Behind the Burly Q

by Leslie Zemeckis

  “The Minskys emphasized that a good strip-tease dancer must know exactly the right psychological moment to remove each garment. ‘It is not just a matter of going on the stage and taking off clothes—it needs finesse.’”

  Stripping implies getting ready for sex. The nude posing on Broadway stages was completely different. The “statutes” were removed. They were art, cold, lifeless, meant for only gazing upon. With stripping, there was an implied invitation, a more immediate intimacy, which is why it was frowned upon. These women appeared to be preparing for sex. They were making the gesture. And it was a palpable one in the theatre.

  “It wasn’t what you took off, it was the way . . . the sultry, the sauciness. The French were nude for years before us. Americans came up with the striptease,” Dixie Evans said. “When Americans came up with the striptease, the French girls ran out and put on clothes. They were already nude.”

  The last showman of the line of impresarios was Harold Minsky, who, according to his former wife Dardy Orlando Minsky, used to carry a “bar” of little bottles of alcohol in his suitcase.

  Harold was Abe’s adopted son. He was born in 1915. At nineteen, Harold took over the business from his father. Every summer his parents went to Europe for vacation and the theatres would close due to the heat in New York City. Theatres weren’t air-conditioned. The performers begged Harold to keep his doors open; the girls were broke and they desperately needed the money from the performances. So Harold stayed open, and though a ticket cost a dime, “he made over a million dollars.” (This was possibly something of an exaggeration, but surely a sum large enough for Abe to hand over the reins.) “No one kept theatres open in wthe summer. Legitimate theatres didn’t have shows. The father retired. He said ‘It’s all yours,’” said Dardy Minsky.

  Stripper Dardy Orlando and her husband producer Harold Minsky

  “Harold was the first one to do nudity in a nice way,” said Dardy. “When the father started it, there was no nudity. He hired girls and did a review. For two years it didn’t make any money. One night a girl’s strap broke, costume fell down, breast exposed. The next night there was a line around the building.”

  Harold would become responsible for discovering and grooming dozens of the most famous names throughout the 1930s into the ’50s. Many owed their careers to his guidance. Harold claimed to have targeted future headliner fourteen-year-old Sherry Britton from an audition. By the mid-1940s the other Minskys were out of the business, and it was solely Harold running shows known for their large casts and elaborate productions.

  Not only did Harold “find these sweet little girls and turn them into strippers,” but he also employed and nurtured first-rate comic talents such as Phil Silvers, who credited Harold as being responsible for his success.

  Dardy Minsky, Lili St. Cyr’s youngest sister, was working as a showgirl, doing bits with the comics and stripping. She was working at Earl Carroll’s when she met Harold at a party in New York. He was smoking a pipe, looking utterly conservative in a button-down Brooks Brothers and tweed suit. “I thought, ‘Can’t go wrong there,’” said Dardy. After a complicated romance due to Harold’s controlling, busy-body mother who didn’t like Dardy, the two finally married. Dardy soon gave up her career to raise two children and help Harold with the shows.

  “Harold did hiring and firing. I would come up with ideas for shows and things,” said Dardy.

  “Mr. Minsky made every girl work and cooperate to make every girl’s act look big,” said Dixie Evans.

  Once you worked for Harold, you knew you were in the big time. Harold was a prolific workaholic. “He had clubs all over the country, and would produce a show and take it to Havana.” Some of the showgirls were so scared of traveling and of landing in an unfamiliar country that they got drunk on the plane before takeoff.

  In 1956, Harold brought his brand of extravagant burlesque shows to Las Vegas, then still a desert town that Lili St. Cyr called “quaint.” Harold, Dardy, and their two children moved there while he put on a show at the Dunes. He kept a chorus line, top-rate comedians, a snazzy band, and, of course, the star strippers. He did smashing business, for the first time making burlesque accessible to an upper-middle-class crowd. Originally presented with a six-week contract, Harold and Dardy stayed nine years. She dabbled in painting, holding some exhibitions, but hated bringing up children there. Except for the desert and horses, “everyone in Vegas in the ’50s was either pit bosses or owners. You couldn’t have a social life,” she recalled.

