Goddess of Love Incarnate. Leslie Zemeckis
a glass tub, who was defended by Hollywood’s most notorious attorney during a trial that would make her infamous. The public Lili would be rushed to the hospital numerous times to have her stomach pumped; men brawled over her; and there were the divorces, six in all.
But there was the private Lili, who lived quietly, loving nothing better than to sit in her elaborately decorated home in complete silence, reading and sewing and cooking in perfect tranquility.
In the end, the misconceptions were long. Lili was a slut who would sleep with anyone, a cold-hearted bitch who used men. She was a feral Amazonian hunter. She was Wolf Gal (quite literally, Al Capp created the character after meeting Lili). She was devastated by drugs and poverty. She was fat. She was skin and bones. Her apartment was a Hollywood time capsule where she was living like Norma Desmond. She lived in filth in a dangerous neighborhood. She was Sunset Blvd. and Grey Gardens combined.
After her first transatlantic crossing, still in her teens, she vowed to travel first class through life. She did. Enjoying life on a lavish scale. She saw and accomplished things few women of her era did. A poor girl from Minneapolis raised with a secret by relatives who weren’t who they said they were. Her family carried a multitude of lies. She learned from those closest to her.
Her life was filled with joy and laughter and much adventure. Heartache too. A deep despondency that sometimes overwhelmed her ran in her blood. It would often bring her to her knees. But time and again Lili would rise out of the ashes of despair and emerge once again to hear the roar of adoration and acclaim.
She had few, if any, long-standing friendships and claimed to despise women. In the end she shunned contact with what remained of her splintered family.
For a woman who made a career of her astounding Nordic beauty, the loss of it affected her most. When her spectacular looks vanished she felt she had nothing to offer. She was used to a great commotion being made over her every whim. People “bowed down to her.”9 When it was gone she decided to go “Garboesque” and retire from public—and private—view. She would close the door for nearly twenty years.
The woman who collected handsome men, antiques, minks, and jewels would in the end have nothing but stacks of photos that she sold for a few dollars to keep a roof over her head.
This then is the story of an extraordinary, private, complex, witty, misunderstood woman. Sex symbol, icon, enigma. This is the story of Lili St. Cyr.
“When executed with deftness and shyness, disrobing becomes an artistic achievement.”
—LILI ST. CYR
CHAPTER ONE
1994
A SEPTEMBER DAY IN LOS ANGELES. NOXIOUS, SMOG-FILLED WAVES OF brownish heat bear down on the desert city, smothering everything under a grimy cloud. Sprinklers shut off as the city feared another water shortage. Grass turned yellow, bleached of life. Everything is brown. The air. The land. It is an ugly time of year. It is nine months past the Northridge earthquake, when the San Fernando Valley shook, hardly felt in Hollywood. Where she lives.
The apartment is within walking distance of Paramount Studios where the greats such as Dietrich, Swanson, and Pickford used to pull their chauffeur-driven Bugattis and Duesenbergs and Mercedeses through the tall iron gates immortalized in movies such as Sunset Blvd. She too has been driven through the legendary gates to work. If she had known then how her life would end, would she have glanced down the treelined street and warned her younger self, or would she have continued down the path she was on?
The apartment is placed well back from the street, an old 1920s Spanish triplex. Built by Paramount Studios for the starlets and quite possibly studio executives’ trysts with the same. It was rumored Gloria Swanson once kept an apartment there. W. C. Fields’s mistress had another. The front room, though not large, is comfortable and would have been sunny if she ever opened her tattered curtains. It is a lower-floor unit with a thick wooden door. Quiet blankets the interior. A place of retreat. Cats roamed inside and out. A few mewed at the back door off the tiny kitchen that was never used. Most people thought the stray cats her only companions.
In the living room facing the expanse of green lawn and tall trees rising outside the French windows, she lies in bed. She had always had a bed in unconventional places. Her bed had been her stage. It still was. This time for the last act of her life.
As a child her bed had been tucked into a corner of the sun porch because there had been no space for her own room. They had been so poor back then, even before the Depression devastated the rest of the country.
And what a bed she had lounged on in her beloved home at the end of a wide twisting boulevard dotted with charming Craftsman cottages—oh! The remembered torment of having given that up—a big hand-carved wooden bed positioned smack in the living room. She had entertained lounging across it like Cleopatra sailing down the Nile, the banks of the river strewn with the carcasses of her lovers. She had played the Egyptian queen onstage, so why not in her home? That life long over now.
The bed, like so much else, was gone. Sold? She doesn’t remember.
She avoids the other residents of the apartment building. She assumed they knew she had once been the infamous . . . the notorious . . . the legendary stripper. Once. Thirty, forty years prior when Los Angeles still had some semblance of glamour. When one dressed to attend the nightclubs and she drank gin fizz and listened to jazz, though admittedly not her favorite music. Life had been more bearable. Or had it? She had certainly had her share of drama and heartache back then. Rushed to the hospital. Stomach pumped. Another divorce. Romance. Another terrible headline. Robbery. Pills. Always the pills.
She was seventy-seven years old. She had been terrified to grow old and ugly. The thought depressed her. As much as her spine was stiff and she experienced difficulty in bending, she wasn’t yet bed-bound. The arthritis hadn’t yet racked her body constantly. She had never been a person not moving. She had been a restless soul traversing from nightclub to theatre, from husband to lover, always on the move. A gypsy dancing her way through life, the wreckage of others left behind. Was it relief or torture to now be confined to a single place, nowhere to go?
Her wings have long been grounded. Flight no longer possible. Except in her mind. Her dreams are the only thing that take her away, that transport her crippled body away and above this modest apartment and the pain in her limbs and her heart and her desperate fear. A dread that has always been there, a terror that she had kept at bay until now.
Her mind could still travel where her body could not.
She lay across the bedspread that had once been fashionable and new. She looked at her arm hanging over the bed. Scarred. It was too damn hot to move. She had always liked the colder climates. “I’m a northern girl,” she would say.10 She should have retired to New York, but here she was, stuck in this suffocating putrid city, wilting and irritable. She had always enjoyed remarkably good health. She had rarely been sick. Rarely been without money either.
Now the only way she didn’t feel—pain or memory or regret—was with a system full of junk. A thick, heavy feeling would wash over her, taking away her apprehension. She would drift in pleasant nothingness, which was preferable to the here and now.
So much to worry about. Her bank was the cash in the pocket of her robe. A thin stack folded against her breast.
Wasn’t she the one who had flippantly told some reporter she always supposed there would be someone around to buy her a burger? She had made baskets full of money. Oh, how she had loved those baskets, decorated with pink ribbon, filled with crisp