A lovely and romantic Valentine’s Day with Mrs. Sleuth alas began with the sad news of the death of Our Gang’s blonde baby girl “Shirley“: Long before SMG (playing Buffy on The Vampire Slayer) or SJP (as Carrie on Sex and the City), there was SJR—SHIRLEY JEAN RICKERT, the Littlest Rascal {hats off to her!}.
Born March 25, 1926 in Seattle, her stage-mother mom moved the family to Hollywood after the 18-month-old tot won a local Beautiful Baby contest. Joining Central Casting at age 3, Shirley snagged an interview with movie mogul Hal Roach and a part in his Our Gang comedy series at the ripe old age of four as “the little vamp in the platinum pageboy” haircut {her first test shot was a pinup}! In all she made five films in 1931 as the cutest of “The Little Rascals“—the adults’ term for the naughty neighborhood tykes—the first filmed was suggestively titled Love Business {sitting on teacher Miss Crabtree’s lap) as rising star Jackie Cooper glares at Chubby}. And male fans got a “Chubby”–today it would be considered “kiddie porn”–when Shirley slurped milk with Norman “Chubby” Chaney {the first Rascal to die, at just 21}, “Mary Ann” Jackson {who lived past 80} and “Pete the Pup” {whose iconic eye circle was drawn on by an unknown Polish makeup artist named Max Factor!}. And when Shirley Jean—whose curls were “developed by Mr. Factor and glued to my face every morning with Wave Set”–joined Dorothy DeBorba, one of the few Rascals to outlive her {she’ll be 84 next month}, in licking an ice cream cone, in “Little Daddy,” the censors became aroused as well.
Our Gang “broke new ground,” according to film historian Leonard Maltin, by putting “boys, girls, whites and blacks together in a group as equals, which had never been done before in cinema.” As another historian added, “Italian Americans were also depicted without stereotyping, notably Mickey Gubitosi” {with brown bangs}—who 9 years later changed his name to Robert Blake…and 66 years later was charged with shooting his wife, a bottle blond who proved it in this exclusive Polaroid sent to potential “sugar daddies.” Platinum blond Shirley Jean enjoyed her most memorable moment in the Gang with bowler-hatted black boy Matthew “Stymie” Beard in their classic “Watt Street” sketch: “What street?” Shirley asks about a candy store. “Watt Street” replies Stymie. “That’s what I’m asking you!” she grows exasperated. The bit later inspired the “Best Comedy Sketch of the 20th Century,” according to Time magazine, the classic “Who’s on First?” by Abbott and Costello. “I now live in Albany,” Shirley Jean joked in April 2007, “and darned if they don’t have a Watt Street!”
And darned if her pushy mother didn’t insist she leave the show after Fly My Kite in late 1931–telling Hal Roach to “go fly a kite” by jumping to “the competing Mickey McGuire comedy series starring Mickey Rooney.” Of her time with the Gang, Rickert recalled: “We had fun. the mothers on the other hand, were awful. Stage mothers are just vile women, including my own.” Still just six, Shirley Jean took her Mae West persona upstairs with debonair dwarf Rooney {think they’d allow this today?} and later wrote a poem about her time as temptress Tomboy Taylor: “With that screwball Mickey Rooney/Though Mick was only eight/Even then he was looking for a mate … Mickey grabbed me one day behind the railroad station/I wasn’t drowning/Why did he tell me it was artificial respiration?”
Her first on-screen smooch came from a much bigger star: “I can proudly say that I’m one of the few females who can boast that I kissed John Wayne. Of course I was only seven years old, but it still counts.” As her obituary confirmed: “She donned a black wig to play a young half-Indian oil heiress in the 1934 John Wayne B-western ‘Neath the Arizona Skies.” Future child stars Rooney, Judy Garland and Shirley Temple had never even made it past the audition stage of Our Gang, so by this time the “Little Girl with the Curl” was “perhaps the best known youngster in the country,” according to a leading scribe. Shirley Jean and “Mary Ann” became the Mae West and Louise Brooks-type tykes as best-selling paper doll cutouts, and she even had a sit-down with Mary Pickford, the most popular actress of the day! However, SJR remarked, “Stardom was my mother’s dream. It wasn’t mine.”
FROM TOT…TO HOT!!
“By then, I had made a small fortune,” sighed the small fortunate one, “by the standards of the day. In a few years it was all frittered away in one bad real estate deal after another {welcome to today!}. At the age of 12 I was washed up in show business. I was literally a has-been .” And not only had mom’s investments gone bust, but little Shirley Jean was beginning to “blossom”—proving the point in starter starlet bra—so she decided to go en pointe to dancing school. Renaming herself “Juli Mason” to avoid the Gang bangers, she got uncredited work as a background dancer in over 100 musicals—culminating in 1951’s Royal Wedding with Fred Astaire {Sleuth spotted her as the blond at back left) before moving up to be one of Gene Kelly’s fine feathered femmes (far left) the next year for the classic Singin’ in the Rain.
