by Karen Abbott
Surely Gypsy knows that she is maddening and impossible, that she maintains her creation at the expense of those who have seen her naked, without it on. The creation rules her as much as she rules it; it is, along with Mother and Michael Todd, the great love of her life. It finally drives her last husband, Julio, away: the scenes, the yelling and stomping about, the inability to connect. He writes a poem for his wife that concludes with the lines
Strangled her
To shut off
Her torrent
of
verbal
abuse
He develops an ulcer because he just can’t “stand the noise,” as he puts it, the constant on-ness of being married to Gypsy Rose Lee, a woman who, for all of her bluster and might, can’t take an aspirin without getting sick. The body reacts, June thinks, because the soul protests.
If she and Gypsy talked about things that could make them fight, June might begin with one night in particular at the 63rd Street house. Gypsy was throwing one of her fancy dinner parties and June was in bed with the flu, too sick to perform in her current show. Gypsy’s cook, Eva, entered her darkened room.
“Here,” she said, lowering a tray holding a cup of broth and a croissant. “You have to eat something.”
No sooner had June taken a bite than Gypsy appeared in the doorway. June could track the course of her sister’s gaze, from the tray to the croissant in June’s hand, settling on her full mouth.
“June, Eva,” she said coolly, distantly, as if meeting both of them for the first time. “You know I’ve only got twelve croissants for the dinner party tonight.” Then, with raised volume: “You know I had so many guests, and it should come out even!” She stomped to the bed and leaned over June, as if to inspect the damage, and nearly scooped the crumbs from her sister’s mouth. The ensuing scene—screaming, pacing, accusing, everything Gypsy had—carried on until the bell rang and the first guest arrived.
And there was the time June was in the hospital with a thyroid condition, nearly comatose, and Gypsy came to visit her. “Darling,” she whispered, “I cannot stay. I have an engagement in Indianapolis that I cannot miss. Now, darling”—and here Gypsy leaned in so her mouth brushed June’s ear—“can you hear me? Can you hear me?” June didn’t stir. “In the side of your bed,” Gypsy continued, “in the drawer, there’s a check for four thousand dollars. You can pay me back at two percent interest, and you couldn’t do better at a bank.”
The worst of it, the memory that June pulled out time and again as evidence, was the night Gypsy gave her that card with the address to the sex party. After that nothing was as it had been before. She couldn’t unsee those people, couldn’t un-hear that noise, and couldn’t separate her sister from the moment Gypsy pressed the paper into her hand and told her to be bright. Seventy years later, bedridden, unable to walk let alone spin on her toes, ninety-five-year-old June Havoc made a confession: “Some things are just—” she said, and stopped short of filling in the space. “I’m still ashamed for her. I wish they hadn’t happened … I was no sister. I was a knot in her life. I was nothing. Or else she wouldn’t have given me that card.”
Beneath all that, what June also left unsaid, was the unforgivable implication that she, too, lived to feed her own ravenous creation. That she had it in her to be just like Gypsy Rose Lee and, by extension, Rose.
And that’s where Gypsy might join the forbidden conversation, if she cared to. She might recall every complimentary word June said about her: Gypsy knew how to “pick up an advantage” and use it. Gypsy was a marvelous storyteller. She was ruthless, she was brilliant, she was strong and sophisticated and elegant. She was the only one in her profession who “climbed out of the slime.” She could do anything onstage that didn’t involve actual talent. And beneath it all lay yet another tacit implication: Gypsy was too good for her own creation, and what a shame the creation was necessary at all.
“There came a day when she looked back on it all,” June said, “and she herself was not pleased with what she’d created.”
Time and again Gypsy endured the looks of disdain and pity, the rejections both silent and bold, the pressure to laugh at her own expense. She remembers trying to help June during those desperate early days in the best way she knew how: the audition at Minsky’s, the blunt advice, the backroom party where the right people might notice her. One Christmas, when June was still struggling, she gave her sister a gorgeous fur coat. June hurled it straight into the fire. “I wouldn’t take anything,” she said, “that was made from stripping.”
