Let's Spend the Night Together: Backstage Secrets of Rock Muses and Supergroupies (4 page)

As the final kicker, Tura opened a notebook and handed me an eight-by-ten '50s photo of herself as Miss Japan Beautiful. In stark-raving black and white, she leans into the camera, smoldering, sequined pasties poised just so. Her unbelievably steamy, come-hither geisha beauty must have raked thousands of male libidos over the red-hot coals. "I was unique on the burlesque circuit," she purred. "Orientals weren't supposed be busty like I was.

Tura was in L.A. staying with her manager, Siouxzan Perry, for a few days (she handles all the Russ Meyer Dolls and Dandies), and I was invited to her trippy Topanga Canyon pad the following night for bourbon-soaked chicken and a trip down Tura's momentous Memory Lane.

After dinner, Siouxzan leads us to a cozy, quiet den where we recline on pillows under a massive Pussycat poster of Tura's menacing self as the vampy Varla. We drink a few glasses of red wine in the candlelight, and the conversation flows with the merlot. Tura's story is astounding, dolls, and I advise you to keep a wide-open mind. Just sit back and go with the glow.

I learned that she didn't live on Easy Street as a kid. In fact, a lot of her childhood was spent behind double barbed wire. During World War II, the young Tura did time with her father and brother in Manzanar, a Japanese relocation camp outside Lone Pine, California. She remembers soldiers with dogs paroling the tents and Quonset huts. Each one housed at least ten confused, displaced families, and any food they ate they had to grow themselves. Tura's mother, an American Indian, was left behind. "She came to the fence, but she wasn't allowed to touch it," Tura recalls. "If she did, she wound up with a baton across the knuckles." The humiliation and horror made Tura's father more determined to be recognized as an American citizen. "When we finally got out of there, he refused to speak Japanese. We weren't even taught our own language at home."

Things got tougher back on Chicago's west side. Tura wasn't even ten years old when she was raped by a gang of five guys, one of whom turned out to be the cousin of the cop who came when she crawled out of the alleyway. A judge was paid off, and Tura wound up in reform school "for tempting those boys into raping me. I was classified a juvenile delinquent." After the rape, Tura couldn't stand to be touched by anybody, not even her parents. She assumed a tough stance, soon heading a rowdy girl gang, and found herself fending off "slant-eye" insults with her fists and her wit. "We patrolled the neighborhood to keep that kind of thing from happening to anybody else." Because of her resilient nature, the hideous experience gave Tura an enigmatic edginess that somehow became part of her charm. Despite all these difficulties, her down-deep dream was to sing and dance.

Tura regales me with tales of her circus performer mom, who taught her how to hula to her favorite tune. "The 'Hawaiian War Chant' was really fast; that's how I learned to do some of my shimmies and moves." Tura stands and wriggles her hips around with remarkable grace and aplomb. "Mom loved Hawaiian music, those drums and electric guitars. You automatically want to move to it."

At fourteen Tura looked years older and worked as a cigarette girl at the Trocadero, the Sunset Strip celeb hang where all the "famous personages" wanted to be the first to show her a good time. Every man Tura came in contact with was bowled over, but she still couldn't stand to be touched. With Japanese, Filipino, Chinese, and Cheyenne Indian blood pumping through her, Tura's exoticness made her quite an enticing treat. "Asians just weren't built like I was," she reminds me. By the early'50s, when she sashayed around in her peekaboo skirt, offering "cigars, cigarettes, cigarillos" to the likes of Martin and Lewis, the Troc had become a faded dream, and Tura moved on.

She tried all kinds of entertainment jobs before landing a "legit" Spanish dancer gig (amusing, considering her heritage), which would catapult her into a surprising new realm. When her boss suggested she remove her La Cucaracha clothes for a substantial hike in salary, Tura's career as "Miss Japan Beautiful" began. Back in 1954, $125 a week was a lot of dough. "At first it was scary," she admits, "but when I saw the looks of appreciation on some of the guy's faces in the audience, it made me feel very special."

