My Ears Are Bent (6 page)

“We don’t compel the customers to buy tickets,” said Mr. Callahan. “This is a free country. I’d like to run burlesque as a cheap revue, but I’m in Rome and I got to be a Roman. I can’t go Presbyterian when every burlesque show and every night club in town is working naked.”

The burlesque girl sweats for her money.

“The kids in the chorus pull down $25.70 a week, including extra compensation for the Saturday midnight,”
said Mr. Callahan. “On the road it runs to $28.30 for the girls in the line, and the same for showgirls. That’s the minimum. We’ve paid showgirls as high as $32.50. A straight woman gets $75. The strippers are the backbone of the show, and most of them get paid from $60 to $125. That is, the large majority of strippers range between these figures, but some get paid a lot more. A few work for a percentage of the profits. A good salary for a stripper in this city is $125. Margie Hart is a $125 girl. Sometimes the girls get paid more out of town.”

There are three general styles of stripping—“fast,” “hot,” and “sweet.”

Miss Corio works sweet and slow. She wears a lot more than most strippers when she begins and when she ends, and she is more feminine than tigerish in her strut across the stage. She is not addicted to the bump, a movement in which the knees are bent and the hips are thrown backward and forward with, in some girls, an almost startling rapidity. Nor is she expert with the grind, which is, of course, a rotary motion of the hips something like the hootchy-kootchy. All burlesque girls must know how to bump and grind. Except for the minstrel show, the strip act is probably America’s only original contribution to the theater, and the bump and grind are integral parts of the orthodox strip.

Most strippers have some little trick or other, a
wriggle or a distinctive manner of loosening shoulder straps, which distinguishes them from their colleagues. Carrie Finnell, a fat girl, has a comedy strip in which she does what she calls “a control dance.” Unfortunately, it cannot be described here. Evelyn Myers, another headliner, has an unusual wriggle; only a snake could copy it.

Peaches Strange is celebrated for blending the shimmy with the strip. Gypsy Rose Lee, like Ann Corio, is fond of working with a lot of clothes. At the Irving Place, she used to come out dressed in a big white fur coat, a coat with a lot of buttons on it. She would glide languidly across the stage, a sort of bound-for-the-opera walk. On her way back into the wings she would twitch the coat open with a negligent gesture, and the customers would go crazy, the bums.

The most dynamic of the strippers is Georgia Sothern, who has the kind of red hair usually described as “flaming.” Miss Sothern works hot. She bounds across a stage, flinging her red head up and down, bumping, grinding. Sometimes at a wild Saturday midnight she will go through all the chorus-girl routines in one strip—the Texas Tommy, the fly-away, walking the dog, the toe punch, falling off a log. All the time she will be taking off her filmy clothes and putting them back on again. She will even do all the kicks if she is feeling good, the muscle kick, the hitch
kick and the fan kick. Between the kicks she will shout, “Let’s go, boys.” After a blackout on a Sothern strip the customers fall back into their seats, exhausted.

“She’s going to drop dead on the stage one of these nights,” said Mr. Callahan. “She’s got too much fire in her for her own good. She strips like she just had dynamite for lunch.”

The burlesque girl is proud of her tricks. A girl who can accomplish an unusual grind is respected. Dressing-room conversation is largely shop talk although they gab a lot about men and clothes, like all women. If Margie Hart comes out with a new way of wearing her red hair the kids will crowd into the wings, whispering, “Look at Margie’s hair. Do you like it that way? She’s a fool to change.”

The girls hang out together; they are overworked and underpaid, but they like the life and they are companions in misery. In this respect they resemble nurses and newspaper reporters. They frequent the same restaurants. If they don’t have boyfriends waiting to buy their dinners, a mob of them goes to the same restaurant or delicatessen. Just before the finale on the 3:30 show they begin talking about where they will eat.

“Where you going to eat?” one will yell.

“Anywhere but the fish place. I’m sick of that joint.”

“Let’s go to the chow mein place tonight.”

“Okie doke, baby. Hey, Woodsy, you wanna get some chow mein?”

