Respected If She Were Young?

I found this arti­cle from the on-line addi­tion of the St. Peters­burg Times and it made me won­der just how many peo­ple would be all in an uproar if this were about a young woman doing the same thing to sup­port her fam­ily. I sus­pect many.

Is Still Here

Chesty Mor­gan: A life more than skin deep

By Jeff Klinken­berg, Times Staff Writer

ST. PETERSBURG

Lil­lian Stello recently vis­ited the Florida Holo­caust Museum in St. Peters­burg to record her mem­o­ries of the Holo­caust, which claimed her Pol­ish par­ents. After their deaths and that of her first hus­band, she turned to the stage as a bur­lesque per­former for nearly 20 years. “I was not a stu­pid girl with a big chest,” she makes clear.

Today we offer a cau­tion­ary tale about jump­ing to con­clu­sions, a tale about how we can go wrong when we judge a book by even the most eye-catching cover. — For exam­ple: What comes to mind when you hear the name “Chesty Mor­gan”? — Peo­ple of a cer­tain age might think: “Wasn’t she an exotic dancer in the 1970s? Famous for her mea­sure­ments? She made a movie with Fellini, didn’t she? She must have been some red-hot mama, whoo hoo!’ - Yes, that was Chesty Mor­gan, a woman objec­ti­fied all over the planet for hav­ing what one night club pro­moter called “the world’s largest nat­ural breasts! She defies med­ical sci­ence!” Yes, Chesty Mor­gan - the woman with the alleged 73-inch bust. - Have your laugh, but lis­ten: The world is a com­pli­cated place. Even red-hot mamas have real lives. Often those lives are tragic. Some­times they are beyond tragic.

Let’s say you are shop­ping at a Pub­lix. You are in the cake mix aisle near the flour and the bak­ing pow­der. You are joined in the aisle by an older woman. She is tiny, prob­a­bly a few inches short of 5 feet, but under a red wind­breaker her sweat­shirt is strained to the burst­ing point.

She makes small talk about baking.

“I make lemon cake for all my friends,” she says in a lilt­ing Pol­ish accent.

Her Florida driver’s license iden­ti­fies her as Lil­lian Stello and says she is 72 years old. She seems younger. Maybe it’s her lively blues eyes. Per­haps it’s because she wears her hair in a blond mullet.

Even some long­time friends don’t know Lillian’s story. Some­times it is eas­ier to tell the whole, amaz­ing story to a stranger.

—

She is a small child in 1937. Her father and mother are well-to-do Jews who live near War­saw. In 1939, Ger­many invades Poland. Her par­ents lose their depart­ment store. They end up in the ghetto afraid for their lives.

Her mother, Eva, leaves the apart­ment to find shoes for a niece. She is caught in a Ger­man sweep, hauled away in a box­car, never to return. Lit­tle Lil­lian puts aside food every day — just in case her mother is hun­gry when she comes home.

Jews even­tu­ally fight back. Her father, Leon, is shot dead in a ghetto uprising.

Lil­lian ends up in Israel, where she lives in a series of orphan­ages, then in a kib­butz where she stud­ies nurs­ing. She has low self-esteem and wor­ries about every­thing. Boys think she is beautiful.

What can they pos­si­bly see in her?

When she is about 20, she meets a man from Amer­ica. Five days later they are mar­ried. Joseph Wilczkowski is her ticket to the United States. They set­tle in New York.

“But guess what?” she says now. “He was a very good man, a very good provider. He had butcher shops. We have two chil­dren. He didn’t see them much because he work so hard. I wanted to work with him, so I could have money of my own, but he wanted a wife who was at home. That was the only prob­lem I had with him. I wanted to work and have a lit­tle money of my own.”

Brook­lyn, 1965.

A late-night phone call. Police­man says: “We need you to come down to the sta­tion.” Lil­lian shrieks and bangs her head again and again against the wall. She has a bad feel­ing about what will come next.

The police tell her that armed rob­bers herded her hus­band and two employ­ees into a refrig­er­a­tor and shot and stabbed them to death. Tabloids call the crime “the ice­box murders.”

Lil­lian, about 27, con­tem­plates sui­cide. But she can’t do it. One daugh­ter is 4. The other is 4 months. She has to live for her kids. But what will become of them?

