EASTMAN, Ga. — You don't hear the term "burlesque dancers" too much these days, but back in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, Tempest Storm commanded a lot of attention.
She was born in Eastman, but left home to pursue Hollywood dreams at the age of 14.
Tempest died this week in Las Vegas, and even though she led a racy life, the small town in Dodge County remembers her fondly.
On Main Street in downtown Eastman this week, the talk of the town is the passing of Tempest Storm. She was 93 when she died in Las Vegas. Quite a colorful character, by her own accounts, she dated Elvis Presley and John F. Kennedy. Her family says she was a classy lady.
"Someone called me and said, 'The guy you're dating is Tempest Storm's brother.' I said, 'Oh, no,' I said, 'No, that can't be, because I heard legends of her my whole life,'" said Charlotte Miller.
Charlotte went on to marry that guy, Leonard Miller, who indeed was Tempest Storm's brother.
She says through the years, people would ask her about her most famous relative, the racy woman who dated celebrities in Hollywood and carved a name for herself in burlesque.
"But she had good friends like Gary Marshall, Mickey Rooney -- all of those guys," Charlotte said.
She was an "A-lister," but Tempest, whose real name was Annie Blanch Banks, never liked to kiss and tell, even when Telegraph columnist Bill Boyd wrote a book about her life in the 1980s.
"I think she would have made more money on the book if she had done a tell-all,' Miller said.
Maybe that is true, but if you ask folks in Eastman, she was unforgettable,
"She was a movie star," one Eastman resident said.
Another remembered, "All I remember is the most is the mink stole she sent her mother, and her stepfather wouldn't let her mother wear it."
After all these years, people are very proud of her because of her fame, and for a conservative town like Eastman, Georgia, burlesque dancing may have seemed like light-years away. Charlotte says Tempest had a definition for it.
"You tease -- you do not show anything. You leave something to the imagination," said Charlotte.
Maybe that was the magic of Tempest Storm, a woman who stretched her small town reality into a big, colorful world of dancing, living on the edge, and yet still appreciating her hometown roots.
Tempest fell in April and broke her hip. She died shortly after.
The New York Times, the Washington Post, and People Magazine all wrote articles about her this week.