Photo: Ed Clark / Time Life Pictures
burly star Lili St. Cyr performs, 1951.
worked in a rough and tumble carnival girl show could get a job in the line at the Follies or the Burbank. The grittier Mayan and Belasco theaters settled into burly stock policies under the direction of such local personalities as Sidney Pink, late of Army Special Services and diminutive comic Wally Vernon. These were cut-rate operations that occasionally featured bigger names such as Lili St. Cyr. A Mirror columnist panted over one 1948 Belasco show:“ Several of the boys in last night’ s packed house must have been off the farm because there were signs of homesickness for Ma’ s jellies and canning time in their sighs over the way trim and tidy little Shirley Stanley got up steam. The stage evidently needed sandpapering because her equipment bounced around like a rough day on the Atlantic. Like Saint Nick, she shook when she shook like a bowlful of jelly. In fact, she almost needs headlights.”
THE OYSTER GIRL, KALANTAN & PIGMEAT MARKHAM In the early winter months of 1948, an 18-year-old carnie drifter came off the road and got a job at the Burbank playing organ. Howard Stanton Levey was from sleepy Mt. Tamalpais, in Northern California. Downtown LA may have been down-atthe-heels, but Levey found it exciting, especially playing for name dancers like Betty Rowland and Sally Keith, the original“ tassel-twirler.”
One of the featured dancers at the Follies in 1949 was Aleene Dupree, a tea-skinned Creole whom Jim Morrison might have called a“ dusky jewel.” She would appear in different parts of the country billed as“ Kalantan” and she was good enough to perform one of her specialty numbers in the movie Midnight Frolics, the first of the burly films. Her schtick was unique— even by burly standards. She would always have a mysterious lady traveling with her, whom she would introduce as her aunt, who would interact with her in various ways on-stage. Kalantan was promoted as an“ interpreter of Afro-Cuban dance” but, ironically, was neither a great dancer nor very limber. However, she did posses a beautifully curved and well-proportioned body that was taut and lean and drove men wild— especially the mercurial multi-millionaire Howard Hughes. As Hughes opened his own movie studio, he remembered her and was cast in his swashbuckling 1955 movie Son of Sinbad, along with burly-ites Nejla Ates and Lili St. Cyr, doing a pole dance routine in the middle of a barren desert. toward the end of 1949, the rhinestones, crystals, glitter, and feathers of burlesque were all upstaged one spectacular night at the Follies when dancer Kitty West, aka Evangeline“ The Oyster Girl” Sylvas, began her act by emerging from a massive oyster shell; her blonde hair, dyed a mermaid-green. After freeing herself from the shell, she gyrated over to the side of the stage
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