We were working Wacko’s the Fourth of July weekend, 1951, when we got run out of Providence. I was lucky — I was working in the city limits in a jazz room, and there is a law that the state police can’t come into the city limits in Providence. But they went in anyway, and took all the female impersonators and put them in manacles and kept moving them from one different jail to another, and Wacko had these two different lawyers trying to get us out. The state police brought all these queens in chains to the Park Hotel and said they were looking for pot. We couldn’t get any — I would have loved to have had some, but we couldn’t get any in 1951. And the state police stole my jewel case, all gorgeous costume jewelry with a few real things, too. On top of this, a queen stole my Scarlet O’Hara dress and went east with the geese. All this gay gay costume jewelry gone. That broke my heart.
My Sister Tommy
I’ve had some troubles, but I haven’t been lynched, like 12 impersonators were in Texas, and I haven’t been through as many scrapes as my sister Tommy Bishop.
Miss Bishop grew up in New Orleans and her grandmother ran a bordello, so Tommy learned Southern hospitality at an early age. Tommy was very outgoing, a real Elsa Maxwell at a party, and she was like this gypsy adventuress that was always traveling everywhere, all over the world, and always generous. Mostly she worked B-drinks in Dixie. A B-drink was where you got johns to buy you a drink, only B-drinks were phony booze so the bar would make money. You just collected the muddlers — the drink sticks — and at the end of the evening you turned them in and split the money with the bartender. Tommy was big in Phenix City, Alabama. It was a wide open city, like the whole world is today.
One time in Phenix City, the boss told her they needed a special kind of act, so Miss Bishop thought, “Oh, I’ll do a snake act.” Snake acts were very popular at that time. Only she’d never done one before. She bought a snake — it was probably a water moccasin instead of a boa constrictor — they were more available in Phenix City. So Miss Bishop begins her snake dance and she brings the snake up to give it a gay kiss on the mouth. Only the snake bites her. Tommy threw the snake right in a customer’s lap.
Everything happened to that queen. Once she was working bar maid in Miami, and she was waiting for a bus in full face and semi-drag. This guy drove up in a white roadster and says, “Hello, little girl, where are you going?” “Might be going with you, who knows?” she says. So Miss Bishop went with him, and he takes her out to a cypress forest as night was falling. He wants a blow job, so she’s going down on him and feels this cold steel at the back of her neck. See, he had a different kind of gun. She realized that when he came he was going to blow her brains out. “Oh Daddy, I have to take a wee-wee.” He keeps on holding to her by the belt, so she undid the belt and gave a lunge. He was left holding the belt, and he’s shooting away while she’s hiding behind a cypress tree all night until he finally left at dawn. Miss Bishop emerged from that swamp, all covered in Spanish moss, walked to the highway, and got a ride from some farmer. Honey, she must have been a sight on the side of the road. The next week, she found out he had escaped from a penitentiary and he had murdered four women in Georgia. It was front page material.
Another time, Miss Bishop was out over Central Park West hanging on a flag pole, without clothes, and her john was cutting the cord. She climbed down the rope to the floor below and they let her in. This was before topless and bottomless. You couldn’t work without nets in burlesque and here is Miss Bishop hanging out over Central Park West without anything.
Tommy just says, “Oh, I’m so outgoing.”
Well, you can get a little too outgoing. But everyone loved Miss Bishop, from the gypsies downstairs to the lumberjacks.
She worked in a lumber camp way outside of Seattle, and they had her trapped up there. Well, there was no real women up there so she looked like Gloria Swanson to them, or maybe Ann Sheridan. Mary, they were all getting into Miss Bishop, and she’s cooking, because she cooks gay. And when she got tired of that she escaped. It was spring camp and she went down the rapids on a log or something. When she got to Seattle she took a boat up to Alaska because that’s where the Seabees were landing. She’s very resourceful, Miss Bishop, so she took up with the police chief in Fairbanks and he set Tommy and another queen up in a little house. It was a little hut with a red light on a sled. That’s how they do it in Alaska.
And my sister Tommy has grace and manners, too, and that’s what makes her a beautiful queen. Miss Bishop is not the dainty type but everything she handles like a Mae Marsh. I remember when I first met Tommy at this meal with the Jewish Madonna, Jackie Phil man, and some other queens. Jackie had all these sound effects when she was eating. Terrible sound effects. Rumblings coming up from down below. Well, I looked up at Miss Bishop and there was this immediate camaraderie. We had manners. I still see my sister Tommy all the time when she’s not around the world.
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.