Tales of Times Square: Expanded Edition (4 page)

Holding court at Bernard’s, where much of the Melody has spilled out after the last set, Kronish appears to be a grandfatherly mentor to every starlet in town. Sultry feline creatures slither from the barstools, asking for his private ear; younger cupcakes, new to the biz, with running tabs here, giggle by with champagne/orange juice cocktails. Al gives any of them his fullest attention. This is the high life, right across the street from the Mardi Gras pigpen. Even fans have the opportunity to mingle, collect autographs, sketch pictures, and shower compliments on their fave starlets. The bouncer is huddled at a table alone, wondering where he’ll sleep that night after his mom threw him out of the house.

Amid all these women, Al can pin down his very favorite stripper in a second: “Kristina Fox is probably the most talented girl in burlesque today. Twenty different acts, dozens of gowns and props which she makes herself. Takes a bath onstage with real steam and bubbles all over the theater. Very nice Jewish girl, straight, no porn. Doesn’t spread legs, doesn’t play with herself or fool around with anybody. It’s peculiar, she don’t accept tips—if someone throws a dollar onstage she kicks it back. She’s very devoted to her profession, in big demand throughout Europe. She’s so great, the other girls all take seats and watch each of her moves.

“Just for fun,” says Al, calling blond starlet Joey Karson from the bar. “To the best of your knowledge, who’s the most talented stripper we’ve had at the Melody—besides you?”

“Kristina Fox?” answers the blonde.

“That’s an extra hundred,” says Kronish.

Aside from his theater, Al claims to have no awareness or interest in the rest of Times Square. “I don’t patronize anyplace. When I have free time, I spend it at the Melody. Sure, we’re part of the whole thing, I don’t relate the Melody to anything in Times Square other than X-rated entertainment.... When this location came along in 1973, it just happened to be on 48th Street. The real estate was good, so we took it. A lot of the X-rated theaters, like the Pussycat, the Circus, came after us. But we had a lot of competition when we opened, at least a dozen other burlesque halls. The Mayfair on 47th, two on 42nd Street, the Broadway on 49th, which is now the World Theatre; when Bob Anthony was manager of the Follies, they had a three-piece orchestra, too. Now there’s just the Melody.”

Rave Up!

Raven De La Croix is set for the big Friday night of her week-long winter booking at the Melody. All I have to do is lug her circus trunk from the Consulate Hotel around the corner, where the Melody management put her up. Along Broadway, black hookers’ eyes bug out as they whistle her down, en route to the theater. Raven smiles back modestly, acknowledging one who has been trying to flag her down all week, presumably with romantic intent.

It’s those hooters that stop traffic, that make man and hooker alike gasp out wisecracks, which drift past Raven’s show-must-go-on, forward-marching step. They jut out cartoon-like, even from within her light-blue jumpsuit, giving the distinct impression that this black-haired vixen of American Indian blood is in a realm of show business in which she earns her living
fishing ‘em out
. Raven once confided she was flat-chested until age seventeen, then all of a sudden started to sprout. Her mother took notice of this volcanic development and bragged to neighbors. Raven was embarrassed, the object of sudden adulation. But then, every stripper worth her salt learns to control the tempo, to exercise a power over men that she never had as a kid. Yet Raven achieves this commanding aura without a trace of manipulation.

She lists a jumble of occupations leading up to her reigning tit stardom: real estate agent, nursery school teach, L.A. roofing contractor, record promoter, nurse at Columbia-Presbyterian near The Bronx, where she grew up. She spent years in the Hell’s Angels, married one, then broke
into
a prison yard to fuck him, when he did time. She supervised something called “Narconon,” a drug rehab program in the California jail system—dressed conservatively, she says, she would mingle with addict prisoners and pit the biggest black guys against the fiercest rednecks in encounter-group staring exercises.

Now in her thirties, Raven has landed dim-witted Hollywood cameos for big-boobed broads, in
The Blues Brothers
and other such rubbish. But she starred in Russ Meyer’s
Up!
, which carries a lifetime constituency; she’s since had to continually do men’s magazine spreads to keep the fans succored. She feels a kinship toward Little Annie Fannie, yet knows how to “walk into a lion’s den and survive.” With a teenage son, she’s come through like a Mack-truck Mary Tyler Moore. And now, clinging to the underside of show biz, bent on bigger movie roles, she commands $2,000 a week, plus accommodations, in what’s vaguely defined as the burlesque circuit, here and in Canada.

