‘Godmother’ of burlesque ran exotic museum
Marilyn Monroe mimic would brook no criticism of profession
Dixie Evans, the dancer known as “the Marilyn Monroe of Burlesque,” who has died aged 86, thrilled postwar Americans with her scantily clad impression of the film star. In later life she ran a museum of exotic dancing in the Mojave Desert.
Evans had no outstanding talent as a dancer or singer. But this did not discourage Harold Minsky, adopted son of U.S. burlesque impresario Abraham Minksy, who spotted her at a Minsky’s club in New Jersey in 1952. “They’ll recognize the big name,” he told her, “and we’ll put the ‘of Burlesque’ in small letters.”
Soon, Evans became a Marilyn Monroe devotee. Every film release saw her first in line, seeking inspiration for her next big number. She draped herself over a producer’s chair wearing only a G-string as the band played You Must Have Been A Beautiful Baby and waltzed across the stage with a dummy of Laurence Olivier in tribute to The Prince and the Showgirl (1957).
In 1958 Monroe threatened her with a lawsuit, but the dispute was resolved without going to court after Evans agreed to restructure her act.
By that time Evans was a bona fide star of the burlesque circuit, with headline billing wherever she went.
She was born Mary Lee Evans in Long Beach, Calif., on Aug. 26, 1926, and her family background was one of some standing. Her mother, Annie (born Wrennette Le Grand), was a descendant of Robert Morris, a signatory of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Her father, Roy, worked in the oil industry. He died in an accident when Mary was 11, and she began working in her teenage years to support the family.
After leaving school at 16 she enrolled in dance lessons and joined chorus lines in performing tours, ending up in San Francisco with no money to get home. There she discovered the burlesque nightclub scene, and the financial incentives it presented: Wages for striptease dancers were four times her own.
After several shows in California she moved to Newark, where Minsky had just converted a downtown concert hall into a burlesque theatre. For more than a decade she made her base at Place Pigalle in Miami Beach, appearing in nightly shows there for six years. A plane towed a banner emblazoned with her headline across the beach four times a day.
In 1962, however, Marilyn Monroe was found dead, and Evans’s prospects seemed to crumble. Depressed, she made an unsuccessful attempt to restyle herself “The Sensational Dixie Evans” before moving to the Bahamas, where a friend found her a job in a hotel. When that ran its course she returned to California and became a nurse’s aide.
She had kept in touch with several women from her performing days, who gathered for an annual reunion at a remote desert ranch in Helendale, Calif. After the death of friend who collected burlesque memorabilia in 1990, Evans decided that the responsibility now fell on her to “keep burlesque alive.”
She moved into the ranch and began assembling displays of pasties, G-strings, costumes, posters and a Strippers Hall of Fame. The collection became Exotic World, billed as “the only Burlesque Historical Society in the world.”
Hailed by her admirers as the “godmother” of burlesque, she was scathing about modern strip routines. She had little regard for lap-dancers who “just take their clothes off.”
Nor would she entertain criticism of her profession from outsiders, saying: “I would never want to have their boring job anyway.”