GiGi Holliday’s purple dress flutters around her shins as she approaches the podium at Detroit’s Second Baptist Church. She fights back tears as she sings Frank Sinatra’s “That’s Life,” wearing a leopard-print hat and shawl.
“Mama Toni Elling, our love language together was music... and we both loved Frank Sinatra,” the burlesque dancer says, her curls falling neatly down her back. “I had the pleasure and privilege of singing Frank Sinatra to her, and I am going to sing to her one more time, our favorite song.”
She wipes her eyes, kisses her fingertips, and plants it on a memorial photo of Toni Elling, one of Detroit’s legendary burlesque dancers who broke racial barriers as a performer in the 1960s and 1970s.
Elling passed away on Sunday, April 2, almost a week shy of her 95th birthday. Family members, friends, and Elling’s burlesque family gathered on Saturday, May 6 at Second Baptist Church in person and virtually to celebrate her life.
Elling’s real name is Rosita Sims, but to the modern-day burlesque dancers who cherished and cared for her in her final years, she’s “Mama Toni.”
“She was absolutely delightful and gracious,” Detroit burlesque performer Lottie Ellington tells Metro Times. “When you were around her, she had the ability to make you feel like you were the only person in the room. Everyone sort of gravitated to her because she was genuinely a pleasant human to be around.”
Elling started her career as a burlesque dancer and singer in the 1960s at 32 years old. She was working a dead-end job as an operator at Bell Telephone Company where she was repeatedly overlooked for promotions because she was Black. After a friend suggested she try stripping, she ventured into burlesque and found her calling in the art of parade, pose, and peel.
Elling wasn’t just any “stripper.” She was the epitome of elegance and grace, teasing the audience with her coy stage presence as she twirled her panel skirt. But while the rest of the world saw her as a portrait of Black beauty, she didn’t take herself too seriously.
“One time she was asked in an interview, ‘What does it take to be sexy,’ and she said, ‘Sexy? I’m not sexy… I’m a clown. I’m silly,’” Holliday tells Metro Times from her Manhattan apartment days ahead of the memorial service. “And you can see it in her performances. She was very cheeky. To dance like her, you have to know how to be shy and demure at the same time. That’s what Mama was.”
Elling’s list of friends reads like a VIP guest list to a jazz concert at Detroit’s 1940s-era Paradise Theatre. She hung out with Sammy Davis Jr., Ella Fitzgerald, and Duke Ellington.
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While the word “burlesque” may conjure images of women stripping down to a rhinestone G-string and not much else, Elling never showed her bare behind. She also refused to put her costume pieces on the ground and would either place them on a chair or hand them to a stage kitten.
“She did pasties, but in all of the vintage underwear that she wore, her hindquarters are fully covered,” Ellington says. “Her thing was, you’re getting what I give you. Don’t ask me about nothing else. Don’t ask me about taking my panties off. Don’t ask me about flashing folks. I’m not doing that. The interesting thing about her being so graceful is that she was also very bashful. She didn’t think she could do things other performers were doing.”
Elling’s list of friends reads like a VIP guest list to a jazz concert at Detroit’s 1940s-era Paradise Theatre. She hung out with Sammy Davis Jr., Ella Fitzgerald, and Duke Ellington. Ellington was one of Elling’s closest friends, and her stage name is a tribute to their friendship — she separated the famed jazz singer’s last name to form Toni Elling. She was often called “the Duke’s Delight” or the “Satin Doll,” as Ellington’s song “Satin Doll” is rumored to have been inspired by her.
She met many of the blues and jazz singers whose company she kept during her job booking musicians for Jack the Bellboy’s radio show on WJBK in the 1940s when she was only 16. Bellboy was a popular Detroit DJ who played R&B, jazz, and blues at a time when Black music wasn’t getting airtime.
Fast-forward to the 1960s when Elling chose burlesque as a career to escape racism at work, and she was still facing discrimination and prejudice.
“I had a harder time than a lot of girls because of my blackness,” she told Metro Times in a 2005 interview. “It was very hard for a Black stripper in those days. We weren’t paid what other girls were paid, and we weren’t allowed to work at certain clubs.”
But Elling’s grace and poise were unmatched, and she often got booked at venues other Black performers didn’t, despite whether white audiences liked it or not. She became so popular that other dancers started copying her acts until she decided to do something off the wall that she knew they couldn’t do.
She wore an afro, painted tribal marks on her face, and danced to South African singer Miriam Makeba while beating a bongo drum.
