Filthiest Performance He Ever Saw
Arrested in 1958 for a dance called "Tom Cat Fever," New Orleans exotic dancer Lilly Christine fought the obscenity charge to the Louisiana Supreme Court, which struck down the state's obscenity law
She comes off the floor at the 500 Club with the lights still on her, a wild crown of peroxide hair and a dancer’s hard, lithe body, and John Grosch is waiting to arrest her.
It is July 16, 1958. Grosch is chief investigator for the district attorney, and for two weeks he has worked Bourbon Street, hauling dancers off in pairs. He tells the reporters that her number, “Tom Cat Fever,” is the filthiest thing he has ever seen, and he is a man who has been around.
Lilly Christine tells them something different. She is an exotic dancer, not a stripteaser. She wears nothing on that stage more daring than the costumes in Peep Show on Broadway, and she never takes it all off.
One of them is about to be proven right by the Supreme Court of Louisiana. It will not be Grosch.
They called her the Cat Girl, for the slow, stalking way she moved. Offstage she was every bit as deliberate. In April 1958, months before her arrest, she had sued two Bourbon Street lounges for billing their own dancers as “Cat Girls,” because she had carried that name since 1948 and held a service mark on it from the United States Patent Office.
The woman Grosch arrested for a dance had already taught herself to use the law. That would matter.
The summer of 1958 was a season of crusades. A few months earlier the city had elected a new district attorney, Richard Dowling, who told the press he had no power to “close the gates on Bourbon Street or anywhere else” and swore he had ordered no arrests. Then he sent Grosch out after “dozens of complaints,” he said, but only after holding off as long as he could.
Grosch needed no second invitation. He loved a reporter and a headline. On the Fourth of July he stalked the strip hunting lewd dancing in the act. The barkers had read the papers and seen him coming a mile off, and the holiday yielded almost nothing.
A week later he tore down posters by the armload, forty-four life-sized photographs he judged unfit for the public. Each one he had photographed again, as evidence. “They must stop that teasing and that filthy dancing,” he announced.
By the time he reached Lilly Christine at the 500 Club, he and his men had arrested fifty-two dancers and barkers in a fortnight. Most of the charges Dowling let quietly drop. Hers he kept.
The state set her bond at fifteen hundred dollars, half again what the other dancers paid. An assistant district attorney named A. I. Kleinfeldt had recommended the figure, perhaps because a woman who had already hauled rivals into court over a nickname was not the sort to plead and go home. Arrested beside her were the 500 Club’s master of ceremonies, Wally Allen, and its manager, Felix Montez, charged with aiding a performance the state called “lewd and lascivious, filthy and indecent.”
The charge against her was obscenity, under the third paragraph of a Louisiana statute that forbade any “act of lewdness or indecency, grossly scandalous and tending to debauch the morals and manners of the people.”
Her lawyers went at the words themselves. They pointed the court to two earlier Louisiana rulings, one holding that “lewd and indecent act” was too vague to name a crime, another that “lewd dancing” was too shapeless to define an offense.
On October 1, 1958, Judge J. Bernard Cocke of the Orleans Parish Criminal Court agreed and threw the case out. The law leaned on the word “act,” he wrote, and “act” was a far harder thing to pin down than, say, a dance.
Dowling appealed to the state Supreme Court. “If I think the law is being violated,” he said, “I’ll raid them again.”
That August the Times-Picayune ran an item marveling that law clerks across Louisiana were now “burning the midnight oil,” researching what the statutes had to say about “the vigor, and direction, with which the pelvis may be tossed.”
The first answer from the high court went Dowling’s way. In November 1959 the justices split five to two. They revived the charge and sent the Cat Girl back to face trial. Justice Walter Hamlin wrote that a dance was a performance and that “lewdness” needed no further defining, since to elaborate would be “nothing but tautology or redundancy.”
Chief Justice John Fournet dissented. To let each lower court decide for itself what counted as lewd, he warned, would leave a citizen “no certain or understandable rule and no uniform standard of conduct” to know what the law asked of him.
Christine asked for a rehearing. She got it, and on February 15, 1960, Fournet’s dissent became the majority. A criminal law, the chief justice wrote, must define its offense so plainly “that any reader having ordinary intelligence will know” whether his conduct breaks it. Louisiana’s obscenity statute did not, and the court struck it down.
A stripper had made the State of Louisiana admit, in writing, that its obscenity law could not say what it forbade.
Dowling took it hard. The justices, he complained, had “put the stamp of approval on Bourbon Street,” and every pending case went “out the window with the obscenity law.”
For years the newspapers had treated the women on those stages as scenery, interchangeable and nameless. Lilly Christine, who had been to the Patent Office before she ever rode in Grosch’s wagon, had shown they could fight the state and win.
The morning after the ruling, the police superintendent promised to keep the dancers in line with city ordinances instead. The Times-Picayune answered with a cartoon: an officer holding a book marked “City Anti-Obscenity Ordinances,” reaching to cover a dancer who has just peeled off another marked “Defective State Anti-Obscenity Laws.”
The caption asked the only question left on Bourbon Street.
Can she strip this off too?