Behind the Burly Q
Page 13
The Cat Girl, Lilly Christine, was a star in the ’50s—a more voluptuous, wilder-looking Lili St. Cyr. In fact, oftentimes pictures of the two are mistaken for the other. Born Martha Pompender, she was a blonde, curly-haired stripper in the era of Tempest and Blaze Starr. She looked athletic, healthy and buxom. She was named the best exotic dancer in New Orleans in 1951–52. She crouched low; she spread her legs apart.
She claimed to have years of dancing, both modern and ballet, under her G-string belt. “Pillow of Love” was something she performed at Prima’s 500 Club in New Orleans, a little scenario about a girl singing for her lover in a faraway land as she lay her head on a pillow. She claimed to “make love to her audience.” Lily would ask the men near her if they wanted to put their head on her pillow (Ann Corio did a similar bit). As she wore only a G-string and a mink-edged negligee, the censors complained her act was indecent. They also complained she didn’t even dance. She, along with a dozen other exotics, was arrested in New Orleans in 1958.
She died in January 1965 of peritonitis at age forty-two, though there would be more sinister rumors regarding her demise. “She didn’t believe in operations or cutting on her body,” said Kitty West.
(There was a real fear among the dancers of having their appendix out. Lili St. Cyr would have hers frozen instead, so greatly did she dread her perfect body being marred by a scar. Morton Minsky relates that Margie Hart also had a phobia about having her appendix removed. Margie said “a wrinkle on your face isn’t as bad as one on your stomach.” And Sherry Britton was horrified by the chorus girls, with their “multiple scars from surgeries for VD”)
Where did these girls learn to bump? Some were taught by former stripper Lillian Hunt, who mentored dozens of strippers including Tempest Storm, Taffy O’Neil, and Blaze Starr. She ran the Follies theatre in Los Angeles.
‘“Lillian Hunt?’ We used to call her something else. Bossy thing ruled the roost,” recalled Dixie Evans. There was one performer she couldn’t control, though.
Lili St. Cyr was the star at the Follies. The president and vice president of RKO Studios showed up to catch Lili’s act. According to Dixie, Lillian was “racing around backstage, telling Lili, ‘Hurry up. They want to see you.’ Lili is sitting with her hands in two big bowls of hand lotion. ‘Tell them to make an appointment.’ ‘You get up and go out there. We’ve never had the president of a major motion picture studio in this burlesque theatre before.’ ‘Tell them to make an appointment.’ So they made an appointment. Lili never showed up. Lillian was screaming. ‘Lili, you didn’t make the appointment.’ ‘Yes, I did drive to the studio. And the guard would not let me on the lot. I would have had to park ten blocks and walk the street through rubble and mud, so I just drove home.’ Lillian called the studio and made another appointment. They were there at the gate with roses. There she is with her beautiful suede suit, ascot, and mink coat.”
Lili St. Cyr was one of the last “elegant” strippers. Times were changing and audiences wanted to seejungle acts and floor work and the squatting and spreading of legs.
Bumps were not so much forbidden, but they were expected—which led to trouble for the dancers and heralded a change in the burlesque scene.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Paddy Wagon
“I was put in a paddy wagon and taken down to the Tombs. I spent the night in jail.”
—April March
“I was met at the bus station by the town’s sherriff and invited out to dinner.”
—Vicki O’Day
“When it’s time for a shakedown or a shakeup, the police grow suddenly moral, and the burlesque show suffers proportionately,” said Bernard Sobel.
“Harold used to stand out in front of the theatre on a Friday night with envelopes,” said Dardy Minsky. “And the politicians would come by and he’d pay off everybody.”
In the early days, instead of a red light serving as a warning, the end girl in the chorus would signal when the police came in and the show would instantly clean up. Usually raids on clubs and theatre coincided with a political election. The strippers and the owners were arrested—a prize for the politico’s constituents.
