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

by Karen Abbott

  She took a deep breath. “I’m real,” she murmured, in a voice she’d never heard before. “I’m no illusion—here take my hand, touch me—feel me …”

  Rose Louise and the Hollywood Blondes signed on for a month at the Gayety Theater, all of them—dogs and Porky the Pig and Woolly Face the monkey included—staying at a nearby hotel. They were making $250 a week (about $35 each) in Kansas City, and at the best New York houses—Minsky’s National Winter Garden, Minsky’s Apollo, and Irving Place—a bottom-billing girl could earn $70 to $125. A lot of big stars worked in burlesque, Rose reasoned, and “it all came under the heading of experience.” Mother looked at her differently now, Louise noticed, as if she were one of the forlorn Christmas trees dragged on the train during their vaudeville days—an inferior but acceptable facsimile of the real thing, a place to hang Rose’s flickering wishes and filmy dreams until every branch was covered, and no one could tell the difference.

  More than a year, now, since June’s escape, and Mother had yet to mention her.

  In addition to her act with the Blondes, Louise took part in several comedic sketches opposite the straight man, reciting lines like “Meet me round the corner in half an hour” and “Quick, hide, my husband.” She found ways to make the jokes funnier than they were, holding the ends of certain words to stretch them out, winking at herself as much as at the audience. In some strange, removed way, she felt as if she were acting.

  She knew it wasn’t talent, but who needed talent? What did talent get June but broken bones and a broken spirit and a broken life, out there somewhere doing God knows what? Mother was right when she said there was no substitute for flesh, but the axiom applied to burlesque, not vaudeville. Vaudeville, with its sense of sunny, mindless optimism, no longer spoke to the country’s mood. Burlesque did, loudly and directly.

  The Depression affected female workers to the same degree as men, and thousands of them, out of work and other ideas, applied at burlesque houses across the country: former stenographers and seamstresses and clerks, wives whose husbands had lost their jobs, mothers with children to support, vaudevillians who finally acknowledged the end of the line. Compared to other forms of show business—compared to any business—burlesque enjoyed a low rate of unemployment, and 75 percent of performers had no stage experience at all. Pretty girls were finally available at burlesque wages, and the supply equaled the demand.

  Burlesque houses from Chicago to Missouri to New York City employed a standard routine. Each applicant endured an interview conducted by the senior chorus girl, who called herself “the Captain.” Her first question—“Will you pose?”—was essentially an order: a girl should strip as bare as the boss demanded. Don’t worry about the audience, the Captain assured, because no one would be permitted to touch her. “Dance hall girls get handled by those bums,” she added. “There’s no monkey business in this show.” She called the boss over to assess a girl’s face, but she herself examined figures: disrobe, she ordered, and turn around, slowly, pausing left, right, back. The women found kinship with the desperate men who came to watch them, performer and spectator equally naked.

  Burlesque, like vaudeville, had its own language and rules, an accidental subculture forged by people who never intended to dwell there. For Louise it was as easy as memorizing passages from Das Kapital or Remembrance of Things Past during those long train rides and layoffs in dreary hotels. She learned that a “skull” is a double-take, delivered by a leering comic, and that G-strings might have been named for the lowest string on a violin. A provocative stripteaser was known as the “snake type,” and a voluptuous body was a “swell set-up.” When a drummer made a rim shot during a striptease number, he was “catching the bumps.” If a girl pulled her G-string aside or discarded it altogether, she was “flashing her knish.”

  Louise listened to the incessant, cheerful spiels of the candy butchers and marveled at the Gayety’s runway, the first she had ever seen. She learned it was taboo to watch other strippers’ acts from the wings; everyone worried about rivals copying routines and stealing gimmicks. “If you were caught watching in the wings,” one stripper warned, “you got a bloody nose.” Backstage, she saw girls rouge their nipples so they turned deep red under the blue spotlights. She encountered the young Jerry Lewis, tagging along with his comedian father and somehow sneaking backstage. “Oh, I like that,” the kid said, ogling the naked slingers and scampering from dressing room to dressing room until his father found him. “Jerrrryyy,” Dan Lewis called, yanking his son’s arm. “Let’s go.” She listened to the performers lament where they were and boast about where they belonged: in New York, under the direction of the one and only Billy Minsky, the best in the business—on any given night he might be sitting in the audience, waiting to discover them.

