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.”
Cooching Up a Storm
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.
Peggy always had a place in the show because she was very well loved. Peggy was always willing to stake people and she was very faithful, so there were people she knew in her old age that were ride boys when she met them and now owned the show. When she finally retired they couldn’t get Peggy into the house — I suppose the central heating would get to her — so she lived out back in a truck. She was a legend among the queens, Peggy Yule.
Carnivals and clubs were two different seasons — in the summer you’d work carnival and in the winter you’d work clubs. But a lot of the carnival queens did not like working clubs — it was the difference between outdoor daytime entertainment and working evenings. The real regular old carnies, if they’d done it a long time, were so used to the routine with certain people. They kept going on to different towns but you’d still be in the same trailer and still be with the same people, and you’d always have to carry water, unless you could get someone to carry it for you.
Here’s Robbi Del Mar, sort of a subdued Carmen Miranda, half-Spanish, half-Hungarian. See the almond eyes. They used to bill her as “the boy with the longest hair in Providence.” This was in 1951, see, they didn’t have the hippies yet. She was very bright and went to college and she had her whole family working the carnival with her. See her poster here, “Front Page People" — that’s Robbi and her family. Her sister married a Naval officer, and they were naturally well-bred, but from what I heard it was not her father’s side of the family that made her well-bred.
And here’s Talla Rae. She’s dead now, I think. She was a circus queen and had never worked clubs before. And she put her lipstick on by applying it to a spool and putting it on her mouth with a spool instead of using a lip brush.
New York and Films
When I left Fonda on one of those road trips I didn’t have any boy’s wardrobe left, so I went to New York and became Rose Revere, Real Woman. I lived in drag for about two months.
I didn’t know New York as well as Boston, of course, but it was very conservative. The only cabaret left on the Bowery was Sammy’s Bowery Follies, and prices for queens were low and going down. It was the summer of 1949 the prices went right down. My sisters used to hustle in Washington Square and business got bad, so they went to 42nd Street — that’s where the Johns were. Then the Puerto Rican queens came in — when a queen would ask for $5, one of the Puerto Rican queens would raise a hand behind her, and someone else would make a lower offer behind her. In a fortnight, business was shot to hell. They should have had a gay hookers’ union.
Here’s Chris Scarlet and my sister Bobby Dale at Sammy’s Bowery Follies, along with some johns. The headliner at Sammy’s was Dora Pollitier, who cut down at the end of her life to weekends and kept working at Sammy’s until she was 96. She’d always close her act dancing a cake walk to the last chorus of “Waitin’ For the Robert E. Lee.”