Strip City: A Stripper's Farewell Journey Across America (15 page)

Dixie began as a chorus girl and page in the supper clubs. She thought she had it made when she was hired as a page for a show in a big San Francisco supper club, but after she got there, the show went broke within two weeks.

"When the show closed I went down to a strip joint," she says, "and here's this girl on the stage in white fur chaps and a white fur cowboy hat, and she's shooting off her cap guns, and bumping and all this stuff. I'm sitting at the bottom of the stairs, watching, and a big man comes up, punches me in the shoulder, and says, 'Hey, I want you to cut your act short this show and get out and mix a little more.' I said, 'But I don't work here!'" Frightened, Dixie ran up the stairs and out into the street.

"In San Francisco the clubs had men out front to duke you in—a tap dancer, or a clown, or a doorman, or something. So this fellow who had punched me runs up the stairs to the mime out front, saying, 'Chase that girl!' Well, that clown is chasing me and now I'm getting
really
scared! I'm gonna be drugged and sent to China. He caught up to me and told me to meet this guy, Bernie Goldstein, at a Chinese restaurant the next day. Well, I did, at two or three in the afternoon. Here he is, slurping noodles, shaking his fork, saying, 'You wanna make some money?' He offered me a job as a stripper and I said, 'I don't have any costumes,' and he took out his wallet. 'Here's ten dollars.'

"Oh jeez, ten dollars, I was tickled to death! I went to Greyson's, a very cheap place, and I got a pink nightgown and a pillow. I had a big old cheap alarm clock. And my act opened with the big alarm clock ringing and I'd wake up and run all around the stage, to 'Mister Sandman,' then I'd put on the nightgown and throw the big pillow up in the air."

The club, the Spanish Village, located at the corner of Mason and Eddy, wasn't the lowest rung on the ladder, but like most strip clubs at the time, it was a clip joint. In addition to performing, Dixie was expected to mix with the customers and pursuade them to spend money on drinks. Most of her income came from alcohol commissions.

"You're supposed to drink as much champagne as you can so the guy will keep buying. One night the owner came up to me and said, 'When you sit with those people and order the champagne, you don't spill a drop, do you?' and I said, 'No sir, I don't.' And he said, 'Then spill it! You're not supposed to drink it!' I was trying not to drink too much, so I took a hot water bottle and put it in my cleavage. I'd be talking to the guy and pouring the champagne down my dress. Then the guy would put his arm around me, and bingo, the champagne would fly up in my face. I always carried a long chiffon scarf, so I got a big old sponge and began carrying it in the scarf. And as I talked to the guy, I poured the champagne into the sponge, and later I squeezed it out."

Dixie was much more interested in perfecting her show than hustling bubbly. "The minute they opened the club in the afternoon," she tells me, "I'd be down there rehearsing an act. You'd have thought I was going to be in the Metropolitan Opera. I couldn't understand why the girls would just get up onstage, sling their stuff around, then go take a shower. They'd been there for a long time, they had children, husbands. They weren't much older than I, but they were settled. They'd say to me, 'You don't belong in joints like this where you're only as good as the liquor you can hold. You'd better go back East where they appreciate an act.'"

Unencumbered and hungry for a more professional venue, Dixie traveled to Newark, New Jersey, to the famous Minsky's Burlesque Theater, where she was christened with the Marilyn Monroe mantle. She got an agent and joined the union, AGVA, the American Guild of Variety Artists. ("Dues were five hundred annually. For that, I think you got a nail in your dressing room painted once a year," she cracks.) She began traveling the country, by Greyhound bus at first, because the depot in any given town was always in the same run-down neighborhood as the burlesque theater. She did the circuit: the Follies in Los Angeles, the Tropics in Denver, and the El Rey Theater in Oakland, as well as dates in Miami, Buffalo, Chicago, Dayton, Detroit, and St. Louis.

She developed acts based on many of Monroe's signature pieces, her roles in
The Prince and the Showgirl
,
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
,
Bus Stop
, and the like. Soon, she was earning nearly five hundred dollars a week, and was booked two years in advance.

