Steve Marcus
Legendary burlesque star Tempest Storm will be featured at the Burlesque Hall of Fame reopening in downtown Las Vegas on Tuesday April 17, 2018.
Saturday, May 8, 2021 | 2 a.m
Southern Nevada lost a legend last month when burlesque queen Tempest Storm, who was friends with Frank Sinatra and dated both Elvis Presley and John F. Kennedy, died at her Las Vegas apartment at the age of 93.
I first met the redhead sensation in June 1983 when she was a 55-year-old dancer, and I was a 26-year-old reporter at the Sahara Hotel to cover Star ’80, an event considered the first exotic in the world World applies dancers convention.
You could call Tempest Storm a dancer or a classic cabaret vedette, but I made the mistake of calling her work a “stripper”. Storm Storm was quick to straighten me out. She argued that in a revue, there is a marked difference between a stripper and a professionally trained headline performer.
“Burlesque is sensual movement, expression that shows your personality with your eyes and your smile,” she told a Sun reporter some 30 years later. “I’ve always been in a class.”
Who could accuse them of being mad at me? I heartlessly reduced what their entire life’s work had been – and what would be – to the lowest common denominator.
Tempest Storm tried to make the word “tease” the main part of the word “striptease”.
She long remained a hit with fans who valued her efforts as a rare veteran of what always was and always will be a game for young women. She was in great demand around the world even in her later years.
In 1952, Tempest Storm came to southern Nevada and first performed for five years at the Embassy Burlesque Club on North Main Street in North Las Vegas before moving to the old Dunes Hotel in 1957, which is now the Bellagio.
Storm last performed on the strip at the old hacienda in 1987, aged 59. She finally moved to Las Vegas in 2005, where she was inducted into the Burlesque Hall of Fame.
Storm was – like burlesque performers Gypsy Rose Lee, Blaze Starr, Sally Rand, and El Rancho Vegas, among others – a pioneer in the endeavor to bring burlesque out of shabby dark joints from the Depression into the light of a modern mainstream art form.
Until the end, Annie Blanche Banks, born in Eastman, Georgia, on February 29, 1928, was caught out of the storm in burlesque. So much so that local exotic dancers Miss Redd and Kalani Kokonuts were sitting by their bedside along with longtime business partner Harvey Robbins when Storm died.
From humble beginnings, Storm dropped out of school to work at the age of 13 and was divorced twice at the age of 15. In 1951, at the age of 23, she moved to Hollywood the latter.
Soon she was making $ 60 a week – a lot of money for a wage earner at the time. In 1957 she legally changed her name to Tempest Storm. In the mid-1950s, Storm signed a 10-year contract for $ 100,000 a year with a burlesque company – the highest amount ever paid to an artist in burlesque history.
Storm has also appeared in 21 films and TV shows, and married Hollywood’s “singing black cowboy” Herb Jeffries in 1959 at a time when interracial marriages were unacceptable to many. She later claimed the eight-year marriage had cost her a profitable career in R-rated films with lots of unpaid nudity.
Storm’s last – and tragic – stage performance was in June 2010 when she broke her hip and suffered a concussion in a fall. In a November 2010 interview with Sun, Storm admitted she was concerned about getting back on stage and possibly falling back into her high heels.
Storm met many celebrities. A friend, Sinatra, introduced her as a member of the audience during a performance at Caesars Palace. Storm dated both President Kennedy and Elvis, and said that if she and the King of Rock’n’Roll had stayed together, she could have helped Presley lead better lives. Storm said she never drank alcohol, smoked, or used drugs.
Storm, who once played at Carnegie Hall, announced her retirement from regular performance in 1995 at the age of 67, but continued working on occasional stage shows through the fall of 2010 at the age of 82.
Tempest Storm will long be remembered for her creative audacity and sweet demeanor on stage.
Las Vegas is indeed diminished by its loss.
Ed Koch is a former longtime Sun reporter.
