Behind the Burly Q

by Leslie Zemeckis

  After thirteen months on the stage, she told her husband Don she wanted to do her own act. He was older and asked, “‘Do you want to work your derriere off or be a star?’ I wanted to be a star and make money. He said ‘Go into burlesque.’ I about died.”

  She was a tall blonde with long legs that would carry her from burlesque to performing in every Follies Show from Palm Springs to Branson, Missouri, well into her seventies. She did a strip at the Las Vegas Reunion that earned admiration from the other women I was seated with. “She’s the real deal,” they said.

  Joan also began doing bits with the comedians Scurvy Miller, Harry Clexx, and Harry Conley. After she learned that a “star” stripper didn’t do bits with the comedians, she stopped. Her agent at the Schuster Agency got her a job at the Palace Theatre in New York as the “extra added attraction,” which was a step up from a talking woman (one who did bits with the comedians). “I did the crawl. Nothing’s sexier than a woman crawling if she knows how.”

  She worried she would forget to take her clothes off. “I never forgot to take em off,” she said with a great deal of pride. During our interview in her lovely, spacious home in Palm Desert, Joan was surrounded by her old luggage trunks, her costumes and photos of days past. She had carefully preserved her life in burlesque.

  One night while working a club, her husband Don sneaked in to watch her strip. He was sitting at the bar between two guys that appeared to know each other. One of the gentlemen poked Don while Joan was on stage doing her thing. The man said, “Boy I’d like to get into that tonight.” Joan’s husband turned to him and said, “Maybe you’d like to, but I’m going to.”

  Joan was a disciplined dancer and would practice in front of a mirror to see all her angles. Fifty years after her opening, she could still fit into a lace black corselet that showed her lean figure. A corselet was a bra-girdle undergarment popular in the 1940s.

  She would have her share of adventures. On another night in a club, she got cold and “something popped out.” Her pastie shot off into the audience. “I was so embarrassed. I had to go retrieve it.”

  This was not an uncommon occurrence, but that didn’t make it less embarrassing for any of the girls. “One time one of my pasties flew off and hit a guy in the eye,” laughed Candy Cotton. Tee Tee Red added: “They got tape on the inside. You always made sure they were on good.”

  **

  Chorus girl Joni Taylor was petite, dark haired, and down to earth. At fourteen, she snuck into to the Casino Theatre in Pittsburgh. She applied as an usher. “I wanted to be on the stage. I had danced since I was three years old.” She did a timestep and they hired her and put her in the chorus. “I didn’t tell my mother.”

  After three months, however, her mother found out, stormed down to the burlesque theatre, and told the owners her age. They let Joni go. But two years later, she was back, again lying about her age, saying she was eighteen. She was hired. There were twenty-two girls in a line. Ten show girls did nothing but pose on pedestals; they were taller than Joni, who was five feet six inches tall. When the captain of the line retired, they replaced her with Joni.

  Eventually Joni stripped. Usually the stage manager named the strippers. The house singer decided she would be known as the “Tantalizing Joni Taylor.”

  “I worked with them all,” Joni said, naming strippers Rose La Rose and Blaze Starr. “You’re usually with a set show for five or six weeks. Sometimes you don’t see people for many years.” Joni herself would never be a star stripper, but she was an excellent talking woman.

  Joni also did a lot of tassel work. She would lie on the floor and twirl up. “Play around and hope you learned you could do it. You watched other strippers. I loved to work fast. If I stood still they could really see me,” she said.

  **

  Kitty West, aka Evangeline the Oyster Girl, had them lining up on Bourbon Street in New Orleans to see her emerge from a giant oyster. The tourists “weren’t gonna leave until they saw Kitty come out of that oyster shell,” said Dixie Evans.

  Kitty West was born June 8, 1930, in Sugarloaf, Mississippi. Her name was Abbie Jewel Slawson and her mother was a distant cousin of Vernon Presley, Elvis’s father (Elvis would indeed catch her strip act). At three years old, she was working in the cotton fields. Her beloved mama would put stockings on her arms to protect her. She saw her mama give birth in the cotton fields. “And it’s because of her I wanted to change everything,” she said.

