Leroy Griffith

Leroy Charles Griffith was born on March 26, 1932, in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, the second of three children of Stella Duncan (1909 to 1961) and Floyd Roy Griffith (1909 to 1984). His father was a theater manager, police officer, and concession stand operator, and his family's obituary adds that he also manufactured concrete blocks. Leroy grew up inside the movie business: he sold popcorn at his father's Strand Theater, ran concessions at the Jewel Theater, and worked as a projectionist, cashier, and usher at local theaters. Decades later his father moved to Florida to work in his son's growing theater business.

Details of Griffith's formal schooling have not been made public. His real training came on the job. At 17 he left Poplar Bluff for St. Louis to work concessions at the Grand Burlesque Theatre for theater concessions operator Oscar Markovich, starting as a "candy butcher" who sold candy and trinkets to audiences before shows and during intermission. He worked his way up to concessions manager, later managed concessions for Harold Minsky's burlesque houses in Chicago, and by 1955 was concessions manager at the Folly Theater in Kansas City while owning the Missouri Coffee Shop on the side.

Griffith was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1955 in Hot Springs, Arkansas. While stationed at Elmendorf Air Force Base near Anchorage, Alaska, he worked with Bob Hope's USO show when it toured there in December 1956, a bill that included Jerry Colonna, Mickey Mantle, and Ginger Rogers. Wikipedia lists his rank as first lieutenant. He received an early discharge and returned to show business at 25.

After the Army, Griffith managed his first theater, the Garden in Detroit, and then ran the burlesque revue "Club 17" for the King Reid Shows carnival on the New England and Canada circuit. He began acquiring legitimate theaters that were going out of business and reopening them with an adult policy. He told The New York Times in 1970 that he once built a new theater and lost money showing The Sound of Music, then took in $4,000 in his first week after switching to adult fare.

From the late 1950s through the late 1960s he was among the leading burlesque producers in the United States. Earl Wilson called him the "new Minsky," and in 1966 the New York branch of the American Guild of Variety Artists told The New York Times he was the largest producer in the field. His shows featured showgirls, strippers, comedians, and vaudevillians, with stars such as Candy Barr, Virginia Bell, Dixie Evans, Lili St. Cyr, Blaze Starr, and Tempest Storm. In New York City he operated the Gayety (now the Village East Cinema), the Hudson, the Mayfair Burlesque (later Sony Hall), the Metropolitan, and the Shore on Coney Island. In 1965 he directed and co-produced The Wonderful World of Burlesque, which ran 211 performances off-Broadway at the Mayfair Theater, and produced Hello Burlesque.

Griffith also produced sexploitation films, including Bell, Bare and Beautiful (1963), Lullaby of Bareland (1964), The Case of the Stripping Wives (1966), Mundo depravados (1967), and My Third Wife, George (1968). In Mundo depravados he cast Tempest Storm alongside her husband Herb Jeffries, an interracial pairing that was unusual for the period.

In 1961 he came to Miami Beach and took over the Paris Theater (described in his family obituary as the former Variety Theater), reopening it as the Paris Follies. He went on to run theaters from Key West to Jacksonville and across Miami and Miami Beach, including the Gayety on Collins Avenue, the Carib, Beach, and Flamingo on Lincoln Road, and the Cameo, Plaza Art, and Roxy on Washington Avenue. In 1970 he bought the Boulevard in Miami for $125,000 and renamed it the Pussycat, later rebranded as Wonderland and Gold Rush. As tastes changed he converted burlesque houses into adult cinemas and later strip clubs. In 1994 he turned the Roxy into Club Madonna and the Gayety into the Deja Vu club. In 2018 he booked Stormy Daniels for a two night appearance at Club Madonna. Wikipedia gives his years active as 1949 to 2024.

Griffith spent much of his career in court. In 1961 he was fined $500 in Columbus, Ohio, for showing B-Girl Rhapsody; he welcomed the arrest as a chance to "demand the same rights as any other American," and in 1963 the Ohio Supreme Court overturned the conviction and found the state's film censorship law unconstitutional. In 1962 Indianapolis revoked the license of his Ritz Theater after a raid. In 1970 he staged the nude play Fear of Love at the Roxy in Miami Beach, leading to a grand jury indictment, raids, and arrests before he withdrew the show.

In 1974 he won a $32,038 judgment against Linda Lovelace after she failed to appear in a stage revue he had booked at his Paramount Theater in Miami. In 1982 he sued to stop a committee proposed by Miami Mayor Maurice Ferré to judge obscenity on cable television, and the mayor dropped the plan. In 1985 he clashed with Hialeah Mayor Raul Martinez over the Atlas Cinema and lost a zoning challenge. The Pussycat in Miami was raided 18 times over roughly a decade; in 1987 prosecutors tried to close it under Florida's racketeering law, and a judge dismissed the complaint. The same year Miami auctioned his theater equipment to collect fines, and Griffith himself placed the winning bid.

With Miami Beach, the dispute ran from the 1989 and 1990 ordinances banning alcohol where nudity was offered into the early 2020s. Griffith adapted by running all nude, alcohol free clubs and fought the city in court, including a federal suit against several officials. His family wrote that across seven decades he outlasted 17 Miami Beach mayors and 16 city managers.

