Forgotten Burlesque Stars of the 1950s: The Women History Left in the Wings

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Everyone's heard of Gypsy Rose Lee. Plenty know Lili St. Cyr, Tempest Storm and Blaze Starr. But for every headliner who made the papers, there were dozens of women working the same circuit, selling out the same clubs and posing for the same magazines, who've almost completely disappeared.

Some left behind a handful of photos and a stage name. Some left a single great story. A few left so little that we don't even know what they were really called. Here are six of them, and what we can still piece together about their lives.

Why So Many Burlesque Stars Vanished

Burlesque in the 1950s was a strange mix of fame and invisibility. A handful of names hogged the spotlight. As one obituary of Tempest Storm put it, women like St. Cyr, Starr and Evelyn West were regularly splashed across tabloids and popular magazines. Everyone else was working the circuit, moving from Newark to Baltimore to Los Angeles, changing stage names whenever a new booker fancied a fresh gimmick.

That's the problem for anyone trying to trace them now. A dancer could perform under three or four names in five years. Most never gave interviews. When they retired, plenty went back to their real names and never looked back, which meant there was nobody to write the obituary when they died. What's left is mostly ephemera: promo booklets, men's magazines and the occasional newspaper clipping.

Even the big names were renamed on a whim. Tempest Storm was born Annie Blanche Banks, and her choreographer at the Follies in Los Angeles simply offered her two options: Sunny Day or Tempest Storm. If a star that big started out as a coin toss, you can imagine how easily the rest slipped through the cracks.

Vicki Palmer: The Mambo Dancer Nobody Wrote Down

Vicki Palmer is a good example of just how little survives. In the 1950s she was billed on a promo booklet as the "Newest Sensation of the Burlesque and Night Club Circuit", and her pictures turned up in men's magazines throughout the decade. Yet nobody seems to have recorded her real name, where she was born or when she died.

What we do know comes mostly from burlesque historians and collectors. She's said to have started out as a peeler at Minsky's in Newark, the New Jersey outpost of the famous burlesque family, before working mainly on the West Coast. She was dark haired, 5ft 4in and of Latino heritage, and her speciality was the mambo, which was red hot in American nightclubs at the time.

She also posed for the photographer Roy Kemp and for a string of adult magazines, and Streetswing's burlesque archive links her to the burlesque films Striporama and Olga's House of Shame. That second credit is a bit of a puzzle, as Olga's House of Shame came out in 1964, long after the rest of her known career, so it's worth taking with a pinch of salt.

Pin-up work in 1950s California could be risky, too. Not everyone with a camera was who they claimed to be, as the models targeted by Harvey Glatman, the so-called Glamour Girl Slayer, found out in the worst way possible. Palmer, thankfully, seems to have simply stepped out of the limelight and kept going.

Evelyn West: The $50,000 Treasure Chest

If Vicki Palmer barely left a trace, Evelyn West went the other way, at her peak she was one of the best-known strippers in the Midwest.

She was born Amy May Coomer in 1921 in Adair County, Kentucky, to a poor farming family, and grew up on a farm in Illinois after her mother remarried. Her first taste of showbusiness came in a sideshow at the Illinois State Fair. Her later career took her to a job at Mather Army Air Field in California during the war, then onto the stage at the President's Club in San Francisco.

Her big gimmick was her 39½ inch bust, which she reportedly insured with Lloyd's of London for $50,000. From then on she was billed as Evelyn "$50,000 Treasure Chest" West, and also went by the Hubba-Hubba Girl. Her act featured a dummy of Esky, the mascot of Esquire magazine, playing her stage lover. She also loved to tease audiences with the line "I know you're looking at my shoes."

She landed uncredited parts in Rhythm on the River and Birth of the Blues, then a proper role in the 1947 burlesque film A Night at the Follies. For years she was a fixture at the Stardust on the DeBaliviere Strip in St. Louis, and she was photographed by Bunny Yeager and Tom Kelley, the man behind Marilyn Monroe's famous calendar shoot.

