by Karen Abbott
Big Lady often fled her dull, untidy life in Seattle and ventured out to San Francisco or Juneau or Tonopah, lugging a trunk of hand-sewn corsets and garters dotted with beads and jewels. Undergarments were her specialty. On the backs she embroidered hearts and across the fronts naughty angels who cracked jokes in bright, cursive lettering. In Goldstream, Nevada, the prostitutes were among her best customers. But she catered to all kinds, even embroidering an altar cloth for the nuns of Sacred Heart Convent.
Once, after Rose, Louise, and June moved in, Big Lady took an extended trip. Rose asked her to knit an afghan throw rug while she was on the road. Months passed, and Rose wondered when it would be finished. “Dozens of tiny squares don’t knit themselves together, dear,” Big Lady told her. Rose accepted this, and kept sending her mother money for yarn.
Meanwhile, Rose described the project to a few neighbors in West Seattle, who told her that they, too, were waiting for this same afghan. They’d also sent money for yarn. Next time they spoke, Rose accused her mother of running a scam.
“Now, Rose,” she explained, “I keep track of every penny sent by each person, so when I finish knitting I’ll add up the score. You see, darling, the one who has paid the most gets the prize. It’s a sort of auction, only it’s private and it goes on during, not after, I make the afghan.”
Impressed, Rose told the story to her daughters. “There’s nothing ordinary about your Big Lady, girls,” she said, and only hoped she could pass on such valuable lessons.
During Rose’s childhood, Charlie Thompson quietly tolerated both Big Lady’s long absences and her brief appearances. His hair was bone white by the age of twenty-seven, and he held the same job his entire life, working as a cashier for the Great Northern Railway. He escaped only as far as his own backyard garden. There, at least, nothing talked back or disobeyed or seethed with disappointment.
Rose didn’t care to pass her time at Seattle’s Alki Beach with neighborhood girls, stringing “Indian necklaces” made of wild rose seed pods. Instead she longed to be on the stage, and Charlie Thompson indulged her, but only for one summer. He had no choice, really; each night the child cornered him with tales of vaudeville routines past and present, and she wasn’t alone in her fascination. “Vaudeville was America in motley,” wrote one historian, “the national relaxation … we flocked vicariously to don the false face, let down our back hair, and forget.”
Variety, as the entertainment was originally called, had its roots in Europe, where itinerant performers trouped from town to town and village to village. Later in the century, “vaudeville” became the more popular term, derived from vau-de-Vire, the valley of the Vire River in Normandy, where locals gathered on mild nights to show off whatever odd or remarkable talent they happened to possess. Similarly, it had always been American tradition to enliven a play with entr’acte performances by singers, dancers, magicians, and acrobats. George Washington, in black satin court dress, always preceded by an usher carrying lighted wax candles in silver candlesticks, used to stroll down the aisle of the old John Street Theatre in lower Manhattan. From the decorated presidential box Washington reportedly saw The School for Scandal no fewer than three times, but not because he enjoyed the play. “His Excellency,” confessed one colleague, “seemed greatly charmed with Mlle. Placide, the lively tight-rope dancer from Paris, who appeared in most gracious diversions between the acts.”
Vaudeville became a community enterprise, cheap entertainment for new immigrants, offering something for everyone: skits, jugglers, singers, minstrel acts, and “coon shouters” (the most famous of whom was a Jewish woman named Sophie Tucker, who donned blackface and sang “Nobody Loves a Fat Girl, but Oh How a Fat Girl Can Love”), gymnastics, animal and human tricks, comedy sketches, choreographed brawls, innovative dancing (in one popular number, a woman spun and leapt and pirouetted among two dozen eggs, never breaking a one), and bluntly ribald humor. A perennially popular skit, “The Haymakers,” began with a group of harvesters, boys and girls, working on a farm. Eyebrows waggled, bawdy quips were exchanged, and each boy lined up to visit the same girl behind the haystack, shocked expressions and disheveled appearances betraying their indiscretion.
