American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee

by Karen Abbott

  “It is not a critic’s play,” he explains. “It is a premeditated crime of box office. I knew exactly what I was doing.”

  Nevertheless, at Gypsy’s and Kaufman’s insistence, they head back to New York for a major overhaul, junking the first act and rewriting it entirely. The protagonist is no longer called “Gypsy” but “Honey Bee Carroll,” whose moneygrubbing mother, “Pansy,” carries a chicken under her arm and issues this command: “Just make it out to cash.” (Rose, true to form, takes grave offense at this portrayal, and threatens to file a suit claiming the play violates her civil rights.) Joan Blondell now wears a diaphanous nightgown instead of a bathrobe and performs several burlesque routines reminiscent of Gypsy’s, with powder puffs and an Adam-and-Eve costume adorned with leaves. Mike adds a mantelpiece clock that suffers a seizure each time it strikes the hour, a nod to William Saroyan’s fantastic pinball machine in The Time of Your Life. The top lifts and lets loose a gush of water, in which a school of fat plastic cherubs float and dip and dive. “A waterfall gets ’em every time,” Mike reasons, although Gypsy points out that Saroyan’s contraption works only because his play does as well. Borrowing again from Gypsy’s past, Mike also recruits several feathered and furry costars to join the cast, including seven dogs, one rooster, and a rhesus monkey named Herman. They begin fighting again, vehement clashes backstage and on the phone, and Mike tells her it would be best that she stop attending rehearsals.

  By the time they arrive in Pittsburgh on October 11, Gypsy can’t even look at him. “Mike,” she writes,

  I blame you for your not allowing me to be at rehearsals. For not allowing me a word as to the changes. For constantly belittling my efforts … you say you’re glad to break up the ‘Boy Genius’ myth. I’m only sorry you are pleased about breaking it with a play I bled over for many months, yes, years. You say you can razzle dazzle it.… Can you blame me for wishing that the play could stand on its own without a razzle dazzle?

  She also vents to the press. The Naked Genius, she quips, is neither naked nor displays any genius. “Every time I see that show,” she adds, “I get a new fever blister on my upper lip.” After the Pittsburgh reviews, Gypsy and Kaufman join forces and corner Mike.

  “The critics will slaughter us,” Gypsy says. “Fold it, Mike.”

  “I’m taking it to New York,” he replies, and that is that. She knows the source of his obstinance, and that it would be hypocritical to insist it doesn’t matter: money. Without at least a three-week Broadway run, his pending $350,000 deal with 20th Century–Fox will collapse.

  Fine, then, she tells him—change her credit to read “Written by Louise Hovick.” This mess will not be blamed on Gypsy Rose Lee. Kaufman finds a scapegoat of his own, a colleague and avowed nemesis. “Mr. Todd,” he requests, “change my credit to ‘directed by Jed Harris.’ ”

  On the night of the October 21 opening, Gypsy strolls into the Plymouth Theatre on 45th Street, her hair pulled into a sweet coiffure, like a dollop of ice cream, her cape hugging her shoulders, her cigarettes close at hand. Mike sits nearby with his prizefighter’s face, bracing for the punch. It’s the first time in twenty-five years on Broadway that Kaufman skips the opening night of one of his shows. “I can sort of understand why Gypsy Rose Lee and George Kaufman wanted The Naked Genius to close last week on the road,” writes critic Louis Kronenberger. “What I can’t understand is why they didn’t get out an injunction or mutilate the scenery or shanghai the cast.”

  Every word of it expected, but Mike saves two surprises just for her. After the curtain’s merciful drop, after the Saroyan-inspired clock stops seizing, after Joan accepts the only sincere applause of the evening, he helps Gypsy into the back of his limousine and directs the driver to the “21” Club, where even the phalanx of lawn jockeys seems to pass mute judgment. They take a booth near the kitchen where Ernest Hemingway once seduced a gangster’s wife. He kisses Gypsy chastely on the cheek and presents her with a small box. A gleaming gold compact from Cartier lies inside. It is her opening-night present, he tells her. She deserves it.

  Mike also tells her that he produced The Naked Genius just for Joan Blondell, and that she returned to Broadway after twelve years in Hollywood to be with him. He tells her he is determined to keep the play open, not because it’s Gypsy’s work but because he wants Joan to stay. He tells her he is in love with Joan, and plans to marry her as soon as he can.

