Candy Cotton regretted that “it couldn’t have lasted longer. It was a very close knit group of people and . . . you always felt welcomed. I never felt alone and I always liked that.”
Chorus girls backstage
Alexandra said, “I miss the music and costumes. You have to know when it’s time to leave. And I think I left at the right time.”
“I thought I was gonna stay beautiful forever. I didn’t think I was ever gonna grow old. When you’re in your twenties, you know, what the heck do you know? You think, ‘Oh, this gravy train’s gonna run forever,’” remembers April March.
By the 1960s, a “burlesque” show was stripped of chorus girls minus the production numbers, divested of novelty acts, and missing live musicians. The emcees were gone, song and dance acts banished, and specialty dancers were dropped.
“Striptease didn’t really survive in the ’60s because of porn, but also because of the women’s movement,” said Rachel Shteir.
After the bikini, Playboy Magazine, and television came the pornography—which put the final nail in the striptease coffin.
Blaze Starr remembers, “You were on the stage during your act and it was a huge club. And over all the way across the building on the wall was hardcore porn.”
“Porno came in and hurt burlesque. A lot of girls didn’t know what to do, where to go. Burlesque was in a gray area,” said Dixie Evans. “A lot had no place to go. They’d get a job at Walmart and cry, ‘It’s all over.’” Most missed the crowds and the applause. They were unprepared for “normal” life. The glamour and glitz was gone.
Val Valentine said, “I miss my gypsy life. I’m restless and can’t seem to focus on where I’m at now; it’s boring.”
There was adrenaline that went along with the performing and traveling despite how difficult it might be.
Sherry Britton thought other strippers “glorified it. Their important moment of fame, where thank goodness I had gone on. I was the only one that ever spoke against burlesque.”
April March said to herself, “I think I’m gonna get out of nightclubs.” She felt the theatres were “safer” than the clubs. “Nightclubs had turned. Girls had to drink, sit with people, and this and that. The misconception was not-talented people. And prostitutes.”
Dee Ann Johnston noticed that “years ago [the girls were] experienced. Towards the end, if you’re walking and breathing, you’re in.”
As more burlesque theatres closed, short films of the women’s performances began to travel in lieu of the large casts, taking the place of live performances often in tents in carnivals. These cheap-to-make films replaced a burlesque show, the producers thinking, “We’ll get into film” and film em and take those around,” said Betty Rowland.
Of these early “stag films,” most of the performers didn’t even know where they were shown. They just filmed a couple, made a few dollars (unless you were Lili St. Cyr, who made $5,000 for the day’s work). “These films, along with postcards, were sold in the 1930s as 16mm home projection movies, or were projected in the back rooms of adult bookstores. In the 1940s, production of such under-three-minute films increased to be shown on panorama visual jukeboxes in a continuous loop of four to eight short-short strip acts,” said Rachel Shteir.
In the early ’50s, nudie-cutie burlesque films were shown between live acts, eventually supplanting the performers by the late ’50s. The films were shown individually or in groups on a looped reel in adult magazine shops and movie houses and carnival tents, or sold as 8mm and 16mm films for stag parties and home viewing.
Lili St. Cyr would perform two routines in the 1960s for Robert Altman on the short-lived Scopitone, the precursor to MTV and music videos. The Scopitone was a juke box video.
Why didn’t the women, as beautiful as any movie star, get snapped up by Hollywood? Dixie Evans explained that when the studios put up the money and asked who was the star and were then told it was a burlesque performer, “studios assumed they had a bad reputation.” They were good enough for B pictures, but “major films? No.”
Tee Tee Red complained, “Go-go killed burlesque. Girls were coming out with nothing and dancing like monkeys on a pole.”
Rita Grable relates. “It started to deteriorate when I left burlesque. In the late ’50s, by the ’60s over, started to get sleazy. It wasn’t like it was.”
