ZingB

Blaze Starr approached stripping the way she approached everything else in life — with panache.

She was just 15, newly arrived in Washington from her tiny West Virginia hometown, and the owner of a strip club who’d encountered her in a doughnut shop was trying to talk her into working for him. But she didn’t take much convincing.

“I liked what I saw. And I thought, ‘My God, to be on stage!” she recalled to the Los Angeles Times of her first visit to a club.

Her meteoric career in burlesque, aided by her ample bosom, shrewd business sense and comedic flair, eventually carried her from that tiny joint in Quantico, Va., into clubs across the country and the arms of famous men.

But Starr, who died Monday at age 83, was best loved and will perhaps be most mourned by those who saw her on “the Block,” a street in Baltimore known for adult entertainment that claimed her as its own.

Advertisement

“She was always a lady who had a flair for show business,” Thomas J. D’Alesandro III, who was mayor when Starr performed there, told the Baltimore Sun. “She had a lot of kindness in her heart, especially for veterans.

“We would go down to the 2 O’Clock Club, and I would give her the key to the city. I caught a lot of hell for it but it was a good time.”

Charming, flirtatious and capable of “taking it all off with the aplomb of Emily Post serving tea,” in the words of one Washington Post writer, Starr was the focus of fantasies for generations of admirers. Her most famous seduction — a lengthy and scandalous affair with Louisiana Gov. Earl Long — was eventually made into a movie.

It was an unlikely path for the girl once known as Fannie Belle Fleming, one of 11 children in a Depression-stricken family in rural West Virginia. Growing up, she used to wash laundry for a dollar a day, she said in a 1989 video profile, but she was determined to move on.

Advertisement

In 1947 she hopped a bus to Washington, according to a 1974 memoir co-written with Huey Perry. While working at the Mayflower Doughnut Shop, a promoter spotted her and said she ought to be in show business.

“I said I had been raised to believe it was sinful to dance, but I could play the guitar. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’m going to make you a star,'” she recalled to People Magazine in 1989.

Starr said she didn’t know what striptease was, but was sweet talked into trying it. She threw up after her very first show, not from embarrassment — she didn’t think there was anything wrong with stripping, she said — but because she was so overwhelmed to finally be on stage.

By 1950 she’d moved up to Baltimore and gotten a job at the 2 O’Clock Club. Admirers describe her shows as funny, titillating and sharply self-aware.

Advertisement

“She was smart and she knew how to conduct herself,” J. Stanley Heuisler, former Baltimore Magazine editor, told the Baltimore Sun. “She took stripping and turned it into a satire. She was equally appealing to people in Roland Park [an upscale community] as she was to her clientele from Highlandtown [a blue collar Baltimore neighborhood]. They all loved her.”

At performances, she’d tuck a rose between her breasts and blow the petals across her chest. Other times a large, trained panther would undo a ribbon holding up her costume so that it fell to the floor.

Starr also invented a “gimmick,” as she called it, that involved lying on a couch as she slowly removed her clothes. When she reached the final layer she pressed a button that sent smoke blowing from under her legs and red streamers flying into the air.

Advertisement

“The audience would become hysterical,” she told People.

It was during a couch routine at the Sho-Bar in New Orleans that Earl Long, governor of Louisiana and younger bother of the populist Huey, first spotted her.

“As I headed onstage for the finale, I could hear him hollering, ‘Will you go to dinner with me?'” she told People.

“Can I trust you?” she replied.

“Hell, no,” was his response.

Long, then in his 60s, was estranged from his wife and taken with the 20-something stripper. Starr, meanwhile, was in the midst of a divorce from club owner Carroll Glorioso, she told the L.A. Times. They had little in common except heartache, but it was enough to sustain a months-long romance.

“He really started to get to me. He was so kind,” she said.

At one point, Long said that he wanted to divorce his wife and marry Starr, she told People, but she shrugged it off. “A governor just doesn’t divorce his wife for a stripper,” she said.

Advertisement

She also claimed to have almost had an affair with John F. Kennedy when he was in Congress. “I never got to be intimate with him in the actual White House, ” she told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1989. “My one big chance for the Lincoln Room, and I didn’t get it,” she claimed. “The Cuban Missile Crisis happened right then and there.”

Her affair with Long ended with his death in 1960. But it saw new life on screen in 1989, when it formed the basis of the movie “Blaze” starring Paul Newman and Lolita Davidovich.

After Long’s death, Starr moved back to Baltimore, where she bought the 2 O’Clock Club and returned to performing there.

“She was the first successful businesswoman who became an iconographic symbol of Baltimore,” Heuisler, the Baltimore editor, told the Sun.

“Cry Baby” director John Waters, who said his work is partly inspired by her show, put it more simply:

Advertisement

“For a while, she was the only famous person Baltimore had,” he told the Sun. “… She had such dedicated fans. We loved her act.”

A 1989 story in the Baltimore Evening Sun referred to Starr’s preferred style as a “gentle” kind of burlesque.

“Blaze has made the most of her gifts in a refreshing, playfully carnal, and generous way,” the Sun described it. “When she flexes her right breast, to demonstrate a popular move she called ‘the thing,’ it’s as if she trained a cuddly pet to do a cute trick.”

When that “gentler” burlesque fell out of favor in the 1970s, replaced by raunchier acts, Starr left the business.

“Honey, I loved it,” she told The Sun in 2010. “But everything has its season.”

For years she lived in Carroll County, Md., where she made jewelry. But eventually she moved back to West Virginia, to a town not far from where she was born. Her nephew, Earsten Spaulding, told the New York Times she died in her home in Wilsondale. She had been experiencing heart problems in recent years, her family said, and was worried about the health of a rescue dog she’d taken in.

Advertisement

“We think that contributed to her death,” Starr’s sister, Cathy Fleming, told the Sun. The dog died just hours after its mistress, she added.

Starr is survived by a brother, John P. Fleming; and four other sisters, Berta Gail Fleming, Judy Fleming, June Fleming and Debbie Fleming, the Sun reported.

In a 1989 promotional video released before the film about her affair with Long, an interviewer asked Starr to look back on her “raucous life that shook up the morals of many towns.” Was there anything she might have done differently?

“Not a thing,” she responded breezily. “I would just do a lot more of it. And try a lot harder.” After a  pause, she added “And seduce a lot more men.”

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLumw9JopKiqnp67qHnMoq9or6Bkf3F9lGhnb2dha3yjwdGlnKyppZrAbq7LmrGeZaOprrO%2BjLCfqGWgqsFuwMeeZK2dkaiybrXNZqqtqpmleqW1xKxkmqxdbYBw