Commit A Crime #2

“I start hitchhiking, guy picks me up, he’s drunk.”  Although there were beer cans all over the floor of the truck, Georgette was desperate to get to her brother, and got in.

Seeing Georgette was in a hurry, the driver told her he knew a shortcut that would shave forty miles off the trip. “Like an idiot, I believed him.” He pulled off into the woods and tried to force himself on her. Georgette was intent on leaving the vehicle, but not without her dresses and turtle. When she tried to retrieve them, he forced her head in his crotch. “I’m fightin’ like a sumbitch. I reached in the back, grabbed a big box flashlight and whacked him in the fuckin’ head.” His cranium connected with the steering wheel. She took off. “I grabbed the damn wardrobe and the damn turtle and run through the woods. I hid for I don’t know how many damn hours.”

Georgette eventually made it to the highway, where a nightclub-owning couple picked her up and drove her to Houston – and to her brother, who would survive his burns. As she left the hospital, she turned on the radio. “They had found the trucker, his head had been bashed in. So I had killed the guy, beat him to death with a box flashlight.”

Thanks for the Memories

To sort out Georgette’s chronology between the age of 16 and 17 is damn near impossible. Here, there and everywhere, she was a human tornado. And the wind was beginning to blow. A trip to Kansas City landed her a real booking agent, Chet Stamps, who helped score her some wheels so she could travel solo. She built up her wardrobe. The “novelty act” was paying off. Better clubs, more moolah. She hit Los Angeles, playing the Pink Pussycat. “I made my rounds real quick, it didn’t take long for me to get goin’.” She started meeting celebrities, among them Joey Bishop, who remained a life-long friend. “I’d ride around with him in an old-time Rolls Royce. I used to be real good at fixin’ him up with girls. I never would date him.” (In Georgette’s collection there’s a postcard of Joey Bishop, and on the back he’s written to her, “Don’t you love me no more?” Said Dante friend Perfecto Mangual, “He was always tryin’ to get in her pants.”)

By this time she already knew Bob Hope. A voice-over artist friend of his saw her at a nightclub in Shreveport, Louisiana and asked if she wanted to meet the comedian. “I always loved Bob Hope, even as a child growin’ up.” Off they went to a swanky restaurant complete with waterfall. “I had a mink hat on, a mink coat – honey, I looked good. I didn’t look like an entertainer, I looked like somebody.” Amusingly, Georgette’s friend introduced her as a jewelry salesperson, and she showed Bob one of her treasures – a small silver keychain called a Dicky Bird, which was “a tiny little dick and balls, with little wings.” Hope took a look at it and cracked, “Hell, I modeled for that in ’47.”

The gang reconvened in Hope’s nearby suite. Georgette, who carried her costumes, torches and record player with her, decided to put on a show for Bob and his friends. “I did my acrobatics and my fire eating right there in his suite. Bob said, ‘I can’t believe you’re that strong.’” To prove it, she arm-wrestled Hope’s masseur, Freddie. “Boop! He went down.” Then Bob took her on. “Same thing. Boop! He went down.”

The guests soon departed – leaving Bob and Georgette alone. “We decided we’d go back to the room. Well, I’m covered in soot from the fire. I told him I want a bath. He sat in there on his hands and knees, fillin’ the bathtub, putting bubbles in it, whooshing it around.  He washed my back, didn’t touch me nowhere else.”

They returned to the bedroom. Georgette was 16, Bob 61. (Not that she told Bob her age until a year or two later in Los Angeles. Hope’s response: “Oh, my goodness – do you know how much trouble I could’ve been in?”) “I don’t want to put Bob Hope down at all – he had a fabulous wife who was a fantastic singer, just beautiful – but when he was on the road, he had to have sex, OK?”

Hope would be the first of Georgette’s senior boyfriends. “When I was dating, I’d date people 60, 70 years old, because I enjoyed their company. Sex, to me that was nothing. I enjoy people and conversations, I don’t care about how big somebody’s dick is. I prefer to be around older people. They’ve stopped playing games…some of them.”

