Behind the Burly Q

by Leslie Zemeckis

  Monkey Kirkland

  Born in 1892 in New York of immigrant parents, Eddie Lloyd would meet his future wife on a show. She was in the chorus. He worked with everyone who came up through the ranks: Alda, Silvers, Ragland, Gus Schilling, Abbott and Costello, Harry White, Irving Benson, and Monkey.

  Harry used to go with his father Eddie to Milt Schuster’s office. Schuster was the leading burlesque booker at the time. Eddie Lloyd was a “Booster for Schuster.” In the 1940s and ’50s, “you had to bring a cigar. You weren’t welcome without it. All the comedians brought it,” Harry said.

  Harry was literally raised backstage “on the wheel.” He was on trains all the time. It was “exciting. I grew up on Chinese food,” Harry said. He would knock on the doors of the chorus girls and call out “Are you decent?” They called him “Sonny.”

  He remembers his parents tried to keep him away from strippers at a young age. But he claims his proximity to them was harmless and had no lasting effects.

  And though it was a “rough life,” Hary said that Eddie had loved it. When not hauling his family with him, Eddie traveled the wheel. He would be gone for six weeks at a time, a different town every week.

  Lloyd was noted for an eccentric dance. His costume consisted of baggy pants, a large tie, an untucked shirt and oversize plaid coat topped with a derby hat. Lloyd would come out, dance around, and for the finale he would squat down doing small steps across the stage. “So all you saw was a coat, like a cone moving across the stage. It got a tremendous hand.”

  Harry and his straight man on stage: A pretty girl walks by, Harry would purr.

  Comic: She’s got TB.

  Straight: What?

  Comic: Two beauts.

  “They would be so entertained by that and it was harmless. A different era. That was the nature of the humor,” Harry explained. “Most scenes involved a young lady walking across the scene and double entendre.”

  Eddie worked until his seventies, dying with a trunk-load of “bits.” A lot of the bits by then had been transferred to film and television by burlesque comedians like Phil Silvers. “The humor and whole burlesque was fun, not porn, nothing of that nature. It wasn’t dirty.”

  In 1939 or 1940, Eddie went to Hollywood to “break into movies.... It didn’t happen. He never wanted to call a comedian, like friend Phil Silvers, or anyone for a favor. That was not his nature. He wanted to do everything on his own.”

  He also worked in Montreal, which had a thriving burlesque business during the 1950s when the wheel was “kinda over.”

  A man who became successful in film stole his routines.” All Harry would say was the comic later appeared in Guys and Dolls. “He will be nameless.”

  In the beginning, the shows had humungous casts: fifteen chorus girls, an emcee, two comedians, four talking women, two straight men. As time passed, they got cut down to maybe ten total burlesquers.

  Audiences were appreciative,” Harry said. But if the pace lagged, “they’d scream ‘girls, girls.’ They’d want to see more.” Harry admitted in general the audience went for the girls, but appreciated the comedians. Harry said the audiences were “very vocal.”

  And though Eddie loved the work, he talked Harry out of following in his footsteps.

  Comedian Steve Mills was a former candy butcher who started at Billy Minsky’s Winter Garden in 1928. “Steve, the man was genius,” said Mike Iannucci. “The nicest man, no larceny in him; he would do anything to help anyone. He was the top banana.”

  Iannucci continued, “Steve Mills ... he lived to be ninety-three or something. He enjoyed every minute of his life because he entertained. He got more laughs than anyone—Red Buttons, etc. He was the classic burlesque comic.

  Dardy Orlando and Pinky Lee

  The Hollywood Theatre in San Diego had “stock comedians for a long time,” said Dee Ann Johnston, daughter of the owner. “Eddie Ware—‘hello there Eddie Ware’—stock comedian and stock straight men. They used to sing.”

  Pinky Lee was also a “wonderful talent,” recalled Dardy Minsky, who did bits with him at Earl Carroll’s. He would play the xylophone while she walked behind him out of his sight, slowly peeling off her clothes. The audience would applause and Pinky would say “You want more?” And on and on the number went, as Dardy stripped down.

