September 28, 1972– Dita Von Teese:
“You can be the ripest, juiciest peach in the world, and there’s still going to be somebody who hates peaches.”
The people who know me well are quite aware that my favorite musical is Gypsy (1959) with music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and a book by Arthur Laurents. It is loosely based on the 1957 memoirs of the great star of Burlesque, Gypsy Rose Lee.
Most people think that “Burlesque” means strippers doing their bump and grind thing. But, Burlesque is a rich source of very American style music and comedy that has kept audiences laughing since the 1840s. It involves transgressive comic situations and songs, but the main attraction of Burlesque has always been the idea of sex tied up with ribald humor and suggestively attired females. Many dismiss Burlesque as the tail-end of show business, but its influence can be found throughout the development of popular entertainment.
Burlesque’s legacy as a cultural art form was always in its gender representations, and that changed the role of women on the American stage and screen forever. The opportunity to see a female body not fully covered by the accepted bourgeois costume forcefully and playfully brought attention to the entire question of the proper place of women in American society.
In the 19th Century, the term Burlesque was applied to a wide range of comic works for the theatre, including non-musicals. These plays entertained the lower and middle-class by making fun of (“burlesquing”) the operas, dramas and social habits of the upper-classes. Everything from Shakespeare to the craze for Swedish opera star Jenny Lind could inspire a full-length Burlesque spoof. On Broadway, the Burlesque productions were among the biggest hits of the mid-19th Century.
By the 1860s, Burlesque relied on the display of shapely, underdressed women to keep the audiences’ attention. In the Victorian era, a time when proper ladies went to great lengths to hide their bodies beneath bustles, hoops and frills, the notion of girls onstage in tights was a powerful challenge to conventions.
Suggestive rather than raunchy, these entertainments didn’t rely on strong stories or songs, but on their sheer star wattage. In 1866, when The Black Crook became a phenomenon, its troop of ballerinas in flesh-colored tights showed that respectable audiences were ready to spend good money for sexually stimulating entertainment.
Scantily clad women played sexual aggressors, combining beauty with impertinent comedy in productions that were often written and managed by women. Instead of hiring a composer to write an original score, they used melodies from popular operatic arias and songs of the day, incorporating them into the action for comic effect. To prevent unauthorized productions, the scripts from these early Burlesques were not published. The material changed often from week to week, so a written script would serve little purpose.
The press praised Burlesque, but the protests of the self-righteous conservatives had an unintended effect. Editorials and sermons condemning Burlesque only made the form more popular. Demand for Burlesque companies grew, many with female managers.
Burlesque left little to the imagination. The popular stage spectacle Ben Hur inspired a production titled Bend Her, with barely clad chorines as the Roman charioteers. But vulgarity was not the thing; the whole point was to spoof and titillate, never to offend.
Unlike Vaudeville performers who went after weekly bookings as individual acts, burlesquers spent an entire 40 week season touring as part of one complete troupe. For decades, this system made burlesque a dependable source of steady work for women.
The biggest burlesque star of the first part of the 20th Century was Millie DeLeon, a dark beauty who tossed her garters into the audience and occasionally forgot to wear tights. Her act got her arrested sometimes, and helped to give Burlesque its raunchy reputation. Although performers in Vaudeville looked down on Burlesque performers, many avoided bankruptcy by appearing in Burlesque, often using an assumed name.
Burlesque’s richest history is its comedy. The lead comic in a Burlesque show is referred to as the “Top Banana” and their sidekicks are “Second Bananas” because they would resort to slipping on a banana peel to get a laugh.
Some amazing performers got their start in Burlesque: Jackie Gleason, Fanny Brice, Bert Lahr, W.C. Fields, Red Skelton, and Bob Hope all used the same old tired routines, but no two played them the same way.
Dita Von Teese was born Heather Renée Sweet. She is our own era’s ultimate American Burlesque performer, costume designer and impresario, keeping alive the tradition of powerful, smart women in the art form.
