Authors: Joseph Mitchell
“I sat him at a table right near the kitchen where it was so warm it would singe your hair. Then I had the waiters spill soup on him and step on his feet and scrape crumbs into his lap. His wife ordered some wine, and I said to myself, ‘I’ll fix her.’ I got me some cold tea and I poured some kerosene in it and I dumped a little gin in it and I shook it up. Well, this couple stayed in the place until daybreak and spent
$125—which was easy to do, of course—and then the man came up to me. I thought he was going to hit me.
“But no. He said, ‘Mr. Holton, I want to thank you for a wonderful night. I never had such an interesting time. I am going to tell all my friends about your place.’
“And then his wife said, ‘And the wine, Mr. Holton! How marvelous! The most wonderful Amontillado sherry I ever tasted. How do you get such wonderful wine in this beastly prohibition country?’
“After that I gave up.”
Mr. Holton talked for two hours and in the middle of the second hour he became incoherent. Finally he stretched out in a booth in the back room of the bar and grill and went to sleep. I left him there, snoring happily, and went back to my office and wrote the story on mass insanity. My city editor approved the story and said that Mr. Holton should be elected President of the Psychiatric Association of America. About six months later I went up to Harlem to ask Mr. Holton to help me locate one of the heads of the numbers lottery for an interview. He wasn’t in the pool room on Lenox Avenue in which I sometimes found him, nor was he in the fried-fish café operated by one of his fat women friends. I couldn’t find him anywhere. A few days later I was walking by the café and the woman came out on the sidewalk and said
she heard I had been inquiring after Mr. Holton. She said, “I just wanted to let you know that he kicked the bucket in Bellevue.” Mr. Holton died insane. His disease was general paresis.
God rest his soul.
If you smirk enough you can get away with practically anything in a New York newspaper and once it is understood that Sex is to be treated coyly or as melodrama, one of the most amusing classes of people to interview are naked people—nudists, strip tease girls, models, dancers who believe that to be artistic you just start unbuttoning. Such people abound in New York City, a city whose women are remarkably narcissistic, and in the last five or six years I have seen interviews with them become part of the feature writer’s routine.
Such interviews are known as “cheese-cake,” a term originally used by photographers for any shot in which a female has been induced to assume a sexy pose but more specifically for those standardized photographs taken on decks of liners in which a girl poses with her dress lifted above her knees. Handing
a ship-news assignment to a photographer, a picture editor will say, “See if you can pick up some cheesecake on this boat.” (I do not know the origin of the term. Except for “cheese-cake” and “lobster-shift,” most newspaper slang is explicable and off-hand, such as “hot squat” for an electrocution and “dry dive” for an out-the-window suicide and “slug” for the identification words—SLAY for a murder; SNATCH for a kidnaping—on sheets of copy.) There is one newspaper in New York City which prints acres of cheese-cake, but you should see one of their holy, down-with-it editorials about burlesque; in my opinion a pimp is a cherub compared with the two-faced editorial writer of this newspaper.
The classic example of cheese-cake is a series of photographs of a French dancer made in her stateroom on the Ile de France. She did not understand any English at all and when the assembled photographers made gestures indicating that she should lift her dress a little so her celebrated legs would show in the picture she misunderstood and cheerfully lifted her dress up to her neck. Photographers exchange cheese-cake, and the utterly candid photographs of the French dancer hang in newspaper darkrooms all over the United States.
Much typewritten cheese-cake is about striptease girls. The feature writer is responsible, as a matter of fact, for the current popularity of burlesque
in a dozen cities. He is, however, not always welcome backstage in New York houses, managers knowing that when newspapers run an unusual number of stories about strippers the reformers throw catfits and in a short time the industry has to be, as Variety terms it, Sapolioed.
I am not opposed to cheese-cake stories on principle. They mirror a form of life which pullulates in this city, and a few of them are funny. The ads I see every morning in the subway—the constipation cure ads, for instance, especially those of the chocolate-covered ones—are far more disgusting to me than anything I have ever seen or heard in a burlesque house. There is little variety in cheese-cake, however, and the fact that there has to be a smirk or an ogle in every paragraph sometimes makes it unpleasant reading. I think there is too much of it. I think, as a matter of fact, that burlesque strippers are a great deal like elephants; when you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all. I think I found out all I will ever want to know about burlesque in one afternoon. I will tell about this afternoon.
