Soon divorcing Frank, Cherie took on managing Faith’s career in the theatres, posing as her sister. An acquaintance of Faith’s claimed Cherie kept Faith on sleeping pills and would seduce Faith’s wealthy suitors. Faith, according to this acquaintance, indulged in numerous affairs with women as well as men. Cherie held onto Faith’s salary, doling out just what she needed and no more.
Faith would grow into a pert, blond Clara Bow-lookalike with fragile, doe eyes and heart-shaped lips and a lithe body. She got herself a job as a chorus girl in “Earl Carroll’s Vanities of 1930.” Earl Carroll was a producer and director of lavish musicals starring beautiful nudes. Faith quickly found herself arrested, however, for lewd and indecent behavior. Instead of posing nude and being still, which was legal, it had been Faith’s idea to be motionless when nude, but to move when she was covered by large ostrich feathers. It got them all arrested. Hauled into court with the other lovelies from the show, Faith proclaimed her act to be art. She showed up in court wearing a fur and cloche hat.
An early Earl Carroll program billed Faith as the “creator of the fan dance.” This predates Sally Rand’s fan dance at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair.
Throughout the 1930s Faith worked high-class joints at Chicago’s Colosimo’s Club, the Empire, and the Haymarket. She also worked in New York and the Florentine Gardens in Los Angeles (again for Earl Carroll), always billing herself as the “originator of the fan dance.” She did her “Bird of Paradise” dance and was once on a bill with a trained seal. After her initial arrest, her lovely picture continued to grace newspapers.
In 1933, a car struck her, breaking her ribs. In 1934, she would again be arrested at the Hawaiian Gardens for an indecent performance of “Girly Show” and rushed to the hospital for an appendectomy.
Sometime in the late 1930s, she met a wealthy businessman, Ed Hanley, when she was dancing in Tucson, Arizona. Faith was in the company of her “sister” Cherie. Cherie wanted the handsome Ed for herself. But Ed was taken with Faith. (Later Ed would refuse to believe Cherie was his girlfriend’s mother when confronted with the truth.) Eventually Cherie departed for places unknown. She would marry a refrigerator salesman and die in Denver. It appears she had little, if any, contact with Faith in subsequent years. She certainly wasn’t there when Faith, near the end of her life, returned to her hometown in Pennsylvania for help.
T E. Hanley was born in Bradford, Pennsylvania, in 1893 to a wealthy family. A bit of an eccentric, he amassed a huge collection of art. He had a socialite wife who divorced him and he would eventually marry Tullah Innes, a Hungarian exotic dancer whose paths crossed with Faith’s often, first in San Francisco in a vaudeville theatre. Tullah describes Faith as timid and shy. According to Tullah, Faith was a lesbian out of necessity, as her mother kept her from the men. However, Faith did have a long affair with Hanley that must have been deep and intense enough for him to feel obligated to help her in her final days.
By 1935, newspapers boasted she was earning as much as five hundred dollars a week, but in 1936, Faith fell through a glass-topped, specially made drum during her “Bird of Paradise” dance. She suffered severe cuts on her legs and was taken to the hospital for twenty-six stitches in both legs. She attempted to sue the club for $100,000 and eventually received a mere $5,000. She claimed to have a long recovery. Faith was hurting, and not just physically.
It made Faith furious that Sally Rand continued to be billed as the originator of the Fan Dance. She was getting all the attention while stealing Faith’s creation. There is much evidence on Faith’s behalf, but Sally Rand had become synonymous with fan dancing. Faith’s title had been stolen. And this, perhaps more than anything, led to Faith’s downfall.
In 1938, Faith filed a suit against Sally Rand for $375,000, claiming when she did the fan dance in 1930, she allowed Sally to hold her ostrich fans backstage. And the turncoat stole the act. Faith claimed Sally’s imitation dance hurt her reputation as an artist. Faith would lose this suit and further tarnish her reputation.
In 1939, she was once again arrested. This time for wearing a skimpy white bathing suit, or leotard, and walking a doe on a rhinestone leash down Park Avenue as an advertisement for her World’s Fair appearance. Newspapers called her “publicity hungry.”