Not that Bob didn’t try to play one as she left. “He’s walkin’ me to the elevator, and he tried to give me a hundred-dollar bill. Well, it pissed me off. I was highly insulted. I had $3700 in my pocket. I pushed it back. He still wanted to give me that fuckin’ hundred dollars – I said no. I told him, ‘I’ll tell you what I want—I want your address. And your phone number.” (Later she turned down a diamond watch. “In those days I had diamonds on all my fingers because I bought ’em from Jack Stein, a professional carnival thief, so I didn’t need diamonds anyway. Bob couldn’t believe I sent it back.”)

Hope gave her his contact info, and they remained friends until the day he died. “He never had anybody to talk to. We talked once or twice a week for years.”

And the one time Georgette needed help, Hope was there. When her brother Bruce was in another bad carnival accident in Florida and she was in the middle of Illinois unable to get a flight out, Bob sent a plane to get her there. He made sure Bruce got a private room and had the mayor of Fort Walton Beach stop by and check on his care. The nurse told Bruce, “You’re a very lucky boy.” “Why,” he asked. “To have a friend like Bob Hope.” “Oh, you found my sister,” muttered a blasé Bruce.

Back to the Carnival

At age 17, Georgette returned to working her parents’ carnival, and she’d continue to do so every summer. Delilah was the one who’d reach out. “We had the same talent agency, so she could always find me. She was always cryin’ the blues – ‘We got no girls, we need help.’ I kept goin’ back, like an idiot.” Plus, she found out her stepfather was taking her absence out on her brother. “He started beatin’ the hell out of him – ‘Whatsa matter, your sister could do all that work!’” But it was simply inevitable that Georgette would return. “I loved the carnival more than I did nightclubs – all the strippers were into stupid shit, like jerkin’ people off and finger-fuckin’.”

That year Georgette married an Italian immigrant named Dave Conedera, “one of the best gamblers in the business, a big shot. He got a brand new Cadillac every year.” Conedara was insanely jealous, and they fought like cats and dogs. One day Georgette was chasing down a wardrobe thief who was climbing a fence to get away when Dave shot at her twice, and she can’t even remember why.

“I left Dave six times in four weeks,” she says. Things came to a head one night at a motel where they were staying. Conedera had accused her of looking at another man in a restaurant, and when they got back to their room he couldn’t find the key, so he “kicked the fuckin’ door down. The motel owner called the police, and he gave the motel guy money for a new door. Dave always had a pocketful of cash – see, carnival people love to carry big wads of money. It might be all one-dollar bills with a hundred around it, but carnival people love to signify.”

Things only got worse once the motel owner left, the argument escalating until Dave tried to jab her in the neck with a pencil, shouting, “Go back to your cunt-suckin’ mother! Let her teach you how to suck some more cunts!” That was it for Georgette. “He was holdin’ me down with my hair, tryin’ to jab me with that damn pencil. I grabbed my pocketbook, dumped everything out, grabbed my brass knuckles, put ’em on and proceeded to beat the fuck out of him. I broke his nose, his jaw, four ribs and his ring finger – I wanted that fuckin’ ring off.”

The couple split for good, but somehow managed to remain lifelong friends. Dave even thanked her for the beating years later. “That finger had healed crooked,” she said with a laugh, “and he said it made him a lot of money.” Working the carnival flat store, he’d wag his finger at the marks and try and engage them enough to come in the tent. “Normally when he’d call people, they’d say, ‘Go fuck yourself,’ but now they thought he was crippled, felt sorry for him and came in to look at the game.” The edge he had wasn’t lost on his fellow carny gamblers. “They all started doin’ their hands crooked…like they had four disabled guys in the fuckin’ joint!”

Behind Closed Doors

“I tried everything in the goddamn world,” says Dante of her private life. “People asked, ‘Georgette, are you bisexual?’ I’m trisexual – I’ll try anything once.” [I don’t think she got that line by way of Andy Milligan’s Torture Dungeon, in case you’re wondering.] Experimentation with women lasted about a minute. “I only had sex with a woman once, almost two times. The first time I did it for money. It was a black girl. She used to dance on glass, glass dancer. She had a real good show.” The two of them were sharing an apartment behind the club.

