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When Burlesque Was More Than ‘Nudie Cuties’

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In the art of striptease, Betty Rowland says, the emphasis was always on tease. She should know. At 81, burlesque’s redheaded “Ball of Fire” still burns brightly as the grande dame of bumps and grinds.

To listen to her cheeky memories is to return to an era when men brought dates to burlesque shows, the bump and grind and the German Roll were separate arts, and the dancer who touched her body while she was dancing ran the risk of going to jail.

“Let’s put a little juice in the Ballet Russe,” she would tempt them onstage in a signature piece, “Bumps in the Ballet, “and give the dying swan a little goose.”

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Although she was deemed the epitome of lewdness in her day, Rowland says her act--in which she went no farther than pasties and a G-string--was quite sedate compared to modern fare. (“What is a lap dance, anyway?” she asks.)

She spends four days a week helping run the 217 Lounge in Santa Monica, which she inherited as a neighborhood bar called Mr. B’s in the late 1960s. In1995, two investors persuaded her to sell the business and join them as a partner, and they renovated the bar.

Then and now? “The difference is there were beautiful girls who would strip and dance in burlesque. Now they’re just nudie cuties--and just nudies. We were striptease.”

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Disrobing in public wasn’t what Rowland intended to do with her life. She and two sisters studied dance at an early age and had a sister act before turning to striptease in New York in the ‘30s. (“I was always more in tune with Minsky than Nijinsky,” she says, reciting another line from “Bumps in the Ballet.”)

In the late ‘30s, New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia closed the burlesque theaters, so Rowland came west. A Los Angeles theater owner dubbed her the “Ball of Fire,” and she was hired as a technical advisor on the 1941 Barbara Stanwyck film of the same name, in which Stanwyck plays a burlesque dancer who helps a crowd of encyclopedia-writing professors decipher slang.

Burlesque was more than just striptease, Rowland says; there were comedians, dancers, jugglers, balancing acts, gymnasts and singers. Female audience members would come backstage to find out where she got her costumes so they could surprise their husbands.

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The grind, as Rowland explains one of the mainstays of her art, was moving the bottom of the torso in a circular motion, while the bump was a forward thrust.

But the bump took skill. So many of the girls, Rowland says, stood straight and bumped rather than drawing back and then doing a bump.

“That way it’s effective,” she says. And when the censors were watching, you always bumped toward the side of the stage, not toward the audience.

Then there was the German Roll, in which she reached down to her ankles and brought her hands slowly up over her head. (“I got in a lot of trouble with that one.”)

Rowland’s problems here began in 1939, when she was fined $250 after a trial in which a husky 200-pound police officer re-created portions of her act on the witness stand, leaving the courtroom convulsed in laughter.

But her biggest case came after a 1952 raid on one of the downtown burlesque theaters.

According to Rowland, the manager--who was also arrested--was filling in at the box office and didn’t recognize two vice officers who wanted to be let in free. They said they would teach him a lesson and they did, charging in their report that she was dancing in “a sadistic (sic) manner.”

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After a 20-minute lecture from the bench, the judge sentenced Rowland and the manager to four months in jail.

Rowland says she was stunned at the sentencing: A deal had been made; checks in the thousands of dollars had changed hands. She was not supposed to go to jail.

L.A. Mirror columnist Paul Coates took up her case, saying that her sentence was as severe as the one handed down in a recent shooting. “Bumps or Bullets?” he wrote.

There was an appeal in which a tearful Rowland promised that she would hang up her G-string forever. But the judge was unmoved, and the furor stirred up by Coates’ column made it impossible for her to be released. The “Ball of Fire” was quenched in the Lincoln Heights jail.

After three weeks, she was quietly slipped out of jail with the promise that she would not perform--at least locally. So she took her show all over the country, doing the performance that was “banned in Los Angeles.”

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There were triumphs too. She recalls the hard work of doing four shows a day, seven days a week (“We didn’t have time to be promiscuous.”) And of working with great burlesque comedians such as Joe Yule (Mickey Rooney’s father) and Abbott and Costello.

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Orson Welles used to love burlesque shows, Rowland says, showing a card she received from Welles and John Houseman after the wrap party for “Lady From Shanghai.” “After every movie, he would throw a whole burlesque show in which he was the emcee,” she says.

Then times began to change. After World War II, couples began staying home with their young families. The crowd became tougher; mostly single men, she says. The pit orchestra dwindled to a piano player and a drummer, and then to recordings.

She continued working from time to time into her 50s, with The Times’ Kevin Thomas writing of a 1966 performance at the now-tawdry New Follies Theater: “Amid this dreariest of settings, Miss Rowland demonstrated that she is above all an artist.”

Finally, some friends who owned several bars in Santa Monica willed Mr. B’s to her. She hung up her G-string at last (“It was time”) and began running the bar.

Now the renovated watering hole has become upscale, with celebrity birthday celebrations and wrap parties, as well as get-togethers like the one Rowland is planning for all her fellow striptease artists. There will be no flesh on display, she cautions, just scrapbooks and memories.

And if they ask, she’ll quote a few lines of one of her routines:

“So in a classical kind of way, do you mind if I put a bump in this ballet?”

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