Starr Power: Life and Times of a Striptease Queen

The real Blaze was a real star. Gypsy Rose Lee, Sally Rand, Ann Corio, Blaze Starr--these were the MVPs and VIPs of the strip-joint runways. In her prime in ‘59, when she met and fell in love with Louisiana Gov. Earl K. Long, Blaze Starr was commanding a then-queenly $1,500 a week.

“That was a lot more money,” she recalls, “than Gov. Long was making on the up and up with his salary.”

Starr, still disconcertingly sexy at 57, still possessed of measurements she gives--cueing no debate--as 38DD-24-37, gave up stripping six years ago to become a gemologist and make and sell jewelry. Each holiday season, at the Carrolltowne Mall here in the Baltimore suburbs, she is a local celebrity selling earrings, bracelets and necklaces fashioned from the gemstones and crystals she collects the rest of the year.

In the Touchstone film based on her affair with Long, Starr, herself is a shooting Starr. She says Playboy is about to publish a photo spread of her, and Las Vegas wants her to strip again. She even appears in the movie, doing a cameo as one of the strippers backstage when Long goes hunting for Starr (“Hello, Governor,” she says when Paul Newman plants a familiar kiss on her shoulder.)

Starr hasn’t ridden such a whirlwind of publicity since her autobiography--”Blaze Starr: My Life as Told to Huey Perry”--was published in 1974. In that book, her romance with Long takes up only a couple of chapters. “Blaze” writer-director Ron Shelton, who optioned the biography in 1983, “told me I had 20 movies in there,” Starr proudly announces in her thick, magnolia-scented accent. She says that there had even been talk once of doing a full-length stage musical about her.

But now, there is the movie, and it’s a big one--done by a major studio with a major star (Newman as Long) and a highly touted newcomer (Lolita Davidovich) portraying her. The movie takes Starr from her midteens at home in the hills of West Virginia to about age 30, when Long died.

By her account, Starr was born Fannie Belle Fleming in the tiny southwest West Virginia community of Twelvepole Creek.

“We lived two miles from the car road,” Starr says. “There was the car road, and the horse road and the cattle path. And this was a dirt road; it was like 15 miles to the hardtop road, where there was a bus.”

At 15, Starr left home to start a career as a country singer, getting as far as a strip joint called the Quonset Hut in the nation’s capital. In the movie, she is a sweet young thing who goes on stage meaning to sing, then discovers the audience is there to see her strip. In real life, the club’s owner had first taken her to a club where the well-known stripper Pat Amber Halliday performed. Starr was star-struck.

“I liked what I saw. And I thought, ‘My God, to be on stage! And you’re not naked.’ Back then, you wore a thick, net bra with great big beaded parts on the end. Today, you see more on the beach! So I looked in the mirror and checked out my measurements.”

She was still underage, but, she says, matter-of-factly, “I had these boobs when I was 14. That’s how I could pass for 18 so easy.”

Her assets made her a natural, but when the owner put the moves on her, she made a dramatic escape that the movie fairly accurately depicts. Other events were dramatized, of course; though with Starr, some of the more unbelievable things turn out to be true.

“I wanted to be a star,” Starr says, “and I wanted something different undressing me. Everything was used by then: snakes, birds, monkeys. I figured, ‘What hasn’t been done?’ ”

Answer: panthers. So, for a while, Starr worked with a big jungle cat, which was trained to undo a ribbon tied behind her and allow her costume to fall to the floor. (Years later, she says, one of the cats turned on her and she realized “ why nobody used ‘em.”)

Curiously, one of the most visual and exciting moments of her life became much less dramatic in the movie: Her first meeting with Earl Long.

In the film, as in reality, Long is smitten at the first sight of Starr performing in a New Orleans club. The first thing Long saw her do on stage was her trademark “exploding couch” number.

“I had finally got my gimmick, a comedy thing,” she says, “where I’m supposed to be getting so worked up that I stretch out on the couch, and--when I push a secret button--smoke starts coming out from like between my legs. Then a fan and a floodlight come on, and you see all these red silk streamers blowing, shaped just like flames, so it looked like the couch had just burst into fire.”

Long was impressed and began pursuing the stripper. The 62-year-old politician and the 20-something stripper had little in common, except heartache. She was divorcing her husband, club owner Carroll Glorioso, and Long was reportedly living alone in a separate wing of the governor’s mansion, away from his wife, “Miz Blanche.”

Blanche Long was a very public figure at the time, but she did not want her name and likeness used in the movie, so the film makers did not include her. Starr refuses to even utter the former Louisiana First Lady’s name.

“There was an agreement,” Starr says when pressed. “Disney don’t need any flak about being sued and all that, even though she couldn’t get nothin’, ‘cause it’s the truth.”

The absence of a wife waters down the scandal in the film. In 1950s Louisiana, it was one thing for a politician to cavort with a striptease star, but to do it with a wife at home was even more disconcerting to constituents. “Blaze” is much more a straight-ahead love story than the story of an affair that rocked the South.

And what of that romance? Was it Long’s power that attracted Starr?

“No, that didn’t faze me,” she says. “Because I had my own power in my own little world. Earl was sweet, he was nice. I dated him, we’d go to dinner, to the race track--all this for about three months before he even kissed me. And then I just started kind of leaning on him and depending on him.”

Their relationship was physical, but not right away, she says.

“At first, when I met him I was grieving because I was goin’ through a divorce. But he was very protective of me when the news media started hounding me. He would put his arm around me and stand right there and say, ‘I love her and that’s that.’ I’m like, ‘Gee nobody’s ever done this for me.’

“So, here’s this older man who wants to marry me. I’d only been intimate with him two or three times, when my divorce was gonna be final. But then he started talkin’ divorce to Miz . . . to his wife. And she didn’t wanna hear it. She blew her mind: ‘You’re throwing away everything the Longs have fought for!’ ”

It turned out not to matter. After a few months out of politics, Earl won the 1960 Democratic nomination for his district’s congressional seat, and died a few days later. Starr assures us he would have loved the movie.