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

by Karen Abbott

  And then Louise stepped out from behind the curtain and she wasn’t … Louise. June didn’t know who this girl was, stark naked, thrusting her hips, crouching on the runway, her silhouette stained by sallow light. She watched for as long as her eyes would let her. “I couldn’t stand it,” June said. “I didn’t even go backstage afterwards. I was in horror.”

  Gypsy watched her leave and thought, How dare June judge her? What does she know, where has she been? What does her marathon audience bring in with them? Picnic baskets, most likely, so they can munch while watching a bunch of rejects have sex standing up and keel over from exhaustion. Her audience was no scabbier or sicker than June’s, and one day someone who mattered would be in the front row. Poor naïve June probably didn’t even understand the sound of all those rattling newspapers.

  June stayed long enough to watch Louise leave too, waiting for the slow, bedraggled scat singing of “Minnie the Moocher” to stop, hiding in the alleyway’s shadows. She heard shouting, something about costumes, and then saw bodies tumbling out a side door. There was Mother, furious, indignant, dragging spangled bits of clothing onto the sidewalk and stuffing them, unpacked, into an idling taxi. Louise stood nearby, hugging herself, wearing only a pair of glittering heels. She didn’t move until Mother dropped a coat around her shoulders and led her, gently, into the backseat.

  Gypsy seized control of what she could—her weight, for one. She ate only one meal a day, but every few hours she sipped a vegetable “essence” of her own invention:

  three bunches of carrots

  six onions

  six tomatoes

  one bunch of parsley

  two bunches of celery

  two quarts of water

  no seasoning

  Simmer for twenty minutes. Pour off the juice, chill it and drink.

  It worked. She was still no bombshell; her breasts were small and her rear pear-shaped, but her waist was tiny and her legs epic, two pillars astride the entrance to some secret, exclusive city. Five feet nine and a half inches and 130 well-distributed pounds. Rose delighted in her daughter’s new shape and image and name; they were true partners and equals now, complicit in both what had already happened and what was yet to come. In preparation for new press photos, Mother fluffed Gypsy’s hair into a soft auburn cloud and painted delicate teardrops in a cascade down her cheeks. She also sent Gypsy flowers each night over the footlights, addressing the cards to “The Fairest of Them All,” “My Queen,” “Stageland’s Loveliest,” and “The One and Only Gypsy.” She signed them from “a secret admirer.” When Gypsy discovered her mother writing one of the cards, she was mortified.

  “You should have told me,” she said. “It makes me feel like a fool—and unless you want to wind up in jail you’d better stop writing those letters, too. There’s a law against that.”

  “Law?” Rose asked. “Don’t make me laugh. A mother’s love knows no law!”

  Some of the venues were almost respectable, nudging the limits of obscenity statutes without breaking them, and in those places Gypsy felt safe leaving the stage to interact with the audience. At the Latchia Theatre in Cincinnati, she sashayed up to a man in the front row and “gave him a lesson in the art of kissing,” in the words of the local newspaper, “such as only a red-haired lady knows how to do.” She sewed a few more costumes for her wardrobe, a set of pink pajamas and a dark blue bathing suit among them, and proved a natural at speaking to the press.

  “You’d ought to read some of the funny letters I get from fellers who think because I ogle at them from the stage that I have a crush on them,” she said. “I received a letter from a drugstore clerk once who enclosed a stick of gum in the letter just to show he wasn’t a cheap guy. He promised to buy me a whole box if I would go out with him. Then I received an invitation to go riding from a parachute jumper who enclosed various pictures of himself taken in various poses while he was clinging to a parachute.”

  Every night, she and Rose huddled together in their hotel room and helped themselves to June’s history, appropriating and editing her scrapbooks until they fit the story of Gypsy as a born talent and star. It was she who had been called “Baby June,” who had headlined the Orpheum Circuit, who had ventured out to Hollywood to star in pictures with Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin. When Gigolo died she had vowed never again to take anything that didn’t belong to her, but Louise had made that pact, not Gypsy Rose Lee.

