Tempest Storm: The Burlesque Queen Who Loved Elvis, JFK and a Mobster
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Tempest Storm spent almost 60 years on stage, but her offstage life reads like a highlight reel of mid-century America's most dangerous men. She danced her way from a Georgia cotton farm to the top of the Vegas Strip, and along the way she wound up in the arms of a president-to-be, the King of Rock and Roll, and one of Los Angeles' most feared gangsters. She outlived pretty much all of them, and she never stopped talking about it.
A Hard Start in Dodge County, Georgia
She was born Annie Blanche Banks on February 29, 1928, a leap day baby, on a sharecropping farm in Eastman, Georgia, right in the middle of the Depression. Her family was poor even by the standards of rural Georgia, and by her own account her childhood held real horror in it. In later interviews she described being assaulted as a teenager by a group of men, one of them a local policeman, an experience she said never fully left her. It's the kind of detail that makes her later reinvention feel less like glamour and more like an escape hatch.
She tried to build that escape early and clumsily. At 14 she married a boy to get out from under her parents' roof, and the marriage was annulled within a day. At 15 she married again, this time to a shoe salesman, and stuck it out for about six months before she left. By 20 she'd already been married twice and was on a bus to Hollywood with nothing lined up, which puts her in the same category of young women whose entertainment careers started because home simply wasn't safe. Evelyn Nesbit, the Gilded Age scandal magnet who was passed between powerful men before she was out of her teens, is the closest comparison from an earlier era: talent discovered young, then handed straight into an industry built to use it.
From Cocktail Waitress to the Highest-Paid Stripper in America
Once she got to Los Angeles, Storm worked as a cocktail waitress and, according to her own telling, briefly lived near a young Marilyn Monroe, who was still an unknown actress at the time. Someone at the Follies Theater talked her into performing rather than serving drinks, and by 1950 she'd picked a stage name. Supposedly she was choosing between "Tempest Storm" and "Sunny Day," and went with the one that sounded like trouble. She made it her legal name in 1957.
The trouble paid off. By 1956 she was billed as the highest-paid burlesque performer in the country, pulling in roughly $100,000 a year on a long-term contract, an enormous sum for the era. Lloyd's of London insured her chest for a reported $1 million, and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were fond of calling it "the best props in Hollywood." She toured constantly across the US, the UK and Canada, appeared in men's magazines, and starred in the 1955 cult film Teaserama alongside Bettie Page. She first played Las Vegas in 1951 and became a fixture there from 1957 onward, headlining the Dunes Hotel through the late 1980s.
The Gangster: Mickey Cohen
Vegas and LA in the 1950s ran on money that didn't always come from casinos, and Storm's circle reflected that. She dated Mickey Cohen, the former boxer turned Los Angeles crime boss who'd built a rackets empire out of jewelry stores, ice cream trucks and loan sharking after arriving in the city with backing from Chicago's Outfit. Cohen wasn't shy about his taste for burlesque queens either. He was also linked to strippers Candy Barr and a performer known as Beverly Hills, and he employed Johnny Stompanato as a bodyguard, the same Stompanato who was later stabbed to death by actress Lana Turner's teenage daughter in 1958. Cohen paid for Stompanato's funeral.
Storm and Cohen's relationship played out in the late 1950s and never turned into anything permanent, but she never disowned it either. Decades later, when Sean Penn was cast as Cohen in the 2013 film Gangster Squad, an 84-year-old Storm gave her verdict to reporters, saying Penn had "a good amount of street experience" for the part and that there'd been "a nice guy" underneath Cohen's tough exterior, whatever damage he was doing to the city at the same time.
Elvis at the Dunes
In October 1957, Elvis Presley caught one of Storm's shows at the Dunes Hotel in Las Vegas. He was 22, she was 29, and after the performance a photographer suggested they pose together for a publicity shot. That photo was the whole story, or close to it. Newspapers later claimed the two had been inseparable for five days straight, but Storm's own account was more modest: they spent one night together, dining, dancing and talking, and that was it.
