After my extended striptease instigation exploration distraction, it’s back to the instagram roundups I started with. Picking up right where we left off; we had…
An ad for the 1937 movie “The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse”
While not directly related to the topic at hand (other than being advertised on the same page as “Panties Inferno” and “Tease For Two,” this March 1937 ad was too suggestive not to share. How do you pronounce your name, Doc?
Allen Lee was kind enough to include the Wikipedia description in a FB response:
“The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse is a 1936 thriller play by the British writer Barré Lyndon. The lead character’s name is a play on the term for the female sexual organ the clitoris - a name characterised by the “yearning, untrammelled nature” of Clitterhouse himself; an extremely daring pun for 1936, yet seemingly anticipated by Lyndon to escape the notice of the contemporary censor.”
Lyndon wrote, “My view was that he was no more likely to locate the pun in my title as to locate the source of it on his beloved bedfellow”.
A billboard roundup of the “12 Best Strippers” of 1937… but we’ll come back to that at a later date.
The front page of the 4/30/1937 Daily News, chronicling the 4/29 raid of two Brooklyn Burlesque Houses. (We’ll get back to this one too.)
Today in #censorship history: April 29, 1937: License Comissioner Paul Moss and Mayor #FiorelloLaGuardia launch the first major attack in their war on #burlesque. Performers arrested that day in violation of PL 1140-A: (Compiled from various sources, hence the name variations.)
…at The Star Theatre:
* Billie Holmes
* Geryl Dean (according to police reports, or “Geraldine” in the paper)
* Marie Voe (or DeVoe)
* Minnie (or Muriel) Lind
* Poppy O’Hara
* Toots (or Marie) Brawner (or Brauner)…at the Oxford (by “a dozen policemen” according to @nydailynews ):
* Mildred Clark
* Helen Green
* Renee Gordon
(Let us take a moment to salute those twelve brave officers who risked their very lives to arrest three naked women.)…at Minsky’s Republic:
* “Two unidentified girls”All charges were later dismissed.
…though burlesque itself, it turned out, had been dealt a serious blow.
And brining up the rear, a 1938 police report, which provides a description of a burlesque move that is almost — but not quite — as instructional as The Burlesque Handbook.
Some of these police reports are downright educational. Filed Nov 2, 1938 by Patrolmen Jordan & Cordes, who provide inarguably the sexiest description of assel twirling ever written: “Attached to the transparent brassiere were two (2) tassels attached where the nipples of the breast were located and two (2) tassels - one on each buttocks. She then started the right tassel moving in a circular notion from right to left rotating and then started the left tassel moving in a circular motion from left to right and then she started to move her buttocks in a circular motion which caused the two (2) tassels there attached to rotate in a circular notion.” -From the NYC Municipal Archives
(These posts were followed was three plugs: one for this substack, the Coney Island Book Fair, and my Marx Bros homage A Day on the Boardwalk, A Night at the Stripshow.)
Next up in IG Roundup #4: Georgia Sothern, Hustler 1974, and Burlesque Slang of 1937ish.