LEE
REMICK
DOES A STRIP TEASE ON TV
TV Guide
March 06, 1965
Guests on the Danny Thomas special coming up on NBC March 14 are Mickey Rooney and Jim Nabors. Cameo parts are filled by such as Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Edie Adams, Jack Benny, Andy Griffith, Don Knotts, and Carl Reiner. Yet little Lee Remick all but steals the show with a striptease in which she takes off more than a glove.
One of the reasons: She dances and that’s how she started her show business career, at age 16. But there were other factors in her triumph as she admits.
To begin with she explains, “We had a real audience, a real theater (the set was a simulated old time burlesque house), and everything seemed real to me. I felt excited when I stood in the wings waiting to go on. Then the audience began to participate. They were whistling and yelling ‘Take it off…take it off,’ and it was great. Mickey said we should take the show on the road.
Another plus was her costume, designed by Roy Aghayan. “I had to look as if I were doing some bumps and grinds,” Lee said, “and the clothes were a big help.”
In the show Lee’s dancing is so torrid, it’s stopped by the police before she can really get into her denouement – between the first and second gloves. Below, she is arraigned in court before Judge Mickey Rooney, as bailiff Jim Nabors, and prosecutor Danny Thomas looks pained.
The show, called The Wonderful World of Burlesque, was a natural for Thomas and Rooney, both of whom started in that branch of show business. Thomas was a “candy butcher” (one who hawks candy to the audience), Rooney was a child actor (his father was burlesque comic Joe Yule). In fact, Danny says, the first time he ever laid eyes on Mickey was at the old Empire Theater in Toledo, Ohio, when he was 11 and Mickey, aged 5, toddled out onto the stage singing Pal of My Cradle Days.
