The book “I AM Delilah Jones aka Doris Gohlke: I Lived And Loved As I Pleased,” is, first of all, large. It’s the size of a sheet of normal bond paper, 337 numbered pages and full of photos. If you’re an edentulate reprobate like myself, you probably – and I hate to say this if she’s reading this– you probably took her into the bathroom with you when you were a strapping young lad because she was in damn near every “girlie mag” that was flooding the back racks of the newsstands, when they had newsstands, and she wasn’t bashful. This wasn’t the Hustler age of girlie mags, they weren’t porn, but they WERE forbidden by moms, girlfriends, and – what are they called?…..oh yeah, wives.
I know what you’re saying: “Is there any tang-of-the-poonage in it?” No. “Is there any cock?” No. It’s not a porn book. She isn’t a porn star. “Well what the fuck is she?” Ok, well, now we’re getting somewhere. And there’s no reason for vulgarity with all the fucks. I’d like to establish an atmosphere of decorum if that’s ok. There’s a lady present. I know what you’re saying; “Yeah! You!” Like as though I didn’t see that coming.
Delilah Jones, escapee with her family from Berlin during the Hitler days, is today, right now, still going strong; I suspect is keeping her clothes on at this point, and spent her whole life, prior to lately, enthusiastically taking her clothes off in front of an audience. I guess it was like being paid for what as a child she assumed was just normal life: being undressed. Her parents were nudists. She might not have even known clothes existed as a youngster.
This book is basically a scrap book, very likely the only one ever produced by a “girlie mag” superstar. She’s not a superstar pro’bly to the public but the professional girlie-mag photographers of the day, all of them well-known to historians of girlie-mags, sought her out PROBABLY because of her attitude. Which was, I am guessing: not being a pain in the ass.
Magazines are a business and the heyday of girlie mags was a business regarded by “proper society” as degrading sinful filth. They were regarded by wives and girlfriends the way Trump is regarded now by, say, Pelosi. But taking photos for magazines is a job. The best photographers, meaning, if nothing else, the ones the women could stand being around because the photographers wanted photos and not dates….the top “glamour” photographers wanted Delilah in front of their lenses. But she also performed for, well, just strangers.
I am a huge fan of the Mafia Business Model. That doesn’t mean I am a huge fan of the Mafia personnel. But they’re not fucking with ME. So I gut no complaint. My attitude regarding the Operating System of the Mafia however? Huge fan. The Mafia is an organization that is basically the free market. It’s basically in competition with the organization created by the Constitution, which is an organization basically devoted to market-disappearance.
The race is, apparently, to see who will stay in existence longer, the Mafia or the Feds. The Mafia tries to provide, for a price, things people actually want. The Feds just fuck with people for no reason and then charge them for absolutely no services rendered. It’s crazy. People call it freedom. If the Mafia had written the Constitution and not bureaucrats things woulda been a lot different and a huge lot better. We’da had a better highway system for sure: contraband needs routes!!
So where is this going. Oh, yeah: all strip joints in the heyday after WW2 were Mob controlled. So this book could PROBABLY be a whale of a lot more informative than it is. However, Delilah is focused here on the stripper life, or at least her involvement with it, which was, and is, enthusiastic involvement.
This is a happy book. She’s a happy woman. She loves, or loved – I THINK she’s retired – she loved performing without clothes for what APPARENTLY were “upscale” nude reviews. This is a book of her history with a ton of black and white photos and personal remarks regarding her career. And it was actually a career.
Escaping from Hitler I guess you learn survival skills: her SISTER, one of them, was married to Sterling Silliphant, who at the time was the most successful creator of tv series pro’bly in TV history. So she was hobnobbing, probably not the right word, I dunno, with the elites of Hollywood and I am guessing the West Coast, if not National, Mob. But this isn’t a Mob book.
This is a photo-history of her professional and recreational life. It PROBABLY would be of more interest to women than to men as far as readability is concerned because – unlike with her stripping – I THINK the target audience for this book is women. She talks about travel, she talks about costumes, – which she routinely designed and made for her co-workers – schedules, workmates, incidents that are likely far more gossipy than she has presented because this is not that kind of a book, but you can surmise scenarios.
