Minette - Recollections of a Part-time Lady

That’s a real blackmail photograph of Nicky Gordon, Mickey Cortez, Rayleen, Bobby Clark and myself. We were in a show together in Spring City, Pennsylvania, that started as a two-week stint and we stayed six months. There was a little heat of course — this was the country. Bobby Clark went and blew someone in the parking lot and it got around. So Rayleen said. “Oh, none of us are homosexuals, you know. This is just our profession.” So Rayleen made her husband into a cousin. She changed cousins several times that job.

Rayleen did quite an unusual strip. She pranced around in a goose-step-like fashion and then at the end she threw bumps like a Gatling gun. More bumps per minute — boom boom boom boom boom boom — just like that. It was not the most sensual of strips — she came off stage with her bony, hipless body wet with sweat — but it was certainly the most energetic.

Rayleen became paranoid and sometimes she was not exactly the berries to work with. Finally, Raeleen gave up her show business career for shoplifting, and show business said, “Thank you, honey.”

Bobby Clark was the one I roomed with. They had her on the wagon because she would get trade-happy when she was drunk. Bobby Clark was “The Double-Voiced Sensation.” She’d do duets with herself in a male voice and a female voice. I think she’s still working in the Powder Puff Revue.

I ran into Micky Cortez years later, when they were still having drag Thanksgiving balls in Harlem. And she had this little button nose. She’d had it bobbed. “I’m out of show business,” Mickey said. “That beautiful new nose and now you don’t want to work drag?” I said. “That’s crazy!” She said, “It’s funny, isn’t it, Minette? But I’m doing something else that’s making better money. You know how it is, Minette.”

“I know how it is, honey,” I said. “I don’t want to be on the road, either. And it’s a snake pit working in the Club 82, with all those bennie-heads.”

This is Yvette Dare, the only act of its kind in the world. Honey, that was a $3500 act, which would be $10,000 today. I toured with Yvette — the whole act was Yvette Dare and the Daring Dolls — all through Dixie. They were so dumb in Dixie they thought a female impersonator was a woman doing impersonations and they couldn’t figure out what I was doing impersonations of.

Yvette wasn’t an impersonator, but this was a fabulous act. The parrots would strip her, and she worked places where no stripper could work. Those two parrots are Lippy and Einstein. They look like twins to me, macaw parrots with a yard-wide wing spread. Yvette wore a sarong of white crepe tied together, all knots, and then Lippy or Einstein would fly down from the gallery and strip her. Lippy got his name because he used to talk during the act. Yvette was half Indian and she couldn’t drink or her mouth would start going. Lippy didn’t like that. So, in the middle of the act, Lippy would start saying, “Fuck you, Yvette. Fuck you, Yvette.” Oh, you couldn’t do that in those days. So that’s how Lippy got his name, and Yvette brought in Einstein. He kept his mouth shut. That’s why he was called Einstein.

I remember when I first met Billy Richards out of Pittsburg in 1953. I had motored across that state with LaVerne Martin, a carnie snake dancer, in a blizzard, over the mountains. I held a flashlight out the window to spotlight the beginning of the precipice. We didn’t go over the edge, so we started playing our club dates. And there was Billy Richards, “the most adorable girl in show business.”

Billy had been working in the wardrobe department of Valentino Studios as a teenager, and about 1930 she did toe dancing at Bebe’s Cellar, a Hollywood drag club. Nils Astor, one of the top movie sheiks of the day, saw her at Beebe’s and became smitten. Mr. Astor discreetly sent in his chauffer to pick her up and bring her to him. That began domestic bliss for Billy in a mansion. Until one day, when Nils was on location, Billy invited some other impersonators over for a birthday party. Gussie Gordon hit the antique candelabras and dripped wax all over the baby grand in the drawing room. Miss Richards got the heave ho.

Most of the queens at Bebe’s Cellar were extras in movies. There was a regulation that no real woman was to work so many feet above the sound stage. All those lovely girls hanging from chandeliers in Busby Berkely productions: all drag queens. So Miss Richards hit her stride in “Golddiggers of 1933.”

It was twenty years later when I met Billy Richards and she still had a marvelous countenance. She toured the small towns and after the show closed in Spring City, Pennsylvania, Billy Richards took a rest. She went to live in a country farmhouse with a local queen named Una Hale, who had started out as a spiritualist and now worked as Whoreintal dancer. There was no electric in that farmhouse, and “the most adorable girl in show business” sat in that house day after day, sewing patches and fake antique Pennsylvania Dutch calico birds and drinking. There was nothing else to do. She became quite an alcoholic.

Here, I am going to give you some of the patches Billy made. She gave them to me many years ago, before she died in a nursing home. Now they are part of Minette’s Free Store. These patches would make a gay pillow for your settee, a little memory of “the most adorable girl in show business.”

One of my road tours was with a carnival in 1954. We did split-weeks in Kentucky and Tennessee, half the week in one town and the weekend in the next town. But I had fun. Because I couldn’t really take it seriously — it was such a low-level show business and no matter what I did it was glamorous, it was fabulous, and they had me talking. They loved me because I could talk real carnie. Like the barker was the talker, and a townie was a “mark” and a big “Hey, Rube” was a fight. But I learned that just from being a queen in Greenwich Village. Around the late ’40s, just before the McCarthy era, all the queens were talking carnie in Greenwich Village.

So they had me talking in the carnival — that means I was the barker and I worked as a real woman. You never worked as an impersonator in the carnival, you always worked as a real woman. If they were in a girlie show, the impersonators didn’t strip down — but they did a cooch dance. The cooch was a kind of belly dance that Little Egypt made popular at the World’s Fair of 1893. The closest thing to being an impersonator was a hermaphrodite in the side show. Usually if you did a hermaphrodite or half and half you got 25 cents extra which was called the blowoff money. See, it was two bits extra to see the hermaphrodite — that’s why they went in anyway — and the queen would get the blowoff for herself.

When I was in the carnival, all the queens were mad for Peggy Yule. She was magic and they always talked about her. She left home in 1875 when she was 15 and ran away with the carnival. She traveled in a covered wagon. Peggy lived in drag and became a real woman as much as she could, not so easy then. She probably used the depilatory wax. And she had long hair, so long she could sit on it, dyed red. Oh, it was gorgeous from what the queens said, and she worked right up to the end. She lived to be 106, and she could hardly walk at the end. But she had a boa constrictor this big around, and she would pull herself up on the boa constrictor and she could cooch up a storm. She could hardly move her feet but she could cooch up a storm, and she was 96 or 98 then. The last few years she couldn’t pull up and cooch anymore, so she worked on a chaise lounge and did fortunes.