Gilded Lili: Lili St. Cyr and the Striptease Mystique

By Kelly DiNardo

Blond and beautiful, Lili St. Cyr shimmied across the country’s nightclubs as one of the century’s great sirens. She inspired future femme fatales including Marilyn Monroe, Madonna and Dita Von Teese. She helped cultivate the modern-day impression of striptease. And, with stage routines featuring themes from fantasy, history and li

• Language: English
• Publisher: West 26th street Press
• Release date: Mar 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9780786754069

Book preview

Acknowledgments

The process of writing this book has been quite similar to performing a striptease; there’s the build-up, the tease, and finally the reveal. Most importantly, there is a cast and crew working and helping behind the scenes.

I am incredibly grateful to those who took the time to share their memories and stories, particularly Armando Orsini, Andrea Hedrick, Bob Bethia, Patrick Guinness, Ellie Hiatt, Jamee Carangello, Doris Quinn Godfrey, Kash, Coy Giambone, Betty Rowland, and Gloria Zomar. Each were incredibly giving of their time. John Chaplin, Eric Schaefer, Sheila Weller, Alan Hustak, and William Weintraub shared their expertise, resources, and leads. Kara Mae Harris, Laura Herbert, and Jaye Furlonger answered endless questions and helped me contact several dancers and friends of Lili’s.

Shauna Redmond at the Pasadena Public Library, Kristine Krueger at the Academy Library, and Nancy Marrelli of Concordia made digging through various records and primary source documents so much easier.

I worked with a variety of assistants who spent hours helping me with research and transcription work including Sarah Morocco, Katy Graessle, Eleanor Edwards, Alyson Casey, Caitlin Murray, David Andrukonis, Sarah Wright, and Lisa Sumner. I am particularly appreciative to John C. Buckholz for his research assistance and translation work.

Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan taught me an immense amount about writing and researching a biography. They have been generous of spirit, time, and love. And Rachel Shteir, whose own research and book on striptease was invaluable, was an incredible cheerleader, mentor, and friend throughout.

Several friends and colleagues were arm-twisted into reading various chapters and versions of the manuscript including Michele Hatty, Michele Aranda, Kathy Balog, Geoff Kirsch, Amanda McClements, Josh Lewis, and Loredana Sherman. Two men, in particular, worked with me to shape and edit this manuscript: my friend Bart Mills and my editor at Billboard Books, Bob Nirkind. If, as they say, to write is human; to edit is divine, then Bart and Bob are certainly my red-pen-wielding angels.

Countless friends and family supported me through this in so many ways. My mother, who taught me the word voracious at the age of five, instilled in me such a love of books and reading that becoming a writer seems inevitable. My father, who answered endless legal questions throughout, rooted me on with enthusiasm and love. My sister tolerated living with me through much of this process—not an easy thing. Kitty, Bob, Nancy, Jim, Mary, Andrew, Courtney, Tom—thank you.

Foreword by Rachel Shteir

Blonde and beautiful—though not exactly by the convention of her era, or ours—Lili St. Cyr was sometimes said to be the burlesque version of Marilyn Monroe—more carnal and more dirty, perhaps what Marilyn would have been had she been able to be herself. In truth, Lili looked very little like Marilyn, except for their shared love of peroxide blonde—the couleur du decade. Lili was tall. A little too tall. She was slender. A little too slender. This was in an era that liked its women zaftig and petite.

In the era in which Lili lived, the era that seesawed between the Cold War and the Rat Pack, between Lenny Bruce and Catholic reformers, burlesque was perceived as a form of pornography, and any woman who worked in it was thought to be a whore. She might have been bawdy, but one thing is certain: Lili was no whore.

She was, of course, a sex symbol—the female equivalent of Marlon Brando, with his tiny elegant head and muscular body in the Streetcar Named Desire era. She was more of a cipher than Marilyn, and she lacked Marilyn’s air of naiveté and highbrow aspirations. In fact, Lili never seemed to have aspirations, other than escaping her past and stripping.

And yet when Lili first began to perform in Hollywood in the 1940s, it was not clear what was special about her. There were a lot of beautiful girls on the burlesque scene. But Lili was the one who embodied something intangible and captured the hearts of American men in burlesque theatres and swank nightclubs. I think of her as the soul of the Fifties—rising as striptease was dying, coyly smiling, mincing, prancing, and above all dancing.