  Gypsy listens to him, a howling silence in her ears. An emergency brake slams throughout the room. All around her laughter slurs to a halt, legs pause midstep, cigarette smoke thickens and clots. The moment splices itself in two, and she holds both parts up to the light. She could be her mother, dissolve into a cyclone of furious weeping, shade the feeling even blacker than it really is. Or she could be Gypsy Rose Lee, who knows when to let Louise Hovick meet her gaze, and tell her she has already given too much away.

  She stands and walks away without a word, leaving the gold compact on the table. She adds Mike to the list of things Joan has that she doesn’t, to the long list of things she’s never had at all.

  Chapter Twenty

  The first hundred stares are the hardest.

  — GYPSY ROSE LEE

  On the Vaudeville and Burlesque Circuits, 1928–1930

  Mother and daughter headed back to Seattle, the frosted windows of the Studebaker making the old neighborhood look softer than Louise remembered it. Her childhood resurrected itself in a lingering slide show: the squat clapboard house where Mother gave birth to her—the original Ellen June—and then took away her name; the lodge halls where Louise realized her sister had something she never would; the sight of Grandpa Thompson waiting on his front porch for any or all of the Hovick women to return to him, at long last.

  Mother told her a story about Grandpa Thompson on the long drive home, while sleet stabbed the windshield and the darkness closed in around them. When Grandpa was a little boy, Rose began, he went to live for a time with his aunt and uncle on their farm in North Dakota. It was a desolate place, the closest neighbors miles away. The winters were so brutal they had to crack the ice on the water pitchers just to wash their faces in the morning.

  Grandpa’s uncle was a kind man, but his aunt was volatile and cruel. She hated the isolation and repetition, her life nothing more than the relentless accumulation of the same empty day. She decided to escape. She gathered her five children and Grandpa Thompson, piled them into a big wooden sled, hitched up the horses, and set off.

  The six children huddled close and buried themselves beneath blankets. Grandpa Thompson watched his aunt stand up, cracking the whip like a man, her long black hair lashing back at the wind. Then he heard the howling of wolves. The pack chased the wagon, lunging at the horses’ hooves, leaping at their throats. The children cried, and the oldest, a boy Grandpa’s age, climbed in the front seat to protect his mother.

  With one swift movement she pushed the boy down into the wolves’ waiting mouths, and for a few moments they stopped chasing her. When the animals came back, she reached back for her other children and dropped them to the wolves, one by one. Grandpa Thompson clamped his hands over his ears to drown out the shrieks. By the time she returned to the farm, only the baby and Grandpa Thompson were left.

  Louise let the story replay in her mind and shut her eyes tight.

  “Mother,” she said, “they weren’t related to us, were they?” The answer was very important; she didn’t want that black-haired woman to be any part of her.

  “Yes, they were,” Rose said.

  And then they were home, Grandpa Thompson waiting on the porch, right where he belonged.

  Grandpa was at a crossroads as well, having tired, finally, of Big Lady’s fanciful excursions. He had begun an affair with a woman who lived nearby. One of these days, when Big Lady graced their little house with her formidable presence, he would slide the divorce papers across the table. She would treat them as she treated everything about their marriage, with no consideration or attention at a
ll, and sign without reading a word. Out of pure, blind fear, he would continue to live under the same roof with Big Lady, never telling her she was no longer his wife. When Big Lady discovered the truth, she turned to the daughter who best understood the importance of having the last word.

  “He can’t do this, Rose!” she raged. “I’ve given him the best years of my life. And now he thinks he’s going to marry her? And when he dies, she’ll get his pension? Oh, no, he isn’t going to get away with this!”

  Charlie Thompson, like every man involved with a Hovick woman, didn’t get away with anything. Six years later, in January 1934, he still hadn’t mustered up the courage to marry his girlfriend and was still living with Big Lady. One day they went out for a drive, and their car was struck by a railroad switch engine at Colorado Avenue and Spokane Street. Grandpa Thompson suffered severe spinal cord injuries and died five days later. Big Lady sustained minor head injuries and began collecting his pension.

