by Karen Abbott
“Hush, children,” Rose said, placing a finger over each daughter’s mouth. “I had given up hope of ever seeing it again … wouldn’t Granny be pleased if she knew that by dying she had saved me from accusing anyone of stealing my diamond?” The girls found themselves trapped in a grid of arms, Mother and Big Lady and Aunt Belle all squeezing tight, and for one moment the family felt incredibly, indestructibly, close.
Later, the sisters would remember things differently, as sisters do, old grudges and misunderstandings refracting each memory, bending them in opposite directions. June looked at her big sister and saw “the most beautiful child alive,” with eggshell smooth skin and a shiny brown cap of hair, instead of an overweight, ungraceful tomboy. She, not Louise, was awkward, with wiry, bruise-mottled legs and a “Norwegian beak” of a nose, her talent more slapstick than refined. In her view, Louise didn’t lack ability so much as interest. “She was haughty,” June said, “and not sure she wanted to be there because she didn’t have to be there.”
To Louise, June was born for the sole purpose of gracing a stage, as if those oddly tired eyes and miraculous little feet had been specially ordered by Dionysus; even the barrel curlers their mother wound in her hair every night couldn’t diminish the effect. “Only actresses,” Louise thought, not without jealousy, “could be so pretty.” But she resented the Baby’s talent most of all. Of course Louise tried to make her steps light and quick and her voice carry without cracking, but her body refused to obey her brain. “I wanted desperately to sing and dance as well as June,” she insisted, “but she learned everything so fast.… I couldn’t help looking at myself and I hated the person I saw.”
The one thing the sisters came to agree on, after years of being entrapped by her words and mauled by her will, was their mother, a woman whose every thought and action defied her last, who raised her daughters as if they were two grizzled generals preparing for war—with men, with her, with each other. From year to year, month to month, even moment to moment, neither Louise nor June nor Rose knew the true status of their relationship: the tornado of slights (real or imagined), remorse (genuine or feigned), and resentment (always authentic, always deep) scythed too fiercely through their paths.
Rose was forthright in her dishonesty. “Never lie, never steal,” she’d advise, “it does no good in the long run,” but she did both every day they spent on the road. A self-professed prude, she invoked God often and disdained makeup (for herself; the Lord understood the girls needed rouge onstage), nail polish, and silk stockings, yet ventured this opinion about marriage: “If you don’t succeed the first time, try, try again, only don’t try to squeeze oil out of a rock.” Her petite hands, with their fragile, baby-bird bones, were capable, literally, of murder. She was by turns tender and pathetic and terrifying, broken in a way that no one, in that time or place, had any idea how to fix. “Mother was,” June thought, “a beautiful little ornament that was damaged.” Her broken edges cut her daughters in ways both emotional and physical, and only sharpened with age.
Louise recalled many injuries from these days, long before Rose’s unyielding focus turned from June to her, long before the Minsky brothers stepped in and rearranged her world, long before she trained her mind to ignore messages from her body. At first Rose tried desperately to fit her into the act. “I know that Louise is destined to be a great, great something or other,” she insisted to Big Lady and Belle. “My children are rare.” She bought Louise a saxophone she couldn’t play and spoiled her with presents, such as a Helena Rubenstein makeup box, to make her forget how jealous she was of June. But Louise knew she was a liability most of the time; her mother made that clear when she called her “excess baggage” and sighed in her direction, asking, “What is the matter with you, Louise? Is it that you don’t want to do the dance? Is that it? What do you want?”
What Rose wanted, at least part of the time, was for Louise to go away, although she worried about strange influences warping her elder daughter. “When she’s away from us,” Rose fretted, “she’s in a nest of civilians. Oh God, please don’t let it rub off on her.” But on several occasions she made it happen, allowing the girls’ father, Daddy Jack Hovick, a rare visit (despite her fury at his remarrying), or taking her to live with Aunt Hilma, Daddy Jack’s sister in Seattle. Aunt Hilma was married to an advertising executive for the Seattle Times, and they owned a grand white house on Queen Anne Hill.