  Kitty’s parents were sharecroppers; they were poor and she had half a dozen brothers and sisters. “I always dreamed of being famous when I was small. I’d go behind trees and dance while we picked cotton. My little colored friend taught me movements and steps that you can’t be taught,” Kitty said in her smooth-as-honey voice.

  As a young girl, she got a job in an ice cream parlor, making a dollar a day to pay for her dancing lessons. She was molested by a man there. Then she went to school to become a nurse. Her father abandoned the family and his responsibilities, so it fell to Kitty to help her mother financially. She started dancing at clubs, earning twenty dollars a night, which was “great money.” She would eventually earn $1,500 a week.

  In 1947, sixteen-year-old Kitty moved to New Orleans to become a nurse. She was walking in the French Quarter when a man stopped her. “I looked innocent and country,” she said. He said to her, ‘I’ve never seen anyone like you. Where are you from?” He was the emcee at the Casino Royal and he hired her, designing a headline act for her.

  It took six months before she worked in front of an audience. She learned to walk and to ballet. To Kitty it felt like “being reborn again.”

  “Someone got sick and couldn’t go on. ‘Do me a favor Kitty and go on in her place.’ I was scared to death. It was packed. Standing room only. So I did. I went on, and the house, it was nothin’ but roarin’. I was scared because I could see my grandfather staring at me. He was a minister and I thought the devil was gonna get me because I had sinned...

  “I went and I had to talk to a priest and a Lutheran minister and a Pentecostal minister. And they said, ‘It’s all within you, in your soul and your heart. You’re not sinning. You’re doing an act. You know the difference between right and wrong.’ I said, ‘But I’m showing my body.’ He said, ‘Well that’s you. That’s your conscience. That’s what you have to deal with. You can find peace within yourself.’ I had to come to terms with a lot of things.”

  Kitty is a woman of enormous pride and dignity. There were things she would not do. “I did not take off the bottom. I didn’t have to.... In my day, we were called exotic dancers. I was respected highly from all walks of life, but I do know that some of the girls and a lot of the places were not.... Garrison would raid the places all the time because they wouldn’t wear pasties, and he would close them down. They didn’t have to raid me.” She wore a net bra and wide panties to avoid breaking any laws she said. “Garrison was the DA in New Orleans. The night life, he was against it. And he thought naturally exotic dancers were the ruination of Bourbon Street.”

  Kitty would work through the 1940s and ’50s, becoming a tourist attraction in New Orleans. At the time, “Bourbon Street wasn’t seedy. I wouldn’t even go now. Back then, you saw so much glamour, so much beauty. Movie stars would come to town and go to the back of the Casino, the bar. Casino Royale was one of the nicest places. It was high class.”

  Kitty despaired over what had happened to burlesque and the strippers. “Like monkeys swinging from a pole. They come out naked and they got off naked. What are you gonna applaud for? It’s a disgrace the way it’s turned and changed. They’re not sophisticated anymore.... You didn’t have to strip; it all goes back to poise. We didn’t have to show our private parts or strip down naked to be appealing or sexy. The tip of a finger was important. How you rub your shoulder.”

  Kitty described her own act, which broke records throughout the industry:

  “It was a story. ‘We take you on a mythical trip to the bayous of Louisiana. Whe
re deep in the mist lies the Lady in Waiting who will come out every one hundred years during mating season. Is it that time?’ Then the shell would open slowly. With one leg coming up, then I would lift myself up and I would stand up. Then I would step out of the shell into the audience looking for my mate. And I would search in vain, dancing all around the stage. I kept looking and finally I’d spot my man, but I couldn’t have him and I knew that because he was taken, and I was still waiting, and if I didn’t find him I’d have to go back to the shell and be doomed for another hundred years. In the end is where I didn’t find my mate and I had to go back to the shell without being mated.”

  Her act was eight minutes.

  “You have to incorporate your whole body into the act—that’s the difference between a monkey on a pole. I worked and rehearsed most of the time. You had to drive in those days to tour.” It was harder in those days, traveling with her entourage of manager, booking agent, maid, trunks of wardrobe, and the shell, which opened “about as big as a sofa,” but she could manage it with one arm. It had a mechanism where you could touch it and it’d open slowly.

