Born January 23rd, 1916
Died April 3rd, 2022
She was known as the “Red-Headed Ball of Fire”, a title given her for her stature — she was a diminutive 5ft 1in — and her fiery hair. She found the moniker, which was often shortened to “Ball of Fire”, corny. But Betty Rowland was a burlesque queen nonetheless. A headliner in the racy variety shows’ glory years in the 1930s and 1940s, she worked well into the 1950s.
Rowland had a languid, balletic style (hers was a gentle grind), and she often threw in an undulating stretch and drop known as a German roll. Her costumes were elegant: she favoured long skirts with a side slit to the hip, bandeau tops and evening gloves. After a slow burn, she shed most of her gear; but, like most burlesque stars, she kept her pasties and her G-string on.
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One of her signature pieces was called “Bumps in the Ballet”, a spoof of a ballet routine that she liked to introduce to her audience with a bit of patter: “Let’s put a little juice in the Ballets Russes, and give the dying swan a goose. In a classical sort of way, might I put a bump in this ballet?”
Rowland died on April 3rd at an assisted-living home in Culver City, California. She was 106.
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 told the stories of Rowland and other burlesque stars.
Outside the tribal world of burlesque, Rowland was perhaps not as famous — or as well paid — as other headliners such as Tempest Storm, another redheaded queen, who dallied with John F Kennedy and Elvis Presley, whose breasts were said to be insured by Lloyd’s of London, and whose earnings at her peak in the mid-1950s were about $100,000 a year (roughly $950,000 today). Rowland did well, but not that well; in 1945 she earned $500 every two weeks, the equivalent of more than $200,000 a year today.
Still, it was “big dough”, as Rowland told the Los Angeles Times in 2009, adding that she didn’t squander it on alcohol or cigarettes. “I never smoked or drank,” she said. “It wasn’t in my family. When we were in show business, we took it seriously. We saw a few of them fall by the wayside because of that.”
Chorus girls
Rowland was of an early-vintage of burlesque star: She had a preteen vaudeville act with her sister Rozelle, performing a bit of soft shoe and tap. When vaudeville faded out and its stars migrated to the livelier burlesque shows, Betty and Rozelle went on the road as chorus girls.
Burlesque, sometimes known as “the poor man’s theatre”, was, like vaudeville, a grab bag of acts — comedy, acrobatics, a little song and dance — with the added zest of a striptease or two.
Betty had her first star turn when she was just 14, filling in for a performer who had sprained her ankle. She was so engrossed in the music that she forgot to take off any clothes.
“We teased. That was the name of the game. You become a fantasy to other people,” she told Liz Goldwyn, author of Pretty Things: The Last Generation of American Burlesque Queens (2006). But, she added, “people whisper, for heaven’s sake, they say, ‘Do you know what she used to do?’ And they’re saying it like I was a porno worker or something. Well they shouldn’t whisper — I was a dancer. It was the only thing I knew how to do, and I was a success at it.”
Betty Jane Rowland was born on January 23rd, 1916, in Columbus, Ohio, one of four daughters of Alvah and Ida Rowland. The girls took dancing lessons, and starting when Betty was about 11, she and her sister Rozelle helped out the family financially by performing together in amateur vaudeville shows, and, later, as burlesque stars, touring a bit but mostly based in New York city.
Betty Rowland moved to Los Angeles in 1938, a year after mayor Fiorello La Guardia put the burlesque houses out of business for corrupting the morals of the city. Her own brushes with the law, however, were rare.
She was fined $250 for lewdness in 1939, after a trial in which a burly cop imitated her act on the witness stand, leaving the court weak with laughter. In 1952 she was jailed when a box-office worker at a theatre where she was performing failed to recognise two vice squad officers who were in the habit of attending the shows for free. As payback, they arrested Rowland and the theatre manager; a judge sentenced them both to four months in jail. A local columnist took up Rowland’s case, pointing out that the sentence was as severe as that given the perpetrator of a recent shooting, and she was released after three weeks.
In 1943 Rowland sued the Samuel Goldwyn Co for using her stage name as the title of the 1941 film Ball of Fire, a screwball comedy starring Barbara Stanwyck as a mouthy nightclub singer on the run, and for breach of contract. Rowland said she had been hired as a technical adviser to Stanwyck but was never paid. Rowland received a lot of publicity for her case, but she did not prevail.
Burlesque lost its lustre in the postwar years. By the early 1960s, the crowds were seedier, the clubs grubbier and the production all but gone. Soon there were only hardcore strip joints, and many of the former burlesque theatres were playing pornographic films. Rowland was disdainful of her crude successors.
“What is a lap dance, anyway?” she asked a reporter in 1997.
Rowland had a long-term relationship with a fellow Minsky burlesque star, a comedian named Gus Schilling — a baggy-pants top banana, in burlesque parlance. Newspapers often described the couple as married, but Rowland told Zemeckis and others that although she and Schilling lived together, he was married to someone else. Her marriage in 1956 to Owen S Dalton, a lumber merchant, ended in divorce in 1963. She leaves no immediate survivors.
— This article originally appeared in The New York Times