YOU CAN'T CALL HER BLAZE IF THERE'S NO SMOKE OR FIRE - WHY MISS SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION?

Commentary by Missy:

Reading around the Internet about Blaze Starr, before I got the book by Leslie Zemeckis, I learned some interesting things about Blaze's performances. You can also check YouTube as there have been some videos of her performing, which because of my policy to comply with Google community standards and not provide what might be considered pornography here at Mistress Manifesto, I will not embed. In one of the videos I watched smoke appeared to blow out of her body. Of course this was akin to a magic trick. It also illustrates the humor that was the early tradition of Burlesque entertainment.

Blaze Starr figured out that burlesque was a good way to make good money early in her life and she had a widowed mother with another ten children to support to think of as well. She was not educated and had few career options, other than to perhaps marry and become a housewife and mother. She never became either. At the top of her career she was earning, according to Zemeckis, $2000 dollars a week.  (The year is not definite so I can't run that through an inflation calculator, but let's say it was 1950. In which case that would be about $25,000 a week.)

She knew she needed a gimmick, a brand, and she tied her stage name with smoke and fire. 

According to various sources, there were Burlesque dancers who moved slowly with grace and there were others who were in the "bump and grind" category like Blaze. Watching films of her dance, she was in no way as graceful and effortless as today's premier Burlesque Queen, Dita Von Teese. Sometimes Blaze appears awkward to me.

She was beautiful and had, from a young age, large breasts. She got known for bullet bras. She tried to have an animal companion on stage with her as a gimmick, as other dancers had. (One even danced with a large snake wrapped around her.) But soon Blaze decided her gimmick was to be smoke and fire. They called her Miss Spontaneous Combustion. One of her exotic dances was called The Fire Dance. She rigged up a couch with a burner so at the end, smoke blew from between her legs. Sometimes the peaches that were put into the burner to create the smoke actually went on fire and flames could be seen.

Blaze made all her own costumes by hand. Gowns were usually expensive and had to be made to last on long tours on the road. There were some companies that made gowns and other items just for the dancers, but not everyone could afford them. The dancer was also expected to have wardrobe changes, so her audience would not get bored, as well as robes for when she got off stage and to be groomed and dressed well in general. The dancers also perfumed themselves. Each stripper also forged her identity on and off stage by her wardrobe choices and had her ideas about how to play with her costumes to tease. They were also careful not to throw the items they removed in the dance. They employed or tipped people behind the curtains or off stage to carefully collect and hang the garments. Some of the dancers employed personal maids who took care of the costume wardrobes and traveled with them. 

***

According to author Leslie Zemeckis, Blaze Starr was arrested three times.The first time she thought it was her boyfriend, on the police force, that had set her up. It was  in Philadelphia and at a time when the city was restricting dancers to less suggestive movement and less revealing costumes. She and the other dancers got released.

She was also arrested at the Sho Bar in New Orleans and weeks later at the Black Cat but charges were thrown out.

Though Blaze had traveled the circuit for years and was extremely popular in New Orleans, it was in Baltimore that she settled and were she became a fixture and a local personality at the Two O'Clock Club where she had first begun performing at age sixteen.

Finally, she retreated to West Virginia and family where she lived into her 80's, unmarried and childless herself.

***

Excerpt page 281:

Blaze apparently gave them something to scream about. One news article claimed she dropped her sequin G string down to her knees and was hauled into court and fined fifty dollars.

She worked hard to be at the top of her profession."She didn't like sharing with me.  She wanted to be the one and only Blaze", April March said.

Not only did Blaze make most of her gowns, handily with a needle and threat, she was a girl who knew her tools. During her act, she "used candles on a little table. I lit them as soon as I started taking my clothes off. I would blow it out with my mouth, but it looked like my boob was doing it.  I thought  This is good I need some fire. 

She got her own tools and cut a foot out of the back of the couch. She wanted it to appear as if her dancing made the couch catch on fire. With the help of some stage hands, she got an empty can of peaches, got a heating thing from an electrical place and rigged it with some safety pins to her couch she said.  She would plug it in and during her act, smoke would come up. Soon as I smelled it, I'd have to turn the thing off or we would have a real fire. This is great, everyone's going wild, because it's unexpected.  I'd done all I could do up there, wiggling around.

