Tales of Times Square: Expanded Edition (6 page)

It’s getting awfully hot and humid in this dressing room. Jeanie keeps wishing she could take a bath, as the time for the next show approaches. She assembles a tight black spiderweb-type dress around her body, directing her moves in the mirror. She’s a knockout now, a blond, peg-legged Vampirella. She shackles up her slave, who trudges out onto the stage ahead of her.

The crowd of fifty sits insanely silent as Jeanie ambles down the aisle. The tortured voice of Marianne Faithfull’s comeback record howls dirty words over the PA, ideal for an S&M act. Once onstage, Jeanie captures her slave and descends on him like a spider, but unfortunately only mildly assaults his body during the four-song, twenty-minute set.

She peels off her own clothes along the way. Her tits are champagne-perfect. She straddles his face, disdainfully slaps his pecker, which rages harder the more she tugs it. He groans and grovels under her splendid rump. Then the leg comes off. A few audience members perk up, not yet sure of what they see. She bats her stump against his cock, then has him suck the stump. She quickly reattaches the artificial portion, pulls on a warmer, and that’s all she wrote. A solid gig.

The audience responds with quirky applause. Jeanie hobbles off during the clapping, pausing momentarily by my chair to whisper a highly sarcastic “Hooray!”

Old Flesh Agents

The several remaining booking agents for strippers in this country are somewhat bitter, quick-tempered men in their seventies—vaudevillian artifacts who resigned themselves to booking strippers after variety shows perished. They were likewise forced down a notch by representing porn starlets in their old age. Irv Charnoff, who left his Times Square Brill Building office in 1972, continues to book girls into clubs nationally from his Queens apartment, taking time off only when struck by heart attacks, of which he’s had a few. Charnoff books the big-tit stars, nonexclusively, including Raven De La Croix, Candy Samples, Chesty Morgan, the aging Tempest Storm, and young stripaholic Hyapatia Lee. “The few that are honorable,” he says, referring to those pros who show up at their gigs.

He loves to gab with the gals on the phone when they play the Big Apple, though his services have become less required in their careers. “They all have different riders on their contracts,” Charnoff explains. “Like Sammy Davis, you gotta bring him thirteen ice cubes in a bucket, if there’s fourteen he gets mad. You’re dealing with crazy or temperamental people. They’re all insane. The kind of work strippers are doing, they’re not in their right mind to begin with. They’re not performers like Milton Berle or Henny Youngman that made sacrifices or disciplined themselves to get ahead, with goals to reach, like playing the Palace. All they do is show their body. You don’t call that entertainment, do ya?”

Charnoff began with strippers late in his career, having booked variety acts into supper clubs all his life. “When some of my nightclubs started to change Over, I didn’t know one stripper from another—I still don’t and I’m not interested. I wouldn’t deal with these girls, I always called an agent who featured strippers whenever a nightclub required them. The variety act went out, the magician went out, the ventriloquist went out. I was forced to use these strippers. I was in a business, I had to stay with it, so I called other agents who had stables of girls. Even then, they were a different kind of stripper. They had continuity, choreography, wardrobe, luggage. The girls today, they have a rug. So they don’t get a splinter in their ass when they spread.”

Jess Mack, premier strippers’ agent in Las Vegas, whose example Charnoff followed, had his original office in Times Square’s Paramount Building. Mack began as a burlesque straight man on 42nd Street in 1924. He continued working the out-of-town circuit, nearly a hundred burlesque theaters coast to coast, after La Guardia outlawed burlesque in New York. In the early 1950s he became an agent, explaining that the days of burlesque had ended.

“When the Apollo opened on 42nd Street, we had Gypsy Rose Lee and Georgia Southern as our feature attractions,” remembers Mack. “Plus sixteen chorus girls, three comedians, three straight men, and a vaudeville act. That was the backbone of burlesque. You don’t see that now, there’s no burlesque,” he laments, his voice trailing off with irritation. “There are strip shows, but I don’t call that burlesque. Now they have what they call ‘stripperama.’ Strip, strip, strip. That’s all.”

Both agents profess to being proud family men who never ran casting couches. But Irv Charnoff, with a vaudeville background, tends to dismiss burlesque in comparison: “One was family theater, and the other was just for morons.” As for pornography, Charnoff states, “I apply myself to it, but I won’t accept it.”