“It starting getting more difficult... I didn’t want to work anymore.” Terry Mixon said the strippers were “working too strong for me. A lot of girls quit—Lotus Dubois quit. They were getting raunchy—cutting out comics.”
“What happens to great athletes after their heyday?” asked Dardy Minsky. “Most of the girls married and had a couple kids. There is a life after show business.”
“What do you do when you can’t do that last handstand?” asked Renny von Muchow. “Our careers in show business ended when flesh acts were not in demand anymore.”
“I was at this place in Canada called The Queen’s Hotel and I couldn’t kick my leg over my head,” recalls White Fury. “And I thought it was time to leave.”
Lady Midnight went to work in a factory as she was “very good on layeths and machinery and things like that. I liked doing that a lot.”
Walt Collins said, “Dad left the business to provide a home and a normal life for me.”
Lee Stuart said, “I went to work for the Houston Chronicle"
After Candy Cotton retired, she went to school and learned electronics. “I worked as a waitress, took the kids, and moved to California. I worked in aerospace electronics.”
Renny said, “I worked in the morgue and I took pictures of anything they needed.”
Joan Arline became “an elder in the church. And I taught dancing at the church. One night I did a number to The Lady is a Tramp" she said. Joan retained her showgirl figure, and showed me her long legs that were still shapely despite having had a chunk removed due to cancer.
Kitty West wanted another child. She worked until she was thirty, but claimed it was hard to quit because she was so famous. “People would fly in to see me. I wanted to be a mother.” She eventually became the director of sales for Hilton Hotels and gave burlesque lessons on the side.
Joni Taylor thought, “It’s time for me to stay home and be a mother.”
Vicki O’Day became a chef and sold perfume in a department store, tended bar, and held odd jobs.
Lorraine Lee and Dick Richards carried on. “We didn’t exactly quit—we went into the dinner theatres, which was like a burlesque revue.”
Renny found a kind of reverse snobbery among some of his performer friends. A lot of friends didn’t make it once they got out. I’m a photographer at the VA hospital. They asked, ‘What kind of money can you make?’ ‘I’m making eighty-seven dollars a week. “You’re kidding? Man I’ll never get out of show business. I wouldn’t stoop to work for eighty-seven dollars.’” Renny would explain: “I’m building something.”
Lili St. Cyr had a hard time adjusting to aging and the attention her beauty had garnered being out of the spotlight. She became a recluse for the last twenty years of her life. For years, she sold three 8x20 photos of herself for ten dollars to fans who wrote her at her home address.
Dixie became involved in helping some of the old dancers. Kitty West called Dixie Evans crying. She survived Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Two years later, as she was sitting in her FEMA trailer that had finally arrived, she told Dixie it was so small, her feet were in the bathtub when she sat on the toilet. “She lost everything. And she has cancer,” Dixie said. Dixie felt Kitty was close to ending her own life. Dixie organized some old guys at a bar that remembered Evangeline the Oyster. “I wrote to a girl who has a bar, get all those old guys around the bar and have them chip in five dollars. Write the girl, she’s about ready to commit suicide.” Kitty told Dixie, “‘I can’t take it anymore, I have nothing. I’m wiped out.’ Little by little money pours in. Original organization was a way to form and help these women.”
After Jennie Lee
died, Dixie soldiered on, writing all the legends to please contribute to the museum in Helendale, which was a “nightmare” for Dixie to organize. Dixie invited Lili St. Cyr, Betty Rowland, and Sherry Britton to a strip contest. None of them showed up.
Over the years, a slow dribble of fans helped keep some of the old burlesque ladies alive by sending the odd bit of money and attention.
During the 1990s, there began a neo-burlesque movement across both America and Europe. At many of these shows, seminars, and conventions, the “legendary ladies” sold their photos and conducted seminars and classes, occasionally performing.
Kitty was strong when I met her. Her beloved son was building her a bigger trailer where her dream house had once stood. The eye of Katrina had traveled right through her neighborhood. She said there were people and dead animals up the trees after the storm passed. The place still looked a mess. There were no street signs and many businesses were still boarded up.