“She’d be turning tricks in the house in the back…she kept tryin’ to get in my pants, over and over again. I wasn’t into sex, period.” The woman kept offering her money, and when the price hit $500, Georgette said yes. “I told her, ‘Go ahead, but don’t go up past my belly button.’ I didn’t want her kissin’ my titties or my face. Y’know – just do your thing, whatever.” When Georgette ran into her at another club, it happened again – a rare occasion when Dante wound up soused. “I passed out on her. She took a cab and went home.”

One other dancer tried to plant a kiss on her in a dressing room after Georgette gave her a pair of earrings. “She went for it – tongue and every fuckin’ thing. I backhanded her, and when I did, she hit the pipes. It broke her nose and messed her jaw up. It messed her up for a few weeks, so I gave her a little money.”

Dante has known some rather unusual men. Every time I talk to her some crazy name comes up. She went out with Freddie Prinze shortly before his death (he committed suicide the day after Georgette’s birthday in 1977) and met actor Michael ‘Little Joe Cartwright’ Landon when she was still a teenager. “I dated him. Didn’t have sex with him until years later.” Another brief encounter? White R&B belter Wayne Cochran.

Georgette was actually engaged to Al Lewis, famous for playing Grandpa on The Munsters. An incredible character who smoked cigars, supported many a liberal cause and routinely embellished his biography, Lewis had also gotten his start in the carnival and was plain crazy for Georgette. She even talked him into joining a carnival she organized herself and took on the road around 1980. Carny bigshot Gerry Murphy recalls running into them somewhere in North Dakota, “Here come Georgette and Grandpa Munster down the midway…he was following her like a puppy dog.”

Although Lewis loved carny life – Georgette has countless snapshots of him sitting around beaming, dancers plopped in his lap – he was the world’s laziest MC. “I needed someone to be out there in front to get the people all wound up while the show’s goin’ on. Al was supposed to be doin’ all that, but he got so hung up goin’ to the cookhouse talking to the damn carnies. He just didn’t give a fuck, the dirty bastard. He’d piss me off.”

Georgette had a Big Apple address for a spell, and she’d take Lewis to visit mobsters they both knew. Or they’d go to the Bronx Zoo, where he’d give her acting lessons. “He’d say, ‘Georgette, watch the animals, see how they walk. Copy that duck’s walk…that’s how you become an actor, by pickin’ up on little moves like that.’ Now when I see movies and somebody doin’ a little silly walk I say, ‘A – ha, you’ve been to the zoo.” (Believe it or not Georgette was also engaged to Pat Buttram, best known as Mr. Haney on Green Acres.)

Although they’ve never been romantically involved, Dante has been pals with Chubby Checker for over fifty years. She met him as a teenager playing state fairs and since that time Chubby’s stayed in touch, inviting her to shows and even dragged her onstage to do his signature twist. Talk to those who know Georgette and they’ve all met Chubby. Toni Turcketta, who worked as an assistant for Georgette in the late seventies, remembers the two of them staying at a motel “in a little town in the middle of nowhere. A bus pulled up and Chubby Checker and all his crew poured out.”

Dante’s Vegas magician pal Gary Darwin tried to date her decades ago. When he took her to meet his mother, Georgette stopped to urinate in the bushes on the way. “Mom thought that was very cute,” maintained Darwin. When they got back in the car Gary joked, “Motel or dinner?” Georgette didn’t see the humor. “We came to a stoplight, she ran out of the car and I didn’t see her for about twenty years. I was gonna take her to a restaurant and feed her!” [Much later Gary and Georgette rekindled their friendship and she visited him frequently in the hospital before he died.]

Georgette hasn’t dated in over forty years. Too many abusive relationships. “I gave it up in ’77. No more sex, no more fuckin’ idiots. People are people, that’s why I don’t date. It’s after the fuck when you really get fucked, mentally and physically.”

What has she learned about the sexes? “In general, men hate women. And if I’d been a man, I’d be a queer. I don’t like women. They’re dangerous, they’re sneaky. One second it’s, ‘Oh, I’m your best friend in the world’ and then they’re fuckin’ out to get you, understand?