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"THE HOTTEST BLAZE IN BURLESQUE" BLAZE STARR and THE CONTROVERSIAL LOUISIANA GOVERNOR EARL K. LONG : A ONE YEAR AFFAIR MADE INTERNATIONAL NEWS

BLAZE STARR

publicity photo Image downloaded from New York Public Library digital collection

Fannie Bell Fleming

1932 –  2015

I've long wanted to elect Blaze Starr to my pantheon of Mistresses, not because she was a Burlesque Queen in the 1950's, but because of her unlikely and very public affair with married politician Louisiana Governor Earl Kemp Long in 1959-1960.  Their relationship ignited such controversy, not just because he was married; it was the combination of these two personalities that turned their one year affair into international news. Their relationship ended right after he was re-elected because he died.

Born in 1932, just a few years before Marilyn Monroe, whom Fannie Bell watched, the girl who would become a famous star on the burlesque circuit was West Virginia poor and would die there at her home at the age of eighty-three. (Her beloved dog died a couple hours later!) The oldest of eleven children, her coal miner father died of Black Lung, leaving her mother with all those children to raise. Fannie Bell left home to make it in the world and never did forget her family in the process. She needed to send money home and did. What was humble and West Virginia in her served her well. She brought comedy to her act, was famous for her inventive use of props that included smoke and fire, kept things decent by today's standards- no hard core porn, and connected with her audiences. Fannie Bell's humanity shone through. She was genuine, a real person, although some reviewers of her memoir felt she had held back some.  

For years she traveled the Burlesque Circuit, appearing at various clubs for a week or two, then moving on. Burlesque audiences were only satisfied by seeing new women, new acts. In the 1950's through the 1970's Blaze was at the Two-O'Clock Club in Baltimore. It was a club she may have owned. (Some say she did, others that she bought half interest in it for an ex boyfriend.) Upon her death in 2015 the Baltimore Sun Newspaper obituary said she had once been the most famous person in Baltimore. 

In 1989 she served as a consultant and acted in a cameo role in a film made about her life called 'Blaze' that starred Lolita Davidovich as Blaze with Paul Newman acting as Governor Long. The film was based on her memoir.  

Unfortunately, Blaze's motivation for leaving rural West Virginia may not just have been the need for money, for she was not yet sixteen years old. She may have been gang raped at fourteen or fifteen. She had physically matured early with breasts that filled a DD cup. Being molested or raped as a teen is sadly the story of too many of the women I've posted about here on this blog. What a horrendous way to be introduced to sexuality, to be robbed of choice and authority over one's own body, mind, and spirit.

As for Governor Earl K. Long, there are far more books and articles written about him than there ever were about Blaze. He was a character, even thought of as possibly mentally ill, in his way outrageous, yet he had been serving the people of Louisiana for a very long time. His wife decided he was mentally insane and had him committed, but he sprung himself and got re-elected anyway.

Blaze was married one time to a nightclub owner, Carroll Glorioso, which ended in divorce.  She said she knew that men, being men, cheated, and it didn't mean a thing but after he confessed he had cheated, a divorce followed.

Blaze, like many women who succeeded in Burlesque were wary of being supported by men, though they also allowed themselves the benefit of Stage Door Johnnies.

Here is what Leslie Zemekis, author of Behind the Burly Q, a primary reference for this month's posts, wrote:

Excerpt page 280 quoting Blaze Starr :

"In West Virginia there is a lot of spousal abuse. We'd walk through the hills two miles to get to school and kids would have their tales "Daddy beat mommy and he blacked both eyes, broke her ribs." The men would get drunk, then cry and ask for forgiveness." It taught her a valuable lesson. "I would never want to be in position to have someone support me.  I would make my own way," she said.

She explained, "Everyone was poor in those years.  It was luxury to own a cow.  There were no doctors in the area. People rode horses and wagons."  

Her mother was a schoolteacher in a one-room school and "Every 18 months a baby would come." Blaze had eleven siblings, one died at six months. She helped raise the others.

