Читать книгу Goddess of Love Incarnate - Leslie Zemeckis - Страница 19

CHAPTER NINE

In 1939 Lili found herself crowded into the chaotic Bedlam Manner in Eagle Rock. Lili got a job waitressing at Carson’s Blue Casino in Los Angeles. Lili had blossomed in the two years since the end of her marriage to Cordy. Her hair fell below her shoulders in platinum blonde curls that she labored over. Her legs were long and fit. She always wore a smile with her makeup. As the beautiful new girl at the restaurant, she wrote, the boys poured in hoping to get a date with her.

AT CARSON’S SHE MET A WEALTHY YOUNG POLO PLAYER BY THE NAME of Maury Morrison. He was suave, good looking, and hung with a fast crowd of rich young things. Morrison, or his father, owned a yacht that he would cruise to Catalina Island along with half a dozen friends, including Lili, living it up under the sun with free-flowing cocktails and rich food. Lili tried her best to fit in but felt she didn’t. She marveled that Maury’s friends didn’t do anything. Just a bunch of spoiled rich kids idling their days away. No one had a job. Except her.

Maury was mercurial, hard to get close to. Lili was hoping for her next serious romance but felt she was a mere dalliance for the shallow young man. The girls on the yacht were polite to Lili but offered no real friendship.

Lili was dissatisfied with everything. She complained about the people in Pasadena. The women had no panache. They were amateurs compared to the women in London. She was a fish out of water, postmarriage and post–multiple affairs, having seen and experienced things other girls her age had not even dreamed about. More than ever she was determined to make her mark on the world.

When not at the movies, Lili and her sisters went to tea at the Biltmore Hotel and danced with young men. The trio felt “powerful.” Though this would put Barbara and Dardy at only fifteen and fourteen, they had grown into nearly six-foot-tall beauties. When the girls walked into a room they turned heads. The three felt “enchanted” to be in the “adult world.”¹⁰¹ Lili felt confident with her gorgeous posse flanking her. Afternoons and evenings were filled with laughter as they readied for dates.

It was easy to see why the boys were swarming around Lili

Half-brother Jack was still fixing up old cars that hung in the yard like shipwrecked vessels. He was crazy for sports. Lili was most uncomfortable with Betty, that wicked scar cutting down her face. Lili would say she thought Betty was a “little crazy,” having suffered “brain damage” from the accident. Betty was eccentric, to say the least, taking on “causes” and befriending strange people, at least once ending up in jail for defending someone.¹⁰² Betty would never be a big influence on Lili, nor would Jack. Both would drift out of Lili’s life.

Despite Lili’s unease around Betty, Lili would be a witness at the second of Betty’s three marriages.¹⁰³ In 1937, seventeen-year-old Bettalee Cornett married forty-one-year-old German-born Fred Schwarz. Then, in August of 1939, she married another older German gentleman. The last record of Betty marrying is in 1955 to thirty-one-year-old Angel Hernandez.

It was Barbara and Dardy who remained closest to Lili. Just fourteen months apart, Dardy and Barbara were so bonded that Lili nicknamed them Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum (often spelled “Teedle” in letters). Like most sisters they shared clothes and stories and gossiped over boys and had their disagreements. They were experimenting as young women did. It had to seem as if they would remain close forever.

Sleeping at Bedlam Manner the sisters would chatter late into the night, ignoring Idella hollering up the stairs, “Girls! Go to bed. It’s late.”¹⁰⁴

The year 1939 was a banner one for movies with the release of Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, and the romantic Wuthering Heights. Audiences flocked to the picture shows. The radio was filled with Glenn Miller’s band playing “Moonlight Serenade.” The highlight for the Blackadder girls that year would be the Saugus Rodeo, held just northwest of Pasadena. Nuts about horses, Barbara and Dardy couldn’t wait to attend. They had become expert riders at a young age, addicted to rodeo shows, which they entered every chance they could. Both learned dressage.¹⁰⁵ Out of the arena, Dardy in particular thrilled at the speed with which she pushed her favorite horse Snoopy through the paths of Eagle Rock. She was invited to ride before the football games in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

Lili wasn’t the least bit interested in getting on a horse. She would stay inside doing her nails and reading her “bible”—Vogue—dreaming of life beyond Eagle Rock.¹⁰⁶ “She wasn’t outdoorsy,” Dardy explained.¹⁰⁷

Dardy recalled a time she and Lili had gotten into an argument and Dardy stormed off up the hill in anger.

