The striptease artist who seduced a governor

Ok, you can see that I am currently catching up on my Week Magazine reading... The Magazine publishes stuff I react to... but I guess that is just the news in general. This blurb was taken from the July 3rd print edition of the Week Magazine as well.

Obviously, no relation, as her name is actually Fannie Belle Fleming... But, because of the Starr the article caught my eye. And she sounds like a pretty interesting person... especially that she sewed her own costumes, became an entrepreneur in Baltimore and also designed jewelry.

With her flame-red hair tumbling down her shoulders, Blaze Starr would writhe on a couch while slowly shedding her clothes. Then, just as the burlesque performer was about to peel off the last stitch, she would hit a hidden button, causing smoke to billow from the cushions, along with ribbons shaped like flames. That brand of playful eroticism earned Starr the title Queen of Burlesque in the 1950s and ’60s, but she was even more renowned as a seductress. Her brazen affair with former Louisiana Gov. Earl Long inspired the 1989 Paul Newman film Blaze. Despite her scarlet reputation, Starr carried herself with dignity. “I always felt that I was an artist,” she said. “If there is such a thing as getting nude with class, then I did it.”
Starr was born Fannie Belle Fleming in Wilsondale, W.Va., one of 11 children of a railroad worker. At 15, she hopped a bus for Washington, D.C., and was working in a doughnut shop there when a promoter “persuaded her to become a stripper,” said The New York Times. After moving to Baltimore in 1950, she settled for a decades-long residency at the rowdy 2 O’Clock Club, which she would later buy. Starr’s act was in demand around the country, said The Washington Post, and she toured with “an elaborate set of costumes she sewed herself.”
After one performance in New Orleans in 1959, Starr met the married, 62-year-old Long. They carried on their relationship openly and were, she said, engaged to be married when Long died in 1960. Starr boasted of other high-profile lovers, but named only one, John F. Kennedy, claiming she met him on the campaign trail in 1960. She went on to become a successful Baltimore businesswoman, said The Baltimore Sun, and “was so unthreatening to local morals” that she appeared in ads for the city’s gas and electric companies. Starr stripped until the 1980s and spent her later years designing jewelry. Asked in 1988 if she would change anything about her life, she gave a categorical no. “I would just do more of it,” she said. “And seduce a lot more men.”