“I got a vibrator named Hummer, and me and Hummer does just fine. I see somethin’ that looks good, I go get Hummer – ‘C’mon, Hummer, get my mind off this.’ No more mistakes for me.”

Twitchin’ and Twatchin’ With The Ormonds

Made by the Ormond Organization, The Exotic Ones is one of those strange question marks in exploitation film history. The first family of low-budget filmmaking in Music City USA, the Ormonds consisted of Ron, who produced, wrote and directed their modest exploitation epics; wife June, who distributed them, and son Tim, who learned the ropes of filmmaking as he grew up. All three appear in their films – in The Exotic Ones, young Tim even sings a sappy pop song (“Well, The Hurt Goes On (And On)” [title approximate]) to the monster, although he’s had this embarrassment snipped out of existing prints.

The Ormonds’ previous work had been mild drive-in fare, so 1968’s The Exotic Ones came as a bit of a shock (even to themselves – all their subsequent films would be made in service to the Lord). The story is pedestrian – monster is caught, monster is shown to public, monster breaks free – but there’s gold in the many peculiar and often pointless digressions it takes. It’s a stupefying and colorful collision of Russ Meyer-as-imagined-by-Nashville, vaudeville, gore and Laugh-In, starring the Ormonds and their ragtag regulars thrown together with bemused Nashville musicians not known for their acting resumes. And the most fascinating thing about the movie is Georgette Dante.

As Titania the exotic dancer, she overtakes the picture. Her first appearance comes at the tail end of the opening credits. “SWAMP MONSTER STRIKES AGAIN – CLAIMS ANOTHER VICTIM,” shouts a newspaper headline. The paper lowers and a gyrating Georgette comes into focus. She’s bathed in purplish-pink light, swirling fire tassels off her pasties (intercut with reactions from the crackpot cast – including Ron Ormond himself playing a gangster and sporting a bad Beatle wig, moustache and shades while puffing a fat cigar). Dante kicks off her heels, peels back her long black gloves, then charges around the stage barefoot as she does acrobatics and splits, tossing a chair around with one hand and drinking out of a glass while going from a backbend into a headstand. She shows off that body – sturdy, not curvy, and strong, like a tough little Eskimo. The point is not sexiness, but knocking you dead with showbiz moves and physical derring-do. Georgette is the hardest-working James Brown of exotics.

This is the only known footage from Dante’s early years, but it’s more than enough. Everything about her appearance is outrageous. The massive, light blue/black/white eyeshadow which runs all the way to her hairline, the bindi diamond on her forehead, the jet-black pile of hair in an angled bun on her head – she resembles some ancient Egyptian concubine who’s taken a wrong turn and wound up in Alabama. Both Divine and Amy Winehouse owed her big time because Georgette got there first. I look at her and hear Alan Vega belting out “Jukebox Babe,” The Sonics blasting “The Witch,” The Jiants tearing through “Tornado.”

Then there’s the attitude – scowling, scrappy, ready to fight. She’s tightly coiled, ready to burst into a karate chop or backflip at any given moment, the whole persona screaming ‘bad girl.’  “I was afraid of her,” admitted fellow cast member Diane Jordan, who appeared as one of the backstage dancers. Had Georgette known of her fear, it wouldn’t have fazed her a bit. “To be honest with you, when I was doin’ the movie I didn’t socialize with any of the girls. My mind was totally on what was goin’ on.” It was another one of her old rules: carny people keep to themselves and don’t pal around.

By the time she made The Exotic Ones, Dante was familiar with the denizens of Music City USA. “I knew Roger Miller, Hank Thompson…Ray Price I dated on and off for years.” That happened when Georgette was playing at Skull’s Rainbow Room. “We’d go over to the motel and fuck. Horny motherfucker, too. He’d jump from one room to another, he knew all the broads. Fuckin’ me just wasn’t enough.” According to Dante, various country stars visited The Exotic Ones set, amongst them Porter Wagoner and Conway Twitty – the latter of whom posed as he stood on Georgette’s stomach. “I had a picture…but somebody stole it.”