Bedlam Manner was remote, with only one neighbor close and a confectionary store at the end of the road. It was beautiful and wild. But not the place for lace and satin shoes.

After Dardy had been gone awhile, Ian asked Lili to go find her and bring her home.

Mad as a hell, Lili ran out wearing a pair of delicate shoes calling, “Rosemary! Where are you? Oh! My shoes! Oh, my shoes are being ruined. Come out now. My shoes! Rosemary! Come out now! If I ruin these shoes you are in so much trouble.”¹⁰⁸

IDELLA WAS RESENTFUL OF HER GIRLS’ FREEDOM AND WATCHED AS they rode their horses away from all responsibility. The whole family had a reverence for freedom and unconventionality. Alice and Ian had ingrained into the children at a young age to seek independence, to do what they wanted. You can do anything.

Ian’s family had lived for centuries along the Blackadder River in Scotland. His father John had been an avid horseman who would joust for fun wearing full armor. In Germany he met the Scottish Norwegian beauty Anna Wilson. Both Barbara and Dardy would look strikingly similar to Anna.

JOHN AND ANNA MARRIED AND SETTLED ON HIS FATHER’S FARM (HIS father was now deceased) at Chirnside, Scotland. The Blackadder family prided themselves on the mix of languages spoken in the home: English, French, German, and Norwegian. The couple would have three children: Frederika (later known as “Erica Hunt”), born in 1898; Rosemary, born in 1901; and Ian, born a year later. According to Frederika, on coming to America Ian spoke with a broader Scottish accent. When Frederika asked him why, he told her, “It’s good business.’”¹⁰⁹

Barbara and Dardy were beautiful to watch astride their mounts, hair streaming behind them. One brunette, the other blonde. They were happiest riding.

The Saugus show was filled with bareback riders, clowns, and steer wrestling. One hot and dusty afternoon, Dardy and Barbara were lounging on a fence sipping lemonades. They were wearing cute white-fringed short skirts, vests, and hats. At their full height they stood out in the bright hot sun. Their hats were slung down their backs, and their long hair shone. They looked several years older than the teenagers they were.

A roar from the crowd rose above the hot and dusty hills.

“Hello,” a fortysomething man said. He had a funny accent and was smartly dressed in a dark suit, not an ounce of sweat marring him.

The dark-haired man introduced himself as “NTG,” or Nils Theodore Granlund. He said he produced a show at the Florentine Gardens in Hollywood and he could always use a couple of beautiful girls like them. Would they be interested in trying out as showgirls?

The girls giggled. They had no idea what or where the Florentine Gardens was, but it sounded exotic. Sure, they said.

“How tall are you?”¹¹⁰ He asked.

Both girls stood up, and though he was tall himself he was impressed. “Six feet,” Dardy said, and in heels she was.

“Here’s my card. Here’s my address. Day after tomorrow we’re having auditions. You girls come on down.” He could just about guarantee he would hire them. He tipped his hat and left. NTG often sponsored rodeo beauty contests and most likely that is why he was in Saugus, scouting for girls.

The girls told Ian when he came back with hot dogs in hand what had happened.

Ian promised to personally call this Granlund.

Mr. Granlund assured Ian that indeed he was auditioning for girls and wanted the sisters to come down. It was a swanky nightclub and he meant no funny business. It was a class joint. Errol Flynn came nearly every night, enjoying the $1.50 fee that got a decent meal and an eyeful of beautiful showgirls parading by.

NTG, a former reporter, press agent, producer, and host, would be credited as being the “creator of modern nightlife.”¹¹¹

Ian decided that if Lili, now twenty-three, chaperoned her sisters, they could go. Lili had been adrift since returning from London. She was no longer seeing Maury and his snobbish friends.