Lili became a star of striptease after striptease in New York had died and Los Angeles became the mecca of the genre. A girl could either make a lot of money doing dirty movies and pin-up poses or she could appear in burlesque. This was the era of L. A. Confidential and the Black Dahlia murder. Lili was big time in the small time. Her acts were tableaux vivantes, posed homages to the great classical women. She was Salome. She was Cleopatra. In a country where Puritanism was King, Lili was a naughty Queen. But she could never do anything other than take off her clothes. She gave other things a try—she tried to sell lingerie and be a stay-at-home wife, she tried to be in the movies—but none of it really worked, and none of it seemed to be able to match the thrill of being on stage.

The history of striptease can be told as the story of dames and broads—funny girls and sexy women. Gypsy Rose Lee was a dame; Lili St. Cyr a broad. But while Gypsy wisecracked her way across the stage, men seemed to think that Lili, who was silent, was sexier. She was also more modern, more classy, more aristocratic. By the time she appeared, striptease was either being performed in down and out burlesque or in high-end nightclubs. She came from the era of Hugh Hefner and the Playboy Clubs rather than Betty Boop and blue movies.

I sometimes think of Lili as being a Technicolor stripper in a Technicolor era by which I mean that though observers might have called her more refined than other strippers, there was something large about her appeal. And in some ways her allure does not translate well to today, though it translates better than that of most strippers. There is one particularly fetching picture of her where she wears jewel tones and looks like a Bollywood Goddess. There could be something regal about her. She gave the impression of being haughty. Some observers said that she wasn’t like other strippers, that she had a kind of elegance other strippers lacked. But when you looked at her, it was not her elegance that was striking. It was her carnality. Not just because of her gap tooth, but because of that impenetrable sex appeal. There was something distant about her, something withdrawn. She seemed both masculine and feminine, slinking across the stage with her wide Cheshire cat-like grin. She was a girl Wild One in a time when girls were only just beginning to be wild ones in public. Every era had its stripper who was not just a stripper, but an icon. Lili was the icon of her era.

Lili didn’t necessarily make good choices, not where her career was concerned, or when it came to men. She married six times, but I’m not sure whether she ever found love. On the other hand, her life could have been worse. It was for many of her peers. Something, perhaps toughness, or her will, must have been on her side. She had the resilience of a cartoon character or a superhero. In contrast to today’s strippers, whose sexuality, in its attempt to be racy often seems naïve, Lili was anything but innocent. Instead she captured a sophistication that has gone out of fashion.

In Gilded Lili: Lili St. Cyr and the Striptease Mystique, Kelly DiNardo brings Lili to life. She has chased down the facts and gathered them into an animating intelligence that reveal the particulars of Lili’s era and her. With great reporting and incisive thinking, Kelly has captured the woman with verve and grace.

—Rachel Shteir

Preface

On a stage set to look like a small cottage, she appeared as Cinderella. She began fully clothed in a peasant dress, with a red skirt and black corset top, which perfectly showed off her body’s curves. Slowly, to the beat of the music, she took off her high heels, her dress, then her bra. Exaggerating each movement, she moved around the stage—revealing an ankle, a thigh, the hint of a breast. Suddenly a wand appeared, magically floating in the air, and delivered silk thigh-highs, a blue and pink-trimmed satin gown, and glass slippers. With her new clothes, she slowly covered up her long, tan legs and torso, still slowly swiveling her hips and mesmerizing the audience. She ran her hands through her short, blonde curls, and puckered her glossy red lips. With a red-painted finger-tip, she softly traced her neck, letting her hand slide down, down, down. Then she nuzzled a brown, fur stole softly across her face, slid it around her body, and admired her new look before her tall, dark-haired prince arrived. She and her prince waltzed across the stage. He leaned in to kiss her, but she coyly turned her face and offered him just her cheek. Then, as the clock perched above her approached midnight, he disappeared. With each passing minute the clock clicked closer to midnight, a crescendo built, and more of her clothing vanished. Tick. She stood in only a blue, ruffled bra and panties. Tock. She appeared in just a G-string and pasties. Tick tock. She stood nearly naked, wrapping her arms around herself so as to hide her breasts. Tick tock. She stared at the clock and in a flash she returned to her red and black peasant’s dress. She looked forlornly at the glass slipper, the only remnants of her enchanted evening.