Their daughter, Helen, died at age seventeen. Aunt Hilma and her husband went out one evening and came home to find Helen in a pool of her own blood—a freak menstrual hemorrhage, the doctors concluded—and they were overjoyed at the idea of taking Louise in. Rose enrolled Louise in the local public school and told her she could stay in Helen’s room. She and June would send for her just as soon as they landed either a string of movie deals or a long-term circuit contract, and they would all troupe together, across the country, hoping, ultimately, to perform at the Palace Theatre in New York City, the heart of vaudeville in the heart of everything.
Forty years later, when Gypsy Rose Lee told the story of little Louise, her old self, the identity she traded in with the hope of trading up, she said that living in Seattle with wealthy relatives sounded just fine. She explored her cousin’s things while a neighborhood girl, Helen’s best friend, provided narration. This silver mirror and matching comb came from “Tiffany’s in New York,” and here was a “real pearl necklace,” to which a new gem was added on each birthday.
“Mother says you’re the luckiest little girl in the whole world,” Helen’s friend said. “Everybody doesn’t get a chance to be adopted into such a nice family.”
At that, Louise felt the comb slip from her fingers, and informed the girl that she wasn’t going to be adopted. She was merely staying for a visit, “until Mother gets back on her feet.”
“Oh no,” Helen’s friend insisted. “I heard my mother and father talking about it after dinner. They said the papers are all drawn up and all your mother has to do is sign them.”
In the doorway stood Mother and Aunt Hilma. Rose blew her nose, poked a tissue at her eyes.
“Louise, dear,” she said, “you’re old enough now to know how hard life has been for me these past few months, what a fight I’ve had just to keep our heads above water. It might be years before June is where she belongs in the theater. Years of hard work and struggle …”
“But if I’m adopted I won’t be yours anymore,” Louise said. Her mother must not understand what “adoption” truly means, she thought. That was the only explanation. “I’ll work harder in the act, Mother. I’ll practice every day, honest I will. I’ll do anything but, please, don’t let me be adopted.”
After a moment Rose sighed, crumpled the tissue in her palm, and ordered her daughter to get her coat. Outside, Louise turned her face upward, willing her mother to look down.
“I’ll make up for it some way,” Louise promised. “You’ll see.”
By now, Rose figured June had been to Los Angeles enough times and scored enough film cameos to merit another moniker: “The Hollywood Baby.” The Hollywood Baby was a natural, perfect at taking direction, with a face that could reflect anything you wished to see. On one visit, for instance, June was in competition for a part along with five hundred other “beribboned, beflowered, overbleached, overcurled moppets.” Rose noticed the director looking their way. “Smile, baby,” Rose instructed, and pinched June’s cheeks until she whimpered.
The director, Hal Roach of “Our Gang” fame, approached and asked June if she knew any rhymes. June launched into a song:
Nobody knows me number
Nobody knows me name.
Nobody knows where I gets me clothes
But I gets them all the same.
“She’ll do,” he said. “Stop slapping her face for color. She’s right as she is. She plays the part of a hungry, beat-up waif.”
Rose was furious but accepted the job on the Baby’s behalf. June would do it because June did it all; clearly, her yo
unger daughter had inherited her work ethic and drive. Hal Roach loved the Baby, booking her for film after film, many of them silent, so all June had to do was let those sad eyes work for her. Before each take, Rose bent down and leveled her face with her daughter’s.
“Darling,” she said, “your dog has just been run over. It was killed.” June’s four-year-old brain tried to process her mother’s tone and expression, to dig at the truth of her words. “NeeNee is dead,” Rose continued. “Run over—dead.” She shoved June, gently, toward the set. For four straight takes, all from different angles, the Baby cried fat, perfect tears, and her mother’s applause beat a wondrous rhythm inside her head.
A glittering, shiny world opened up and made room for them. The film star Mary Pickford planned a party, a high-profile fete that Rose anticipated for weeks. That afternoon June developed chicken pox, and the doctor advised Rose to let her rest. Instead she sat on the bed and made up her daughter’s face: mascara, dollops of rouge, lipstick, thick greasepaint to hide the splotches and bumps. “You’re my trouper,” she murmured, leaning in to kiss June’s cheek. “Nobody could ever guess now by looking at you that your temperature is 103.” And off to the party they went.