  Harold took a hands-on interest in the show and the strippers. Rita Grable remembered working for Harold in the 1950s and called him a ”wonderful man.” He told her he would make her the headliner of the show.

  “He had the first show at Dunes that played burlesque. Harold brought a writer in and wrote a parody.” Rita did a song, some spoof on a current hit. “It was like a Broadway show because he had comics and me and Carrie Finnell with tassels. She was wonderful. Older. Harold had them build a long runway.”

  Harold’s sister-in-law and frequent Minsky headliner was Lili St. Cyr, who loved and admired Harold. She nicknamed him “Solid,” because she considered him to be a solid citizen. She would do anything for Harold and vice versa. He painted her dressing room and installed a bed so she could sleep there at nights instead of returning to her hotel, garnering extra hours of much-needed sleep.

  For Lili, men “would be lined up around the block,” said Dardy. Harold would have to keep going back to Lili, asking her to add another show. Lili would pretend to think about it, then name all the pieces of a sterling silver set she wanted. Harold would get her the sterling set along with baskets of cash. “She loved cash,” Dardy recalled. And apparently Reed & Barton’s Silver Baroque Sterling.

  April March was the only act that ever starred for Minsky who didn’t have to audition first. Harold later cut her act back, though, which she found offensive. “Sir,” she said. “I do thirteen minutes.” In response, Harold said, “Ms. March, seven will be sufficient. Always leave the audience wanting more.’” April would join Minsky at the bar after shows for cokes and talk every night. It became a ritual. He started buying her stockings, with a seam up the back of them. “Buying three boxes of em,” she boasted.

  Working in a Minsky show was “a lot of work,” said Betty Rowland. There were four shows a day, seven days a week. “You get to practice a lot.”

  Once when stripper Lili Christine—nicknamed the Cat Girl because of her feline moves; green, slanted, catlike eyes; and long, thick mane of platinum hair—was on stage, “a man in the audience fell out of the balcony. After the show Harold went up to him and, instead of asking him how he was, he says, ‘How much do you want to do that for every show?’ Always the showman!” Dardy laughed.

  Harold “would have Dardy, believe it or not, check out the women’s breasts, to see what kind of breasts they had,” said Beverly Anderson. Harold was “too classy to do it himself,” she explained.

  Running a show wasn’t easy. “Censors would come in,” Dardy explained/and see the first show and they they’d ask you to change stuff. We never had a problem.” Unions were a whole other matter, but there was no getting around them and their hold in the theatre.

  “Harold would stand out in front of theatres with money and the politicians would come by—unions were terrible. He’d pay them off. Unions [are the] biggest crooks.” Harold was running two theatres in Chicago. Someone from the union called him at 8 a.m. and told him to hire two more men in the lighting booth, and their salary would have to be retroactive. Harold argued, truthfully, that there was no room. The union said “they can sit in the balcony in case of an emergency.” Then the musicians’ union called. “We want three more musicians in the pit.” Harold argued that three more musicians wouldn’t fit in the pit. The union told Harold, “They can sit outside in case you need them.” Harold hung up and closed the theatre, and moved it all to New Jersey. “All you could do was give them money.”

  Harold woul
dn’t fly, so one time leaving New York, they stopped in Chicago on the way to Las Vegas and Dardy took the children to Marshall Fields. “We ran into three people who worked at our theatre. They were out of work. Selling shoes in Marshall Fields. I said, “That’s your union.’”

  According to Dixie Evans, Harold once precipitated reconciliation between Dardy and her more famous sister, Lili. “Dardy looked just like Lili. Minsky would do anything Dardy asked.” According to Dixie, Dardy “stole” Lili’s bubble bath act and Lili, flyinginto Chicago, found out. The two didn’t speak for months.

