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80-Year-Old Dancer 'Not Ready To Hang Up My G-String Yet'

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The Associated Press

Published: July 13, 2008

LAS VEGAS - Tempest Storm is fuming. Her fingers tremble with frustration. They are aged, knotted by arthritis and speckled with purple spots under paper skin.

But the manicure of orange polish is flawless and new, and matches her signature tousled mane.

She brushes orange curls out of her face as she explains how she's been slighted.

She is the headliner, you know. She is a star. She is classy.

"I don't just get up there and rip my clothes off," she says.

Indeed, the 80-year-old burlesque queen takes her clothes off very slowly.

More than 50 years ago she was dubbed the "Girl with the Fabulous Front" and told by famous men that she had the "Best Two Props in Hollywood." Since then, Storm saw the art that made her famous reach the brink of extinction. Her contemporaries - Blaze Starr, Bettie Page, Lili St. Cyr - have died or hung up the pasties.

But not Storm. She kept performing. Las Vegas, Reno, Palm Springs, Miami, Carnegie Hall.

Her act is a time capsule. She knows nothing of poles. She would never put her derriere in some man's face. Her prop of choice is a boa, perhaps the occasional divan.

It takes four numbers, she says adamantly - four numbers to get it all off. To do it classy.

But the producers of tonight's show, just kids, they want her to go faster. She gets just seven minutes.

"I did seven minutes when I started," she says.

They gave her trouble last year, too. They even cut her music before she finished.

There may not be a next time for this show, she says. The threat lasts just minutes.

"No, no. I'm not ready to hang up my G-string yet. I've got too many fans that would be disappointed."

Stardom and fandom feature prominently in Tempest Storm's life - and in her neat, two-bedroom Las Vegas apartment.

Visitors are greeted by photos of a young Elvis, her favorite rock 'n' roller and, she says, a former lover.

He met her after her show in Las Vegas and fiddled with her skirt as he introduced himself. The relationship ended about a year later because Elvis' manager didn't approve of him dating a stripper, she says.

But she could not change who she was. Stripping already had made her famous.

It put her in the room with Hollywood's heavyweights. Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Mickey Rooney, Nat King Cole.

She dated some, just danced for others. The evidence is framed and displayed on tables and the living room wall.

That's Storm and Vic Damone. Storm teaching Walter Cronkite to dance. Storm and her fourth and last husband, Herb Jefferies, a star of black cowboy films who swept her off her feet in 1957 when such unions were instant scandals. They divorced in 1970.

"When I look at this picture I say, 'What the hell happened between this gorgeous couple?'" she says.

The moment is brief.

Storm is rarely wistful. She has no doubt she still is what she once was. Although she performs just a handful of times a year, she would do more, if asked. She chides those who think age takes a toll on sex appeal.

"Ridiculous," she says.

There are just as many recent photos in the room: Storm and her daughter, a nurse in Indiana. Storm and her fiance, who died a few years ago. Storm and a beaming older gentleman, just a fan who approached her for a photograph.

In others, the petite beauty with the long lashes and glamorous hair is alone, out of focus, in full makeup and smiling wide. In one, she is perched on her living room couch in a red hat and low-cut black suit.

"I took that picture of myself," she says proudly. "I have a self-timer. I took these, too."

"That stage saved me," she says as she leaves a sound check hours before the night's performance.

She had been expecting a much smaller space, and she is relieved. She's a "walker," she explains. She needs room to move.

It is a direct and once-racy style, the signature work of Lillian Hunt, the choreographer at the Follies Theater in Los Angeles, where Storm became a star.

She was Annie Blanche Banks then. The 22-year-old sharecropper's daughter had fled sexual abuse, two loveless marriages and poverty in small-town Georgia, she says.

She was working as a cocktail waitress but wanted to be a showgirl. First, she needed her teeth fixed.

"Do you think my bust is too big for this business?" she asked Hunt at her audition. Hunt put her in the chorus line, told her not to gain a pound and called a dentist.

In Storm's telling, she didn't stay long in the background. She got a new name ("I really don't feel like a Sunny Day") and took to the spotlight quickly. Then and now, she blossomed to the chorus of hoots and cheers.

The trick is having a warm presence, an inviting smile, she says.

On Sundays, Storm tunes in to a televangelist who tells her anyone can overcome odds. It's the only religion she's ever taken to. She believes this is the lesson of her life. Be a survivor. Never stop doing what you love, it makes you who you are.

"If you want to get old, you'll get old," she says.

There have been men who disappointed her, financial strain, brain surgery.

"I feel good about myself. And I enjoy it," she says. "I have fun when I'm onstage, and the audience loves it. Nobody ever said it's time to give it up. Why stop?"

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