At the restaurant they talk about the business. If a comedian stuck a new line into his bit during the last show they appraise it. For example, if the comic judge in the court scene says “We got to take this to a higher court” and puts his chair on the bench and sits up there during the rest of the scene, the girls decide whether it is O.K. or lousy. What they really love, however, is a comedian who makes cracks about a rival burlesque house during a show. Most of these cracks have to do with the antiquity of the girls in the other show.

“Geeze,” said one the other night, over her bowl of chicken chow mein, “Joey Fay got off a good one last week in Philly. He took Rosemary out to the lights and he introduced her. He said, ‘I want all you nice people to give this little girl a big hand because her mother just had a terrible accident. Her mother just fell off the running board over at the Star and Garter.’”

A “running board” is the runway extending out into the audience on which the chorus prances. They are not permitted in New York City any more.

The Women’s League Against Everything thinks they are awful.

When anything gets as popular as the strip-tease act someone always comes along and tries to do the reverse of it. One morning Mr. Samuel J. Burger telephoned my office that he had just begun to manage “a Chicago dame, and my God, she’s so unusual she’s got me nuts.” I did not feel well that morning, so I was sent up to interview her. Mr. Burger is a thin, inspired, wax-mustached Broadway promoter who books for vaudeville such spectacles as the juries of murder trials, the relatives of murdered criminals, bubble dancers and Indian mind readers.

His latest attraction turned out to be a shy young woman with a business school education, a giggle and a pair of hosiery-ad gams. She was nineteen years old and her name was Jan Marsh. We met her in a theatrical hotel, and she demonstrated her act.

“I may be nuts.” she said, slipping out of her dress, “but I think I have an act which will ruin the strip-tease racket.”

She tossed her dress on the arm of a chair, and then she took off her shoes and stockings. Then she took off an assortment of black lace undergarments.

“Now look,” she said, unnecessarily. “This is the way I start my act. I begin where the strip-tease ends. I am nude, definitely nude. Oh, definitely. I come out in front of the audience in that condition. I slip
on my black lace panties. Then I put on a garter belt. Then I slip on my black net stockings. Black is such a fascinating color. Then I get into my shoes. Then I get into my dress, a zipper dress, the kind of dress they call a taxicab dress. Then I pin on a corsage of flowers, orchids maybe. Then I put on my coat and hat. Then I put on another coat, maybe two or three coats. I just keep on getting into clothes until the audience begins to moan. I put on maybe a ton of clothes. I may be nuts, definitely nuts, but I think my act will ruin the strip-tease racket, which I think would be a great service to my country.”

Miss Marsh grinned. Then she executed a few dance steps.

“Of course,” she said, “when I begin the act I am as nude as any tease stripper. Definitely.”

“She does it all for art,” said Mr. Burger.

“That is right,” said Miss Marsh. “I do it for art and I don’t mean I have a boy friend by the name of Art. I have seen the enormous success of these voluptuous strip-tease women, but I do not think the public is really interested in that kind of thing. I am a sweet, natural girl. I am not like those bouncy women. I think that when I do the reverse of the strip-tease it will be enormously popular and will start a new movement. I don’t smoke or drink. Of course, if I liked the way it tasted I would, but I think whiskey is horrible. I am a good swimmer. I am just
a natural American girl, and I think the public would prefer that to one of those bouncy women.”

Miss Marsh said she was born in South Amboy, New Jersey, but that the family moved to Chicago when she was a child. Her mother and her father are divorced. She said her mother knows that she came to New York City to ruin the strip-tease racket and does not mind. She said she went to Chicago High School, then to Drake’s Business College. Then she got a job as a secretary to a woman who worked for the city.

“She was in the tax department, or something,” said Miss Marsh.

The young woman said that when she was younger she used to pose for artists.

“I like to pose for artists,” she said. “They are so serious. You stand in front of them nude for hours, but they do not take any interest in you except from an artistic standpoint, which I like. You are just an inspiration to them. I am not a wild girl. I do not even approve of necking.”

Miss Marsh smiled.

“She is the society type,” said Mr. Burger. “Yes,” said Miss Marsh.

She said that recently she saved up some money and decided to come to New York City and go on the stage.

“I had this idea about reversing the strip-tease,”
she said, “and people told me I was crazy. Then I heard about Mr. Burger, and I decided he must have the same kind of mind I have. I went to see him and I found he had.”

