Grinding to a Halt

If vaudeville was once king, burlesque was the nation's raffish, rococo old queen. Sixty years ago this week, Baltimore's New Monumental Theater featured "Divorceland: A fantasy of song and jest, with sumptuous scenic environment and an ensemble of beauteous femininity, prodigally clad in costly raiment." Throughout the '20s and '30s, pratfalls and epidermis at Minsky's warmed the Broadway night. From Boston's elegant Old Howard Theater to the vulgar palaces of Midwestern river towns, innocently dirty old men of all ages whistled and stamped at the sultry writhings of Gypsy Rose Lee, Ann Corio and Rose La Rose.

Fiftyish but still game, Rose was back at Cincinnati's Gayety Burlesk last week. But the beat at the Gayety was a dirge to the vanishing world of burlesque. In its rowdy, 60-year history, the old grind house featured such titillating favorites as Tempest Storm, Trudine, The Quiver Queen, and Moonbeam McSwine (complete with an armful of randy piglets). Like most such houses, it has been reduced in recent years to skin flicks, separated by the geriatric gyrations of faded strippers. Now the Gayety is being torn down to make way for a parking lot. To mourn the moment, the town fathers brought Harold Minsky and his troupe from Las Vegas and persuaded Rose La Rose to come out of retirement. The result was simultaneously salacious and a much too respectable salute to a bygone era.

Flit Guns. Cincinnati citizens turned the two-night extravaganza into a community project. The Minsky show was staged in the nearby Shubert Theater, and post-performance parties were thrown at the Gayety. Some 100 lady volunteers scrubbed away part of the Gayety's grime and even painted over the most unsavory washroom graffiti. Sixty years of libidinous musk was impossible to eradicate, however; before the opening-night party, Flit guns filled with Nettie Rosenstein perfume were distributed among the ladies.

Nearly 4,000 black-tied gentlemen and bejeweled matrons turned out for the two performances. Catcalls and whistles echoed throughout the house as the curtain rose on a chorus line of topless dancers and intensified at the entrance of Alawn Don Jay, the "Sophisticate Blond Beauty." Audiences paid $25,700 for the show. Highlight of the evening's entertainment: Cece Ingram, a top-heavy lass billed as Satan's Angel. Satan's little darling stripped down to a G string and tassels, which she set aflame and proceeded to twirl in opposite directions. Sighs Cece: "It wrecks the breasts, but I've stayed in the business because--well--burlesque is my home."

Teasingly Yours. At intermission, traditional candy butchers did a thriving business in "surprise packages" containing little nasties and taffy at a dollar a throw. Later, at the Gayety, Rose held court in a silver gown, signed men's shirttails with "Teasingly Yours, Rose La Rose" for $10. Bright young girls hawked pasties ($2) and tassels ($7).

John J. Strader, a wealthy Cincinnatian, lovingly cradled six boxes of G strings and pasties as he said: "I've bought these to give to old friends, to the lovers of the better things in life." Added his wife: "We like to see a little Americana left. If we don't preserve some of the things that make up our history, we'll end up with a country full of parking lots."

Alas, that seems to be the fate of all the Gayeties. Boston's Old Howard burned down nine years ago. "The Block" in Baltimore, once a glittering mecca of burlesque, is slated to be razed next year. Dirty movies and crass, ubiquitous nudity have virtually finished burlesque. A few bawdy old burlesque houses are left, but where they once were a cornucopia of good, smutty fun, now they are mainly a refuge for the pitiful and lonely. Where Lily St. Cyr and Pepper Powell once performed with lavish eroticism, Abba E. Bond and her Gaza Strip and Terry and her Privates now perform grim, grotesque imitations.

Worse, says Looney Lewis: "Some of the top strippers these days are guys with silicone treatment around the hips and chest." Mourns Cece of the flaming tassels: "It will never be the same again. I'll never be a Tempest Storm or a Lily St. Cyr. Burlesque is dead."

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