by Karen Abbott
She was someone who finally lived alone. No more huddling under the sheets with Mother, burying secrets in the safety of the dark, secrets that belonged to Louise Hovick only. She didn’t even want Rose to visit her at 81 Irving Place in Gramercy Park, a distinguished brown brick building where gargoyles perched on Romanesque archways and she never had to open her own front door.
She decorated the apartment herself, with just the slightest assistance from the antique dealers on Third Avenue. It was an ebullient mix of periods and styles: blackamoors guarding the front door; a Chippendale sofa; a few chairs covered with her own needlework; Victorian settees upholstered in a muted salmon; crimson satin draperies held back by brass angels in flight. Metal and plaster cherubs kept watch in every corner, and on the walls she hung a smattering of Charles Dana Gibson plates, a collage of her programs and press clippings, a series of Marcel Vertes watercolors (including several portraits of herself), a white elephant from Florenz Ziegfeld, and a hodgepodge of Victorian tattoo designs, all elaborately framed with colored velvet mattings and a wreath of gold leaf. Each piece could prompt a conversation—whether or not nudity was innocent or risqué, whether tattooed skin was naked or concealed, whether societal notions of such matters had advanced or stagnated or regressed. Nothing matched, but it was hers. It was her.
To attend to her every need, Gypsy hired a cook and maid, Eva Morcur, another of Eddy’s brilliant ideas. Every star had one, he told her, and she needed to start behaving as such. A former singer for the Cotton Club in Harlem, Eva too craved publicity and knew how to get it, waiting until the cameras were poised before draping Gypsy with her silk robe. On Friday nights Gypsy threw exclusive soirees, her invitations coveted by those on the social register (including the aforementioned Squimpfenhuppels as well as the Otis Chatfield-Taylors), artists, writers, and gangsters alike. Eva fretted over every detail, preparing several courses of comfort food—roast beef and liver smothered in gravy, platters of vegetables, boiled potatoes, homemade chocolate cake—while Gypsy ran about in a frenzy, wearing nothing but a sheer negligee, three-inch fingernails, and $25,000 worth of jewelry, soon to be stolen during a holdup in her apartment vestibule by six men who apologized and told her, “We’re broke or we wouldn’t do this, Gyps.” She tried to swallow her pear-shaped diamond ring, but one of the thugs punched her so hard she spat out the diamond and loosened a few of her Waxey Gordon-sponsored teeth, as well. She instantly recognized the thugs—old acquaintances from her underworld days—and knew better than to say a word.
After the guests arrived and collected flutes of champagne, the talk turned to art and books and theater and, inevitably, to Gypsy Rose Lee herself. What did she think about Strip Girl, the show on Broadway that told the story of a burlesque dancer? Was it based on her life? “I consider that show an insult,” Gypsy replied, “not only to me but to the many stars who have been in burlesque. The author should have his eyes opened and his mind washed.” Did everyone hear that Mae West called her “Lady Peel”? Gypsy’s retort: “Mae West,” she said, “is the weakest link in the Vassar daisy chain.” When another actress, Carole Landis, criticized “leg art,” an informal term for burlesque, Gypsy feigned offense. “Leg art requires no protection from Miss Landis,” she purred. “I am sure no one will mind if she does Salome in long underwear and a fire helmet.” When Yale boys informed Gypsy she placed second to Ann Sheridan in a campus popularity poll, they asked for her opinion of the actress. “I think he was a swell general,” she said sweetly.
Did everyone see her picture with the Princeton football team, where her position was given as “Right End”? How clever she is, seasoning her conversation with French—comment beau, comment special, comment futé—and to think she had so little formal education. Did they hear Gypsy once attended a publishing party with playwright and publisher John Farrar? She took charge of every conversation, tossing off casual references to Shakespeare and Karl Marx, to Dorothy Parker’s Death and Taxes and Damon Runyon’s Guys and Dolls, to the recent autobiographies published by Emma Goldman and Lincoln Steffens. Isn’t it darling when she tilts her head self-consciously and inquires, “Whither the New Negro?” Have they heard that Gypsy is a drug addict? A lesbian? A damn good female impersonator? Aren’t her stories about her mother hilarious—bilking all those lodge men, stealing blankets and wigs and entire sketches, shooting at her sister’s boyfriend, threatening the late, great Billy Minsky?