***

Fannie Bell was close with her mother who told her whatever she did, do it the best. In the film she comes home to tell her mother that the money she's earning isn't from singing or acting and her mother shows her that she already knows, she's kept the news clippings.  Her mother is without negative judgement.

Her only marriage, to nightclub owner Carroll Glorioso, ended in divorce.

Blaze, in her own book, recounted her story about meeting and later having a few dates with the man who would become President of the United States, John F. Kennedy.  She said that she and other dancers had met him previously.  However it's this passage from Leslie Zemeckis' book that is telling because when the met more officially, Kennedy acted as if it was the first he had ever met her.

Excerpt Page 208 quoting Blaze

"I'd met Governor Earl Long, working the Sho Bar. (New Orleans)  Earl was there that night, he had a table.  A big club, with a big balcony - everything filled up.  People standing at the door.  JFK and Jackie came in. I thought.  This can't be.  Now this cannot be. By then I was a Jackie fan. I come out - they were at Earl's tale.  ... Earl told me to be nice to him, 'He's gonna be your next president.' JFK shook my hand as if I'd never seen him before. He said,' Ms. Starr, you were very good tonight. " She replied, "I've been told I'm the very best."

(Jackie was also complimentary)

Twenty minutes later, Jackie left her husband at the clu b "I ain't telling you about the rest of the night, " Blaze said.

***

Blaze was discovered to have what she called a "small heart problem." She retired after having five bypass surgeries, not wanting to die naked on stage. When told her recovery would take a few years she did an enterprising thing.  She went rock hunting in North Carolina for rubies and emeralds and learned to cut them. Then she created and sold jewelry.

In 1975 she sold the Two O'Clock Club in Baltimore. Blaze, in her sixties, went back to West Virginia and family. She had made some wise investments and the cost of living there was low.

This month I will post on Blaze Starr, as Mistress of the Month, based on a variety of sources including a book about Burlesgue called Behind the Burly Q by Leslie Zemeckis. I hope you, my reader, will stick with me as we explore the life of this vivacious performer and the Governor, here at Mistress Manifesto.

Missy

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*** I kept checking YouTube videos for quality and an absence of commercials. (There were some but in keeping with the Google policy for public bloggers I can't post what might be considered offensive or X-rated.  I kept checking libraries for a copy of the book Blaze Starr!: My Life as Told to Huey Perry ( published in 1974).  I found one library that had a copy hidden away in reference: my special requests to borrow it rather than travel several hours a day to read it was not granted. On the Internet  a bottom price for a beat up copy was about $70. One source wanted near $200 for it. ming. I did find reviews and excerpts. No wonder the library had the book locked up! I want to do my best for Fannie Bell Fleming. This would not be the first month since beginning Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot that I would have to synthesize my posts from a variety of sources, some repetitive, and make some judgement calls too. 

You may also be interested in these archived posts:

November 2016

ELIZABETH L. RAY : Mistress of Representative Wayne L. Hays. She said, “I Can’t Type, I Can’t File, I Can’t Even Answer The Phone.”

September 2018

GYPSY ROSE LEE - Stripper Mistress in New York of Waxy Gordon

May 2021

JEWELL DIANNE "LADY" WALKER - A Mistress of Billionaire J. Howard Marshall : She went Christian and Died of a Face Lift. 

WHO GOT THE ART ? THE COLLECTION OF GEORGE A. LUCAS - BALTIMORE - WALTERS

According to Wikipedia, "Lucas wrote his will, died a couple months later, and he gave his art to Henry Walters (not his niece Bertha) but with the understanding that the collection would go to the Maryland Institute for the Promotion of Mechanic Arts (MICA), which had been destroyed in 1904 during a great fire.  But in 1933 most of the art went to the BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF ART on a loan.  Today it is part of the permanent collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Walters Art Museum.

BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF ART - OFFICIAL WEBSITE

WALTERS ART MUSEUM

THE MACHINATIONS - THE DEATH OF M - OCTAVIA JOSEPHINE MARCHANG and the WILL OF GEORGE ALOYSIUS LUCAS

BOOK REVIEW/REPORT from Missy.

