Utanför universum (enligt hennes biografi Gudinna av kärlek inkarnat: livet för Stripteuse Lili St. Cyr. ) var hennes inblandning en hyllning till Richard O'Brien Smiths ungdomars besatthet med allting kitsch och glam.
Ordalydelsen av låten "Dream It It - Be It" (och förmodligen mycket av resten av filmen) innehåller uppenbarligen flera in-joke referenser till obskyra 1950-talet burleska tidningar.
Growing up in New Zealand in the 1950s, Richard Timothy Smith's "adolescence was swamped with joys that most of the fifties decent society decried as mindless, comics, rock-n-roll, B-movies." He became fascinated with comic books and pulp fiction, in his town of Tauranga was a shop filled with kitsch and magazines. Lili St. Cyr. adorned many of those magazines.
Smith became fascinated with her. She "was one of the most beautiful women in the world and, by default, a transsexual's dream girl." Smith noted that burlesque "was aimed at the eternal adolescent in males." Lili clearly was the leading element of that "particular Zeitgeist."
In 1973 Smith, now known by his stage name of Richard O'Brien, wrote what would become the cult hit The Rocky Horror Picture Show, both the musical and, in 1975, as a cowriter, the screenplay.
The character Janet, played by Susan Sarandon in the film, sings "Don't Dream It— Be It." It was inspired by one of O'Brien's pulp magazines asking the question, whatever happened to King Kong actress Fay Wray? The last line of the song is "It's beyond me, help me, Mommy — God bless Lily [sic] St. Cyr." And though it was just twenty-five years from her heyday in the fifties, most of RHPS's audience had no clue who Lili St. Cyr was. The "inclusion of Lily [sic] was driven by the recognition of my own imagined self."
O'Brien believes the LA stage version bought some of their costumes from Lili's lingerie store in 1974.