Kelly DiNardo

Back in the early 1960s, it was still impossible for the average pubescent boy to lay his hands on any of the visual aids for sexual self-expression that are now freely available at convenience stores, movies, television, billboards, and the Sunday New York Times Magazine. Playboy was only offered “under the counter” and certainly not to someone my age – although an enterprising classmate had liberated one from his older brother’s stash under the mattress and made a small fortune in lunch money charging us for a brief look at Miss April or the Vargas Girl. Raunchier magazines were only ill-defined rumors, and the majority of us had to be content with girdle ads in the Sears-Roebuck Catalog.


However, there was a possible alternative. While youngsters were protected from the sight of female skin, blood and gore were entirely acceptable, and even the most callow could save up dimes and buy True or Argosy or Men’s Adventure. A vanished genre nowadays, these featured stories and garish cover illustrations, usually on one of the following themes:


*Red-blooded American GIs slaughtering hordes of Nazis, Japanese, or North Koreans.


*Red-blooded American GIs held captive and tortured by suggestively clad SS ice maidens or exotic female kempetai operatives (the popularity of these may say something about the sexual fantasies of the average red-blooded American male).


*Red-blooded Americans (non-military, for a change) enduring attacks by a variety of wildlife – grizzly bears, mountain lions, snakes, gorillas, giant spiders, and, in a particularly unlikely encounter, flying squirrels. (If you’ve ever seen a real flying squirrel, you know they’re so sweet that you want to dunk them in your coffee; however, the animals busy with the hero under the headline “FLYING RODENTS GNAWED MY FLESH” looked like a cross between a wolverine and a Ju-87, and there was a whole Stukageschwader of them gliding in to finish the job).


What really interested a teenage lingerie pervert like myself, however, was not the cover (well, maybe the SS ice maidens) but the ads in the back for various exotic female undergarments. While Fredericks of Hollywood held the dominant market share in this area, second in line was The UndieWorld of Lili St. Cyr, with intimate items either shown on line drawings of ladies anatomically quite different from anyone I’d ever encountered at Jackson Junior High, or modeled by Miss St. Cyr herself. I fell in lust.


All this is background to finding a biography of Lili, Gilded Lili. The author, Kelly DiNardo, actually tracked me down on LibraryThing and suggested I might like her book, and when a lady suggests something like that it’s the gentlemanly thing to accommodate her.


Alas, the life of Lili, although interesting enough, was really rather sad. Lili (born Marie Van Schaack) came from a broken home and got interested in the stage relatively early. In her heyday in the 1940s, she was described as being “as streamlined as a P38 but with more firepower”. She put a lot of effort into her performances, setting up music and lighting, and like her contemporary, Gypsy Rose Lee, she was quite literary. Her specialty was the “story strip”, in which she acted out some scene from literature which could plausibly involve the heroine disrobing. Since she had a bent for classical literature it must have puzzled some of her patrons to see her do “Dido and Aeneas” or “Leda and the Swan”. Unlike contemporaries that joked or talked to the audience, Lili played inaccessible, never making any sort of contact; her reviewers always described her as “classy”.


Unfortunately Lili was anything but unavailable off-stage. She went through six husbands and (by her own admission) eleven abortions. She also charged “Stage Door Johnnies” for her company, on a sliding scale depending on how early she had to get up in the morning; and although author DiNardo pussyfoots around the subject it seems clear that some of the encounters involved more than dinner and a show.


At the peak of her career in the 1940s/early 1950s, Lili was making $5000 a week, at a time when that was a great deal of money indeed. Exactly what she did with it all isn’t clear; DiNardo suggests that Lili had a weakness for men she could “mother”, and many of her husbands and companions were deadbeats living off her earnings. As classical burlesque disappeared under the onslaught of sexual liberation, Lili played smaller and smaller clubs and eventually was reduced to “carnie shows”. She took off her clothes on stage for the last time when she was 57.