Of course, I want to know about the costumes that predated spandex and thongs. "In our era," Dixie says, "we had to wear what were called strip nets. They were flesh fishnets with a strip up the back and little patch over the crotch, and a net bra and pasties. Most of the time, you could take off your net bra at the end of your act, but you'd better have your pasties on. You could affix the pasties two ways. Spirit gum is one way, but I used to take regular Johnson's adhesive tape and just snip it—about five or six one-inch pieces that I'd roll into loops and stick on the back all around. Then you blow on them to heat up the adhesive and put your street bra on over the pasties, and go on with your makeup and hair or whatever you have to do. Then at the last minute you take off the street bra and the pasties stay."

"So did the tape work well enough to keep the pasties on all night?" I ask.

"It was all right," Dixie replies, "but pulling the pasties off at night—sometimes you're so drunk when you get home, you just fall asleep with the darn things on and you roll over on them in your sleep and oh, they hurt!

"A lot of the girls liked to use moleskin for pasties and put rouge on the end so it'd look like your real breasts. Sometimes we'd get a couple of hairnets, whatever color we were down there, wad them up and sew them on the outside of the g-string. It kept the cops on their toes. You see, you got to put a little schmaltz into it."

…

Being the Marilyn Monroe of Burlesque meant that not only did Dixie have to fashion her look and her performance around whatever Marilyn was doing, it also meant that in a strange way, her life was linked to Marilyn's, a phenomenon common among impersonators. "I always put my makeup on at seven, seven-thirty at night, while looking at the news on TV. I was watching the news when I was working in Miami, and all of a sudden, I see Marilyn Monroe on a stretcher going into the hospital in New York. My heart sank, I was just sick.

"I sent her a telegram and about six weeks later, I got a letter. I opened it up and it said, 'My Dear Dixie Evans: Of my many friends and acquaintances throughout the entire world, your telegram was the greatest comfort to me at this time. Signed, Marilyn Monroe Miller.'" Later, Monroe's attorney threatened Dixie with a lawsuit if she didn't stop her Marilyn act. No suit was ever filed, but the original cease-and-desist letter hangs in the museum.

At the time, nightclubs featuring burlesque acts were a draw for celebrities who liked to catch the shows and enjoy some undisturbed frivolity. Imagine Dixie's embarrassment when one evening at the Place Pigalle in Miami Beach, she was about to perform her act based on Marilyn's tempestuous relationship with Joe DiMaggio and she found out that DiMaggio himself was in the audience! "My God," she recalls, "I didn't even want to go on!"

Dixie describes the DiMaggio act: "I strolled onstage in a really tight pink satin gown and a number-five Yankee cap. I'd be holding a long handkerchief and I'd say, like I was crying,

"I never said the word, but I'd reach in my pocket, pull out two baseballs, plant a kiss on each of them, and toss them into the crowd.

"I used real major league baseballs at first, but that got expensive, so after a while I got cheap rubber ones at the novelty store."

In keeping up with her heroine, when DiMaggio and Monroe reunited, Dixie changed the finale of her act from "Stormy Weather" to "This Could Be the Start of Something Big."

"So, did you do it?" I asked Dixie.

"Do what?" she looks puzzled.

"Your act. For DiMaggio."

"Oh! Well, yes! He begged me to. 'Please,' he said, I've come so far to see it!'"

He later took Dixie out to breakfast, and afterward she brought him home to meet her mother.

I can't help but notice that in recalling the basics of her history, Dixie struggles to maintain her focus, flubbing dates and names and places. But when it comes to her various acts, she recites every bit perfectly—from blocking to lighting to costumes to that breathy Monroe whisper.

DiMaggio wasn't the only celebrity who caught Dixie's act. She performed before Lena Home, Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, and Frank Sinatra. Her very first celebrity encounter was with Bob Hope when she was sixteen.

"During the war, I danced in USO shows. Me and four other girls went up to Camp Pendleton, that's a big Marine base, you know, and we did some silly ol' soft-shoe act.

