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

by Karen Abbott

  Directly across the street, Earl Carroll presented a new edition of Vanities, his long-running “dazzling and superabundant revue,” this time with a twist: in Murder at the Vanities, a young woman is killed backstage in the midst of a conventional musical. It was a curious amalgamation of comedy and mystery, with the occasional “nasty innuendo” and parade of “Minsky-ized” beauties, and Billy responded by dangling a two-story banner from the Republic’s roof that read SLAUGHTER AT MINSKY’S. Earl Carroll was not amused.

  Neither was George White, the esteemed producer who had discovered Ethel Merman, W. C. Fields, and the Three Stooges. White always took the same route to work, and one afternoon, Billy stood directly in his path. Billy gave him a slow, wolfy smile, unwrapping the expression as if it were a gift, a sweet, mock lament for the fact that no one was paying $5.50 to see his rusty old Scandals, now twelve years in the running.

  The producer came at him fast and with purpose. Billy saw the flash of White’s fist, his fat, pale fingers aligned like the slats of a miniature picket fence. There was a popping, shallow explosion in his head, and the absurd, horrifying feeling that his nose had collapsed against his face.

  In the end he was just bloodied and swollen, no major damage done. In fact, the encounter was a gift, a New York–style rite of initiation into the big time, proof that Minsky’s burlesque was finally being taken seriously not only as entertainment, but as a threat.

  Billy decided to celebrate by finding a new crop of slingers, girls who would elevate him even higher in the ranks of Broadway producers, girls who would make Ziegfeld want to break his legs and the Shuberts to wring his neck. He ventured ninety-nine miles south to the Trocadero Theatre in Philadelphia and took a seat, waiting through the stale comics and lumbering, thundering chorines until the emcee announced the headliner, a girl named Georgia Sothern, who stood no more than five feet tall.

  She didn’t have a gimmick so much as a double-jointed torso that was able to, in the words of one observer, “bump so vigorously and incessantly and speedily that her act transcended the boundaries of obscenity into the domain of unmannered eccentricity.” Another fan marveled that she “strips like she just had dynamite for lunch”; she even fainted during one particularly frantic convulsion. Billy knew Georgia was just starting out, another child vaudevillian who turned to burlesque when the Orpheum Circuit died, leaving behind her real name and “Hazel Anderson” for good. An Atlanta native, she began calling herself “Georgia Sothern,” after her home state and region. She scrawled her name so quickly on her first burlesque contract that she omitted the “u” in “Sothern.” If she took too long to sign, she feared, the manager might change his mind.

  Billy offered Georgia double her current salary, and she became his. It was the highest salary Billy had ever granted a female performer, but Philadelphia prices were not New York prices, and he expected, sooner or later, to find someone worth even more.

  And he did.

  On March 19, 1931, Billy caught a revue at the Empire Theatre in Newark, New Jersey, called Wine, Women, and Song. The headliner took her time emerging from behind the curtain, peering out as if slightly wary about what she might find, and with her first step, even before she said a word, she made it clear to Billy Minsky that he had never seen anyone like her and never would again.

  She didn’t strut or skip or move in any of the usual ways but sashayed, rather, with leisurely grace, and when she acknowledged the audience it was with faint surprise, as if she were rustled from some deep and intimate solitude and had expected to remain alone.

  Then she began to talk.

  Clearly she was shy—ironically, most of the slingers were—but this girl had a way of teasing her own trepidation, mocking it, turning it inside out like the fingers of a glove. Stripteasers rarely spoke two syllables on stage, but this one couldn’t not talk, as if each twirl of the wrists, every stride of those legs, deserved narration. She wielded a powder puff on a stick and swiveled her strangely exquisite neck like a periscope, seeking a secret hidden somewhere in the crowd. “Darling! Sweetheart!” she exclaimed. “Where have you been all my life?”

  She wasn’t addressing him, but those words, and the girl who spoke them, were already his. The name on the marquee outside read GYPSY ROSE LEE, but she was nobody until Billy Minsky said so.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Once I chided her, “Mother, don’t you trust anyone?” She snapped, “Trust in God, but get it in writing!”