Once upstairs in the Melody lobby, Raven is instantly surrounded by admirers and tit hounds. A gigantic, jolly black fellow named J.J. is introduced as the “president of her New York fan club.” He is nearly seven feet tall and four or five hundred pounds, and his hands are large enough to crush a basketball, which he absentmindedly seems to be trying to do as he shakes mine.

Friends of J.J.’s nudge him in the ribs—”There she is!”—which causes him to burst into giggles. Raven’s “Uncle Lou” is here, a more reserved fan she met during her summer 1981 engagement, now elevated to dinner companion. The old cocker in the box office cackles his way out of the booth, complaining jealously because she hasn’t invited him to dinner. At every utterance from Raven, the enormous J.J. is reduced to giggles, unable to make conversation with his dream queen. Her pictures, I’m told, wallpaper his entire apartment.

All of these fellers, who act reverent enough before the regular strippers, are downright awestruck in Raven’s presence. That such a woman stands before them, living, breathing, greeting them with a wink and a wisecrack, soon to strip off her clothes—which they will witness for a seven-dollar entrance fee—is too good to be true.

“I’ve always had a really fortunate instinct for picking the safe ones from the Hillside Stranglers,” says Raven, both of us settled in the headliner’s dressing room, behind a locked door. “Like Lou, for instance. He’s like a distant uncle. He’s a nervous guy with a stutter; but he’s very honest and vulnerable, and I’m the kind of person, it seems, where all of a sudden, a guy feels he can be honest with me.”

“Tell me more about Lou,” I say.

“He’s just a regular guy. I brought him to meet my mother last summer. He’d never try to lay a kiss on me, other than just being sweet.... God, this room smells terrible.”

The star’s room at the Melody is closet-sized, with exposed heating pipes and a high ceiling. A horizontal mirror hangs across the dressing table, where flowers from Al Kronish and fan cards are stationed. A new, blue paint job, covering old graffiti by strippers, leaves a lingering odor in the air.

“Mind if I get dressed?” asks Raven, with under an hour before her 11:20 show. She opens the trunk, containing six costume changes, each with its own soundtrack cassette. Hers is a self-designed wardrobe of stripperwear, more prestigious than Frederick’s. On top lies her trademark Indian costume, which transforms her into “Princess Bursting Feathers.”

“What freaks me a bit,” says Raven, “are the guys who tremble in their seats with their mouths hanging open.” She relates the incident of a pen pal, a lawyer, one of many who persistently write her, and with whom she corresponds. “So the guy came to one of my shows, talked to me a bit in the lobby. But he’d never been here before, and he overreacted to Mardi Gras by pulling down his pants and whacking off in the seat. Someone stopped him before he got tossed out.”

Most of the old goats who follow Raven are more than content to be professional fans, incapable of crossing the line. “But who’s safe? I never used to trust myself when picking friends from fans, but now I do. I protect myself, though, I don’t wanna end up anyplace weird. I’m not a victim.... Most of the guys out there, I would never go out with. They’re dear fans, they know what they are, they never expect anything. I’ll go across the street to Bernard’s with a bunch, but there’s no reason to go anyplace else.”

These old coots also provide a protective entourage in New York. Raven can deal with wackos in the audience, humor them perfectly. Like the guy out West who falls to his knees and prays to her—she works it into the routine and obliges him with a religious spell. “You’ll be the first I’ll tell, if I need help,” she tells her dukes, who are eager to defend her, “but even if they seem nuts to you, I know how to handle them.” It’s more dangerous for strippers in Middle America, where folks are more apt to figure her profession qualifies her as rape meat or something. Yet some porn starlets have claimed that they run less risk of being raped because they’re perceived as too powerful sexually: the exact opposite of what some idiot bent on rape would seek. When it does happen to a girl in the perimeters of porn, the cops offer no solace.

“Everyone finds the weakness of the other, in this business,” says Raven. “I’ve seen girls forced to give head. If a girl is easily scared or thinks her job is more important than her integrity, the guy’ll find out what the weak point is and dive in there. I see thirteen-year-old girls whose parents have put ‘em to work in strip clubs.”