Alexandra the Great said, “It was a wonderful business. It was very good to me. I met some wonderful people and I saw some wonderful places.”
Kitty West - Evangeline the Oyster Girl wiped out after Hurricane Katrina with the very pregnant author
“It was the only kind of happy time I had,” said Dixie Evans. “It was great. Yeah.”
Maria Bradley remembered, “They were truly, truly, truly the happiest days of my life.”
Rita Grable agreed. “I’ve never been ashamed of what I’ve done. Never. All my friends know it.”
“It was a great life. I have no complaints,” said Alexandra the Great. “I thought I was very professional. I conducted myself that way. I was treated that way. I think a lot of people have the wrong idea of what it was like. I’m not shy about saying I’ve been in the business. It was very good to me. I miss it as it was. But everything changes.”
“I don’t think any of us thought about how cute we were,” said Vicki O’Day, “until you’re older and look back.”
“I used to get roses every night. That’s all gone, too. That was the good days. That was the fun days. They’re all gone now,” said Tee Tee Red.
Even Beverly Anderson had to admit it was a “great experience, taught me a lot.”
Candy Cotton claimed, “It was a true art form.”
“Yeah, I’m still shaking my booties and the beat goes on,” joked Tempest Storm.
“I think when you look at women of that era they led amazing lives. They did the absolutely best they could under the situation and they did even better than that. You know they learned to survive,” said Kelly DiNardo.
And they survived with grace and humor.
Before surgery for possible breast cancer, Sally Rand’s son Sean related, Sally knew she would be knocked out when she went into surgery so she got a yellow notepad, wrote a note, and taped it to her chest with the gown on top. When the doctors went in to operate and they pulled Sally’s gown off, they doubled over laughing. She had written, “If you need to remove one, put the other in the center so at least I’ll be a novelty.”
Dixie fondly recalled the best lesson she ever learned. Brand new to the business, she made the mistake of saying to one girl, ‘“I’m only breaking in an act. I’m not in burlesque.’ She yanked me out in alley. ‘Listen bitch, don’t ever say that in a burlesque show. You better make it big, because if you ever come crawling back here, we’re like the Mormons, we’ll shun you.’” Dixie then realized that the other performer was right. “Be proud of where you are and what you’re doing. It was an industry. A huge industry.”
“Now that we’re talking about it being gone, it makes me sad,” said Maria Bradley.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Blackout
“.. fabulous, wonderful world you’ll never create again.”
—Chris Costello
“Too long these burlesque girls have been held down on the low rung of the entertainment ladder, but no more.... They have a right to climb the ladder to the top.”
—Dixie Evans
Original burlesque was performed with a wink and a nod. It was a tease. It was raucous, simple humor. It was accessible, upfront, sometimes brazen, always provocative. It was stripped of pretension. It never tried to be anything more than good entertainment for the common man.
In the dark theatres, the women of burlesque seemed attainable, representative of the American Dream—success, happiness, and a woman to call their own.
“Immigrants came to America with nothing in common, not language, religious culture, except lack of women,"jokes Geoffrey Gorer in Hot Strip Tease.
The burly show died after degenerating into the strip clubs we know today, where nothing is removed, or left to the imagination. The tease vanished fifty years ago. No one goes to a strip club today to see an elaborate production. Patrons are there for the nudity, not for entertainment. There are no big-name strippers left. That kind of fame was last afforded famed topless stripper Carol Doda, known for her enormous silicone breasts in the 1970s.
There is no longer a place where novelty entertainers can make a steady living performing their quirky acts. No comedians can work forty-plus weeks a year, three shows a day, five on weekends, to full houses. Burlesque has been replaced.