  —GYPSY ROSE LEE

  England, 1952

  Before Gypsy Rose Lee performs her famous routine for the very last time, but long after she has begun to tire of it, she finds herself, one day, facing the task of writing a letter to her sister that no sibling would ever wish to send. She thinks about their strange, peripatetic childhood, those days when June felt loved—by strangers, if not their mother—and Gypsy felt happiest alone. They have been distant, in both miles and affection, and then reunited, regarding each other with cagey eyes and pricked senses; this dance of rancor and reconciliation will continue for the rest of their lives, and even beyond.

  For too long Mother was their lone common denominator. Over the years she dipped in and out of their lives, advancing and receding like a wave, ferocious when she flowed and pitiful when she ebbed but exhausting either way. They took turns fielding her requests and enduring her intrusions. During June’s run in Pal Joey Mother stormed the office of director George Abbott, stinking drunk, with a “big lesbo” by her side. No charming damsel in distress this time, but a fierce and furious vortex, heard clear through every wall and floor.

  Oh, how she loved her girls, she cried, and yet those ungrateful “heels” were “starving” her. Would Mr. Abbott mind getting her something to eat and, perhaps, two tickets for the show? He did, just to be rid of her.

  “I hate like hell to give that dreadful person a cent,” June wrote to Gypsy. “Jeepers that old bag ought to go to work—not at the job she picked out for us naturally … she’s too old. But something like digging ditches … she is such an Amazon it would be like playing marbles for her.”

  Gypsy advised June to hire a lawyer, and to communicate with Mother in that way as much as possible, for as long as possible.

  Once Gypsy and June gathered some distance from Rose they could make room for each other, and for the first time the present superseded the past. In the early 1940s, Gypsy invited June to live at the house on 63rd Street and to take a trip around the world. “I’d like you even if we weren’t sisters,” Gypsy told her, a confidence June cherished even as she struggled to believe it. Now, ten years later, they speak often about their husbands, Julio De Diego (Gypsy’s third and favorite, an acclaimed Spanish painter she married four years after divorcing Bill Kirkland) and Bill Spier (June’s third, and true love); about their children, Erik and April; about work or the lack thereof; about Gypsy’s ever-growing menagerie of pets, especially her Chinese crested hairless dogs; about anything at all as long as their words have sweetly dull edges, and don’t threaten this fragile thing they’ve made.

  At the moment, Gypsy is across the Atlantic on an extended European tour, and June has tentative plans to join her. She will be good company during this old grind, night after night of applying body makeup from neck to feet and gluing black lace bows to her breasts, seven-year-old Erik watching while she primps without a stitch of clothing on. She tells everyone who questions his presence that she believes a child belongs with his mother, and that Erik has been her constant companion on the road since he was six months old. Of course he receives an education; he’s enrolled at the prestigious Professional Children’s School, designed for children in the performing arts, which permits students to complete lessons by correspondence while on the road. He counts the future star Christopher Walken among his classmates. Sure, there is trouble occasionally, like the time Erik swallowed one of her straight pins while she was onstage and had to be rushed to the hospital. She was furious and never played that theater again
, nor did she thank the owner for saving him.

  But Erik is mostly an asset, a constant and reliable piece of her life, and as soon as he is capable of holding a camera or helping her change between acts, Gypsy plans to put him to work. He already does his share, in a way. Any problem—a contract dispute, inadequate advertising, a mechanic who insists he can’t fix her Rolls—and she grabs Erik’s hand to pull him close; he is the evidence that wins every case. “I’m a woman alone in the world with a child,” she says, hearing her mother inside each word, “and I’ll do whatever I must to survive.”

  They spend at least six months of every year on the road—the house on 63rd Street has become little more than a place to do laundry—and she enjoys the tours, especially abroad. She scores the loveliest souvenirs, another skill inherited from Rose, “liberating” ashtrays and keys from her favorite restaurants and hotels, slipping them into her Vuitton handbag when no one is looking. And overseas, at least, she can avoid the graying men who insist they skipped high school to see her shows at Minsky’s, to which she always replies, archly, “Honey, I wasn’t even born when you were in high school.”

