NORM: Batten the hatches for Tempest Storm

Burlesque icon Tempest Storm is returning to a Las Vegas stage after a 19-year absence.

"I left my notorious past and I'm back to reclaim it," said Storm, who will be appearing at the Celebrity Theatre on opening night of the May 26-28 salute to burlesque weekend.

Along with Lili St. Cyr and Blaze Starr, the red-haired Storm was a burlesque queen during the 1950s and '60s.

She made her first appearance here at the Embassy nightclub in North Las Vegas in 1951 and her last in 1987.

"I'm old enough for Medicare and young enough for men to care," Storm, 78, said in a telephone interview.

In her day, she dated Elvis Presley and was linked to John F. Kennedy and Sammy Davis Jr.

Raised in Georgia as Annie Blanche Banks, she left an abusive home life at age 14 and made her way to Los Angeles in her late teens.

All of 19, she was a popular carhop at Simon's Drive-In in L.A. before getting into show business.

That summer, she was seeing a handsome man named Ben, and on June 20, 1947, she was to go out on a date with him, "but my boss called me and said I had to come in because one of the girls was sick."

A day or so later, the mob-hit murder of her friend Ben "Bugsy" Siegel, 41, operator of the Flamingo, was front-page news.

"I had no idea he was connected to the mob until he was murdered," Storm recalled.

By 1957 she was starring in Minsky's Follies, the first topless show in Las Vegas. Later, her striptease show helped put the sin in Sin City, when she headlined at the Dunes and the Aladdin.

"Burlesque is back," she said.

And so is Tempest Storm: She moved back to Las Vegas in February.

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