Some clubs in particular, such as Miami’s Jungle Club and Red Barn, were targets whenever an official ran for office. Both club owners and the strippers would be hauled off to jail—repeatedly.
Club owner Leroy Griffith was used to raids, but one night it was relentless. He and the dancers were arrested for “an hour or two. We’d go right back and open up the same night.” In Miami, some politicians had revoked his license. It didn’t stop Leroy from having the show go on. “I would go into the box office by myself for a minute. They would come in and arrest me for operating a theatre. I would get in the police car. We were arrested twenty-four times, I think, in one night.”
The headline in the paper the next day joked “when they advertise ‘they never close,’ they mean it.” Leroy said it was “politicians wanting their name in the papers. You have those problems in this business.”
“I was routinely arrested,” confirmed Dixie Evans. Once in Miami, the club was packed. The police came backstage and said “follow us.” Dixie and the others were getting in the back of the prowl car when she noticed her landlady going into the club. Dixie made a fuss and the obliging officer told the landlady, “‘She’ll be back in ten minutes; it’s only routine.’” They went down to the station. The girls were booked and released in time for the next show.
Kitty West said, “I went to the jail and I just stood in front and they took pictures is all. Isn’t that cute?”
In 1951, Zorita was arrested for holding her snake suggestively at the Two O’Clock club. She paid a fine of $42.90 and returned in time for the next show.
Alexandra the Great was arrested twice. Once “at Walgreens. I had a pistol in my coat, and somebody saw it and I was arrested. That was taken care of,” she said. Club owners and managers bailed out their stars.
Betty Rowland was arrested several times. She blamed it on both politics and shows competing with one another. “Clubs would call the vice squad to get the competition in trouble.”
In 1952 where Betty danced, the club’s manager was “involved with police.” The cops came into the Burbank Theatre in Los Angeles. The regular girl at the front was in the bathroom and whoever was selling tickets insisted they buy a ticket. There was an argument and the officers threatened to close the club and arrest everyone inside. “They did arrest me,” Betty said. She was sentenced to three months. The fine was steep. “Five thousand dollars to get out. I could tell stories about the judge.” Her boyfriend at the time paid the fine. “We didn’t make that kind of money. Money went for costumes and press agents.”
Another time Betty was sentenced to three weeks in jail in Lincoln Heights. She has vivid memories her time there. “When it was mop time again, a couple of guards walked up and presented me with a smaller broom adorned with a big red bow. ‘For the Ball of Fire,’ they said. . . . The day started at 5 a.m. in order to get in line for the toilet. Each morning was a bed inspection—it had to be neatly made—then it was breakfast, when we’d line up for coffee and bread rolls.... At night playing dominoes helped to pass the time until lights out at 8 p.m.”
Betty was in absolute misery. “I cried every day, but quietly, because on the first day as I was weeping one girl said, ‘Oh come on, stop the bawling.’”
Betty was involved in many lawsuits. She sued a radio station in Los Angeles because they “refused to give her time on the radio for the accomplishment” of advertising her “artistic abilities,” claiming her acts were immoral and indecent. In response, Betty offered to give the judge a free show so he could decide himself if her act was truly immoral and indecent.
In 1943, she sued Samuel Goldwyn Inc. Betty alleged she and the company had entered into an agreement whereby she would be “technical adviser to Barbara Stanwyck” for the motion picture Ball of Fire. Betty alleged in her complaint that Stanwyck was to �
�enact certain dances done and performed by plaintiff [Rowland].” Betty was promised $250.00 a week for work commencing four weeks prior to the start of film, through the nine weeks of shooting. Betty lost her case.
Sherry Britton was arrested in 1936, along with nine others, after appearing in “Scanties on Parade.” The ten pleaded guilty and threw themselves at the mercy of the court, who sentenced Sherry. According to court records, the judge stated, “Believing you will profit by the leniency of the court, you are placed on probation for the period of two years.... If you behave properly, you will be released.”
