American Rose

by Karen Abbott

  Two weeks after the Pantages audition the mail truck lumbered up to Charlie Thompson’s house, carrying a letter for Rose. She slammed the door behind her and held the envelope aloft, letting bills and catalogs flutter to her feet.

  “It’s here, papa, it’s here! Girls, the letter is here!” Rose closed her eyes. “Oh, please, please God, make it good news.”

  She ravaged the envelope and read its contents, lips moving wordlessly. God still listened to her every thought.

  Against his better judgment, and after a calculated chorus of weeping by Rose, June, and Louise, Grandpa Thompson fronted the money for a wardrobe trunk, publicity photographs, winter coats, and new costumes. With the addition of a boy named Kenny, whom Rose rechristened “Master Laddie Kenneth,” the “King of the Ballad Songsters,” Baby June and Louise became “Baby June and Her Pals.” Rose couldn’t decide what role Louise would fit best, so her older daughter was billed, alternately, as “Honey Louise,” “The Doll Girl,” and just plain “Rose Louise,” a “clever Juvenile character actress.” Pantages offered $100 per week, about $5,000 in today’s dollars, for twenty-five consecutive weeks. But the act wouldn’t get top billing, and they’d be stuck, invariably, with the dressing room on the very top floor.

  They trouped by car since it was cheaper than by train, cramming into Charlie Thompson’s early-model Tin Lizzy alongside props, costumes, Rose’s two dogs, and NeeNee, June’s dog from her Hollywood days, still alive and well despite her mother’s frequent insistence to the contrary. Rose strung a sign across the passenger side door with the words TO-NIGHT! TO-NIGHT! VAUDEVILLE emblazoned boldly. On to Tacoma, Portland, Vancouver, Spokane, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Winnipeg, and Victoria, where Rose, Louise, and June slept in one bed, the mutts sprawled across their feet. Master Laddie Kenneth merited a mattress on the floor. Rose cooked breakfast and lunch over a Sterno stove or gave the kids coffee and rolls. Dinner was at the closest Chinese restaurant. They must order yaka mein noodle soup, she insisted, the cheapest dish on the menu. She set down saucers of coffee for the dogs.

  Master Laddie Kenneth, Louise, Baby June, and NeeNee. (photo credit 8.2)

  During every free moment they practiced the act. Rose reminded them to sing out and speak out—they were performing in theaters that seated three thousand people, remember, without microphones or amplification of any kind, and they had to train themselves to be heard.

  Louise and Master Laddie Kenneth appeared onstage first, dressed in what Rose considered the fashion of “rich children”—a tailored velvet suit for him and a short dress for her, long shiny necklace skimming the hemline. Tapping a drumbeat rhythm on slates, they sang:

  I think and think and think and think

  Till my brain is numb

  Put down six and carry two

  Oh, I guess I’m just that dumb!

  June skidded into sight on her rear end, shoved out by stagehands. Barefoot and in grubby coveralls, she held up a thick piece of rope.

  “What a vulgar child!” Louise said. She loved any line that made her feel superior to June.

  “C’mon, help me, will you?” June begged. “C’mon, take an end of this rope.”

  An exaggerated count of three, a swift tug, and the other end of the rope rose into view, revealing a small dog. Rose believed that even the animals had to earn their keep, and NeeNee’s cameo got a big laugh.

  “Don’t talk to her, sonny,” Louise said to Kenny. “She’s just an adopted child.”

  “Oh, yes?” June lisped. Her mother insisted that she blur all of her consonants so she still sounded like a baby. “Well, just remember this. When my ma got me, she picked what she wanted. But when your ma got you, she had to take what she got.”

  Another big laugh.

  The girls then met backstage for June’s costume change. When the Baby reemerged she waited, expectantly, for the spotlight to follow her. She wore a short tight skirt held together with a safety pin. A straw hat sprouting a plume sat askew atop her curls. The end of the feather pierced June’s scalp, sharp enough to draw blood. She sauntered across the stage gangster style, hands on swinging hips, a seven-year-old version of Texas Guinan, one of her vaudeville idols.