Georgette actually met the Ormonds not in Nashville, but Atlanta. “I was performing at the Nitery Club and the waitress come back to me and I thought she said, ‘Georgette, do you want to be in a whore movie?’ ‘A whore movie?!? I don’t wanna do no damn X-rated movie.’ Turns out she said ‘horror movie.’” Georgette went out and met the ones inquiring – Ron Ormond and his buddy Ed Moates, who would appear/invest in The Exotic Ones. Ormond had originally planned to use Georgette in a smaller role, but there was just no containing her.

Serious as death when it came to show business, Dante found the script a challenge. “In those days I could hardly read or write at all, so I had to have somebody read me the script.” She not only memorized her dialogue – but everybody else’s. “Ron would look at me constantly and say, ‘Georgette, just get up here and tell this actor what his line is!’” Georgette did a lot of the dancers’ makeup as well. “The makeup person didn’t know the burlesque way of doin’ things.”

Georgette’s carny background provided further inspiration. As mentioned, Ormond incorporated some of her stepfather Bob’s carnival banter in both the film and the trailer – “She’ll twitch it/And twatch it/And stand there and let you watch it” –  and after Ron heard her tales of being a geek, fowl decapitation was added to the monster’s act.

For Diane Jordan, geek day was an indelible nightmare. “A farmer came in and brought three chickens in cages and somebody said, ‘After we break for dinner, we’re gonna shoot a scene with the monster ripping up this chicken.’ It was mortifying.” Diane contemplated setting the chickens free but thought to herself, “‘They’ll get so mad I won’t get my $200.’ I agonized over that. That poor chicken didn’t have a chance!” Jordan was further dismayed when Georgette informed her that after the real geek act in the carnival, “they would eat the chicken afterward. They never wasted it!”

Outfitted in a black fright wig, plastic fangs and loincloth, rockabilly singer Sleepy LaBeef plays The Exotic Ones monster, and it’s a rather geek-like performance – a lot of wigshaking, mumbling and crazyface. Georgette tried to show Sleepy her old blade-palming carnival trick, but it didn’t take. “I handed him the razor blade and he couldn’t do it. I ran out there, grabbed the blade, cut the chicken’s throat and put it up to his face.”

Adding to the difficulties, LaBeef was standing on a stack of crates to make the creature’s stature more threatening. “He was literally fallin’ off the damn crates goin’, ‘OwwwwrrrrWaaaarreee’ while he was tryin’ to hold the damn teeth in. In the movie it looks like he was growling and making noises, but he wasn’t – he was getting sick. That’s why he’s makin’ all those damn faces.  I was squeezing the chicken, trying to follow the scene through, and Sleepy was giving me the worst looks. I grabbed the damn razor blade for the last time and opened all the guts, ripped the chicken open. Sleepy lost it – and his teeth. He threw up in the cage.” (Years after The Exotic Ones Georgette had a little dalliance with LaBeef. “I run across him at a motel. I was in the swimming pool I looked up and saw him outside a room. I hollered, ‘Sleepy!!!’ I wound up havin’ sex with him. I don’t know why, but I did.”)

There are fabulous scenes of the dancers gathered in the dressing room, June Ormond playing their mother hen. A catfight breaks out between Dante and another girl, and as the others gather around, Georgette looks like she’s playing for keeps, ready to pound the skull in of any challenger. “I could hear Gordon Terry and Ed Moates hollerin’, ‘Pull her bra off!’ If you watch the movie, you can see where I reach up and grab her bra. I whipped it right off her and kept on with the fight.”

On one occasion Georgette clashed with the director himself. She laughed recalling what happened. “I almost killed his ass, I was so goddamn mad at him.” She had managed to hit the lines right for all her dialogue, but this time she was up to the third or fourth take, which presented a challenge to the budget. “I was messing up. They had changed one of my lines – ‘I paid for that dress with a pound of flesh’ – because they decided to use a damn blouse. It threw me off because they didn’t tell me and Ron was hollerin’ to say ‘this blouse’ instead of ‘this dress.’

