BLAZE and A PANTHER AS A PROP?

In Leslie Zemeckis's book Behind the Burly Q, a reference for this month's posts, we learn that Blaze Starr tried to include various animals from the feline - Big Cat family into her act, without success. As you may know most strippers have a gimmick, a brand, which helps them define how they are different from another dancer.

EXCERPT : Pages 196-197

Starting out, Blaze Starr admitted, "I first saw Gypsy and I thought, Well you gotta have a gimmick, something people remember ya by." Everything had been used. She thought "animals." She got an ocelot and dyed it black. "I didn't have sense enough to know; it got sick and died.  It wasn't big enough."

So next she bought a Samoa leopard. "Got it through an animal company in New York who found it from a zoo... (Again) I didn't have sense. You can't ever train a cat, couldn't travel with them. I wasn't scared of them. They were babies.  t swallowed a rubber ball and died. Then I got a puma - a mountain lion they're called. Big and dangerous. It had been declawed. Died during surgery."

Her bad luck with cats continued, but she hand't given up yet. "I paid $1,100 for a baby black panther. I'd get it raw steak, just warmed."

Blaze and her panther were in a hotel in New York and Blaze went out shopping, leaving the panther inside - something she was used to doing. Although she'd leave it in the cage when the maid came. "(The maid" didn't come in and clean. She'd give me clean sheets." While Blaze was shopping, "it got in the shower, turned on the hot water. I come back, the cops and firemen are there. It had flooded a wing of the hotel. No one cold go in the room, it was screaming, weighed one hundred pounds."  Blaze went into the room. "It jumped on my back and laid its head on my shoulder and scratched my brow. I thought it was going for my jugular vein. I knew then. This is ... scary.  I sold it back for five hundred dollars.

***

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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TOP HAT and CANE

 

THE ART OF SHOWING OFF A LITTLE - NOT A LOT

In some photos I've seen of Gypsy, she looks rather thin, especially considering that very thin wasn't quite in until Twiggy, the early 1960's London fashion model who looked pubescent and work a boyish "Pixie Cut" hair style.

GYPSY ROSE LEE - STRIPPER MISTRESS OF WAXY GORDON in the SPEAKEASY ERA

Update : Here's an interesting article from Daily Mail UK about Gypsy's son Erik Preminger's new film about his mother!
DAILY MAIL : STRIPTEASE ARTIST GYPSY - DOCUMENTARY

Rose Louise Hovick - Gypsy Rose Lee

1911-1970

To prepare to write this Mistress of the Month post, besides reading author Karen Abbott's book cover to cover, I watched a few YouTube videos including excerpts from the film in which actress Natalie Wood played Gypsy.  I found a joking and fully clothed Gypsy Rose Lee on an old television show called "What's My Line," which is in black and white and seems extremely dated.

Gypsy projected humor and a certain optimistic joy of living.  It is that attitude that she brought into her burlesque theatre routines.  Her smile was dazzling, but her first set of caps that made her teeth thick, even, and white, was a first perk when early on she was the mistress of a New York mobster named Waxy Gordon, original name Irving Wexler.

Years ago I attended a musical play about Gypsy Rose Lee at a local college theater department.  The play as well as most every mention of Gypsy (and her sister, who became the actress June Hovic) seems to include their mother, Rose, who was the back stage mother from hell, something that perhaps actress Wood had in common with them. 

Why was Rose hell?  Well, I imagine that she was not just driven but a Narcissist and not just a Narcissist but a Malignant Narcissist.  Both of her daughters learned to keep her out of their business eventually. With all the pushy single mothers back in the day getting their pretty and talented daughters to support them, well, maybe this was what it took to survive starvation.  It was the early 1900's when Rose as a single mother of two daughters with no other talent than her pushiness - which likely repelled their fathers - decided her girls were destined for show business.

Petite and blond June, the looker when they were kids, was the one Mama Rose promoted first.  No doubt these two sisters were highly incompatible by their natures and no doubt mom set up a competition between the two but for a while Rose Louise, the darker haired daughter who would become a world renown stripper, was outdistanced by her sister. The one thing both of them had in common was Rose, who as an irrepressible mom had to be dealt with, had to be kept out of their lives as much as possible.

If June went the way of the "good girl," Gypsy, went the way of the "bad girl," at least by reputation. Mom taught her that men should get just the opposite of what other girls, and other strippers, gave, which even then, in acts that generally were tame compared to what strippers do at your local venue, was too much.