In Philadelphia, Blaze Starr also had herself a problem. “Politicians were trying to close [Philadelphia]—not allowed to bump and grind, solid bra, not see-through, a real bathing suit as far as you can strip. I was dating a captain on the police force. Then he comes in one night with his boys like he never knew me and arrested me. And I thought, ‘You son of a bitch—I’ll fix your ass, because one day I’m gonna be famous and I’m gonna tell your wife.’ And she did, including his story in her autobiography. The captain was thought to be Frank Rizzo, who went on to become mayor. “They came in, put me in a wagon with three or four other strippers. They’re crying, ‘What am I gonna tell my babies?’”
The boss got Blaze and the others released. But she was in there two hours. “It was awful. I’ve been claustrophobic ever since.” Years passed, and Blaze never forgot the humiliation. “I put him in my book. He died a few years ago. Climbed the ladder, then he died. Men do things to you. I’m not bitter.”
That wasn’t Blaze’s only run in with the law. She was also arrested in New Orleans at the Sho Bar and weeks later at the Black Cat Cafe. Both times the charges would be thrown out.
La Savona was arrested in New York. “They arrest the whole place. The boss had a problem with one of the cops. I got a lot of nice publicity.”
“Sometimes they just liked to arrest ya,” said former stripper Ricki Covett, “for kicks.”
Sally Rand was arrested too many times to count, once four times in one day. Her son had all the newspaper clippings to prove it, starting in 1933. In fact, Sally had always kept meticulous books on her press and they came in handy. She was brought to court, but she proved she was somewhere else because she had the ink to prove it.
Stripper La Savona on stage
It was demeaning and frightening for the girls as they were hauled off to jail. Sometimes forced to pay an exorbitant fine, many had to spend the night behind bars. It was just another hazard of a job that riled the pious and gave a platform to the hungry politicians. The strippers were caught in the middle.
After Lily Ann was busted and banned in Boston, she swore she’d never break another law. “And I kept that.... I didn’t get a traffic ticket until I was fifty-seven years old,” she said.
Not all the arrests or shutdowns of the shows was without justification.
In 1953, Boston’s venerable Old Howard was shut down because of flashing. By this time, there were no longer large choruses; it was mostly strippers. The acts became “downright naughty.” Both Rose La Rose and Irma the Body admitted to “going too far” at a performance, causing the banning of burlesque in Boston. The police snuck in a camera in the theatre and caught Irma the Body apparently doing something she shouldn’t have.
The bumps and the grinds were killing burlesque.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Little Flower
“It makes no difference if I burn my bridges behind me—I never retreat.”
—Fiorello LaGuardia
“There is no Democratic or Republican way of cleaning the streets.”
—Fiorello LaGuardia
A big picture number
The Great Depression was on. Soup lines barely kept the long lines of unemployed fed. Hooverville shacks were a mainstay in Central Park and elsewhere across a frightened and starving nation.
“People in that era were so depressed and there was no hope,” said Dixie Evans. “The masses were just out of work and out of money.” But the burlesque shows drew in the desperate who sought shelter, the possibility of laughs and the glorious site of beauty. It was a refuge.
On 42nd Street in New York, the burlesque theatres pasted large posters of the voluptuous strippers in all their glory for anyone to see. There was a growing resentment among “legit” theatre owners, who were watching their missing profits flow into the burlesque houses. Church congregations griped repeatedly to the police and politicians; they didn’t like all that flesh on display. Burlesque houses were—incorrectly—thought to be dens of sexual activity and prostitution. Trouble was brewing for the burly q.
New York’s Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia had entered office in the mid-1930s, at the time burlesque was prospering. Much to the consternation of Broadway theatre owners, the girl shows were taking a substantial bite from their box office. Legit had become too expensive to produce and too costly for the average unemployed Joe to afford. Broadway shows were tanking. But for a dime or a quarter, a man could spend a few hours in a dark theatre forgetting his troubles. In the privacy of a dark theatre, a man could slip into another world, of fantasy and hope and escape.