“I don’t care for pornography,” says Mack. “It ruined burlesque, put everybody out of work. How can you enjoy something that hurt you financially, that hurt your career? I don’t book 42nd Street—I book coast to coast, Europe, Hong Kong, Singapore. I spoke to Guam today. Agents book wherever they can.” Mack feels there are under a half-dozen genuine striptease queens left today. “Stripping is not burlesque. We had burlesque long before we had stripping. But nobody’s come close to Ann Corio or Gypsy Rose Lee. If they did, you’d see their name in lights.”

By the 1930s, any American town with over 100,000 in population had a burlesque house. In addition to the featured strippers, each theater employed a line of six to eight chorus dancers in skimpy outfits doing risqué material—an easy way for dolls to break into show biz. Geoffrey Gorer, a British critic who’d attended a dozen New York burlesque houses in the mid-Thirties, found “Miss June Glories” to be the typical American stripper of his rather superficial visits. Unlike the state-of-the-art performance set down later by Gypsy, the low-caliber Miss June Glories was not graceful, entering the stage in a backward lean. Her knees remained unflexed as she walked in a goosestep, arms held away from her body. New York State, Gorer assumed, considered it immoral to undress to any light except green or blue; thus spotlights onstage darkened to these colors as garments began to lower.

“Give the little lady a hand,” repeated each theater’s emcee as Miss June walked off in her undergarments, having given a sexless, impersonal performance, like a military drill. The girls of burlesque often came from pious Catholic families and earned only $20 a week for a fourteen-hour day. The show’s comedian would often marry one.

Some of the primitive burlesque houses existed in the Bowery, a quarter that was virtually without women. The elevated subway ran down the middle of Third Avenue, which was made up entirely of rooming houses and hotels “For Men Only,” where beds cost thirty cents. Here was a melting pot of transient workers—Italians, Poles, Germans, who spoke little English and were too poor to marry. Only at burlesque theaters could they fully view a woman. Every week these lonely guys, hideous with drink, managed to spare twenty-five cents for this sad and solitary female-viewing pleasure, never able to cross the barrier of the footlights.

The Olympic on 14th Street offered your basic low burlesque—installments of sidewalk conversation alternating with the appearance of girls. “I’m in love!” one of the cuties would cry, “I’m in love! I’m gonta jump off the Brooklyn Bridge!”

“Don’t do that,” said the straight man, “you’ll get the water dirty!” The strippers rippled their bellies and peeled to their pasties and G-strings. The forefathers of today’s old lobsters watched this sexual exhibition with mute, unsmiling impassivity, only to applaud when they left the stage. Contact with the girls was unthinkable.

In Slight contrast to this was the Minsky Brothers’ Republic Theater on 42nd, which cost a dollar during the Depression, while Ziegfeld charged six dollars across the street. Laughter echoed through the aisles at sexual “dubble entenders.” The Minskys hired buxom girls, not skinny flappers, who earned $25 in the chorus, and betrayed their roles by laughing inappropriately at the jokes. One perennial Minsky routine, “Anthony & Cleopatra,” had Caesar in a tin helmet smoking a fat cigar catching Anthony (the Jewish comic) on a divan with Cleopatra (the leading striptease girl).

“Not for Your Aunt from Dubuque,” read the
New Yorker
ads for Minskys’ in the 1930s. The Republic discovered comics like Red Skelton, Phil Silvers; they had thirty-two chorus girls, rolling across the stage, posing in silhouette behind a male singer. But the Minsky performers couldn’t remove their pasties or point a finger crotchward. Once again, physical contact between audience and strippers was unthinkable.

This thriving, giddy Minsky chain was put to death by Mayor La Guardia, who outlawed burlesque in 1940, closing thirteen theaters in New York. “There was no question it was politically motivated,” said surviving brother Morton Minsky during a public conversation at Lincoln Center. “Without this cause célèbre he would not have been reelected. We were denied the use of our name Minsky,” said the bald, aging former owner, with a high-pitched Wally Cox-type voice. “If there were no statute of limitations, I for one would sue the city of New York for millions,” he declared, forty-four years after the loss of his business. “I am of the opinion that burlesque will return in some form, if young, talented people develop the tradition.... What they call ‘burlesque’ today is something we would have no part of.”