And Gypsy relished all of it, standing behind her shiny chrome bar and letting them come to her. On these nights she was incapable of turning herself off, of doing anything that would stifle Gypsy Rose Lee, and the next morning she waited for proof that she was still worthy of her own creation. Drama critic Bernard Sobel sent a letter she pressed into her scrapbook for safekeeping:
Dear, beloved, dazzling Gypsy:
It was all so wonderful, so cozy, exciting, alcoholic and fascinating that I have decided to forswear parties. No. I will never go to another party, for fear of obscuring the glow of yours.
There they sat in that salle à manger, Heywood Broun, and the engaging Connie, and you—on the floor, I believe; and deliciously sensual Fanny Brice, the pure Semitic passion percolating through the comedy conversation.… There they all sat, excepting those who, like Tallulah Bankhead, were standing at the refectory table grabbing a second portion of the hot liver.
And those, like George Jean Nathan, who were not standing were traipsing around the house; rushing into the kitchen and the antechambers; guzzling beer; listening to George Davis; sliding up and down the elevator; studying the Greek frescoes over the mantelpiece; inspecting your well-worn and notably high-brow library; gossiping about you; chit-chatting about your guests; admiring the African knickknacks in the shadow of the high semi-circular window.
But alas and alack! It’s all over now: the memory of the kiss Beatrice Lillie administered as she passed me in the hall; the feel of your rounded, taut breasts; the quality of Claire [sic] Luce’s personality; the ubiquitous energy of your faithful secretarial Achates; the realization that some of your guests had salad and others did not.
I’m inarticulate with emotion. I’m saddened at my own mendacity because it’s all the bunk that I won’t go to another party as long as I live. Just ask me; and—of course, keep on loving me.
She was someone unsure of how to fit her family into her new world, if at all. June was tap dancing her way across the country, playing “every ladies’ luncheon, bazaar, county fair, or turkey shoot” from Boise to Denver to St. Louis, still hoping for a break. She was pregnant, due in April 1935, and like Gentle Julia in vaudeville all those years ago, she never identified the baby’s father. The idea of having her own family moved her to reconnect with her sister. “There was someone other than myself,” June thought, “who was aware, indeed wary, of family characteristics. I wasn’t alone … my sister would understand.” (June, ironically, would one day borrow a bit from Rose’s old stories, telling her own daughter, April, that her father had died after contracting syphilis, masturbating and then rubbing his eye, through which the disease entered his brain.)
June took a bus to New York and knocked on the door of the West End apartment, where she assumed Gypsy lived with Mother.
“What in hell has happened to you?” Rose asked. “I don’t know anyone who can help you. My poor baby.” But she let her inside and told her not to expect Gypsy. “Oh, no,” Rose said. “She lives in a penthouse downtown. Got a maid that waits on her hand and foot—I’m only allowed in when nobody else is there. You’ll be the same.”
For a brief time June moved in with Rose, and slowly, cautiously, Gypsy let her sister reenter her life. Once June appeared at her hospital bedside after Gypsy was rushed in an ambulance from Irving Place—after yet another shot from her ulcer. Wires patched to her chest, a heart monitor blinking nearby, Gypsy gave her sister a lingering look of pity. “I’d like to be sure this baby business doesn’t ruin all your chances,” she told June. “You wearing that big br
a? If your breasts droop you’re going to be out of luck, that’s all.… It’s too late to try to help you any other way.”
Another time, the bell rang during one of Gypsy’s parties. She swung open the door to find June, oddly nervous, shifting her weight. Behind her, in the parlor, all her famous friends were smoking pot and laughing like idiots, and Gypsy wished they all would just leave and leave her alone. At least for the night.
“Getting on my nerves,” she said, her arm sweeping toward the noise. She wrapped a white mink around her shoulders. “They’ll never know I’m gone.”
Over an order of yaka mein, still the cheapest dish on the menu, the sisters circled each other warily, wondering what to omit and what to divulge. Gypsy emptied a jigger of brandy into black coffee, lit a Murad cigarette. For reasons both banal and complicated, she felt the need to explain herself.