Was virginity really expected?

During the Great Depression, according to the author, seven out of ten single men and women were active sexually.  That was risky taking. It was illegal to advertise birth control.  Lovers had to mail order "marriage hygiene" products, tried the rhythm method, or invested in a 14 caret gold button IUD!

The woman who appeared on "What's My Line," has in common with actress Marilyn Monroe, the forgiveness of popular culture, the understanding that sometimes when you are a nobody with nothing coming out of nowhere, you do things which are maybe immoral or wrong. A certain aspect of our popular culture figures any kind of work is better than a handout.

To tell the truth, Gypsy got out of stripping not just because she was aging but because the up and coming strippers were going well beyond anything she ever did, making her stripping seem like a comedy act by the 1950's.  Still, she was active as an entertainer from 1928-1969.
Believing that the tease was what her audiences wanted, rather than blatant nudity that shows all, it wasn't until her last strip that she was briefly seen entirely in the nude and then for a fast second before she went behind the curtains.  She kept that ongoing joke of a tease going for years and years.

Gypsy married, divorced, married and had one son, Eric, who, according to some sources, was supposedly the son of film director Otto Preminger, rather than her husband at the time, and divorced.  She married a third time and divorced again.
But for our purposes here, we enter into the reasons beyond a strip act that came to be thought of as tame, for the "bad girl" reputation that Gypsy Rose Lee had back in her early days.

According to author, in the 1930's in New York, there were "animal parties" which were basically sex parties, and gypsy went to them though at heart she was asexual.  It is not said if she simply watched, held her men at arms length, or if she was actually participatory, but her attitudes about sex were very pragmatic. Rose knew it and was indignant that Gypsy had gone this low.


Rose might have objected to her daughter being sexual but Waxy Gordon was not Gypsy's first lover nor did she aim to be married to Mr. Right.  She had lost her virginity to "Ed" a wealthy man connected to Broadway and literary circles that she aspired to.  Then she had a fling with Red who taught her how to Kiss.  Then a Crooked cop.  As she worked her way down to Waxy, who was a short, plump and dangerous man with a diamond bracelet on his own wrist, a man who made his money in speakeasies during Prohibition, she got to know that he knew everyone in the mob from Lucky Luchiano to Arnold Rothstien.  Waxy ran 32,000 speakeasies, illegal nightclubs that served illegal liquor and varied from beautiful locations with the finest of liquors to what amounted to holes in the wall with stuff that could kill off your liver laced with dangerous chemicals.  He brought in 80% of the liquor from Canada and the Bahamas and worked with Irish gangs.  It was rumored that his tactics included murder and even a 6000 foot beer pipeline underground.  Waxy Gordon lived in splendor with a wife and three children, not that he was known to be faithful.  When the average person was earning less than $2000 a year, he was paying about $6000 in personal rent, the children were in expensive private schools and rode horseback.  Waxy is said to have worn underwear bought for $10 a piece under his slick custom suits.  In 1930 he had money to spare from an estimated income of 1.5 million in income, for which he paid $10.76 in taxes.  As a side, the television series Boardwalk Empire has Waxy as a character.

After he set eyes on Gypsy, he sent over four bottles of champagne in a typical act of generosity to those he was interested in and soon they had an implicit agreement that he would open doors for her.  He called her the day ater they met and said she had to go to his dentist to have her teeth straightened.  Mama objected so they didn't go.  But then came the next message from a friend who said Waxy was very hurt and that she had better go.  It was a warning.  The doctor owed Waxy and soon she had new caps that looked like real teeth.  When he asked her to perform at a prison benefit she went.  Rose had bought them a house for $8000 in Queens but it had no furniture.  Waxy started having furniture delivered.  Soon, according to her blond actress sister June, Gypsy became the Pet of the Underworld.  She too was concerned about what was happening to her sister who said "I will never be Louise again.  Call me Gypsy."   Gypsy said, "Nobody is going to be a roadblock for Gypsy Rose Lee."

Gypsy started to think that all men were married and wanted a mere ornament of a woman who would help them live a fantasy life. 

As for Waxy, Gypsy called him "Mr. Gordon and he called her "kid."

Rose decided to like him.  She said, "Give me a true blue gangster anytime."

Nobody was kidding anybody.