Cinderella was not Lili St. Cyr’s most famous striptease, but often the fictional world she created on stage echoed, predicted, or commented on the real circumstances in her life. And in many ways, she lived a sexier, bawdier Cinderella tale. Instead of an invisible fairy godmother with a magic wand, she used the sexy twirling of her G-string clad hips to pull herself up from a working class life to inhabit a real bejeweled, fur-draped world.

Born into a poor family, abandoned by her parents, and raised by her grandmother, she overcame the obstacles of her childhood and used her ambition, beauty, and charm to escape her small-town life. She practiced the art of seduction on rich, older men aboard the steam liners that traveled between the United States and Europe. She perfected the art of the tease on the stages of seamy burlesque theaters, upscale cabarets, and hole-in-the-wall nightclubs. In the end, she became the top striptease dancer after World War II. She shimmied across the country’s swankiest nightclubs in front of audiences that included Frank Sinatra, Ronald Reagan, and Humphrey Bogart. Her sex appeal rivaled that of Lana Turner and Ava Gardner and inspired Marilyn Monroe. Photos of her in various states of undress covered hundreds of magazines. She danced through several Hollywood movies, including Howard Hughes’ Son of Sinbad and Norman Mailer’s Naked and the Dead. And she took down six figures a year for taking it off.

She became a star not by portraying Cinderella—fairy tale characters more suited to Disney than burlesque remained rare portrayals for Lili—but by playing femme fatales and sirens. She reinterpreted the stories of women like Carmen and Salome, who used their beauty and erotic dances to control men. And she created her own characters that gave audiences a voyeuristic glimpse into her character’s world. In one, she played a mannequin come to life. In another, she starred as a tormented woman who commits suicide. In her most famous, she prepared for a date and audiences watched as she bathed, dressed, and primped beforehand. Onstage and off she starred as a seductress—a woman who used her physical appeal, dance moves, sexpertise, and charisma to enchant men and live outside the traditional feminine sphere.

Seductresses are often dismissed as blonde bimbos, gold-diggers, or vamps, but while far from perfect, they are also about more than sex, more than simply talented at bewitching men. Seductresses were mistresses of misrule, carnival queens who cast off repressive shackles and declared a public holiday, wrote Betsy Prioleau in Seductress: Women Who Ravished the World and Their Lost Art of Love.[1] Far from sellouts to patriarchy . . . they subvert and sabotage it. They menace male domination. Since antiquity they’ve roiled the waters and upset the hierarchy.

A seductress uses her erotic nature, her shimmering allure, and her brain to further her own cause. She lives with a captivating vitality and joie de vivre that is near-impossible to refuse or ignore. And she uses these skills, her feminine wiles, to stretch the boundaries of what’s acceptable for women. As Prioleau wrote, The art of love . . . is consistent with the highest principles of feminism. It promotes self-development, autonomy, and liberation and expands our options.[2]

Lili St. Cyr spent her life imagining and presenting this art of love. And as a seductress and striptease dancer, she became part of the 20th Century debate about sex and gender. Throughout the century, Americans struggled with the tension between the puritanical ethic—sex as sin—and a new message: sex as the ultimate expression of romantic love. Americans danced with and around sexuality, first by shaking off Victorian ideals and exploring sex outside of reproduction, then by publicly celebrating chastity while being teased by women on stage and in the pages of girlie magazines, and then finally by shaking free of the cult of virginity and embracing sexual liberation. Replete with innuendo and flashes of flesh, burlesque helped introduce the country to overt sexuality and made the discussion and selling of sex more acceptable. As one of burlesque’s most popular stars, Lili helped usher in these changes. As a powerful seductress, she inspired other great sirens, from Marilyn Monroe to Madonna.

