An actual showgirl spills the sequins on her high-stepping career. Spoiler alert: unlike the movie, it’s not sad.
In the recent movie, The Last Showgirl, Pamela Anderson Lee looks over the dazzling strip — Las Vegas — that’s turned its back on splashy showgirl revues. At age 57, clad in a massive feathery headdress and a curtain of false eyelashes, her character has reached the end of her career. She’s all dressed up with no more places to go. According to Diane Christiansen, it’s a good story, but it’s all wrong.
Christiansen is an actual showgirl who strutted her long-legged stuff in Vegas, Paris, Montreal, the Bahamas, Puerto Rico, and New York City. She’s also the author of The Last Real Showgirl: My Sequined ’70s Onstage. This racy page-turner speaks to the power, resilience, and resourcefulness of those dancers. It’s a tell-all, a celebration, and a glitter-splashed history lesson rolled into one. Fyi: it was started and titled years before the movie.
Dancing night after night in heels, a G-string and a 30-pound feather headpiece takes a lot more than just a pretty face, according to Christiansen. Showgirls are usually trained dancers, often with ballet experience. They’re coordinated, strong, and intensely fit. They’re also tall — that’s a requirement of the gig. But it’s their mental strength that matters most, she writes. She and her co-dancers knew their worth: they were pragmatic go-getters who took care of themselves and planned for life beyond the stage. Most retired in their 30s and headed for successful careers in real estate, teaching, designing, working behind the scenes of big productions, modeling, coaching dance, or acting. Christiansen — the ultimate showgirl multi-hyphenate — modeled, designed clothing, did stand-up comedy, and acted. She got her SAG card while still dancing and left the Lido revue in Las Vegas for a part on The Young and the Restless. Years later she became the top acting coach in Hollywood, and wrote a really fun book.
The Last Real Showgirl is packed with great showgirl-related trivia and information. For the multiple costume changes required in those top-shelf productions, dancers were assigned dressers, who carefully took off one set of lavish costumes, wig, head dress, and feathers, and then helped put on the next. The costumes were treated and stored like museum pieces. Dancing topless — with sequined pasties — is known as dancing nude. There are some poignant moments, including a scene in which an 18-year-old Christiansen, having made the leap from sheltered Illinois girlhood to the fabled Rudas dancers, injures her hamstring on the Can-Can line. Told she should try dancing topless instead, she’s then asked to reveal herself to the producers, and she’s mortified. “I had never revealed my breasts to anyone,” she writes. Soon enough, she realizes it’s less dancing for more money. Instead of feeling cheapened and reduced to a commodity, she feels empowered and freed. And yes, there’s a bout of “diet pills” at the behest of her employer, but Christiansen kicks the habit and discovers the power of meditation and yoga instead. As she notes, this is a career where you learn fast.
For all the revealing costumes and triple sets of eyelashes, for all the skin and allure, these dancers had agency over their bodies, their lives, and their happiness. It being the 70s, showgirls (and show boys) also had a lot of fun: they were treated like royalty, got into the best shows in any town for free, and rubbed more than shoulders with celebrities. Boldface names from the era abound: Liberace, Calvin Lockhart, Wayne Newton, David Brenner, endless rockstars. The magic and stardust of performing is a constant, whether it’s being a glamorous Bluebell at the Lido de Paris or a fantasy disco diva in La Clique in New York City. Christiansen has a great knack for storytelling when it comes to putting on a show. This is a crew that knew how to cast a spell, there’s no doubt. But they also worked hard and saved up for the future. They had each other’s backs, mentored the up-and-comers, fell in love, settled down, had partners and families, and survived. There’s nothing or forlorn about that.
Learn more about Diane Christiansen, her book, and the world of showgirls at thelastrealshowgirl.com.
Garth Thomas