Wikipedia lists four marriages: to Carolyne Sandler (married 1958), Joy Hodges (divorced 1964), Juanita Gilreath (divorced 1969), and Linda Rivera, whom he married in 1989 and who survived him. His children were born of earlier marriages. His family's obituary names surviving children Charles Griffith, Cash Griffith, Kimberly Vandergriff, and Vanessa Philman, along with several grandchildren and great-grandchildren; Wikipedia's infobox lists five children in total.

In May 1964 Griffith saved his 18 month old son Cash after pulling him unconscious from the family pool at their Venetian Islands home, crediting mouth-to-mouth instructions he had read on a flight the week before. His son Charles was convicted in the 1985 mercy killing of his three year old daughter, who had been in a long coma after an accident; he later pleaded guilty to second degree murder in 1995, was released, and went on to publish an addiction recovery magazine and open a sober house in his daughter's memory.

In later years Griffith walked his dog around his gated neighborhood, spent time with Linda and their cats, played cards with close friends, and liked lunches at Joe's Stone Crab and the 11th Street Diner, casino outings, cruises to the Bahamas and Bermuda, and late meals at the Denny's at Biscayne and 36th. He became close friends with former Miami Beach mayor Alex Daoud, once an opponent, until Daoud's death in 2025.

Griffith consistently framed his fights with city halls as questions of constitutional rights and free expression. When Cuban exile protests and bomb threats greeted his 1971 screenings of the film Che!, he told The Miami Herald: "Freedom of expression and the freedom to see what you chose to see is what they came over here for, isn't it? In America we have the right to see, hear and do what we like." He often blamed his clashes with authorities on "politicians wanting their name in the papers."

In December 1965 Earl Wilson thanked Griffith in print for a Christmas check to the Earl Wilson Help the Needy Fund. In October 1966, after the 23rd Street fire in Manhattan killed 12 firefighters, his Gayety Burlesque devoted the proceeds of a show to the firefighters' widows and 32 children. For years he staged annual benefit shows at the Carib Theater in Miami Beach for the Police and Firemen's Benevolent Association; when the police chief objected in 1969 to a $2,200 donation, the association kept it and used it to start a scholarship fund for the children of officers and firefighters killed before retirement. He also supported the Miami Beach police softball teams and pension fund and donated bicycles to the department's bike patrol in 1997.

1970s: Key to the City of Miami Beach, awarded by Mayor Harold Rosen. 1970s: Recognition for "unselfish contributions" to the annual All-Star show from the Miami Beach Police and Firemen's Benevolent Association. 1997: Recognition for "outstanding dedication and service" to the Washington Avenue Bike Unit, Miami Beach Police Department. 1999: Recognition for "generous support" of the Miami Beach Police softball teams. 2000: Recognition for "generosity and continued support" from the Miami Beach Policemen's Relief and Pension Fund. 2007: Best Adult Club in Miami Beach for Club Madonna, The Miami SunPost.

Griffith made brief cameo appearances in some of his own films, including as a theater manager in Bell, Bare and Beautiful (1963). He shared his memories of the burlesque era in Leslie Zemeckis's 2010 documentary Behind the Burly Q. His Miami Beach home on Pine Tree Drive was a location for the Frank Sinatra films Tony Rome (1967) and Lady in Cement (1968). Interior theater scenes in Norman Lear's The Night They Raided Minsky's (1968) were filmed in his Manhattan Gayety, and scenes for South Beach Academy (1996) were shot inside Club Madonna. A young Mickey Rourke once worked for him in Miami Beach as a cashier and projectionist.

Griffith's adult businesses drew decades of opposition from officials, churches, schools, and residents, with repeated raids, arrests, license revocations, and lawsuits in Ohio, Indiana, Louisiana, and Florida. In 1994 lawyers for the singer Madonna demanded he rename Club Madonna; his attorney replied that Madonna was a name "that's been in the public domain for a couple of thousand years," and the name stayed. In 2013 Club Madonna was briefly shut down after police discovered that a trafficked 13 year old girl had been performing there. Griffith maintained he did not know, saying he and his manager were out of town; neither he nor his management was charged, and three men accused of trafficking the girl and taking her tips were arrested.

Griffith was one of the last links between the classic American burlesque circuit and the modern adult entertainment industry. His legal victories, alongside those of other operators, helped push back against film censorship and restrictive local ordinances, and contributed to the wider acceptance of adult entertainment in American society. In South Florida he became a fixture of Miami Beach history, a businessman whose theaters spanned the city's postwar heyday, its decline, and its South Beach revival.

Leroy Griffith died peacefully at his home in Miami on October 3, 2026, at the age of 94, his family said. A cause of death was not made public. His death was reported by the Miami Herald on October 9, 2026. He was survived by his wife Linda, his former wife Juanita Gilreath, his children Charles Griffith, Cash Griffith, Kimberly Vandergriff, and Vanessa Philman, and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren. In accordance with his wishes, his body was donated to the University of Miami for medical research and education.