Things seemed to come easier for her half-sisters; Miss California, ribbons and titles in horse shows, now an offer of work in a club. Though she would act disingenuous, most likely Lili—an avid movie magazine reader—knew all about the glitzy club in the heart of Hollywood frequented by John Barrymore, Rudy Vallee, and many other movie stars. Live radio shows were broadcast from the Gardens. Unlike other clubs on Sunset Boulevard, the Florentine catered to the “meat and potatoes” crowd, compared to the caviar set over at Earl Carroll’s, a nightclub west on Hollywood Boulevard.

The Gardens was a spacious supper club with floor shows featuring beautiful girls. There was a revolving stage and seating for 1,160.

The three girls arrived at the appointment, a little wrinkled and dusty after transferring buses from Eagle Rock. One can imagine the scene that confronted them: a vast club where they would be swallowed up by its current emptiness, dimly lit, a couple of boys sweeping the outer edges of the floor, sticky with spilled drinks. Various long-limbed girls sitting around the unadorned square tables. And the tangy smell of all nightclubs, old smoke, sour fruit, liquor, and sweat. The smell the girls would grow to love. It would be the smell of work and good times and carefree nights of their youth.

Interior of the Florentine Gardens. Barbara’s nude is prominently displayed.

SINCE LILI WAS NOT THERE TO AUDITION SHE SAT IN THE AUDIENCE and opened her Vogue while a stage manager assembled Dardy and Barbara among the other girls. Lili had to be feeling turbulent, no matter how cool she acted. She was between boyfriends and jobs, drifting aimlessly, wasting afternoons doodling costumes and outfits in a notebook, listening to Sergei Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky or Tommy Dorsey and Judy Garland on the radio. She toyed with the idea of designing clothes. She was excellent at sewing and loved pretty things. She would later claim that something told her—on this very day—to pay attention to what was going on around her. She felt luck was in the air.

NTG was scrutinizing the lineup of girls. He stopped and gave the Vogue-reading, long-legged blonde a look up and down, wanting to know why she wasn’t on the stage.

Barbara, on the left, easily outshone Lili—at the Florentine Gardens

Though elegant, he was hardly handsome, with a sagging chin, receding hairline, and large nose. But NTG was very good at producing live entertainment.

Did he ask if she could dance? Did he care? With her almond-shaped eyes, wide cheekbones, and statuesque body, she was made for the stage. He could hire three sisters as easily as two. No one else was as tall as the trio.

He insisted they call him Granny.

It looked as if all three sisters had a job until someone asked Dardy her age.

“Well, I was wearing my school outfit,” she later admitted, apparently including skirt and ankle socks. They needed to fill out some paperwork and though she lied and said she was fifteen, it was obvious Dardy was underage.

“Get off the stage,” someone yelled at her. Dardy was devastated, possibly jealous. Her time onstage would have to wait.

At the time, hiring girls under eighteen was prevalent in the clubs. However, the Board of Equalization was stepping in and preventing the practice. Though Barbara was only sixteen she was deemed safe to hire. By the following year both NTG and nightclub king Earl Carroll were “stripped of” the practice of hiring underage girls. Carroll was forced to fire a fifteen- and a seventeen-year-old.¹¹²

Lili and Barbara were exactly what NTG had been looking for. He positioned each one on either side of the ponies—chorus girls—who were shorter. They would be his bookends.

AT LEAST THAT IS THE BASIC STORY LILI TOLD OF THE BEGINNINGS OF her show business career. There would be variations over the years as if she was embarrassed to have wanted a career. In her telling it would always happen accidentally.

But according to Dardy, all three sisters took four buses to arrive at their mutual audition for a Harry Howard–produced show. The Blackadder/Klarquist girls were literally heads above the others. As in Lili’s version, Dardy was shouted off the stage and Barbara and Lili were hired.¹¹³

Barbara and Lili were now officially in show business. They signed contracts for a whopping $25 a week.

The girls began rehearsals. Barbara and Lili shimmied into skimpy outfits wearing tall gossamer headdresses, net pants, and rhinestone-covered bras across their nearly flat bosoms.