Dime museums, such as P. T. Barnum’s famous place on Broadway, staged 10-cent shows in divided buildings—one for freak exhibitions, the other for variety acts—showcasing fat ladies, bearded women, pickled embryos in jars, Bertha Mills and her nineteen-inch feet, Laloo and the parasitic, headless twin sprouting from his stomach, Down syndrome children passed off as “Aztecs,” and a few entertainers who would go on to achieve legitimate success, including comedians Weber and Fields and magician Harry Houdini.
For years Houdini was the highest-paid vaudeville star in the country, and crowds flocked to see him, hoping to learn his secrets. One renowned songwriter, Gerald Marks, recalled following Houdini from show to show. Every time the magician appeared wrapped in heavy chains and prepared to submerge himself, upside down, into a tank of water, he warned the crowd, “This is a very dangerous thing I’m about to do, and I don’t know if I’m going to come out alive. I always kiss my wife good-bye.” With that, Bess Houdini rose solemnly from her seat in the front row, approached the stage, and embraced her husband. One night the songwriter discovered the secret: Bess, too, was an illusionist, distracting everyone with her sweet, stoic smile and then slipping a key beneath Houdini’s tongue.
In New York City a producer named Tony Pastor introduced “refined” vaudeville, shows to which respectable men could take their wives, sisters, or sweethearts without fear of encountering harlots or drunken revelers. Pastor favored sweet, wholesome performers such as the minstrel duo who first sang the tune “While Strolling Through the Park One Day.” The idea spread, and managers across the country advertised theaters with “no wine room” and exhorted the new commandments of vaudeville: Keep it clean, keep it neat, keep it dainty. No hells, no damns, no mention of any deities. Ladies will wear silk tights to the hip. And if you have to stoop to dirt to get a laugh, you’re in the wrong theater.
In 1904, the summer she was twelve, Rose joined a group of child vaudevillians, practicing the mandolin and dance routines, but when the days shortened again Charlie Thompson told her enough was enough. He enrolled her in a Catholic boarding school for girls in Seattle, where, according to Big Lady, she could “learn manners and obedience from the sisters.” Big Lady herself claimed to read the Bible regularly and warned of God’s growing wrath. “God wouldn’t like the way men have turned everything around,” she said, “to make things easier.”
Rose came to believe that God witnessed her every act and heard her every thought, and that He cleared a path especially for her. She didn’t need outside channels or people to get His attention. To underscore her point, she used her Bible to make a paper doll family. When the silence of the halls grew unbearable, Rose told the nuns she had to go home to visit her sick father. Instead she joined any roving vaudeville troupe that happened to pass through. After a few weeks the nuns caught on, dispatched a search party, and found her, invariably, in the front row of a chorus, singing out louder than anyone.
A dozen years, two divorces, and two children later, Rose begged her father to assist his granddaughters’ burgeoning careers. Charlie Thompson acquiesced when she asked for two favors: a recital at the Knights of Pythias lodge hall, where he would play piano, and money for costumes. Rose still had a flare of hope for Louise—the girl had done one thing right, scoring first prize in a “Healthy Baby” contest when she was a year old—and decided to dress her in a sensible ensemble: striped skirt and black sweater, feathered hat, and white stockings tucked into thick-heeled Mary Janes. June got a pink tarlatan ballet dress and toe shoes and a butterfly pin that nested inside her blond curls, which Rose touched up with a dab of peroxide. Every night she knelt before her baby and massaged cold cream onto June’s knees, and every afternoon she took June to the best vaudeville houses in Seattle. Watching from the wings of the Orpheum or the Adm
iral or Pantages, Rose ordered her daughter to memorize all of the best songs and steps, and she did, within hours. “We always,” June said, “stole our stuff.”
The Hovick girls’ debut followed the induction of new Knights of Pythias officers, and once the men took their seats Louise found herself in the center of the room. Her brown hair was bobbed at midear, Dutch boy style, and the hat’s tight string gave her an extra chin. She was wide and round and curveless—her grandpa called her “Plug”—and both her front teeth sloped to a point, like sharpened pencils. Every month Charlie stashed some money away, saving up for the dentist.
She sang a tough tomboy number—“I’m a hard-boiled rose, everybody knows”—and executed a series of poses too disjointed to be called a dance. Knee bent, heel lifted, hands on hips, swivel and repeat from the other side, scowling all the while. A stage direction on the sheet music instructed, “Pull skirt up,” and at the appropriate place in the song Louise did, sliding a gloved hand up one pudgy thigh.
