American Rose

by Karen Abbott

  But Rose forgot her spying scheme when the manager of the Orpheum in San Francisco approached her. Did Madame Rose have anyone in her act who could do a scene with Fanny Brice? The role called for a teenage girl, able to speak five lines, and he needed her right away.

  She decided that Louise, now thirteen, would do the part. Not a natural like June, but she handled herself reasonably well onstage and knew how to deliver a joke. Besides, June was still a baby and could never convincingly play a teenager, not even when she became one.

  Louise could scarcely believe her luck. All those nights spent ducking in the shadows of the stage, resenting June’s talent and her own irrelevance. All those rehearsals where it became clear she was interchangeable, her characters not truly her own. All that time wasted hating the act simply because it could carry on, indefinitely, without her. And now, finally, performing was an opportunity rather than an obligation, a chance to prove she was an intrinsic part of their future, that Mother had been wise not to leave her behind.

  A dozen years later, when Gypsy Rose Lee considered Fanny Brice her mentor and best friend, she would recall nearly everything about the day they first met, the day she had her first solo without June or the Newsboy Songsters. Fanny looked different than she’d expected, clothed in a plain black dress, no bustle or fur or feathers, not even a glint of jewelry. She invited Louise to sit in her dressing room so they could discuss the scene: Louise is the drunken flapper, a know-it-all kid named Mary Rose, and she struggles while a cop tries to arrest her. Fanny talks him out of it, then steps in and delivers a lecture about her gutter ways. Louise listened to every word Fanny said, each one amplified in the intimate space of the dressing room, and told her she was sure she could do it, even though she wasn’t sure at all.

  She tried on her costume, a bejeweled orange chiffon dress with a floaty skirt of feathers. “I can’t wear this in front of an audience,” Louise whispered. “It isn’t modest.” Fanny shook her head, and noticed that the girl looked scared to death. “Look, kid,” she said. “You can’t be too modest in this business.” Louise slipped into a pair of gold brocade heels that pinched her growing feet—so badly she had to retrieve the clunky oxfords from her newsboy costume, and hope the feathers would hide them.

  She felt June watching her and heard her sister’s question—“Does Mother know you’re wearing a dress like that?”—accompanied by a wise little smile; for once, the Baby played the big sister. With each moment an internal shutter clicked, imprinting everything: the numbness in her legs; the grace of the conductor’s hands, waving like “pink wax birds” over the black expanse of audience; the remote, untamed sound of her voice as it recited each line. What Louise remembered most of all was how the spotlight felt hotter, somehow, when it had only her to shine on.

  Chapter Thirteen

  If only you knew how difficult it is to strip one’s heart clean, and to tell you boys how proud I am of you for the fine service you are giving to your country and to the strengthening of the arsenal of Democracy.

  — GYPSY ROSE LEE, IN AN OPEN LETTER TO SERVICEMEN

  New York City, 1942

  A few weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, while 2,500 Japanese residents are being rounded up and shipped to Ellis Island, Gypsy receives a phone call from Michael Todd.

  While walking along 42nd Street, he tells her, he was struck by an idea. He wants to revive burlesque, transform the tired old bump and grind into a flashy, expensive Broadway musical—a brilliant marriage of Minsky and Ziegfeld on a grand and opulent scale; Americans crave nothing in times of hardship so much as the distractions of beauty and noise. He’ll call the production Star and Garter and stage it at the Music Box Theatre. Mayor La Guardia won’t dare interfere with one of Broadway’s most prestigious venues.

  Gypsy is intrigued. She’ll be the lead in her own Broadway show as well as a producer, roles she never played before. Even better, she’ll get to work with Mike again.

  Souvenir program from Star and Garter, 1942. (photo credit 13.1)

  They stay up nights perfecting skits and sharpening jokes, but as the June 24 premiere date approaches, he is still $25,000 short. He knocks on Gypsy’s dressing room door to tell her Star and Garter is finished before it even starts.

  “You have to open,” she protests. “I bought two gallons of body paint. Two gallons, Mike. That’s enough for years!”

  “One of my backers, Herb Freezer, wants his G’s back. And I’m tapped out.”

  “I’ll buy Freezer’s interest,” she says, casually.

  “I said G’s, not G-strings.”

