American Rose

by Karen Abbott

  Left: Morton, Billy, and Herbert Minsky. (photo credit 10.1)

  Sacrifice and patriotism had become New York’s latest trends with the United States’ formal entry into World War I. For the first time the city had more motor vehicles than horses, and the streets were crowded with Studebaker sedans, red, white, and blue ribbons streaming from bumpers. One couldn’t window-shop without encountering artist J. Montgomery Flagg’s finger-pointing, craggy-faced portrait of Uncle Sam beseeching young men to join the army. A group of New York society matrons calling themselves “The First Fifty” announced that they would diminish waste and extravagance by “pruning their lunches to two courses, and dinners to three.” (Of course, one editorial writer pointed out, women of that milieu tended to eat lightly, anyway.) The Anti-Saloon League of New York argued that responsible citizens should support an immediate halt in distilling and brewing to conserve fuel and grain for the troops, developing slogans such as “Booze or coal?” and “Save 11,000,000 loaves a day.”

  City Hall bowed to the pressure, passing an ordinance forbidding hotels, restaurants, saloons, cabarets, and roof gardens to sell liquor after 1 A.M., and imposing new taxes on everything from cigars to telegrams to tickets for Broadway shows. Despite the added expense, the theater industry, as in Paris, managed to thrive. The blocks from 38th to 50th Streets offered fifty-five amusement houses, all but five of them devoted to theater, and all but thirty-four of them belonging to the three Shubert brothers, sons of poor Jewish immigrants. Lee Shubert, whose formal education had ended at age ten, was an odd-looking man—“a fascinating cross,” Gypsy Rose Lee noted, “between a wooden Indian and a hooded cobra.” He was reportedly illiterate but a genius with numbers. Although he knew nothing about directing or the creative process, he worked to cultivate an image as a businessman with highbrow taste, and Billy Minsky considered him the greatest showman in the country. “The people must be amused,” Lee Shubert said. “The war, even with its ticket tax, will have no appreciable effect upon theatrical entertainments, provided, of course, they are what the people want.”

  Minsky “Rosebuds” on the runway at the National Winter Garden. (photo credit 10.2)

  Downtown, in a decidedly more modest family empire—so far, at least—the Minsky brothers prepared to debut their new attraction. When the show opened on Monday, Minsky’s six showgirls, all of them over thirty, christened the runway with a sad parade. The harsh yellow house lights were unkind to their skin, showcasing every clump of foundation and wayward smear of rouge. Even worse, the footlights seemed to cut the girls in half, illuminating the bottoms but not the tops of their legs, and shining beams directly on their chins—or, in some cases, double chins. Still, they walked through the audience, so close the men could smell their perfume and hear them lose their breath as they strutted and twirled. Close enough for the men to look directly up their legs—bloated legs encased in garish pink tights, but legs nonetheless.

  The National Winter Garden was sold out all that week. Billy, still troubled by the footlights’ distortion of the girls, asked little brother Herbert to study the psychology of color. Blue was remote and cool; green, soothing; yellow cheerful. Red or magenta signified drama, romance, mystery, and sex—the proper colors for Minsky’s. With Billy’s and Abe’s permission, Herbert spent $2,000 on power cables for stage lighting and tried a rich magenta, which seemed to flatter every skin tone and evoked, subtly, the feeling of an old-time brothel.

  Billy and Abe kept their focus on business matters while Herbert took over “culture,” commissioning an artist to transform the concrete walls into a mural celebrating Othello: Iago and Roderigo frozen in banter; a drunken Cassio; Desdemona, lovely even in death. He himself fashioned whimsical backdrops in the style of Aubrey Beardsley. Deep crimson paint created borders between each scene, and lush, multicolored silk drapes swept down from the ceiling. The hard wooden seats stayed—let the uptown joints waste money on velvet—but Herbert added one last touch: “The play’s the thing” etched along the proscenium, with proper credit to “Will” Shakespeare.