She remembers another time, when June was starring in a Broadway play and fielding offers from Hollywood. Gypsy was on the road, doing the same old act. June wanted Gypsy’s opinion on a script, but there was a phone strike and very few calls could go through.
“What’s the emergency?” the operator asked.
Gypsy identified herself and said, “This is my sister in New York, and she called me because she got an offer for a film and she wants my advice.”
“Your advice?” the operator asked. “Well, you didn’t do so well out there yourself.” And she wouldn’t permit the call.
They laughed about that for years, even though June—and June alone—knew Gypsy found it more painful than funny.
A few years later, in 1949, June was directing a production of Clare Boothe Luce’s The Women, and Gypsy planned to play Sylvia. She was nervous and called June at all hours of the night with every concern, even those having nothing to do with the play. “June,” she complained during one 3 A.M. chat, “you pay attention to everyone but me.” Another time: “June, what earrings do you think I ought to wear?”
June declared that Gypsy’s first performance was “fine.” She followed the direction, she got her laughs. But when June left town for a few days, Gypsy had to compensate for her sister’s absence. She put on her old monkey fur coat and the short dress that wouldn’t let her sit down. She let Gypsy Rose Lee overtake Sylvia, and the company people called June and insisted she come back. June didn’t have to say what she was thinking: Gypsy brought her gimmicks because they were all she had.
She tried, though, and June knew it. In 1960, she made a record, an actual record, called That’s Me All Over, a dozen or so tracks of her singing about her strip days. She rushed to June’s theater, grabbed her hand, and pulled her away from rehearsal. “Listen to me sing, June, I sing, I really sing!” she said. “Wait till you hear me.” Gypsy put on the record, and they sat together on the floor. They listened to Gypsy rhyme “Tchaikovsky” with “take it offsky,” boast that her “oven’s the hottest you’ll find,” and lament everything she’s been through, all that wear and tear. And June said only, “Boy, you’re going to make a lot of money on that” in that voice of hers—that trained, professional voice, so skilled at slipping sly, private meanings beneath each word.
The cancer is the strongest part of her now. Each day it surges further beneath her skin, claiming new territory, staking fresh ground. One afternoon she and June lounge on chairs, side by side. Gypsy sits up suddenly, as if a bug is scuttling across her.
“June,” she says, “look at this.”
She pulls up her blouse to reveal the tumor under her breast. It has pushed clear through, a purple mass that pulses like a deadly second heart. June rises and starts toward her, arms outstretched. Gypsy asks her, kindly, not to hug her, and to please not say a word. And if she cries, Gypsy will beat the hell out of her.
In the beginning of February she calls her friends, one by one. Calmly, she finally says the word aloud: “I have cancer.” The announcement makes the gossip columns. Everyone begins remembering Gypsy Rose Lee, the woman and the creation; they have never known the two as anything but connected, synonymous.
She had enjoyed the happiest time of her life just a few years earlier, during her syndicated talk show. For the first eight weeks, until the show found its rhythm, she did something she’d never done before: work for free. Ironic, wasn’t it, that the best audience s
he ever had was made up of conservative, conventional middle-aged women? The same group who once protested her Hollywood career en masse? Her “ladies,” as she called them, tuned in faithfully at 4 P.M., Monday through Friday, from 1965 to 1968, for a peek into Gypsy’s life, and she was more herself with them than she ever was onstage. Nothing was too private or trivial to share: letters from Erik when he was stationed overseas; the results of her latest face-lift; updates on her birds, fish, dogs, and flowers; tips on making jewelry out of bread dough; and recipes for French-fried chrysanthemum leaves. Everyone from Judy Garland to Liberace to Andy Warhol to Tom Wolfe sat down with her for interviews. Once she performed a dramatic reading from an article titled “How to Create a Compost Pile,” beginning with “First you take a dead horse.” She stashed potential fodder in a large, wheeled shopping basket and insisted on taking it to the studio in San Francisco. “I won’t check it,” she told airport security, “because my television show is in here and it’s my entire life. I want the bulkhead seat, and I want this bag with me.” And she always got her way.