  But Europe presents its own challenges. She has to smuggle her cats into hotels. There are too many drunks on the roads. She loathes Liverpool, where someone hurls a rock through her dressing room window. In Pompeii she half expects to be murdered in her bed. Each night she retreats to her hotel room and vents in her diary: “Rehearsal in three languages is something. One girl speaks only Spanish. 2 Swedes speak only Swedish … it is a riot. Leader is a cold fish if I ever saw one. Signs backstage ‘no smoking’ in five languages. No running water in dressing rooms.… Oh Gawd I’m tired.” Her show at the New China Theater in Stockholm, in particular, is a catastrophe. The producers bill her as a sexy American stripper, a surefire strategy for failure. Not a female face in the audience, and the men expect a sex show.

  “Have decided,” Gypsy writes, “that everyone who speaks English has seen the show. Audiences watch me with their mouths wide open, but not laughing. After all, they seem to be saying, ‘We show more than this on the beach,’ and indeed, with mixed nude bathing, they certainly do.” How she dreads facing rows of “bewildered, disappointed, leering faces.”

  And in London, where she is scheduled to appear at the Finsbury Empire Theatre, the county council suffers an untimely bout of prudery, outlawing stripteasing and ordering her show closed by January. A pity for the Brits, but she does wangle some publicity from the decision, calling the council members “fuddy-duddies” and explaining to the wire services why she isn’t a stripteaser at all. “A stripteaser,” she says, “is a woman who puts on an exotic sexual spectacle. My act is straight comedy and boy, they love it.”

  She leaves London and settles in a small city nearby—they all blur together after a while—staying in her usual choice of hotel: any place cheap, with a kitchen, and located close to work. An entire ocean between them, and still Mother can get to her. She rolls a piece of paper into her typewriter, next to which sits an ashtray overflowing with menthol cigarettes smoked to the nub and a mug of hot tea, plenty of cream and sugar. The occasion truly calls for her old favorite standby, coffee with brandy, emphasis on the latter, but alcohol is the lone pleasure she’s agreed to give up.

  Gypsy begins to type:

  Dear June:

  I hate like hell to have to write you this letter … it’s so awful. Mother has cancer of the rectum. They are operating Wednesday … if the operation is successful it means that she has to wear a container … they remove the entire colon. It means weeks of hospitalization, two nurses and a nurse at home even when she leaves the hospital.…

  They’ve been giving her blood transfusions and have already postponed the operation. Some drunken lesbian is causing a lot of trouble with the newspapers—the Mirror told me about the entire thing! They didn’t call me at home or call Julio—but they called the Mirror. Terrible people. But even if she were a total stranger she’s in great pain and with an operation like this the chances are fifty fifty. She’s at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Suffern New York. Please let me know as soon as you can how much financial help you can give me. I’ve already had to put out two hundred and fifty … and with nothing booked ahead and a year and a half of nothing behind me I’m in a bad way for this great monstrous expense. Up until today the shows were going fine … but my God I can’t concentrate on my work with this hanging over my head. Between the newspapers, the drunken bitch, and the general horror of it all I’m almost out of my mind. Please let me hear from you as soon as you can make it.

  She types the word “Love,” signs “Gypsy,” and realizes that the beginning of Mother’s end is also, somehow, her own.

  Gypsy Rose Lee, headliner at the Republic, circa 1931. (photo credit 26.1)

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  It was all too discouraging not learning to sing

  Until the messrs Minsky took me under their wing

  They put my name on Broadway in electric lights

  Below it said wrestling, Thursday nights.