The house was the Apollo and it is on West Forty-second Street. When I arrived the second show of the day, the 3:30, was moving along and the first stripper, copper-haired Margie Hart, was taking off her clothes out on the horseshoe stage. Backstage a mob of naked young women were standing around,
yawning, waiting to pony-prance out on the stage with grins on their tired faces. The flyman stood with one hand tightened on a rope, ready to snatch a drop into the air for the comedy bit which customarily follows the first stripper. There were thirty-eight girls in the show and backstage everything was crowded.
The show was a little behind time and Miss Hart, who is well-set-up, was working fast. She didn’t “work up.” Just before the third blackout she let out a yell, slipped out of her filmy, pink step-ins and tossed them into the wings. Except for her G-string, a pair of blue shoes, the rouge on her lovely cheeks and the fillings in her teeth, she was naked as the day she was born. She gave the customers a couple of grinds and a series of hot bumps and her strip was over. Although the customers—“the boys”—kept smacking their hands together insistently, she was seen no more, the sweet thing.
A moment later a stuttering comedian began one of burlesque’s basic comedy scenes, the scene in the doctor’s office, a scene with a multitude of variations. (Each comic has his own variation of the court scene, the honeymoon scene, the night-clerk scene, the cop in the alley scene, etc., and he can play them “slow” or “dirty,” according to how the censors feel at the moment.) The straight, or talking-woman, waited in the wings until it was time for her to strut out with her hands on her lean hips. She rested
against a boomerang, a stanchion for a wing floodlight. Lifting one of her bare legs, she scratched an ankle. Her eyes were sleepy.
In a minute she was on the stage, wide-awake, and backstage you could hear her talking, telling the doc she sure did need about two dollars worth of his best advice. Then there was the report of a loud slap in the face. They talked fast and only at intervals could the lines be distinguished backstage. You could hear her jumping up and down and chanting, “Oh, doctor, I feel so good. Oh, doctor, I feel so good.” You could hear the stuttering doc get off some gag about mercy-killing. He jumped up and down as he talked.
The reason for this insane leaping about is obscure. Sometimes comics will forget all about the bit in which they are working and start jumping up and down, chanting some unrelated line, such as “Meet you around the corner in a half an hour. Meet you around the corner in a half an hour.”
After the climax gag and the blackout, a “number girl,” a singer who leads numbers, strolled out on the stage singing “These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You).” The number girl was Mary Joyce, a nice blonde with a nice voice, and when she knocked off, the curtains opened and the stage was crowded with girls. The chorus danced out toward the customers and then danced back in, gently bobbing the transparent bibs over their breasts. The haughty showgirls
paraded. Then the toe-line, a chorus of ballet girls from the Fokine school, an innovation in burlesque, tiptoed out.
“Let’s catch this toe number,” said Emmett Callahan, managing director of the Apollo, who was backstage for a few minutes.
He got out of his chair beneath the call board, and pushed his way into the wings. The pert little girls in the ballet tiptoed this way and that. They made a sudden dip in unison and their short, starched skirts billowed out. Mr. Callahan watched them with approval, smiling at the leader as she danced into the wings.
Mr. Callahan is one of burlesque’s bright boys. He came from Toledo, where Joe E. Brown was in his class in public school. He used to work in vaudeville—“Midgie Miller & The Callahan Brothers.” He has been in the show business twenty-six years, mostly around New York, and now, even including the Minskys, he is probably the most important burlesque impresario.
He is the husband of Ann Corio, by far the most popular stripper, the girl who once drew down $1,900 for a week in Cleveland, topping Gypsy Rose Lee by hundreds and hundreds of dollars. She works on a percentage basis, taking a big cut of the profits. Mr. Callahan calls her “Annie.”
“Classy little shrimps,” said Mr. Callahan, surveying his ballet.
