“Gotta Get a Gimmick”: The Burlesque Career of Millie De Leon

You can pull all the stops out Till they call the cops out Grind your behind till you're banned But ya gotta get a gimmick If you wanna get a hand .... "You Gotta Get a Gimmick" (Sondheim) Although Stephen Sondheim's lyrics were sung by a fictitious burlesque performer of the late 1920s in the musical Gypsy, they may have just as easily come from the mouth of Millie De Leon several decades earlier. De Leon, billed as "The Girl in Blue," would have been more accurately billed as "The Gimmick Girl." Arrested numerous times from 1903 to 1915, Mlle. De Leon was a master of stirring public scandal and thereby gaining free publicity at a time when newspapers were clamoring for sensational stories. Over seventy-five newspaper clippings at the Theatre Collection of the New York Public Library (NYPL) chronicle De Leon's success at attracting both the press and an audience with her controversial behavior inside and outside of the theatre. Extolled as "the first real queen of American Burlesque" (Toll 230), "burlesque's first truly national sex symbol" (Toll 226), "the reigning burlesque 'classic' dancer" (Zeidman 13), and "the best in her line" (New York Clipper 30), De Leon is too often forgotten by theatre and dance historians.1 Well before Gypsy Rose Lee started stripping with style, Millie De Leon became a prominent figure in the battle over public decency in entertainment. Among other interesting facets, Millie De Leon's career provides a provocative glimpse at the character of burlesque dancing in the early twentieth century, the limits of so-called public decency at that time, and the use of newspapers as a tool for sensationalistic self-promotion. More importantly, this study demonstrates that De Leon deserves to be remembered for her role as a figure (quite literally) in the public spotlight. The Origin of Cooch Dancing in Burlesque "The history of American burlesque begins with a Greek classic and ends with a leg show," according to Bernard Sobel (Burleycue 3). Although parody, the original intent of burlesque, can be traced back to Aristophanes, the nearest cousin to modem burlesque is linked to Lydia Thompson and her British Blondes, who brought Americans a combination of clever parody and shapely feminine legs in the 1860s and '70s. As with music halls and vaudeville, burlesque of the 1890s incorporated a variety of entertainment, including comic sketches, songs, and dances. However, by the turn of the century, the dances became scandalous, with the advent of the belly dance, or "cooch" dance, as it came to be called. The advent of cooch was integral to the decline of burlesque; by the mid to late 1920s, burlesque had degenerated to little more than raunchy jokes and striptease.2 Cooch dancing first caught the attention of American audiences when Little Egypt and others danced at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. The fair featured exhibits of various world cultures, ranging from "primitive" African and Indian cultures to the "civilized" White City. Somewhere in between lay the Middle Eastern and Asian exhibits, complete with belly dancers. In his book Horrible Prettiness, Robert C. Allen explains what made the cooch dance taboo to American audiences: The "cooch," or "cootch," or "hootchy-kootchy" phenomenon-as belly dancing quickly came to be called-points out the contradictory nature of the fair's construction of femininity. Inside the White City, women's accomplishments were granted a more prominent place than at any previous international exposition.... At the same time, on the other, "popular" side of the fair, all that had been suppressed in the White City's representation of the female body as frozen, solemn, and chaste reemerged in the undulations of the cooch dancer... a reminder of the atavistic nature of women in a "semi-civilized" state. (228) Burleque and cooch appeared to be a perfect match. Very quickly, the cooch dancer became a highly popular feature of burlesque, and imitators of Little Egypt flourished with their "Oriental dances" and "Salome dances" of seven veils. …