“I wasn’t getting it, so he run up and slapped me right in the face. That’s not a good thing to do to someone who lifts 400 pounds and drives semi trucks. I didn’t react – and luckily I didn’t go beat the fuck out of him. He overreacted. You don’t slap a carnival person. I had tears in my eyes I was so furious.” Realizing his mistake, Ormond immediately “ran backwards away from the camera, over to the corner and started throwing kisses at me. If he hadn’t backed up as quickly as he had, I would’ve gone after him.”

Georgette provided her own brand of excitement on the set. “Georgette always wanted to wrestle,” said Ed Moates. “She’d hit you on the arm and it was like being hit by a truck.” The Exotic Ones was shot at Trafco Studio, which was run by a local Methodist church. As Moates recalled, “We’re in Trafco and Ron says, ‘Georgette, go lift Sleepy LaBeef up.’” Sleepy was a sturdy 6’ 5” and a bit of a challenge, even for Dante.

“She had to walk up, put her belly to his side, put her arms around him and lean back to get Sleepy off the ground. I just happened to be standing by three or four nicely dressed Methodist ladies. And Georgette didn’t have any panties on! You can imagine what that looked like, with her rearing back and lifting Sleepy. June Ormond was walking by at that moment, did a double take and said, ‘Georgette! Go get your panties on!’ Georgette said, ‘June, I would, but somebody stole them two days ago!’”

Co-star Gordon Terry was a well-known fiddler and guitarist who’d been in Merle Haggard’s band. “I knew him years before we did the movie together, ‘cause I met him in nightclubs,” said Georgette. Terry was smitten with her. “He was in love,” muttered Dante, instructing me on how utterly unimportant this was. “Even though we had sex, that was nothing to me. Because I’m very, very dedicated to show business.” They were hanging out in Georgette’s motel when Terry had to use the facilities. Little did he know her snake had gotten into the toilet. “Gordon went in there, sat down, and the damn snake came up the hole…they have a tendency to do that. He whooped and hollered and he run outta that damn bathroom. He fell over his pants running outside, sayin’, ‘You comin’ or not?? I’m outta here!!!’”

Georgette joined the Ormonds for a promotional tour of movie theaters when The Exotic Ones came out. Ed Moates recalled the memorable first stop in Kentucky. “Georgette had fire on her toe, then lit the mayor of Knoxville’s cigar.”

Delilah came along on the tour as well. The stars were entertaining the crowd from atop the concession stand at one drive-in when chaos erupted. Georgette, in a cape doing her fire show, looked down to see some local groping her mother. “Georgette literally dove off the concession stand roof, ready to do battle,” said Tim Ormond. Dante continues the tale. “I flew off the roof like Batman, backhanded the guy, knocked him down, grabbed my mother, shoved her back towards the candy counter and she climbed up on the roof with us.”

Georgette never really appeared in another movie outside of bit parts (she can be seen performing briefly at the end of the 1972 obscurity Miss Melody Jones) and it’s a pity. Like Tura Satana in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Georgette was too big for the screen, too ahead of her time. We can all be thankful she was immortalized in The Exotic Ones, which she looks back on with fondness. “Oh hell, yeah. That was a really good time for me. I’m not used to teamwork outside the carnival. Ordinary people don’t seem to do that. The Ormonds were just like carnival people. Workaholics that stuck together at all times.” She remained friends with the family, particularly with the one surviving member Tim. She even fixed him up with a few dates.

“I consider Tim a brother. Honey, he’s a beautiful person, and he was very dedicated to his mother and father.”

Star Time

From the late 60s to the early 80s, Georgette was on a roll, crisscrossing America playing clubs, state fairs, and carnivals and clocking thousands of miles on her car –  a Pontiac Bonneville Brougham she’d replace every year. “My salary was $3500 a week in clubs. I spent $1200 on new gowns, and I had nine, with beautiful headpieces.” Sexy costumes struggled to contain the Amazon within. She’d drag men up onstage and have them stand on her stomach two at a time (she tried upping the ante to three, but “once was enough”).

Carnival owner Gerry Murphy recalls introducing her to a friend at the Independent Showmen’s Convention in Gibsonton, Florida. “He was a big guy who thought he was pretty tough with his muscular arms. I said, ‘See this lady here? She could throw you across the room.’ He laughed. Well, she grabs ahold of this guy with one hand and lifts him into the air. One hand! He practically crapped his pants. She sets him down real gentle and I said, ‘Well Mike, whaddya think of that?’ He couldn’t talk. Couldn’t talk!”