  After one opening, “Mr. Carroll would give notes. He said to Pinky, ‘You were so good, but it’s the dinner show. Please don’t sweat.’ ‘How am I gonna stop sweating?’ ‘I don’t know Pinky, it’s your act.’” According to Dardy, who worked with him for years, Pinky “had a wonderful talent for getting contracts with the movie studios. They would fire him, but they would have to pay him over the years.”

  The beloved comedian was born Pincus Leff in 1907. An early day Peewee Herman, he would have his own children’s television show in the 1950s. He wore oversized bows, checkered pants, and a checkered coat and spoke with a trademark lisp.

  Mike Sachs was a blind comedian who played the Old Howard in Boston regularly. He got his start in vaudeville when he was just a kid. His wife Alice Kennedy was a “classy woman. She was the prototype talking woman, older woman. She’d lead her blind guy out and he’d talk about seeing the girls,” said Eddie Lloyd. The audience didn’t know he was blind, which had happened suddenly. Sachs said the last thing he saw before he went blind was the eggs on his plate.

  Harry Conley was born around 1892. Like many, he ran away from home as a teenager and joined a vaudeville show. He would become a top banana for Billy Minsky. A staple of his act was browbeating his wife on stage.

  Conley would say, “What the hell’s going on? I put you out in the cornfield as a scarecrow, and look what happens. The crows brought back every kernel of corn they stole.” His stage wife stood silent through the abuse. He would continue to perform despite a stroke that paralyzed half his body.

  Phil Silvers worked for Harold Minksy for years. In the mid-to-late 1950s, he was the star of the television show Sergeant Bilko. The show garnered multiple Emmy nominations and wins.

  Silvers, on a break, was in Florida and bored. He called Harold, who told him to meet him in Chicago and they’d go out. “Lili’s [St. Cyr] working,” Harold said. Silvers said he had always wanted to meet Lili so he went to Harold’s theatre in Chicago.

  “He was a sweet charming gentleman. Full of beans.” And full of himself, recalled Dardy. Lili was becoming more reclusive, so Dardy told Phil, ‘"I can’t do this ahead of time; she’ll never met you. Come after the show; we’ll go backstage and knock on the door. That way she couldn’t say ‘no.’”

  Dardy took Phil backstage and knocked on her sister’s dressing room. Phil entered and was stunned by Lili’s appearance, as she was sitting semi-nude in a sheer black negligee. Dardy introduced the two. “Oh hello, Mr. Silvers,” Lili said, “and what do you do for a living?” That simple question took the wind out of his sails; he couldn’t believe Lili didn’t know who he was. “You know actors, they have such egos,” recalled Dardy.

  Many women in burlesque began their careers by working with the shows’ comedians. “Dancers or lesser strippers come out with the top banana, they would bounce humor off her,” explained Renny von Muchow.

  “No matter what you were doing—the chorus or stripping—you were always required to do the scenes. You know, work with the comics. And that was a big deal because you got paid $2.50 extra.” Maria Bradley recalled.

  “Comics set their own scenes. Before eleven on Sunday, a comic would post programs for the next week and you’d know if you were in the scene. You rehearsed between shows,” said Dee Ann Johnston, daughter of theatre owner Bob Johnston.

  Joan Arline learned a lot by working with the comics. The talking women and comics would parade back and forth in front of the curtain while the scene changed for the next act on the bill.

  Joni Taylor worked as a talking woman with comedian Charlie Robinson. “Sometimes I blacked out teeth, had fat rollers in my hair, sometimes I dressed as a man. You ha
d to be very versatile do scenes. Usually comics were picking on bald men in the front row. [The] audience loved them. Jack Rosen and Al Anger—they got as big applause as any strip.”

  Others refused to be a talking woman or quickly moved out of it. It wasn’t until burlesque changed and was near death that the inimitable Lili St. Cyr was forced to do bits with her comedian in Las Vegas in the late 1950s. This was something she had avoided for nearly twenty years in the business.

  When burlesque shows cut down on personnel, comedians scrambled to stay in the game. Eddie Ware at the Hollywood Theatre continued to stick it out. On weekends, he played the theatre, but the other four days of the week he drove a cab, said Dee Ann Johnston.

  Like the strippers, there was a mixed view of the burlesque comedians. Dardy didn’t think the rest of the cast “looked at comedians as being intelligent or interesting.” Their skits were bawdy and low down. “They weren’t big hits with the casts.”