“The pay was good and the work was glamorous, but jobs were few and far between,” Juli Mason learned. So she searched for “something steadier and with more of a future”…. before becoming burlesque queen “Gilda and Her Crowing Glory” in 1953. “When they stopped making movie musicals,” Shirley freely admitted, “I became a strip tease in Burlesque and traveled all over the U.S. and Canada playing in theaters and nightclubs.” Her Crowning Glory was her long-flowing hair, those forehead curls still bang-in’, which added the “tease element” to her routines: “Once peeled down to her pasties, she swings her long blond tresses in a wide head roll, fore and aft,” read one review of her revue, “alternately revealing and concealing her well-formed 37-1/2 inch bosom.” Since her married name—which she kept for the rest of her life—was Shirley Jean Measures, we should fill in the flanks: a 24-inch waist, 36″ at the hips, with 118 lbs. displaced evenly across her 5-foot-5 frame. A full C cup by then, Gilda was top billed among her zipper-sorority sisters in the 1953 movie A.B.Cs of Love.
Quickly dubbed “Burlesque’s Sexiest Blonde,” Shirley said of her fellow Rascals: “I don’t think the kids would mind if they knew what I’m doing.” And the platinum peeler made sure to point out her roots while taking it off: “As Shirley Jean I played the flirt/In Our Gang comedies,” she purred when stripping to pasties. “I never dreamed I would wind up as Gilda/But who does it hurt?,” as her panties hit the floor. “The women in the audience will be taking inventory,” the patter continued. “Oh, but I seem to be getting a little behind in my story.” Butt she’d always stop her tale before showing too much: “I won ‘t do anything that could get the owners into trouble,” Gilda stressed (while dressed). Some girls will do a ‘flash.’ Just before the lights go out, they’ll take everything off for a second to let the boys in the audience see what little girls are made of. That’s the phony and easy way out. As far as I’m concerned, I’ll take off everything the law allows.”
But not enough for famed critic George Jean Nathan, writing partner of jug-eared icon H. L. Mencken {who famously coined the term ecdysiast in 1940}. Nathan—on whom cold-blooded theater critic Addison DeWitt of All About Eve was based, winning an Oscar for George Sanders while introducing Marilyn Monroe—blasted Gilda in Esquire as “that over-clothed stripper who doesn’t taken enough of it all off”! Never mess with a former Gang member, as Shirley shot back: “That doddering old idiot thinks I didn’t take enough off ? Do you know how far down we strip at Minsky’s, where he saw me? To a G-string and nothing else, I mean nothing! And you know how big a G-string is? Why, that old man {what a dummy} could fit one into his hearing aid!” So this old man put his ear to the ground to unearth this ultra-rare glimpse of Gilda’s nipples sans pasties on the Night They Raided Minsky’s {a 1968 film starring blond Britt Ekland}.
By 1959, Gilda had grown tired of the (bump and) grind…and Little Miss Curly quit the Burly. “I like burlesque,” she snapped at her critics. “It’s what a person is, not what they’re doing. A lot of idiots are secretaries.” Over the next 50 years, Shirley became a secretary, bartender {”One of my husbands’ ideas”}, and a traveling saleswoman for industrial hardware. “I walk in and they say, ‘Not another nuts-and-bolts salesman,” Ms. Rickert told the Associated Press in 1993. “And then I open my sales folder and show them an 8×10 of me in Our Gang. I say, ‘You grew up with me.’ Then they do a 360.” So let’s come full circle with what must Shirley be the finest finds ever of this ravishing Rascal: a nude set taken in a hotel room shortly before she quit stripping for good! Starting out shyly in a see thru negligee, the Our Gang girl slipped it off to reveal a bare breast … then doffed her undies for the only time…losing the prop to reveal her pillows … before laying back on the bed to fulfill the areolar fantasies of fans who’ve wanted to sleep with “Shirley Jean” for nearly 80 years!
“I guess once you’ve been bitten by the Show Biz Bug, the bite mark never goes away,” Shirley Jean Measures observed two years before her death…and she continued to do burlesque skits in local playhouses, attend conventions in her retro roadster, and speak to classes about her nine decade career. “It’s really great to be over 80,” the retired Rascalian remarked in March 2007, “and know that a lot of people have had good memories of you for so long.” Those good mammaries landed “Gilda” on the Dancers Wall of Fame, selection in the Top 10 Strippers of the ’50s by the Erotic Dancers League, a museum exhibit tribute to her remarkable run 5 months before her death, and now a posthumous place atop a classic 2009 calendar as being among the all-time greats.
“My mother was very full of life and proud of what she had done in show business,” her only child, lookalike daughter Melody Kennedy said upon her parent’s passing in Sarasota Springs, NY. “I had a child,” mom once mugged, “found out what caused it and quit. (Yeah, sure!).” Observed that offspring: “Her whole thing was making people happy and making them laugh.” They cried when she died…but let’s leave her last words as those she chose when asked why hers was the only website run by a surviving Little Rascal: “I’m just about the only one left who can both sit up and type on a keyboard,” the youngest comic in recorded history quipped. “It was a fun life and I enjoyed it. Ain’t life grand?”
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