Words by Roxy Bourdillon
In this edition of Trailblazers of Tease, we pay tribute to an incredible performer who changed the face of burlesque forever.
Have you ever wondered who did the first striptease? Invented the tassel twirl? Persuaded Gypsy Rose Lee to become a burlesquer? Well, guess what.
We have the glorious Carrie Finnell to thank for all three!
This sensational performer pioneered the peel as we know it today. On top of that, she was the first dancer to adorn her pasties with tassels and she was the one who convinced our beloved Gypsy to take to the stage and take it all off. Oh, and if that’s not enough to make you fall head over high heels in love with her, she once beat screen siren Mae West in a stripping contest. Talk about legendary.
With boundless charm and unrivalled creativity, Carrie was the awe-inspiring foremother to burly queens the world over.
Born around 1900 in Covington, Kentucky, Carrie spent her early teens working as an aid to a Phys Ed teacher and training for the Olympics. Her first time onstage was with Covington burlesque troupe, Le Roy Guy Players. From then on, she was dubbed “Minneapolis’s sweetheart”. A gifted dancer, she could pull off high kicks and precise turns with her strong, powerful pins, which were insured for an astronomical sum. This ingenious publicity stunt meant Carrie could be promoted as “The Girl with the $100,000 Legs”..
She travelled the country, playing venues including the Minsky brothers’ National Winter Garden Theatre. Then one night in Cincinnati, a fire broke out in the middle of her number. The roof began to collapse, and panic gripped the audience. In an attempt to calm everyone down, Carrie improvised a dazzling dance. Little did she know that Florenz Ziegfeld was in the audience. Thanks to her quick-thinking and undeniable talent, she gained a coveted spot as a chorus girl at the renowned Ziegfeld Follies.
While she wasn’t the first stripper (that accolade goes to Anne Toebe), Carrie is widely recognised as the very first “teaser”. Tired of not being viewed as the main attraction, Carrie decided to switch up her act in September 1923.
At a theatre in Cleveland, she embarked on her record-breaking 54-week striptease. Yes, you read that right. Carrie was so captivating she could keep an audience begging for more for 54 weeks straight.
Removing only one item of clothing per week, she flirted with her goggle-eyed audience, telling them they’d only get to see more flesh if they came back for another show. She explained to a journalist that she came up with this unprecedented routine by accident: “So I got the idea of taking off one strap each week; there were 10 of them and it took 10 weeks.” As her clothes became fewer, customer demand skyrocketed, and ticket prices rose accordingly. The story goes that once she had disrobed all the way down to her panties and pasties, she needed something else to string out this strip a little longer. That’s when she had a brainwave that changed her act, and the whole burlesque industry, forever. Taking tassels from a can-can costume, she sewed them onto her pasties. Behold, the original nipple tassels.
In the words of the strippers in the musical Gypsy, “You gotta have a gimmick”, and Carrie had the most crowd-pleasing gimmick of all. “Please welcome to the stage the divine Carrie Finnell and her ‘Educated Bosom’!” With seriously impressive control of her pectoral muscles and special elastic stitched into her seams, Carrie could bounce her boobs right out of her dress. This nifty move was referred to as the “bust in the eye”. She was brilliant at chest isolations too and could swivel her funbags individually or in sync, causing the tassels to twirl whichever way she wished. Variety called it “acrobatic heaving”. Fellow burlesque icon Ann Corio likened Carrie’s rotating titties to the propellers revving up on a World War 1 plane:
“Faster and faster it [the first tassel] would spin while its fellow tassel lay limp and neglected on the other bosom. Then the other tassel would come to life. It would start spinning slowly, while the first tassel was at full speed. Carrie looked like a twin engine bomber. She would walk across the stage with the tassels swirling in front of her and applause would ring out.”
When a reporter asked Carrie about the way she used her breasts in her act, she replied simply, “I made them work for me”. Sometimes she liked to attach bells or small electric lights to her pasties and twirl them with abandon too.
Carrie was hilarious and spectacular, touring with her one-woman show, The Chestcapades, and twitching her titties to the beat of tracks like Shave And A Haircut, Two Bits and Pop Goes The Weasel. Playfulness was key. A master of silly facial expressions, Carrie used bawdy humour, sang provocatively and bantered with the audience. She even talked directly to her tatas, prompting roars of laughter from the spellbound onlookers.
Another reason Carrie is so amazing is that she paved the way for performers with diverse body types. While she was more voluptuous than the typical dancer of the day, something newspaper articles just loved to mention, she was unapologetic about her gorgeous figure. Confident in her own skin, she relished every one of her bountiful curves and the audience couldn’t get enough of the breathtaking “Mammary Manipulator”.
Billed variously as “The Bad Girl of Burlesque” and “The Most Novel And Most Startling Act In Show Business”, Carrie was an utter triumph. At one point she was the highest paid burlesque artist on the planet, earning as much as $2000 per week. How awesome is that? A plus size performer was once the most successful burly dancer in the world.
In the mid-1950s, she gave up performing apart from the odd TV appearance, and turned her attentions to real estate. She never gave up on glamour though and carried on wearing eye-popping ensembles and painting the town fabulous. Her nephew, Michale Now, told SFGATE, “Until the end, she was quite scandalous”.
Carrie’s career spanned 45 years, from the roaring ‘20s to the start of the swinging ‘60s, earning her the nickname, “The Gland Old Lady of Burlesque”. Those who knew her described her as down to earth, kind and generous to friends and strangers in need. She was married twice, first to theatre manager Charles Grow with whom she had one son, and then to Thomas Morris, the great love of her life. Carrie continued performing right up until the end. Tragically, when Thomas passed away in October 1963, Carrie, completely heartbroken, followed just a few weeks later.