American Rose

by Karen Abbott

  Inside her dressing room, Gypsy reclines on a chaise longue and holds a glass of brandy in shaking hands. The smoky-sweet scent of knockwurst drifts over from her hot plate, but her appetite is gone. She can hear them, the dull thrum of their expectations, the drumbeat chants of her name. Gypsy Rose Lee, voted the most popular woman in America, outpolling even Eleanor Roosevelt. Gypsy Rose Lee, who boasts that her own billboard is “larger than Stalin’s.” Gypsy Rose Lee, the only woman in the world, according to Life magazine, “with a public body and a private mind, both equally exciting.” Gypsy Rose Lee, whose best talent—whose only talent—is becoming whatever America needs at any given time. Gypsy Rose Lee, who, at the moment, is as mysterious to herself as she is to the gathering strangers outside.

  She sips her brandy, lights a Murad cigarette. The voices beyond these four tight walls grow louder still, but can’t overtake her thoughts. At age twenty-nine, she stands, precisely and precariously, on her own personal midway, cluttered with roaring secrets from her past and muted fears for her future, an equal number of years ahead in her life as behind. A half-dozen scrapbooks are fat with clippings from vaudeville and burlesque, her first marriage and Hollywood career, her political activism and opening nights; a half-dozen more, blank and empty, wait for her to fill the pages. Not a day passes without her retelling, if just to her own ears, the densely woven and tightly knotted story of her own legend, and not a day passes when she doesn’t wonder how its final line will read.

  She senses that the next chapter might begin with Michael Todd, the man who said he’d give his right ball to hire her, who granted her the Stalin-sized billboard and a second chance with New York. Earlier that afternoon, he banged on her dressing room door, and she took her time letting him in.

  “What’s the matter in there?” he asked, pushing his way inside. “Can’t you read?” He pointed his cigar toward a sign on the notice board: NO COOKING BACKSTAGE.

  “Of course I can read. It saves money,” Gypsy said in that inimitable voice. She’s worked for years on that voice, scrubbing the Seattle out of it, ironing it smooth, tolling her words like bells: “rare” became rar-er-a. It is both charming and affected and, when either raised a decibel or compressed to a whisper, positively terrifying. It makes babies cry and one of her dogs urinate in fear.

  “On your salary,” Mike responded, “I can’t afford to have you stinking up the theater.”

  Gypsy invited him to try her knockwurst, and he sat down across from her. She smiled at his singular philosophy about money and success: “I’ve been broke but I’ve never been poor,” he told her. “Being poor is a state of mind. Being broke is only a temporary situation.” She noted his graceful, fluid movements, strangely at odds with his features: rectangular, filet-thick hands dead-ending into tubular fingers, a head that sat atop a brick of a neck. He nearly licked the plate, and afterward ripped down the sign.

  A cheapskate, Gypsy thinks, but not a hypocrite. Just like her, on both counts. She suspects they’ll work well together now and in the future, since they both understand that ambition comes first and money matters most.

  She sets her brandy down on her vanity, making room amid a Roget’s Thesaurus, millipede-sized pairs of false eyelashes, an ashtray, a typewriter. Whenever she’s not performing she plans to work on her novel, a murder mystery set in an old burlesque theater; the book counts as one bold step into her blank and waiting future. She’s told favored members of the press about her literary ambitions, confessing that she’s lousy at punctuation due to her limited schooling and sharing her theories about storytelling. “I don’t like poison darts emerging from the middle of the Belgian Congo,” she says, “and I think there is no sense having people killed before the reader is acquainted with them.”

  She doesn’t mention that she has a few authentic, true-life murders in her past, or that the person responsible has recently resurfaced, sending a terse, cryptic note that concludes: “I hope you are well and very happy.”

  Which, coming from Mother, signals another gauntlet thrown.

