Oh, where to start with the story of Tempest Storm. Should we begin with the time an impetuous young Massachusetts senator named Jack Kennedy swept her into his embrace? Or the time Elvis Presley vaulted the hedge around her Las Vegas hotel pool and declared himself "as horny as a billy goat in a pepper patch?" It is tough to say which of her many conquests, onstage or off, best demonstrates the power that strategically placed pasties can hold. But let's start with this one.
One night Tempest Storm was performing, as usual, to a packed house filled with goggle-eyed gents. Where does not matter. It was a lavish hotel ballroom in Las Vegas or New York; it was an upscale theater in Boston or Atlanta. The attraction was the same: a voluptuous red-haired vamp who took in the cheers of her salivating audience with a coquettish smile. Then occurred the climax every man came for—the moment when the star would slip expert fingers behind her neck, loosening the straps on the most famous (and voluminous!) brassiere of the breast-obsessed Eisenhower era.
Peering past the footlights, she saw a patron come rolling to the foot of the stage in a wheelchair. He took one look at Tempest Storm's ample charms and reared back his head. All the way from the stage, she could hear him holler, "Heal me!"
Did she? "I tried!" says Tempest Storm, laughing still at the memory. The lucky stiff got what movie stars, millionaires, pop singers and politicians all wanted: the undivided attention of the world's most famous burlesque performer. In all her travels, though, there is one thing she has never done. She will rectify that Saturday night, when she makes her first Nashville appearance ever. She will walk onstage, cue the strains of "Stormy Weather" and perform the same striptease that's knocked men dead for five decades.
Tempest Storm is 76 years old.
Not that you would ever know from her glamour stills—including, yes, topless shots that suggest a repeal of the laws of gravity. And as she's quick to tell you, her 44-inch bust and hourglass figure are all natural. "I've got to get her beauty tips!" exclaims Katy Kattleman, a.k.a. Katy K, the Nashville fashion designer and burlesque enthusiast who organizes the successful "Girlesque" nights at the Mercy Lounge.
"My secret is, I eat naked in front of the mirror," the septuagenarian stripper says from her home in California. She's clearly been asked many times. She rattles off a special diet—no pasta, no sweets, plenty of steamed veggies—but insists that the key is mental, not physical. "You have to think young and stay young, and retain your beauty inside and out," she explains. "There's no excuse for getting old and ugly."
It was Katy K who convinced burlesque icon Storm to give her first Nashville performance Saturday at the Mercy Lounge, after 55 years in the business. A racier offshoot of vaudeville, alternating buxom striptease artists with baggy-pants comics, burlesque flourished in the 1940s and '50s. But loosening sexual mores and the rise of nudie pictures started the genre's decline in the 1960s. By the late '70s, porn had largely nailed its coffin.
"We were certainly sexy and sensuous, but we had class," Storm says, dismissing today's explicit performers as "pole-climbers." "It was as much about the tease and what you didn't see."
Ironically enough, porn's latter-day grubbiness and grimy lack of production values may have fanned the appeal of a small but growing neo-burlesque circuit. Go to a "gentleman's club" if you want groin grinding. The new ladies of burlesque—like Girlesque regulars Panty Raid and Kicky La Rue—reach back to a time when a carefully guarded glimpse of galmeat had the erotic effect of a lap dance, only with class and flair. Their revival has its roots in retro-kitsch culture, the swizzle-stick iconography of martini lounges and Esquivel records and Bunny Yeager cheesecake shoots.
Beneath the irony, though, lies a longing for everything missing from the current strip circuit: seduction, a few secrets and the long, slow tease. "A woman's greatest weapon," Tempest Storm says, "is a man's imagination."
She should know. A small-town Georgia girl, the former Annie Blanche Banks was forced at an early age to use any means at her disposal. Her 1987 autobiography The Lady Is a Vamp details an adolescence of horrors: assault, abuse, a stepfather's drunken advances. When she fled Georgia in the 1940s, a string of bad relationships followed. "I must have a magnet on each one of these boobs that attracts these kinds of men," she says.
Desperate for work, she auditioned for a slot in the chorus line of a Los Angeles burlesque house. She had no experience, but she caught the eye of Lillian Hunt, a famous trainer of chorus girls and strippers who saw she had something extra. (When she asked Hunt if her 44-inch bust was too large for the job, Hunt burst out laughing.) The trainer coached the nervous girl, taught her the cardinal rule of stripping ("Always keep moving!"), and helped her build a routine. "I've kept it all these years," Storm says. "You never throw out what made you famous."