  Even with these upgrades, the Minsky brothers well knew they weren’t Florenz Ziegfeld, the impresario behind the famous Ziegfeld Follies, and this was precisely their intention. The Minskys understood the National Winter Garden audience, the ethos of the working man. Fantasies had to have a tangible, realistic shell. The sort of girls the Minskys advertised—“plenty of short girls, tall girls, fat girls”—sounded, above all, attainable. A man paid 50 cents to see a Minsky show, more than double the cost of a ticket at a lesser burlesque house, but this was the closest he might ever get to the Follies. The rest of Manhattan was full of reminders of what a workingman could never have, but the Lower East Side stood level with his gaze, spoke his language, deigned to shake his hand.

  Ziegfeld, on the other hand, traded in fantasy. In 1907, he produced a Parisian-style “revue” on the roof garden of the Jardin de Paris near 44th Street, and the Ziegfeld Follies was born.

  “No name in the history of American entertainment ever had such a magic connotation,” wrote the comedian Eddie Cantor. “When an Arabian wizard said, ‘Open sesame!’ you expected diamond fountains and platinum flowers to sprout out of a rock. When a Hindu fakir said ‘Abracadabra!’ you knew he’d change into a flying horse or a singing tree. But when somebody said, ‘The Ziegfeld Follies!’ you expected the Seven Wonders of the World to stand at attention and say, ‘Yessir!’ ”

  Ziegfeld sought tall, pin-thin ladies with absurdly long legs who were more decorous than dirty and who could stretch the limits of New York law, which permitted a nude woman onstage as long as she stood still. He aimed to transform the American chorus girl into an abstract objet d’art, a remote, glittering ornament too delicate to touch. After the Follies found a permanent home at the New Amsterdam Theatre, Ziegfeld produced a cabaret number called “Midnight Frolics” that evoked Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, with girls parading across the stage in flawless unison, all lithe limbs and blade-edged bones, a Cubist tableau in motion. “One type is missing,” Ziegfeld wrote, explaining his criteria, “because the public has eliminated it. Time was when big women were admired onstage. They were so tall and broad that skirts were imperative. One sees them on the boards no more.”

  In addition to “glorifying the American girl,” Ziegfeld offered the best comedic talent in the business: Eddie Cantor, Will Rogers, W. C. Fields, and the gawky Fanny Brice, whose clever parody of Follies girls made her the most famous of them all.

  By mocking Ziegfeld and satirizing his skits, the Minskys offered burlesque in the original, truest sense of the word. That distinction allowed the brothers to skim the edges of class and elegance without being limited by them. Billy planted signs on Second Avenue that read WHAT THE FOLIES BERGERE IS TO PARIS, MINSKY’S IS TO NEW YORK and THE POOR MAN’S ZIEGFELD FOLLIES and hired a first-rate soubrette named Mae Dix, an “energetic Amazon” known for flashing her “censorless ginger.”

  One summer night, toward the end of the season, a thick heat skulked through the auditorium. Men huddled in large packs, heaving toward the stage, shirts polka-dotted with sweat stains. The place smelled of greasepaint and talc and cheap cigars. Spirals of smoke unraveled upward, fogging the air, blurring the Shakespeare quotes on the walls. Mae Dix sauntered across the stage and down Abe’s runway, wearing a short black dress with white collar and cuffs, French maid style. The collar and cuffs were detachable, so they could be washed daily, although Mae tried to make them last for at least two shows.

  At the end of her number, after a final twirl and shake, she pulled at her collar, holding it away from the thick makeup on her neck, but she was not yet behind the curtain. A man in the audience hinged his fingers on his lips and whistled, begging her to stay onstage and do it again—take off something else, the cuffs this time. Mae obliged, fell into a bow, and thought the show was over.

  But there was a stampede of clapping now, furious and unrelenting, and Mae slowly, tentativel
y, undid her bodice, one button at a time. She stepped back behind the curtain, where Nick Elliott, the house manager, stood glaring at her.

  Ten-dollar fine, he said. She knew perfectly well that showing more than what the script called for was a punishable offense.

  He threw on the house lights, pushed the curtain aside, and took center stage.

  “The Minsky brothers,” he yelled above the frenzy, “run a decent theater. There won’t be any more of that, and if you don’t like it, you’re free to leave.”

