heralded as “the world’s most beautiful” woman. She claimed to be the originator of the fan dance. A contemporary and rival of the world-famous Sally Rand, Bacon danced at the 1933 Chicago’s Century of Progress at the same time as Sally.
While Rand garnered all the headlines, Bacon, a former Earl Carroll Vanities dancer, went on to enjoy her own decade of outrageous success, which then sputtered to an end all too soon.
Faith was an inspiration for dozens of dancers, including Lili St. Cyr, who saw her dance at the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles. Lili would create a “Bird of Paradise” act based on a bird act Faith had performed. Faith also danced à l’après-midi d’un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Fawn). Lili would borrow that, also.
Faith was a sensation and earned great sums, performing to standing-room-only crowds. As she aged, the work dried up and she became addicted to drugs. She resorted to performing in low-class dives as the work became increasingly hard to come by. By all accounts, she was a troubled woman.
On the night of September 26,1956, Faith, a gorgeous blonde dancer of extraordinary talents, threw herself out of the window of the Alan Hotel in Chicago as her horrified roommate—some say lover—looked on. She died at Grant Hospital of a fractured skull and perforated lungs. It was not an easy end to a life that hadn’t been lived easily.
She was born Faith Yvonne Bacon in Los Angeles on July 19, 1909, to Frank and Charmione Bacon. Charmione, or “Cherie” as she called herself, was a frustrated dancer who, at seventeen, gave birth to a pretty little daughter that she saw as her last grasp at fame. Little is known about Faith’s mother except that she was exceptionally pushy when it came to signing Faith up for dance lessons and pushing her into a career that she had hoped for herself.
Behind the Burly Q Page 33