She reached into her bag and tossed a newspaper on the table. “Look at that,” she commanded June. Two curved lines marked the relevant paragraph like black wings.
June read aloud: “Gypsy Rose Lee says her favorite fan sits in the front row at every performance with a lunch box on his lap and his room number printed on his forehead.”
“If I keep saying things like that in all those columns,” Gypsy said, “I’ll be a fad.”
“You want to be a fad?”
“I want to be a legend. A fad is just one step along the way.” She sipped her coffee and debated telling June her big news: an offer, at long last, to be in the Ziegfeld Follies. After Florenz Ziegfeld’s death in 1932, the Shubert brothers had taken over the title and offered Gypsy the part previously played by Josephine Baker. They would open in New York at the Winter Garden and then go on the road. The salary was disappointing, just $250 per week, and she would have to cover costumes and travel expenses. But for the first time she’d be a real principal and, even better, work with Fanny Brice. Fanny, too, had fallen in with gangsters and changed her appearance, hiring a Chicago doctor to use “saws, hatchets, chisels, files, and whatever other instruments were necessary” to reshape her nose. She had been able to transform her vaudeville past into a legitimate stage career—a feat even June, with all those lessons and dedication to her craft, had yet to accomplish.
“Think I’ve got a lovely job coming up, June. It means the road, but you’ll be proud of me.” She guzzled the rest of her coffee and began reapplying lipstick, waiting for her sister’s reaction.
“I’m proud now,” June said, surprising her.
They were quiet a moment, studying each other.
“Let’s say you’re prouder now than you were, huh?” Gypsy said, and they walked together out into the cold. The wind rocked the air and lashed at their faces. A fleet of Packard sedans and boxy Oldsmobiles trudged along Lexington Avenue, keeping them noisy company. Without thinking, Gypsy pulled her sister into her arms.
“I wish to God I didn’t worry about you, June,” she said, “but you don’t make it easy.” She sneezed into June’s hair. “There. If I catch cold in this frigging wind, it’s going to be all your fault!”
June unwrapped herself. “Go on home, go inside,” she said. “I’m fine! Don’t worry, I’m going to be okay.”
Gypsy walked halfway down the street before turning back to shout, “Like hell you are!”
She worried equally about her mother, but for different reasons. She’d stashed Rose away in that rambling apartment on West End Avenue, where she rented the empty rooms to a bevy of lesbians who found her as charming and irresistible as Murray Gordon had all those years ago. Rose knew they weren’t welcome at “normal joints” and took full advantage, sending them on errands and charging them for every measly meal: 75 cents for a plate of spaghetti with no cheese, 15 cents for a cup of coffee. The yelling, the screaming, the all-night brawls culminating in accusations about who was stealing from Rose—Gypsy heard about all of it from June. There were the inevitable reconciliations, too, with Rose sobbing about how she couldn’t work because of her asthma and how much she loathed sex. “I gave up marriage years ago because I hate sex, hate hate sex,” she’d say, clinging to her pet du jour. “Don’t I, Kate?” The girl would say, “Yes, Roanie, yes,” and squeeze Rose to her chest. And they all knew to comfort Rose when she told tales about her two daughters, the one who had failed her and the one who had forgotten her.
It’s true; Gypsy Rose Lee did push Mother away, and remade her in the process. Rose was now a legend in her own right—the punch line to Gypsy’s favorite jokes, the antimoral to every parable, the sad, twisted cameo in her act. Gypsy’s Irving Place repertoire included a number called “Give Me a Lay!” Henry Miller, on at least one occasion, sat among the nameless men who fanned newspapers across their laps, watching Gypsy shuffle stark naked across the stage, her only prop a Hawaiian lei. She asked if they knew how it felt to get a good lay, how even her mother would be grateful for a lay once in a while. Why, Mother would take a lay on the piano, or on the floor. An old-fashioned lay, if need be. A lay any old way, yes sir …
“The strippers talk to their customers as they do their stunt,” Miller reported.
The coup de grâce comes when, after having divested themselves of every stitch of clothing, there is left only a spangled girdle with a fig leaf dangling in front—sometimes a little monkey beard, which is quite ravishing. As they draw towards the wings they stick their bottoms out and slip the girdle off. Sometimes they darken the stage and give a belly dance in radium paint. It’s good to see the belly button glowing like a glowworm, or like a bright half dollar. It’s better still to see them holding their boobies, especially when said boobies are full of milk.
