She is known as the “Redhead Fireball” and is the title given to her for her height (petite 5 feet-1) and fiery hair. She often found Monica, abbreviated as “fireball.” But Betty Rowland was still the Queen of Burlesque. The headliner of the racy variety show shows her glorious years in the 1930s and 40s, and she worked well in the 50s.
Roland Had a sloppy, ballet style (She was a gentle grind) And she threw undulating stretches and drops, often known as German rolls.she Costume Elegant: She preferred long skirts with side slits in the hips, bando tops and evening gloves. After her slow burns, she stripped off most of her equipment. But like most burlesque stars, she left the pasties and G-strings on.
One of her representative works was called “Ballet Bump”. This was a parody of ballet routines, and I liked to introduce it to viewers with a little pattern. “Put a small amount of juice in ballets and give a dying swan. Goose. Can I hit this ballet in the classic way?”
Roland died on April 3 at a living support facility in Culver City, California. She was 106 years old.
Her death, which was not widely reported at the time, was confirmed by Leslie Zemeckis, the director of the 2010 documentary “Behind the Burly Q,” which tells the story of Roland and other Burlesque stars.
Outside the burlesque tribal world, Ms. Roland is probably another red-haired queen, such as Tempest Storm, who quarreled with John F. Kennedy and Elvis Presley, whose breasts are said to be insured. It wasn’t as famous as the headliner. By the Lloyd’s of London, her peak income in the mid-1950s was about $ 100,000 a year (today about $ 950,000). Roland worked, but not so much. In 1945, she earned $ 500 every two weeks. That’s more than $ 200,000 a year today.
Still, it was a “big fabric”. As Roland told the Los Angeles Times in 2009She added that she didn’t waste it on alcohol or cigarettes. “I never smoked or drank,” she said. “It wasn’t in my family. When we were in the performing arts, we took it seriously, so we saw some of them fall on the roadside.”
Roland was an early vintage of Burlesque Star. She played a teenage yose with her sister Rosell, playing a little soft shoes and taps. Betty and Rosell went on their way as choir girls when the yose disappeared and the star moved to a lively burlesque show.
Burlesque, also known as the “Theatre of the Poor,” was like a yose, adding the enthusiasm of a striptease to a theatrical bag of comedy, acrobatics, small songs and dances.
Betty made her first star turn at the age of 14 to assist a performer with a sprained ankle. She was so absorbed in music that she forgot to take off her clothes.
“We made fun of it. That was the name of the game. You would be an illusion to others,” she told Liz Goldwin, author of “Pretty Things: The Last Generation of American Burlesque Queens” (2006). Told. But she says, “People whisper for heaven. They say,’Do you know what she was doing before?’ And they say I’m a porn worker or something. Well, they shouldn’t whisper — I was a dancer. That was the only thing I knew how to do, and I succeeded with it. “
Betty Jane Roland was born on January 23, 1916 in Columbus, Ohio, as one of the four daughters of Aruba and Aida Roland. The girl took dance lessons, and since Betty was 11 years old, she and her sister Rosell helped the family financially by playing together at an amateur yose show, and then toured a bit as a Burlesque star. However, most are based in New York.
Betty performed frequently at Times Square’s flagship Minsky Theater, among other venues. At the time, Minsky’s name was the Burlesque franchise, the institution where Abbott and Costello, Phil Silvers and Gypsy Rose Lee started their careers.
Rozelle Rowland gained fame as a “golden girl” and was completely nude, but painted with gold paint from head to toe. During her London tour, she met Jean-Empine, Baron of Belgium, one of Europe’s wealthiest men, the heir to possessions, including the Paris subway. As her story progressed, they fell in love, she became pregnant, and the Baron said she would marry her if she had her son. “The 14th St. Burlesque Baron’s Golden Lily” read a local headline in 1937, the year of her marriage.
Ms. Roland moved to Los Angeles in 1938, a year after Mayor Fiorello La Guardia closed Burlesque’s home to undermine the city’s morals. However, her own writing brush was rare.
She was fined $ 250 lewdly in 1939 after a trial in which a muscular policeman imitated her actions at a witness stand and laughed and weakened the courtroom. In 1952, she was imprisoned because the theater’s box office revenue she was playing couldn’t recognize the two deputy unit officers who had the habit of attending the show for free. In return, they arrested Mr. Roland and the theater manager. The judge sentenced them to four months in prison. A local columnist took up Roland’s case and was as harsh as the one given to the perpetrators of the recent shootings, and she was released three weeks later.
In 1943, Ms. Roland sued Samuel Goldwyn Company for using her stage name as the title of the 1941 movie “Ball of Fire.” Roland was hired as Stanwix’s technical advisor, but she said she wasn’t paid. Roland received a lot of publicity in her case, but she didn’t win.
Burlesque lost its brilliance after the war. By the early 1960s, the crowd was more seedy, the clubs were more moody, and production was almost gone. Soon there were only hardcore strip joints, and many of the former burlesque theaters were showing pornographic films. Roland looked down on her crude successor.
“Anyway, what is lap dance?” She asked a reporter in 1997.
Roland, in burlesque terminology, had a long-term relationship with fellow Minsky burlesque star, a comedian named Gus Schilling. Newspapers often said they were married to a couple, but Roland told Zemekis and others that she and Schilling lived together, but he married someone else. rice field. Her marriage to her lumber merchant Owen S. Dalton in 1956 ended in 1963 with a divorce. She does not leave her survivor immediately.
In the late 1960s, Roland inherited his interest in a bar in Santa Monica called Mr. B. In the mid-1990s she lost ownership of the investor and the investor renamed the location to 217 Lounge. She remained as a hostess and she was still working there in 2009 at the age of 93. She filed for bankruptcy protection in 2003.
Roland stopped dancing when he married Dalton. However, after her divorce, she retired for about a week in 1966, and she performed at a theater in downtown Los Angeles. (at the time, She told the Los Angeles Times, She wrote a memoir under the tentative title “Ham and Legs”. Sadly, the manuscript has never been found, said Zemekis, who bought Roland’s costume collection and helped her last year’s finances. )
“The theater was unexplained and dingy, the band became a drummer and pianist, and the mid-week audience was painfully spared,” the Los Angeles Times wrote about its 1966 performance. “Still, in the volatile stock of’Hello Dolly!’. Petite Miss Roland still comes out with a dignified redhead, experience can overcome young people, elegance and humor draw over time. I proved that I can beat it. “
Kitty Bennett contributed to the research.