  “I heard you.”

  “Twenty-five big ones, Gypsy. You can’t dig up that kind of scratch in twenty-four hours.”

  She bends her lips into a smile. “One hour.”

  It is that easy and it isn’t. Gypsy has the money, but it’s stashed in banks throughout Manhattan. Right on schedule she meets Mike and his lawyer, Bill Fitelson, with $25,000 in hand.

  “How much percentage do I get?” she asks.

  Mike’s lawyer seems incapable of speaking in words, just fractions and numbers. Gypsy might have forced her way through Proust’s oeuvre, but she still uses her fingers to count. She sighs, exasperated.

  “Can’t you just give me a pie?” she says.

  “A pie?” Fitelson asks, confused.

  But Mike understands right away. “For chrissakes!” he yells. “The dame wants a pie, give her a goddamn pie.” He draws the pie himself, slicing up each investors’ share, shading in her cut until she is satisfied.

  Star and Garter premieres to mixed reviews, but the show is sold out far in advance. “It was wartime,” Gypsy said, “and it was the first girlie show that had been done on Broadway in a long time—beautiful girls, scanty costumes, low comics.… It was beautiful, lush, extravagant, and wonderful. I remember one matinee, one of the ladies was leaving—my dressing room faced the street—and there were some friends waiting for her when she came out. She said, ‘Mabel, I have just seen without a doubt the dirtiest, filthiest show I’ve ever seen in all my life. Don’t miss it.’ ”

  She has yet to regret her investment in Mike, personally or professionally. The time has come, she decides, to go all in, to push her last coin across the counter.

  I’ve never been close enough to anyone to share an honest feeling, she tells him, let alone an intense one, and now I’m sharing both with you. Get a divorce, and marry me.

  Once it leaves her hands there is no taking it back, even when he says he could never divorce Bertha—not because he loves her, of course, but because he loves his son. She asks again in different ways with different words but receives the same answer. No one misses their raucous fights behind the curtain of the Music Box Theatre after each closing. Pleas morph into demands, anger into desperation. After two months, in August, she decides to withdraw her offer and bluff. Fine, Gypsy tells Mike. If he won’t marry her, she’ll find someone who will.

  She doesn’t have to find William Alexander Kirkland, a perfectly nice, blandly handsome, closeted bisexual actor, known as Alexander in business and Bill in private. He is already there, calling her his “princess,” courting her in his patient, sensible way. At a party for her Star and Garter costar Bobby Clark, she decides to hurry things along. Climbing atop a crate, she calls for everyone’s attention and makes her announcement: she and Bill Kirkland are getting married.

  Gypsy looks directly at Mike as she speaks. Around her the room fills with movement and noise, whistles and applause and men rushing to shake Bill’s hand. Mike remains the only still thing, pinning her with unblinking eyes, until he rises without a word and leaves her alone with the crowd.

  Chapter Fourteen

  We’ll get drunker and drunker, and drift about nightclubs so drunk we won’t know where we are. We’ll go to bed late tomorrow morning and wake up and begin it all over again.

  — HARLEM RENAISSANCE WRITER CARL VAN VECHTEN

  New York City, 1920–1924

 
; As midnight approached on January 16, 1920, Billy Minsky prepared to meet the new needs of his patrons and his city, stocking his office at the National Winter Garden with ice buckets, crystal tumblers, bottles of the finest whiskey, scotch, bourbon, and cognac, fruit juices to make Orange Blossoms and Old-Fashioneds and Sidecars, sugar cubes and maraschino cherries and lemon peels for garnish. Outside his windows New York was in the throes of a citywide wake, up and down every avenue, across every street. Black-bordered invitations had been dispensed weeks before, announcing “Last rites and ceremonies attending the departure of our spirited friend, John Barleycorn.” The death was premeditated and met with sadness and gaiety, mockery and contempt, and few predicted the resurrection soon to come.