If anyone worried what Alice would think about the girls parading about nearly nude, it didn’t seem to be a concern. None of the girls were self-conscious about their bodies. Idella, of course, would thrill that her girls—especially Barbara—were in the spotlight. And in fact, Alice loved it too. She thought her granddaughters were spectacular and they should enjoy the adventure, the attention, and the paychecks.

The money seemed to go a long way toward soothing any concerns.

The reality of making money—real money—during the Depression was slim. Especially for young, not especially well-educated women. There were teaching jobs and secretarial jobs. Both mundane and not suited for girls who wanted adventure.

Burlesque, an outgrowth of (or stepchild) of vaudeville, could and did afford single young women the chance to travel, earn decent—if not really good—money. And if they weren’t quite “stars,” they did make fans and generate publicity and were for a while “someone” in that circle. They, like Lili, felt “necessary.”¹¹⁴

And though strictly speaking the Florentine Gardens was not a burlesque house, the acts were similar and would have played both vaudeville and burlesque.

In the beginning Lili didn’t move anywhere near as gracefully as she would in the coming years, but she had a sparkle and a beautiful body, not to mention stunning features with a cleft chin, wide jutted cheekbones, and green eyes that were both mischievous and wholesome. She was fresh and nervous, occasionally tripping over her own feet, not exactly sure what to do with her hands. But she was endearing and delightful, eager to please, anxious to be liked. Barbara was equally stunning with an easy smile and enthusiasm for everything.

Barbara

LILI WOULD FOREVER REMEMBER HER FIRST NIGHT AT THE FLORENTINE, the smell of tomatoes and garlic and sweet cocktails. The sounds of the band and laughter. It seemed to be the happiest place on earth. Barbara and Lili were deliriously nervous, stomachs in knots, but also electrified too.

Backstage was chaos; girls running around in various stages of undress, stagehands lugging props, lifting furniture. Music soared through the club along with the tinkling of glass and silverware. There were many dressing rooms for a show that included an enormous cast of twenty chorus girls, jugglers, dance teams, and more.

For her first bit Granny had Lili walk around in net panties and bra. Years later she recalled the terror. She couldn’t feel her feet and hands. Her lips stuck to her teeth. The audience scared her. All those eyes on her.

To assure the girls didn’t get into trouble, Ian drove them to and from the club each evening, a thirty-minute car ride that any number of new admirers would have been willing to do. And soon were offering. Dardy was left at home to cry at the injustice of it. After all, NTG had spotted Barbara and her, not Lili.¹¹⁵

The shows at the Gardens were “built around NTG,” who meandered from table to table between the shows, bantering with the audience, sometimes telling crude double entendres and ribbing his celebrity friends like actor John Barrymore, a notorious drunk who often fell over.¹¹⁶ Movie stars such as Judy Garland, Robert Taylor, and Barbara Stanwyck packed the place.¹¹⁷ The show had comedians and chorines, dozens of scantily clad girls who slithered and slinked across the wide stage or gathered on the dance floor for spectacular and elaborate dance numbers. NTG was big on audience participation, sometimes asking soldiers up, inviting patrons to hula-hoop. Between 1940 and 1942 an astounding two million patrons enjoyed Granlund’s show at the Florentine.¹¹⁸ For Lili and her sister it was a huge opportunity.

The Florentine employed dozens of pretty girls who came and went. Lili gathered that if she wanted to stand apart from the ambitious showgirls clogging backstage, it was advantageous to be as naked as the law allowed. She was determined to get noticed and was bare-bosomed often. Ironically, as her career progressed, Lili would learn the value of clothing and cloaking, becoming less nude as she danced up the ladder of success. But for now she needed the attention of an audience jaded by the plethora of beautiful girls shaking across the floor. Competition was fierce.

Just west on Sunset Boulevard loomed the cavernous Earl Carroll Theatre, a supper club that showcased the same type of starlets as the Florentine, billed as having “the most beautiful girls in the world.” Not a unique claim. In Hollywood there was the Trocadero, Mocambo (opened in 1941), and Ciro’s (opened in 1940), all snazzy clubs vying for the attendance of movie stars. There was the Coconut Grove downtown and Sebastian’s Cotton Club. La Conga on Vine was a dance club that featured the recent Rumba craze. Clara Bow’s “It” Café was lush, with an elegant art deco interior. Hollywood nightlife was at its finest.