Rose kept silent as Louise performed, waiting in the wings for June’s turn. “Baby June” was her new name, her official name, though by now she was two and a half years old. Charlie Thompson struck a chord and his granddaughter spun out, splitting in the air and raising herself up. “The rose step,” Rose called out, hands clasped as if in prayer. Her voice carried to every corner in the room. “Smile, dear, smile. That’s right. Now, arabesque, arabesque.” Baby June was more graceful than either Leland sister and prettier than Anna Pavlova, the famous Russian ballerina.
Charlie Thompson could play the piano by ear but kept his eyes fixed on the sheet music, never once glancing up at June. “Fank you,” she said, falling into bow after bow, her forehead flush against her knees, compact as a folding chair. “Fank all of you.” Inside her tiny toe shoes the Baby’s feet were bleeding. Rose had just enough money for a brand-new pair, filched from her father’s account. Louise’s teeth could wait; the girl didn’t need a proper smile to sing about being a rose, hard-boiled or otherwise.
Chapter Three
A Minsky never says die, or if he does, he says it softly.
—THE NEW YORK TIMES
New York City, Late Spring 1912
“Billy Minsky!” a voice called from behind, and the man who owned that name turned. It was late, and the street lamp cast a dim semicircle of light on the corner of 14th Street and Second Avenue. He couldn’t see who was wielding the gun, just its long silver finger of a barrel, pointing and accusatory.
He should have known this was coming. Wasn’t it just a few weeks ago that four gangsters pulled up to the Metropole Café in a Packard touring car and shot Beansie Rosenthal dead? Beansie had been Billy’s source, telling him all about a crooked police lieutenant and his graft and gambling and prostitution rackets. Billy knew it was risky to write about the scandal for the New York World, but he had always been one to take chances. He embodied the times, preferring swift action to careful planning, no matter the consequences. “This is a get-things-done-quick age,” Life editorialized that year. “A ready-to-put-on-and-wear age. A just-add-hot-water-and-serve age. A new-speed-record-every-day age. A take-it-or-leave-it-I’m-busy age.” He penned article after article about the lieutenant and his henchmen, thugs with names like Billiard Ball Jack and Gyp the Blood. His exposé had sent several of them to jail earlier in the year, and now one of them was out here, waiting for him by the stoop of his family home.
Rivington Street on the Lower East Side, circa 1912. (photo credit 3.1)
Beneath the ceaseless clamor of the Lower East Side, the most crowded neighborhood in the world, Billy Minsky heard the cock of the gun. The silver finger quaked and lowered, pointed directly at his forehead. Billy dropped to the pavement.
If Billy were a spiritual man—as his father, the son of a rabbi, wished—he might have taken that moment to reflect on how he’d made it this long, this far. He spent all of his twenty-three years operating at only one speed and in one direction, furious and forward, convinced that a collision could only improve the ride. As a child he played in the alleyways of the Lower East Side, outrunning his brothers and outwitting his friends. He learned the nuances and advantages of pitting people, and even entire blocks, against one another: Rivington Street hated Allen, Allen scoffed at Delancey, Delancey considered Forsyth a band of savages, and they all looked down on Uptown—except for Billy.
A chronic fugitive, he skipped school, fled to the Houston Street station (always dodging the attendant), and took the El to 42nd Street, watching the neighborhoods shift, the East Side’s murky scrim yielding to Broadway’s gaudy brilliance. He took frequent trips to the grand old mansions along Fifth Avenue. Not his style, he decided, though he certainly appreciated the money required to live there. When the time came for his bar mitzvah, he addressed his beaming relatives with eloquence beyond his years.
“As I enter a new phase of my life,” he said, “the New World I live in enters a new phase too, its twentieth century.… I will take from the new century what is good, and just, and right.… I will give to the new century what is mine to give, my gifts from the past, the gift from my parents, from all my people since the days of Abraham. I will take and I will give.”