One reviewer said she “parades through a moth-eaten fan dance that has lost its punch long ago.” Faith was spiraling.
A despondent Faith increasingly relied on barbiturates and had frequent affairs with women. She became obsessed with her looks as she saw herself aging. She tried to keep her age a secret, often claiming to be ten years younger than her actual age. She took whatever work she could in increasingly sleazy clubs, carnivals, and even Tijuana nightclubs. Club owners became reluctant to book her because she was unreliable and often out of it, either from drugs or drink.
In 1948, a fragile Faith checked herself into a sanitarium for rest after a “humiliating” tour on a carnival. She told reporters that the owner of the carnival wanted to push her out of the dance troupe and threw tacks across the stage before she danced.
The next ten years were no better.
In 1952, she claimed to have teamed up with singer Jimmy Farrell to market a line of beauty products. (Sometimes billed as “the new Danny Thomas,” he was a minor star in the 1930s. Farrell was most remembered for singing with the Johnny Green Orchestra.) Also in 1952, she visited her then- married millionaire beau Ed Hanley at his home in Bradford, Pennsylvania. The walls in his home were hung with Picassos, Cezannes, Goyas, and on and on. Ed was married to Tullah, a wild woman who said “sex is my hobby.” Tullah would write a scandalous biography about her varied and prolific sex life.
Faith arrived at the Hanleys’ via bus. Tullah gave her some clothes, remembering that Faith couldn’t even cover her last hotel bill. Faith told them she’d just been sprung from a hospital stay of several months due to a nervous breakdown. She was very thin, slept late, and she was still “gobbling” pills. Ed and Faith probably resumed their affair behind the watchful eye of Tullah. Later, Tullah found ardent love letters from Faith in her husband’s desk. After ten days, the couple shipped the drugged Faith back to Buffalo where she had another gig.
Faith’s bad luck continued along with her drug problem. She was seen in the winter snow wearing sandals. Work was ever harder to come by.
In 1954, Faith borrowed money and opened a ballet school in Hammond, Indiana. She was found unconscious on the dance floor after taking too many sleeping pills.
Somewhere along the way, she married Sanford Hunt Dickinson, a musical consultant, but they spent years estranged and at her funeral, he was nowhere to be found. Three weeks prior to her death, she returned to Erie looking for a job or solace from whatever family remained there. Perhaps she stopped in Bradford and saw Ed Hanley.
Returning to Chicago, Faith sought work, anywhere, but no one wanted her. She walked to the Daily News for a little empathy. The reporter chronicled that Faith was so down on her luck, she had nothing left but her name. And it was a name no one cared about.
Faith and a new roommate—or lesbian lover, according to Tullah—forty-year-old grocery clerk Ruth Bishop shared a dingy room sans bathroom at the Alan Hotel.
On the day of Faith’s suicide, Ruth would later tell police the two had been arguing for close to six hours about whether Faith should return to Erie. Ruth claimed Faith received an allowance from her family and would have to return if she wanted more money. That was probably pure fiction, as her family never came forward after her death. The only money she likely received was from Ed Hanley. Faith was all alone and surely felt it.
As Ruth followed the former “World’s Most Beautiful Girl” around the room, the platinum blonde suddenly flung herself through the window. Ruth reached for her, but felt Faith’s dress tear and her friend went sailing down. To Ruth’s horror, the former fan dancer fell for two and a half stories, landing on the roof of a saloon.
It is most certainly true that Faith was the original fan dancer
. Author and burlesque expert Sobel mentions Faith covering her nakedness with a fan as early as 1931. Her nudity had been elegant, her dance artistic. But that wasn’t enough and she fell to petty grievances and lawsuits, ruining her reputation even as she sought to regain it.
When neither family nor husband came forward, the AGVA claimed Faith’s broken body. She was buried in Wunder’s Cemetery in Chicago. Ruth Bishop ordered a wood box for five dollars, but the subsequent bill was returned as “address unknown.” Ruth had vanished without paying for Faith’s final resting place. The indignities never stopped.