  The ice-slicked streets did little to deter the “mourning parties,” which began at dinnertime and multiplied as the hours advanced. Guests paid their respects at the Waldorf-Astoria, hip flasks peeking from waistbands, champagne glasses kissing in farewell toasts. Park Avenue women in sleek ermine coats and cloche hats gripped bottles of wine with one hand and wiped real tears with the other. Uptown at Healy’s, patrons tossed empty glasses into a silk-lined casket, and eight waiters at Maxim’s, clad entirely in black, carried a coffin to the center of the dance floor. Reporters on deadline tapped out eulogies for John Barleycorn and imagined his final words. “I’ve had more friends in private and more foes in public,” quoted the Daily News, “than any other man in America.”

  A grand finale at the National Winter Garden, “slumming” destination for uptowners. (photo credit 14.1)

  Past and future purveyors of vice marked the night with anticipation, a sense of déjà vu, or no feeling at all. The “Lester sisters”—two former madams exiled from Chicago—spent a quiet evening in their Upper West Side brownstone, sipping champagne and marveling at the lunacy of the reformers. A Brooklyn boy named Alphonse Capone, considered a minor player in the old Five Points Gang (or what remained of it), had been discharged from the army the previous year. The dawn of Prohibition fell, coincidentally, on his twenty-first birthday, but all of its possibilities had not yet occurred to him. One of his Five Points cohorts, twenty-three-year-old Charles Luciano—soon to earn the nickname “Lucky”—had served time as a teenager for trafficking cocaine and heroin and knew precisely how to take advantage of the new law. “I never was a crumb,” he said, meaning a common workingman, “and if I have to be a crumb I’d rather be dead.”

  Arnold Rothstein, pawnbroker to the underworld and future inspiration for The Great Gatsby’s Meyer Wolfsheim, was deep into a card game on the night Prohibition struck. He was no stranger to grand schemes, having fixed the World Series of 1919, and would soon join bootlegging forces with a Lower East Side gangster named Irving Wexler. Better known as Waxey Gordon, Wexler stood poised to become one of the country’s premier rum runners. On at least one occasion he would use his resulting fortune for an ostensibly benevolent purpose: ordering a New York City dentist to fix Gypsy Rose Lee’s teeth.

  All across the city, speakeasies sprouted in unexpected places: tucked behind receptionists’ desks in office buildings; amid the rubble and machinery of construction sites; in the cellars of fashionable hat shops and the back rooms of pricey town houses; across from police stations; and even at the top of the Chrysler Building. Revelers bet one another who could find the oddest location for their next libation. In one apocryphal story, a young man spent hours drinking at a speakeasy that felt “vaguely familiar.” Slowly, it came to him that he was standing in his childhood home, in the very room that had once been his nursery. Two federal agents named Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith, donning disguises that ranged from fishermen to firefighters, football coaches to bums, sophisticated operagoers to matronly Italian women, made bartenders faint when their true identities were revealed.

  The Minskys welcomed every new speakeasy that graced their neighborhood. Dozens lined East First, East Fourth, Rivington, Chrystie, and Stanton Streets, the Bowery, and Second Avenue. The best in the neighborhood, and perhaps all of New York, was Manny Wolf’s at Forsyth and Grand, just a few hundred yards away from the National Winter Garden’s door. Moneyed uptowners arrived in their Cadillac limousines, afflicted with, as one reformer noted, “an itch to try new things.” Drinking now required cunning, an urbane wit, the code to a secret and thrilling language. “Give me a ginger ale,” they said, and waited for the bartender’s wink and knowing reply: “Imported or domestic?” The correct answer, imported, earned the customer a regulation pre-Prohibition highball.

  Occasionally, Billy noticed, these uptown visitors wandered over to the National Winter Garden, sufficiently sober to make it up to the sixth floor but tipsy enough to enjoy the show. They sat among the factory workers and longshoremen and blacksmiths, all of them grimacing at the comics (WAITER: Would the lady like some tongue? WOMAN: Sir, I’ll have you understand that I never eat anything that comes out of an animal’s mouth. WAITER: Then how about a couple of eggs?) and ogling the girls. It was fine by Billy if those uptowners thought they were “slumming” at his theater, if they made jokes about needing a passport to venture so far south on the island. Instead of being insulted he invited such guests to his office for a postshow nightcap and frank, enlightening conversation about what they most wanted to see onstage. A hefty wallet and a string of numerals after his name didn’t prevent a man from enjoying the more vulgar sketches. Often such patrons laughed hardest when a comic shook a bottle of seltzer and squirted the contents into a girl’s waiting buttocks, or when she perched herself on a toilet seat and burbled lines about going to Flushing and buying stock in Consolidated Gas.