  Dixie was working for Harold in Newark. After the show, Harold “made the sisters kiss and make up.” He told Lili and Dardy, “‘Now girls, you end this feud.’” Dixie remembered sitting around the bar afterward, doing an imitation of Marilyn Monroe’s signature walk to the delight of Lili and Dardy. “Lili said, ‘This is the way Marilyn walks.’ And got up and did her version.”

  Dedicating his life to his business and running a first-rate show and a tight ship came with a price. Harold would divorce twice and have a serious drinking problem, according to Dardy. However, during his time in the wings, everyone who was anyone in burlesque worked for Harold Minsky.

  In 1937, New York’s Mayor LaGuardia banned burlesque and the name “Minsky” because it was synonymous with the filthy shows he wanted out of New York. With the expulsion of burlesque, Harold picked up his New York clubs and moved them to New Jersey, where burlesque thrived at the Empire and the Adams Theatres.

  In 1970, Lili St. Cyr (by then Harold’s ex-sister-in-law and once the reigning burlesque queen of Las Vegas) performed her last Nevada show for Harold at the Aladdin Hotel.

  Dardy eventually divorced Harold, tired of his ever-present entourage of buddies that followed him and the relentless drinking at her Vegas home. Harold toured his shows in various dinner theatres around the country. He remained in Vegas, producing burlesque shows. He died in 1977, looking far older than his sixty-two years.

  Harold changed the scope of a burlesque show like no one else. His productions had elaborate costumes and scenery and big lines of girls. When he died, there were no authentic burlesque shows left. Nor was there anyone around who knew how to produce a Minsky-type burly show. Lili once said, “If we had a few more Harold Minskys, burlesque would last forever.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Peelers

  “They didn’t think highly of us; they thought we were a different breed. Same attitude we have about hookers that hang on the corner.”

  —Maria Bradley

  “Women would strip and the finale would be she would display her breasts, which were usually beautiful.”

  —Renny von Muchow

  “Vaudeville became burlesque with strippers,” tells Nat Bodian. “They added the strippers to keep the men from going to the movies. The idea was: What reason was there, if you could go to a movie, to go to a live show?... And one of the answers was because it had naked women.”

  They were called strippers, peelers, bump and grinders, ecdysiasts (meaning “one who molts or sheds”), exotic dancers, stripteasers, and burlesque queens. During the Depression, work was plentiful for the burlesque performers. As Broadway shows closed, girls pounced on peeling for a living and comics crossed the avenue to work. It was steady employment, but “theatres could be the grungiest. Sometimes in bad neighborhoods. A lot of shows with little, if any, time off.”

  “Performers were always asking, ‘Were strippers prostitutes?’” said Rachel Shteir, “and whenever strippers themselves were asked, they would always say, We don’t really have time to be prostitutes—we’re in rehearsals.”

  “A lot of people were of the opinion that you were a hooker,” said Carmela, the Sophia Loren of Burlesque.

  Many, like Georgia Sothern and Sherry Britton, started as young teens. It wasn’t uncommon for mature-looking thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen year olds to lie about their age and get a job. Minsky, who hired Georgia, complained to her once, “‘Georgia, you’re acting like a child.’ And she said, ‘I am. I’m thirteen,’” laughed Dixie Evans.

  Not all the girls who got into burlesque became as wildly famous as Sally Rand, who would perform in front of the Queen of England or, as her son said, dance for 17 million people in her lifetime.

  There were hundreds of girls who joined burlesque for mere weeks, or as long as it took to buy “a Frigidaire or a car or something,” Betty Rowland explained. A smaller percentage worked twenty to thirty years in the business.

  They would not all would become “queens” of the stage, either. Some would have a few pictures in the girlie magazines, while others were regularly plastered on covers of Cavalcade of Burlesque or People Today and Modern Man. For some, it was a blip, a mere breeze across the stage, then marriage and normal life. For others, it was the highlight of their lives. They were defined by their time as strippers. For some, all that remains are photographs without a name or a story.

  Once the ladies dropped their rhinestone G-strings for the last time, the burly fans quickly forgot their names and faces and they faded into obscurity.

