Criminals Fear Chesty Morgan's 73" Crime Fighting Bust! DEADLY WEAPONS & DOUBLE AGENT 73
She is in the Burlesque Hall of Fame in California, along with Gypsy Rose Lee, Josephine Baker, Sally Rand, Bettie Page and Mae West!
Film debut of Zsa Zsa, the stage name of famed Polish-Jewish Stripper Chesty Morgan playing a secret agent. Chesty's claim to fame was her 73FF-32-36 figure. Directed by Grindhouse Legend Doris Wishman:
Watch Chesty Morgan in DEADLY WEAPONS by clicking this link here
The follow-up to Deadly Weapons and Chesty's last feature film. She would go onto have a scene in Fellini's Casanova in 1976 but it was cut from the theatrical version, although it is possible it does exist today.
Watch Chesty Morgan in DOUBLE AGENT 73 click this link here
New here? Any title we have in the headline we link to in the post. In this case the above 2 posters that introduce the page today have underlined links that go direct to the movies. Subscribe for the wildest movies, cartoons, music and oddball TV shows on Substack. Psychotronic is psycho as in horror, tronic as in electronic or science fiction. But we cover all pop culture with a very different point of view! Now the tragic, yet still uplifting story of Chesty Morgan.
Chesty Morgan in DEADLY WEAPONS
She is a small child in 1937. Her father and mother are well-to-do Jews who live near Warsaw. In 1939, Germany invades Poland. Her parents lose their department store. They end up in the ghetto afraid for their lives and change their names to avoid detection. Sarah Wajc (pronounced ‘Weiss’) was the name she was born with.
Her name was changed to Ilana, her mother’s to Eva, and her father’s to Leon, to hide their Jewish identity from the Nazi occupiers. Most of all, she doesn’t remember the day her mother ventured out to buy her niece new shoes and was apprehended by German soldiers, who bundled her into a car and drove away. Ilana’s father, Leon, tried in vain to leverage a local German contact and buy her release. No deal. Eva perished in a gas chamber just weeks later.
Shortly after, Ilana was separated from her father: he hid with an ever-changing network of friends, joining the underground guerilla offensive against the occupying forces, while Ilana was passed between her mother’s and father’s sisters in Leszno and Warsaw.
What Ilana does remember is the hardship. Scavenging food from the streets. Pretending to be dead when soldiers broke into the house. Hiding in a series of flooded, cold, underground grottoes beneath the streets of Warsaw, sometimes not seeing daylight for months on end. She remembers saving scraps of food in case her parents were hungry when they returned for her.
It got worse. As a young child, she was considered a burden to her aunts who pushed off to a series of orphanages, some caring, many neglecting. Ilana describes her early years as an unloved Cinderella. That would be true if Cinderella’s mother was killed by Nazis, and she was malnourished, unloved, and in constant fear for her life. Leon never showed up again, shot and killed in combat, another anonymous casualty of the long conflict.
At age twelve, there was the hope of a new beginning: Ilana’s aunts relocated her to Israel, a youth kibbutz in Neve Hadassah in the middle of the country. The mission there was for children to attend school in the mornings and work the rest of the time. Ilana was assigned to laundry duty. She studied hard, and took part-time work tutoring kids to earn money for the first time in her life.
Five years later, she left the kibbutz and moved in with an aunt nearby. She started nursing school, working in Hadassah Hospital. People with her skills were in short supply, so she found herself looking after sixty toddlers each night.
At nineteen, her cousin introduced her to a visitor to the area: Joe was a Polish refugee living in Brooklyn who was visiting his family in Israel. His backstory was no less scarring than Ilana’s: he’d survived the Holocaust in a Nazi death camp, moved to Israel briefly, before carving out a new life in the United States. Joe took a shine to Ilana. Ilana took a shine to the American life that Joe talked about. After four days, Joe proposed and Ilana accepted. They wed quickly. Within weeks, Ilana was a married woman living in Brooklyn, having changed her name again, this time to Lilian.
The whiplash life change may have been difficult for someone less hardy: the city had more people than she’d ever seen before, and Lilian knew no one except for Joe. Further, she couldn’t speak English and frequently got lost on the New York subway where she couldn’t ask anyone for help.
It was a culture shock, but after the first twenty years of her life, it was a perfect one too, and Lilian didn’t look back.
