[A dead, naked, gold-painted woman would certainly be
newsworthy, but I’m not aware of any Goldfinger-like
reports from the first half of the twentieth century. That’s not to say that no
performers ever passed out from the fumes or suffered severe reactions to the
paint. – BC]
Leslie Zemeckis, Behind
the Burly Q: The Story of Burlesque in America (New York: Skyhorse
Publishing, 2013), pp. 140, 187-8.
[Lillian Kiernan Brown worked as a burlesque stripper
under various names – Lily Ann Rose, Lloma Rhodes, Shadow, and Statue.]
She was the girl in gold for a statue act. “In those
days, if you were scantily dressed you couldn’t move.” Barely clad beauties
would pose on the stage as frozen statues in tableau. Lillian was covered head
to toe in toxic gold paint. It was a popular “outfit” at the time and
performers only had a short period of time to be covered in the paint, then
they would have to get out of it. “You could die from it. In fact, a lot of
performers did die.”
* * *
[Roz Elle Rowland] was quite literally the “Golden
Girl.” She worked with her nude body spray-painted gold, a sometime dangerous
occupation. Many people died from the toxic paints, Lily Ann Rose said.
She was making $3.50 a day at the Irving Palace in New
York. Theatre impresario Nils Thor (“Granny”) Granlund hired her for three
times that amount. Granny had her nude body painted gold and stood her on a
pedestal, and in slow motion she performed an acrobatic dance. It took three
pails of hot water at the end of the night to remove the paint. She became
known as “Goldie.”