  The four syllables of her name thrash inside her ears. It’s time, now, and she makes her body comply. One last review in the full-length mirror, a slow turn that captures every angle and inch. She knows the crowd outside doesn’t care who she plans to be. They want the Gypsy Rose Lee they already know, the one whose act has remained unchanged for nearly ten years; they delight in the absence of surprise. They’ll look for her trademark outfit: the Victorian hoop skirt, the Gibson Girl coif, the plume hat slouching over one winking eye, the size 10½ brocade heels, the bow that makes an exotic gift of her long, pale neck. They’ll wait for the slow roll of stocking over knee, strain to glimpse a patch of shoulder. They’ll beg for more and will be secretly pleased when she refuses. She knows that what she hides is as much of a reward as what she deigns to reveal.

  The curtain yields and admits her to the other side. She senses the spotlight darting and chasing, feels it pin her into place. Voices circle one last time and collapse into silence, waiting.

  “Have you the faintest idea of the private life of a stripteaser?” she begins, caught between her personal, unwritten World of Tomorrow, and deeper and deeper yesterdays.

  Rose Thompson Hovick, “a beautiful little ornament that was damaged.” (photo credit 1.1)

  Chapter Two

  Do unto others before they do you.

  — ROSE THOMPSON HOVICK

  Seattle, Washington, 1910s

  No matter what Rose Hovick tried—hurling herself down flights of stairs, jabbing herself in the stomach, refusing food for days, sitting in scalding water—the baby, her second, would not go still inside her. A preternaturally stubborn little thing, which she should have taken as a sign. She wanted a boy, even though men did not last long in her house. Her first child, Ellen June, was a chubby brunette, twelve pounds at birth, tearing her mother on her way out. The house had no running water, and the attending midwife washed the baby clean with snow. A caul had covered her face, which meant she had a gift for seeing the future as clearly as the past. But she was clumsy, too, and by age three already diluting Rose’s dreams.

  Ellen June’s new sibling arrived early and when it was most inconvenient for Rose, during a trip to Vancouver, but the baby was instantly forgiven—even for being a girl. This second daughter had a sprig of bright yellow hair and blue eyes with dark circles etched beneath them, as if she were already weary, and her head seemed tiny enough to fit into a teacup. She could spin perfect circles on her toes before she could talk, and Rose decided that since the girl had refused to be destroyed, she might consent to being created.

  Rose Louise Hovick’s birth certificate, amended to read “Ellen June.” (photo credit 2.1)

  Rose would give the baby everything—even things not rightfully hers to give—including her older daughter’s name, the first and favorite name. From then on the original Ellen June was called Rose Louise, Louise for short—a consolation prize of a name, half borrowed from her mother. It was the first of many times she would become someone else.

  In the beginning the family lived in a bungalow on West Frontenac Street in Seattle, built of crooked wooden slats and a sloping shingled roof, squat as a bulldog, four rooms that felt like one, the kind of dank, dreary home that looked inviting only in a rainstorm. A porch jutted from the front, supported by columns where Rose could string wet laundry, had she been that kind of housewife. The place had a single grace note: the tiny square of Puget Sound visible from one window.

  No matter where Louise or Ellen June (nicknamed “June”) hid, their mother’s voice could find them. “Her low tones were musical,” June said, but “her fury was like the booming of a cannon.” Rose had married John “Jack” Hovick in 1910 at age eighteen, one month pregnant with Louise, and by 1913, when her dainty baby June was born, she had already left and returned to her husband half a dozen times. She vowed to memorize his offenses, real or imagined, so that when the day came she could recite her lines in just on
e take.

  Rose got her chance in the summer of 1914, when she placed her hand on a Bible in a King County courtroom, a box of tissues by her side. Your Honor, she began, her husband, Jack Hovick, forced her and their daughters to live in an apartment on Seattle’s Rainier Beach that was “damp and full of knot holes”—unacceptable, especially for a woman suffering from the grippe and weak lungs. Their next apartment was no better, what with its “bad reputation” and tenants of questionable character. She and her husband separated, reconciled, separated again. Rose so feared for her and her daughters’ safety that she had applied for a restraining order against Jack, and nailed shut the door and every window. He had threatened to steal Louise and June, never to bring them back. “If I could only get the kids,” he’d said, “it is all I would want.”