Later in life she lived as Amy Charles in Florida, cheered on the St. Louis Cardinals and even sold memorabilia to fans on eBay. When the Mitchell Brothers asked her to come out of retirement for their San Francisco theatre, she turned them down. She was nearly sixty. She died in 2004, aged 83.

Irma the Body: Philadelphia's Favourite and Her Prize Corgis

Irma the Body was a headliner at the Trocadero in Philadelphia, known to regulars as the Troc. Details of her life are thin, but one brilliant story survives thanks to a letter sent to American Heritage magazine in 2002.

Around 1952, the student paper at Haverford College, a Quaker college just outside Philly, ran a review of that week's show at the Troc. It caused uproar on campus, so one freshman did the obvious thing and invited Irma herself to dinner. She and the students then dared the rest of the college to come and see her that night.

Loads of them did, packing in among the usual older crowd. And for her grand finale, Irma came out wearing nothing but two Haverford buttons and a Haverford pennant. It's not clear what the management made of it, but the students never forgot it.

Her life after the stage was a bit more wholesome. A university burlesque archive has a photo of her surrounded by corgis. Once she'd hung up her pasties, she bred and showed them, and a pair of her dogs won best brace in show. The same caption gives her real name as Mary Goodneigbor, most likely a misspelling of Goodneighbor. If you've got a taste for old Philly, our collection of Philadelphia mug shots from the 1950s and 1960s shows the other side of the city's nightlife in the same era.

Lily Ayers: The Woman With Four Stage Names

Lily Ayers might be the best example of how stage names muddy the trail. In just five years she performed as Icel Condon, then Exotic Lily, then Lorali, before finally settling on Lily Ayers in 1955. Try finding all of that in an old newspaper index.

Her film biography says she was most likely born in Norfolk, Virginia, around 1930, to a sailor father and a fashion model mother. She quit high school to join a modelling agency in Los Angeles, spent a year as a showgirl in Las Vegas, then started stripping in 1950 at the Follies under Lillian Hunt, the same choreographer who named Tempest Storm.

Her routines were wildly inventive. She did The B-Girl Ballet, The Serpent and the Girl and a striptease while climbing out of a giant bass drum. She also had a singing act where she put clothes on instead of taking them off. She was apparently a decent singer with dreams of musical comedy, and won prizes riding horses in her spare time. Apart from a small role in the 1950 film Everybody's Girl, though, her only surviving screen work is a couple of short burlesque reels.

Cherry Knight: On Screen With Bettie Page

Cherry Knight (sometimes spelled Cherrie) is mostly remembered today because of who she appeared alongside. In 1955 she was one of the strippers in Teaserama, the Irving Klaw film introduced by Bettie Page and headlined by Tempest Storm. Her screen credits also include a solo striptease reel from the 1940s that simply carried her name as its title.

She was the cover girl on Modern Man magazine in February 1957, and her old reels still pop up in vintage burlesque compilations. Beyond that, there's very little. No birth date, no real name and no idea what happened to her after the 1950s. For a woman who shared the screen with two of the most famous faces of the decade, it's a remarkably faint footprint.

Zorita: The One Who Fought Back

Not every forgotten star was content to slip away. Zorita, who danced with live boa constrictors, spent decades fighting Miami police and judges, ran her own club and openly lived with women partners at a time when that could ruin you. She was arrested in 1939 for walking a six-foot snake on a lead through downtown Miami, which was a publicity stunt, and charged again with indecency in 1960, though a judge threw the case out.

She deserves far more than a few lines, which is why we've given her a whole article of her own.

Why These Women Still Matter

Burlesque was never just a sideshow. In cities like New York, there was a whole world of rowdy entertainment, from burlesque houses to bars like Sammy's Bowery Follies, and the women at its heart worked hard, travelled constantly and often ran their own careers in an era when that wasn't easy.

Most of them got none of the credit. Their names were changed, their pictures sold without them and their deaths went unrecorded. But every promo booklet and battered magazine that turns up on a collector's table is a small clue. With a bit of digging in old newspapers and trade papers, some of these women might yet get their stories back.