Legendary Stripper Blaze Starr Is No More

WILSONDALE, W.V.—Blaze Starr, the legendary stripper whose signature, besides her 38DD boobs, was her fiery red hair, and whose notoriety off-stage was perhaps even better known than her dancing, died Monday of what appears to have been a heart attack. She was 83. Born Fannie Belle Fleming on April 10, 1932, Blaze Starr was one of 11 children, and as was common in West Virginia in the dregs of the Great Depression, she found work at a young age washing laundry for a dollar a day, and got gang-raped in her early teens, even as her dad was dying of black lung disease from working in the state's coal mines. But by the time she'd reached 15, she was already a singer in a country band in Washington, D.C. She continued performing in nightclubs until she turned 18, when she moved to Baltimore and began the striptease career which brought her worldwide recognition. Her first gig was at the 2 O'Clock Club—which she later bought—in the section of Baltimore known as "The Block," which The New York Times described as "a famous strip of adult entertainment shops and stages." The club's then-owner, Red Snyder, put her on stage with a guitar, expecting her to sing, but when he noticed that most of the audience was soldiers, Snyder (who later became her manager) urged her to take off her top, but she balked at revealing her bosoms until Snyder said, "Do it for America." "Being a patriotic gal, she decided, 'What the heck'," wrote one of her biographers, Leslie Zemekis. "The reaction was life-changing. She had wanted to be a movie star and flourished under the cheers and hollers of the audience." Starr continued to work the burlesque circuit, and in 1954, Esquire magazine featured her in an article where she was described as the successor to the then-reigning queen of burlesque, Lili St. Cyr. But Starr was much more than simply a stripper. For one thing, she made all her own costumes, noting to The Times, "I didn’t have a thing to do between shows, so I started to sew." During that era, she also designed her own ranch-style house in Baltimore, valued at $100,000 and containing a sunken purple bathtub and fur-covered furniture—possibly to go along with her professional wardrobe which included three mink coats. Starr was at least as inventive with her act as she was with her wardrobe. "I had finally got my gimmick, a comedy thing where I’m supposed to be getting so worked up that I stretch out on the couch, and—when I push a secret button—smoke starts coming out from like between my legs," Blaze once said, reported Hollywood Life's Gabriella Ginsberg. "Then a fan and a floodlight come on, and you see all these red silk streamers blowing, shaped just like flames, so it looked like the couch had just burst into fire." Almost as famous as her act were Starr's many romances, often with prominent politicians. She is perhaps best known for her relationship with Louisiana Gov. Earl K. Long—a major scandal since Long was married at the time, although at the time of his death in 1960, he had already filed for divorce and Starr said that she was engaged to be married to him. In a videotaped interview Starr gave in 1988, now posted on YouTube, Starr related another famous liaison. "Yes, I had an affair with President Kennedy," she told the interviewer. "He was great—fast and great. You know, he was going to be president; I guess he had to be in a hurry. ... He [Gov. Long] was hunting for me and I guess somebody was hunting for Jack, and he caught us in this huge walk-in closet, and he said, 'What are you doing in there?' And I said—a few tears, you know; I can act a little bit—I said, 'My mink coat is gone. We're hunting for my mink coat.' Well, he put everybody to hunting for the mink coat, and I don't know if he believed it or not, but we were in there hunting for the mink coat. I didn't wear a mink coat that night." Before that, in the early '50s, Starr had been working at a club in Philadelphia which was raided by the police and Starr was arrested—a situation which led to her having an affair with one of the policemen: Frank Rizzo, later to be elected mayor of Philadelphia. Asked in the 1988 video interview if there were anything about her life that she would change if she had the chance to do so, she replied, "Not a thing. I would just do a lot more of it and try a lot harder, and seduce a lot more men than I did." In 1974, Starr wrote her autobiography, Blaze Starr: My Life as Told to Huey Perry, which was later made into a movie, Blaze, starring Lolita Davidovich in the title role, with Paul Newman as Gov. Long. "Society thought that to be a stripper was to be a prostitute,"  Starr told The New York Times in 1989, at the time of the movie's release. "But I always felt that I was an artist, entertaining. I was at ease being a stripper. I kept my head held high, and if there is such a thing as getting nude with class, then I did it." Of that, there is no doubt.