Raven applies her mineral oil, the better to bounce those light signals off her bosoms into the tit-starved audience. She hates makeup and never uses the traditional Max Factor body pancake many strippers need, which is plastered on with water and alcohol, then buffed like a shoeshine so it doesn’t streak. Just this morning, to avoid makeup, Raven spent forty-five minutes under a Silver Solarium sun lamp to maintain her California tan. Only one spot requires the hated pancake: “I had this tattoo on my inner thigh that said ‘Forever Damien.’ It was removed by a plastic surgeon, so there’s a little scar.”

Raven does her act barefoot, and never wears heels onstage, since falling and injuring her left bazoom. It almost had to be removed. Russ Meyer recommended a cosmetic surgeon who specialized in Vegas showgirl implants. The surgeon was able to zero in on the swelling from an angle that left the breast intact, and corrected the injury.

“The operation was three and a half hours and I had to come up with $5,000. I figured I might as well have the tattoo carved out too.” She dabs the pancake over the faint spot where the good doctor’s work was.

“Last time I was on tour for seven weeks straight, my feet were torn and bloody from dancing. I’ve picked up splinters and glass. The lighting at the Melody isn’t too good, but at least their stage is smooth. Stages are all different, and my show changes instinctively with each one. I usually play dinner clubs, cabarets. I was the first stripper ever to play the Playboy Club in L.A. The Melody is still unusual for me.”

Friday night’s costume turns out to be Wonder Woman; Rave is just snapping on the finishing garters. Before going, I can’t resist asking what advice she might offer young, aspiring strippers out there in mental-illness land, who bungle their way into the profession. What brand of sanitary napkins, for instance, should they use?

“Some girls wear Tampax. You have to. You can’t wear sanitary pads onstage Make sure you don’t have the string showing. A lot of the audience is real juvenile and they’ll point and laugh: ‘Haw haw, string!’ There are some dreadful stories.

“For instance, this untogether black girl with long, pendulous breasts, a big butt, wild hair. She was onstage and her G-string was black, but she forgot to put it on. This was in Toronto at Zanzibar’s, where you have to have your G-string on or it’s a $500 fine. No one really noticed at first. She was very black, had a perfect V-shaped you-know-what. Suddenly guys started cracking up, it rolled back through the theater in waves. The girl looked down in the middle of doing a split and there was this little white string hanging out.”

A five-minutes-to-showtime knock on the door comes. I leave and pick me a nice old seat in the third row, facing the T-runway head-on. A lot of royalty present; about a hundred old duffers show up for a midnight bosom erection.

Rave moves about the stage in a jazz ballet, an Indian maiden gliding through the woods. She is applauded, however, only after removing each article of clothing, particularly when the Wonder Woman bra comes down. The applause is businesslike, like that which accompanies new elections to a PTA council. J.J. remains bundled in his winter coat in the first row. Only a small portion of him fits over the seat, and he giggles throughout the set, friends slapping him from behind. Uncle Lou makes three separate trips during the set to deposit a one-dollar bill onstage. Rave uses a transparent veil to keep the view of her you-know-what to a minimum. Normally she doesn’t remove her G-string, but at the Melody it’s a requirement.

“Any questions about Hollywood?” asks Raven during a little Q&A after her last number.

Friends badger J.J. to ask a question, but he breaks up giggling, waving his hand, out of breath.

“You’ve got God-given talent,” declares an admirer.

“Talent? It’s just flesh,” says Raven.

“How much does a guy need to take you out?” inquires some old Festus.

“I believe in love and magic. Money can’t buy that.” A few of the old dukes smack their knees over this retort, with a good chuckle at the expense of the wiseass who cracked the question. Rave bids them good night.

When she returns from her dressing room, her contingent is again waiting patiently in the lobby. “Good snakes!” she says, greeting a lineup eager to pose for Polaroids. “I can pay for a daily Shiatsu massage at the hotel with these,” she tells me—but I don’t see her accept one dollar. An assortment of old codgers are lined up like little boys in a candy store, smacking their lips, smiling wide, and shaking their heads in wonder. One grabs her hand, congratulating her on her marvelous pair. Another, who resembles a middle-aged Dennis the Menace, snaps off a few pix, then declares his undying devotion. “I’ll be back tomorrow night, Raven,” he says, looking up to her as if she were a mommy.