“She was one of the best showgirls I’ve ever seen,” said Ronnie ‘Leroy’ Evans, a keyboard player who’d work (and live) with Georgette for years. “People would think she was just a regular stripper – next thing you know she’s in the audience pickpocketin’ and takin’ off a person’s rings, watches and belts. She would blow people’s minds.” His brother Roger recounted how Georgette would get the fire tassels on her breasts going “and light some guy’s cigarette in the audience.” Roger became part of the act. “I’d stand there with a cigarette and she pop that cig out of my mouth.” (Chemicals fortified his courage: “We only did that one when we had some good smoke.”)

Both brothers were members of the Slaphappy Band, a funky outfit that opened for Georgette. “We were the only Southern rock band with a big following and a tour bus that never had a record out,” said guitar player Dennis ‘Face’ Wiley. “We could go from ‘Dixie Chicken’ to Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller.’”

Commit a Crime

They travelled together, sharing motel rooms, and it wasn’t unusual for Georgette to be waltzing around naked with doves on her fingers. “Clothes were nothing to her,” said her friend Donna Smith. “She was more like their buddy.” A lot of weed was smoked, which could make mile-a-minute talker Georgette even more of a handful. “She’d get too far out there, man,” said Dennis Wiley. “She could always get away from us, but we couldn’t get away from her. I’ve shut the door on her a couple of times – with her still talkin’!” Dante laughs at the memory. “We didn’t worry about who did whatever. We were a team, and double damn cool.”

Georgette Dante and Slaphappy graced the stage of many a crazy joint. “We used to play for the Dixie mafia on the Gulf Coast,” said Dennis Wiley. “They owned all these little gambling bars. We had the most fun in them places, because they paid us phenomenally—sometimes we’d go to work and the boss would stick a hundred-dollar bill in everybody’s pocket and say, ‘You guys take the night off.’ They’d be all these judges, lawyers and bigwigs from Mobile gambling. One night we were playin’ in this place called the Silver Slipper, a little bitty shack. The stage was so small and I’m kinda tall, so the club owner had ’em cut a hole in the stage with a chainsaw so I could wear my cowboy hat. The owner said I didn’t look right without it.”

Gangsters loved Dante. “Georgette fit right in with all of them,” said Wiley. “She had connections. She wasn’t no ho and she couldn’t be bought – I always had alotta respect for that. Now, if she wanted to sleep with ya, you’d be the first one to know.” And carny people were always showing up on the road to greet her. “I had the lobster man and bearded lady in the audience!” said Wiley.

Nobody had to look out for her on the road, either. “She was strong as an ox,” said Roger Evans. One night in Buffalo, New York “some guy tried to mess with her and she knocked most of his teeth out,” he said, laughing. “She was bad to the bone.” Georgette’s assistant Toni Turcketta watched her nearly take out a stalker. “Somebody started following us from a club one night and she was drivin’. She had her piece under her leg as she was shiftin’ gears and all of a sudden she slammed on the brakes, parked, got in position and – BOOM – blew out their fucking tire!”

Georgette was fiercely protective of her friends. Living at an Odessa, Texas motel, she became close with owner Faye Waddell. “I had minor altercations with people who didn’t pay their rent,” recalled Waddell. “I’d just go take care of business, go down there and beat on their door with a pickhandle until they paid the money. I turned around one time and Georgette was just standin’ there, backin’ me up. Didn’t have to ask her, she had radar tuned in. She said she could just tell when she glanced up and saw the way I walked by the door. Georgette didn’t take no bull from nobody, and she was so strong she could damn well pick up a horse.”

