by PATRICK LEJTENYI

It seems the juices are still flowing in the veins of William Weintraub. In his latest novel, Crazy About Lili, the 79-year-old Montreal author, journalist and filmmaker recalls, with a vivid wit, the heady days of the golden age of striptease, of which Montreal was a famous and enthusiastic participant. This is familiar ground for Weintraub: In 1997 he published City Unique: Montreal Days and Nights in the 1940s and '50s, a lively and affectionate look at the metropolis in the decade following the war. Corruption, prostitution, poverty, religiosity, gambling and good times characterized the city's flavour, so it's small wonder that Weintraub uses this setting as a fictional flipside to his previous work.

Weintraub's hero, Richard Lippman, is about to enter his first term at McGill. He is promptly thrown into the seamy world of Montreal's nightlife - its clubs, its cabarets, its women of easy virtue. Over the course of several months he learns to live cheek-by-jowl with stripteasers, crooks, dissolute journalists and wide-eyed, manipulative communist beauties. Altogether, it's a frustrating place for a virgin.

Crazy About Lili, Weintraub says, is about "rounding out the picture of that era," he researched already, he says. City Unique's section on the cabaret scene, in particular famed burlesque dancer Lili St-Cyr, "got an enormous response. These old geezers called me up and wanted to talk about it. And that formed the backbone of the novel."

Wishes fulfilled

Richard's quest for sex takes him to the odd places that decorate Montreal of the late 1940s: the dressing room of the Gayety, the city's upscale cabaret; the offices of the McGill Daily, where he encounters his first asshole editor (presumably of many - as a young man Weintraub worked as a reporter for The Gazette, until he was fired for union organizing. "The best thing that ever happened to me," he says); a cramped room full of communists, who both court and despise his "bourgeois" poetry; and the Côte-St-Luc gambling dens run by his Uncle Morty. Along the way he falls in love with a dancer, is betrayed by his friends, learns, to his dismay, that he's a good bullshit artist, discovers Freudian psychoanalysis and gets laid.

"The book is full of things I wished happened to me," Weintraub says, sitting in the office of his spacious Westmount home. "It's autobiographical in that it describes what I daydreamed of at that time, but not what necessarily happened to me. Wish-fulfillment is a good word for it."

Sex then and now

Anyone even vaguely familiar with post-war Montreal knows about Lili St-Cyr, and Weintraub admits to having been a fan back in the day. And his interest is piqued by burlesque's recent revival.

"What the performers today detected in burlesque is the element of comedy," he says. "They're learning that burlesque is allied to comedy and irony. Take Gypsy Rose Lee. She'd sing songs about Cézanne and Oscar Wilde. It was always tongue-in-cheek. There was a charm to it. What's making it come back is the realization that the charm is gone. There's a nostalgia for the old style - and also, the dance was on a stage, not in some guy's lap."

The eponymous Lili in the book's title - Weintraub, unlike Richard, never met her, so she remains a projection of the author's whimsy - is an obvious gold-digger who uses the protagonist for her own means, but remains sympathetic. Another dancer evolves from a clunky disaster on stage into, thanks to Richard's help, a wildly popular dancer whose girl-next-door act goes a little too far. And a beautiful, filthy-rich Westmount student communist uses her charms to lure him into the fold.

"We all had fantasies about getting next to them," he says. "And of course going with them, all the way. They were up on stage, these glamorous women - or girls, as we used to call them."

Reading the book, a reader could be forgiven for thinking that Weintraub is painting an overly rosy picture of the past. But he says that was part of the era. "We all had the pleasure of ignorance," he says, especially regarding sexuality. "But the main thing that changed was the arrival of the Pill, which made it a lot easier to get laid."

Wiliam Weintraub will be present at the booklaunch for Crazy About Lili next Thursday, Sept. 22 at Nicholas Hoare (1366 Greene) from 5–7 p.m. To RSVP call 933-4201