—

“Guess what?” she asks one day while sit­ting in front of her favorite Pub­lix. “Amer­ica is the great­est coun­try on Earth. You know why? In Amer­ica, you can do any­thing if you work hard. I am always will­ing to work hard.”

In 2009, it is dif­fi­cult to find a good job no mat­ter how hard you are will­ing to work.

In 1965, it is just as dif­fi­cult, espe­cially if you are a Pol­ish immi­grant woman who speaks uncer­tain Eng­lish and has lim­ited job skills.

She has a lit­tle money and a lit­tle prop­erty from the mar­riage, but New York is expen­sive. She wor­ries about bank­ruptcy, being thrown out on the street. In her life she has lost two par­ents and a hus­band. It is her nature to expect the worst.

She is pretty. Volup­tuous. Men knock on her door. A few sug­gest mar­riage. She tells them, “I will never marry again. I’m too afraid.” In her expe­ri­ence, love leads to death. How could she endure another tragedy?

She asks one suitor, Maury, to help find her a job. Maybe she would feel bet­ter if she had a way of mak­ing a liv­ing. In 1972, Maury takes her to a smoky night­club. On stage, a woman slowly removes her clothes while men hoot and holler. Maury says, “You’re very attrac­tive, Lil­lian. You know, you could do this. They’d pay you.”

“Maury, I never want to see you again,” Lil­lian says. “How dare you sug­gest it.”

End of date.

But she thinks about Maury’s suggestion.

—

At first she calls her­self Zsa Zsa; later, a night­club owner sizes her up and sug­gests “Chesty Mor­gan.” On her first engage­ment, she refuses to take off her bra. She gets over her shy­ness. Soon she makes enough money to pur­chase cus­tom bras and expen­sive cos­tumes. She hires a chore­o­g­ra­pher, learns how to tell a joke and to sing.

Book­ings all over the United States fol­low. In Boston, a writer describes Lil­lian as an exotic dancer “with a front as impos­ing as the Fen­way wall,” refer­ring to the local base­ball stadium’s tow­er­ing left field fence.

A B-movie direc­tor, Doris Wish­man, hires Lil­lian for a cou­ple of won­der­fully awful R-rated films. The kitschy Deadly Weapons and Dou­ble Agent 73 remain in cir­cu­la­tion today. The famous Ital­ian direc­tor Fed­erico Fellini is in New York to pro­mote his lat­est movie, Amar­cord, and catches a glimpse of Chesty. He invites her to be in his upcom­ing film, Fellini’s Casanova.

She dyes her hair black and flies to Rome. Casanova, played by Don­ald Suther­land, chases Bar­ba­rina, played by Chesty, around and around a table. Fellini cuts her part from the film, but her scene remains in a doc­u­men­tary that still cir­cu­lates on the Internet.

Back in the States, she trav­els and per­forms and per­forms and trav­els, some­times mak­ing $6,000 a week. “I was not stu­pid girl with a big chest,” she tells peo­ple now. “Night­club own­ers, they want you to work for drugs or booze and I always wanted the money. Don’t tell me you want me to come to San Fran­cisco for a cou­ple of shows, hon-ney. Pay me for a week. I have to fly across the coun­try in an air­plane, be away from my chil­dren, stay in a strange hotel, go with­out sleep. You have to pay me for all that trouble.”

She tells night­club own­ers, “I never show my bot­tom half. I never dance around pole or go in pri­vate room with customers.”

She is among the last of the old-time bur­lesque queens. She val­ues the tease as much as the strip. In San Fran­cisco, she chris­tens a ship in a cos­tume so tight the sailors carry her to the water. Now and again she is arrested, allegedly for let­ting men next to the stage touch the tops of her breasts. She wants the world to know they are real. Chesty Mor­gan does not need breast augmentation!

She mar­ries again, in a lonely moment, and moves to Florida. Hus­band No. 2, a major league umpire named Richard Stello, is a nice man, fun to be around when home, but he is never home — he trav­els for a liv­ing. Of course, so does she. They divorce in 1979.

Still, they keep in touch. He helps her through the death of her old­est daugh­ter in a traf­fic acci­dent in New York in 1984. She and her ex-husband remain close. He loves her chicken soup with matzo balls. He is killed in an auto acci­dent near Lake­land in Decem­ber 1987. They had planned to spend the hol­i­days together. She was going to make him soup.

She con­tin­ues danc­ing, cry­ing, sav­ing money, cry­ing, invest­ing in the stock mar­ket, buy­ing real estate. She dances for the last time in Hous­ton, 1991. She remem­bers because it is the open­ing night of the Per­sian Gulf War. On stage she dances the hoochie koo. Back­stage Chesty Mor­gan is glued to the tele­vi­sion with the rest of America.

—

She now lives in an expen­sive house on Tampa Bay. In boxes she has old pic­tures, old posters, old cos­tumes. She can no longer fit into her old size 5 cos­tumes. But almost.

Every morn­ing she walks to stay fit. Her back, which strug­gled to sup­port her chest for so many years, is an unfor­giv­ing antag­o­nist. In a belt pouch she car­ries aspirin for chronic pain. Some­times she won­ders if she should finally get the breast reduc­tion. Prob­lem is, she dis­trusts doc­tors. They might try to cheat an older woman like her.

Some days she walks 2 miles, other days 8. Walk­ing com­pan­ions receive ear­fuls of advice and warn­ings about dan­gers that may lurk around every cor­ner. She wor­ries about all the “For Sale” signs. She wor­ries that her prop­erty is los­ing value. She wor­ries about what is going on in Tal­la­has­see and in Washington.

She dis­trusts politi­cians, espe­cially Democ­rats, and lis­tens almost exclu­sively to Fox News while bak­ing lemon cakes or prepar­ing chicken soup. “If I could,” she says, “I would marry Glenn Beck, Sean Han­nity and Bill O’Reilly. I love them like they are my husbands.”

After her walk she climbs into her 9-year-old pickup truck. She can hardly see above the steer­ing wheel as she dri­ves to Home Depot to buy sup­plies for the apart­ment build­ings she owns.

In Home Depot, she is on a first-name basis with cer­tain clerks. They don’t know her show busi­ness back­ground; they know her only as the older female fire­ball com­fort­able with man­ual labor. “They are kind to me there, so help­ful. You say please in your story that Home Depot is a very good place. Home Depot is one of the things I love about America.”

From Home Depot she dri­ves to a neat apart­ment build­ing she owns near U.S. 19 in a working-class part of town. Some­times she hires work­men to help, but often she takes care of upkeep herself.

She climbs a lad­der to the roof. Her last roofer for­got to seal the spot where the air con­di­tioner rests. So now she has to do it. She knows plumb­ing, air con­di­tion­ing, car­pen­try and roofing.

She wears yel­low rub­ber gloves, slacks, milk-white sneak­ers, the tight sweat­shirt. Soon the yel­low gloves turn black with tar.

She is a long way from a night­club stage in San Francisco.

“My act? Hon-ney, I had bet­ter cos­tumes than Lib­er­ace! I walk through the crowd from the back so they can see me up close. I have a long coat with a tail. I swing the tail this-a-way and that-a-way as I walk.”

On the roof, she spices up her demon­stra­tion with body language.

“I am on the stage, and I turn this way and that way and the coat opens, but just a lit­tle bit” - she pro­nounces it lee­tle bit - “just enough to a give a peek. Then on stage I take off the coat and the gloves - rhine­stone gloves - one at a time, very slow, and then my top, except for the corset. After that I …”

Yes, Chesty Mor­gan was a strip­per who bared her breasts with­out apol­ogy. She is in the Bur­lesque Hall of Fame in Cal­i­for­nia, along with Gypsy Rose Lee, Josephine Baker, Sally Rand, Bet­tie Page and Mae West. Yes, the pop singer Tom Waits men­tions her in a song called Pasties and a G-String. In Swe­den, an avant-garde pop band calls itself Chesty Morgan.

In west-central Florida a tiny woman named Lil­lian fixes roofs, bakes lemon cakes and makes matzo ball soup for friends. When she thinks of her mur­dered par­ents, a mur­dered hus­band and a daugh­ter killed in a traf­fic acci­dent - when she vis­its the Holo­caust Museum in St. Peters­burg - she often breaks into tears.

But not right now, not while she works on the roof. On the roof, work­ing with her hands, she can live in the present moment.

The tiny woman kneels, pours tar, mas­sages it into an apart­ment roof with rub­ber gloves. She says, “Hon-ney, guess what? Some­times if you want some­thing done right, you got to do it yourself.”