by Michelle Carr This interview was originally published in the September 11, 1997 Velvet Hammer souvenir programme.

Velvet Hammer: What are your earliest recollections of the world of burlesque? How old were you when you got that first taste?
Anton LaVey: I was awed by Sally Rand in㤯-㤰. Her fan dance catapulted her to fame because the World’s Fair was mainstream. She was a woman when I was a kid. She was in her late 20s then, I was nine or ten. I got in to see her because I was dressed in a shirt and tie, they must have thought I was a midget or something. She had this great thing called the ”Sally Rand Nude Ranch.” The ”d” was crossed out. She had all these girls in skimpy cowgirl outfits. The girls were stuck in this windy corral spinning their lariats and getting up and down from their horses. It was pretty bawdy because they were wearing these little bandana loincloths and they were getting away with it!! A friend of mine who was a founding father of the Church of Satan, who later I compared notes with, said when he was a kid, he too managed to get into Sally’s Nude Ranch, and in the corral he saw his Sunday school teacher!!! That was a real epiphany for him. From that moment on he was a Satanist. I spent 20 minutes in there before someone showed me the door.

Velvet Hammer: Tell us about some of the burly houses you worked in.
Anton LaVey: When the [carny] season ended in 1948, I drifted to Los Angeles as a relief organist. Fortunately, I was at the right place at the right time--the Burbank, the Mayan, the old Plantation Club which had become Zucca’s. It was an old speakeasy by the Helm’s Bread factory, it was almost a surreal type of environment, a sort of a mound of a building, where people drove for their hooch. After prohibition, it became a high-class night club. The place caught fire about a month after I left. It finally came to an end. That’s where Lily [St. Cyr] did her bathtub scene.

Velvet Hammer: What type of girl was attracted to burlesque at that time in history? Was it the money or perhaps the need to become a star in Hollywood?
Anton LaVey: When I was migrating to L.A., people were drawing from or providing girls from the carnival. It was the closest thing to show biz these girls could hope to achieve. They were from cow towns and whistle stops. If they could sign on to a traveling girl show, that was their ticket to glamour. If they went with it, there was a likelihood that they would become professional dancers for the first time in their life. When the season ended, they had their choice of the usual path of failure or disillusionment. They could drift, get a job in a night club, and go into night club routines as opposed to burlesque. The path of least resistance was to get into an established burlesque house. I got my first job as an organist at the Burbank on Main Street in downtown L.A. The Follies was a sleazy place down the street. L.A. was quite a place back in the ’40s, it was a haunted city.

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