BURLESQUE: Baedeker

Burlesque Boss Harold Minsky has no prejudice against home-grown talent, but at Las Vegas’ Dunes Hotel the foreign-born element in his chorus line is the spice of the show (“People enjoy talking to them”). So last month Minsky* took off on a recruiting trip to Europe, returned last week with a report that was part showbusinesslike, part sociological. Said he: “Europe is one big striptease. Hamburg looks like 52nd Street in the wild days; Paris is one strip joint after another.”

But Explorer Minsky’s standards are high (“Her limbs,” he says of the ideal stripper, “must be tapered rose stems, and her ankles sufficiently narrow so that an ordinary man’s hand can completely close around them”), and Harold was disillusioned by what he found. “The girls just aren’t as pretty as I’d expected. I don’t know whether it was what they went through in the war, or what, but they aren’t what they ought to be.” Minsky’s Burlesque Baedeker in brief: ¶Germany—”The girls are awful; there’s no taste to their numbers. They just strip. All those great big girls lumber around like cows.” ¶Italy—”I don’t know why, but they import all their strippers. Italian girls are only interested in the movies. It’s like Hollywood 15 years ago; every girl is a starlet. I didn’t meet one who didn’t claim to have been in Ben Hur.” ¶Denmark—”The emphasis is on vaudeville acts. One of the best had a man in an upper berth peering at a girl in a lower as she got ready for bed. They have lots of creative imagination over there. Danish girls are a cross between the English and French, but they’re prettier than either.” ¶England—”The girls just aren’t very sexy. The shows are all in private clubs, and they’re uninhibited. But the girls have little expression, and they don’t move too well.” ¶France—”A Parisian girl can be sexy just holding a glass. Strippers work as many as four clubs a night. They travel between joints like the Club Sexy and the Club Blushing, carrying their little bags like doctors.”

* Son of the original Abe Minsky (1888-1949), the Barnum of burlesque.