  — GYPSY ROSE LEE

  New York City, 1931–1932

  The city felt different from Gypsy’s time there as a child, back when she toted Gigolo on her shoulder and slunk through the streets with a fur-clad June, the two of them such an odd spectacle that even New Yorkers stopped to stare. Now it seemed as if someone had uprooted an expanse of color and noise and in its place laid tracks of fervent desperation. The street vendors hawked Tijuana Bibles—pornographic comic books featuring crude couplings between Minnie Mouse and Donald Duck and other celebrities, real or cartoon. Police arrested the “singing beggar” of Broadway for the twenty-ninth time. Flappers were extinct, and once again hemlines grazed ankles. Homeless men loitered in front of Hubert’s Flea Museum, where fleas “juggled” balls coated in citronella. Two and a half miles north, a “Hooverville” of shacks sloped along the emptied Central Park Reservoir, sandwiched between several new luxury apartment buildings on Fifth Avenue and Central Park West. The air smelled of old hot dogs and fresh perm solution, and the lights fell hot and merciless on Gypsy’s face.

  In one particular house on 42nd Street, New York wasn’t New York at all but a miniature corner of Paris—how else to explain the doorman’s curlicue mustache and red-lined cape; the female ushers wielding perfume atomizers; and, of course, the Napoleon Bonaparte doppelgänger who called himself Billy Minsky, a century removed from the original but equally in command of his empire. He met Gypsy and her mother at the Republic’s stage door and told them to follow him to their dressing room, up one flight of iron stairs. Not the largest room, but still a decent size, with a clear view of the stage. Once she was settled, Gypsy planned to bring Woolly Face in to keep her company.

  Billy Minsky was shorter than both Gypsy and Rose, and he stared up at them through thick glasses. As soon as they’d received his telegram, not so much requesting but ordering Gypsy to work at the Republic, Rose began packing their bags. “He wants us!” she gasped, skipping around their room. “This is it, Louise. This is the break we’ve been waiting for! The Republic Theatre is the showcase of Broadway. Billy Minsky said so himself. Why, burlesque is the womb that has borne great big stars, and the Ziegfeld Follies at the Winter Garden is no different in any way from Ada Onion from Bermuda at Minsky’s!”

  Gypsy remembered the gossip on the circuit about the so-called inventor of modern burlesque and his brother-partners, two of whom hovered behind Billy now. Herbert was thin, with greased hair and a mustache so tidy and trim it looked like a set of false eyelashes blinking over his lip. The youngest, Morton, was plump and disheveled, the bow tie on his tuxedo askew, his glasses tilted on the bridge of his nose. He seemed in awe of Gypsy, afraid to look at her directly but unable to shift his eyes. She knew Billy had fallen out with the eldest and original burlesque mastermind, Abe, and a part of her couldn’t help but wonder which sibling would win.

  Billy had a quick but precise manner about him, and
he spoke as if he first ran his words through a blender.

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  If Gypsy had to guess, she’d say sixteen; in truth she was twenty.

  “Just eighteen,” Rose said, quickly.

  “That’s all right, then,” he said. “I can’t take any chances with minors.”

  She felt him appraise her. He let his eyes take their time. She was wearing a heavy tweed coat over a dress with a frilly Peter Pan collar. She covered one glove with the other so Billy wouldn’t notice the rip in the finger. His stare stopped at her head, which bore a gray felt hat atop a mound of fuzzy curls.

  “Do you wear your hair like that on stage?” he asked.

  “Of course she does,” Rose said, impatient now. “Didn’t you see her work?”

  He ignored her and dragged a chair from the makeup shelf. Gypsy followed his silent command and sat down. His pulled off her hat and used his fat fingers as a vise, holding her hair flat against both sides of her head.

  “Wear your hair like that,” he said. “It’s more ladylike.”

  Even though the straight hair made her look like Rose Louise again, Gypsy decided to take Billy Minsky’s advice. There were certain people in this business whose requests should be honored, and she sensed that he was one of them.

  Every day she rehearsed on the rooftop of the Republic Theatre. A line of Minsky Rosebuds danced a frenzied Charleston, and then parted to let the star take her place. Gypsy wore a mink stole and tight dress, sheer enough to show the sharp outline of each rib. Strutting slowly forward, she unhooked the pins along one side until a sliver of hip was exposed. She spun and walked away, letting the dress fall down to the dip of her back. Another spin and her hands made a choker around her neck, elbows just covering her nipples. She imagined someone in the audience begging her to let her arms fall, just long enough for a look.