  She met the “G-string buyer” who offered each girl $5 for her garment; neither he nor his customers were interested unless they were used. She learned how backstage morals varied with time, place, and people. Sometimes the stripteasers and chorines were churchgoing and chaste, but more often prostitution thrived at the stage door. Some of the girls suffered multiple scars from surgeries to remove genital warts, and applied homemade tonics and potions to dull the symptoms of syphilis. Proper treatment for the disease required repeated shots of arsenic compounds alternated with shots of bismuth to reduce the chance of toxic reaction, weekly appointments for more than a year, an ordeal that could cost as much as $1,000. If a girl couldn’t afford a complete regimen, she skipped appointments and soon suffered a relapse.

  Louise came to understand the bartering system, both crude and intricate, internal and external, that allowed someone to take off her clothes for a living. By prescribing explicit rules and regulations of undress and behavior, the censors actually helped those who were inclined to push the limits; anything that wasn’t expressly forbidden was, in effect, sanctioned. The girls knew this, and also that more of their unemployed sisters would be joining burlesque each day. Increased numbers meant fiercer competition, and fiercer competition bullied them into going further than they might otherwise have dared.

  Louise realized that the men, too, were familiar with the system, and came to the theaters fully prepared for the “early-bird acts,” women kissing their own breasts and crouching on the runway, low down and close enough to touch. When the lights dimmed they pulled a milk bottle from their jacket, stuffed a slab of liver inside, and undid their zipper. As a lark, the house drummer occasionally got in on the act, asking a patron in the first row, “Am I keeping the right rhythm for you? You want me to go any faster?” Some of the more discreet customers brought newspapers to spread across their laps, the rattling progressing within minutes from timid to furious, and Louise wondered what the girls onstage were thinking while all this went on: if they indulged themselves and felt sick inside the moment, if they imagined a kind and distant place, or if they somehow willed their minds to remain empty of all things.

  On February 21, 1930, police raided the Gayety, the sergeant in charge complaining of “shocking” displays of anatomy and immoral “parties” where the revelers committed acts not fit for print. Rose, Louise, and the Blondes packed up their animals and costumes and hit the road again. They had a driver now, a friend of one of the Gayety’s stagehands. Her name was Murphy and she was, in the words of the stagehand, “as big as a horse, a real good-natured slob,” with the “strength of ten men.” She had worked as a taxicab driver and a housepainter, and Rose adored her right away.

  They ended up in Toledo, Ohio, where they had an engagement at another Gaiety Theater, same pronunciation, different spelling. Louise suggested they camp out instead of wasting money on hotel rooms, and Rose agreed. She unwound the grouch bag from her waist and paid $42.50 for a secondhand tent, a two-burner cook stove, stakes, a box of cooking equipment, and an army cot. Murphy drove the Studebaker past city limits to the most rustic spot she could find, a weedy swath of grass behind a welding shop. They brushed their teeth in a nearby trickle of wat
er, donned flannel nightgowns, and slept in a tight line, the dogs and Porky coiled by their feet, the monkey at Louise’s side.

  Louise awakened a few hours later to the sound of strange footsteps. A hobo was wandering around, crunching heavily across the frozen ground. Her mother, sleeping on the cot next to her, sprang up and stared at the slit in the tent, terrified that the man might force himself inside.

  “Close the flap,” she whispered. “Hurry, Louise.” She tunneled a hand beneath her pillow and pulled out her gun. The dogs snarled and yanked at their leashes.

  “Stop where you are!” Rose yelled. “Stop or I’ll shoot!”

  She fired a shot straight through the side wall of the tent, and another and another, until the small space clouded with smoke. There was a sound like bricks smashing, and then a heavy silence. Rose turned back to Louise with a taut, steady look, registering somewhere between an invitation and a command. With that, mother and daughter understood what must be done, and what must never be said.