  Billy Minsky panicked at the words. He rushed to Nick, clamped a hand around his shoulder, and yanked him back behind the curtain.

  “If people want it,” Billy said, “we’ll give it to them. When a court finds that I’ve broken some law, I’ll stop. Until then, we’ll sell tickets.” The way Billy saw it, men had seen Mae’s routine countless times at private stag shows. He hadn’t invented the strip, but he’d bring it out from the back room.

  Give Mae back her ten dollars, Billy ordered. Moreover, she’d score a ten-dollar raise as long as she repeated her “accident” every single night.

  A few weeks later, a man named John Sumner, the secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, requested that police pay a visit to the National Winter Garden. Sumner never expected to become the city’s premier vice quester, having lost his virginity to a prostitute at the old Haymarket “resort” in Chelsea, but he strove to match the efforts of his predecessor, Anthony Comstock (who reportedly “died of joy” after procuring the conviction of birth control advocate Margaret Sanger).

  A horse-drawn paddy wagon pulled up to Second Avenue and Houston Street, and the officers handcuffed the first Minsky brother they spotted, who happened to be Herbert. They took him for a ride downtown to chat with Inspector McCaullaugh at the precinct station.

  The Minskys knew the law wasn’t on their side. Two years prior, in 1915, the courts had decreed that movies and theater were popular entertainment, not art, and therefore unprotected by the First Amendment. Burlesque, not surprisingly, fell into this category. For two hours the inspector railed at Herbert and for two hours Herbert took it, eyes downcast, threading and unthreading his fingers as if they might produce a singing cat or length of rope, some vaudeville trick on the fly.

  “I have never before or since,” he confessed to his brothers, “felt quite so mean and worthless.”

  When the inspector ran out of condemnations, Herbert stood and grimly shook his hand. “Have your men drop in anytime,” he said. “They’ll never see anything off color at Minsky’s.”

  The following afternoon, Herbert installed red, white, and blue lights in the center of the footlight trough and wired them to the ticket booth, where he was stationed every night. If he saw a cop in uniform or suspected one had infiltrated the audience in disguise, he threw on the red light. At once the act downgraded into a tamer version of itself—a “Boston,” they called it, named for that city’s especially vigilant enforcers of decency. Bodices remained buttoned, hips swayed to a halt, and the officer would leave disappointed, not having seen anything remotely objectionable.

  Never let it be said that the Minskys weren’t men of their word.

  Chapter Eleven

  Michael Todd was the toughest, lowest kind of man, that close to being a gangster. And Gypsy was mad about him. Really mad about him.

  –JUNE HAVOC

  Chicago, Illinois, 1941

  After arriving in Chicago, Gypsy does what Michael Todd will not, filing for divorce from a spouse she doesn’t love. Just as her mother did nearly thirty years earlier, Gypsy claims her husband, Arnold “Bob” Mizzy, treated her “cruelly” by using “obscene and abusive language” and knocking her down twice. She requests that the decree apply to her two wedding ceremonies, one in a water taxi off the Santa Ana coast and another at Long Beach, both sanctioned by 20th Century–Fox and attended by the press.

  Reporters follow Gypsy to Chicago, covering her divorce (GYPSY ROSE LEE “STRIPS” HUBBY, headlines blare) and the grand opening of Mike’s Theatre Café on the city’s North Side. Teenage waitresses wear gingham skirts and serve Jell-O and milk along with highballs. Children swing back and forth on the railing while their parents watch Gypsy work the stage, using every one of her old tricks. She pays a woman in the audience to scream as she pulls off her last pin. A beat later, a busboy drops a tray of dishes. While the audience roars, Gypsy pretends to faint. “I never try to stir up the animal in ’em,” she confides to Chicago’s press corps. “Did you ever hold a piece of candy or a toy in front of a baby—just out of his reach? Notice how he laughs? That’s your strip audience.”