  “ ’ullo, Gov’nor!” June shouted. Master Laddie Kenneth, dressed like a miniature hoodlum, stepped out to join her. The music swelled, all mournful violin and menacing bass. He clutched her, lowering her into a deep dip. She sprang forward, taking the lead. Back and forth they went, an underworld brawl masquerading as dance, bumping knees and elbows and shins. June would awaken black and blue and scabbed all over but prepared to do it again—hours of practice, matinees, evening performances. “I got hurt a lot but it wasn’t important. I just had to cover that bruise and get out there again,” she said. “It was safe. The affection of the audience was like a big, warm blanket.”

  From behind the curtain, Louise watched her sister, halfway wishing it were hers—the broken body, the salve of applause, the endless bows—and all the way pretending not to care.

  They returned to the circuit the following year and Rose hired six little boys, scouting them out at dance schools and amateur contests. After renaming the act “Dainty June and Company,” she updated her advertising posters and invested in some velvet curtains that looked almost new. She filed away every success and indignity from the first season, determined to repeat what had worked and fix what hadn’t, and remembered, specifically, some advice from the Glencoe Sisters: get an agent. “Ten percent, right off the top,” one sister said. “But you just got to have an agent. And if you’re smart, you’ll slip him a little extra, as an incentive, you know.”

  Rose didn’t know, but she learned. A mother had to be wary. Unscrupulous agents targeted desperate performers. “What are you getting?” the sham agent typically asked. “Two hundred dollars? I’ll get you three hundred for twenty percent.” The performer readily agreed, and the agent, in concert with a theater’s booker, put the act through for $500. Then he paid the performer $300 and split the difference with the booker. On the whole bookers weren’t any better, changing schedules on a whim and ordering jumps, at a moment’s notice, from New York to Philadelphia or Baltimore to Washington, with the performers absorbing all travel costs. Any complaints, and another act would gladly take the job.

  Rose believed that Dainty June and Company deserved William Morris, the top agent in vaudeville, a German immigrant and former advertising solicitor based in New York City. But in the meantime she kept her options open, and during a booking in Detroit one presented itself.

  Louise and June were playing in the hotel lobby, as they often did, running around and sitting on the laps of strange men. “It’s a wonder,” June later mused, “why I wasn’t taken off and raped.” A group crowded at the cigar counter, playing poker dice, calling out, “A horse on you!”—a signal to the loser to pay for drinks. One of them hoisted June up on the counter so she could get a better look. She loved it there, being higher up than her big sister, clicking her heels against the thick wood, breathing in the scents of tobacco and pomade, giggling when someone dropped coins in her palm and said, “You keep the change, honey.” These men seemed so much nicer than the ones her mother met occasionally on the road, fleeting and temporary “uncles” who slid next to June in bed and slipped her hand inside their trousers. Now, in the lobby, June noted a man striding toward her with purpose and concern. He wore a proper suit and a gold watch chain that grabbed and held the light. He leaned in close enough for June to smell the soap on his face, and said, “What are you doing here? What do you think you’re doing?” June felt small and oddly displaced; a moment she later identified as her first pangs of shame—of her background, of her upbringing, of her business.

  Just then Rose started down the lobby stairs, taking her time, lifting her skirt so the hem kissed her knee. June watched her mother, and the man followed her gaze. “I’ll never forget the expression on his face,” June said. “He fell in love with her at first sight.”


  He introduced himself as Murray Gordon Edelston. He was tall, with an elegant gait and dark hair everywhere, even in penny-sized tufts along his knuckles. Certainly he was wealthy, Rose thought—look at that silk tie, those imported shoes, the leather briefcase covered in stickers from around the globe; so what if the gold initials stamped on the side weren’t his? He looked like a broker, maybe, or a banker, but he told Rose he sold soda pop for a small company there in the Motor City.

  June, Gordon, Louise, and NeeNee. (photo credit 8.3)

  It took Rose just one afternoon to talk him into becoming a vaudeville manager. He was a businessman. He could switch from selling soft drinks to entertainment; the same techniques and confidence applied. He could get them to the big time—the Orpheum Circuit, the Palace Theatre on Broadway. He was smart and talented and could make them more money than she’d ever dreamed possible. And if he left his wife and child behind, a child nearly the same age as June, Rose promised she and her girls would replace them, become his brand-new family.

