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

by Karen Abbott

  And now Ginny Augustin was dead.

  The reports were nebulous, but repeated certain details until they took on the sheen of truth. Ginny Augustin was a twenty-nine-year-old woman from Kenosha, Wisconsin, who had moved to Chicago and then to New York City. She was slim and pretty, with straight blond hair that swept her neck and pouty rosebud lips. She taught art classes at the Textile High School in Manhattan and displayed her work at the Municipal Art Gallery on West 53rd Street, watercolors that were deemed “a credible though not at all momentous showing.” She had a history of depression and suicide attempts, most recently slashing her wrists with a razor blade. When she heard about the farm named Witchwood Manor up in Highland Mills, she knew she had to live there. She arrived and painted and tended to Rose and her family for months, without incident.

  On the afternoon of Tuesday, June 1, 1937, Ginny Augustin went hiking in the woods around the property. Upon her return, she locked herself in her bedroom. She wore a white, short-sleeved blouse, black shorts, and thick cotton socks. Somehow she managed to point a rifle at her temple and pull the trigger. She landed on her back, her right leg folded under her in a limp, rag-doll pose. Blood soaked the carpet and spread as far as the door, but not one splatter marred the walls. She left no note. The body was discovered by Rose Thompson Hovick, and the coroner pronounced the death a suicide. Gypsy Rose Lee, former striptease artist, known as Louise Hovick in motion pictures, was not present at the cottage at the time of the shooting.

  Maybe she was, and maybe she wasn’t. Her old Minsky comrade Georgia Sothern would swear Gypsy had been there, as would a deputy sheriff named E. Sergio. Either way, she had to get involved. Mother and daughter, keepers of each other’s secrets, hoarders of a devastating currency they couldn’t afford to trade. Gypsy had never said a word about certain incidents from their vaudeville days—the unfortunate cow that wasn’t really a cow at all, the hotel manager who “fell” from a window—and neither would she say anything about Ginny Augustin. The rumors would linger past Gypsy’s lifetime, rumors she never confirmed or denied: there was a party attended by Rose’s six boarders, numerous neighborhood men, assorted friends, and Gypsy. Ginny Augustin made a pass at Gypsy, which infuriated Rose; she did not want to compete for attention or affection with either one for either one.

  Rose followed Ginny into her bedroom and shot her, once, in the head. She burned the girl’s diary, full of what she called “crazy lies” that could hurt Gypsy’s Hollywood career, and concocted her story.

  “I didn’t do a thing,” Rose confided to June, and then contradicted the coroner’s report of a shot through the temple. “She took the shotgun out of my hand, put the nozzle in her mouth, stepped on the trigger, and pow! I didn’t actually offer the gun, don’t you see? I just had it, that’s all … she was deceitful and—and bad. With your sister trying so hard to be a Hollywood star, and that fool girl blowing the whole top of her head off.… I’ve never been able to stomach a poor loser. I never told her she was moving in with me. Why would I clutter up my life with a wild tramp like that? I’m tired of getting into other people’s muckups, just because I know what loneliness is.… Abandoned, ignored. Sometimes I think I’d be better off dead, too. I told her that, I did. I said, ‘Why not just check out if you’re that unhappy?’ And there was the gun, and—well, I think she knew what she was doing.”

  Rose sat back and trusted the incident would be covered up because of Gypsy, and it was. Sheriff Sergio took charge of quieting things down. Ginny Augustin’s mother, unconvinced that her daughter committed suicide, demanded an investigation. Members of a grand jury descended upon Witchwood Manor. They walked the grounds, toured the little theater room decorated with cutouts of Gypsy, saw the studio where Ginny painted portraits of Rose and Aunt Belle and Big Lady, sat on the bed where the girl got her final night’s sleep. Four days later, they issued a report that the Orange County district attorney deemed “tantamount to refusal to indict.”

  The clamor subsided, Ginny Augustin was forgotten, but the aftershocks rumbled in Gypsy’s ears. Mother was on the other side of the country, but Gypsy could sense the ominous jumble of her thoughts, anticipate her growing cache of trouble and threats.