  “It’s completely vanished; we have our striptease culture in the alternative lifestyle, but that’s quite different. That isn’t an industry. Burlesque was an industry, part of the entertainment machine,” said Rachel Shteir. Most modern-day historians refer to the 1930s as being the “Golden Age” of burlesque, though in 1938, Sobel was bemoaning the fact that the current burlesque was a far cry from the “Golden Age” of the 1880s. The burlesque show was continually morphing and transforming itself. A burlesque show of the 1880s looked nothing like one in 1934, and the same would be said for shows twenty years later. The 1930s Golden Age was a dazzling, provocative, hilarious show. It was the burlesque we think of today, with star strippers and talented star comedians. It was a big show.

  Most of what we know and celebrate about burlesque has all too much to do with the strippers. Shows would very quickly become tailored around the disrobing damsels. Everything was a prelude until the next bare-legged babe bumped across the stage. Even the co-feature’s act was geared toward the much anticipated star stripper and the crescendo of the show, climaxing with the last few minutes of the feature’s routine before the curtain closed.

  During the 1930s, some of the legendary glamorous goddesses of stripping, as beautiful, if not more so, than any Hollywood movie star, were Ann Corio, the curvaceous and auburn-haired woman who ruled Boston’s Old Howard theatre, and Gypsy Rose Lee, who raised the art of the stripper into a symbol of sassy intellect. That was part of her tease: See I’m taking off my clothes, but I’m quoting Homer while I do it.

  Usually strippers were something to gaze upon and fantasize about. They were mere feet from the audience, accessible, tantalizing, fiery, forbidden, sexual. They were moving objects d’art. One could and did shout at them in the theatre, holler and stamp and masturbate over their lusciousness, but the stripper wasn’t expected (and most didn’t even want) to speak, though a few did. Georgia Sothern, Sherry Britton, and Lili St. Cyr and dozens more performed in everything from run-down theatres to glorious former vaudeville houses, ornate and gilded. They also took it off in chic cafes and nightclubs. The clubs were often a more posh setting amongst a mixed crowd that dressed elegantly and ordered cocktails. There was no booze in the theatres. In nightclubs, the stigma (for both the performer and the audience) was less pronounced, if it existed at all. Well, she’s taking off her clothes, but it isn’t burlesque. No one said they “snuck into” a nightclub and saw a stripper, as they did about going to the theatres.

  In the nightclubs, men weren’t masturbating under newspapers or in popcorn containers, but the experience wasn’t without its seedy bits. Sherry Britton would be propositioned by men and women to join in on threesomes, and one couple wanted to take her out to watch pornos.

  Sherry Britton at far right. The girls were expected to mingle with the audience.

  Strippers in the Golden Age brought an elem
ent of glamour to the business. They were professionals and acted as such. They arrived with costumes and sheet music ready to go. Many brought a flourish of art to their performance, turning their relatively short time on the stage, anywhere from eight to fifteen minutes, into a memorable turn.

  In the theatre in general—and it all varied—the exotics danced to three “trailers,” or songs. Sequin, like most, danced “slow, medium and ending fast” to rouse her fans. The women relied on their fans. They needed men to return to the theatre. A full house was crucial to raising one’s profile and salary.

  About Tempest Storm, who danced wild, Dardy Minsky said, “She liked the audience to go crazy, so she’d ask for more money when she came back.”

  Some ecdysiasts were earning a living while others thought of their participation in burlesque as an investment; Tempest, Ann Corio, and Carrie Finnell were some of the better-known strippers who worked for decades. That took endurance, training, and professionalism, in addition to the obvious looks and charisma. Few had reputations for being divas or difficult.

  **

  Glamour was very important to Joan Arline (real name Connery). Like most young girls, she took dance classes. At the age of twenty, she was working as a private secretary when she decided to quit and try her chances as a chorus girl. Joan was “pulled out of chorus and made a soubrette.” She did solo dance numbers and a specialty parade. “I stopped dead for someone taking a camera and I held a pose.”