  At the moment, Grandpa Thompson was comforted to see his daughter and at least one of his granddaughters. Taking Rose in his arms, he said it was fine to cry over June and the demise of the act, but not in front of the neighbors. No sense letting the past yank her back when she needed to plot a future. Rose dried her eyes and agreed. Then she got to work.

  First things first: no boys in the act this time—too untrustworthy and temperamental. Girls were much easier to handle. “We’ll comb the city of Seattle for talent,” Rose announced. “We’ll cover every dancing school, every amateur contest. We’ll get the cream of the city’s crop.” Her optimism waned, however, when she began making the rounds. Not one of them was as talented as June, and their looks failed to compensate. Even Grandpa Thompson was skeptical, musing that if this was the cream of the city, someone had scooped the top layer off the bottle.

  But Rose forged ahead, holding rehearsals in the basement of a local lodge hall. Louise set up her sewing machine in the corner and began work on the costumes: cretonne and organdy, with ruffled bloomers and oversized matching hair bows. She designed a black velvet trouser suit for herself since she was the “tailored type,” as Mother put it, which she took to mean that her weight was still a problem. The costumes fit Mother’s criteria: girlish and cheap.

  The act consisted of Louise and seven other girls: Madeline, Ruby, two Lillians, Dorothy, Mae, and Vanna. They would be called, alternately, “Madam Rose’s Debutantes” and “Madame Rose and Her Dancing Daughters.” For branding purposes, Rose decided each of them should take her name as a surname: Madeline Rose, Ruby Rose, and so on; even Louise would perform as “Louise Rose.” Mother sketched out prospective routines and personas: the “tuff” girl, the Hula Girl, the “rube” girl, a “Wop” number, a “Daddy song,” and a dance in which they used oversized mechanical baby dolls as partners. The freakishly flexible Ruby Rose, still petite enough to pass as a “wee tot,” did a contortionist routine. Louise adorned Ruby Rose’s brassiere with layers of filmy ruffles, so her “two tiny swellings” were concealed when she sank into her backbends. Since Rose didn’t take her dreams and omens lightly, she decided that Susie the Dancing Cow would be spared retirement. Grandpa Thompson helped them pack up the Studebaker, affixing the scenery to the roof, the cow head on the trunk rack, and makeup and shoes wedged along the running boards. Rose’s dogs and Louise’s new monkey, Woolly Face, crammed inside.

  Bookings were difficult at first. In El Paso, Texas, they served as the Tuesday-night entertainment for the local newspaper’s fourteenth annual Cooking and Better Homes Exposition. No admission charge and no payday, but Rose worked the press as only she could, promising “a kaleidoscopic pageant, differing in its whimsical phases, specialties and climaxing in a beautiful finale.” On to Tucson, where the Dancing Daughters were billed under the new Conrad Nagel talkie Let’s Make Whoopee. Just to shake things up a bit, Rose gave herself a number in the act, singing “Mother Machree”:

  There’s a place in my memory, my life, that you fill.

  No other can take it, no one ever will.

  For this performance, out of both habit and heartache, Rose submitted to the newspapers an old photograph of June.

  Three months now, and not a word from the Baby.

  Rose had no idea her daughter was living, as June herself put it, “in the shadow of the real world” on the dance marathon circuit, swaying on her feet for weeks at a time with only ten-minute intervals for rest, growing calluses on top of calluses, watching her fellow “horses” go squirrely from lack of sleep. The assistant surgeon general issued a graphic warning about the fad: “It’s the same as putting a five-ton load on a one-ton truck. Something must give. No nervous system, no matter how strong, can stand seventy hours of dancing without ill effects. It may result in overstrained heart, rupture the muscles, or cause serious injury to the nerves of the body. The dancers may not notice it for months but the strain they put on their bodies is certain to tell.”

  One teenage girl had visions of Jesus. Another disrobed in the middle of the dance floor and went through the motions of taking a shower. A young man gnawed off the tops of potted palms, believing they were fried eggs. Some talked to imaginary friends or snatched nonexistent objects from the air. A twenty-seven-year-old dancer named Homer Morehouse dropped dead of heart failure as he left the floor.