  When her oyster act premiered, she thought something was missing. She had a formula made up and dyed her waist-length hair green. She did this for one or two years, but then learned that she’d gotten skin poisoning from the dye. She then went blonde. “[I’m] naturally dirty dishwater brown. I always wore white gowns, with boas with silver in it.” She always dressed in a white evening gown when she went out to dinner. Kitty patterned herself after Gypsy, who was a friend. “I thought she was fantastic,” she said.

  She had her first child, then quit dancing for two years, and then went back. She had a new shell made. She worked the Sho Bar in New Orleans along with flamboyant stripper Blaze Starr. Kitty’s husband was good friends with Governor Earl Long.

  “I don’t care for Blaze.... Blaze Starr,” she narrowed her eyes. “In her film [Blaze] wanted to copy my oyster shell and that’s why she had the clam, because I would have sued her. My act was copyrighted—even today. I had my lawyers send her a letter.”

  In 1949, Kitty had her picture in Life Magazine chronicling an onstage cat fight with Divena, a stripper who peeled in a glass box filled with water. A plethora of “Divenas” had been on the carnival circuit, and they appear to be somewhat mythical, like Little Egypt. According to Girl Show by Al Stencil, the Divenas performed underwater strips, advertised as “the world’s loveliest feminine form.” There was an abundance of them.

  Kitty explained that “Divena was from California. She came in and it was a publicity stunt, but I was the last one to know and so was she. Mr. Lyle says, ‘Kitty, we have somebody coming in.’ He planned this. He says, ‘She’s gonna take top billing.’ I said. ‘Mr. Lyle, that’s not what my contract says.’ He put her on and really ran a big ad in the paper telling everybody about Divena from California, underwater strip. All this time wanting to get me stirred up.”

  And on Divena’s second or third night, Kitty became infuriated. “[Lyle] says, ‘I’m gonna have to let you go and she’s taking over.’ I got the fire ax and went out there and busted that [Divena’s tank] into a jillion pieces....

  “Life Magazine and everybody was there shooting. That’s when he told me it was all a joke. I even lent her a suit to wear to court. [Divena] was gonna sue me. I had to straighten that out. She continued her act for a few more weeks. I went back to being the star. She went back to California. And I think she got married.”

  Divena’s real name was Clarice Murphy. Life Magazine captured an action-packed picture of Kitty as she broke Murphy’s tank and the water spilled across the stage. It was phenomenal publicity.

  Unfortunately, Kitty’s oyster has been lost. It, along with all her memorabilia, was destroyed in Hurricane Katrina. She showed me her scrapbooks covered in toxic filth. Pictures were torn, faded, and now irreparable.

  **

  When a girl chose to get into burlesque, it was because she sought to see her name in lights. April March was one type of girl, a raven-haired beauty, short and lush, born with the very unstripperlike name of Idella in Oklahoma City. She took ballet lessons as a child, “as all young girls did. I wanted to be an actress when I grew up. I wound up in burlesque,” she said.

  Alexandra the Great spoke highly of April March. “April was Class with a capital C.... She suggested more with her eyes than she did with her body.”

  Lying about her age, April got a job selling flowers and cigarettes in a club in Oklahoma City. The club had exotic dancers. She wondered how the women could live with themselves after taking their clothes off in such a fashion in public. One night, a man literally bumped into her and said, “Excuse me, are you in the show here?”

  She told him no.

  “You ought to be in show business,” he told her.

  She asked him if he owned a nightclub. “Yes, in Dallas. If you ever decide to get into show business, here’s my card,” he said.

  “You can put me in the movies?”

  “Oh, that might come later.”

  “So off to Dallas I went,” she told me.

  The man, Barney Weinstein, was Abe Weinstein’s brother. Abe owned the Colony Club, a classy joint in the Dallas downtown area. Barney owned the Theatre Lounge.

  The ravishing April knew she was going to Dallas to strip. She wanted to be in the movies and figured this was the first stop.

