buyitflauntitthrowit: lilly st cyr

Monday 1 August 2011

lilly st cyr

She was born as Willis Marie Van Schaack in 1918. She had a sister, Rosemary Van Schaack Minsky.Her grandparents, the Klarquists,

reared her and her two show business sisters, Dardy Orlando and Barbara Moffett.She came from Minneapolis.

Having taken ballet lessons throughout her youth, she began to dance professionally as a chorus line girl in Hollywood. Unlike other women who have stroke-of-luck stories about being plucked from the chorus line and selected for a feature role,

St. Cyr had to beg her manager at the club to let her do a solo act. From her self-choreographed act she eventually landed a bit part at a club called the Music Box in San Francisco, with an act called the Duncan Sisters.

It was here that she came to a revelation: A dancer's salary was only a small fraction of what the featured star's salary was. The difference? The featured star was nude.

From the 1940s and most of the 1950s, St. Cyr was the most recognized acts in striptease. St. Cyr's stage name is a of the French aristocracy, which she first used when booked as a nude performer in Las Vegas.

Though she is rather obscure today, her name popped up regularly in 1950s tabloids: stories of her many husbands, brawls over her, and her attempted suicides.

St. Cyr was married six times. Her best-known husbands were the motorbike rider Cordy Milne, musical-comedy actor and former ballet dancer Paul Valentine

, restaurateur Armando Orsini a New York restaurant owner whose good looks and Continental courtliness defined the atmosphere of dolce vita that made Orsini’s, on West 56th Street,

a favorite hangout in the 1960s of movie stars, society people and diners willing to pay dearly to sit near them in velvety darkness, died on July 13 in Asheville, N.C. He was 88.His personal history, which

became part of his appeal, always remained somewhat mysterious. By some accounts, he worked in the construction trades after arriving in New York from Rome at the end of World War II. By other accounts, he was a university-trained architectural engineer. He was the son of a cruise ship captain in one version, or the son of a deckhand who left his wife and two sons destitute in Depression-era Italy.

By all accounts, he was living in Greenwich Village when he married Lili St. Cyr in 1950, just before she became the most famous stage stripper of her time. They divorced in 1953.

Whether Ms. St. Cyr bankrolled the restaurant that Mr. Orsini and his brother started that year, as some accounts have it, is unknown.

“I never knew whether she put the money up for it, but there’s no doubt that her connection was a big help in getting famous people to start coming to the restaurant,” said Paola Orsini, the daughter of Elio Orsini, who died in 2006. “My father told me that Lili had a lot of friends.”