  She craved success so fiercely that she betrayed herself again: 20th Century–Fox suggested she marry a nice, ordinary man, a civilian, just to make her “more like everyone else.” His name was Arnold “Bob” Mizzy. He was a dental supply manufacturer from New York and, at age twenty-five, just one year younger than she. He was also a friend of Eddy, who still darted in and out of her life; when the three of them were out together Bob pretended to be her date. Gypsy had dated Bob occasionally when Eddy was off with his wife and even developed a genuine affection for him, despite the fact that he was not at all her type.

  Bob came from a wealthy family, had attended elite schools and summer camps, spoke proper English, possessed a full head of hair and no rough edges. She liked his “intriguing frown” and regarded his normal childhood upbringing with a mixture of wonder and skepticism, as if it were some ancient artifact with dubious authenticity. “Think, June,” she mused to her sister, “the same two parents all along the line. Mother, father.” She reconnected with her own father, Daddy Jack Hovick, still living in Los Angeles and with his second family. He wrote her letters, calling Gypsy his “sweet lovely datter.” Gypsy’s stepbrother, Jack, and stepmother, Elizabeth, wrote, too, reminding her of the conventional civilian family she’d never known. “I remember when I was pregnant with Jack [your father] hoped it would be a girl,” she wrote. “He did miss you and June so very much.… It is a sad thing when boys and girls have to be deprived of their dads.”

  The ceremony was scheduled for Friday the thirteenth of August, 1937, which Gypsy told the press was her lucky day. “I wanted to be married on the high seas,” she said, and threw in a fib for the sake of publicity: “My father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all married there … our name is a contraction of ‘Ho, Viking!’ But to keep all the records straight, we’ll be married again—on land this time.” On their first wedding night, after the water taxi pulled back to shore, Gypsy returned to her beachfront home in Santa Monica and Bob to his Hollywood hotel room, both of them alone.

  Darryl Zanuck doubted the legality of the maritime marriage and ordered another wedding. On August 17, a Tuesday afternoon, Gypsy and Bob wed again, saying their vows before a justice of the peace on Santa Ana land.

  Rose promised to meet the newlyweds at the Highland Mills cottage, along with a photographer from Life magazine. Two months had passed since the Ginny Augustin tragedy, and Gypsy and Rose maintained a cautious, deliberate peace, as if a sudden move by either might ruin both of them at once. Their letters were light and hazy, their endearments frequent but rote. Rose telegrammed when she couldn’t make either of Gypsy’s weddings to Bob—“Darling cant make trip call me at twelve heartsick love=Mommy”—and cracked jokes about the union, calling the newlyweds “Mr. and Mrs. Ha Ha High Tide.”

  But another shift began between Gypsy and Rose, deeper than any in the past, unfolding slowly and imperceptibly, a fever that cooled by fractions of degrees. Maybe it was prompted by a letter from June, who knew more than she cared to about her sister and mother’s poisonous bond, about the suspicious deaths and questionable characters floating into and out of their world, about how vulnerable Gypsy became when a crack surfaced in her creation.

  “Colossol [sic] Stupidity,” June called her sister by way of greeting,

  Is this your idea of “The Glory Road”? And if I am not being too indelicate—where is the end of the too, too thrilling road? You know Louise, I am younger than you are and poorer than you are, less lovely than you are and much less well, say—popular than you are—but By God I have three times the chance for happiness that you have—do you know it? … this illusion of yours isn’t the only one you cherish—its one among many—your tinsel (stupid word but damn good) and fools you surround yourself with—drink with—live with�
��parasites—no—you aren’t the big sister—I am.… I want to stay as far away from you and Momie as I possibly can.

  While I write to you and you write to me it generally stays right beside you where it belongs—but when I try to see and talk with either of you it bounces all over your faces and conversation and I come away sick and miserable—I hate every bit of it—it isn’t even amusing—sad—tragic—anymore it stinks to high heaven—its rotten and unwholesome—its just plain garbage—and somehow while I am away from you it doesn’t exist—and that is the only way we can manage … lets never mention your appetite or lack of it again.

  Neither June nor Gypsy specified what that “appetite” was for.