  Beverly Anderson said, “The comics in burlesque were mean, vicious, angry and frustrated. They had tried to make it in show business, probably on Broadway or vaudeville, and couldn’t do it so they were regulated to burlesque.”

  The funny men went into nightclubs when burlesque was over.

  “Comedians... they were mostly old men. The good ones were in their eighties; the younger ones were too young to be funny,” said Maria Bradley. “The comics didn’t care about becoming a Red Skelton. They just enjoyed what they were doing; they never thought about going into legitimate theatre.”

  “They were happy with what they were doing,” said Renny von Muchow.

  In 1965, Ann Corio presented This Was Burlesque, a revival of what a burlesque show had been. At the time Ann and Mike started their show, it had been “eight to ten years between the good burlesque comics and then the strippers took over. Then eight years later we came back. They [the comedians] were gone. They hadn’t done a job. They did nothing . . . for those years when burlesque died.” Maybe they would do the odd date at a club. But according to Mike Iannucci, “they had almost no work. They loved it when we came along. We gave them steady work doing what they loved to do.”

  The comics knew that Ann would not allow any raunchiness at all. “Ann wouldn’t let comics say ‘hell’ or ‘damn’ on the show. And they didn’t have to say those words,” said Iannucci. She knew all the comics. She brought back Steve Mills, Dexter Maitland, Ma Bateman, Charlie Robinson, and Maxie Furman.

  Mike recalled a special New Year’s skit where Steve Mills “would come out as Father Time with a beard. He’d walk across stage. We timed it so that it would be exactly midnight when he got to stage right. Then all hell would break loose, the confetti, girls would push out Baby New Year,” which was comedian Billy Ainsley dressed in a diaper, in a carriage. The cast would sing Auld Lang Syne.

  The production was filling “1,200- to 1,300-seat theatres. Packed. Our show was a new life for the comics after being out of work.”

  Maria Bradley said, “Ann used to stand in the wings and she’d be hysterical; then she’d holler at [Steve Mills] because he said something off color. Laughing, she’d say, ‘You know you’re not supposed to say that.’ Mills was the one most guilty of doing double entendre. He was so funny, you were kinda glad he said it because it made the audience howl. Yet at the same time, you were hoping it wasn’t going to close down the theatre.”

  Despite the misconception, the comedians were the stars of burlesque. For a time, they were the kings of burlesque and the reason people came to the theatres . . . until the strippers took over. Though some were bemoaning the takeover in the 1950s, writer and burlesque expert Bernard Sobel claimed in his book that as early as the 1930s, the “fun [had] trickled out....” He complained “it was nothing but a strip show.”

  Val Valentine said, “Most of the comedians were very old and some of them real old. There were never any newcomers. There was never anyone new coming into the business.”

  Maria Bradley added, “The comedians... you know, I think they just died on the vine with all their wonderful memories.”

  Comedian backstage

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Straights

  “They usually sang in the wings, safe from tomatoes and other thrown objects.”

  —Ann Corio (This Was Burlesque)

  “It was my kind of trash.”

  —Lee Stuart

  Straight man Lee Stuart

  The straight man on the show was also the show’s tenor. Ann Corio claimed they couldn’t sing. Unlike the comedian, the straight dressed elegantly.

  “The role of the straight man is very interesting,” Alan Alda explained. The straight man’s job was not to be funny, but to help support the comic. It was a “subtle” role. One played extraordinarily well by such straight men as Bud Abbott, Dexter Maitland, and Robert Alda.

  “He never got the credit he deserves, as a straight man in burlesque,” Chris Costello said about her father’s partner Bud Abbott. One time in Las Vegas, the duo performed their “Who’s on First?” routine. “Dad had done ad-libbing and threw Bud totally off and didn’t know where to get back into routine. They couldn’t figure out how to get back into that one point.... Bud would have a way of bringing him back in.”

  Bud Abbott “was one of the most sensitive human beings. He wasn’t the character people knew him on screen,” said Chris Costello.

  When Abbott and Costello broke up, “it was difficult for Bud. That’s all he knew.... [He] tried to resurrect the humor with another comedian, doing fairs.” But it didn’t work. He couldn’t capture the chemistry he had had with Lou Costello. “You couldn’t recreate that era and that style of comedy.”

