Goddess of Love Incarnate. Leslie Zemeckis

gray feet protruded.

      CHAPTER FOURTEEN

      Lili St. Cyr was making her long-anticipated debut at Lou Walter’s Latin Quarter in Miami. She was officially announced in the papers as Lili St. Cyr.

      The Latin Quarter had been built in the 1920s as the Palm Island Club, a private club for the posh set during Prohibition. Located at 159 Palm Island Drive, it was smack in the center of Palm Island, accessible only via car along a narrow sand causeway that passed through a security gate.²⁰⁸

      It was December 1943. A warm tropical breeze blew. The grand marble entrance was impressive and elegant, exhilarating for Lili after the nondescript entrances of the Follies and Hollywood Theatre. She was moving up in the world.

      HOWARD HUGHES—WHO YEARS LATER WOULD PUT LILI IN A FILM—sat around a booth with his buddies. Joseph P. Kennedy drank whiskey with his Palm Beach cronies, listening to the band play the club’s theme song, “So This Is Gay Paree.” All of Florida came to gamble and enjoy the opulent, sophisticated shows.

      The type of extravagant showgirl-filled entertainment that was proliferating from coast to coast in high-class joints had began in the 1930s when Broadway impresario Earl Carroll produced a show at the Palm Island Club. In 1940 Lou Walters bought the club and gave it a Latin flavor. There was a “state-of-the-art kitchen” along with housing for the dancers, where possibly Lili bunked. The show was two hours long, lush, and filled with a bevy of cancan girls who “not only did splits, but defied gravity and anatomy by . . . landing in the splits.”²⁰⁹ In its first year of operation Walters claimed the club made $1,250,000.²¹⁰

      Walters had started out booking talent in vaudeville. His first club in Boston was a former Greek Orthodox church. He took over the lease with “sixty-three cents” in his pocket.²¹¹

       A radiant Lili

      Walters’s idea was to offer dinner and a show for a reasonable fee, keeping it naughty enough for adults but not enough so that mom and dad couldn’t take the kids. He transformed the church into a Parisian club, painting the walls with “murals of Parisian café scenes.”²¹²

      It was a huge success and by the time he opened in Florida he moved his wife and daughter Barbara into a fifteen-room mansion on five acres of lush tropical plants across from the club and down the street from Al Capone. More disturbing was the tenant that came with their rented home.

      Bill Dwyer and his “chauffer or bodyguard” lived in one of the rooms. Named “The Fixer,” he was a Mob man who would live with Walters’s family their first year in Miami.

      Backstage Lili prepared among thirty-six gorgeous chorus girls, “more than any Broadway musical today.”²¹³

      The entertainment at the club was first-class, with Milton Berle and Martha Raye headlining. Sinatra would croon there. The music pumped out a sultry Latin beat. It was crowded with seats for six hundred. Sexy and glamorous, it was a huge leap above the burlesque houses Lili had been toiling in. Lili would always say burlesque was her stepping-stone.

      Lili had persuaded Corinne and Tito to choreograph a routine for her debut.

      THE PAIR DESIGNED A SOLO “EVE” FOR THE ENCHANTRESS THAT SHE was becoming.

      It was a perfect balmy Miami night. With the war on, and men enlisting by the droves, over eighteen million women would join the workforce, patriotic and proud to do their bit. Everyone was in a mood to live life fully. The popular films were Lassie Come Home and Heaven Can Wait. Oklahoma opened on Broadway. A bottle of Coke cost a nickel, the average car $900.

      Thirsty soldiers crowded the booths and tables in clubs throughout Miami, but in particular the Latin Quarter where they enjoyed the extravagant show. Buddy Mary, a juggler, tossed dumbbells up on the stage. A chorus did a boudoir routine. There were skating dolls and chorus girls. It was filled to capacity and this was only the ten fifteen show, one of three nightly.

      About to go on, Lili was a nervous wreck. She hadn’t been assigned the first show because one of the feature dancers had a last appearance before her contract expired. She didn’t mind; the club was bursting to capacity by the midnight show.

      One reviewer singled Lili out, calling her act vulgar and offensive. Perhaps eager to get noticed, Lili was far more obvious in the beginning of her career, stripping to “the brassy blare of trumpets and the beat of drums,” as all strippers did using the “stiff-legged strut” seen across every burlesque house and probably learned in San Diego.²¹⁴ She was accused of leaving “nothing to the imagination.”²¹⁵ Her belief that nudity would catapult her into the big time wasn’t working. It was time to rethink her plan.

       “Signing my first autographs—I wasn’t famous yet but the boys didn’t seem to give a hoot—later when they were released from the hospital they would come, crutches and all, to see me dance at the Old Howard Theater—some of them still write after all this time.”—Lili St. Cyr

      LILI WAS A LATE RISER. AFTER THE LAST PERFORMANCE AND A DRINK with a date it took time to come down. Probably about now Lili started to experience insomnia. She was lucky to fall asleep as the sun came up. Someone provided Lili with sleeping pills. Her “helpers,” she would call them, and she would delightfully sleep until afternoon.²¹⁶

      Lili began to pore over books looking for another Joan of Arc or Eve, historical women to up her game. She admired “sophisticated women.”²¹⁷ As she discovered, “alone onstage, more was expected of me.”²¹⁸ She needed something like the flying G-string to rise above the other girls. She spent countless hours in dressing rooms and hotel rooms sewing costumes. She was on a mission to be the most well-known exotic in the business. Unlike many showgirls, Lili wasn’t waiting to marry a wealthy man and get out of the clubs. She claimed she didn’t want to ask a sugar daddy for money. Most of the girls wanted husbands and babies. That life didn’t interest her in the slightest. Her body was everything. She couldn’t imagine it swollen and distended by pregnancy.

      When she had the time, Lili walked along Lincoln Road, lined with chic boutiques loaded with gorgeous clothes and accessories. She bought outfits for her numerous dates. Men in Miami shepherded her around to drinks at Club Bali or the Clover Club restaurant.

      Business was brisk as the Latin Quarter packed with couples dressed to the nines sharing steaks and drinks and smokes. The music was loud and strong.

      She finished her contract and moved to Walters’s club in Boston and then the big time—New York City.

      If Lili wasn’t yet the star she wanted to be, that was about to change.