  Gypsy kept the letter, tucking it away along with her scrapbooks of press clippings, but she saw herself, perhaps for the first time, through June’s eyes. There were disgust and outrage on those pages, yes, but also concern and, of all things, disappointment. It was that sentiment that bothered Gypsy most, this utter reversal of roles—the unbright, naïve Baby casting haughty judgment on the maddeningly self-assured Duchess—and the subtext, as obvious as it was undeniable: it was time once again to distance herself from Mother, or risk becoming her.

  After a cross-country honeymoon drive, and after a brief stay at Witchwood Manor (during which Gypsy baked biscuits for Bob and treated her status as newlywed like a movie role, telling the press, “A gal has to know something besides wearing a jewel studded G-string if she’s going to hold her husband”), she and Bob headed back to Hollywood, leaving Mother behind.

  From then on, when Gypsy turned her attention back to Rose her eyes were sharply focused, her ears attuned to nonsense passed off as fact. For the first time the three-thousand-mile distance began to do its job, and far away, on the east side of that divide, Rose could feel her grip slipping, her hold weakening, finger by clenched finger. She grasped and felt nothing, shouted and heard no response.

  At last, in spring 1938, Gypsy ordered Rose and her lesbian harem to leave Witchwood Manor but continued an allowance that paid for a rental—for Mother only—two miles up the road. To Rose this meant war, and her mind began preparing for battle, tallying slights both recent and old. Her daughter had a habit of claiming and denying ownership at whim, whichever reaction was convenient in the moment, thinking always of how it would serve her image and never of the truth. How dare Gypsy complain when Rose went back to Witchwood Manor to collect certain items: antiques, books, dogs, even Waxey Gordon’s thirty-piece dining room set. Those were Rose’s things, by God, and it was time Gypsy admitted it.

  “Louise,” Rose wrote,

  do you ever stop to think how much of the stuff in that house really belongs to me? Where did it all come from? How did most of it get there? I was your slave and colored maid for years and years, there I was a house keeper for you. I was never paid a salary I was given just enough to run your house on the few pennies I scraped together after expenses were taken care of I put back into your house never dreaming I would some day be turned out.… I am begrudged $37.00 a week to live on, even called a thief and made out a leper.

  And if Gypsy were being honest, she would take responsibility for the darker edges around their days, all of those strangers who stepped in and tinkered with their lives. Gypsy was fooling herself, feeling “so perfect” and turning everyone against Rose: Bob Mizzy, June, even Jack Hovick and his new family, who had the nerve to pretend they cared for Gypsy more than did her own mother. Rose addressed all of it in the same handwritten letter, the force of her rage evident in every heavy word, the point of her pencil breaking several times: “What have I ever done that you haven’t done twenty fold worse … you even advised the last fatal party that took place.… I mention all this because I want to know why am I so unwanted all of a sudden. It’s a pretty tough time to let me down Louise.”

  No response, and Rose tried again, contrite and martyred. “I will regret as long as I live the unfortunate unhappiness I caused you through the Ginny affair that I was helpless to avoid,” she wrote. “You can’t hurt anything you love dear and I adore and love you.… Do you think you would feel better about me if I came to Cal. to live dear?”

  Rose would not be ignored. She showed up in California, wielding a rifle no one knew was unloaded, and chased Bob around the house until she was tackled and restrained. For the first time Gypsy hired a lawyer to put some official space between them, but she knew she’d always feel the pull of her mother’s hand, and hear the tune of her mad song.

  She realized, too, that her Hollywood career as Louise Hovick was as insubstantial as her marriage. The studio never gave her a chance to do straight drama, and she couldn’t rely on her striptease or its inherent humor. Her next four movies under contract—Ali Baba Goes to Town, Battle of Broadway, My Lucky Star, and Sally, Irene and Mary—were all critical and commercial failures. GYPSY FLOPPED IN HOLLYWOOD, one headline trumpeted, and she distracted herself by reconnecting with her activist friends. She became a fixture at Communist United Front meetings and charity events. The Dies Committee, so called after Representative Martin Dies, chairman of the House committee investigating un-American activities, began a dossier on Gypsy and issued her a subpoena to testify. “With my act and Dies’ publicity,” she joked to the press, “we could bring back vaudeville.… Sure, we gave parties in Hollywood to help poor Spanish kids. I thought it was American to help the downtrodden.”