She remembers, “After everything that happened in Poland, I thought what could go wrong, you know?”
She may not have had an exciting life, which she didn’t really want, but her husband and his partners had a profitable meat and poultry store in an area of the Bronx the police avoided. Crime was very bad, but the store never had a problem. They donated food to the local church, let people buy food on credit with no interest. But an employee decided to get a couple of friends and rob the place one night.
A knock on her door awoke her and the police took her to the morgue. There she saw her husband, his head split open with a meat cleaver and blown apart by 3 bullets to the back of the head.
Shortly before the trial, New York State had abolished the death penalty for all but police killers, so the two men were sentenced to 26 ½ years-to-life in prison instead. If the victims had survived, they would have received 75 to 150 years. It was a bizarre quirk in the law at the time. The public seethed. Lilian was outraged. The judge apologized, and urged the state legislators to rectify the penal code.
She almost killed herself, but with 2 little girls and her memories of growing up without parents, she knew she had to go on. Her daughters were 4 months and 4 years old.
And so a brand of feminism was born, a fight for self-sufficiency and financial independence without relying on any man. Lilian resolved to take care of her family, whatever the personal toll. Gone were her distant private pipe dreams of training to be a doctor or lawyer. Now she was a single parent faced with the reality of working two, sometimes three, jobs. For the next five years, she did whatever she could: she toiled in real estate sales, as a clerk in a New York department store, as a secretary for a distribution company. It was an uphill battle, and she still didn’t seem to have two nickels to rub together. Hiring sitters for her daughters was expensive and she couldn’t even afford to run a car. It was time for a re-think.
In 1972, one suitor, Maury, took her to a nightclub. It was her first time. Lilian didn’t drink, smoke, or cuss, and had little idea such places existed. They watched a striptease. Maury suggested she could do that. It paid good money, he said. Much more than the dead-end jobs she was taking. Lilian was disgusted, and told him she never wanted to see him again. But the thought lingered.
She discussed it with friends. Some encouraged her to exploit her prodigious dimensions. At first, Lilian’s reactions were split into two contrasting directions: fear and greed. As time went on, the latter eclipsed the former: what if the best way forward was to use her largest assets? “I figured, I supported this body of mine for years. Now it could support me. But I only was going to try this for two weeks – and then I was getting out.”
That decision would change her life forever. Asked if she has any regrets today, Lilian says only, “I just wish I had started in show business sooner. But better late than never. What else could I have done to make as much money?”, in those days for a woman alone with kids, nowhere. (1)
She earned $6000 a week, $6,000 in 1972 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $45,081.67. She didn’t do drugs, she didn’t drink. She invested her money, choosing her stocks by herself after researching them.
One part of her act, which she started with the name Zsa Zsa and then changed to Chesty Morgan, she allowed a man from the audience to testify her breasts were real. This would lead to arrests and fines.
Chesty Morgan was 54 years old when she took her final bow on stage, the night of the Gulf War invasion.
She still had the same 73’ chest, red and black sequined dress, and improbable blonde wig, but now she was tired. It had been a long ride and the asphalt highway had taken its toll. The aging burlesque star was finally ready for a quieter life.
For twenty years, she’d disrobed in hundreds of theaters, survived ridicule and sexist slurs, been arrested for lewdness and obscenity, and suffered immeasurable personal tragedy.
When the curtain came down on her final performance, she could allow herself a rare moment of self-reflection: she had survived. More than that, she had saved her money, raised a family, owned her own home, and maintained her dignity. And who can say that after two decades of stripping? (2)
It had been a long, bumpy ride.
(1) The trials of Chesty Morgan podcast part 1 click here
(2) The trials of Chesty Morgan podcast part 2 click here
Coming Friday: MY HEART BELONGS TO FLORRIE
She has written hits for Kylie Minogue, Rebecca Ferguson and the Pet Shop Boys and many others. She signed to a major label a decade ago and was fired and told to give up music. She now has her debut album THE LOST ONES which you can hear on Spotify, and in just a week since its release is receiving rave reviews. Friday. The incredible music journey of Florrie. Subscribe now for a brand new take on pop culture.
Behind the paywall: Incredibly Strange Film Show - Fred Olen Ray and Doris Wishman
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Global Psychotronic Film Society to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.