Everything she talks about would ignite a long list of interview questions from any reporter. But this is about her experience as a stripper. Not as a gossip. All of it in the golden age of things “nice” girls didn’t do in public.
Now, in all of this I have avoided the elephant in the room, since this is likely being read only by men, and that elephant in the room is the inquiry or observation or suggestion or intimation, though unspoken so far, and that query is, if I can articulate it politely in case there are children present…”Well…isn’t the only REAL reason for strippers to even exist is to create down the road, maybe later that night when the strip show customer has returned home, to create human ejaculant into a pile of tissues or a stack of laundry?”
Frankly, I don’t see that as a demeaning end-result. In as much as ejaculant transferred from inside a ballsack to a new location inside someone else’s groinage is why we’re all here in the first place. Think twice before fulminating against ejaculant, is my advice to you. You are after all 50% ejaculant and 50% egg yoke. The fact that the ejaculant may or may not end up in a Kleenex or a towel or a t-shirt or on a tree trunk or on your mom rather than sent specifically into a vagina NOT a sheep’s is something I think only Catholics should worry about.
Since to Catholics, ejaculant intentionally sent on a journey to nowhere – rather than specifically sent on a journey into a human egg – sends the donor to Hell. Or at least gets him into the line for instant ELEGIBILITY to Hell unless said ejaculator tells another man inside a confessional booth, in other words a very, very, small enclosed cabinet, just the two of you talking calmly back and forth with each other about your cum shots….unless that man tells the other man about it….he will go to Hell. If he dies before talking to the man in the little room. These admissions regarding emissions between these two men go something like this:
”So did you masturbate more than once?”
“You mean since our last session together in this closet?”
“I mean, no, just during this self-abuse session that has driven you in here to avoid eternal damnation.”
“Well I’ve been masturbating a blue streak actually since our last Forgiveness Go-Around, actually.”
“Have you confessed to all of them? Or are you starting fresh with just the one you talked about at the start just now.”
“To save some time?….can I have a complete past-and-present whitewash? A kind of bucket-load over the head of forgiveness? Is that available?”
“No, I need to know the exact number of times you masturbated.”
“What about just masochistic arousal-and-deprivation, what about that, is that masturbation?”
“The Pope hasn’t actually itemized that.”
“Seems uncaring. What about the degree of hardness.”
“When was the last time you masturbated.”
“Last night. After the girlie thing at the burlle-q emporium. She did the shimmy-shimmy-shake topless in a micro bikini on the stage and I did the pumpy-pumpy-squirt when I got home.”
“I forgive you.”
“Thanks your worship. Say…..why do I see jizz draining over to my side down there on the floor?”
All of which brings me to what you might be asking but probly aren’t: “So isn’t stripping all about getting men hot?”
That’s a good question. Reading this book stripping seems to be instead – at least from the stripper side of things – more about pride in the workplace. I know good employees. I should be doing all the hiring everywhere. And this broad’s work ethic is phenomenal. I mean let’s face it, it’s all about generating paid admissions. It’s a job.
This book is basically an itinerary of The Stripper Life from a stripper who took the job very seriously enough to where, as they say in the Mob, she was an earner. The Mob respects and caters to earners. I don’t think Mob homage was her motivator. I think job performance was her motivator.
She made costumes for herself and the other strippers. She was the go-to model for the major girlie photographers for the rags and mags that spent their lives under the bed or under the porch wrapped in a tarp. She made bosses and customers happy and got along with her co-workers and they apparently got along with her. It’s like inside her head she was always thinking “Why would anyone think there was anything WRONG with this life??”
From reading this, my first stripper-history book, maybe the only one in existence, I get the real strong feeling that stripper life is a lot like outlaw biker life: a self-enclosed support system, trying to do your thing, not fucking with people, and having as much fun in the process as possible.
This book is a history, not a tell-all. She’s no snitch. But if she ever becomes one in another book, she won’t need it packed with photos to keep the interest alive is my guess, not that photos are a problem!!!
She’s basically a totally selfless saver of lives: the strippers of her day were often the only thing that kept the men of my day deciding, over and over, “Yeah, I guess there really IS a reason to live after all: showgirls and strippers.”
endo