  Some of her colleagues weren’t quite sure what to make of her approach, especially when she reprised her role in the Follies for a roomful of sedate dowagers. She meant no offense; her act was the truest, easiest way she knew to raise money, and wasn’t that the point? One of the offended ladies happened to be her mother-in-law, Ruth Mizzy, who afterward sent Gypsy a stern reprimand.

  Dear Louise,

  I realize now how very stupid I was not to have understood that when you were being advertised as Gypsy Rose Lee that you would appear in the role you played at the Follies. I have been trying to find a reason for your having given the Strip Tease performance at the Mecca Temple and to save my soul I really cannot find one. Perhaps you thought we would not mind seeing that it was a benefit for Spain … it was a serious Faux Pas.… I gather you are planning to continue in the show business doing the Strip Tease.… You have but a short time in which you can continue with this type of work—and as you definitely have a great deal of knowledge about the theatre and histrionic talent it would seem that with a very little bit of specialized training you could very easily find a most suitable and desirable place in the theatre which deals with drama. At this time you should make every effort to find the best material possible as a vehicle for your talent. Now, while you are still young, you can pass from one type of work to another.

  Gypsy decided to cast aside Louise Hovick—for good this time. She didn’t have it in her to argue; striptease was her talent, her theater, her drama, the one way she knew to get accolades and attention, and there was no room for it here. She left Bob and Hollywood and the memory of every failed take and awful review. Teaming up with Jimmy Durante, she launched a tour called the Merry Whirl Review and stripped her way back east, incorporating a parody of a character named “Mr. Censor.” When reporters asked her what she thought about Sumner’s battle against the Minskys, she deemed it “silly and rather provincial. If anyone’s morals could possibly be jeopardized by burlesque, he’s pretty far gone anyway.”

  She performed in every grand and musty old vaudeville theater across the country, spotting ghosts from that sad, sweet part of her life before she was anyone at all. New York was her final stop, the city that discovered her, and the only place she knew that offered redemption along with heartache.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Wish I had a town I belonged to. All the towns we drive through I see the lights on in the windows … it looks as though it would be warm and friendly inside—but I’m outside.

  — GYPSY ROSE LEE, WRITING ABOUT HER CHILDHOOD, 1956

  New York City,
1958–1959

  Despite June’s resistance, David Merrick and his team move forward with plans for the musical. One afternoon, Gypsy lounges in her drawing room, smoking a cigarette and sipping tar-thick tea, anticipating the arrival of Arthur Laurents. His last work, West Side Story, was nominated for a Tony Award, and she is thrilled he’s adapting her memoir for the stage. He wants to ask a few questions, fill in some gaps about her life, and she tells him to come over, darling, anytime, she’ll be happy to chat. Even his short walk through her front courtyard grants him insights not to be found in Walter Winchell’s column or the Police Gazette. In one section of her mansion on East 63rd Street, she rents out several rooms to tenants on the condition that they leave their doors open. “Closed doors,” Laurents notes, “meant she was running a multiple dwelling which meant permits and taxes, which meant money. Like mother, like daughter.”

  Gypsy (left) and June, 1959. (photo credit 34.1)

  Gypsy knows it is Mother, in fact, who most intrigues Laurents, all those stories he’s heard out in the Hamptons from some woman who claims Rose Hovick was her very first lover. Oh, she says, that Rose was curvaceous and charming and manipulative as Clytemnestra, somehow convincing a crew of women to work for nothing at her cottage upstate; she operated that place like a slave farm. Apparently, Mother confided to this lover all of her greatest hits. There was the time she took her ladies to a Chinese restaurant, crashed into another car, and blackmailed the other driver into paying for damages; the girls all vowed to be her witnesses. And the time, so long ago now, when she pushed a hotel manager out of the window. And of course the time she shot a girl who’d made a pass at Gypsy, and for this story Rose invented a twist ending: she buried the body in the backyard, and then asked, ever so sweetly, if some of the girls might like to hoe the dirt. She acted so surprised when she saw what turned up …