Seattle Strip Clubs: Deaths elsewhere
Alice Schiller was a bit of a prude who didn’t swear, drink or smoke, much less endorse women disrobing for entertainment. So when her husband told her he wanted to turn his struggling Hollywood nightclub into a striptease house, she cried. But once she dried her tears, she got down to business, transforming an erstwhile Latin dance and jazz club on a rundown stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard into a Los Angeles landmark: the Pink Pussycat. Opened in 1961, it was pink through and through, just like the inside of Schiller’s house and her entire wardrobe. For the next two decades, Schiller was the club’s hostess extraordinaire who took pride in marketing burlesque to fit mainstream tastes. She also invented unique stage names for the strippers, including Fran Sinatra, Samya Davis Jr. and Dina Martin. Schiller died in her sleep Dec. 19 in Washington, D.C. She was 95.
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