At the same time, Lili also struggled with the push and pull surrounding notions of sex. She lived outside the traditional feminine domain by highlighting her very femininity. She seduced millions through her performances, yet found love elusive. She echoed the need to belong to someone even as she chafed at the role. She worked so hard to perfect her acts, and at times seemed to love her work so much, that she sacrificed relationships for it. Yet by the late Fifties she publicly questioned her profession. She made her living selling sex, but turned up her nose at the ubiquitous commercialization that followed and that she helped enable. Secure in her sexuality, she dared to be provocative before it was acceptable. She used her beauty as currency and famously said, I broke hearts and emptied pocketbooks. Sex is currency. What is the use of being beautiful if you can’t profit from it.[3] She herself, however, ended up destitute.

Lili struggled with the paradoxes that underlined much of her life. This struggle and the controversies and incongruities of the era in which she lived made hers a painful story at times. She was riddled with flaws, plagued by bouts of insecurity, and filled with self-destructive passions. Ultimately she bought into the myth that seniors could not be seductresses; that beauty remained integral to success, happiness, and power. And her finale lacked the happily-ever-after outcome of her fairy-tale inspiration, Cinderella.

These flaws and doubts led Lili to isolate herself completely in the hope that she would be remembered for the beautiful, ahead-of-her-time siren that she was. As she grew older, she turned down interviews, refused fans’ requests, and rebuffed friends’ attempts to visit. Instead, she was forgotten. After more than twenty-five years of seclusion, her name dimmed from the marquee in the public’s mind. Now, if she is remembered at all, it is most often as the answer to a trivia question—she is the woman Susan Sarandon’s character Janet blessed in the cult film The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

More than Lili’s self-imposed seclusion, it was her career as a stripper that cast her to the dusty corners of history. Whereas the men of burlesque—Phil Silvers, Abbott and Costello, Jackie Gleason—were celebrated outside of that bawdy world, the women rarely were. The public maintained a contradictory attitude towards the striptease dancer as Lili and the women of burlesque represented the supreme contradiction for women. The audience projected its wants, needs, loves, or desires on the dancer, but beneath the fantasy lived a real woman. She teased the eye and libido, but remained untouchable. She was at once a heavenly sexual goddess and earthly woman, appealing and abhorrent, glorified and stigmatized. She was alluring and yet repellent, enticing and scary, desirable and repugnant. She also stepped outside her appointed roles as woman—brazenly flaunting her sexuality and using it to live outside a woman’s traditional realm. And so the stripper holds no one place in the public mind or the social order. It is often just easier to ignore and forget her.

Ignoring or forgetting Lili and the women of burlesque, however, ignores and forgets an interesting piece of women’s history and a fun, flirty piece of our sexual history. Despite her own complications, paradoxes, and flaws, she challenged traditional gender roles, seized control over her own sexuality, and broadened the range of sexual possibilities for other women. At her zenith, the culture celebrated women’s hair color—blonde—and the shape of their bodies—hourglass—and defined women by their roles in the lives of men. Lili used these notions to her benefit. She shook her blonde curls, shimmied her hourglass figure, played up her femininity onstage, and earned a fortune and her independence by turning the very idea on its head.

Lili hardly comprised the mythical, pure, straightforward heroine of the more legendary tellings of our history. She did not set out to intentionally challenge conventional norms. Her aim was primarily selfish—to live well, to live with abandon, to live glamorously. Nor did she comprise the sweet, innocent characters of Disney-fied fables like Cinderella. Her story is riddled with the same contradictions and paradoxes with which she herself was filled. Her story abounds with sex, drugs, money, and lonely anguish. Her story teems with love, champagne, and wild applause from throngs of admirers. She could be both virginal and lusty, pure and dirty. She was both incredibly kind and generous, callous and selfish, insecure and filled with a don’t-give-a-damn bravado. She was glorified for her beauty and sex appeal and also stigmatized for overtly selling sex. Her story is raunchy and romantic, bawdy and classy. It is a story of glamour and adventure, disillusion and disappointment. Mostly, however, it is a story of passion and seduction.

---

Seductressby Betsy Prioleau (Viking, 2003)↵

Seductress by Betsy Prioleau (Viking, 2003)↵

St. Cyr won fame with strip show, The Gazette, February 2, 1999↵

Chapter One: In the Beginning

Audacity is essential to greatness.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

In May 1936, as the jacaranda trees bloomed with clusters of trumpet-shaped purple flowers throughout Pasadena, eighteen-year-old Marie Van Schaack left her childhood home and traveled nearly 3,000 miles across the country to New York. There she boarded the S.S. Manhattan and leaning against the rail of the ship’s deck, a champagne coupe glass in one hand, she watched the confetti fall around her. Standing in the sun, her dirty blonde hair hanging in waves and curling at her chin, Marie watched the crowds wave goodbye as the boat slipped down the Hudson and out to sea on its way to England.

