THEY PUT SHOW IN ROADSHOW : Ex-Showgirl Recalls the Teasing Days

When Helen McCree De Cenzie hung up her dancing slippers and spangles of the flapper-jazz age just a few weeks before her 60th birthday 34 years ago, the one-time leggy showgirl (“I could still pass for 35”) became one of the most sought after lecturers on the roadshow circuit.

To hear Hildegarde Esper (screenwriter of “Narcotic” and author of the peep-show best seller “Facts of Life”) tell it, De Cenzie was so popular as a lecturer (on topics including permissive sex, demon rum and devil weed) that large auditoriums often had to be booked to handle her audiences.

The former musician-exotic dancer-chanteuse-Errol Carroll Vanities headliner was brought into the roadshow arena by Pappy (Colonel) Golden, a film hustler who cruised Kentucky, Arkansas, Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle.

“There are those that say Pappy was a rascal,” admitted De Cenzie. “Being a bachelor, his life style, even in his late 70s, was boisterous. But in my presence he was always proper.”

Now 94, De Cenzie lives in the same small Tenderloin District apartment she’s been in for 40 years. She’s visited frequently by old friends and is alert and content; arthritis is the only thing that restricts her activity. On her last birthday she received 102 cards, some from as far away as Australia. A trunk of clippings, photos and letters attest to her kaleidoscopic career: as a piano player in a Toledo nickelodeon, reciting skits in a dirt-floor tent, performing on a Mississippi showboat and achieving notoriety in burlesque.

She claims that she taught Gypsy Rose Lee how to strip at the Rialto in Chicago, and said that burlesque and roadshow shared a common trait: “We promised sin, but delivered tease.”