NTG treated the beauties with respect. Many of the girls lived with Granny in his big house on Fountain Avenue. “And never any hanky panky,” the girls swore, since he had a beautiful showgirl girlfriend, Sylvia McKaye.¹¹⁹

Lili watched and wondered and wanted the audience to single her out. She had bleached her hair about as white-blonde as it would go, and she wore thick Max Factor foundation that made her break out. She had even darkened her arched eyebrows. Along with Barbara, she had nude photographs taken. They were beautiful and artistically shot. Barbara sat modestly on the floor, Lili standing behind her, arching her slender torso, brazenly bare-breasted, her arm in the air.

This rare photo of Lili at the Florentine Gardens clearly shows she hadn’t yet chosen a stage name

BARBARA DANCED UNDER A PSEUDONYM, BILLED AS BARBARA Moffett.^3*** Granny took credit for naming her after his two dear friends, heiress Barbara Hutton and Adelaide Moffett Brooks, a “society songstress” who was the daughter of a former vice president of Standard Oil and the widow of David “Winkie” Brooks, who “fell” out of his fourteenth-floor apartment in 1936.¹²⁰

Undecided as to her perfect name, Lili remained Marie Van Schaack (and occasionally Mary Van Schacht). Possibly she wanted people to know of her success and didn’t yet want to hide behind a pseudonym.

WHETHER FROM SHYNESS OR SNOBBISHNESS, LILI WOULD NEVER become chummy with the other showgirls backstage. In return most would feel threatened by her. Many of the girls were younger than Lili. There was competition for boyfriends and prominent positions in the show.

Barbara and Lili were moderately friendly with “Dingbat,” a tall, raven-haired girl who had renamed herself from the ordinary Margaret Middleton to the more exotic Yvonne de Carlo. Barbara and Yvonne had much in common, such as ruthlessly ambitious mothers. Dingbat’s mother made Idella look modest in her plans for her daughter.

Yvonne, who would go on to become a star in both film and television, was pushed by a stage mother who showed up regularly at the club. They lived together in a small apartment downtown. Yvonne’s mother had always wanted to be a ballerina and forced her daughter into dance, though Yvonne lacked the ballerina’s body, with too long a trunk and too-short legs.

“She had a screwy figure,” Dardy recalled. “But she was sweet and charming.” Yvonne’s father had left home when she was three. For a while she too had lived with her grandparents. Like Lili she had dropped out of high school. It was unfortunate they never became friends. Yvonne too longed to escape her past and become a sophisticate. Her path would cross with Dardy’s one day at Earl Carroll’s. Lili, however, remained—not yet aloof as she would become—separate from the other girls. Women were and would remain a threat.

By March of 1940 Barbara and Lili were enjoying a variety of numbers in the show. “The ‘Bookends’,” Granny teased.¹²¹

DARDY MARVELED AT THE TRANSFORMATION OF HER SISTERS INTO glamorous “showgirls.” They learned to bead their eyelashes, which was an elaborate process of melting black makeup from a round metal tube in a spoon and then carefully glopping little balls onto the end of each eyelash with an orange stick. There is a famous photo by Man Ray, a close-up of a woman’s eyes with both rows of lashes holding tear-like dots on the end of the lashes. The effect is, though dated today, stunning. “It made the eye pop,” Dardy explained. The showgirls wore thick red lipstick. They attached falls to their hair for volume and length. The girls wore platform shoes. Dardy viewed them as exotic creatures and she couldn’t wait to become one.

Barbara at the Florentine Gardens

Barbara and Lili (on the right) as bookends

Lili, who still pined for her traveling days, declared working in the club to be the next best thing. She was becoming entranced by this show business life. Yet the girl who wore black on her wedding day to be “different” still searched for an opportunity to stand out. She wasn’t meant to be one of a dozen. She felt stymied in her personal and professional life. She studied lighting and dressing. She looked for an opportunity.