The perfect description of her: Auntie Mame. She was eccentric, delightful, totally in another world. “Darling,” she told Erik when he was just a boy, “I cannot sing. I cannot dance. But just remember your mother’s a star.” She took solace in that. She flopped in Hollywood and struggled on Broadway, but she could make the street a stage just by strolling across it. She traveled to Istanbul for impromptu weekends, taking only a change of clothes and a shopping bag. She nearly slugged Billy Rose at a dinner party for ordering her to stop talking. She was described, by the screenwriter Leonard Spigelgass, as having the “magic gifts of enthusiasm and incandescence, and the tenacity of a bulldog.” She called Erik’s fifteen-year-old girlfriend a “scheming little bitch” who just wanted money, and suggested her son lose his virginity to a prostitute. “Love,” she told him. “You haven’t the faintest idea of what that word involves.” And when Erik, at age eighteen, demanded to know the name of his father, Gypsy responded by lighting a cigarette.
“I’ve decided not to tell you,” she said.
“What do you mean?” Erik asked. “How come?”
“Because it’s none of your business.”
When she finally relented and said, “Otto Preminger,” Erik was disappointed. He’d always suspected it was Michael Todd.
She never bought gifts. It wasn’t just that she was tight—no one who knew her would suggest otherwise—but she preferred to make her own. They were personal and funny and said as much about the recipient as they did about Gypsy. She could make gorgeous, intricate lampshades by poking holes in tin cans. She knitted argyle socks while watching movies in the dark. For one friend’s birthday she dressed a stuffed animal mouse in a hand-sewn prisoner’s uniform and adorned its floppy ears with enormous hoops. She brought homemade ratatouille to dinner parties, a tiny jar meant to feed eight people, and exclaimed, “Darling, this is a delicacy, you’re only supposed to have a taste.” Her thriftiness pervaded her business dealings, as well. After a taping of Hollywood Squares she packed up all the leftover food. “This is for my animals,” she said, but none of her costars believed it. When Edward R. Murrow came to interview her in her Upper East Side mansion, she accidentally dropped a hammer on her new marble floor—and then billed CBS for the damage. Her back-and-forth sparring with the notoriously difficult fashion designer Charles James was legendary. Gypsy recorded the disputes in her diary: “He said would count what he owes me (about $500, so he says) for making dress shape which I’m to pose in for him … he can’t understand why he shouldn’t be paid for his time. When I said what about my time, he called me a whore. Really!”
She notices, during one of her last radiation treatments, the queue of patients waiting behind her. “When I look at all these people,” she says, “I can’t bring myself to berate God for giving me this horrible disease. I’ve had three wonderful lives, and these poor sons-a-bitches haven’t even lived once.”
Still, Gypsy can’t believe she is finally shutting down. “I’m going to beat this thing,” she insists. “I’m going to beat it.” She repeats this intention when she can no longer walk and spends her days in a wheelchair in her room. She repeats it when she exchanges her old bed for an electric one, when the oxygen tank is delivered, when she begins spending more time with a nurse than with her own sister. She repeats it when she weighs herself to measure how much she gained; she never notices—or pretends not to—when June leans on the back of the scale to make the needle jump. She repeats it when she douses herself with perfume, so as not to smell like death already lives inside her.
The gossip columns keep tabs on every setback, every trip to the UCLA Medical Center, every triumphant reprieve. On Sunday, April 26, 1970, the ambulance comes once again. Paramedics bind her to the stretcher and hoist her up, and the doors shut heavily at her feet. She is alive, Gypsy tells herself. Still in the ring, standing and taunting, still refusing to retreat to her corner. June will drop everything and meet her halfway, as always, bringing violets and forcing her to eat and knowing better than to cry. She wills her ears to hear the wail of the sirens, her face to feel the soft pressure of the mask that gives her air. It grows darker behind the lids of her closed eyes and her own breath teases her, letting her catch the tail end of each inhalation before slipping out of reach. Her body begins working in reverse, exhaling, exhaling, exhaling, giving everything it has, taking nothing in return. With her knowledge but never her permission, it relents at last.
