Kitty West: The Axe Woman of Bourbon Street

Tribute today to burlesque legend Kitty West (Abbie Jewel Slawson, 1930-2019), whose ingenious stage name plants the idea in your head that you’ve heard of her before, no doubt because it sounds like a combination of Kitty Wells and Dottie West (those are both major country singers, Yankees). I first heard about Kitty West when she was a talking head in Leslie Zemeckis’s documentary Behind the Burly Q.

Like my own folks, Kitty was from cotton country, growing up on farms in Alabama and Mississippi. As anyone can tell you, that kind of work is for the birds, and it’s especially not for beautiful young women, so when she was 16 Kitty lit out for New Orleans, and became a dancer. She was mainly associated with the Casino Royale Club on Bourbon Street, where she was known for her Evangeline the Oyster Girl act, where she rose like Venus from an oyster shell wearing nothing but a few pearls, to the tune of “Ebb Tide”. (The concept of the act is a wonderful American mash-up. Evangeline is a Longfellow poem with special meaning for Cajuns — it’s set amongst the Acadian folk when they were still in Canada. It has naught to do with Greek mythology or Botticelli. Except…now it does).

So successful was the Evangeline number that the Casino Royale booked another water act, Divena the Mermaid, who did her number in a tank. This made Kitty so jealous she took an axe to the aquarium while Divena was in it. The Burlesque Hall of Fame has a terrific photo of the event to prove it, which suggests that the tiff was likely staged. If so, the stunt worked. The publicity sold tickets and cemented the local legends of both dancers. It even inspired a 2020 book The Axe Woman of Bourbon Street by “Historian Jane” Delacour:

Kitty retired in the ’60s, started a couple of beauty salons, and worked as the front desk greeter at a couple of NOLA hotels. Her husband Jerry West was a jockey. When neo-burlesque emerged in the 1980s and ’90s and beyond, Kitty mentored a lot of the up and coming dancers. She was 89 at the time of her passing.

For more about show business history, please see No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous,