For decades, Blaze Starr performed her elaborate striptease act at a club she owned in Baltimore and in hundreds of other nightspots. She became perhaps the country’s most notorious stripper in the late 1950s when her affair with Louisiana’s governor, Earl Long, became a national scandal. It was a story later dramatized in a 1989 film.
Starr, who said she regretted nothing in her adventurous life, died June 15 at her home in Wilsondale, West Virginia. She was 83.
Her nephew, Earsten Spaulding, said she did not awake after going to sleep early Monday morning. She had a history of heart problems.
Starr was barely in her teens when she left her West Virginia home town in 1947 to escape poverty. She got off a bus in Washington and became a waitress in a doughnut shop.
At 15, she was already voluptuously endowed, and it wasn’t long before she was asked whether she wanted to get into show business. She could sing a little and play guitar, and she envisioned a career in country music.
She went onstage in a cowgirl outfit. She came offstage with her hat, and a career was launched.
Starr began working near the Quantico Marine base in Virginia at place called the Quonset Hut, then moved on to other clubs in Washington and suburban Maryland. Her manager suggested the name “Starr Blaze,” but she thought it sounded better the other way around.
By 1950, Starr had become the featured attraction at the 2 O’Clock Club on Baltimore’s notorious “Block,” which Time magazine described as “a loud, neon-bathed concentration of gin mills and peel parlors” that was “something of an Eldorado for the fun-seeking male.”
She was soon nicknamed “The Hottest Blaze in Burlesque” and “Miss Spontaneous Combustion.” She developed an array of exotic stage acts, including one in which a panther nibbled at her costume until it fell to the floor. She had dark red hair and a figure that would make Marilyn Monroe look like a wallflower.
Without prompting, Starr gladly revealed her dimensions: 38DD-23-37. She even wrote a song about herself, called, naturally, “38DD.”
In time, Starr purchased the 2 O’Clock Club and became, in the words of filmmaker John Waters, “the best tourist attraction that Baltimore ever had.”
Starr went on the road with her three mink coats and an elaborate set of costumes that she sewed herself. She also traveled with her “exploding couch.”
“Once I had this erotic dream about making love so passionately everything started smoking,” she told People magazine in 1989.
Thus inspired, she rigged a love seat with a hidden smoke pot, attached to a button. During her act, she writhed on the couch, languorously removing one article of clothing after another until, at the climactic moment, she pressed the button. Smoke shot up from the couch, along with ribbons in the shape of flames.
Starr was performing her exploding-couch act at the Sho-Bar in New Orleans in 1958 when she met the 62-year-old Long, Louisiana’s governor. Although married, the governor asked Starr on a date.
“Earl was sweet, he was nice,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1989. “He was very protective of me when the news media started hounding me. He would put his arm around me and stand right there and say, ‘I love her and that’s that.’ “
Their affair was an open secret until the governor’s wife had him committed to a mental hospital in Texas in 1959. Long was released after several days, then returned to New Orleans, where he “received redheaded Blaze Starr, his favorite Bourbon Street stripper, at 2:30 a.m.,” according to Time magazine.
“At week’s end,” the magazine added, “six doctors gravely warned Long that he would risk his life if he undertook any more strenuous activity.”
He died a year later.
Starr described their affair, and much else, in a 1974 memoir, co-written with Huey Perry. The book formed the basis of the 1989 film “Blaze,” directed by Ron Shelton, with actress Lolita Davidovich in the starring role. Paul Newman played Long.
Starr had a cameo role in a backstage scene at a strip club.
“I’m puttin’ on my makeup,” Starr told Toronto’s Globe and Mail newspaper, “and Paul Newman comes over and kisses me on my naked shoulder. I turn to him, say, ‘Hello, Governor,’ and go back to my makeup. Now to just turn away from those baby-blue eyes and pretend, that’s acting.”
Fannie Belle Fleming was born April 10, 1932, in Wilsondale, in West Virginia’s coal country near the Kentucky border. She was one of 11 children. Her father was a railroad worker.
In 1949, she said, she first encountered a young congressman from Massachusetts named Jack Kennedy. Years later, during the 1960 presidential campaign, she said they reignited their steamy acquaintance in a walk-in closet.
“Well, he was going to be president,” she later said. “I guess he had to be in a hurry.”
Starr continued to perform until the mid-1980s, when she said the artistry of striptease had become lost. “If there is such a thing as getting nude with class,” she told the New York Times, “then I did it.”
Her only marriage, to nightclub owner Carroll Glorioso, ended in divorce.
After her stage career, Starr made jewelry, which she sold at a booth in a mall in suburban Baltimore. She returned permanently to West Virginia in her 60s to care for her ailing mother and brother. Survivors include one brother and five sisters.
Starr’s lusty life included many high-profile love affairs – including, she claimed, with two presidents and two vice presidents. Except for Kennedy, she didn’t reveal names.
She was asked in 1988 whether she would do anything differently with her life.
“Not a thing,” she said. “I would just do a lot more of it, and try a lot harder – and seduce a lot more men.”
Matt Schudel, The Washington Post
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