Goddess of Love Incarnate. Leslie Zemeckis

off it. She had been an artist. She had always had to defend herself. Arrests, divorces, accusations in the papers. Questions regarding her “private parts,” testimony from “experts.” Countless humiliations.

      As far back as 1948, after her first arrest, she had defended her performance as being art. To the judge she attempted to explain “anyone who doesn’t understand the story I dance probably would think the dance is suggestive. The story is about the lonely wife of a sultan who is unfaithful with a slave. My dance didn’t go that far, however.”¹⁷ Always she tried to inject humor in a situation. Her little acts always had a backstory, a beginning, middle, and end, she explained.

      She took pride in her work. She was the first to produce little mini plays. “Pantomimes,” her great friend Tom Douglas had called them. She had changed the business of stripping forever. She had been the first stripteaser to play Vegas, for years. When Vegas had been a handful of quaint hotels scattered randomly in the middle of hot sand she had earned thousands there. A charming western town. Remote, outcast, trying to be something it wasn’t. Inventing itself.

      She had been a star. She had worked hard to remain one. She learned where to place a light, what color gel to put over that light. She didn’t skimp on her costumes, one of a kind from Bergdorf Goodman, and jewels from Cartier. She created elaborate sets decorated with antiques. She gave everything of herself on the stage. Ironically, reviewers said her popularity was due to the fact that she was unattainable. “She had this wonderful haughtiness. After she’d taken a few things off, she’d half cover herself with the curtain and say, ‘That’s it, boys. You’re not getting any more from me.’”¹⁸

      She didn’t play to the audience as the majority of strippers did. She danced as if she were alone. Reporters were wrong. She gave everything. She was a savvy, calculating entertainer. She knew who could help her and what the audience wanted. She regularly decried any sense of ambition, saying she preferred to stay at home, that she worked only for the money. She always “needed” it, true, but she lived and breathed her work. It is what would kept her alive and on top. It was the only thing that made her feel substantial, the only thing that meant something.

      There weren’t many regrets. She had lived her life as she wanted to. Yes, she had lost her house, her looks, her health, and her family. She had nothing. But she had had it all. Every single damn thing. The men had come to see her because they wanted her. The women came because they wanted to be like her.

      When her act ended and the audience applauded, she smiled, satisfied, and slipped between the curtains and off the stage. The show was over. And Lili St. Cyr would vanish.

      CHAPTER TWO

      Lili was named after her mother, Mariah Marie Curry Klarquist, or “Maud” as she was known in the family.¹⁹

      Pasadena was a fashionable winter destination for the well-heeled in the 1930s, catering to a bustling tourist industry. With its wide boulevards and temperate weather the city was the ideal place for middle-class families to put down roots.

      By at least 1929, fifty-four-year-old Maud Klarquist had rented a modest one-bedroom cottage on the pleasant treelined South Oak Street at 215.²⁰ Lili slept on a cot on the porch. Maud procured a job, working long hours in the alteration department of Peterson’s, the woman’s store for “Those not slender,”²¹ hemming and fixing dresses for an upscale clientele for owner Chester W. Peterson. With older parents and after years of a nomadic existence, no doubt daughter Lili was a solitary, shy child.

      It had been a long, circuitous road from a quaint village in central Wisconsin to the citrus groves of Southern California.

      Maud had been born in or about 1874 in Port Edwards, Wisconsin.²² The village was built around a sawmill and her Canadian-born father, Daniel, was a foreman/partner in a lumber mill. Mother Emily Jerome was New York born. Maud was one of seven sisters and a brother.

      She would grandly claim to have been “a showgirl back in the day when Diamond Jim Brady” was about and had “traveled with a road company of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’” some sixty years prior. If that wasn’t enough yarn for the reporter, Lili’s grandmother Maud went on to claim, “I used to do a special dance to a song called ‘There’s a Longing in My Heart.’”²³

      At twenty Maud married Francis Cedric Peeso in Monroe County, Wisconsin, on September 4, 1895. A year later she gave birth to the first of what would be three children: Idella; a baby, who died at birth in 1898; and son William, born in 1899. By 1900 the family was living in South Dakota renting a farm and taking in a boarder. In the census Francis was listed as a “stock raiser.” One would assume of cattle. By 1910 the family had settled in Hennepin, Minnesota.

       Baby Lili

      Hennepin lies among numerous lakes and hills. Originally home to the Dakota Indians, it was largely settled by Germans, Norwegians, and Swedes. The area was another town built around sawmills and that was presumably why the family settled there.

      However, the marriage between Maud and Francis did not last. By 1916 Francis Peeso was listed in the Hennepin directory living with “Cecilia,” possibly his sister. Peeso then drops out of the picture and by 1918 Maud was divorced and remarried to a forty-one-year-old carpenter by the name of Ben Klarquist.²⁴ Ben had been an aging bachelor, moving often, living as a boarder in Hennepin, whose parents were Swedish born. Ben, probably born with the name Bryoguin, had blue eyes, light hair, and was of medium build. He too came from a large family with a sister and three brothers, all carpenters. There was a large contingency of Swedes by the name of Klarquist who settled in Minnesota and worked construction.

      ON OCTOBER 25, 1916, MAUD’S TWENTY-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER IDELLA wed twenty-seven-year-old Edward Van Schaack, a South Dakota–born traveling “land salesman.”²⁵ The two probably met in Hennepin where they would live for the next several years while Edward worked for the First National Bank.

      Edward himself was from a divorced home and had been living with his father, Frank, a proprietor of a grocery store, while his mother, Rebecca, moved in with her daughter Mabel. Edward was handsome, stood five ten and a half, with brown hair and gray eyes.

      Idella soon became pregnant, giving birth to a daughter in 1917. A year later, on June 28, Van Schaack enlisted.

      Idella was by all accounts a beautiful, temperamental young lady. At some point she contracted polio, either as a child (though photos show no effects) or probably around 1916, when the United States was experiencing an outbreak, and indeed President Roosevelt himself contracted it as an adult.

      With a husband in the army, Idella moved on. By 1919 she married brown-eyed, dark-haired Louis Sherman Cornett Jr., born in 1896 in Crawley, Louisiana. They had a child, Bettie Lue or Bettalee (“Betty”), born (probably) in Nova Scotia in 1919. A son, Louis Cornett (Jack), followed in 1921.

      In the 1919 Hennepin directory, Louis is listed as a chauffeur for an undertaker. In 1920 the Cornett family was living in Louisiana with Louis’s brother; both were listed as rice farmers. By 1923 the family had settled in Texas.

       Lili with Maud and Ben Klarquist

      Not surprisingly for the ambitious Idella, that marriage didn’t last either. By 1925 Cornett was living in Nebraska and had remarried. He would have three more children, becoming a real estate salesman. With Cornett gone, the pretty Idella took her third husband, John Alfred “Ian” Blackadder, a charming “black-Scotsman” from an impoverished yet noble background who resembled Errol Flynn and had lovely “aristocratic manners.”²⁶

      Ian