"We do our thing and get offstage and another girl goes on, she's about fourteen or fifteen, an acrobatic dancer. Now, she's standing on her head with her legs far apart, spinning around and around and around and Bob Hope walks out, points right between her legs, and says, 'That's what we're fighting for!'

"Well, the Marines threw their hats up into the air and screamed and hollered and tears start streaming down this girl's face. She ran off the stage. Her mother is furious. We're in the next dressing room, we don't know what's happening. We hear all these guys screaming and stomping, and in the little dressing room next to us, there's crying and the mother yelling, 'I want an apology right now' and so forth. Naturally, when we found out what happened, we sided with the girl. And we held that against Bob Hope for the rest of our lives."

Dixie was forty-one when she retired from performing full-time in 1967—a fact that startles me. These days, unless you're especially youthful-looking or possessed of singular talent, you only have until your mid-thirties before managers at the coveted clubs look at you, clear their throat, and delicately (or not) inform you that they usually "book a little younger." A thirty-two-year-old friend of mine was let go by a club manager who told her, "We have to make room for the eighteen-year-olds." They want the newest faces, the youngest body. Today, the average stripper is in her early twenties, and a generation in the adult business is about five years. Not back then, to hear Dixie tell it. "At that time in history, you built up a name. Age didn't really make that much difference because if you were Irma the Body or Tempest Storm or someone, you had a name, you were a headliner, and you put on a good show. Your audience grew up with you."

On that principle, Dixie could have kept dancing well into the sixties, but when Marilyn Monroe died in 1962, so did Dixie's burlesque career. "Marilyn's death brought my life to a sudden halt," she says. "I went into a horrible depression. Yet your rent goes on, your life goes on, you've got to pay your bills." So Dixie started doing a Marilyn-less act, performing for conventioneers and retirees at private corporate-sponsored club dates in New York City.

But she did revive Marilyn one last time. At her friend Shirley Day's urging, Dixie put together a show called "A Portrait of Marilyn" and did a brief run at Shirley's nightclub, the Orient, on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

"I came onstage and did a little bit of every one of her acts. I had a big fake diamond and I said, 'Oh, diamond, you've brought me so much and yet so little.' Then, at the very end, I donned a black negligee while the band played 'The Blue Prelude.' Oh boy, the drummers can really go on that song. I'd turn my back to the audience and then lift one arm over my head and drop a fake pill into a champagne glass. Then the trumpet, he would scream out real good and I would scream and fall to the ground. I had a little blue telephone that I grabbed off of a table as I fell, knocking it off the hook."

When Dixie finished her first performance of "Portrait," the audience rose silently to its feet and many wept. Afterward, people came up to Dixie and thanked her for bringing Marilyn back, if only onstage, if only for a little while. Walter Winchell gave her tribute to Marilyn a better mention than he gave Arthur Miller's
After the Fall
, a play based on his relationship with Monroe, which was on Broadway at the same time. Her show ran for six months.

I can't imagine yoking your professional identity to someone else's, only to watch it collapse when that person passes away. Part of you dies, too. "Oh God, it was horrible," Dixie says. But she wasn't the only one with that particular misfortune. "There was a fella, Vaughn Meader. He impersonated President Kennedy, and in the early sixties, he was at the top of his career. He was on Ed Sullivan. He was making big money. Then, after Kennedy was shot, I saw him in New York at the B & G Coffee Shop. He was in this big black cashmere overcoat, you know, and the tears, oh, he had big, big, dark eyes. He just stood there outside, with the rain pouring down. His life was over. His career was over. People were only concerned about the dead president. They didn't say, 'Gee how's that poor guy Meader ever gonna pay his rent?' Oh, he was in very bad shape for a long time and so was I. Because of the guilt—the horrible guilt. The guilt alone was bad enough without not working on top of it," Dixie grimaces.

I'm chagrined to dredge up these painful memories. I don't want to drag her down on a day like today when she should be having fun, hobnobbing with the pageant contestants and TV crews. I pause for a beat so she can regain her composure, then change the subject and ask how she decided to start the contest.