  As Gypsy would later tell it, her mother crawled from the tent to investigate and declared that she had murdered a cow. Rose began to cry. “A poor, defenseless cow,” she sobbed. “Oh, why did I do it?”

  They had to bury the body quickly, Rose said, before its owner discovered what had happened.

  Louise lifted the thick slab of a head, trying not to stare at the face. She nearly fainted from the sour smell of its last escaping breath, the mottled stickiness of blood between her fingers. They dug until dawn, pushed and pulled and rolled the body into the grave, and covered it up with dirt.

  “What a waste,” Rose said, peering down. “We should have cut off a few steaks before we buried him.”

  With its shabby marquee and parade of lurid photographs along the sidewalk, the Gaiety in Toledo was a demotion from the one in Kansas City. The headlining show was called Girls from the Follies, and its producer, Ed Ryan, had descended into panic. His star, Gladys Clark, got drunk and assaulted a hotel manager in Dayton—with an inkwell, of all things. The cops threw Gladys in jail, the rest of the troupe had moved on without her, and now he was desperate for a replacement. A renowned star on the Mutual Wheel, Gladys held nothing back during her strip numbers. “When Miss Clark is showing she’s just showing,” as one critic put it, “walking around like a queen wondering if the tub is full.”

  Rose, Louise, and the Hollywood Blondes stood in the lobby, waiting for Ed Ryan to acknowledge them. “There isn’t any show without her,” he explained to the theater manager. “Where can you find a woman in Toledo who strips, does scenes, and plays five musical instruments?”

  In that moment Louise Hovick traded in the last piece of herself, and when she opened her mouth it was Gypsy Rose Lee who spoke. She told Ed Ryan that she could fill in for his missing lead, strip scenes and all, and then she sat before her dressing room mirror and met her creation for the very first time. “I was a star,” she thought. “I picked up the lip rouge and rubbed it on my mouth, then I put up my hair behind my ears and gazed at myself for a long time. I was a star.” She was an outline now, an exoskeleton on stark display, and she wanted to start adding texture and layers, to shade herself in.

  She strolled outside to christen her creation, telling the man stringing her name up in lights that Rose Louise wasn’t her name at all. She was Gypsy Rose Lee.

  “I happen to be the star of this show,” Gypsy said, “and you’ll put up my name the way I want it put up!”

  She waited until those three words dominated the marquee and then said them aloud, pleased with the feel of them on her lips, the crisp, assured sound of them as they hit the air.

  For the rest of her life she’d tell numerous versions of how she made the transition, her delicate, unclean break from the past. It was Rose, and not she, who looked that producer “straight in the eye” and said her daughter would strip. “I have,” Gypsy claimed, “been pushed into everything I’ve ever done.” She had no idea how she came up with “Gypsy”; it was merely a prefix for “Rose Lee,” a pseudonym to trick Grandpa Thompson from learning she was in burlesque. She acquired the nickname during her days as a kid in vaudeville, when she wore a bandanna, winter and summer, to keep her hair in place. “Rose Lee” was still too close to her mother’s name, and she felt she’d earned the “Gypsy.” Because of her “lush, exotic beauty” and “roaming nature,” she had always had that nickname. Of course “Gypsy” came from her ability to read tea leaves and see the future, what else?

  Put together, she liked its cadence: the exotically strange Gypsy, the languorous drum roll of Rose, the cymbal clash of Lee. It worked on many levels: Rose as verb, predicting the future, suggesting ascension; and Rose as noun, the name of her mother, the most stubborn bond to her past. It was a headliner’s name, a name that stood on its own, and she no longer needed the Hollywood Blondes. She didn’t need anyone, except for the man who would discover her.

