When Rosina DePello first stepped on stage in 1930 or so, then just a teenage girl wooed by the prospect of a significantly bigger paycheck than she was making as a bookkeeper, she had never actually seen a burlesque performance.
So perhaps it isn’t surprising that her act took an unexpected turn: The teen didn’t know that her striptease should have left something to the imagination.
Such was the name-making debut of Rose La Rose, a legendary burlesque performer who traveled the country with envelope-pushing acts throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Her career included memorable performances in Toledo, where her “banned in Boston” billing packed the Town Hall Theater in 1953. Toledo also became her home in her post-performance years, when she settled down to manage her own burlesque theater.
Toledoan Kenneth Dickson recalls the days when La Rose was a well-known name in the city. It’s part of the reason that the local author’s latest local history account, Teasingly Yours: The Queen of Burlesque, explores the performer and her local ties.
“Rose La Rose and the Town Hall Theater was like a rite of passage,” he said. “You had to cut high school sometime and go sit in the front row. And your buddies had to watch you do it.”
Dickson and his wife, Bonnie, spent at least two years researching La Rose before releasing the self-published book, which is available for $20 at several area businesses. Interviews and newspaper clippings uncovered numerous colorful stories about the performer, they said, including that of La Rose’s first night in show business.
Rosina DePello was born in 1916 in New York City, coming of age as vaudeville and, within it, burlesque were attracting significant attention in U.S. theaters.
She took a job at one such theater, Minsky’s Republic on 42nd Street, first as a cashier, then a bookkeeper, then finally a burlesque performer herself, according to Dickson. His research suggests she might have been as young as 14 years old when she debuted her act.
The move came with the support of her mother, who Dickson said helped her put together her costume that first night and would later chaperone La Rose to performances across the country.
(While she was known to push the limits of lewdness on stage, Dickson said, La Rose remained a devout church-goer when not under the lights, and his research suggests no evidence of promiscuity or unfaithfulness to either of her two husbands, each of whom she eventually divorced.)
Her more-than-suggestive debut created an immediate audience for the newly christened Rose La Rose, who picked up her stage name that first night when a sign painter arbitrarily determined her given name to be too long to fit. She performed at Minsky’s for about a year, then in New Jersey, and then on a cross-country circuit that hit New York, Boston, Los Angeles, St. Louis, and, of course, Toledo.
“She was the first of the burlesque stars to earn $2,500 a week,” Dickson said. “During the Depression, this is just fantastic money.”
While police officers more than once stepped in to break up a too-lewd show, it was the 1953 performance at Boston’s Old Howard Theatre that saddled her with her ticket-selling “banned in Boston” billing.
Her next appearance was in Toledo, where Dickson said an eager audience awaited.
La Rose decided to give up the stage in her early 40s — “a lady knows when it’s time to leave,” as Dickson credits her thinking — and purchased the Town Hall Theater in Toledo, where she herself had performed as part of her circuit. When neighborhood redevelopment forced her out of the later-demolished Town Hall Theater in 1967, she purchased and managed the downtown Esquire Theater, also since demolished.
She struck a familiar and well-dressed figure around town for more than a dozen years, Dickson said, living and working as a theater proprietor and aspiring socialite.
She died of cancer in 1972 when she was 59 years old.
Dickson said that his earlier research into Toledo in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, which he has written in additional books including Something for Nothing: Gambling in the Glass City, in part piqued his interest in Rose La Rose. He and his wife said that focusing specifically on the burlesque performer for this latest book proved to be interesting work.
“She was a lady who made a living taking her clothes off,” Dickson said. “But, in all respects, she was a lady.”
Teasingly Yours is available for $20 at Frogtown Books, Toledo Police Museum, Classics Gift Shop at the Toledo Lucas County Main Library, Glass City Cafe, and Rudy’s Hot Dog in Point Place, 6069 N. Summit St.
Contact Nicki Gorny at ngorny@theblade.com or 419-724-6133.
First Published March 7, 2018, 7:59 p.m.