More wine is poured and I ask what made her act different from others on the circuit. "I made my audience participants in my routine; I talked to them, played with them, made jokes with them. I said 'OK, where have you got your hands right now?" There must have been a lot of action going on under the tables, because Tura soon became a hothouse staple on the burlesque scene across the country. Although she was still a bit wary, she soon warmed up to her new means of self-expression, because "the men in audience wanted to adore you."

Long before the yucky debacle of crotch-in-the-face lap dancing, strippers left a lot to the rampant imagination. Burlesque was an exquisite art form in the '50s, and Tura's costumes were elaborately beaded, highly embellished Asian rhapsodies, which brought a man's inherent geisha-girl fantasies to the eyepopping surface. She gracefully balanced ornamented headdresses, stroked long Japanese swords, and slowly slipped out of her hand-painted kimonos. Her prop Buddha rested in his velvet-lined case, and his hands burst into flames when she brushed against his upturned palms.

The family atmosphere of the "Burly-Q" circuit helped Tura unlearn the bad habits she picked up in reform school. Her fellow dancers completely accepted her mixed-up heritage, and it soothed her injured soul. It was a good job. She was taken care of, and nobody messed with her. But because of her nightmare childhood experiences, Tura began to drink heavily. "The minute a guy touched me, I'd deck him. My automatic reflex was to go on the defensive and strike out blindly. I took up drinking and I was damn near an alcoholic, downing maybe two or three fifths a day." It took a long time before Tura could be touched without flinching. "People on the circuit cared and made me feel like I was family, so I listened when they told me drinking would make me old and dumb very fast. The gals I worked with helped me face what happened. I did a deep cleansing of my mind, and I was a lot better off." Due to the nurturing Tura received from her newfound family, she gradually began to accept affection from her many suitors, and was free to become even more daring, enthralling men and women alike with her peerless stage presence.

"My audience knew I enjoyed fooling around with them, and there was always one who yelled, `Oh, I wish you were my mother!' and I'd say, `Yeah, and you'd still be a breast baby, wouldn't ya?" Tura's specialty was tassel twirling. She could make those sequined mini-cups that covered paradise spin every which way but loose. "It came to me naturally," she insists with pride. "During my routine, my boobs would automatically move with the rest of my body. I had good muscle control, everything got moving and the tassels started twirling!" Tura was the only person in the universe who could twirl tassels lying flat on her back. And twirl them in opposite directions! She could also stop the whirling tassels, change direction, stop again, and spin 'em the other way! "When I twirled my tassels I'd say, `Someday I'm gonna fly if I can get enough RPMs!" It must have been quite a salacious spectacle. The sailors blushed and stammered when she twirled their peaked white hats round and round on her creamy globes. "I had so much fun with those navy men. I'd slide up to the end of the stage on my knees and say, 'OK, who's first?"' There were those who looked down their highfalutin noses, believing that Tura was nothing but a plaything for men. "It was the other way around," she insists. "Men were my playthings."

It was after a wild night of tassel twirling for agog sailors in Biloxi, Mississippi, that Tura made the acquaintance of a certain blossoming rock and roll singer. "I was a big draw that night," she recalls with delight. Oftentimes it took the teenage girl hours to unwind after dishing out damp dreams to horny strangers. On this early morning, she was cooling down by walking along the sand outside the club. "I was unwinding on the beach and this good-looking guy came walking up to me, and I said, `Nice night, isn't it?' `Yes it is, ma'am.' `Ma'am?' I was only sixteen years old and I'd never been called `ma'am' before. I'd been fibbing about my age, everybody thought I was nineteen. He said, `What are you doing out here so late at night?' I told him I was trying to unwind, and he said `You too?" The young couple walked slowly along the beach, then sat on the sand, talking 'til the sun came up. "He said he did a show up the road apiece, but I didn't know who he was. Once I took a look at those eyes of his, aahhh...." Tura has always had a weakness for blue eyes. "I looked at his eyes and thought, `Oh God, this one's a keeper." Later she realized she'd never even asked his name.

