She nervously took the stage, wondering whether she could muster the nerve to part company with her gown. Hunt offered her a $20-a-week raise if she would strip. Kennedy, though she said she met the 35th president back when he was a senator. My mother would disown me.’”īut the man arranged an audition with Lillian Hunt, the choreographer of the Follies Theater in downtown Los Angeles, who put her in the chorus at $40 a week.Ī few weeks later, Ms. Tempest Storm, burlesque star who knew JFK, Elvis, dies at age 93. He said it was just dancing, but you take your clothes off. Storm recalled in a 2013 interview with The Quad-City Times. A customer told her she ought to be in show business and asked whether she could perform a striptease. In her midteens she wed a shoe salesman, though that marriage, too, was short-lived.īy the time she was in her late teens she had made her way to Los Angeles, where she found work as a cocktail waitress.
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She married a Marine soon afterward, though the marriage was annulled about a day later. Tempest Storm, exotic dancer called ‘The Last Queen of Burlesque,’ dies at 93. Exotic dancer and JFK mistress Tempest Storm was backstage putting on her makeup in a dressing room at Honolulu’s infamous Forbidden City strip club. She left home at 14 but got only as far as Columbus, Ga., where she held a variety of jobs, including inspector in a hosiery plant. Tempest Storm, burlesque star who knew JFK, Elvis, dies at age 93. “Tempest in a D-Cup,” the headlines called her “The Girl Who Goes 3-D Two Better.” Her breasts were said to be insured with Lloyd’s of London for $1 million. Playing burlesque stages in New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, the Bay Area, London and elsewhere, she was reported to earn $100,000 a year in the mid-1950s (the equivalent of about $950,000 today). Storm proudly told an interviewer in 1975, “is all mine.”
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Almost certainly the last of her ilk, she was, at her height in the 1950s and early ’60s, famous the world over, as celebrated for her flame-red tresses as for her vaunted 40-inch bust. Storm was every inch as ecdysiastical as they, and for far longer. Routinely named in the same ardent breath as the great 20th-century ecdysiasts Lili St. Harvey Robbins, her longtime manager, confirmed the death. Tempest Storm, one of the most celebrated strippers of midcentury burlesque, who continued plying her craft until she was in her 80s - not because she had to, but because she could - died on Tuesday at her home in Las Vegas.