IAN CONTINUED TO ARRIVE PROMPTLY AFTER THE LAST SHOW TO escort the girls home. They would bundle up against the cold night and ride home drained, though excited, usually falling asleep before they reached Eagle Rock.

In the beginning Grandma and Idella stayed up wanting to hear all the details of the night. Barbara and Lili relayed stories about the other showgirls and the famous faces in the audience, singer Rudy Vallee, restauranter Steve Crane, producer Pat de Cicco. Errol Flynn would stagger in with an even more inebriated John Barrymore.

“Queen of the Orient”

The two sisters spent the better part of the next eight or nine months performing nightly. They were eager to do anything Granny asked of them. One night Lili was a “Southern Peach,” another a “Chinese queen” held aloft by a flank of girls. Her high moment came crashing to the floor as she was accidently tipped over. Another night Lili wore a green wig, which she occasionally wore out “as long as her dates didn’t protest.”¹²²

BARBARA STARRED IN THE ANNUAL COLORADO RODEO, WINNING THE title of California’s Loveliest Cowgirl and in 1941 she would have several pictures published in Life magazine. Barbara, who others called “buoyant,” seemed to be the sister with the most promising future, much to Idella’s delight.¹²³ Barbara was more nervous than her sisters. Barbara had a fragile personality. A brilliant girl who took her varied interests to extremes. Barbara was sensitive and delicate, easily hurt and easily influenced by others. In 1942 Billboard would call her a “rodeo performer of note.”¹²⁴ Riding was and would remain an important means of escape.

Lili seemed to be making no more headway at the club than a secret romance with the headwaiter, a thirtysomething man named Dick Hubert of “Belgian descent.”¹²⁵ He was tall, charming, and dark haired with a sculpted physique. Dick was enchanted with Lili but it was forbidden for coworkers to date. They were “nuts about each other.”¹²⁶ The pair would bide their time.

LILI WATCHED FROM BACKSTAGE AS A LITHE COUPLE SPUN AROUND the dance floor. The evening’s program announced the novelty dance act of Corinne and Tito Valdez, who danced to Chopin’s nocturens.

Billboard applauded Corinne and Tito for titillating with their “cobra dance” and their “slinky castanet dance.” The audience went crazy for the “sexy, smart” lovely Corinne as she was scooped up in Tito’s strong arms.¹²⁷ They performed from coast to coast, often choreographing other acts. Their work was flashy and they sprinkled their show with a hint of the exotic.

One of the “favorites” of the Florentine Gardens, they would travel the circuit as dancers and dance directors from Miami to New York in everything, including Mike Todd’s Peep Show starring Gypsy Rose Lee in 1950.¹²⁸

Young, muscular, and dark-haired Tito wound his arm around the lithe Corinne, who was blonde with perfectly shaped ballerina legs. Lili admired not only their flawless figures but also their gorgeously choreographed dances. Both performed a “near nude, weaving, sexy dance in smart style.”¹²⁹

Corinne and Tito helped propel Lili to the front of the line

Corinne asked Lili to appear in a number with them. The trio performed a seminude number about Adam and Eve and the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Corrine, as the snake, stalked Adam, slithering suggestively, attempting to crush Tito/Adam. Finally Lili/Eve, wearing a knee-length blonde wig and G-string, appeared onstage, swaying between the pair, attempting to ward off the serpent, until she too fell under its spell. It was a smashing success, an imaginative and highly erotic dance.

Lili had been knocked out by her participation in the number. It was energetic, sexy, and creative. It was also an opportunity to be noticed. “Taking off your clothes doesn’t take much nerve,”¹³⁰ Lili would always say. She was never shy or embarrassed with the human figure. As long as it wasn’t vulgar.

If nudity—and it wasn’t yet technically stripping, that would come later—meant a higher salary and rising above the chorus, Lili was all for it. But she would be conflicted. Stripping was thought of as low-rent. She never liked the word “stripper.”

