A good age for a stripper

By Jerry Fink

Friday, Feb. 29, 2008 | 2 a.m.

You wouldn’t think that Pope Paul III and stripper Tempest Storm have anything in common.

But both were leap year babies, born on Feb. 29 — that extra day every four years slipped into the calendar at the end of February by Julius Caesar in 45 B.C. to make the years come out right over the long haul.

Of course Pope Paul III, born in 1468, is long gone. But Storm, born in 1928, is still very much alive, kicking and stripping whenever she has the opportunity. Her last gig was in June when she took it off during the Exotic World Burlesque Revue at the Plaza.

Today is leap day, and Storm turns 80.

“Gravity hasn’t gotten me yet. I have had a (heck) of a run and I’m not finished,” says Storm, who moved to Las Vegas two years ago so she could be close to the action. “You know, age is only a number.”

Numbers have always been a big part of her career. Try 38DD-21-34, her figure when she started stripping in 1950.

Like most things, burlesque has changed since Storm, a native of Georgia, quit her job as a cocktail waitress and went to work as a stripper for Lillian Hunter at the Follies Theater in Southern California.

“It’s not like it used to be,” she says. “The new burlesque they have is not the way I did it, not the way I remember burlesque, when something was left to the imagination. Now it’s just all out there. The pole dancers and the lap dancers, they leave nothing to the imagination.”

Storm, whose name was Annie Blanche Banks before she legally changed it in 1957, says she spent some time working in London in the late ’60s and when she came back, things were beginning to change.

“They started taking their G-strings and flashing audiences,” she says. “The next thing you know they’re taking everything off.

“There’s absolutely no art anymore. It’s exhibitionism.”

Storm spent a lot of time in Las Vegas when her name was synonymous with burlesque.

“The first time I worked here was in 1951 in a small nightclub in North Las Vegas, a very nice club called the Embassy Lounge,” she says.

She went on to headline “Minsky’s Follies,” a topless revue at the Dunes that debuted in 1957. Her last major gig here was 30 years later, in 1987, at the Hacienda, when a producer tried to revive the “Follies.”

“I guess that was the last real burlesque revue they had in Vegas,” Storm says.

Her life has had lots of highs and lows.

High points?

Performing at Carnegie Hall, she says: “They thought I was a singer until I came out onstage.”

Meeting John F. Kennedy: “When I met him he was still a senator. I was working at a nightclub in Washington, D.C., and he came in with his entourage to check it out.”

She had a private meeting with him. When asked if he hit on her, she said, “Of course. But we won’t go any further.”

Her 10-year marriage to jazz singer and cowboy actor Herb Jeffries was a low point.

“I kicked him out of the saddle,” Storm says, laughing. “It was the worst, most expensive mistake in my life. The only reason it lasted 10 years was I was on the road a lot with my career.”

Although she hasn’t stripped lately, Storm says she isn’t retired.

“I’ll never retire. I’ve kept myself fit,” she says. “I never drank, never smoked. I’ve always watched my diet, eaten fat-free foods. I exercise to stay in shape.

“When people find out my age they are amazed. They can’t believe it.”

Of course, she’s only about 20 — in leap years.