Burt Kearns and Jeff Abraham interviewed legendary musician, comedian, and leader of the sexual revolution Rusty Warren a few weeks ago in southern California. Today, their time with the famed ‘Knockers Up Gal’ of the Fifties and Sixties has been turned into a long article posted on PleaseKillMe.com, the rock, pop culture and literary website based on Please Kill Me, the definitive punk rock history book penned by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain.
Burt, as you know, wrote Tabloid Baby. Jeff is Hollywood’s leading comedy historian. The pair collaborated on a book we can’t tell you about just yet. Their piece on Rusty unearths many anecdotes about her life and career, and brings to the forefront for the first time the sisterhood alliance among the top female comedians of the era.
Here’s a sample, as Rusty Warren looks back at the heyday of Las Vegas:
“In Vegas, you’d always have three comics, myself and two other people,” Rusty recalled. “We’d trade off. The men were all dressed to go onstage, except they’d pull their pants down and the gals came over and gave them blowjobs. And then: ‘Now, ladies and gentlemen… dadadadada…’ Up… Zip! Pull up, out and get out to go on. My room was right next to theirs.”Whether working the lounges or the big rooms, the male performers went their own way, she said, kissing up to the mobsters running the casinos or hoping to pal around with big stars like Milton Berle or that prick Jerry Lewis. The women supported each other.
“Joan Rivers was always nice to me, even when she was working the main room,” recalls Rusty. “Phyllis Diller gave me her house when she was gone. I was there three times a year and she let me use it. Totie Fields, she was younger. Her house was nearby, she’d come round. She made it big, but she came to me as a friend because I was one who didn’t go on (in the main room) where she goes. She’d ask, ‘What should I do with so and so?’ She was very nice. It was a nice combination of friends.
“Las Vegas was different then. I don’t go to Vegas today.”
Read the entire article by clicking here.
(Burt and Legs go back forty years. In the late Eighties, Legs was Burt’s editor at Spin magazine.)
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