Kelli DiNardo peels back the layers of Lili St. Cyr – fondly remembered even today as one of the greatest strippers of the burlesque era, a highly complex woman who was simply gorgeous – in the biography GILDED LILI: LILI ST. CYR AND THE STRIPTEASE MYSTIQUE.
As you’d expect, being a stripper doesn’t equate to a squeaky-clean existence. There are references to St. Cyr being “passed around” like a plate of hors d’oeuvres at a party, and perhaps this was intentional on her part. After all, she was sexually liberated at a time – the late ’30s and early ’40s – when such a thing was a no-no, and once stated her motto was “Time costs money, but sex is free.”
Yet for all those stripper clichés that sadly ring true – six marriages, several abortions, recurring depression – she was by all accounts intelligent, brave and – yes – supremely talented. Any woman can strip, but DiNardo comments how St. Cyr found the graceful art in it, like a ballet in which the performer just happened to lose her clothes, one article at a time.
So good was St. Cyr at what she did that the Catholic Legion of Decency and others were quick to point out she wasn’t a saint at all. Her famed bubble-bath routine even landed her in court. It’s amusing to recall an America this puritanical; witness also an amusing anecdote in which a college guy causes a campus scandal by sending St. Cyr a letter asking for her bra and panties. Only after he burns his letter in public does the hot water he lands himself in cool off.
DiNardo interviewed several players in St. Cyr’s life for this short but never-worn-welcomed biography, including Vic Vogel, who used to play in nightclubs as a teenager where the stripper performed. Seeing such acts at such a hormone-frenzied age had their effects on the lad. Says Vogel, “My father had to change the sheets every night. He didn’t know what was going on.”
St. Cyr’s life grows more miserable after her beauty passes her peak, and DiNardo drops a bombshell about the “anatomic bomb” late in the narrative that is terribly sad, even though it shouldn’t be a surprise given all that comes before it. GILDED LILI could use some lightening up – less endnotes, more photos – but St. Cyr evidently needed the same thing herself. And with that, we’d have no book. –Rod Lott
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