Before the advent of jet travel, the ships that sailed between America and Europe oozed with the aura of opulence. While many suffered below deck in cramped and sometimes diseased steerage berths, the carefree indulgence of the first-class passengers imparted a sense of excitement and wonder about the era’s idea of ship travel. Travelers with last names like Rockefeller and Carnegie and the on-board exploits of movie stars and Olympic athletes generated headlines and newspaper columns about the steam liners. Moving between two continents, ocean liners could become their own world, magnificent floating palaces.

On her first trip aboard a grand steam liner, Marie reveled in the excitement of this milieu. She felt she had "penetrated to the very heart of a grandiose and marvelous party. Everything made me crazy, excited me, surprised me, enchanted me. Everything happened like the scenes I’d seen in films. . . . I had the realization that life was mine, that it was my own universe.[1]" Her journey in 1936 would be a six-day whirlwind of bubbly dinners and illicit moonlit kisses. Three women had shown Marie that the world could be this glamorous adventure—her grandmother Alice, the European princess Rosemary Blackadder, and Greta Garbo—and for the rest of her life she strove to live her life as if traveling first-class on an ocean liner.

* * *

Fact and fiction are inextricably interwoven in the story of Alice’s life. In the great American tradition of personal reinvention, Marie’s grandmother, a talented seamstress, so artfully stitched the tales together that the seam between truth and fairy tale is nearly invisible. Various family members have tried to unravel the threads of her tales, but that has proven almost impossible. Some stories—like Alice’s claim to be a descendant of either a Moroccan prince or a Moorish sea captain, depending on who is re-telling the tale—are clearly fantasy. Others are less obviously false; perhaps she was part Sioux Indian.

In reality, Alice was born Mariah Maude Curry on March 21, 1874 in Port Edwards, Wisconsin, a riverside community roughly midway between Milwaukee and Minneapolis. Her parents, a Canadian named Daniel Curry and his New Yorker wife Emilie, likely moved to the area in the second half of the 19th century, when Wisconsin experienced a population boom. Between 1836 and 1850, the state’s population exploded from 11,000 to over 300,000. A third of the arrivals were foreign-born immigrants, primarily from Germany, Norway, and Canada[2]. The new Wisconsinites settled in frontier towns that stretched out from the lakes and rivers that supported the miners, fur traders, and lumber workers. Daniel worked along the banks of the Wisconsin River as a foreman in a lumberyard. Emilie cared for their six daughters.

Little is known about Alice’s childhood and teen years, although Marie later described her as a pioneer. An early settler portrayed the area in which Alice grew up as "only a small settlement with a trail running down the river bank.[3] Women, a minority in these small outposts, could make a decent amount of money doing the demanding domestic work that they were expected to do for free in more populated areas. Alice’s sister Nellie worked as a cook in the mountains, feeding the men who worked on the logging crews, and it’s likely that Alice held similar work—possibly sewing or cooking, as she was also a gifted cook. It didn’t matter what was in the house, she could always whip up something terrific, explained Coy Giambone, Nellie’s granddaughter[4]. The sisters also enjoyed the advantages of being the scarcer sex outside of work as well. They were strong-willed, independent, and man-crazy—they were all married several times and had lots of boyfriends, said Coy. For women in those years they had a lot of nerve in picking up and leaving a person if things weren’t working out well. They were perfectly willing to work very hard on their own to achieve whatever they were looking for."

Through her own adventures, or perhaps through her father’s work, Alice met Francis Frank Cedric Peeso, who worked in a paper mill, later owned a restaurant, and then worked as a painter. In 1895, twenty-one-year-old Alice married Frank. Within a year, Alice gave birth to a daughter, Idella Marian Peeso. The young family then moved in with Frank’s family in Merrill, Wisconsin. Alice gave birth to a son, William Austin Peeso, before the family packed up and made the 200-mile journey to Minneapolis. At some point after 1910, Alice and Frank’s marriage withered and ultimately died; by 1917, Alice had married Ben Klarquist, a carpenter.