At the Florentine Gardens

After much searching and experimentation she would find a way to strip on her terms. Elegant and classy. “Always the lady,” they would say about Lili.¹³¹

LIFE WAS GOOD FOR MARIE. AS MARIE, LILI WORKED HARD. SHE WAS ecstatic when Granny singled her out for any special bits. After shows she was regularly feted by customers eager to get to know her. She sipped champagne, never having too much, then moved on to the next admirer’s table. There was always someone who would buy a pretty girl dinner. Lili and Barbara often received invitations between the shows. When one sister received a dinner invitation she would convince the man to bring a buddy along for the other. It was one for all and all for one.

Barbara had her share of romance, going on dates with many eligible men like actor Franchot Tone, recently divorced from Joan Crawford and not yet moved on to the disastrous Barbara Payton. Idella carefully monitored the level of the man’s fame to see if she approved of her daughter’s choices.

Headliner Faith Bacon would make a huge impact on Lili when she joined the show. A dancer who garnered acclaim holding two giant ostrich feathers nearly the size of her petite figure, Faith claimed to be the “original” fan dancer, though both she and Sally Rand danced at the 1933 World’s Fair with their fans. By the 1939 New York World’s Fair in NTG’s “Congress of Beauties,” the popular Faith was making $450 a week.

In May of 1940 Faith joined the cast at the Florentine for an “indefinite” stay.¹³² She would temporarily be sidelined in a Santa Monica hospital for an operation in July but was back onstage at the Paramount by August. The show had been preceded by a spectacular publicity stunt. Bacon as “Lady Godiva” led a parade on horseback through the streets of Los Angeles where curious onlookers were treated to the fan dancer in the near—if not total—nude followed by dozens of chorus girls. It is conceivable, as an expert horsewoman and Florentine regular, that Barbara was one of them. Variety reported the parade left the “yokels to gap in wonder.”

As just one of the chorus, Lili would have had little contact with Faith. But one afternoon Lili slipped downtown to see Bacon perform. The show would have a seismic shift in how Lili went about trying to get noticed, turning what she did into an artistic performance.

Lili would credit Bacon as changing her whole perception about a career stripping. Technically, Lili wasn’t yet a stripper. She did not remove clothes at the Florentine. She hadn’t performed a tease, which is the defining element of burlesque. Lili realized she needed something that would identify her, something that audiences would want to see because she—and no one else—performed it. Also, “If I was going to do nudes, I might as well get paid well for it.”¹³³

“Faith Bacon was the greatest artist in the business,” Lili would declare.¹³⁴ She was thunderstruck by what the petite beauty who looked like a blonde Clara Bow, with thin, arched black eyebrows and big blue mischievous eyes did. She was an extraordinarily graceful dancer, performing sensuous ballet-like moves without shoes. Bacon held a pair of creamy ostrich feather fans that were quite heavy, requiring strength and skill to (mostly) cover her body. Faith twirled them with gusto and elegance. Though she made it look easy, it was not.

LILI WAS INSPIRED BY FAITH’S DANCING, NOT ONLY BECAUSE OF THE movements—obviously more than parading, as Lili had been doing—but also by Bacon’s elaborate props and scenery. She worked to classical music that soared and mimicked her story. In one number Faith rapturously portrayed a bird, wearing gorgeous, vibrant colored feathers. At the end of the number she died, her chest penetrated by an arrow.¹³⁵

Bacon did not just dance, she told a story. Bacon was using herself as art; her body was her tool. “This is the kind of thing to strive for,” Lili said, feeling as if she’d been struck by an arrow herself.¹³⁶ Lili watched Bacon create illusion on the stage: “The stage was haunted by the appearance of beauty.” ¹³⁷

Faith defiantly reveled in her nudity. Lili thought she was beautiful and recognized her performance as a “big moment” in her life.¹³⁸ She would try to live up to her new idol’s artistry.

Lili threw herself into work. She was determined more than ever to be a solo performer. She would be the creator of her destiny. She was through waiting for Granny or Corinne and Tito or anyone else to give her an act. She would design her own.

Years later a starting-to-be-well-known Lili crossed paths backstage with a down-and-out Faith Bacon. Lili had been misquoted as saying that if Faith could dance, so could she, as if Faith’s talent was small and dismissive. At this point many had copied Faith’s act, Sally Rand being the biggest name who claimed she was the original fan dancer. Faith had turned bitter and “aggressive.”¹³⁹ Lili’s idol, hardened and aging, turned away from Lili backstage. Faith didn’t want anything to do with the young upstart criticizing her.