Baby June en pointe. (photo credit 5.2)
The Baby didn’t always have to cry, or look sad and neglected, to score parts. Harold Lloyd, second only to Charlie Chaplin as a silent-film leading man, heard about June and wanted to work with her. His movie On the Jump was standard comedic fare for the time—choppy, disjointed scenes that each vied independently for a laugh. A midget balances books on his head, a man whacks passersby on their behinds with his cello, people chase each other around for no apparent reason, someone pulls a dog out of a purse. In one scene, Harold Lloyd hoists a box and stumbles under its weight. He lowers it to the ground, runs off to the side, and then lifts two tall tiers of china. From the corner of his eye, he sees the box’s lid fly off, and a cumulus cloud of yellow hair rises over the edge. The girl it belongs to is improbably tiny, no higher than his knee, and it’s as if an unseen hand lifts her slowly to her toes. She unfurls her arms and begins to dance. The camera pans back to Lloyd, who is so enchanted he drops his china. He makes no move to sweep up the pieces. She knows he’s watching her, and for his benefit she leaps around the box, weightless, a leaf being kicked by the wind. She wears a calm expression—regal, almost—as if Rose had told a different sort of story before this take, one that promised everything would be okay, now and always, for all of them.
Chapter Six
America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
–OSCAR WILDE
Paris, France, Summer 1916
Abe Minsky was in a hurry. He had paid $100 for a first-class ticket on the SS Lafayette and sailed 3,142 miles, docking in Bordeaux, France. He traveled another 362 miles to Paris by train, drumming his fingers against the window, watching the lolling countryside slip past him, ideas somersaulting in his brain. He had decisions to make and he knew, better than anyone, that New York could not be persuaded to wait.
The First World War was raging in Europe and inching closer to U.S. shores, despite President Woodrow Wilson’s campaign promises to the contrary. On Sunday mornings Manhattan’s faithful sat rapt in pews, listening to unsettling sermons and adamant predictions. “The second coming of Christ,” warned a minister at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian, “is not only certain, but signs of the time point to an early coming. Might it not be well if His coming were to be now and bring about the end of the great war?”
Every incident was spliced, examined, threaded with conspiracy. An early-morning explosion on Black Tom Island, in New York Bay off Jersey City, killed seven men and destroyed $40 million worth of property within a twenty-five-mile radius. Shells and shrapnel intended for Allied ships continued to burst for three hours, breaking windows along Wall Street, shattering plate glass all the way to Times Square. German saboteurs were to blame, everyone believed, since the country’s agents were infiltrating New York’s neighborhoods, depositing millions of dollars in its banks. Even the city’s socialites prepared for potential disruption, hosting a rash of “war weddings” and “war engagements.”
Performer at the Folies Bergère, 1916. (photo credit 6.1)
Abe was not interested in developments on the western front or, for that matter, on the Upper East Side. He only wanted to visit France before it fell to Germany, especially the grand burgundy-and-gold music hall, now almost fifty years old, tucked away at 32 rue Richer in the foothills of Montmartre.
He knew the history of the Folies Bergère well. Here Charlie Chaplin made his vaudeville debut at age fourteen, and the crafty Anna Pavlova surrounded herself with inferior dancers so she appeared even greater than she really was. Elephants, seals, and rats shared the stage with jugglers, acrobats, clowns, cyclists, and an Indian “rubber man.” A performer called “The Kangaroo Boxer” challenged his marsupial rival for three two-minute rounds; the animal, using gloved paws, always won (owing, in part, to the performer’s reluctance to permanently maim his livelihood). Before the turn of the century the Impressionist genius Édouard Manet sat here for hours studying the barmaids, and a thick-lipped, bearded cripple named Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec drank his signature Tremblement de Terre (“Earthquake”) cocktail—equal parts absinthe and cognac—while forging an unlikely kinship with the ladies who ruled the back promenade.
