Sin-Sational

There was once a much more innocent time when double-entendres passed for naughtiness and bawdiness. And one person who took advantage of that was Rusty Warren.

A whole industry sprouted up in the 1950s around “blue” comedy records. They were made by nightclub performers whose material didn’t consist of jokes about a-dime-for-a-cup-of-coffee and Bing Crosby’s horse. Their subjects included s-e-x. You’d never hear them on the radio.

Warren was the queen of these kinds of acts, as far as I’m concerned. I saw her perform almost four decades ago in a small lounge. Considering how acts fill the air today with four-letter words and crudeness, her suggestive humour seems pretty tame and hokey now. But she was clearly enjoying herself on stage and audiences were laughing just like they did in the ‘50s because she was saying stuff you clearly don’t discuss in polite society.

Despite being in the underbrush of popular culture, Rusty made the entertainment pages every once in a while. Let’s dig out a couple. First, a feature story from September 1, 1961. The comedy album industry was still a busy one at the time.

Singer Rusty Warren Has No Fear About Making Big Time
By DICK KLEINER
Rusty Warren has a hunch she'll never be one of the biggest stars in the entertainment world but she doesn’t care. She has her apartment houses, supermarkets and assorted investments to keep her warm.
Miss Warren's chosen field is risque comedy. Obviously, doing her songs and comedy material on TV is out. And, equally obviously, a gal can’t become one of the great stars without TV.
But she is a highly successful night club performer. And her Jubilee albums sell in the millions. She also has something which she cherishes — reasonable anonymity.
All this makes her a happy girl — a career she enjoys, so much money that she doesn’t even know what investments her business manager has made for her and the privilege of walking around the streets without being mobbed.
Rusty sort of drifted into her particular area of entertainment. She’s a Massachusetts girl who started out to be a pianist but she wasn't dedicated enough to pursue the classics beyond one appearance with Arthur Fiedler in Boston. So she made for the cocktail lounges, where she played tinkly music and bantered with the customers. The banter gradually grew into an act.
Her material isn’t really blue—you might call it baby blue—and she’s proud of the fact that it isn't abnormal or sick. She thinks it’s all very healthy, and her opinion is shared by many. Among them, she says, are "famous names that would surprise you.”
She explains the current success of risque records as a byproduct of the move to suburbia.
"I just say what everybody thinks,” she says. "In today’s suburban living, a couple moves into a new house and they buy a bed, a stove and a hi-fi in that order. To break the ice with their new neighbors, they play party records. It starts conversations.”
Miss Warren, a tall, beautiful girl with the red hair you would expect from her nickname, has no great ambitions, beyond doing what she’s doing better.
"I don’t want to act,” she says, although Rusty Warren really is a part I’m playing. That’s the only acting ambition I have—to play Rusty Warren well.”

The world changed over the ‘60s. Young people rejected the sexual hang-ups of their parents that had been fuelled by media censorship. “Free love!” was the cry. The Gay Liberation movement burst out, demanded to be treated seriously. Simple plays-on-words about someone’s naughty parts became quaint and a little old-fashioned. But it didn’t appear to hurt Rusty Warren. Young people didn’t reject her. In a way, she was on their side. She punctured their parents’ taboos by having fun with them.

Here’s an article from August 28, 1975.

Blue Songs But No Blues
By Joe Pollack
Of the Post-Dispatch Staff
Perhaps it was a giant step when Eileen Goldman, piano student at the New England Conservatory of Music, became Rusty Warren, brassy piano player and singer of so-called suggestive songs, but it's going to be a real leap for Rusty Warren to become Mama Red, stand-up comic on current topics at rock clubs.
"The kids call me that," she said exuberantly of her new appellation, "and I love it. The rock club scene, the kids scene, is a whole new trip for me as a performer. Even though I'm a lot older than they are, we really seem to come through on the same wave length. They're exciting, and they're with it."
Miss Warren smiled softly and ran a hand through her close-cropped hair. It's more tawny, more blonde than rusty, and she has blue-green eyes that sparkle with a touch of mischief. She wore a denim suit over a T-shirt that advertised her most famous record, and she glowered only half in jest at the Playboy Club bunnies who served her lunch. She'll be appearing at the club through Saturday.
"Yes," she said, "and being jealous of these well-stacked girls.
"It's funny," she went on, musingly, "I was the far-out one, the sexually liberated one, to their parents. Now it's come full circle, and they're talking about things that make me realize I'm more inhibited than they are.
"Not much," she continued with a laugh, "but some."
There are many situations these days when a mention of Rusty Warren's name brings a reaction of "Is she still alive?" followed by, "Gee, I used to have some of her records. I wonder what ever happened to them?"
What probably happened is that the kids found them, played them and realized that dear old Dad and good old Mom had known about sex, and had told jokes about it and listened to other people tell jokes about it.