A man could believe—for a few hours, anyway—that the flesh on display was available, as were all the riches America had to offer. A man could identify with the comics who looked just like him. They were generally scruffy, wore ill-fitting clothes, talked and walked like an “everyman.” The men in the audiences felt comfortable and among their own. They belonged. The burly q and all its layers of fantasy and cheap gags was perhaps the only thing keeping a man’s spirits up in an otherwise dismal time.
Fiorello (“little flower” in Italian) LaGuardia was a fat-faced, greasy-haired, five-foot-tall, three-term mayor who had it in for burlesque, among other immoral, corrupt goings on in his town. Vowing to reform most everything in the Big Apple, LaGuardia took aim at burlesque, considering what went on there to be filth. He believed it when he was told burlesque incited sex crimes. Burlesque was a den for prostitution, he thought. He would remove it from his city.
Burlesque wasn’t without its part in its own downfall. Mike Iannucci said, “The fact that the strippers took over, the comics lost their power and it became a strip show—that’s when it got raunchy. When you give someone an inch, they take your arm, that’s how some of the strippers were. People were offended. LaGuardia started getting complaints and he said, ‘Either clean up your act or you’re gone.’ And they wouldn’t clean up their act and he banned them. He had the power at the time and that was it.”
LaGuardia’s cohort in sweeping the streets of New York clean was Paul Moss, the Commissioner of Licenses (a former blackface performer in vaudeville as a child in the 1890s, according to Nightclub City author Burton Peretti). As a 1937 Time Magazine article stated, “the power to license is the power to reform.” Moss, under pressure from LaGuardia, refused to renew the license of fourteen burlesque theatres in New York. LaGuardia upheld the ban. And bye, bye burlesque. “May 8, 1937, he banished it from New York,” said Mike Iannucci.
“Everyone ran to their agents,” remembered Betty Rowland. Suddenly a dwindling field for the performers was crowded with actors and girls willing to cross over to burlesque.
According to Peretti, one vindictive denouncer of burlesque wished any woman who worked in burlesque to be “out of employment for a long, long time and to go hungry.” Ouch. The women were vilified and targeted.
The repercussions of banning burlesque shows in New York were widely felt. Thousands were out of work. “But in six months it was all back,” with new rules and new names for the shows, Betty Rowland said.
Negotiating with the politicians, some theatres reopened with the word “follies,” or “reviews.” “Burlesque” and “Minsky” were forbidden. The ban didn’t touch nightclubs in LaGuardia’s city that continued to thrive with the same sort of acts from the strippers, with the same amount of nudity. For whatever reason, the mayor chose not to go after these institu
tions.
Booking more exotic dancers than jazz musicians, 52nd Street would flourish with just as much nudity as the theatres. Instead of Swing Street, it would be thereafter known as Stripty Street, and in the late ’40s would begin the reign of Lili St. Cyr and dozens of other burlesquers considered glamorous and appropriate for the upper-middle class.
New Jersey “became the base for burlesque in that era,” said New Jersey resident and historian Nat Bodian, and brother of Al, who wrote the screenplay for the 1953 film Striporama starring Betty Paige and Lili St. Cyr.
One appreciative reporter bemoaned, “If Burly goes, who will train the Red Buttons and the Jan Murrays [a slapstick comedian] of tomorrow?”
Eventually the politicians would find their way to New Jersey by the late ’50s attempting to ban nudity and dancers on the stage, ramping up arrests of strippers. The Empire built in 1912 was a one-thousand-seat theatre. In 1957, amid another anti-burlesque climate, dozens of strippers were arrested; the Empire lost its license and closed. The beautiful, historic old theatre was leveled and made into a parking lot.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The High Cost of Stripping
“You make big money but it does cost money to stay in the game.”
—Dixie Evans
“The biggest majority think ‘no talent,’ ‘prostitutes.’ ‘Low lifes.’”
—April March on what people thought of burlesque dancers