Tempest Storm, legendary burlesque star who blazed trail for striptease artists, dies

Tempest Storm, the legendary burlesque star who blazed a trail for striptease artists for more than half a century, has died at her home in Las Vegas.

Storm died Tuesday at age 93, her longtime friend, confidant and business partner Harvey Robbins told the Las Vegas Review Journal.

“She was the last of the great legends in the golden age of burlesque. She was perhaps the biggest of all,” said Robbins, who was at Storm’s home when she died. The star had been struggling after hip surgery this month and also suffered from dementia.

Born Annie Blanche Banks on Feb. 29, 1928, in Eastman, Ga., she was the daughter of a sharecropper, leaving school in seventh grade and working as a waitress. At age 14, she married a U.S. Marine, though the marriage was annulled 24 hours later. At age 15, she married a shoe salesman and, after six months, left him to pursue a career in Hollywood.

She was working as a cocktail waitress when a customer told her she’d make a great striptease performer. In 1951, Storm landed an audition with Follies Theater talent manager Lillian Hunt. Within a month, she’d upped her pay from $40 to $60 per week, and Hunt said the new performer needed a stage name.

Offered a choice between Sunny Day and Tempest Storm, she said, “Well, I said, I guess it might as well be Tempest Storm.” She legally changed her name six years later.

Storm would become an internationally known figure, selling out clubs across the country. She was featured in a variety of films by pioneers Russ Meyer and Irving Klaw, including a co-starring role with Bettie Page in Klaw’s 1955 film “Teaserama.”

In 1956, she became the highest-paid burlesque performer in the country when she signed a 10-year contract at $100,000 a year with the Bryan-Engels burlesque production company.

Soon after signing, Storm married Herb Jeffries, then a singer in the Duke Ellington Orchestra. The interracial marriage was seen as scandalous at the time and likely slowed her film career. The two had a child, Patricia, in 1964. Storm’s estrangement from her daughter is at the center of the 2016 documentary “Tempest Storm.”

Tempest Storm at her home in Las Vegas in 2008.

(Jae C. Hong/AP)

Storm first performed in Las Vegas in 1951, at the Embassy Club in North Las Vegas. She moved to the Dunes in 1957, and as late as 1987 was still headlining on the Strip. She was 59 at the time.

Her final performance was at the Plaza in June 2010, at the Burlesque Hall of Fame reunion show. She fractured her left hip that night, effectively ending her stage appearances.

For years, Storm hung out with the stars of the Strip, including Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, with whom she performed at a Hollywood awards show that spoofed the Oscars called the Mickey Awards.

She knew Frank Sinatra, too. “He introduced me from the audience once, when he was at Caesars, and said, ‘She taught me how to dress,’ and the crowd applauded. Then he said, ‘You thought I would say she taught me how to undress!’ And everybody laughed.”

For a while, Storm dated Elvis Presley and recalled how one of his confidants told her that if Presley had remained with her, he might have lived a longer and healthier life.

“I’ve never smoked, drank or taken drugs,” she said. “That’s why I have lasted in this business so long.”

Credited with delivering the art of striptease to the masses, she shared a theater tour with the rock band the James Gang in 1973.

“Carnegie Hall was one of them,” she said of the venues. “That was the greatest. What a thrill.”

Storm moved to Las Vegas in 2005, about a year before her friend and fellow burlesque legend Dixie Evans moved the Burlesque Hall of Fame from her ranch in Helendale, Calif., to Las Vegas.