“[I had] 40 bracelets on both arms, stripes on my face, and I’d paint my toenails orange so that they would show up in black light, and I’d go out in blacklight,” she said in an interview with the League of Exotic Dancers. “When I put the drum down and took off my cape, then I got wild. Then I’d be all over everything. I didn’t even know what I was doing. And they just loved it. Nobody else could do it, so I had it all to myself.”
Though she officially retired from burlesque in 1974, Elling continued to be part of the burlesque community, doing Q&A sessions and special performances at conventions, and attending shows in Detroit. In 2014 she received the Burlesque Hall of Fame (BHOF) Living Legend Award. In 2017, fellow Black Detroit performer Lottie the Body was given the award and Elling accepted it on her behalf. She even performed at BHOF Weekend in 2012, when she was well into her eighties.
Burlesque grandbabies
Lottie Ellington picked her stage name after reading the 2005 Metro Times article about Elling and Lottie the Body. She mashed “Lottie” and “Elling” together, adding “ton” at the end for “Toni.”
At the time, Ellington knew how influential the Detroit legends were and how they paved the way for Black burlesque dancers like herself in the 1960s and 1970s. What she didn’t know was how close she and Elling would become, and that she’d eventually plan the dancer’s funeral.
“That’s my buddy,” Ellington says. “I would just sit with her and talk and she’d tell me stories or give me advice. She’d say silly stuff and then I’d say something silly back. I just wanted to make her laugh…. She started calling me ‘Ms. Fix It’ because when I’d come to visit, I’d fix whatever she needed around the house.”
Ellington, who is from Detroit and lives here now, was living in Virginia when she started doing burlesque. After picking her name as an homage to Elling, she was contacted by a disgruntled performer who found it disrespectful.
“Vagina Jenkins reached out to me and said ‘You can’t do that, you don’t take peoples’ names,’” Ellington remembers. “It wasn’t anything malicious, I just wanted to pay tribute to these amazing women from Detroit because I’m from Detroit... How do I fix this?”
Ellington says she reached out to former Metro Times culture editor Sarah Klein, who wrote the article about Lottie the Body and Elling, but didn’t get a response. Klein, who was also a burlesque dancer and performed as Sparkly Devil, died in a car crash in 2013. Somehow, Ellington was able to get Elling’s email address and contacted her to apologize, but the dancer wasn’t the least bit offended.
“She was the sweetest Toni that we all know, telling me, ‘No baby, it’s OK,’” Ellington remembers. “She asked if I would like her to send me a picture. I told her I would love that, so she did.”
Ellington would finally meet Elling when she came back home to Detroit for an all-Black burlesque show in 2012. Elling was in her eighties at the time, but a few local performers would still bring her out to shows in Detroit.
The two hit it off when Elling told Ellington she “had her head on straight.” Similar to Elling, Ellington had also started her burlesque career in her thirties, and the two bonded.
Every time Ellington came home to Detroit to visit her family, she’d make sure to spend time with Elling.
“I would just come hang out and see how she was doing,” Ellington says. “I hung out with her for the sake of visiting and being in her presence, not because I needed anything from her or wanted anything from her. It was a genuine thing where we just enjoyed being around each other.”
After Ellington moved back home to Detroit in 2019, she noticed Elling’s health was declining. She also noticed during her visits that there weren’t many people spending time with Elling outside of her caretaker and family friend Sharlene Simpson.
“I took her to the Michigan Burlesque Festival in 2019 and that’s when it became clear to me that she needed a lot more help than what I thought she did,” Ellington says. “She needed a wheelchair, so I had to put her in one. … I didn’t see anyone else filling in that space, so I thought if her burlesque family is going to love on her, let her burlesque family love on her.”
She continues, “If her biological family does not see the amazing human that we see, then that’s their loss but we’re going to give her her roses while she can still see them and not wait until she dies to say, ‘Oh, she was a great person.’ She told me she wanted to have a Christmas party so I got all the burlesque people together, we had a party at her house and I got her a Honey Baked Ham because that’s what she wanted. Anything that she wanted, I would give it to her.”
“Her and my grandmother were born one week apart, and the universe knew that I missed my grandmother more than anything in this world. That woman raised me.”
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Holliday alludes to the absence of some of Elling’s family members due to their disapproval of her burlesque career.
“Respectability politics… it’s a curse amongst the Black community,” Holliday says. “I just think that she may have lived her life in a way that they did not respond well to, but it just is what it is.”
Elling’s cousin Juanita Green told Metro Times via email, “I don’t know that this is true… I believe she would simply want it to be known how much she really did appreciate the loving care that was shown to her by her family members and the burlesque community over the years until her transition.”