  On March 19, 1931, a Thursday night, she performed in a revue at the Empire Theatre in Newark, New Jersey. Called Wine, Women, and Song, it was one of her cleaner shows by far, and even the trade magazines seemed relieved by the temporary reprieve from early-bird acts. “No filth,” Zit’s Weekly wrote appreciatively, “just great entertainment and clever performers.” The press and audience alike were most enthralled by the “new find” named Gypsy Rose Lee, a “brunette of unusual face and form” with a “charming personality” and “flirty eyes.”

  By now she knew how to mark herself as different, how to put on as she was taking off. She played the prude who showed her skin almost by accident and always as a lark, a self-professed “daytime person living in a nighttime world.” Here she came with her powder puff on a stick, walking the aisle slowly, her long, elegant neck craning left and right, settling on the winner. “Darling! Sweetheart!” she exclaimed. “Where have you been all my life?” She rushed to him, left a bright red imprint on his gleaming skull. He panicked and fled. She shook her head and tsk-tsked while she watched him go. “Lost him,” she murmured, and her eyes swept over the crowd. In the smoky thick of it, chomping on a cigar fat as a baby’s arm, stood a short, blocky man whose eyes pinned her down, recognizing not who she was but who he’d make her become.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  You can become a winner only if you are willing to walk over the edge.

  — DAMON RUNYON

  New York City, 1930–1931

  When America awakened from the crash its citizens had no idea what to do with themselves. In the span of one week the blinding clamor and deafening glare of the past eight years fell silent and dark. Every morning Billy Minsky read of another tragedy, hoping to soothe the sting of his own. The founder of a coal firm in Providence, Rhode Island, shot himself in his broker’s office while watching the ticker. The president of the Rochester Gas and Electric Corporation, who lost $1.2 million in a single month, locked himself in his bathroom and inhaled gas from a wall jet. The head of a major brokerage firm in St. Louis guzzled poison. A man slit the throats of his wife and seven sons before turning the knife on himself. The owner of a wholesale produce firm jumped from a seventh-floor window of the Munson Building on Wall Street. A Scranton man doused himself with gasoline and struck a match. In the Bronx, a man who lost his life savings of $30,000 leapt in front of a Jerome Avenue subway train.

  Politicians began finger-pointing and public posturing. Newly elected New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt decried the “improper schemes and questionable methods” that had fed the crisis. Mayor Jimmy Walker urged movie executives to show pictures “that will reinstate courage and hope in the hearts of the American people.” More than four hundred leaders representing every branch of industry, commerce, trade, and finance convened in Washington, D.C., to discuss President Herbert Hoover’s plans to stimulate and stabilize the economy. The president himself offered one last word of advice: “work.”

  Minsky’s Republic, circa 1931. (photo credit 25.1)

  New York donned a stoic face and obeyed. Brokers, bankers, and clerks filed downtown even on Sundays. Restaurants kept their doors open past normal hours. Tour buses made special trips through the district, pointing out “where all that money was lost.” The employees of one brokerage house, which stayed open until anywhere from ten at night to five in the morning, adopted the unusual custom of singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” before heading home, often so loudly that police came to investigate. A sixteen-year-old messenger boy for the New York Stock Exchange did a bri
sk business in boutonnieres, since proper brokers considered it uncouth to trade without a flower adorning their lapel, no matter the circumstances.

  Billy Minsky, too, turned his focus toward rebuilding what was lost. He no longer had the capital to buy his own Broadway theater but he still had his investor Joseph Weinstock, who had emerged from the crash with both his bank account and his faith in Billy intact. Weinstock agreed it was time to make another run on Broadway. These days a man couldn’t spare $5.50 for legitimate theater, not even if he wanted to, but for just $1.50 he could see pretty women taking off their clothes—prettier, now, than ever before; all of those aspiring actresses who once dreamt of applause on a stage were now settling for whistles along a runway. They should be grateful, Billy thought, just to have anyone, any voice, caring to call for more.