They didn't meet again until nine months later when the twenty-one-year-old arrived backstage at Chicago's Follies Theatre with the owner. "Do you remember me?" Elvis asked. "Biloxi," Tura said, smiling. "I didn't know your name then, but yes, I remember Biloxi." Turned out Elvis did see Tura's show in Biloxi, and he enjoyed her Follies routine as well. When he wondered how she moved the way she did, Tura told him her routine was based on martial arts. "He asked if I could teach him," she recalls with a throaty chuckle. "I told him, `Martial arts is not only a disciplinary art form, it also teaches you control,' and he said, `Well, you sure got control!" He wanted to know how she did the slide and the splits at the same time. How she did the shimmy, how she shook all over. He was quite intrigued. The enamored singer then jokingly asked Miss Japan Beautiful if she could teach him how to twirl the tassels. "I said, `No, honey. I can't teach you how to spin two tassels, but I can teach you how to spin one!" Elvis grinned, "Well, that might be a novelty."

Elvis may have been shaking up the planet, but even back in '56 he had the Colonel's minders watching his every move. Obviously smitten, he wanted to be alone with Tura. He somehow managed to sidestep his two furtive sidekicks and take her to breakfast at an all-night diner. "He had the aura-you knew he was going to go places. I was drawn to him mostly by his smile," Tura says wistfully. "And that Southern drawl could make your knees melt. Back then he was so down to earth, so natural. He had the magnetism; he drew women right and left. He was a natural attraction."

Elvis was able to slip away from his protectors two more nights in a row, but the third evening they parked outside Tura's family home, waiting while Elvis enjoyed his first Japanese meal, cooked by Tura's daddy. "The Colonel and those two guys thought that was the last of it, but anytime he could get away and sneak out of his room, I would meet him at a hotel or at my friend's house."

On the first couple of dates, Elvis gave Tura "wet kisses on the cheek," which she thought was sweet, but when he got to her mouth and gave her a "wet fish" kiss, she felt it was her duty to teach the boy one of life's most important lessons.

"No, no, no, you don't kiss a girl like that."

"None of the girls have complained before."

"Well, maybe they didn't know what they were doing either."

"What do you mean? I don't know how to kiss?"

"That's what I'm tellin' ya, you don't know how to kiss."

And she literally showed him how to do it.

OK. Deep breath. I have heard a few fantastical claims to fame before, but this one takes the entire bakery full of three-tiered cakes. You mean those Love-Me-Tender lips needed assistance?

She assured the bewildered, slightly chagrined Elvis that he didn't have to hold his lips so tight. "I didn't do a French kiss at first, I wanted to show him the beginnings of it. Then when he felt my tongue going around his lips, he went `Mmmm,' and he opened his mouth and I showed him how to French kiss. `Oooh, I like that!' And he went on from there. Once I showed him the difference between how he was kissing and how I kissed, he said, `Oh God, that feels so good.' When I said, `Yeah, it feels good all over too,' his eyes lit up."

Elvis and the exotic dancer began meeting secretly whenever possible. Tura sneaked into his shows and was very pleasantly surprised to see how he had taken her shakes and shimmies and made them his own. "It was a thrill to see him do the moves on stage, and to know that I was the one to teach 'em to him. Also how to do it in the bedroom-that was even better." Tura insisted they keep their affair quiet so the relationship wouldn't damage his upwardly spiraling career. She also didn't expect him to be faithful. "When we were dating I said, `I know you're going to have women throwing themselves at you and you're not gonna be able to say no.'" He said, "I will, I will, if you stay with me." Tura knew better. "There were guys who could say no, and guys who couldn't, and Elvis didn't know how to say no. He was always afraid of hurting people's feelings. That's why they took advantage of him, especially the Colonel. They walked all over him because he was so giving. He was a down-home country boy who loved his mama."

Tura leans into me conspiratorially, about to divulge some classified info. "He didn't have too much respect for his papa, not until he got older-because his papa was a player and Elvis knew his papa was cheatin' on his mama. He didn't like that one bit.