WHAT RUINED BURLESQUE? IS THERE NEW INTEREST? WHAT ABOUT DITA VON TEESE?

In the chapter entitled Bye Bye Burlesque towards the end of Leslie Zemeckis' book,  Beyond the Burly Q, the author reports what various strippers she included in that book had to say about the end of the profession that sometimes also meant the end of their personal careers. Some of them would've aged out by the early 1970's anyway but some simply had no idea what else they could do for a living besides burlesque. They were used to being independent women who earned their own money.

When burlesque first developed as an art form it occupied a gray area of entertainment but was close to a variety show like vaudeville. It was about comedy and included a straight man and other often actors on stage. It was not necessarily about taking it all off. Then over a few decades things changed and the art form was challenged.

The reasons include:  

A new morality in which various cities banned burlesque, which included arresting dancers which made it difficult for them. 

In the 1960's. Go Go dancers who were also often dancing near nude and pole dancing.

The woman's movement (feminism).  (I suppose that in the 1970's feminists thought of strippers as women who were repressed by men, but it was also a time when sexual liberation influenced ordinary women.)

Drag shows by transgender burlesque entertainers and "drag queen" types.

Nudie films that were also shown in the same theaters or between live entertainment.  Some of the dancers were paid a little money to allow filming, not porn, but substitutes for live performances that were then showed in theaters.

Pornography, especially so.

Excerpt page 297:  By the 1960's, a 'burlesque" show was stripped of chorus girls minus the production numbers divested of novelty acts, and missing live musicians.  The emcees were gone, song and dance acts were banished, and specialty dancers were dropped.  

Blaze Starr remembers, "You were on the stage during your act and it was a huge club.  And over all the way across the building on the wall was hardcore porn."

Excerpt page 302:  Once the strip clubs came in burlesque was out. 

My notes. The strippers and others who had worked those theaters felt their art had been degraded by pornography.  However some think that burlesque exists in contemporary  entertainment, citing Lady Gaga, Madonna, Bette M, and RuPaul. 

The argument for the current existence of burlesque is that it was once low culture but went mainstream. The height of burlesque happened in the World War II era when there was a surge in popularity.  (This figures in the story of Blaze Starr being prompted to please the army men in an audience by taking off her top.) In 1931 it went to Broadway and at the 1933 Chicago Worlds Fair Sally Rand and Faith Bacon appeared with fan dances.

However, I think the popularity and success of Dita Von Teese challenges the idea that burlesque is a lost art.  I've watched her performances on YouTube videos (as well as the performances of some of other contemporary dancers). I think Von Teese has created shows that are of the highest quality and that her performances take into consideration how every move will appear to the audience.

C 2023 Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights

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.

***

TOP HAT and CANE

 

"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

C 2023 Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot  All Rights Reserved Including Internet and International Rights

*** 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. 

CASANDRA DIAMOND : I WAS SEX TRAFFICKED FOR YEARS

CASANDRA DIAMOND is the Founding Director of BridgeNorth.

Here is the link: BRIDGENORTH ORG - OFFICIAL SITE

In a YouTube video I watched, TEDToronto talk, we learn that brothels are hidden in plain sight in the form of massage parlors.  She was for nine years part of a "stable" of prostitutes working as "masseuses. " There there were 40 to 60 women working there around the clock.  She was a child in a family that was mentally ill and abusive which lead to neglect and the streets.  She played outside all day long in summer and was raped by a stranger and degraded by neighborhood boys. She became paralyzed with shame.

She learned to be hyper-alert to avoid being attacked.  She says pedophiles will say things like "If you tell your parents, they won't love you any more."

BRIDGE NORTH is unique because it is SEX TRAFFICKING SURVIVOR LEAD.

EXCERPT from BRIDGENORTH:

Modern-day sex trafficking affects girls and women from all economic backgrounds. Homelessness and poverty are certainly risk factors, but individuals from safe homes and neighborhoods can also be targeted.  They are lured in from schoolyards, shopping malls, and social media channels, then forced into prostitution.  Predators pose as friends and boyfriends, promising a glamorous life of love and wealth. In reality their victims live a horrific nightmare from which is very difficult to escape.

IS PIMPING GOING ON IN YOUR SCHOOL?

Addition to post.  I've published the below comment.  I would suggest a person report to a hotline rather than local police.  I've heard of corrupt police before.  Another alternative is to go higher, perhaps the FBI.  Keep reading!

MIKE TODD and GYPSY ROSE LEE - BEFORE ELIZABETH TAYLOR?

Gypsy Rose Lee starred on Broadway and rumors were that she and Michael Todd, who would marry actress Elizabeth Taylor, had a thing, and that Gypsy was crazy about him.

Image replaced June 2021

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.

THE G-STRING MURDERS by GYPSY ROSE LEE was A BEST SELLER

Noir in a book, Gypsy Rose Lee always did have literary aspirations.

Pose behind a typewriter for publicity photos, this book was a best

seller, based on her notoriety first.  It launched her career as a writer.

LET ME ENTERTAIN YOU

According to the poster of this YouTube video, this is a very tame version of Gypsy Rose Lee's strip routine. Her high brown attitude and voice is interesting to me. At heart she was a literary person. She has a book in her.

"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."