While the factual details of Alice’s early life remain scant, what is apparent is that she was determined, fiercely independent, incredibly warm-hearted, and apt to display a vivid imagination[5].

Later, after Alice was widowed, she traveled around the country visiting her sisters, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. She would just take off, explained her granddaughter Ellie Hiatt[6]. It didn’t seem to bother her that she was alone. She just loved to sit and talk to people. She was very personable, her house was always open, and there were no pretenses at all. She would get into telling her stories and I imagine she embellished most anything. But that’s all right. We loved to hear it. It was always fun to listen to her.

Alice was such fun that for her sixteenth birthday present, Kris Plasch, Ellie’s daughter, asked to visit her great-grandmother once a month. She just seemed to conquer whatever she set out to do, said Plasch[7]. She overcame a lot of obstacles; she raised some of her grandchildren and even one of her great-grandchildren, who was a real handful. She adapted to whatever the circumstances were. She was just an amazing, remarkable woman.

While Alice spent a lot of time with several of her grandchildren, she raised Marie, the future ocean traveler. In 1916, romance bloomed between Alice’s 19-year-old daughter Idella and Edward Van Schaack, the son of a Dutch settler from New York named Frank Van Schaack and an Iowan farm girl named Rebecca Ann Gray. It is unclear whether Idella and Edward ever married. Regardless, on June 3, 1917, Idella gave birth to Marie Frances Van Schaack at Abbott Hospital in Minneapolis[8].

Instead of Marie’s mother, Alice and her new husband took the newborn home from the hospital and raised her. Years later, her family told Marie that Alice and Ben took her home because Idella was too sick to care for her and her father simply disappeared.

But in fact Edward hadn’t disappeared, he’d been drafted. Two days after Marie’s birth, as America mobilized to join World War I, the nation held a Registration Day, requiring all men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty to register for possible service. In Minneapolis, the day took on the "bearing of an unofficial patriotic holiday,[9]" and saloons and most stores in the city closed. By fall of 1917 almost 19,000 men reported for training at Camp Lewis in Washington State, one of sixteen new Army installations whose ranks eventually swelled to 44,000. The United States entered the war toward