It was pretty rapidly downhill from then on. Although Lili had a much younger live-in male companion, neither of them had any money; her sole income was the occasional request for an autographed picture and $100/month in royalties from the underwear business. As she had to move out of her house to a series of apartments, each smaller and nastier than the last, she became a recluse; although willing to talk on the phone or exchange mail with friends and fans, she refused any requests for public appearances, even lunch meetings with other retired dancers. She eventually stopped even answering her door, asking delivery people to leave things tied to the doorknob. Ironically, the only person DiNardo was able to interview about Lili’s last years was her heroin dealer; she apparently became addicted through the efforts of her final male companion. Lili eventually moved to a nursing home but bribed an attendant to release her and died at her apartment in January 1999 at the age of 81. All that dancing exercise must have been good for something; 81 is an impressive age for a chain-smoking heroin addict.


For a tragedy, the book was worth reading. Ms. DiNardo adds the almost obligatory comments about women rebelling against the stereotyped role of wife and mother, and celebrating their sexuality; in Lili’s case these observations are quite probably true. There are a few black-and-white pictures of Lili doing her acts; none is even as titillating as anything you could see in a current Playboy, or even Cosmopolitan. I think I have to recommend this one; it’s a story of a kind of life that I’m not very familiar with and evokes nostalgia. Lili may not have lead an exemplary life, even by modern standards, but I’m reminded of the motto of the Rolls-Royce Company: “Anything done well is noble”.… (mer)

The most popular burlesque star throughout the Forties and Fifties, Lili St. Cyr influenced Marilyn Monroe, performed with Dean Martin, and danced well into her 50s. Author Kelly DiNardo recounts the fascinating life of "the queen of striptease" in the well-researched and superbly written Gilded Lili: Lili St. Cyr and the Striptease Mystique.

Beginning with the introduction by [author:Rachel Shteir], writer of the excellent burlesque history, [book:Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show], Gilded Lili explores the truth behind the legend while establishing St. Cyr within a proper sociological-historical context. DiNardo immediately humanizes St. Cyr, born Marie Van Schaack, by exploring the stripteaser's childhood in a broken home. Raised by her grandmother, Van Schaack barely knew her father and spent much of her life estranged from her mother. DiNardo deftly follows Van Schaack from her modest Minneapolis roots to her transformation into the world-famous Lili St. Cyr, the first lady of burlesque. St. Cyr married six times and spent the last 35 years of her life with Donald Markick, whom she never married. She died at 81 in January 1999 after spending years as a reclusive heroin addict.

DiNardo wows with her extensive research. She personally interviewed many key figures, including several of St. Cyr's ex-husbands and ex-lovers, as well as their current spouses. Quotes from other entertainers who shared the stage with St. Cyr usher forth from the pages. DiNardo spoke with fans, journalists, psychologists, and even met with St. Cyr's heroin dealer. DiNardo weaves these conversations with bits from other sources, such as St. Cyr's two memoirs, celebrity bios, pop-culture studies, and newspaper accounts.

It is in the lengthy epilogue that DiNardo stumbles. While the current stripper-chic and neo-burlesque trends certainly deserve a place within this biography, they feel like a digression after the story's climatic finish and would have been better placed within the context of St. Cyr's life.

DiNardo successfully reintroduces a largely forgotten star, recounting her unbelievable life. For burlesque fans and aficionados of cultural history, Gilded Lili: Lili St. Cyr and the Striptease Mystique returns Lili St. Cyr, warts and all, to her rightful place on the center stage.

This review originally appeared in The Austin Chronicle, November 16, 2007.… (mer)

Before I stumbled across this book at the store I had never heard of Lili St. Cyr and considering how huge she was in her day this surprised me though it really shouldn’t have. America doesn’t seem to like to admit woman like her existed or had value to our culture when it doesn’t have to.

A great deal of research and time went into this book and it shows, you get a real feel for the life and times that Lili St. Cyr lived through and how they shaped who she became as well as how she played a part in shaping our culture even to this day. Even though I didn’t know her name I did know about her most famous routines even though I had never seen them.

This was a very entertaining and informative book and I found the look it provided into a world that ended long before I was old enough to even know it existed a fascinating and educational one. I also really appreciated the respectful way this book was written. Nothing was sugar coated or glamorized nor dealt with cheaply or salaciously, which can often happen when strippers are the topic… (mer)