LILI SINCERE
All about the best dressed undressed woman in the world
By Don Stradley
All about the best dressed undressed woman in the world
By Don Stradley
About their sister burlesque performer, most of the ladies in
the biz remembered Lili St. Cyr as aloof, maybe shy, stand-offish, but also as
a one-of-a-kind entertainer, someone who conquered Montreal and made that city
her own, and then brought stripping to Las Vegas, back when it was still a wild
west town. She should’ve been a movie star, if she hadn’t been so hell
bent on controlling her own destiny, and though she claimed it was because she
couldn’t remember lines, it was really because she felt no director in
Hollywood understood her quite like she understood herself. Yet, the very self-absorption
that made St. Cyr the highest paid peeler in the world also landed her in a
dreadful old age, living as a destitute drug addict in a houseful of cats,
watching The Flintstones while she was nodding out on heroin, while the last of
her hairy chested Romeos shuffled around the house, bent in half by his own
pain and addiction.
She probably didn’t have the energy to fight her way out of her
misery, exhausted from decades of being the most
famous disrober of ‘em all, not to mention her six marriages, each of them tumultuous and
draining, and her endless affairs, for if ever there was a woman who
exemplified the old Rogers and Hart song “Falling in Love with Love,” it was
this towering girl from Minnesota. As depicted in Leslie Zemeckis’ Goddess
of Love Incarnate: The Life of Stripteuse Lili St.Cyr, a
well-researched but slow moving trudge through St. Cyr’s 80 years on the
planet, St. Cyr was a groundbreaker as a performer, a nondescript showgirl who reinvented herself and turned the business of strip teasing on its ear, but wasn’t quite as
interesting as the men around her. The names
of her beaus include Jack Dempsey, Orson Welles, and Victor Mature, plus hockey goons, second tier gangsters, and fringe Hollywood players. St. Cyr provided a kind of
empty vortex around which any number of brilliantined mugs could flutter.
Like the great ones in all professions, from Hulk Hogan to Bette Davis, she went on long after she should've quit. The stage gave her something she couldn't get anywhere else - whether it was a sense of identity or, more likely, a bankroll - so she kept her aging face in the dark while her still flexible body did the journeyman's work. Like her childhood hero, Greta Garbo, Lili maintained a mysterious demeanor, not even sitting
poolside in a swimsuit. If you wanted to see her flesh, you had to pay.
It wasn’t a bad gig, really, taking bubble baths onstage for leering men, even
though death and violence was all around. The book is loaded with suicides and
murders, gobs of mental illness, desperate dancers hurling themselves from high
windows, and enough family secrets to keep a reader slightly confused
throughout. And the bits, where St. Cyr would dress like Salomé or the “Chinese
Virgin,” must’ve been scandalous in the 1950s, enough to get her busted
several times for indecency, and to incite one of her critics to declare "the theater is made
to stink with the foul odor of sexual frenzy." Still, there’s nothing in Zemeckis’ descriptions to make one want to
track them down on an old Irving Klaw reel, or sit through RKO's Son of Sinbad, where Lili irritated the censors with her belly-dancing. One is more intrigued by Lili the
toothless smack addict, her once beautiful feet crippled by arthritis, checking
her fan mail for "gifts," nettling her admirers for stamp money.
When Al Capp saw Lili in her prime, he immediately created a new character for his Lil’ Abner comic strip: Wolf Gal. Based on some of the photos in Zemeckis’ book, there was something faintly lupine about Lili in her arched brow and pointy nose; Capp was onto something. But wolves travel in packs, and Lili was a loner. This is usually the case for people who make a living through fantasy. As Zemeckis makes clear, St. Cyr created a balloon of make-believe for herself to float in. When it burst, she plummeted to earth. Zemeckis finds this tragic, but I'm not sure. Though she was certainly an innovator, there’s very little about St. Cyr to make anyone not bewitched by the legends of burlesque to think she was anything more than just another stripper.
When Al Capp saw Lili in her prime, he immediately created a new character for his Lil’ Abner comic strip: Wolf Gal. Based on some of the photos in Zemeckis’ book, there was something faintly lupine about Lili in her arched brow and pointy nose; Capp was onto something. But wolves travel in packs, and Lili was a loner. This is usually the case for people who make a living through fantasy. As Zemeckis makes clear, St. Cyr created a balloon of make-believe for herself to float in. When it burst, she plummeted to earth. Zemeckis finds this tragic, but I'm not sure. Though she was certainly an innovator, there’s very little about St. Cyr to make anyone not bewitched by the legends of burlesque to think she was anything more than just another stripper.
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