  She wept for a moment at the horror of the memory. The courtroom quieted, waiting for her to compose herself.

  Once, Rose continued, Jack broke through the glass, trashed all the furniture, and stole the bedrails, leaving her to sleep on the floor. He also “struck and choked” his wife and once beat Louise “almost insensible, slapped and kicked her and put her in a dark closet on account of some trivial matter.”

  Her husband made $100 a month as an advertising agent for The Seattle Sun yet refused, during all of their married life, to buy Rose even one hat or a dress suit or “any underwear to speak of.” He never gave her money to spend on herself or for “any purpose whatever”—including private dance lessons for Louise and June, although she omitted this last grievance from her public testimony. Rose would use the girls not to escape a life she’d never wanted, but instead to access one that had always stood just out of her reach.

  No longer, though. That life crept closer the day she took her daughters to a group lesson at Professor Douglas’s Dancing School in downtown Seattle. Four lines of girls bobbed up and down to sounds from the professor’s piano, thumpy renditions of “Baby Shoes” and “A Broken Doll,” and not a talented one in the lot. Especially not Louise, always a half beat behind, swatting at the air rather than stroking it. Rose stood on the sidelines, making elegant butterfly swoops with her arm and pointing her toe, hoping Louise would follow her lead. June stood nearby, grasping the ballet barre, watching as if hypnotized. She toddled toward the line of dancing girls and they parted, making room. “I cannot recall the compulsion that led me out onto the floor,” June said, “but I can close my eyes and still thrill to the memory of being there.”

  Rose understood compulsion and recognized its worth. Compulsion, along with indomitable women, had propelled her family through generations of misery, failure, and boredom; it was by far their finest trait. She shared with her daughters a favorite bit of family lore. Their great-great-grandmother emigrated from Norway and set out for the West Coast in a covered wagon. She made it as far as the Sierra Nevada mountains when her party was stranded by a blizzard. Most of the party died, frozen or starved or devoured by wolves. Rescue workers whisked Grandma to the nearest settlement and undressed her, discovering what appeared to be horsemeat strapped around her body, hidden from the other survivors. She alone appeared plump and healthy. On closer inspection, the rescue team discovered that it wasn’t horsemeat after all but rather the flesh of her less fortunate companions. It was a fairy tale, Hovick style, in which drama trumped veracity and the women always won.

  On that afternoon in Professor Douglas’s studio, Rose’s eyes shifted from Louise to June. She watched June lift up until her tiny feet were perpendicular to the tile floor, and then her baby’s body let itself fall, legs parting into a split, seamless as opening scissors.

  Professor Douglas pulled at his beard. “In a few years,” he said, “bring her back to me.”

  “What’s the matter with her now?” Rose asked.

  “Mrs. Hovick, here you have a natural ballerina. But let me implore you to heed my warning. Do not buy her a pair of toe shoes until she is at least seven years old. You will ruin her.”

  But Rose wouldn’t—couldn’t—wait, she told Jack that night. June was double-jointed; any child who could stand on her toes and do splits had to be. It was a gift, couldn’t he see that?

  “We simply haven’t the money for private lessons,” Jack said. “I have faith in the future, but right now I am forced to be frugal.”

  “Frugal!” Rose yelled. “You’re Norwegian, that’s what you are. I should have listened to my mother. She tried to save me from throwing my life away.” The marriage was over, Rose declared. She would leave and take the girls with her.

  Jack Hovick told a different story. Instead of dance lessons he bought his daughters a kitten, and watched them pet the soft length of its belly as he left the next morning for work. When he came home, he found the pet’s body, the sweet little face severed from the torso and cotton fluff of its tail. A bloodied hatchet stood propped in a corner, mute testimony to what his wife had done, and what she might be inclined to do.

  He fled that evening and never returned.