Deep in the recesses of my own collection is a copy of "Knockers Up," the 1961 album that made her famous. It was right next to a couple of albums by Ruth Wallis, who had preceded and influenced Miss Warren in the piano-bar genre of off-color songs.
Playing them, and listening to them, makes one realize exactly how much change there has been in American society and thinking in the last generation. Both Miss Wallis and Miss Warren deal with sex, but the allusions are so masked, so cloaked in double-entendre, that only a true Puritan could look so deeply as to see "sex" or "smut." Of course, a wise man once said that only the true Puritan can really enjoy the fall from grace, so perhaps that's what made Miss Warren's albums popular enough to sell some seven million copies, and for her night club work to provide her with the wherewithal for homes in Michigan, Arizona and California.
She's 45 years old, into astrology, vegetarianism and tennis, as well as sex and entertaining, and comes on very strong. There's a softness beneath the veneer, but it doesn't peep through very often. Mostly it's the tough-talking, very aware, very "with-it" woman who is on stage almost all the time, and obviously would rather keep the private Rusty Warren separated from the public one.
There are traces of her background that do show up from time to time. Her "Yeah," is a perfect New York, and she travels in the same type of "cah" that Bostonians use all the time.
"I was born in New York, but I didn't live there very long," she said. "I was adopted by a couple from Boston when I was just a baby, and I really grew up there."
The fact that the orphanage did not record the time of day on which she was born is a bother to her in terms of getting a reliable astrological chart, but "it said I was Jewish, legitimate and from parents with a musical background."
Even allowing for all these things, how did Eileen Goldman become Rusty Warren?
"Well, there was this guy," she said, and she broke into a wide smile at the repetition of a line that has become a cliche, "and he didn't want to marry me. This being a long time ago, he didn't want to go to bed with me, either. He kept talking about ‘respect’ and things like that.
"So I went out and got a job. I played a lot of piano at hotels and clubs in Boston, and one of the early ones was just off Warren Street, so I took ‘Warren,’ and my hair was a deeper red then than it is now, so ‘Rusty’ kind of followed along.
"As time went by, I added some vocals to the straight playing, and then I began to improvise a little. I'd heard Ruth Wallis with some of her songs— they called 'em 'risque' in those days— like ‘The Cutest Little Dinghy in the Navy,’ and I'd watched her perform and made some notes. I made so many notes that her husband came up to me one day and said, ‘I don't mind you stealing Ruth's material, but the least you can do is give her credit.’ "
In addition to Miss Wallis, the comedienne also pays tribute to singers like Nellie Lutcher and Sophie Tucker, whose style and presentation "really showed me how to put a song across."
Miss Warren's act evolved, as most acts do, from cross-pollination of ideas from an audience, from current events and topical humor.
"I felt sex didn't belong in the closet," she said, "and I still don't. When I work to kids, I deal with them on their level, in their language, and even though I try to do it in a funny way, I get very heavy with them in terms of venereal disease. ‘Learn about health,’ I tell them, and I blame young girls a lot for the almost epidemic proportions the disease now has. They can be the carriers, without even knowing about it."
In recent years, Miss Warren has abandoned the piano for a more stand-up, or sit-down-on-a-bar-stool style, and her current routine includes a three-man band behind her. She works from a stool with a couple of overhead spots and a follow spot, and works closely with her audience. Her performing style these days is similar to comedians like Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, who dealt with contemporary problems, each in his own way.
"I think I'm the only woman who performs in this manner," she said, "but I began to find the piano too limiting. I was always getting up from the piano bench to get closer to the audience, to get some feedback and to deal directly with the people. Finally, I decided to just give it up and let somebody else play it."
Miss Warren's Playboy Club routine, and she plays a number of the clubs around the country, obviously has changed from what she did a generation ago, and also is different from what she does when she plays the rock clubs, with their primarily younger audience.
"I tell the kids that the only way people over 30 are admitted is if they (the kids) bring their parents," she said, "and they love it. I love it, too, if a family is together enough so that two generations can enjoy me.
"My material still is made up of truisms, though. I talk and sing about sex and the sex habits of every day people. You could say that I hold up a mirror for people to look at themselves as they are. Those who laugh the loudest are usually happily married couples or well-adjusted people. Those who grumble, I guess, seem somewhat frustrated."
Whether it comes by deep allusion, or in explicit terms, there's no question but that sex is the subject of the show, proving only that Eileen Goldman, Rusty Warren and Mama Red all have learned one important thing. Sex sells!

Rusty turns 90 this year. She’s still around. She has a web site, and she’s still selling her brand of (can I say it?) s-e-x.