In 1972, wearing Gracie Hansen's gown, using the name Darcelle, Walter Cole became the fifteenth empress of Portland, only the second empress elected in a new city-wide voting system that began the year before.

But Walter didn't just borrow Hansen's gown. He borrowed her entire persona. When the Hoyt Hotel went out of business, Walter in his own way became Hansen. Although diabetes took first one leg and then her life, Grade Hansen lives on, her jokes and dresses and loud personality, in the form of Darcelle XV

Well, they were sort of Hansen's jokes.

In her act, Walter says, Hansen carried a big feathered fan. But when she was learning a new routine, the fan would be paper so she could write her jokes on the inside. Her memory wasn't so hot. She'd stop, read a joke off the fan, and tell it. "When she needed new material," he says, "she went to see Totie Fields in Las Vegas and smuggled in a tape recorder."

Walter says, "I inherited all her wardrobe, and I'm still using parts of it. Her jewelry. Her sewing room . . . I'm still sewing on some of those sequins and beads and rhinestones from the Hoyt Hotel." He points out a framed photo of himself as the character Darcelle, wearing a sequined blue Gracie Hansen gown.

If you ask, Does it still fit him?

Walter says, "Yes . . . ?"

And the staff of his nightclub laughs.

"Okay!" he says. "So I added some feathers on the side. That's no sin!"

In 1972, when Walter opened his nightclub in Old Town, Roxy was in the original show. His first night tap dancing there, "Roxy's first boy tap dance got this," Walter says and claps once. "The next night, in drag, he got a standing ovation because nobody'd ever seen a tap-dancing drag queen."

Officially called "Walter Cole Presents: That's No Lady—That's Darcelle XV and Company," Walter and Roxy still run the last real burlesque show in town. In the North End's dark tradition of cabarets and music halls, it's a storefront theater, where—sick or well—the show must go on. Even now, at seventy-one years old, Walter Cole still adjusts the stage lights. He cleans the toilets. He makes his own costumes. When it rains too hard, the gutters flood the basement, and mopping up is also his job.

But when the curtain rises, he's wearing Gracie Hansen's gowns and jewelry, laughing her laugh. Telling her jokes. Well. . . telling Totie Fields's jokes.

"The only way I'll retire is when they plant me," Walter says. "And I hope it's during a full house."

"And he's just gotten a laugh," Roxy says.

"And I've just gotten a standing ovation," Walter says.

Darcelle's is at 208 NW Third Avenue. Phone: 503-222-5338.

10. BEHIND CLOSED DOORS