  Rose suggested they all go out for ice cream. Louise sat across from her mother and this strange man. By now she knew all of Rose’s tricks and signals—the lowered eyes, the flushed cheeks, the fanciful, patchwork story of their past. “I lost their father when the baby was two and a half,” she said. “June could dance on her toes almost before she could walk, so naturally when I was faced with having to earn a living, I thought of show business.” June, too, seemed to take to Murray Gordon right away, since he promised to buy her a doll. “I’m Baby June,” she said, by way of introduction, “and I’m going on four and a half.” In truth, she was nearing seven. But four and a half years was the age currently sanctioned by Rose, and June recited her lines just as well offstage.

  But Louise hated him on sight, and said so aloud. “I hate him,” she told June. The girls had been forbidden to say that word, and she was pleasantly surprised by the sound of it. She hated him even more the following evening, when he climbed aboard the Chicago-bound train with the entire act, squeezing close as he could to her mother. Louise watched Rose during the ride—the way she laughed, throwing her head back, the curve of her hand, like a delicate vise, around his shoulder—until her eyes insisted on turning away. Every time her mother behaved like this she ended up marrying the man, and Louise was tired of it. Tired of men appearing, tired of them being removed, and, most of all, tired of vying for her mother’s attention. June was competition enough.

  June Havoc (with Van Johnson) in Pal Joey. (photo credit 8.4)

  Chapter Nine

  If you cry, June, I’ll beat the hell out of you.

  — GYPSY ROSE LEE

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, December 1940

  Their dynamic as sisters now feels familiar and rehearsed, roles given to them rather than established by them, an act without the payoff of applause. June is idealistic and Gypsy pragmatic, Gypsy untalented and June unbright. Gypsy makes life fun and June infuses it with drama; June is generous and Gypsy tight. June is an actress but Gypsy is a presence. They understand each other implicitly but neither seek nor offer approval, and they never, June said, “talked about the things that would make us fight.” June defers to her big sister and listens to her stories, even the ones that make her blush rather than smile, the kind Gypsy tells once they’ve receded far enough into her past.

  To Gypsy’s surprise, the Baby is back onstage again, stopping the show, just as God—or at least Mother—had always intended. The show is Pal Joey, a Rodgers and Hart musical with a nightclub setting, starring an unknown dancer named Gene Kelly. June plays a chorus girl, Gladys Bump, and had so impressed producer George Abbott with her “original juke box voice” that her two numbers grew to five. Pal Joey would debut on Broadway on Christmas Day but the initial date is in Philadelphia, and the play promises to be a much greater success than Forbidden Melody, June’s initial “comeback” vehicle of a few years prior. Gypsy drives from Brooklyn to see her sister at the Forrest Theater. For the first time in years every eye is on June; it’s like vaudeville all over again.

  But even on June’s big night, Gypsy shares the spotlight. In one scene the actress Jean Casto appears, playing a jaded newspaper reporter, clad in a dowdy sweater, clunky oxford shoes, and thick glasses. In a song called “Zip,” she mocks a certain burlesque queen’s most famous routine, making reference to stripteaser colleagues Margie Hart and Sally Rand, miming undoing a zipper during each refrain:

  I interviewed Leslie Howard

  I interviewed Noël Coward

  I interviewed the great Stravinsky

  But my greatest achievement

  Is the interview I had

  With the star who worked for Minsky

  I met her at the Yankee Clipper

  And she didn’t unzip one zipper

  I said, “Miss Lee you are such an artist.

  Tell me why you never miss.

  What do you think while you work?”

  and she said, “While I work

  My thoughts go something like this.”

  Zip! Walter Lippmann wasn’t brilliant today

  Zip! Will Saroyan ever write a great play? …

  Zip! I’m an intellectual

  I don’t like a deep contralto

  Or a man whose voice is alto

  Zip! I’m a heterosexual.

  Zip! It took intellect to master my art

  Zip! Who the hell is Margie Hart? …

  Zip! My intelligence is guiding my hand

  Zip! Who the hell is Sally Rand?