Faith Bacon’s grave remained without a marker until 1958, when Ed Hanley, after being informed by Faith’s former secretary Margie that his lover had killed herself, paid fifty dollars for a simple marker. Faith’s tender-hearted lover also paid for seasonal flowers to be place on her grave for the next ten years and for the perpetual care of her final destination. But when Hanley died in 1969, the flowers stopped. He left a note for the cemetery, saying he was a “good friend of Faith’s” and indeed he was. He was, perhaps, her only one.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Bye, Bye Burlesque
“How tough it must have been to have an industry die out on you like that”
—Walt Collins
“A lot of friends didn’t make it once they got out.”
—Renny von Muchow
On stage
With owners demanding it and audiences expecting it, strippers began to flash more than they had in previous years.
“Girls were beginning to get raunchy and get props to use . . . like poles. They’d back up to poles and rub up and down, or swing on the pole. I don’t think that’s sexy,” said Kitty West. “They would wear less and less. They wouldn’t come out in a gorgeous gown and disrobe gracefully. They started coming out with nothing hardly and ending with less. The further it went, I just gave it up. I didn’t want any part of that.”
There became more of a “divide between high-class striptease and really grungy, kinda going towards what we think of now as modern porn,” explained Rachel Shteir. There was no middle ground. “It was no longer connected to vaudeville. It was dead.”
More and more dancers decided to hang up their rhinestone G-strings and get out.
Tee Tee Red said, “I was forty-nine and I was dancing in a go-go place. By then, nightclubs were all gone. The first place I worked, in Miami, none of the girls had wardrobe, didn’t know how to wear wardrobe, didn’t know how to take it off.” Because the size of the stages had shrunk in clubs, there were no longer big production numbers or long lines of chorus girls. Tee Tee couldn’t wear big gowns. “I went up in a negligee. I says, ‘Well I’m turning fifty; it’s time for me to retire.’”
Burlesque was no longer what it had been when it started with the British Blondes. The tease was dropped, the humor whittled down to a few tired old comedians just trying to get by in the clubs.
In New York and other large cities, strippers were hired for retirement parties and conventions. “Every hour, on the hour you can work,” said Dixie Evans. “They rent a hall at [the] Waldorf” and hired strippers. Mara Gaye, Sherry Britton, they all worked them.
Sherry Britton working at a private party
The new breed of stripper was more nasty than naughty. By the tail end of the 1950s, burlesque was no longer.
Our habits had changed, too. For many boys, what had been a rite of passage, sneaking into theatres to experience their first glimpse of naked flesh, was quickly replaced with X-rated films and gentlemen’s strip clubs, where there was little to take off. It was full-throttle nudity.
Playboy Magazine, founded in 1953, became widely available, and that became many young men’s first experience with naked women—not the burlesque theatre.
Even the appearance of the bikini had an impact on strippers, or more accurately, their audience. There was no need to pay to see a dancer in panties when one could see less on a beach.
Making its debut in 1946, the bikini was invented by a French engineer, Louis Réard and was modeled for the first time by a nude dancer from the Casino de Paris. In a few years, the bikini was commonplace, allowing women to showcase more of their bodies than ever before and making burlesque moot.
Then in 1948, there was this little invention called television that kept Americans at home for the first time. Television was a boon for the burlesque comedians, giving their old routines new life in front of thousands.
When Milton Berle’s show first aired in 1948, there were only 500,000 sets in America. More than half of American households owned a television in 1954. A decade later, those little boxes with the “wiggly lines” were in 90 percent of households.
With a surplus of money after WWII, American families purchased even more televisions. It was on everyone’s must-have list. Sales skyrocketed. Television took a huge bite out of the burlesque show.
“You couldn’t withstand television,” Dixie Evans lamented.
Berle’s show was a huge hit. So influential was Uncle Miltie that it was said the nation stopped on Tuesday evenings when his show aired. This wasn’t good for the theatre or nightclub business.