  Dexter Maitland was another classic straight man. He sang, usually when the chorus girls did some numbers. He sang while Ann Corio was on stage. He “had a whiskey tenor—slightly off-key singing.”

  Lee Stuart was a dignified and handsome man I was introduced to at the reunion. “I was nineteen years old and I wanted to get into show business. The straight man is six feet tall, wears a hat, dresses very nattily, and speaks very distinctly where you can understand every word. I was not a good straight man. I heard one of these comics talk to the boss. And he says, ‘I thought you had a straight man for this show.’ He says, ‘Well I got three men.’ He says, ‘Yeah, you got three. You got a gay guy that sings opera. You got a dancer that can’t talk, and you got a hillbilly from Arkansas that don’t know the difference between the proscenium arch and a condom.’ And so, I said, ‘Well, I better learn something.’”

  Lee would go on the road as a blackface doing straights for a minstrel show. “Burlesque was like going to school for me. We could do a scene once and I could not miss a word. I trained myself to pay attention.”

  He continued, “One straight man, Jack Coyle, I watched him. He was smart, six feet two inches, well-dressed, spoke good English. I admired him. I patterned myself after him. You watch someone, if he’s got a good line, you find yourself using it in a week or two....

  “Freddy Frampton—he’s akin to Rags [Ragland]. Freddy spoke with a W. C. Fields accent, nasal—to me he was funny. I found myself unconsciously copying him. While I’m doing straights, I’m doing W. C. Finally, they had to tell me, ‘Kid, you’re not supposed to be funny. You’re supposed to give the straight line.’”

  When Lee Stuart started in burlesque in 1947, “there was only one straight man on the show. The juvenile would do the bit parts.” There was a line of six or eight chorus girls when he started. When he left in 1957, the chorus line was down to four or five girls.

  CHAPTER TWEVLE

  The Tit Singer

  “I lived in a cocoon of weirdness.”

  —Alan Alda on life on the road with his father

  “This pig was stealing my parents from me.”

  —Alan Alda

  Sherry Britton and “tit singer” Robert Alda on right

  Straight man Robert Alda was born in 1917. “I think,” his son, actor Alan
Alda, admitted. According to newspaper reports, he was actually born in 1914 in New York. His father had emigrated from Italy.

  Robert was born Robert Alphonso D’Abruzzo. Taking the first two initials of his names, he became Alda. “In those days,” Alan explained, “you either denied your Italian heritage or played to the stereotype.”

  He studied architecture and was a junior draftsman “on some buildings still standing in New York today.” He was handsome, with dark eyes and hair and a beautiful voice. “When the Depression hit, he needed to make some money and began singing at various movie theatres during amateur nights. Somehow that got him into burlesque as a straight man.”

  Alda would become one of the best straight men in the business. As the straight, he had to understand timing: how to set up the comic so the comic wouldn’t have to do all the work himself.

  Robert was also what was known as a “tit singer.” He would sing to the opening number while the chorus girls danced, “usually without their shirts on,” but no doubt with pasties. “That job was known officially as the tit singer,” Alan explained.

  He was a young husband and father, married to Joan Browne, who gave birth to Alan, their only son, when he was twenty-one. Robert was intelligent and sensitive. “You can’t step into the funny. He was very good at it.”

  Robert’s partner was comedian Hank Henry. The two wrote their own sketches, or modified others’ work. The sketches were basic, Alan explained. “It’s hard to imagine people laughing” at them. But of course, it was a more “innocent time,” he said.

  Hank and Robert created an act with a pig. Hank Henry said to Robert, “Get outta here, and don’t come back until you can bring home the bacon.”

  And the end of the sketch, Robert walked in with a pig under his arm. And he said, “Well, I brought home the bacon!”

  Alan continued, “In order to do that sketch, they lugged this pig around with them everywhere they went, from town to town. All over the Eastern Wheel, I think it was called. And they put the damn pig in the back of the car, and there wasn’t any room for me. So they left me with two crazy aunts in Wilmington, Delaware. This pig was my sibling, you know. This pig was stealing my parents from me.... Now the damn pig was going up to the dressing room instead of me.”