The ringing rebuke to Morton Minsky and the booking agents is Bob Anthony, former day manager of the Melody Burlesk, who became part owner of its new incarnation, the Harmony. The back office at 48th and Broadway remains a salty, sub-show business sanctum striving for legitimacy, a proud alter cocker clubhouse for those never admitted to the Friars. Anthony, who’s been in the burlesque game quite a few years, managing various and sundry Broadway theaters before this, is quick to reflect on his early days with Sinatra:

“I was his right-hand man, the early Jilly. I used to be his secretary, belt out guys for him and everything. I once knocked out Buddy Rich in the old days, didn’t like what he was sayin’ about Frank. We’re all good street fighters. We were raised in Hoboken, it was rough and tough, a seaport. He got me my first singing job with Ina Ray Hutton’s all-male band in 1944, when I came out of the navy. Now I’m an alter cocker, same age as Frank,” says Anthony, with a youthful head of hair and open V-neck shirt, like a Vegas showman. “You’d love Frank. I visit him all the time. He’s a mensch.”

The Harmony, née Melody, has indeed become the lone Times Square holdout of striptease. The Melody booked a landslide of wild strippers and hot sex queens. There, finally, Anthony let down the drawbridge whereby men could touch, or in fact
lunch out
on the participating strippers, when “Mardi Gras” was first initiated. The typical Harmony gals, however, tend to be the Miss June Glories of today. The dolls’ acts are strictly gynecological these days, but Anthony does keep a burlesque aura, what with Doris Day musical interludes between strips, and showcards, the better to keep lawmen away. Apple pie? “Yeah, that’s it!” cries Anthony. OI’ fashioned cheesecake? “You got it!” says Anthony. “I give ‘em good fuckin’ burlesque, we run it clean. Don’t kid yourself, there’s a depression out there, my friend, they’re lucky to be working.”

Manny Rosen, confidant of the management, seventy-six, an ex-boxer who came within days of fighting for the lightweight championship, interjects: “I’m very tight with Shecky Green, and I’ve been on the Carson show twice.” Rosen wrote “King Heroin” for James Brown, whom he met while working at the Stage Deli for thirty-two years. He came up with the theater’s original name, the Melody, when Al Kronish grabbed the location of the Oasis massage parlor in the early 1970s. He spends much of his time here, holding court with Anthony, keeping a special close watch on the young strippers. “I like to be surrounded by ‘em,” says Manny.

“Mendel, you bastard you, that’s my boy,” sings Anthony, a former big-band crooner. “Mendela, you alter cocker. He gives them all a good schtup. Manny’s been with me since the Follies Burlesque, my right-hand man.”

Some of the crustaceans who linger here are ex-boxers of sorts, an army of old warriors on red alert should any trouble arise. “My day manager is an ex-wrestler,” says Anthony. “He’ll pin you in a second, throw you a mile. All good people here,” he insists. “Stevie and Freddie, that was a bad rap they got. There’s no prostitution here, there was never no prostitution, that’s terrible,” he says, referring to the last crackdown on the Melody, when newspapers revealed an assistant D.A. was co-owner. Hence, the Melody’s closure for several months in 1983 and its reopening as the Harmony. “It’s a joke, I mean the worst thing we ever did was, they sat in guys’ laps and accepted tips. The girls wear G-strings. What was so bad?

“I’d love Mayor Koch to come up here. Rocky Graziano comes up, Tony Atlas, all the pro wrestlers, fighters come up to visit Manny. I tell ya, priests come up here, rabbis... and all my goombahs from Hoboken come up, Frank’s friends.”

Has Ol’ Blue Eyes ever been up?

Bob Anthony hesitates then seems to recall his coming incognito once to scout a film location. “Straight, clean burlesque is what I run, good, old-fashioned stuff. I guess you could call me Mr. Burlesque.”

How do the old flesh agents tell an old stripper when she’s ready to be put out to pasture?

“You just stop booking her,” says Anthony.

“When she can’t get a job,” says Jess Mack. “I wouldn’t have the nerve to tell anybody that. When they can’t get bookings, they know something’s wrong.”

Irv Charnoff chimes in: “You gotta tell ‘em that they’re asking for youth, they’re not looking for professionalism or wardrobe, they wanna look at skin. I don’t wanna recall any incidents, it’s sad enough. See, a boxer, he gets punch-drunk. Some of these girls, they feel they’re pretty, they’re vain and everything, so you cop out, ya tell ‘em business is a little quiet, or a little white lie not to hurt their feelings. It’s a business where a lot of girls get jealous, envious, they don’t know why somebody else does better than them. Some agents, just say ‘Go get lost, get yourself a job at Sears and Roebuck.’”