Michael Todd and Gypsy at the World’s Fair. (photo credit 36.2)
Chapter Thirty-seven
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
— F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
New York World’s Fair, 1940
Only she can transform a subdued return into a grand entrance. No one will look at her and think she is less than what she’d been, or that she regards tomorrow as warily as she does her recent yesterdays. She steps into the city and wraps it tight around her, comfortable and sleek as one of her old ermine coats, Gypsy Rose Lee wholly intact underneath.
She is everywhere at once, remaking her life as it was before she left it: the East Side apartment with a calculated jumble of antique furniture, the chorus line of nosy cherubs, the lascivious portraits of naked women, the thousands of erudite books teetering on shelves—some for reading, some for show. She settles back into her good-natured jousting with H. L. Mencken and her boldface status with Walter Winchell. She continues her political activism, performing a strip to benefit the United Committee for French Relief at the Ritz-Carlton, strolling out onto the stage clad in a skirt, a few strings of beads, and a bolero. German banking heir Paul Felix Warburg scores her red garter for $50, and Mary Pickford offers $400 if she’ll keep her costume on. She references her recent time in Hollywood under her old name as if it were passé, a tired sketch she’d quickly outgrown; she’d much rather seduce a live audience than a phalanx of cameras, and it was all for a lark, anyway. “I guess my Fourteenth Street burlesque technique wasn’t so good,” she explains, shrugging. “There was never any Stanislavski in my methods. I just got up and said my lines.… I came back with a swell collection of autographs.” She announces, with the subtlest touch of irony, her plan to strip to the song “I Want a Girl Just Like the Girl That Married Dear Old Dad.”
She speaks of who she might become—Gypsy Rose Lee, author of mysteries—but says nothing about her plan to chronicle her life, a narrative every bit as mysterious as any she could invent. A page of notes is already tucked away in her scrapbook. “When I was a little girl,” she’s written in her boisterous, looping scrawl, “I was the #1 custodian of the family scrapbook. News photographers covered the first important event in my life—that was in Seattle, Wash when I won a healthy baby contest—then my sister June came along and could dance on her toes when she was 2½ years old. I was four and couldn’t do anything.”
On rare occasions she even speaks wi
th candor, interviews that carry the burden of ulterior motives. “I want to do something serious and important in the theater some day,” she admits, wistfully, to one columnist. “My sister is an actress. She’s a real actress. She’s been doing serious, important things for some time now.”
“She has?” the columnist asks. “What’s her name?”
June Havoc, Gypsy thinks but her mouth disobeys: “Jane Hovick.”
Of course the columnist has never heard of her.
She and June are closing in on each other again, reshuffling their dynamic, wondering how best to fit into each other’s lives. They are still the Duchess and the wunderkind—those original roles can never be stripped away—but they are nuanced and layered now, unafraid to step out of character. When June sent her that rabid, vicious letter after the murder at Highland Mills, Gypsy finally understood. June loves her in the same way she herself loved Mother: fiercely and irrevocably, and often against her better judgment.
June comes one day to visit while Gypsy is getting her usual “ass pounding,” the masseuse chopping at her midsection while she lies spread-eagle across her mattress, her hands strangling the bedposts. “All that garbage, censor this, censor that,” Gypsy mutters. “Well, I am Gypsy Rose Lee from now on, and the Ladies Mutual Admiration Society can stuff it up their noses.” Her tone softens. “I don’t know when I’m going to work again.… God alone knows what’s next. Look over there—that’s all I’ve been offered since I came back covered with glory.” She pushes the masseuse away and sifts through a pile of paper, coming up with a sheet of music. “Wait a minute,” she says. “There’s a great song there. The writers are wonderful, June.” She thrusts the page into her sister’s hands. “They don’t know I can’t sing this, and I’ll be damned if I’ll prove I can’t in public. Why don’t you do it?” She has been taking from June for so many years, filching chapters from her life and diverting its path, and in a small, tentative way she seeks to atone.