  For her very first strip she wore a costume she’d made that afternoon, pinned instead of sewed. It had sheer lavender netting with violet buds for the bodice and a full skirt she lifted primly as she pushed through the curtain, as if she were a proper Victorian lady alighting from her carriage. The orchestra launched into “Little Gypsy Sweetheart” and she strolled across the stage, taking her time, just like Tessie and Flossie and the Octopus Girl, hearing her mother’s voice beneath the song (“Smile, dear! Hold your stomach in!”), feeling the spotlight’s searing focus on her face. One by one she pulled the pins from her side and dropped them into the tuba below. Plink, plink, plink. A collective low murmur from the audience; they’d never seen such a trick. Backing up, sweating now, her arms slick, beads sluicing down her back and stinging her eyes, she dropped her shoulder straps and let the lavender netting fall, exposing herself for an interminable second until the curtain swallowed her whole.

  For the second number she changed into another homemade costume, sheer red netting festooned with three blooming cotton roses. With prop in hand—a powder puff on a stick, just like the one June used as a kid—she flitted about the audience, talk-singing an old turn-of-the-century whorehouse ditty she learned in Kansas City:

  Oh, won’t you powder my back every morning?

  ’Cause, honey, there’s no one can do it like you.

  Oh, won’t you powder my back every morning?

  It makes me feel happy when I’m feeling blue.

  And if you powder my back every morning,

  Then maybe some morning I’ll do it for you!

  She found a bald man, picked up the lone thatch of hair threading across his pate, and tied a red ribbon around it. Yanking at his coat lapels, she ordered, “Now stand up and show them how pretty you look.” When he sank down further, she pulled harder. “But darling,” she protested, “I want them to see how pretty you look!” She bent and kissed the man’s head, fleeing back to the stage while the applause swelled behind her. “They would always be so embarrassed,” she said of her baldheaded targets. “And I was always so panicky, so very panicky.”

  And that’s the way she told the story of her first year in burlesque, the time between Kansas City and New York, before Gypsy Rose Lee filled her up entirely and for good. She merely lifted her skirt, dropped her netting, let a strap slide from her shoulder. “Well,” she said, “the shoulder strap led to one thing and another, if you know what I mean, and that’s how I started the strip business.” It was beneath her to attach details to that “one thing and another,” disrespectful to include such memories in her scrapbooks, sacrilege to admit that the singular, legendary Gypsy Rose Lee had begun just like everyone else.

  Others, over time, would pick at the thick, vague knot of that missing year. “She was never an ingenue,” June said. “She was never ‘the ingenue.’ And she never just dropped a shoulder strap. Ever.” Gypsy’s own son wondered about what she had done and seen before she became herself. “There is a year my mother doesn’t talk about,” he said. “It’s blanked out. I’m sure that it was not an easy year �
�� there were rough girls, gangsters, prostitution. They had to eat. And she was perhaps forced to do things against her will.” But with the aid of time and distance Gypsy Rose Lee could give herself a backstory, adding and subtracting and editing until the myth and the original were one and the same.

  Soon after the Hollywood Blondes disbanded and she and Rose set out on their own, Gypsy heard from her long-lost sister. June had just finished a marathon dance in Revere, Massachusetts, and discovered Gypsy was performing nearby. She called the theater and told Gypsy she was on her way.

  “Well, don’t stay,” Gypsy replied. “I don’t want you to see the show.”

  Not enough time had passed for Gypsy to establish the distinction between herself and her creation. She was still lost in the ugly tangle of those murky nights, strange hands touching her, low voices giving orders that dulled her mind.

  “Well, my goodness,” June said. “Why not?” And she meant it.

  June believed that her sister, her clever, brilliant sister—the voracious reader, the haughty Duchess, the greedy collector of lush dreams and exotic words—could somehow get away with being in burlesque without being of burlesque, without doing any of its dirty work. Maybe Louise just walked out and posed onstage as she often had in vaudeville, making a beautiful picture, the Doll Girl, or a funny one, the Bowery Tough. Maybe she did just drop a shoulder strap, peel off a glove, spin so that her skirt bloomed around her.

  Settled in the back row, waiting for her sister to appear, June heard a rustling noise. She turned and a man bent down, leveling his head with hers. “Would you like a cup of coffee?” he asked, each word a rank hiss of breath. She shook her head no and turned away, waiting for the sound of receding footsteps.

  Then it came to her: My god, she thought. That was code. He thinks I’m a prostitute, just for being in this theater.