  “Burlesque, like Broadway, is changing in its ever-vacillating clientele,” Billboard observed. “This is especially applicable to Minsky’s National Winter Garden, for no more do we see the ever-yawning smokers of hop and dreadful degenerates, [but] out-of-town slumming parties and would-be sporty boys and girls who demand an indecent thrill.”

  At the same time, Billy wanted the interlopers to know that the National Winter Garden was superior to the rest of the neighborhood’s stock burlesque houses, that the brothers were familiar enough with the so-called legitimate producers to parody them properly. To that end, he took out pointed half-page ads in the New York Clipper:

  WANTED

  for

  MUSICAL STOCK BURLESQUE PRINCIPALS OF CLASS AND QUALITY

  Comedians, Straight Man, Characters Man, Dancing Juvenile, Prima Donna, Soubrettes, Ingénue, Leading Woman

  ONLY THE VERY BEST WILL BE CONSIDERED

  SALARY NO OBJECT. WRITE YOUR OWN TICKET IF YOU CAN DELIVER.

  THERE IS NOTHING TOO GOOD FOR THE MINSKY BROTHERS

  Billy also sought the services of Anne Toebe, widely acknowledged as the burlesque industry’s first stripper, and Carrie Finnell, the first teaser (despite Mae Dix’s fortuitous wardrobe mishap back in 1917 as she exited the Minsky runway). The monikers were self-defining. A teaser sashayed, strutted, winked. She exited the stage each time she showed skin, even if just a square of collarbone or the dip of her waist, and returned until adorned only in her girdle and brassiere and G-string, offering, if the men begged sufficiently, a flash of breast at the end.

  A stripper was more focused in her approach, unhooking clasps and hooks with connect-the-dots predictability until clad in her “union suit,” a one-piece garment designed to look like bare flesh. The chubby, redheaded Toebe engaged in “rough” flirtation with the audience, imprinting scarlet kisses on the pates of bald jewelry salesmen. One of her most popular songs went, in part:

  My face ain’t much to look at

  I gotta shape like a frog

  But I can make the boys in the gallery

  Sit up and yell “Hot Dog!”

  Carrie Finnell, years after her heyday at the National Winter Garden. (photo credit 14.2)

  Finnell, by contrast, performed in baby blue silk and rabbit fur boots, and was known as “the girl with the $100,000 legs” after her manager, in a well-pub
licized move, had them insured. The teaser, Billy figured, would do much to dispel the unfortunate nickname the Minsky runway had earned since its inception: “Varicose Alley.”

  Last but far from least, Billy brought back Mae Dix, who was by now one of the biggest draws in burlesque, demanding $175 per week and top billing. Wearing nothing over her union suit but a handkerchief, the point falling strategically between her legs, Dix announced the following week’s attractions and invited the audience to share suggestions. “I’ll do anything at all for you,” she said, adding with a wink, “within reason.” She had a supporting cast of chorus girls who specialized in cooch dancing, a tradition derived from Little Egypt’s slinky undulations during the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and one that had come to burlesque to stay.

  Sex, Billy predicted, would soon be the predominant component of burlesque, edging out the corny comics and suggestive repartee and animal-bladder bashings, and he would do everything in his power to hasten that change along.

  Billy celebrated success with his customary zealous focus. He zipped a brand-new Stutz Bearcat sports car through the Lower East Side’s narrow streets and bought a vacation house in Seagate, a private, exclusive community on Coney Island. He sent his wife, Mary, and their young son to live there permanently; she wouldn’t like the theater, he insisted. Too vulgar for her refined tastes, and she should take her exclusion as a compliment. In truth, he and Abe—by now remarried—spent most of their downtime competing for the affections of various Minsky “Rosebuds.”

  The brothers also continued to spy on the big uptown productions. One night, Billy ventured to a Shubert theater on Broadway and settled, as inconspicuously as possible, into a back row. Critics had raved about Cinderella on Broadway, calling it “a lavish and bounteous extravaganza.” At the close of the first act, a great silver slipper transformed into a staircase, down which paraded an impressive cast of beauties.