Green added, “She was a refined lady of excellence with a deeply loving heart who sincerely cared and sought the best for others. She loved and appreciated and fearlessly immersed herself in the beauty of God’s creation.”
Holliday, who has been a burlesque dancer for 13 years, says Elling was like a second grandmother to her after her biological grandmother passed away.
“Her and my grandmother were born one week apart, and the universe knew that I missed my grandmother more than anything in this world. That woman raised me,” Holliday says. “I knew that when Toni Elling came into my life, it was my grandmother being like, ‘Oh, my baby still needs me but I can’t be there. Let me give her this other grandma.’”
Elling developed dementia near the end of her life. Ellington made the decision to put her in a nursing home following an accident in 2021 where she was taken to the hospital after throwing herself out of bed in her sleep.
“She had gotten tangled up in the sheets and I came to help her on Saturday. She had been stuck like that since Friday,” Ellington remembers. “At the hospital, they said she was in good physical condition, but she was 92 at the time, and based on her age and the fact that she didn’t have 24-hour care they couldn’t, in good conscience, send her back home. I was the only number they had, and they were like, ‘What do we do?’ And I didn’t know what to do. They were saying either someone has to tell them something or they're going to start the process to make her a ward of the state.”
She continues, “They mentioned there were some open beds at Mission Point, so I said OK, let’s do that… I know there’s some grumblings about it but I didn’t know what else to do and there was no one else that I could contact.”
Holliday remembers visiting Elling at Mission Point Nursing Home and says watching her “sundown” — get confused and disoriented as the day progressed due to her dementia — was heartbreaking.
“It made me and Lottie more protective of her to the burlesque world,” she says. “A lot of people did not understand. They kept asking, ‘Why don’t we just interview Toni Elling,’ and we’re like, this woman is wheelchair-bound, her mind is going, and her family is not 100% around. We’re legally in charge of this woman.”
Simpson said at the funeral she and Ellington just “went on loving [Elling] so she could be alright with what she was going through.”
“As it was happening, she was OK with it,” Simpson said. “One thing about her was that little lady wasn’t scared of anything. She stood flatfoot and said, ‘OK come on. Me and my lord is gonna take care of this.’”
‘In every art form, there are Black women’
Elling gave Holliday and Ellington the same advice as Black performers who weren’t getting booked because venues rarely wanted more than one Black dancer on the bill.
“She told me, ‘If you can’t work where you are, then go someplace else. You don’t have to work in your area.’” Ellington recalls. “She said, ‘I didn’t work in Detroit. I did the majority of my work out of town.’ That was like a lightbulb moment and that’s when I started to do festivals and that led me to so many more opportunities.”
Other than passing on her business advice, Elling loved to tell her burlesque grandbabies stories. One of her favorites to tell was the story of how she met Frank Sinatra and got his autograph on a napkin.
“She saw him walk by in the club, and said, ‘I'm gonna get his autograph,’” Holliday retells the tale, mimicking the confidence in Elling’s voice. “Her friend told her she was being ridiculous but she got a pen and starts to try and walk past his security guard. Of course, the security guard goes, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ She was just very bold, and simply said, ‘I’m here to see Mr. Frank Sinatra and I’m here to get his autograph.’ The guard probably thought this tiny little lady isn’t going to do anything, so he lets her by.”
She continues, “She has her pen and her napkin, and she told me, ‘He looked up at me, and I’ve never been star-struck before, but he had the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen in my life.’ She said he signed the napkin. That’s my favorite memory of her. Driving her around [Washington] D.C. listening to Frank Sinatra and her telling me the story of when she met him.”
Back at the memorial service in Detroit, Holliday’s voice cracks as she croons, “That’s life and I can’t deny it/ many times I thought of cutting out but my heart won’t buy it/ but if there’s nothing shaking come this here July/ I’m gonna roll myself up in a big ball and fly,” changing the last word from “die” to “fly.”
Ellington tells the church with authority, “Without Mama Toni, there is no Lottie Ellington. There is no GiGi Holliday. There is no Eartha Kitten… Jeez Loueez, Perle Noire. We are standing on her shoulders. She made it so that we could continue this art and continue to let the world know that in every art form, there are people of color. In every art form, there are Black women.”
She continued, “We are here… bringing all of the gifts that we have. We are bringing Black excellence. We are bringing our love, our spirituality, we are bringing our energy. We’re bringing our fire and we bring that every single time we step on stage. She made it possible for us to be able to do that, and I’m so thankful for her... Toni was my friend. She wasn’t just an icon in burlesque.”
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