These ladies were tradition, one of the Folies Bergère’s oldest, as much a part of the scenery as the striped crimson ceiling and sham indoor garden. Folies Bergère management distributed cards only to the best dressed and best behaved, passes that were valid for two weeks. On the appointed day the general manager hosted a parade to decide which prostitutes deserved a renewed card. Pretty boys offering paid companionship circulated as well, although gentlemen for hire were excluded from the pass system.
Abe had been to the Moulin Rouge, too, before a fire closed the famed hall down a few years earlier. The Folies Bergère was older and, in his opinion, just as grand. There it stood, at the end of a long line of literary cafés, next door to a mattress shop named Les Colonnes d’Hercule. With its golden speared bars winding around the top floor, the place looked to Abe like an eighteen-karat jail.
The theater’s door swung open, and he waded through a forest of gilt and plush. Patrons laid claim to every square foot of the hall, hundreds of them laughing, blowing spires of smoke, singing lyrics he couldn’t understand: “Allons, enfants de la Patrie, Le jour de gloire est arrivé; Contre nous de la tyrannie, L’étendard sanglant est levé.” Soldiers in brocaded képi hats and hobnailed boots sipped bourbon at Toulouse-Lautrec’s green bar, flirting with women in the more subdued costumes of wartime: dresses in dour grays raised to a practical midcalf length, hats adorned with a single feather, a dab of Vaseline on the eyelids instead of charcoal liner. Professional linguists strolled about the theater wearing caps marked INTERPRETER, facilitating some conversations and eavesdropping on others. Promenade ladies fanned themselves, and the ripe scent of their underarms mingled with the weak perfume of dying flowers pinned along their necklines.
No matter what happened on the western front, Paris would not have its pleasures curtailed. “To deprive Paris of a chance of smiling, even in war time,” said one theater owner, “is like depriving it of air to breathe.” As a New Yorker, Abe appreciated a city that knew its priorities, especially when those priorities included black leotards, red garter belts, and the tease of nearly bare flesh. He sank into an armchair seat, impatient for the curtain to rise. This was not pleasure but research; Paris shows were the best ones in the world from which to steal.
After Billy’s close call with the gunman, Abe accepted his little brother’s offer to join his movie theater business—on one condition: he, Abe, was boss, and would have final approval on all decisions. Abe was going to build an empire, make the Minsky name famous across the country, and Billy was lucky just to be standing with him
now, at the beginning.
Billy looked at his brother for a long, silent moment. He agreed and left it at that.
Privately the brothers marveled that anyone made it to their National Winter Garden at all. Access to the seats was maddeningly difficult, requiring patrons to ride a rickety, temperamental elevator, squeeze through a narrow lobby, and then shimmy around the theater’s back wall by way of the fire escape landing. A swarm of shrewd thieves infiltrated the crowd, picking pockets while their victims focused on reaching their seats alive. Customers didn’t care much about the quality of the films or music; they were willing to risk robbery or injury for the rooftop atmosphere alone.
Rooftop gardens were the height of fashion. On summer nights wealthy New Yorkers flocked to the roof of Madison Square Garden, where braids of colored lights connected a forest of palm trees and Chinese lanterns swung low from rafters. The Minskys’ rooftop wasn’t quite so glamorous, but it offered a rare luxury for tenement dwellers. For once they could look down on the city rather than being trapped in the thick of it, high above the screams of slum boys playing slugball and hit-the-crack, the first-floor parlors crowded with old men hunched over hands of pinochle, the rotten scent of the street vendors’ overripe peaches.
Despite the rooftop ambiance, the brothers soon realized that a local, family-based operation couldn’t compete with new movie chains, like the nearby Loew’s Delancey Street Theatre. Nor could they book any major vaudeville acts, since the big-time palaces outbid them. They knew they had to transform their operation, one way or another, into a house that could draw the stars. Maybe films and vaudeville weren’t the way to go, Billy suggested. The Minskys were, after all, men who took risks and who appreciated the risqué—men more suited to burlesque.