For forty years Lucas and M lived almost as husband and wife and he acted as stepfather to her only son, Eugene.  By the 1880's some of their friends called Octavia Josephine Marchand "Mrs. Lucas."  He felt if he left her nothing it would break her heart, but then she burned up in a fire in Lucas' Paris apartment, which was right next door to the one he rented for her, and thousands of art objects escaped - as did he. Lucas was shattered and shocked by the sudden death of M, but when she died in 1909, the question was what, if anything would go to Eugene.  Eugene, who was married and had several children, was gifted the country house and some furnishings. George Lucas signed his last will on October 23rd, 1909.  By this time he was a well known and respected collector of art and had acted as an agent for wealthy people who collected.  It was understood his health was failing and his art collection was wanted by others. 

His niece Bertha Lucas seemed to head up a plot, along with his clients Walters and Frick, to get the collection to Baltimore.  Bertha wanted to be the principal beneficiary of his estate and she was a high society American who wrote a column for the newspaper, the Baltimore Sun.  She first visited Lucas, who had lived in France for decades and had never returned to America, in May of 1896.  When it came to the love of art, she was his kindred spirit and not just his kin, but according to the author, Stanley Mazaroff, in his book 'A Paris Life - A Baltimore Treasure,' she may have started stealing for herself.

By 1906 Lucas was bedridden with arthritis and Frick and Bertha Lucas blamed M and his son, ridiculously, for the old man's condition, saying he was neglected. Actually M had her own health issues and the couple were increasingly unable to care for each other.

In the Chapter of the book called 'The Final Years" Mazaroff writes that Frick and Bertha Lucas considered M "a hopelessly helpless woman who was incapable of rendering him (Lucas) any services." (page 155).  They also didn't like Lucas' support of Eugene. Though his mother and Lucas had never married, he certainly had long been treated as a stepson.

Lucas also died in 1909, just a couple months after he signed his last will.

In the end, the collection went to Baltimore.


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"M" : OCTAVIA JOSEPHINE MARCHAND : MISTRESS OF THE ART COLLECTOR GEORGE ALOYSIUS LUCAS of BALTIMORE

The bulk of the information in this art collection lover's book is in chapter seven called 'M, Eugene, and Maud.' The book serves as the primary reference for this month's post.

George Aloysius Lucas went to West Point and also trained as a civil engineer but went to Paris in 1957 where he found his profession and calling as a collector of art and agent to other collectors. He was born in 1824 and died after M did in 1900.  According to Wikipedia, at his death, he owned 19000 prints, 300 paintings, and 170 bronze sculptures.  

OCTAVIA JOSEPHINE MARCHAND - Mistress of GEORGE ALOYSIUS LUCAS

Born about 1833 - Died 1909

George Aloysius Lucas, who would one day become famous as an art collector who gifted Baltimore, never married or had children of his own, but he had a mistress for decades, living almost as husband and wife for 40 years, and he hid her so well, it's primarily his diary that gives evidence of their relationship.  Not one to blurt, he simply called her M. Were it not that his closest friends, often artists who also had mistresses in France, and their mistresses too, knew of her, we might not know M existed, unable to infer much of anything from his sparse recordings.

Octavia Josephine Marchand was a married woman with a child whose husband seems to have left her in France while he lived in England.  When this husband died, if he knew of her relationship with Lucas, if the two ever divorced, her motivations for staying with Lucas - all of this is unknown - making 'M' another mysterious muse of a mistress.  Possibly she modeled for two of the paintings that dressed the walls of the country house they eventually bought. The images that are possibly M are Charles Baugniet's "Skating" and Alfred Alboy-Rebovet's "Figure in Blue."  We know so little of her that we don't actually know what she looks like. 

In 1857 Lucas' notations recorded in his diary indicate that they were introduced at a dinner by a mutual friend, possibly her best male friend.

She was 24 years old, married but separated from a husband - officially or not - who lived in London, had a three year old son, Eugene, and was considered a "lorette." The pair did go out on the town to concerts, strolls through parts, and museums, but perhaps they claimed to be friends.  By July of 1858 they were likely lovers.  (And I personally wonder if perhaps her legal husband married her to cover his homosexuality - pure speculation on my part.)