Reviews for Gilded Lili

[setnahkt · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Back in the early 1960s, it was still impossible for the average pubescent boy to lay his hands on any of the visual aids for sexual self-expression that are now freely available at convenience stores, movies, television, billboards, and the Sunday New York Times Magazine. Playboy was only offered “under the counter” and certainly not to someone my age – although an enterprising classmate had liberated one from his older brother’s stash under the mattress and made a small fortune in lunch money charging us for a brief look at Miss April or the Vargas Girl. Raunchier magazines were only ill-defined rumors, and the majority of us had to be content with girdle ads in the Sears-Roebuck Catalog.
However, there was a possible alternative. While youngsters were protected from the sight of female skin, blood and gore were entirely acceptable, and even the most callow could save up dimes and buy True or Argosy or Men’s Adventure. A vanished genre nowadays, these featured stories and garish cover illustrations, usually on one of the following themes:
*Red-blooded American GIs slaughtering hordes of Nazis, Japanese, or North Koreans.
*Red-blooded American GIs held captive and tortured by suggestively clad SS ice maidens or exotic female kempetai operatives (the popularity of these may say something about the sexual fantasies of the average red-blooded American male).
*Red-blooded Americans (non-military, for a change) enduring attacks by a variety of wildlife – grizzly bears, mountain lions, snakes, gorillas, giant spiders, and, in a particularly unlikely encounter, flying squirrels. (If you’ve ever seen a real flying squirrel, you know they’re so sweet that you want to dunk them in your coffee; however, the animals busy with the hero under the headline “FLYING RODENTS GNAWED MY FLESH” looked like a cross between a wolverine and a Ju-87, and there was a whole Stukageschwader of them gliding in to finish the job).
What really interested a teenage lingerie pervert like myself, however, was not the cover (well, maybe the SS ice maidens) but the ads in the back for various exotic female undergarments. While Fredericks of Hollywood held the dominant market share in this area, second in line was The UndieWorld of Lili St. Cyr, with intimate items either shown on line drawings of ladies anatomically quite different from anyone I’d ever encountered at Jackson Junior High, or modeled by Miss St. Cyr herself. I fell in lust.
All this is background to finding a biography of Lili, Gilded Lili. The author, Kelly DiNardo, actually tracked me down on LibraryThing and suggested I might like her book, and when a lady suggests something like that it’s the gentlemanly thing to accommodate her.
Alas, the life of Lili, although interesting enough, was really rather sad. Lili (born Marie Van Schaack) came from a broken home and got interested in the stage relatively early. In her heyday in the 1940s, she was described as being “as streamlined as a P38 but with more firepower”. She put a lot of effort into her performances, setting up music and lighting, and like her contemporary, Gypsy Rose Lee, she was quite literary. Her specialty was the “story strip”, in which she acted out some scene from literature which could plausibly involve the heroine disrobing. Since she had a bent for classical literature it must have puzzled some of her patrons to see her do “Dido and Aeneas” or “Leda and the Swan”. Unlike contemporaries that joked or talked to the audience, Lili played inaccessible, never making any sort of contact; her reviewers always described her as “classy”.
Unfortunately Lili was anything but unavailable off-stage. She went through six husbands and (by her own admission) eleven abortions. She also charged “Stage Door Johnnies” for her company, on a sliding scale depending on how early she had to get up in the morning; and although author DiNardo pussyfoots around the subject it seems clear that some of the encounters involved more than dinner and a show.
At the peak of her career in the 1940s/early 1950s, Lili was making $5000 a week, at a time when that was a great deal of money indeed. Exactly what she did with it all isn’t clear; DiNardo suggests that Lili had a weakness for men she could “mother”, and many of her husbands and companions were deadbeats living off her earnings. As classical burlesque disappeared under the onslaught of sexual liberation, Lili played smaller and smaller clubs and eventually was reduced to “carnie shows”. She took off her clothes on stage for the last time when she was 57.
It was pretty rapidly downhill from then on. Although Lili had a much younger live-in male companion, neither of them had any money; her sole income was the occasional request for an autographed picture and $100/month in royalties from the underwear business. As she had to move out of her house to a series of apartments, each smaller and nastier than the last, she became a recluse; although willing to talk on the phone or exchange mail with friends and fans, she refused any requests for public appearances, even lunch meetings with other retired dancers. She eventually stopped even answering her door, asking delivery people to leave things tied to the doorknob. Ironically, the only person DiNardo was able to interview about Lili’s last years was her heroin dealer; she apparently became addicted through the efforts of her final male companion. Lili eventually moved to a nursing home but bribed an attendant to release her and died at her apartment in January 1999 at the age of 81. All that dancing exercise must have been good for something; 81 is an impressive age for a chain-smoking heroin addict.
For a tragedy, the book was worth reading. Ms. DiNardo adds the almost obligatory comments about women rebelling against the stereotyped role of wife and mother, and celebrating their sexuality; in Lili’s case these observations are quite probably true. There are a few black-and-white pictures of Lili doing her acts; none is even as titillating as anything you could see in a current Playboy, or even Cosmopolitan. I think I have to recommend this one; it’s a story of a kind of life that I’m not very familiar with and evokes nostalgia. Lili may not have lead an exemplary life, even by modern standards, but I’m reminded of the motto of the Rolls-Royce Company: “Anything done well is noble”.

[kellswitch_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Before I stumbled across this book at the store I had never heard of Lili St. Cyr and considering how huge she was in her day this surprised me though it really shouldn’t have. America doesn’t seem to like to admit woman like her existed or had value to our culture when it doesn’t have to.A great deal of research and time went into this book and it shows, you get a real feel for the life and times that Lili St. Cyr lived through and how they shaped who she became as well as how she played a part in shaping our culture even to this day. Even though I didn’t know her name I did know about her most famous routines even though I had never seen them.This was a very entertaining and informative book and I found the look it provided into a world that ended long before I was old enough to even know it existed a fascinating and educational one. I also really appreciated the respectful way this book was written. Nothing was sugar coated or glamorized nor dealt with cheaply or salaciously, which can often happen when strippers are the topic