She remembered him fondly, calling him "a real Southern gentleman, very polite," with, in her words, the most beautiful eyes she'd ever seen. Elvis's manager, Colonel Tom Parker, was reportedly furious about the publicity photo, worried that being linked to a burlesque dancer would hurt his client's clean image. Elvis apparently agreed enough to quietly let the whole thing drop. Storm wrote about the encounter in her 1987 memoir, The Lady Is a Vamp, and again in a 2016 documentary about her life.
"I Told Him He'd Be President": JFK
Storm's other headline-grabbing claim was a relationship with John F. Kennedy, which she said began in 1957 when he was still a senator from Massachusetts, years before the White House. "I met him in 1957 when he was a senator," she told an interviewer decades later. "It was a great relationship." She also liked to say she'd told him early on that he'd end up president one day, a prediction that, if she really made it, turned out to be right within three years. There's no independent paper trail confirming the relationship the way there is for some of her other connections, but she repeated the story consistently for the rest of her life, right up through her final interviews before she died.
The Rest of the Little Black Book
Elvis and JFK were the two names Storm got asked about most, but her circle went well beyond them. She was pursued by Sammy Davis Jr. in the 1950s, had an affair with singer Vic Damone, and was close with Nat King Cole in a friendship that, by her account, crossed into romance at points. Louis Armstrong was reportedly a suitor before her Vegas years took off, Mickey Rooney and his wife were regulars in her audience, and she was later linked to director Russ Meyer, who cast her in some of his films. It's a guest list that reads like the greenroom of American entertainment at its mid-century peak, and Storm walked through most of it on her own terms.
The Marriage That Cost Her Everything
Storm's most consequential relationship wasn't with a gangster or a star. It was her fourth marriage, to singer Herb Jeffries in 1959. Jeffries had sung with Duke Ellington's orchestra and was known as Hollywood's first singing Black cowboy, having starred in a run of all-Black western films in the 1930s. He and Storm were an interracial couple at a time when that alone was treated as scandal, and the backlash was immediate and expensive. MGM Studios, which had reportedly been circling her for film roles, walked away. Her manager cut ties. Friends and family disapproved. Storm always said the marriage cost her the mainstream film career she might otherwise have had.
The couple had a daughter, Patricia Ann, in 1963. Storm tried bringing the baby on tour with her, but after receiving threatening phone calls aimed at the child, she stopped, choosing to leave Patricia at home while she kept working the circuit. That distance never really closed. She and Jeffries divorced in 1967, and Storm spent decades afterward trying and largely failing to rebuild a relationship with her daughter, something she later called the greatest sadness of her life. Jeffries, for his part, lived to 100 and reportedly reunited with Storm on camera for her 2016 documentary before he died in 2014.
An Almost 60-Year Career
Storm kept working long after most of her contemporaries had left the stage. She officially wound down regular touring in 1987 at 59, but kept doing one-off shows for years afterward, including a 1999 performance at San Francisco's O'Farrell Theatre that was significant enough for the city's mayor, Willie Brown, to declare a "Tempest Storm Day." In 1995 she posed for Leg Show magazine alongside a young Dita Von Teese, effectively handing the torch to the next generation of the art form. She gave what's often cited as her last performance in June 2010, at a Burlesque Hall of Fame reunion show, at 82 years old. Musician Jack White interviewed her for a Third Man Records project in 2011, and in 2016 a feature documentary simply titled Tempest Storm traced her career and the fractures in her family life.
Final Years and Death
Storm settled in Las Vegas for good and lived there until her death on April 20, 2021, at 93. She'd had hip surgery and was dealing with dementia in her final stretch. Her longtime business manager, Harvey Robbins, said she "passed peacefully at her home with loved ones by her side." There was initial talk of raising funds to bury her at Westwood Village Memorial Park in Los Angeles, next to fellow burlesque performers Bettie Page and Dixie Evans, but that plan didn't stick. She was ultimately laid to rest on May 12, 2021, back in Eastman, Georgia, the same small town she'd married her way out of at 14. It's about as clean a full circle as a life like hers could manage.