  Gypsy refuses to be upstaged—not by someone spoofing her routine, not by her sister, not by anyone. She begins sobbing at June’s first entrance, wailing with such force that songwriter Richard Rodgers leaves his seat at the rear of the theater, walks discreetly down the aisle, and escorts her back to sit with him. She continues crying through the homage to her act, through the final scene, through the curtain call and standing ovation. It is by far one of her most convincing performances—if only 20th Century–Fox could see her now—and she knows June will understand. Sooner or later, her sister always does.

  Photographers catch each frame of her movement, her rush to embrace June when she slips backstage. She presses her sister’s face into her ermine coat and fits her mouth tight against June’s ear. “You always stopped the show, June,” she whispers. “You used to have to go out in front of the damn newsreel to take a bow, remember?” A throng of reporters fringes out around them. Gypsy sniffs, pulls away, and says, “I stop the show, too.”

  June pulls back and stares at her, notices the haughty lift of her chin, that sleek white ribbon of neck. She realizes that Gypsy Rose Lee the creation is slowly killing the only sister she has. “It wasn’t hilarious and funny at all, when you got back to the dressing room,” June said. “She put on this wonderful, sophisticated, glamorous, I-know-more-than-you-do attitude with such conviction, she convinced the world. But she would come home and cry because she’d been on an interview and all they wanted her to do was take off her gloves, slowly. They wanted to leer. It made her sick, and nobody ever knew that.”

  How Gypsy envies June’s freedom, that elusive trick of hiding inside your own skin. A month earlier, she’d asked June her opinion of her own Broadway performance, when she briefly replaced Ethel Merman in Du Barry Was a Lady.

  “I … I didn’t think you were ready,” June had said. “You couldn’t sing.”

  Silence, and then Gypsy replied, “Well, you see, June, if you are Gypsy Rose Lee, you don’t have to act, you don’t have to sing. All you have to do is keep up your strength so you can carry your money to the bank.”

  In this moment, on the night that was meant to be hers, June wants badly to say something to her sister—something specific and ugly, something heavy with the weight of their history: “Men yelling ‘Take it off, come back and take it off’ is not stopping the show.” The words push against her closed lips, but she never lets them out. They don’t need to be spoken in order for Gypsy to hear them.
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  Within the week, Gypsy breaks the news to George Davis: she will be leaving the house on Middagh Street and heading to Chicago to star at the Theatre Café. Michael Todd, not to mention her adoring public, is waiting. Gypsy Rose Lee is a brand before branding exists, and she knows instinctively the danger in growing predictable or stale. She’ll give the people what they love best, all the things that hurt her most.

  Chapter Ten

  Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

  — H. L. MENCKEN

  New York City, 1917–1920

  As soon as Abe Minsky returned from his field trip to Paris, he summoned Billy for a conference at the National Winter Garden, eager to share the details of his potential European import.

  “Ya know,” he said, “if we could only get lights somehow, there’s quite a stunt they pulled at the Folies Bergère. They paraded girls on a runway—”

  That got Billy’s attention. “Runway? What kind of runway?”

  “There was a raised platform coming down from stage right into the theater,” Abe explained, pointing with his cigar. “The audience went crazy when they paraded down in spotlights. If we could manage a few spots—”

  “Spots, hell!” Billy interrupted. “If it’s in the house, we’ll use the house lights. They may not be glamorous, but they’ll be able to see the girls. For the moment we can do without the glamour, or at least until we have some more money for spots.”

  The following Sunday, when the National Winter Garden was closed, the Minskys brought in a team of carpenters and watched the runway come to life. They planned to advertise it as the first such contraption in American theater history—who cared if it were true?—and it was a beauty, a long gleaming strip that ran from the orchestra pit up the center of the house to a point just under the rim of the balcony. The crew had to dismantle forty-eight orchestra seats, a painful but necessary concession, and the brothers added one more decorative touch to their theater, this time with homegrown rather than Gallic flair: American flags pasted flush along the edges of the exterior windows and jutting at jaunty angles on either side of the doorway.