She writes that she remembers the first time she stripped. She was 19 years old. She had been working as a go-go dancer in LA when, one night, a friend took her to a bikini club. She liked what she saw. She auditioned on an amateur night. Blondes in bikinis were the name of the game. But, she took the stage wearing a pink corset with black velvet trim, black stockings, long black gloves. The Manager told her: “You’re wearing a lot of clothes up there…”, but he hired her anyway. The Burlesque star Dita Von Teese was born that night, a stage name she found in the phone book.
In the past two decades, she’s taken off her top, and sometimes the bottom, thousands of times. In her memoir Burlesque And The Art Of The Teese (2005), Von Teese writes that she feels very lucky. And although her rise to fame was lucky in many ways, luck really had little to do with it. She works hard for her money.
She is the most famous Burlesque artist in America today, even if you only know her from the tabloids or from her marriage to, and divorce from, rocker Marilyn Manson. Her fans include fashion designers, artists, style makers, club kids, gay guys and fetishists. She, more than anyone, has revived Burlesque, just as the form was close to dead.
Von Teese controls every aspect of her onstage career: From the lights to the makeup, to the sequins and feathers, along with the many special tricks that go into creating the illusion of her unworldly perfection:
“I control what everyone sees. It’s not the same as being nude in front of a lover or anything…”
She claims that taking your clothes off in front of 30,000 people feels different from stripping in front of a handful of people. The smaller the audience, the more difficult it is. She senses the large crowd is “with” her and she takes in their energy. But, sometimes she feels completely separated from them:
“It’s just me onstage in that moment by myself. And they’re looking into the window.”
She once did a show in Francis Ford Coppola‘s living room in Napa Valley, with George Lucas as one of the guests. Von Teese made her entrance in a giant martini glass filled with water and splashed around. She writes that feeling nervous was less about being naked than it is about messing up.
“Sometimes I’ll say, ‘Oh God, Kylie Minogue’s in the audience.’ And she does a beautiful, amazing show and she’s a good dancer and she can sing. I’m gonna get up there and do my little dance, and I’m not her. I’m not a pop star!”
For a girl who takes it off for a living, she owns a lot of clotting. She has more than 400 pairs of shoes, most of them by Christian Louboutin. Her wardrobe includes Dior, Gaultier, and Elie Saab. She is known for going grocery shopping in Hollywood wearing nothing less than the perfect dark hair and the perfect red lips and a beautiful gown, arriving at her local Von’s Market in her 1939 Packard.
“Because you never know who you’re going to run into. You never know who you’re going to meet.”
I totally get that. I never understand seeing people shopping in their yoga cloths or sweats. I would never dare. You never know when you might pass by a big film producer.
She does not consider herself an exhibitionist. Taking off her clothes doesn’t give her a sexual thrill. On the red carpet she rarely shows a hemline above her knee.
“I’m an ordinary blond girl from a farming town in Michigan. I’m probably overcoming my feelings of being very average-looking. Which made me want to create glamour and paint myself and do my makeup and hair well, and become something that I wasn’t originally.”
In her 20s, she thought she might strip for a few years and be finished by 30. She’s still got it at 44 years old.
Von Teese is tiny, and in excellent shape. She does daily Pilates classes and eats sensibly. Still, life in Burlesque has a “best use by” date:
“Do I want to be 60 years old in a G-string? No!”
She has designed a new lingerie line for Wonderbra. One of Von Teese’s trademark items is the garter belt with six garters instead of the usual four, with two each at the front, side seams and back. In 2012, she launched her own clothing and underwear line called Von Follies.
Her idols are 20th century Burlesque artists Gypsy Rose Lee and Lili St. Cyr, who were smart about changing the way they did their shows:
“The smart striptease artists knew how to evolve and maintain, because some people are totally reliant on their looks, no?”
Lee wasn’t the most beautiful woman or the best dancer, but like Von Teese, she was chic, witty, and clever.