Lili, shivering backstage (at the Follies in Los Angeles) tried to explain she hadn’t meant it like that, she admired Faith.

Lili’s bird act

Faith, with her big blue eyes and white hair, still young but disillusioned, perhaps on drugs, having lived some desperately unproductive years, her salary slipping, injuries to her beautiful body tearing at her, snarled her lip and flounced away.

Later still, Lili made a special trip to Texas to see Faith perform. The aging stripper had a palpable smell of desperation about her by then. After a horrific accident onstage she had scars and pain in her legs. She was coming to the end of the road, unsure where her next $100 or her next job was coming from. She had lost the inner beauty that had driven her dance. She was just another down-and-out stripper.

Not long after, Faith would sail—possibly in a cloud of drugs—out her hotel window seeking relief from her life. Without work, without admirers, without money, the former “inventor of the fan dance” who was once billed as “the most beautiful woman in the world” had nothing left to keep her on the ground.¹⁴⁰ It was a story that terrified Lili. She thought, “This is how we push great artists” to tragedy.¹⁴¹ Lili too would dance to the highest peak of a career that depended on her beauty. When her looks faded, what would become of her?

Faith’s death would not be an easy one. Her body wrecked and broken when retrieved from a second-story awning that broke her fall, she expired after a few agonizing hours. Faith’s lungs were punctured, her ribs broken, her face mangled. Lili couldn’t imagine it.

ANOTHER SEMINAL MOMENT IN LILI’S LIFE WAS ATTENDING A PERFORMANCE of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo at the Philharmonic Auditorium in Los Angeles. The Monte Carlo was a famous offshoot of the Ballets Russes, which had performed under the genius leadership of Sergei Diaghilev. After Diaghilev’s death in 1929 several companies formed, one being the Monte Carlo Ballet. The Monte Carlo toured mostly in the United States, debuting in Los Angeles in January of 1935.

In her Canadian biography Lili would claim she was seventeen and it was 1934 and Ian took her alone as a special treat. This was pure fiction. Maybe it was something the kindhearted Ian would have done. But the particular show she saw wasn’t until 1945 (dates would never be important to or remembered accurately by Lili). By then Lili was a twice-divorced woman, not a schoolgirl who needed an escort.

Lili thought the performance magnificent. The troupe danced to Debussy’s “Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faun.” (She would later create her own version of “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun.”)

The choreographer and lead dancer that profoundly impressed her was twenty-four-year-old David Lichine, a handsome Russian “poet-choreographer.”

Performing at the Florentine Garden

He danced to Scheherazade (Lili too would include this in her repertoire), which incorporated a “protracted orgy” scene.¹⁴²

Lili was mesmerized by the graceful ballerinas in “sensuously skimpy” costumes, with their elegant arm movements, their haughty manner as they danced as if there was no audience.¹⁴³ The male dancers were strong and sensual. It was a thrilling, artistic experience that deeply moved her. The dance (though it did not include Nijinsky’s infamous and controversial masturbatory scene) opened Lili’s eyes to the possibility that dance could be not only erotic or lustful but also artistic, despite the half-nude costumes. And more importantly Lili had been dancing to and for the audience. She had been seeking their approval and their eyes. This would soon change. She noticed most of the acts at the Florentine sought approval from the audience. Something about that bothered her. Later she equated it with dating. She felt once a man thought a woman was interested in him, the less interested he became. She would learn the same was true of audiences. They had to want her and not the other way around. Lili would make the audience seek her. She would perform privately as if there were no one to please but herself.

When Nijinsky had originated “Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faun” in the 1920s he had been roundly condemned because of the subject matter, shocking the audience by rubbing himself. No matter when or where Lili saw the performance and Lichine, it would change her ideas about dance and give her a taste of emotion through movement. She would often deny it but Lili did strive to elevate her work to be on par with the highest level of the artists of her day.

*** Remember her real name was Ruth