“I’d sell my soul for total control...”
Gina Healey molded her body into an S to The Motels’ new wave dirge “Total Control.” She was “scat dancing,” relying on her instincts, and not one bit of her — neither head nor toe nor in between — stood still. On that Sunday afternoon in the spring of 1980, her face a mask of Kabuki white, Healey felt beautiful, and she was. Her black curls shifted en masse as she slipped off her jacket and dropped it to the floor, the camera riveted.
The 20-year-old danced for Myron Zabol in his photography studio as the rest of the crew whirled around them — an assistant, a props master, a hairdresser, a makeup artist, a costume designer. Myron’s future wife, Shirley, the shoot stylist, floated near three other models, two of whom were exotic dancers like Healey: Maureen Marder, resplendent in a red Holt Renfrew dress, and the quiet one Healey remembers only as Trish, who wasn’t sure she should even be there. “Look, it’s going to be OK,” Healey told her. “This could be your chance out of here.”
After weeks of planning, Myron and Shirley had decided to take the dancers out of Gimlets, the bar where they stripped, and into the studio. They needed what Myron now refers to as “a raw-edge feel” for this new kind of dancing Healey was doing — hence the white makeup, to make her stand out.
Conspicuously absent from the shoot was Tom Hedley, the man for whom this was all going down. In his stead, he had left a scribbled note about a woman with a blue-collar day job (Myron remembers her working in a steel mill, Shirley doesn’t) who dances at night. Earlier that April, The Globe and Mail had reported that Tom Hedley had sold the movie idea for development to Los Angeles production company Casablanca for $300,000 and 5% of the net.
Zabol looks over a contact sheet of slides from the 1980 photo sessions.
Photograph by Aaron Vincent Elkaim for BuzzFeed
Myron edited the photo session down to approximately 400 images and slipped the originals into slide sheets. He stored the outtakes in his archives and sent the rest to Casablanca. The Zabols (Myron and Shirley wed in 1984) and Gina Healey understood that the photos were to serve as a sort of mood board to help Hedley sell his script to a studio. He vowed to compensate them after Casablanca made the sale. Hedley and Myron shook on it. Shirley watched. Then Tom Hedley disappeared.
By 1981, the script, which Casablanca producer Lynda Obst helped Hedley hone over several months, had been sold to Paramount. Initially known as Depot Bar and Grill, it now had a new name: Flashdance. “The moment that fashion, music, and dance collided into a single image,” Hedley explains. “In a second, in a flash.”
The film was released in April 1983 and pirouettes around a young Pittsburgh welder, Alex Owens (Jennifer Beals), who works in a steel mill by day, strips by night, and pines for a spot at the local ballet school. At home she sports artfully torn off-the-shoulder tops and thigh-high leg warmers, but onstage she morphs into stripper Cinderella. Alex and her fellow dancers don elaborate costumes and perform complex choreography full of flips and hips to loud lights and louder music.
Paramount Pictures courtesy of Everett Collection
Before Flashdance, musicals were dead. “Then suddenly everywhere I went everyone was wearing one-shoulder sweatshirts,” producer Lynda Obst says. Flashdance, a thinly disguised life-support system for a music video, appealed to the nascent MTV generation, while the film’s blue-collar heroine embodied second-wave feminism's workplace gender politics.
Paramount’s sleeper hit went on to earn approximately $150 million worldwide and defined the look, style, and sound of the '80s. The title song, "Flashdance... What a Feeling," won an Oscar and wore out the radio waves, while the soundtrack, which also included "Maniac" and "Lady, Lady, Lady,” garnered a Grammy. Based on the terms of his deal with Casablanca, Hedley came out $8 million richer. The Zabols, however, received neither credit nor payment nor were their slides ever returned. Meanwhile, Gina Healey and Maureen Marder were paid $2,300 each for signing away their life stories to Paramount and agreeing never to talk about their involvement.
In the three decades since, neither Healey nor Marder nor the Zabols have been entirely able to move on. The dancers, who were legally bound to secrecy, feel they deserved more. The Zabols, who were not, agree. “How many millions of girls has [Gina] influenced worldwide? Millions and millions,” photographer Myron Zabol says. “If I would’ve gotten credit for what I had done, how would that have changed my career?”
It’s a question familiar to Hollywood. In the past five years alone, the filmmakers behind lucrative features like The Wolf of Wall Street, The Hurt Locker, The Hangover II, Honey, and Sister Act have all been sued by their alleged sources. Flashdance, though, captured not only the box office, but the zeitgeist, while the people who purportedly inspired it have been caught up asking “What if?” for 31 years.