He meant the last words literally, having cribbed his entire speech from a book he’d found in the public library titled Anthology of Orations for All Occasions, and then given to it his singular flair for showmanship. His mother wept, convinced that her unruly boy—“such a trouble,” she called him—had finally come around, and his father, though he’d be loath to admit it, knew all too well which parent was responsible for Billy’s dramatic gifts. A few years later, the boy dropped out of high school. It didn’t matter, he insisted, since he’d earned something more useful than a GED—a GE, his “gutter education.”
He had already grown into his adult height of barely five feet four, a short, squat doorstop of a man, and gave the impression of being too big for himself. He approached work with the same relentless energy he’d applied to everything else, tending to the jumble of schemes in his head careening along like overloaded freight cars, threatening to veer off track, always one more charging around the bend. A Wall Street firm hired him as a messenger boy, the New York Stock Exchange let him answer telephones, and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World decided he’d make a fine journalist.
He did. He was the only reporter who talked his way into the office of J. P. Morgan, Sr., hoping to get the financier’s opinion on President Theodore Roosevelt’s decision to remove “In God We Trust” from American currency. For hours Billy sat in a leather chair in Morgan’s office, waiting. He filched a cigar from a humidor on the desk, lit up, puffed away, and waited some more. The smoke from the Havana clogged the air, and Billy’s empty stomach began to churn. I’m going to be sick, he thought, and couldn’t find a trash can. Indeed, the only available receptacle was Mr. Morgan’s silk hat. Fleeing from the office, clutching the cigar with one hand and his mouth with the other, Billy recounted the story often and with great verve to anyone who would listen. A week later, J. P. Morgan issued a statement declaring his thoughts on the matter: he liked God and he liked money, and saw no reason to separate the two. Billy counted it as a win.
He also crashed Gladys Vanderbilt’s wedding to Count László Széchenyi of Hungary. While the choir from St. Patrick’s Cathedral serenaded the couple, Billy slipped into the Vanderbilts’ Fifth Avenue mansion wearing his old messenger-boy uniform. After the reception, twenty of his colleagues hoisted him up on their shoulders and carried him to the Plaza Hotel, eager to hear tales of what went on behind the event’s barred doors. Impressed, his editor made him a society reporter, and every night from then on the high school dropout wore a crisply pressed tuxedo no matter where he went or whom he talked to, including underworld characters such as Beansie Rosenthal and shadowless, armed thugs who followed him home.
Billy was lucky, really, that the neighborhood itself hadn’t already killed him. The city that would one day make Gypsy
Rose Lee was filled with people who wouldn’t make it to tomorrow. At the turn of the century, Jews fled pogroms in Russia only to find that life in New York’s Lower East Side was scarcely safer. Two thousand people to an acre, fifteen people squeezing into tenement apartments measuring just 325 square feet, all connected by a dingy web of laundry lines. Dead-eyed women stood half naked in streets, babies suckling openly at breasts. Children were warned never to enter the Orchard Street lairs of the Gypsy women, with their billowing skirts and gold flashing from ankle to teeth; no fortune in this neighborhood was worth hearing, anyway. Hit men abided by a strict pay scale: $10 for the administering of a sound beating, including discoloration of eyes and, perhaps, the loosening of teeth; $50 for breaking the subject’s nose or blinding him; $100 for preparing him for delivery to a hospital; and $500 for murdering him outright.
Billy’s father had faced certain death himself when, in 1883, he was conscripted into the army of Russian Tsar Alexander III. Panicked, he made inquiries and connections among his fellow Jews and finally found a man who was willing to sell his identity card. A private meeting, a discreet exchange, and, just like that, Louis Salzberg became Louis Minsky.
Louis fled Russia and settled in New York’s Lower East Side with his wife, Esther, and young son Avrum (“Abraham” in his new country). He worked as a peddler and saved enough money to buy a building on Grand Street. A natural marketing savant, he sewed a string of bed-sheets to use as a screen, projecting images of his dry goods interspersed with old Jewish proverbs and neighborhood gossip, complete with English subtitles. He offered free matzohs during Passover and a soda fountain for customers, who arrived parched and weary after riding cramped Manhattan El cars or the Brooklyn ferry. Soon Minsky’s Department Store was luring customers from long-established emporiums such as Arnold Constable, Lord & Taylor, and Milgrim’s. He told his sons a story that would shape the way they came to view the nature of business in general, and of thievery in particular.