  She keeps her word to George Davis and pounds on the typewriter between performances, rereading while she soaks off her body paint in the tub, a process that often takes hours. His connections help her land a contract with Simon & Schuster. “I’ll do my specialty in Macy’s to sell a book,” she writes to her publicist. “If you would prefer something a little more dignified, make it a Wannamaker’s window.” She’s eager to finish now. George is a great friend but a stubborn, temperamental critic, and his letters often have less to do with The G-String Murders than with his own floundering literary career, the daily chaos at Middagh Street, pointed comments about her decision to leave (“I’m delighted to hear that Todd wants you to stay on and make more money”), and, most maddening, his insights into her future.

  “I think it very funny,” George writes, “that you were once arrested for playing in a sketch called ‘Illusion.’ By rights you should have been given a life sentence: you’ve been playing it constantly.… Over and over I catch myself staring the mask of youth off you, the way dirty boys stare the dress off their teacher, and what I see scares the bejesus out of me. Not for myself, but for you.” More foreboding than his words is the fact that she had thought them first herself, the looping, silent sound track in her mind since becoming Gypsy Rose Lee.

  She and Mike spend nearly every hour of every day together operating the Theatre Café, and if he leaves Chicago he sends letters: “Darling, I reread your pink letter at least 10 times.… I feel exactly like you do and wish I could say it as good as you do—somehow I can’t make with gags & funny words.”

  His wife, Bertha, has her suspicions, and Mike still insists on discretion, mostly for the benefit of his son. If Bertha discovers their affair, she will keep him from seeing Michael Todd, Jr. One night, when Gypsy is expecting Mike for dinner, she hears a knock at her door. To her surprise she finds Junior, dressed in a suit, comb lines visible across his hair.

  “My father was unavoidably detained,” he says. “He has asked me to take you to dinner.”

  The kid is eleven years old.

  He orders Gypsy’s favorite dish and brand of champagne, discusses his burgeoning business philosophy. At the end of the meal, he drops his hand over the check.

  “Dad is paying for dinner, Miss Lee,” he says, “but your split of champagne, that’s on me.”

  Gypsy thinks, not for the first time, that Mike would be a good father to her own child, should she ever decide to have one.

  With the Theatre Café making $55,000 per week, Mike takes an extended business trip to New York, seeking a show to produce on Broadway. In his absence, Gypsy notices one of the managers making some curious changes. A pinup-pretty girl now stands behind a green felt box and encourages patrons to play a dice game. He also raises drink prices, imposes a minimum, and fires half of the waitresses.

  Mike is furious upon his return and demands that everything revert to the way it had been. The manager explains that certain business “connections” demanded the changes, connections who could not be reasoned with. The next day, two henchmen for the Chicago Mafia stop by to underscore that point. Mike withdraws his name from the Café, sells it to the Mob for one dollar, and flees the city.

  Gypsy leaves with him and takes the act on the road, traveling across the country, three shows a day, six days a week. In August, as the tour nears i
ts end, Bertha Todd bursts into her dressing room in Syracuse, weepy and wild-eyed. She aims a shaking finger at Gypsy.

  End your affair with Mike, she demands. Immediately.

  There is no affair, Gypsy says, her tone calm and cool.

  She has her superstitions, developed during childhood and deepening as she ages. Eat twelve grapes on the twelve strokes of midnight every New Year’s Eve. Never lay your hat on your bed. Don’t whistle in the dressing room. No hint of the color green backstage. And truth is malleable, something to be bent or stretched or made to disappear, but direct lies always find the path back to the one who tells them.

  Dainty June, at the height of her career. (photo credit 11.1)

  Chapter Twelve

  Forty-five weeks of two shows a day, seven days a week, in states that permitted Sunday shows. And if you made good you stayed on the wheel, show after show, until you were too old and shaky to play any part at all.

  — SOPHIE TUCKER

  On the Vaudeville Circuit, 1920–1924

  By now Louise was nine and June seven, but Rose Hovick didn’t need the calendar to tell time. She had a private clock, set precisely to her needs and preferences, years tacked on and stripped away within mere moments. Birth certificates were forged and forged again: locations chosen at whim; dates substituted or invented entirely, always younger for train travel and older for evading child welfare. Had she not wished so desperately for her girls to be seen, they might not have existed at all.