“There was a lot of who did this and who did that, which is just complete nonsense, it doesn’t matter, it's irrelevant,” Hedley tells me. “You’ve got people here who had some peripheral involvement at the beginning and have taken some kind of identity out of this. It isn’t accurate. This is a piece of fiction.”
In 2008, Hedley, 71, revived his most lucrative piece of fiction in the form of a stage musical, which kicks off its second national tour in the fall. And this time, Gina Healey, Maureen Marder, and the Zabols are refusing to keep quiet about its backstory, despite the risk of litigation.
“I want it out there,” Healey says. “If they want to come and stomp on my face then so be it. “
Photograph by Aaron Vincent Elkaim for BuzzFeed
Now I hear the music / Close my eyes, I am rhythm / In a flash, it takes hold of my heart—“Flashdance... What a Feeling,” Irene Cara
Gina Healey lives by the water in Kingston, Ontario, a city of 123,000 that was once the capital of Canada. She is 54 but her voice is much younger. It’s bright and cheery and wide-eyed like Healey, who believes we were predestined to meet. She describes herself as a “faith-driven” person but she’s more mystical than that — “I walk from my soul,” she tells me. Healey shakes my hand hello, but hugs me good-bye. “Live with no excuses, love with no regrets,” reads a plaque in her apartment.
On this warm June day, Healey dresses all in black — black boots, black leggings, black vest, black jacket, black beret; a white button-down shirt breaks the monotony, as do her pale skin and fuchsia lips. The vitiligo on her hands explains her summer over-garb. She developed the autoimmune condition in 2006, before her marriage fell apart. Her recovery took a hit two years later, post-divorce, when she suffered a stroke — she is still undergoing rehab — while working nights as a cleaner at Loblaws, a Canadian supermarket chain.
Healey photographed in Toronto in August 2014.
Photograph by Aaron Vincent Elkaim for BuzzFeed
Healey’s one-bedroom apartment, like her, is part rock ‘n’ roll, part vestal. A silver jaguar sits on a glass coffee table with white legs, while we sit on a leather couch, equally white. It’s a dualism shared by Healey, who once struggled to maintain a sense of modesty while stripping for strangers. She laughed when Tom Hedley once told her Madonna claimed to be the first real flashdancer. “Madonna could never be Flashdance because she likes to take her clothes off,” she says. “There has to be a fight to be pure.”
Healey usually won the fight on stage. “I think there was a purity I felt inside when I was involved in the music that would keep me from feeling it was seedy,” she says. As someone who continued to read her Bible nightly, she used the music to justify her job. Still, Healey didn’t tell her mom about her stripping career and, to this day, she “has no idea about Flashdance.” As far as she knows, her dad doesn’t, either.
Healey’s father was an orchestra leader who left when she was 6. Two years later his daughter was mimicking The Monkees' Davy Jones, though she didn’t consider dancing seriously until she visited Canada’s National Ballet School on a class trip. “My heart wanted to do that, but I knew the expense was not something I could get,” Healey recalls. Clubs were affordable. In her teens, she snuck out so often to gigs with her boyfriend that her mom eventually kicked her out and she became a ward of the state.
“I didn’t wake up one day and decide taking my clothes off and dancing was the first thing I wanted to do. Neither do any of these girls,” Healey says. “Usually something’s happened.” For her, it happened when she was around 4, at the hands of a female babysitter. Though she grew up in a pious household that branded nudity a sin, the abuse removed what she believed to be the indignity of removing her clothes.
Gimlets was a refuge for women like Healey. The three-story red brick establishment at 73 Victoria St. — the address has since been incorporated into number 75, which houses the sterile Beer Academy brew pub — was more burlesque than strip. On a full night, Gimlets could hold about 50 patrons, which meant you were never that far from the roped-off, 8-foot stage. It was a safe spot for dancers to try out new acts for suits during the day and artists at night. Owner Nick Georgas, a Greek ex-pat, encouraged experimentation and treated the strippers well — no catcalling, no bad behavior, no money on stage. Men brought their wives and girlfriends.
By the time she started working at Gimlets in 1978, Healey hadn’t yet confronted her abuse. She expressed her anger as alter ego Gina La Machina — a friend’s stage name for her that stuck. “My ferocity onstage was, 'Nobody’s touching me and I’m not sexual to you,'" she says. “I lost myself in that world with the music.”