Animal Crackers

Georgette’s been a great lover of animals for as long as she can remember. “We had an animal show in the carnival – a crocodile, a bobcat, a raccoon and a couple of skunks. I’d feed ’em, take care of ’em.” She’s picked many a wounded animal off the highway to nurse it back to health – hawks, possums, rabbits, dogs, cats. “I’d take ’em to the motel, put ’em in the bathtub, clean ’em up and start workin’ with ’em. But if the animal was too far gone, I’d stop and just drive over it and keep goin’. No way in the world I’d let it lay there for days suffering. I feel the same way about people. When a child is born crippled, there’s no way carnival people can take care of those kids…the gypsies would just drown them.”

Working the carnival, she’d become particularly fond of the snakes, feeling she could communicate with them psychically. In the slow winter season, they’d have to let the reptiles go. One year Georgette made her way down to a nearby creek to do just that, but when she opened the gunny sack,  “They started crawlin’ around my ankles.” And when she started up the embankment,  “They were literally followin’ me back up the hill…I’m not scared of ’em. They sense that.”

Around 1964, Georgette had herself buried in a van filled with 102 rattlesnakes as a publicity stunt. There was a built-in scope so the good people of Coushatta, Louisiana could peek at the action. The snakes were in a big wooden cage. “I laid in front of it naked for days at a time so I could smoke marijuana and look at them. They got used to seein’ me. I had a good air conditioner in there so it kept the snakes cool. If they were a little hot, they’d get moody and want to bite. Every so often I’d take one out and blow smoke in his face. After a while they mellowed out…they were happy, I was happy. I’d put a little lipstick on them so I’d know which one they were. I was under there 5 days – supposed to be 7, but it rained out.”

Years later (1981 or so) in Odessa, Texas, Georgette wrestled an alligator, one she caught herself. She’d originally gone into the swamp with three burly guys (one a professional boxer), but they’d all chickened out. “They wanted out of the boat – ‘No fuckin’ way!’” Georgette went back alone that night. “I managed to get the first alligator with a loop around his neck, but he was too damn small, I let him go.” The next one was “bigger than the boat. I let him go.” Finally she nabbed a six-footer with star potential, but he suffered from stage fright. “As soon as the damn spotlight hit him, he did nothin’. Hardly moved! I still got a page write-up out of it.”

Ronnie Evans recalled being in a motel room with some musicians he knew. “Georgette had a money bag settin’ on there. One of my friends sitting on the bed said, ‘Hey, you got money in that bag?’ She said, ‘No, let me show you something.’ She opened it up and out came one of those boa constrictors. My friend must’ve jumped up about six feet!” Then there were the birds. “She kept them doves in the bathroom,” said Roger Evans. “Ronnie walked in, they were flyin’ around, crappin’ everywhere. He told her, ‘You gotta get rid o’ them damn birds!!!’”

Everybody has a Georgette animal story. She once conned Donna Smith into going to a snake farm, even though her friend was terrified. “She said, ‘Donna, I promise, I won’t get no snake.’ We got down the road about twenty miles and she pulled a snake out of the sleeve of her blouse! I’d like to have tore that car up. She put it in the glove box – and it got out. I was cryin” about that snake. Georgette pulled over, she was laughin’ so hard. We never could find that snake.”

Then there were the arachnids. Dennis Wiley remembers Georgette parking her bag on the table of a Mobile gambling joint they were playing. “I noticed some girl put her hand in the purse, and all of the sudden she screamed. This big tarantula come crawling outta the purse and landed on the table. This woman like to have shit her pants. Georgette just laughed. I looked at the spider and noticed it only had seven legs. I asked her how come. ‘Oh, Face, it tried to bite me when I first got it. We’re good friends now, though.’ That was the goddamnedest thing. I sat there with my mouth open. Georgette could stare down lions and tigers. And drunks.”

Special thanks to Charlie Beesley and Natalia Wisdom.

Jimmy McDonough is a biographer and journalist. He has written acclaimed biographies of Neil Young, Tammy Wynette, Russ Meyer, Al Green and Andy Milligan. Time magazine declared his Milligan biography The Ghastly One “a masterpiece” and John Waters has repeatedly named it one of his all-time favorites. McDonough has also authored definitive profiles on Jimmy Scott, Gary Stewart, Hubert Selby, Jr. and Link Wray. His most recent work is The Exotic Ones: That Fabulous Film-Making Family from Music City, USA -The Ormonds.