  When Billy wasn’t busy at the Apollo or checking on his brothers down at the National Winter Garden, he scoured the trade papers, made phone calls, and took long strolls through Times Square. It was clear, already, that the Depression was having a profound effect on Broadway. The number of productions declined from 239 in 1929–1930 to 187 in 1930–1931, and would continue to drop throughout the decade. “By 1930,” wrote one historian, “the boom that had engulfed New York for nearly 30 years was over.… [In] no sphere of urban life was the Depression more accurately mirrored than in Times Square, the center of its theater and entertainment world.” Billy walked along 42nd Street, past the hot dog stands reeking of rubbery meat, the nomadic pitchmen unloading broken watches and rusty shears, the hobos and migrants shuffling along in a melancholy chorus line. In the lobby of the Hotel Marguery a man could turn a crank and watch a peep show of odalisques.

  Billy stopped halfway in between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. Next door Noël Coward’s stilted satire Private Lives played to a dwindling audience, and down the street Fred and Adele Astaire—antiquated relics from an obsolete time—pranced for rows of empty seats. If the legitimate houses succumbed entirely and offered themselves up, one by one, to burlesque, Billy would cheer each transformation, each step into Broadway’s new and inevitable future. And this, number 209 West 42nd Street, would be the first.

  Built in 1900 by Oscar Hammerstein, the Republic Theatre had been home to Broadway’s longest-running production, Abie’s Irish Rose, a sappy, sentimental tale about a nice Jewish boy who marries a Catholic girl. By the time the show closed in October 1927, it had played in New York a record 2,327 times without interruption, nearly double the previous longest run of any production in America. Currently, the Republic was operating as a movie house, showing shorts all day for a quarter admission.

  Billy also knew that one of Abie’s Irish Rose’s principal financiers was none other than gangster Arnold Rothstein, who, one week before the mayoral election between Jimmy Walker and Fiorello La Guardia, had been shot in the groin while leaving a card game at the Park Central Hotel.

  Rothstein survived for a week in the hospital, wandering into and out of consciousness, and every time he roused the cops were hovering over his bed, shouting questions.

  “Who shot you?” one detective asked.

  “Got nothing to say,” Rothstein whispered. “Nothing, nothing. Won’t talk about it.”

  On election day, when Franklin D. Roosevelt narrowly beat Al Smith for governor and Jimmy Walker trounced Fiorello La Guardia for mayor, Arnold Rothstein died, his assailant still a mystery.

  Billy followed the case closely; his gangster source back from his newspaper days, Beansie Rosenthal, had mentored Rothstein and initiated him into the underworld. But Billy was most interested in Jimmy Walker’s reaction to the shooting. On that evening, the mayor had ventured in his chauffeured, silver-trimmed Duesenberg to a nightclub in Westchester. An associate approached and whispered the news into Walker’s ear. The mayor called for his car and apologized to the bandleader for leaving so early. It was only just past midnight, but he must return to Manhattan at once.

  “Arnold Rothstein has just been shot,” Walker explained. “This means trouble from here on.”

  The mayor surely realized that any investigation into the kingpin’s empire and untimely demise would lead to the door of City Hall. Throughout the mayoral campaign La Guardia had done his best to paint Walker as a puppet of Tammany Hall and an advocate of New York’s underworld, to no avail; New York still yearned to believe in its mayor and all he represented, the raucous vulgarity and gleeful rapacity of the precrash days. As a son of a former Tammany politician, Billy understood the depth and force of the organization’s reach, and how fiercely it would fight to maintain its grip when the wrong sorts of questions were asked; what would happen if Tammany, for once, couldn’t dictate the answers? He wondered how the city might look, stripped of its familiar mores and codes, and if it would still have room for the Minskys.

  Billy called Joseph Weinstock, who told him that another burlesque producer, Izzy Herk, was also angling for the Republic’s lease. They had no time to waste. Weinstock gathered his money, Billy called the press, and it was official: the Minskys were back on Broadway. The Republic would have a two-a-day policy, he announced, $1 admission for matinees and $1.50 for evenings.

  The lease, Billy revealed with relish, was for twenty long years.