Gimlets was one of the rare Toronto clubs where strippers could deny their sexuality. It was a throwback to the original strip scene, rooted in performance art, partly because the dancers moved into the bars from the theater and partly because the era of Deep Throat and Emmanuelle was more permissive. Then, in 1977, a 12-year-old shoeshine boy named Emanuel Jaques was raped and killed on Yonge Street, igniting a metropolitan moral panic. Within a few years, Toronto had started issuing licenses to sex workers and strippers alike, and the latter, offended by the comparison, cleared out. In their place arrived table dancers, cheaper acts who pranced atop boxes for tips, denuding striptease of its art.
“The understanding of the tease also moved from the gradual revelation of the nude woman beneath her layers of costume, sometimes associated with a narrative, to a sexual erotics onstage, mimicking seductive poses in pornographic films and magazines,” wrote Deborah Clipperton, a Toronto-area stripper for 15 years, in Selling Sex, a collection of essays on the Canadian sex industry.
Flashdance caught the strippers before the tables turned. This was such an integral part of the original story that, according to Flashdance the Musical writer Robert Cary, Hedley briefed Cary's musical team on the end of Toronto striptease’s golden age. “We used to laugh and say, ‘My god, that girl spread her legs so wide you could see what she had for breakfast!’” says Ann Stirling, who had originally considered stripping a way for women to empower themselves. “We lost our power when things changed so much.”
Gina in the 1980s.
Courtesy of Gina Healey
Gina La Machina gave it back to them. Gina Healey towered above not only the table dancers but Gimlets’ traditional burlesque performers who would bump and grind in gloves and garters. “She was the most inspiring,” says Tom Hedley. She writhed to unlikely songs like Meat Loaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” and wore equally unlikely outfits. Gimlets' owner tried to put her in a G-string, but she sported swimsuit bottoms instead. She paired them with one of her many Salvation Army shirts and jeans and resisted taking anything off until the last beat. “I thought maybe I could make the music more important than my body,” she says.
In between sets she convinced limo drivers — she made around $400 a week and traveled only by limousine (Stirling says many dancers at the time, including herself, “wasted” their money) — and artist reps to bring musicians down to see her. She rocked out to “Need Your Love” for Cheap Trick, who gave her a standing ovation in return, and, as a present to Andy Summers from the Police — with whom she claims she had an affair — she performed to “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic.” (Summers did not respond to requests for comment, but Healey does pop up nude several times in his 1983 photo book Throb.) Healey even danced behind a scrim for Toto when they performed at Massey Hall. “I was trying to be in music videos,” she says. She landed two album covers instead — a 1978 self-titled record by the unfortunately named punk band Battered Wives and the 1979 self-titled debut by an all-girl disco trio called Touché.
These days Healey writes more often than she dances. She is working on an autobiography, I Flashdance, and is actively seeking an editor and a publisher. At the same time, she has been watching Tom Hedley promote his musical in the Canadian press. More than once she has heard him say that the women on whom Flashdance was based were never able to cash in on their dreams.
“Are you kidding me?” she says. “You took my dreams.”
Gina featured in Andy Summers' 1983 photo book entitled Throb.
Dancing behind masks, just sort of pantomime/But images reveal whatever lonely hearts can hide —“Lady, Lady, Lady,” Joe Esposito
Tom Hedley is primarily known as a magazine editor. Yes, he was credited with conceiving and co-writing Flashdance, Hollywood’s third-biggest release of 1983 — behind Return of the Jedi and Terms of Endearment. Otherwise his screenwriting career, which spanned six scripts over four years, has not been particularly noteworthy (apologies to the 1984 Rick Springfield vehicle Hard to Hold). In The Toronto Star in 2010, Hedley said his subsequent ideas were “too original and difficult to sell.” His editing career was more fruitful.
After becoming the youngest editor in Esquire history in the ‘60s, he returned home to Toronto and eventually took over the monthly magazine Toronto Life from 1977 to 1978. There he met Myron Zabol, who occasionally worked for the publication as an editorial photographer. At the time, Myron’s girlfriend Shirley had quit nursing to help style his shoots. The couple knew a number of exotic dancers around the city since they lived and worked at 241 Yonge St., steps from a strip club called Les Girls. “He and Shirley had a commiserating humanity toward the girls,” Gina Healey says. “They saw them as artists.”
Tom Hedley in Toronto, April 2014
Andrew Francis Wallace / Getty Images
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