The year 1857 the controversial book Madame Bovery by Gustave Flaubert had been published and society was shocked - or claimed to be - and Flaubert was roasted for not turning the story of adultery into a morality tale. Supposedly even sophisticated Paris thought of women as either wives or prostitutes, or maybe virgins or whores?  This double standard meant that a married woman with a child who had an affair was considered a criminal while the man she had the affair with was simply immoral. Lucas, born in Baltimore Maryland, trained as a civil engineer, had come to Paris after not much success in general in America, and he found his profession and his calling in collecting art, sometimes purchased directly from artists who would someday be famous. His closest friends included the artist Jimmy Whistler  (known for portraits such as "Whistler's Mother), who had a mistress named Joanna Hiffernan and then a mistress named Maud Franklin; both of these mistresses liked M. Lucas loved his life in France and would never return to American though he bought art for many Americans.

As a lorette, M could be introduced to his closest friends but not his family.  It's thought that he kept the existence of M and their relationship hidden in order to maintain an impeccable reputation with his American clients first and foremost.  And so there are no letters between them to be found, no photos, sculptures, or other images - expect possibly the already mentioned paintings. 

Was she simply a beautiful woman to show off to his friends or did he love her?  Evidence of love is that in August 1880 when she went to London to visit her ailing husband and wouldn't say for sure when or if she would return, he recorded in his diary that he was heartbroken. He wrote to her urging her to return and she did a week after the mother and son departed.

He sought a country house for them to share as a family and found one in Boissise in August 1866 but it would take years before it was completely paid for, remodeled, and decorated.  And then it became the home that hosted a great many friends. He took M and Eugene all to his favorite place called La Maison Blanche for a month in 1868 and so you could say they were out as a couple.

1870 was the Franco-Prussian war and there is no mention of her in his diaries and so it's possible that the couple split up - lived separately during that time.  It wasn't until 1873 that the house was complete and by 1875 maybe the whole Flaubert scandal behind them, Lucas began to entertain including American artists at the house, revealing himself and his relationship to more people.  Still in the fall they would go live at 41 rue de l'Arc de Triomphe in adjoining apartments, Lucas paying the rent on hers - the two front doors adjoined.  There on the 4th floor in the apartments - including hers - Lucas kept his collections in cabinets, armoires, and cardboard boxes. The apartments held prints, drawings, watercolors, oils, letters and photos of the artists, this and that.  There were hundreds.  He was earning a good income on commissions as he sought out and sold art for collectors.

In Paris Lucas lived the life of a wealthy businessman outwardly but his heart was in the Fontainebleau Countryside where he had vineyards and a Bohemian atmosphere went on and other unmarried people were open in their relationships.  Artists Rousseau and Millet  who lived in nearby villages openly had mistresses.  His frind Huntington, a journalist, brought around Angele Allaine,his mistress and after he died Lucas supported her for a couple months in 1885.

Eugene was treated as a son by Lucas and the two became close.  in 1874 he left France for college.  College completed, he returned to Paris.  Lucas loaned him money to start up as a civil engineer in London but eventually he was back to Paris. In 1886 Eugene was 32 years old and got married.  His five children were treated well by Lucas who paid the rent on a family home for them and they frequently came to dinner.

By 1904 both Lucas and M were in failing health and, as seriously ill as she was, they could not care for each other.  Their last trip to the country house was in 1897. Lucas gifted the country house to Eugene for his family  and still Eugene came to Paris to visit.  Meanwhile the Maryland Institute wanted the collection of art. There had been a fire in 1904 and then a half million raised and a Neoclassical building designed to house an art collection. M died in 1909 so she could not be the heir to the collection. Eugene was the likely candidate but this was not meant to be. This is where, perhaps not surprisingly, a plot was hatched. His last will was written October 23, 1909.

To let you hang on that cliff just a bit, let's just say that the death of M left Lucas shattered.  She burned to death in his apartment and he is said to have escaped by miracle as did thousands of art objects.  (Perhaps a murder mystery is implied?)  His relative's machinations to get that art to Baltimore had become mean spirited for they blamed M and hated her. 


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This post was edited due to formatting issue on September 9, 2019 and due to not holding corrections on September 17, 2019.