  In a tacit, and—although Billy would be loath to admit it—nostalgic nod to Abe, the original family Francophile, he decided to model the Republic Theatre after the old music halls of Paris, but with upscale touches lacking at the Apollo or National Winter Garden: an intimate, plush lobby where burgundy curtains pooled on the floor; a velvet drape that circled the hot dog concession like a gilded waterfall; a complimentary gardenia corsage for the ladies; male ushers whisking about imperiously, all dressed in the ornate, braided uniforms of French gendarmes; female ushers costumed in maids’ outfits with rigid black skirts and lace stockings, spritzing each patron with perfume as she led him to his seat. At Billy’s behest, Herbert installed the standard red-light warning system, a precaution borne more of habit and superstition than genuine fear, and a construction crew removed a hundred seats from the auditorium. There would be not one but two illuminated runways, all the better for intimate interaction between the audience and the girls. Finally, Billy had the Republic’s drab facade repainted in a sleek checkerboard pattern, onto which he pasted floor-to-ceiling, near-nude likenesses of his headlining slingers as soon as he found them.

  He decided to start with some old favorites, Mae Dix and Carrie Finnell. Dix had left burlesque, briefly, to marry an undertaker and then returned after her divorce. She was bitter and therefore feistier than ever, an attitude that only improved her act. “Three years it took me to learn his business,” she grumbled, “then the sonovabitch gets jealous because I’m a better embalmer than he is.”

  Finnell’s remarkable pectoral muscles had only grown stronger and more agile, or perhaps they were aided by a new burlesque trick: fish swivels affixed to her pasties. The mechanism allowed Finnell to pinwheel her tassels in any direction, from any position, at any speed, so effortlessly that she began billing herself as the “Remote Control Girl.” As she stood perfectly still, the tassel on one breast began to rotate slowly, then faster, then furiously, the other dangling limp and forgotten. One smooth, deft pop and it sprang to life, catching up with the first, the two of them propelling with such vigor she resembled a twin-engine bomber. For her grand finale, Finnell lowered herself to the ground—back first, limbo style—and even when she was fully supine both tassels spun at maximum power. “She has trained each generous bust,” raved one critic, “to twitch on cue, jump to attention, and do just about everything except sing ‘April Showers’ in Swahili.”

  Mayor Jimmy Walker might not have made it to his office in City Hall on the day of February 12, 1931, but that night he was among a thousand patrons congratulating Billy Minsky on the new Republic Theatre. Men in tuxedos and women in evening gowns clustered inside the lobby, praising one another’s fine looks, exposing their necks for a squirt of perfume, wo
ndering what they might expect from a production entitled Fanny Fortsin from France, thankful that this odd little venue, with its downtown roots and bourgeois ambition, offered a respite, no matter how brief, from what the world had become.

  They watched the horizontal coochers strut to the end of the runways, spacing themselves evenly under the lights. Slowly, gently, as if preparing for bedtime, the girls lay down on their backs and then executed moves never before seen on a Broadway stage: a shimmying and grinding and thrusting of hips that evoked, equally, sexual intercourse and an epileptic seizure. It was daring and brilliant and raw, and the audience was rapt, motionless, unsure if they should laugh or applaud or try, futilely, to avert their eyes. Billy anticipated the critics’ responses—the usual ho-hum complaints about the humorless comedy, the raunchiness of the stripteasers, the heavy, sea-lion waddle of the chorus girls—but his audience recognized the show for what it was: entertainment for a fair price, with the appropriate mood for a specific time; a show meant not for the Broadway of old but for the Broadway of the Depression. “The only trouble with the performances,” confessed writer L. Sprague de Camp, “was that, when time came to go, standing up presented a problem.”

  The Republic was at full capacity every night, as many people turned away as admitted, half of them representing the city’s political and cultural elite, the other half its most weary and desperate. “In the unnatural blaze of lights over Times Square marquees at eight in the morning,” wrote critic Alfred Kazin, “there were already lines of men waiting outside the burlesque houses … people sat glued together in a strange suspension, not exactly aware of each other, but depending on each other’s presence.” The legitimate producers seethed, watching their rightful slice of New York invaded by swarms of the undesired and the uncouth, and Billy, at every opportunity, claimed another inch for himself.