  But June, used to working herself past exhaustion, knew she could survive—and that this job was temporary. Every hour with Bobby on the dance floor was spent plotting her return back to both the stage and to Mother, this time following her own schedule, writing her own script.

  With Gordon’s negotiating skills in mind, Louise devised a plan: if they offered one free night, the managers might be persuaded to book them for a week or two. It worked. The Lyric Theatre in Yuma, Arizona, professed to host a “complete Orpheum Circuit,” but its advertisements blared pure burlesque:

  Attraction Extraordinary

  GIRLS—GIRLS—GIRLS

  And Then Some More

  Madame Rose

  —and—

  Her Dancing Daughters

  Vaudeville’s Most Beautiful Production

  Watta Show! Watta Show!

  The Dancing Daughters were actually headlining this time, their name strung up in blinking lights—so what if the orchestra was inadequate, with the town butcher moonlighting as the violinist and the manager’s teenage nephew working part-time as the drummer? If only a stagehand hadn’t nailed their scenery to the back wall, thereby making it impossible to enter and exit fluidly, a misstep that sent every girl but Louise into nervous hysterics. One of them refused to do her number with Porky, the baby pig Rose picked up at a roadside farm along the way. The contortionist’s shoulder strap broke as her dusty, stockinged feet brushed against her forehead, dropping her leotard and exposing her breasts. She quickly righted herself and fled the stage in tears. During the new military number, the backs of the uniforms were supposed to spell out DANCING DAUGHTERS in radium, a radioactive chemical (and, as it turned out, carcinogenic besides) used in luminous paints. Some of the girls were out of order, some sobbed in the wings, and the rest were too paralyzed to turn around. The audience tittered and offered a timid patter of applause.

  After the show Louise found Rose in their hotel room, consoling the girls. She could either join them and wait for her mother’s moods to turn, from sympathy to despair to outrage and back again, or she could step in and direct the action, sure as a conductor waving his wand.

  “Look at us, Mother,” Louise said. “You’re pretending we’re little girls and that’s what’s wrong. We aren’t little girls anymore. We’re almost grown up. Then why not make us look really grown up? Have us wear make-up and high heels—”

  Rose stood. “Stop that yelling and shouting,” she said. “You’ll wake up everybody in the hotel. High heels? Have you lost your mind? High heels, on these children?”

  “That’s just it!” Louise stepped closer to her mother. “We’re not children anymore. We’re not anything. We hav
e to make ourselves into something. Just think how much better we’d look if we were blondes!”

  Rose’s eyebrows leapt, and she clamped a hand over her mouth. After a moment her expression relaxed. “The girls might be very pretty as blondes,” she conceded. “Yes, I’m sure they would. And we could change the name of the act to “Madam Rose’s Baby Blondes.”

  “No, Mother,” Louise said. “I have a better idea. We’ll change the name to Rose Louise and Her Hollywood Blondes, and I’ll be the only brunette.”

  Rose relented. She watched as Louise poured peroxide over every head but her own, and agreed that the change called for new press photos. Arranged in ascending order of height, the girls flashed full-tooth grins for the camera, peering over pale, bare shoulders—all but Louise, who dipped her head coyly away from the others and allowed the corners of her lips only the slightest upturn. For the first time her face found a mask that fit: sultry, sly, and suggestive, with no trace of Plug, Hard-boiled Rose, or even Louise.

  Rose did her part updating the publicity materials, calling the Blondes “Seven Sunkist Sirens of Song & Dance” who were “really and truly from Hollywood” and scheduled to appear in “a number of the larger cities.” Despite their newly saucy appearance and the more suggestive phrasing of their ads, the act remained the same: the dancing cow, the mechanical dolls, the skit with Porky the Pig, the perennial “Hard-boiled Rose.” She secured them bookings at knock-off Orpheum Theaters in places like Marion, Illinois—theaters that weren’t on Martin Beck’s once-prestigious circuit but clung to the vestiges of his glory. The Orpheum Circuit didn’t even exist anymore, technically, having merged with the equally formidable B. F. Keith–Albee Vaudeville Exchange. Edward F. Albee, who once boasted “I am vaudeville,” was also ruined; his most trusted associate betrayed him by selling all of his Keith-Albee-Orpheum stock to one Joseph Kennedy, father of the future president.