“People stayed at home,” Dixie Evans recalled sadly. “And looked at these little wiggly lines.” The theatres tried to lure the paying customers in with promises of air conditioning. “Big signs outside the theatre said ‘air conditioning,’” recalled Dixie. Often times the strippers would show up and demand to know why “air conditioning” was on the banners and not their names. “But it didn’t work. People stayed home. Television put burlesque out of business.”
Dixie and the other girls would watch TV in the Chinese restaurants between shows. One time a comic told her, “Don’t you know that’s gonna put you out of business?”
While the comedians fared OK, the strippers had a choice to either remove more or call it quits. Their skills as strippers didn’t translate into any other viable form of entertainment. The exotics weren’t actresses.
“Strippers really don’t have any talent. They have a nice body and that’s about it,” quipped Dardy Minsky. “And will travel.”
I found the performers I interviewed to be resilient. They survived the burlesque stigma throughout the years, only to have the industry fade away with nowhere else in show business for them to work.
“The audience changed,” Betty Rowland remarked. There would be maybe five or six people in a show. The “presentation [was] not there. Neither was the audience.” They weren’t showing up.
“The unions closed a lot of the theatres because they couldn’t keep up with the salaries,” said Val Valentine.
In the beginning of burlesque, “stripping hadn’t been the big thing. But it got to be that way because of competition,” explained Betty Rowland. One club or theatre would have three strippers, the club across the street would have four, even if they were “less talented.” It became quantity over quality.
“It was the girls that were the stars. It should have been the comics,” said joan Arline.
“There was no Stinky and Shorty,” Al Baker, Jr. lamented, referencing two popular comics. “These guys just aren’t around.”
“The comedians lost their power and it was a strip show,” Mike Iannucci told me. He complained of the strippers of the 1950s and ’60s being the “anything goes era.” They were all flashing. “She had a way, no matter what she wore, she would be nude by the time the thing was over. Blaze Starr, that’s what killed burlesque originally. She was a latter-day stripper. When you give someone an inch, they take your arm; that’s how some of the strippers were.”
Younger dancers were competition for the stars who’d been around for decades. “I was hearing about age—how old are you? would be the first question,” remembers Tee Tee Red.
“I wanted to go out while I was on top,” Kitty West said. “I didn’t want to say, ‘Well, gee look at that old woman up here dancing.’ I didn’t want that.”
Boston was Vicki O’Day’s las
t strip. “I wanted to quit before people made fun of me. It was so rough and so awful and I was an alcoholic. I was just going downhill and that was my swan song. They loved me because I brought in a lot of booze. But I was falling apart.” Eventually Vicki got sober on her own “without a program. There is a strength there.”
Marilyn Monroe died in June of 1962, killing Dixie’s career as the Marilyn Monroe of Burlesque. “I fell to pieces,” she said. Her husband told her, ‘“Dixie, Marilyn’s dead.’ I leaped up and hit him. ‘I hate you. I hate you.’ I went to the couch and popped a can of beer. Three solid days that TV rolled. I didn’t know what to do,” she said. She told her husband she was going to send flowers. She was friends with Walter Cronkite, so she called the newscaster. He found out where Dixie could send the flowers. “A white heart with a red rose in the center. Flowers got there. I cried and cried. I didn’t cry for my lost career. I cried because Marilyn was gone forever.”
Dixie was booked in a club in Canada. She “got all made up” as Marilyn and walked into the club. A “woman screamed and dropped her drink. I had to do the act anyway. After that booking, I fell apart.”
In 1968, the City Council in Toledo banned burlesque. Rose La Rose was forced to close The Esquire, losing thousands of dollars of weekly income and displacing many.
Alexandra the Great worked until she was forty-eight. “I lost a lot of interest when Rose died. Rose guided and directed me. In those days, you needed an act, you need costuming, you needed professional photographs, and in some ways you needed a sponsor. You couldn’t just walk in off the street. Rose taught me the things I needed to know to be a feature,” she said. And so much had changed. “It was the end of burlesque. When it finally did change, it had no appeal to me anymore.”
Behind the Burly Q Page 34