  Rose was finished with Jack Hovick, but not yet with men. Seattle had stretched from a sleepy frontier town into a bustling city, home to upward of a quarter-million people. Would-be millionaires from around the world passed through on their way north to the Klondike fields, hoping to find gold. Rose knew her strengths. Men noticed her bonnet of shiny brown curls and her striking eyes—nearly violet, with feathers for lashes. She had a compact, curvy figure and a flash-beam smile she used at her discretion. She was a proper lady, uneducated but ruthlessly shrewd, by turns vulnerable and witty and savage. In her own words she was a “jungle mother,” and knew to evaluate the worth of a thing or a person before bothering to stake her claim.

  She decided that Judson Brennerman, a traveling salesman from Indiana, would be her next husband. Surely someone in his profession would understand how rare her baby was, and agree that June needed an act, and an audience, as soon as possible.

  Rose and Judson were married at the First Unitarian Church in May 1916, on the same day newspapers reported that Seattle had surpassed Reno, Nevada, as the divorce capital of the United States, averaging twenty-five splits a week. Rose told the girls to call her new husband “Daddy Bub.” The following September, Daddy Bub bolstered the statistics by filing for divorce from Rose. He alleged that she was “cruel in many ways,” causing him to “suffer personal indignities ever since his marriage, rendering life burdensome.” The judge ordered Brennerman to pay Rose $200 in cash immediately, and $500 more over the course of the year.

  “Men,” she told her daughters, “will take everything they can get and give as little as possible in return.… God cursed them by adding an ornament here.” Rose pointed to between her legs. “Every time they so much as think of a woman, it grows.… Why girls, when I married Daddy Bub he promised me faithfully that he would educate my two little baby girls, I would run his house, and we would just be good friends. The very night we were married, he tried to enter my room. He had no intention of just being friends! That’s why Daddy Bub is no longer with us.”

  Rose ended this lesson by telling the girls exactly where they’d come from: she’d found June tucked inside the petals of a lovely red rose, and Louise had been plucked from a cabbage leaf.

  Rose took the settlement money and paid for more dance lessons, even for Louise. The girls had never brushed their teeth or seen the inside of a classroom, but they were ready for their first dance recital at Professor Douglas’s school. The professor, at Rose’s repeated insistence, let June wear toe shoes and kept any thoughts about her potential ruin to himself. June was no bigger than the dolls she longed for in toy store windows, spinning circles in slow-motion perfection, a music-box dancer come to life. Louise jerked her arms and wobbled on her kicks, self-conscious until she realized that not one eye was on her.

  Rose took the girls to stay with her family at 323 Fourth Avenue, in West Seattle. Her father, Charles Thompson, owned the house, but the women he lived with ran it. His wife—Rose’s mother—w
as Anna, but Louise and June called their grandmother “Big Lady.” She had a glorious pelt of thick dark hair and was tall enough to look down, literally and figuratively, on her husband. She had never wanted to marry him, especially not at age fifteen, and wanted her four children even less. Rose’s only brother, Hurd, accommodated Big Lady by drowning when he was nine.

  A search party discovered Hurd’s naked body trapped beneath a sunken log in the middle of Lake Union. The neighbors whispered about the strange circumstances: everyone knew the boy had been petrified of water, and why were his clothes folded neatly by the bank? But the mystery was buried along with Hurd, and the Thompson women took some solace in the fact that the boy was spared from becoming a man.

  Rose’s older sister, Mina, died of a drug overdose when she was just twenty. Afterward the younger sister, Belle, clung to Rose, absorbing her philosophy, noting the patterns of her behavior. Big Lady’s mother, Dottie, rounded out the crew. She, too, shared the family penchant for marrying young, wedding Big Lady’s father at age fourteen and then simply losing track of him. Big Lady, Rose, Louise, and June knew nothing of their father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. “Of course, he was only a man,” June said, “so it didn’t much matter.”

  Big Lady often fled her dull, untidy life in Seattle and ventured out to San Francisco or Juneau or Tonopah, lugging a trunk of hand-sewn corsets and garters dotted with beads and jewels. Undergarments were her specialty. On the backs she embroidered hearts and across the fronts naughty angels who cracked jokes in bright, cursive lettering. In Goldstream, Nevada, the prostitutes were among her best customers. But she catered to all kinds, even embroidering an altar cloth for the nuns of Sacred Heart Convent.