While June proved to have no talent or instinct for stripping as an art form and felt ashamed when she tried it,  Rose with the help of Waxy was soon working for the Minsky Brothers, entertainment pioneers if you include stripping.  But now she had to step into Waxy's world which including the shocking parties in which there was smoking and conversation, but mostly sex.  June went to one and soon fled.  How could Rose have allowed it? June was convinced it was because her mother never loved her.

Maybe Rose only loved herself?


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ALL HEART

"OUR FRIENDSHIP HAD ALREADY BEEN BROKEN AS A CUP SHATTERS ON THE SIDEWALK"

CHAPTER :  "A NEW BEGINNING"

(UNNAMED WOMAN went to New York from Nijniy Novgorod at the age of 22.  Her friend Marina, who'd been raped on a beach by a stranger and had an abortion, had gone to New York before her.  Marina, who she had been friends with for 18 of her 22 years, just told her life was wonderful. She promised to find her a good job and place to live.  The good job was that of a stripper.)

Page 109 - 110 

"Later on, Marina, who was supposed to be my friend, demanded payment for my housing and food,.  She started fights and conflict.  She betrayed me.  I found out that the entire time she lived in the apartment she had never paid rent and that she had put the lease in my name.  The landlord demanded the rent from me.  The whole thing cost me $4000.  I started to dance at the club since there was no other choice. Later, I discovered that she got a commission for bringing me in on this job.

Then Marina disappeared... Our friendship had already been broken as a cup shatters on the sidewalk.

When I first decided to try dancing it was not as simple as you might think.  I had to undress down to my underwear and let dirty sweaty-handed men put dollar bills in my panties.   They did so with excited expressions on their faces as if they were giving me one-hundred-dollar bills.  The first time, I was the only one on the stage.  I was as thin as a stick, and unable to move right.  I was paralyzed with fear... Later, I learned how to move and become a bitch..."

RUSSIANS INVENTED LOVE IN ORDER NOT TO PAY? SHE FELL IN LOVE WITH A BLACK MAN AND AMERICA AND IS A STRIPPER

CHAPTER : "THE SECRET LIFE OF TWO SOULS"
SHATTERED DREAMS BROKEN PROMISES is C 2007 Michael Viner Phoenix Books

UNNAMED WOMEN fell in love with a Black American man, while still in Russia, called Smith.   Though her mother loved American Jazz, and she had reason to believe her mother had an affair with a Black man herself at one time, she knew this was not acceptable behavior.  She conducted her dating relationship with him for a year without introducing him to her parents and then he continued to write to her from America.  She came to New York as a dancer on a Broadway production and she had Smith continued their relationship.  She became pregnant while living with him.  Eventually she becomes a Stripper.

Page 177 - 178

"I decided I would talk to my dad and he would prepare my mother for the news.  Surely, the most important thing was that I was a happy woman.  Smith gave me an engagement ring and said we should get married right away.  It's funny because in Russia, you don't swap rings before you get married, the "wedding ring" is called the "engagement ring" and you're given this on your wedding day.  We got married and had a small celebration with just the two of us.  I thought it was strange when Smith put the ring on my left hand.  In Russia, you only wear the ring on your left hand if you are a widow.  Otherwise, it is customary to wear their ring on your right hand... his parents didn't accept me."

(She called Russia to announce she was three months pregnant and married to Smith.  Her father died of a heart attack from the shock immediately after talking to her.  She had her baby, Anastasia, and then four years later Smith had an affair with a co-worker and left her alone in America.)

Page 178
 
"Not long ago our maid from Moscow called and told me that my mother had died.  I took a flight with my daughter back home.  People around us gave me condemning looks and whispered about my black daughter.  After I had been there a few days, I understood how much I loved America.  I will never go back to Russia."

... You spend your money simply without thinking, making sure that the ever-present shadow of despair does not suck you in,  This is how you prove to yourself why you work in this business and why you shake every part of your body in front of strangers' faces.

Working as a strip dancer, you can't build a serious relationship with a man  Indeed no man wants to learn that his dear girl shows her body in front of hundreds of salivating men. The men who work as the owners of the clubs, the drivers of the girls, the managers and the guards have nothing against us.  They know that we are normal.  But it's not a good idea to have an affair with someone from the work place.  For a woman, it is emotionally hard to hide the work she's doing from the man she loves.  She lies because she is afraid to lose him.  She works because she needs to survive.  And she is always afraid to be alone.

... In my home country they say that "Russians invented love in order not to pay."

MATA HARI - A SPY and EXOTIC DANCER

New video added here June 2021

Video by IntlSpyMuseum