By 1951, she was headlining the El Rey Theatre in Oakland and posing in the off hours for a young combat photographer with a genius for glamour shots. His name was Russ Meyer. She credits him with giving her career an early boost, and they remained friends long after he became famous for films such as Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
Storm never appeared in any of Meyer's films. But she did make one foray into spicy pictures: a 1955 burlesque film called Teaserama that has become a collector's treasure. Not only was it shot by Irving Klaw, a photographer whose kinky stills are now enshrined in the halls of retro cool, it features the Holy Grail for fans of stripper exotica: a reverse striptease between Storm and fellow cult icon (and former Nashvillian) Bettie Page.
She formally adopted "Tempest Storm" as her name in 1957. It might have been "Sunny Day," had Hunt not told her that she danced up a storm. By that point, she was already a marquee name, a Vegas headliner and a continuing object of scandal-sheet interest. She was wooed by Mickey Rooney and pursued by Nat King Cole and had intense affairs with each. In her book, describing one marathon romp (of many), she says she left Rooney "draped across the bed as limp as a wet dishtowel." Columnist Walter Winchell called her "the most sinful act in Vegas" and flew in often for firsthand evidence. To this day, she's the only ecdysiast ever to perform at Carnegie Hall—and the bluenoses who wanted her banned had the nerve to ask afterward for signed photos.
Despite her celebrity, Storm says she could never surmount the stigma of being a stripper. Movie offers were limited to burlesque roles. "Lots of movie stars would come by for my show," she recalls, "but they felt like they were slumming." Offstage was worse. Men chased after her, then grew furious when she didn't retire her act. She tells the story of a famous politician who wanted her to become his alone. "I make a good wife, a good girlfriend and a good mistress," she responded, with characteristic candor. "Which one do you want?" In the end, he got none.
"A mistress has more control," Tempest Storm says, years later, with a laugh that sounds more resigned than regretful. "Once you become a wife, a husband wants you to wear blouses up to the neck and tries to change you. They can't realize there's a real woman behind the image."
In the 1960s, she married Herb Jeffries, the former Duke Ellington vocalist who made a name for himself early on as the screen's first black singing cowboy. It didn't last. "They called him 'the Bronze Buckaroo,' " she says, then drops the punch line: "I kicked him out of the saddle." But their union did have a pleasant result: a daughter, Patty, who now lives in Evansville, Ind.
She and Patty are close now, but they spent much of the 1970s apart. As the burlesque circuit was fading, Storm had to work harder than ever. Among her employers were the Mitchell brothers, Art and Jim, who ran San Francisco's O'Farrell Theatre. Though notorious for their 1972 porn blockbuster Behind the Green Door, they wanted nothing more from Storm than her time-tested routine, keeping her separate from their hardcore interests. She says she was so oblivious to the hard-candy scene around her that when Art told her the little lines of white powder on his piano were coke, she replied, "I didn't know it was that color."
Burlesque wasn't the only casualty of porn: Storm remembers her shock in 1991 at hearing Jim Mitchell had shotgunned his brother Artie. Nevertheless, her career endured long after the burlesque theaters had shuttered their doors: at luxury hotels, on overseas tours. She recently overcame bouts with cancer and a brain tumor. But even then she was gratified when a doctor saw the age on her chart and thought he had the wrong patient. "He told me, 'You should bottle that and sell it,' " she says.
In October, Storm received a career milestone when the Las Vegas Tropicana inducted her into its Hall of Fame, alongside luminaries such as Debbie Reynolds and singer Jack Jones. She's also negotiating the movie of her life story—she likes Catherine Zeta-Jones for the part—and writing a second memoir that she jokingly claims "will get even with lots of people."
And then, on Saturday, after sessions for local photographers, a TV appearance and a shoot with Marty Stuart, she will be yours. She will walk onstage alone, without her usual props, and the loudspeakers will fill with "Stormy Weather," and the years will fall away. It will be close to the same routine captured a half-century ago in Teaserama, where she radiates a kind of innocence even as she's showing us everything she's got. Or so we think.
Does she ever get sick of it—the demands, the fans and photographers still beating at her door? Tempest Storm just laughs. "When they stop beating," she says, "I'll start worrying."