When the ballet finished up, three Negro tap-dancers in fancy brown tuxedos clattered out. Mr. Callahan, uninterested, left the wings and went back to his chair. Unclothed girls stood all around him, but he did not notice them. When one girl passed he nodded when she spoke, and said, “How’s your cough, Mary?” The little girl said, “Oh, I’m O.K., Mr. Callahan.”
A cough is unusual in a burlesque company, and colds are practically unknown. The hardihood of the overworked and underpaid burlesque girls is amazing. They work naked, sometimes in drafty houses, and they make quick changes in overheated dressing rooms and then run down cold stairways, but they are rarely under the weather. Mr. Callahan said the exercise they get makes them robust; stomping their way through four or five shows a day the girls get more exercise than a fighter in a training camp.
The conduct of the girls backstage is always disappointing to reformers. Out on the stage they will work naked and feel no embarrassment, but when they run backstage and climb the stairs to their dressing rooms they try to cover themselves up.
Conversation between the girls and the men in the stage crew is forbidden. The boyfriends of the
girls are not allowed to come backstage. As a matter of fact, it is hard for any outsider to get permission to go backstage in a burlesque theater in this city. The days when Billy Minsky used to permit gents from the Racquet and Tennis Club to stand in the wings are gone with Billy.
Each chorus has a captain, a girl with a sense of responsibility, who can impose fines on her colleagues if, for example, she catches them chewing gum on the stage. If a girl sits down on a dusty backstage bench, getting her costume dirty, the chorus captain says, “Stand up.” If the girls chatter too loud in the wings the captain says, “Dry up, kids.” In the business the girls are always referred to as “the kids.”
If they show up tipsy, they are tossed out of the show. Even a beer breath warrants a bawling out. Burlesque, of course, is a target for all sorts of reformers. If men were allowed to congregate at the stage door, as they congregate at the stage doors of the $5.50 musical comedies, or if a girl were drunk on the stage, the Women’s League Against Everything would be in the manager’s hair in a few hours.
The crusades carried on by sin-haters and license commissioners have given people a low opinion of the character of the burlesque girl, an opinion at variance with the facts. The girls work too hard for tabloid orgies. A girl who has jumped up and down a
stage for twelve or fourteen hours a day does not want an orgy; all she wants is a quiet place to sleep.
When a burlesque producer is asked in court about the morals of his workers, the answer always is, “Some virgins, no professionals.” You would probably find that the private lives of any twenty stenographers who work in Wall Street and live in Greenwich Village are more lurid than the private lives of a similar number of burlesque girls. You would undoubtedly find that the kids at the Apollo would be shocked by the private lives of some society girls.
“Working in burlesque isn’t so awful for a girl,” said Miss Lilly Berg, an elegant showgirl who doesn’t have to grind and bump like the chorus. “I used to work in one of the biggest department stores in this city, and I prefer this. I make more dough, and I’m not so exhausted at night. You can’t even sit down in a department store. It’s also better than working in a cabaret or a dance hall. The customers here are so far away you can’t smell the garlic. In a store a cranky old woman can come in and get fresh, and you have to stand there and take it. But if a customer gets fresh here he gets a sock on the puss.”
The burlesque producer looks upon the censor as one of the persistent evils of his business, like damage suits and comedians who show up drunk. No
person in the world can grow as angry as a producer who opens his newspaper and sees the headline “Burlesque Told to End Obscenity; Commissioner Gives Houses One Day to Clean Up Shows or Lose Their Licenses.” The producer feels that he is being made the goat, and he shouts that his girls wear as much as the girls in the expensive cabarets.
He knows that the comedy on his stage is about as low as comedy can be, but he says Dwight Fiske sings about the same things at the Savoy Plaza, and the cops don’t try to pull him away from his piano, do they? He shouts that the poor man is entitled to his depravity as well as the rich. He feels that he is being persecuted, and most of the time his feelings are justified.
He says the strip act is a work of art. He says a citizen ought to realize that a burlesque show is not Sunday school and abstain from buying tickets if it shocks him.