We forget the comics were venerated by audiences or that dancers were worshiped and glorified as much as any Hollywood movie star. Theirs was not an image projected on a screen. They were in the flesh mere feet away with the sweat visible on their brow, with the sound of their beads rattling in the air. They were sexy, spicy, and tantalizing. They were tangible and visceral in every sense. It was “entertainment with the glamour and the nude,” said Dixie Evans.
It was uniquely American, if only because we invented the striptease.
During its day, burlesque pushed the envelope of what one could hear and see. But tastes changed, the audience grew sophisticated and jaded and restless—always demanding new, faster, more.
Those burlesque days of old are gone and most of the people have passed. But they left so much for us to appreciate.
Burlesque is everywhere. “I see burlesque in TV commercials,” observed Dixie Evans.
Indeed, television and film carry on the tradition. It could easily be argued the humor of Monty Python and Saturday Night Live owes everything to the burlesque skits of the past, passed on from those like Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show to the next generation. Films like The Hangover and Bridesmaids borrow from burlesque.
Reality television is burlesque, whether it is intended to be or not. The “housewives” are burlesque. Lady Gaga is pure burlesque, backed up by pure talent. As are Katy Perry, Madonna, Bette Midler, and RuPaul. Rappers are burlesque with their lyrics and their big diamonds and their baggy pants.
Mae West, though never in burlesque, made a career burlesquing sex in her plays —plays that got her arrested and charged with “corrupting the morals of youth.”
Classical striptease in its golden age had an impact on American culture, fashion, advertising, music, and every form of entertainment. It was so-called low culture that spilled over into the mainstream because of its vitality and messiness. Burlesque influenced and fascinated many artists such as Reginald Marsh, who frequented the burlesque houses from the 1920s through the ’40s, painting beautiful depictions of strippers in their glory (I’m the proud owner of one). He called burlesque “a part of American life.”
The burlesque performers worked and lived under a veil of illegitimacy, the bastard children of entertainment. Their ability to rise above it was admirably and profoundly American. Their struggles, perseverance, and eventual triumph are ours.
“With strippers and dancers, we have as a society, kind of, this mixed view of them. On the one hand, they’re desirable and titillating. And on the other hand, they’re going against the status quo,” said Kelly DiNardo. “And we sort of have this reproachful disdain for them.”
“They were put down, partly in response to how society viewed them. It’s just the way the life evolved.
They spent a lot of time in bars,” said Alan Alda.
Burlesque was a mixed bag of talents. Like anything else, some were professional and supremely talented, others were there to get by and could have cared less about burlesque.
But the whole industry suffered the indignity of not counting, though it generated untold amounts of money. They weren’t important. The performers had no talent. They were in burlesque because they couldn’t make it anywhere else. They were sexual deviants.
“There were a few bad apples, a few prostitutes in the bunch. But very few. Probably fewer than there were secretary prostitutes. I worked with two girls who were virgins. One was desperatly trying to lose her virginity,” remembers Vicki O’Day.
“Things that give an audience pleasure are always at the bottom rung. Even though it takes skill, because there was an erotic element to burlesque, the comics, straight men and talking women, all were downgraded by society. “Cause [they were] involved in something that gave pleasure,” said Alan Alda.
“It wasn’t a dirty business, but it wasn’t totally innocent either. It was an intensified mix of many different kinds of human activity in a special little caldron that the rest of the world didn’t get to see except over the footlights.”
The performers gave of themselves and most were satisfied with their lot.
“House singers weren’t hoping one day to be big recording stars,” Maria Bradley claimed. “Almost everyone in burlesque, it was a world of its own. I don’t even think it entered anyone’s mind to go further... they were in their own little world.”
To see it from the inside let Alda see it in a more “human way.” He didn’t know there was a world outside of burlesque. “I actually thought that we were the privileged people and civilians were to be pitied because they didn’t know how to make people laugh. They had to come watch us to laugh. The burlesque company could make each other laugh all night long on the train. They didn’t need to pay anybody to make them laugh.”
Behind the Burly Q Page 35