Rose knew too much about the mechanics of Gypsy’s creation, where the paint might peel and the screws might loosen, the remote corners where the damaged parts were stashed, the lovely lies they invented together to fill in all the gaps. With one dagger word Mother could kill her, a fairy-tale character that couldn’t be put together again. The city had become too small for both of them, so Gypsy bought a country house and farm out in Highland Mills, New York, an hour northwest of the city. She named it Witchwood Manor, and there Rose once again collected a harem of willing and faithful servants. They hoed the land, tended to the animals, reroofed the barn, painted the chicken coop, and widened the driveway. Rose paid them nothing for their effort—wasn’t part of the fun of living on a farm tending to its upkeep?—and in turn each of them gave Rose $3 per night.
On Fridays, just before Gypsy’s parties began, Mother sometimes showed up with her rooster, Solly, tucked under an arm. She did not understand how her elder daughter, the one she’d made her namesake, had become this creature who no longer needed or wanted her. Being cut off from Gypsy was every bit as painful as giving birth to Rose Louise; it was as if her firstborn nearly killed her all over again.
The rift affected them equally but inversely, protecting who Gypsy had become while dismantling who Mother had been—Madame Rose, the “Developer of Children”—and there was no room to give on either side. Rose tried to take what she could, literally pushing at Gypsy’s door, Solly squawking and fidgeting as she fought for purchase.
“I guess he’s not good enough for such a grand apartment,” she yelled, thrusting the rooster at Gypsy. “All we’re good for is to work like horses on that farm of yours.”
Beyond her daughter’s shoulder she heard the clinking glasses and riotous laughter. She glimpsed the sleek fur stoles, the animals’ heads still attached, resting on the bodices of empire gowns. She smelled smoke so foreign, so musky sweet, she forgot all about her asthma. For once her words held no self-pity or deceit, and they dropped from her mouth like hail, cold and hard and perfectly formed.
“I,” she said, “have as much right to be at this party as you have. And by God, you can’t keep me out.”
Gypsy clutched her mother’s wrists and danced her backward into the elevator.
“Get the hell out of here,” she said, “so I can be myself!”
Ro
se snorted. “Yourself? You mean so you can pretend to be that phony-voiced con artiste with the trick French gags and the filthy jokes, and waltz around half naked with all the flashy jewelry Eddy tosses your way?”
“Out!” Gypsy insisted. “Out, for God’s sake, and let me go to work.”
Finally Rose relented, and she was gone.
It wasn’t over, though; it would never be over. From June she heard every accusation and complaint: Mother just didn’t know why Gypsy spent every weekend in a hospital, ulcer or no ulcer. She says it’s restful? Fiddle! Why not go in a taxi instead of an ambulance? Gypsy thinks it’s stylish to be exhausted all the time. Here Rose was, a prisoner up in the country, while Gypsy enjoyed ambulance rides and all that publicity. Anyway, the illness was all in Gypsy’s mind. The girl was scared of her own shadow, nervous about everything, and it served her right. That’s what she gets for ignoring her own mother, for treating her like a stranger and a joke, for being an “unnatural child.” Her heart was sick with shame for both her daughters. One day, if Gypsy didn’t repent, everyone would know every detail of her seedy, sordid lost year in burlesque, when she was no more special than anyone else, when she nearly killed herself in order to live.
On occasion, only when necessary, Gypsy and Rose reunited and remembered how it had been, just a poor single mother and daughter against an unforgiving world. Such a temporary reconciliation was vital on the afternoon of November 3, 1936, when Gypsy invited her mother and sister to meet at her apartment. This time, Rose did not bring Solly the rooster, and she made sure to arrive before June. She and Gypsy needed to discuss that morning’s Daily News—in particular, an article about an actress calling herself June Havoc: “The world knows of Gypsy … darling of the literati, star of the Follies, lily maid of the Minskys, but who knows of her younger sister, June.… Her show, Forbidden Melody, might not be a hit, but June Havoc, secret sister of Gypsy Rose Lee, most certainly is. Broadway is still ringing with the applause.”