  Barney had a girl make her a costume. One day, as she was rehearsing with the band, Barney proclaimed, “We’ve gotta come up with another name.... I’ve got it. April March is your new name.”

  “But March comes before April,” she protested.

  “Not in your case,” was his response.

  April was a nervous wreck the first time she stripped. She made eighty-five dollars a week. Her parents didn’t know. “They thought I was tap dancing,” she said.

  **

  In 1953, Taffy O’Neil had a dry cleaning route. She met a dancer and saw her show. “I thought the money sounded good.” She was then introduced to an agent, whom she would stay with for the next nineteen years. Her first job was in a club run by a married couple. The man was a drummer by trade and he practiced with her two days a week for six weeks. He asked her to gain ten to twenty pounds. She drank banana shakes, but couldn’t gain the weight.

  Her first strip was at a club in Santa Monica. The bartender introduced her. The club was for “people going in or out of the business, to get them on stage.” She danced behind the bar and then took her makeup case and went home. This was something her agent advised her to do so she’d avoid being after hours in the clubs. From there, she moved on to better venues.

  She found the work “physically rewarding. The endorphins light you up like you’re in love. A good, invigorating feeling.”

  A newspaper took her picture and ran a story on her titled “Mother by Day, Stripper by Night.” They took pictures of her son and had her pose as though she was ironing—an activity she never performed.

  **

  La Savona is a bewigged, heavily accented, tiny woman. She was born in Czechoslovakia. She was young when the Germans took over during World War II. At the end of the war, she met a fellow dancer who then asked her to partner with him. At fifteen, she was in the chorus of a ballet in the opera. The duo danced ballet all over Europe. When she arrived in America, she tried to do ballet work, but “there was no such thing,” she said. She didn’t think anything was wrong with stripping; the only problem was “they wanted bosom, big bosom. I don’t have big bosom.”

  **

  By most accounts, Zorita was not considered “glamorous.” In many pictures, she looks as if she could, and would, kick the daylight out of anyone staring at her so much as cross-eyed. Zorita could be aggressive and raunchy. She was a savvy, tough talking bisexual who charged men stock in General Motors to sleep with her.

  “Her real name was Ada,” said her protégé Tee Tee Red. “Tough with a good heart.”

  Zorita died in 2001.
Those I talked to remembered her mostly for working with snakes. She ended up in Florida, wearing muumuus. Zorita was a friend and admirer of Sherry Britton. Among Sherry’s things is a note from Zorita (“Memories, Love Zorita,” her “Z” drawn like a snake with tongue and eye) and a pile of pictures, including a newspaper article with Zorita in her later years, swathed in fur, a shrunken white-haired old lady with a belligerent look in her eye.

  If press articles are to be believed, Zorita was working in the carnival at seventeen. “I’m not the intellectual type,” she had said. She was married at least three times and had a daughter. Articles claimed she was only five feet three inches tall and weighed 135 pounds. She appears taller and heavier in photos, though.

  “I had some fun times with Zorita,” said April March. “I worked several clubs in Miami. She bought a club from Martha Raye. Zorita was a great party gal. She had an old vintage Rolls Royce. When any celebs came to town, naturally they went to Zorita’s. Judy Garland, Desi Arnez... One night we went to a restaurant for breakfast after the show. Judy Garland was there—quite inebriated. Zorita was flamboyant, fun-loving. I never got close to her snakes.”

  Terry Mixon was working the Old Howard in Boston when Zorita appeared on the bill. “Zorita came through. I was scared, I didn’t work that week. I have a phobia of snakes.” At first, Zorita did, too.

  Zorita claimed she was terrified of snakes. They “drive me up the wall,” she had said. A snake charmer helped rid her of her phobia by giving her two snakes. Although she beat her fear, she claimed to never grow fond of her snakes. “To me, they were like part of my costume,” she said.

  **

  The peelers came from all over America, an inordinate amount from the rural, poor south. According to Dixie Evans, “Most all came from hard back grounds. Yes, I think about all of us, like me raised with no father, no money. Most girls came from that.”