“Great minds run in the same channel,” said Mr. Burger, flicking some cigarette ashes out of the white carnation in the lapel of his overcoat.

At one time or another I have talked with several of the lovely young women who hope to become the Sally Rand of the New York World’s Fair of 1939 and I know how ambitious they are. I hope none of them felt thwarted when they read that Mr. Grover A. Whalen had decided to ban “all amusements of the fan-dance type” from the Fair’s 280-acre Midway. I hope they will pay no attention to Mr. Whalen and will keep right on trying to invent a new dance, something to take the place of those exposition favorites—the muscle dance, the hootchy-kootchy, the fan dance, the butterfly dance, the bubble or balloon dance, and the swan dance, all of which are rather old-fashioned now.

Mr. Whalen is president of the New York World’s Fair Corporation and it is only natural that he should want to ban such artistry, but it surprised me when he took the bit in his teeth and also banned that good sound American word “Midway.” He appears to
prefer the pompous phrase “Amusement Area.” Speaking about the carnival section of the Fair, Mr. Whalen said, “It has been definitely decided not to call it a “Midway.” The word seems to have a connotation of evil to Mr. Whalen, although every state and county fair, and nearly every amusement park, has a Midway and the word is recognized in the dictionaries. I don’t believe Mr. Whalen’s ban on “amusements of the fan-dance type” will be enforced; in fact, I believe the Flushing Meadows will practically crawl with nude wrigglers of one sort or another in 1939. I also believe that most visitors to the Fair will call the carnival section the Midway; the headline-writers on the newspapers will see to that.

Mr. Whalen’s outburst of euphemism is unusual, but his decision to ban wriggle dancers is not. The making of this decision is one of the routine duties of exposition executives. Mr. Rufus C. Dawes made the decision when the Century of Progress Exposition was being planned in Chicago in 1929. Mr. Dawes was the president, and he said, “No entertainment of the Little Egypt type will be permitted at the Exposition.” Mr. Dawes is probably sitting somewhere at this moment staring at a ceiling and mumbling those words over to himself, dully; by the time his Exposition was dismantled, Sally Rand was a national figure, and there still are millions of Americans who have never even heard of Mr. Rufus C. Dawes.
Mr. Whalen practically duplicated the Dawes decision. He said, “No entertainment of the Sally Rand type will be permitted at the Fair.” After the Fair gets under way, Mr. Whalen will certainly be surprised when the newspapers start paying more attention to the inevitable nude wriggler than they do to him, or even to George Washington, whose inaugural as the first President of the United States the Fair is supposed to commemorate. Mr. Whalen is an idealist and he thinks his trylon and his perisphere are more important than sideshows. He can’t be blamed for hoping that visitors will be less interested in the Midway dancers than in such educational exhibits as “The Arts and the Basic Industries.” Exactly the reverse of this, however, has been the traditional fate of American expositions, and there is no reason the New York World’s Fair of 1939 should escape.

I don’t really believe many people will take Mr. Whalen seriously. I know a girl who is all prepared to become the Sally Rand of the Fair, and if she read about his ban, I am sure it made her giggle. Of the several girls, similarly prepared, whom I have talked to, she is my favorite. Her name is Florence Cubitt, and she was the Queen of the Nudists at the California Pacific International Exposition at San Diego in 1936. The nudists—twenty girls and five bearded men—were segregated behind a fence in a big field, and the customers paid forty cents to go in and watch
from a distance while they played games. Her Exposition name was Tanya Cubitt, she told me, because “Tanya sounds more sexy than Florence.” I met her on St. Patrick’s Day in 1936, and I spent several hours of a rainy afternoon listening to her talk in her room at the Hotel New Yorker.

Miss Cubitt was sent here to get some publicity for the San Diego Exposition. It is this fact, as much as any other, that makes me think Mr. Whalen’s stern statement would cause her to giggle. The officials of the San Diego fair, which was supposed to “tell the story of mankind’s restless urge toward achievement,” also said they would ban “all but the highest type of concession,” but when customers stayed away by the million, they decided that Miss Cubitt’s nudist concession was of an extraordinarily high type. More than one American exposition has been saved from bankruptcy by uninhibited young women.