by Karen Abbott
Billy was watching closely, noting which set designs and physiques would work downtown, when he felt a finger drill into the back of his neck. He turned and found himself staring at the bedraggled brows of Lee Shubert, obsidian eyes glaring beneath them.
“Look out, Minsky,” he said. “Don’t let me catch you using any of this stuff in your show at the National Winter Garden.”
Billy smiled. “Too late,” he said.
It was time, the brothers decided, to bring the Minsky name to Broadway. The press greeted the news with enthusiasm and praise. “They are far seeing youths,” the Times wrote of the Minskys, “and have old heads on young shoulders.” The new venture would be housed in the Park Theatre at Columbus Circle. Billy envisioned an entirely new type of show, a superior sort of burlesque—“Burlesques,” he called it, emphasis on the final s, a brand that would become as recognizable as the Follies. Calling it the Park Music Hall instead of the Park Theatre would evoke a more elegant age, the height of Old New York. The company consisted of an English pony ballet (in which sixteen girls danced on the backs of live ponies), fifteen leading actors (called “principals”), and forty chorus girls, who must weigh less than 170 pounds—the first time Billy imposed such a restriction, never having forgotten the mean-spirited review that described the Rosebuds as “hulking.” No unsightly veins, either; Broadway wouldn’t tolerate a Varicose Alley.
A jazz orchestra of twenty began rigorous rehearsals, and a Hawaiian octet set up in the foyer to play during intermissions. The Minskys would keep the same company but change the show every week. Two dollars and twenty cents per ticket was several times the cost of their shows downtown, but a bargain compared to the overpriced and overrated Follies at $6.60. Forget the New Amsterdam or the Winter Garden, the Park Music Hall would be the new Victoria, Oscar Hammerstein’s opulent, grand old theater that set a standard back in 1899. “The Victoria,” the New York American wrote that year, “at a bird’s eye view, looks like a big twinkling pearl, all white and gold with the opals of electricity studding it in profusion.… Gorgeous carpets, splendid lounges and all the ultra-elegance the metropolis loves were to be seen everywhere.” Better to forget the Victoria’s ultimate disgrace at the hands of Hammerstein’s son Willie, who took over operations in 1904 and turned it into a freakshow venue, booking acts like “Sober Sue—You Can’t Make Her Laugh.” Willie posted a $1,000 reward and several of the best comics of the day tried their best, but all failed. When the engagement ended, it was discovered that it was physically impossible for Sober Sue to laugh since her facial muscles were paralyzed.
The Park Music Hall would require much time and effort, but the Minskys couldn’t neglect their flagship burlesque theater. Billy suggested that Herbert stay downtown and make sure the National Winter Garden kept attracting ethnics and uptowners alike. To keep an eye on audience rowdies and drunks, Abe hired Albert and Walter, two retired Pinkerton detectives with barrel-sized arms and convincing costumes—gold-plated badges and stiff-brimmed police caps filched from the Minskys’ props department. Patrolling the rooftop, they smacked billy clubs against beefy palms and tossed out “sleepers,” bums inclined to loiter until the next day’s matinee. They also kept an eye on the oddball who engaged in loud, intense conversations with his penis during the show.
Billy devoted his energy to the Park Music Hall and offered the youngest Minsky brother a proposition: how would Morton like to work the Park’s outdoor box office, where patrons could buy premium seats closest to the girls? It was time for Morton to stop hanging around aimlessly and bothering the soubrettes (his crush on Ethel De Veaux, for instance, was cute but wearisome; he was always offering to escort her to the subway and staring, entranced, as she cracked her wad of Juicy Fruit gum). With some tutoring and hard work, Morton could be an asset to the growing Minsky franchise. Morton immediately dropped out of New York University, and begged Billy to teach him everything he knew.
No one, unfortunately, mistook the new Minsky theater for the old Hammerstein Victoria. “The long-awaited uncorking of the Park Music Hall,” wrote the New York Clipper, “was attended by a loud pop! it is true, but the ensuing flow of its contents proved it to have no new flavor.” The list of complaints was long as a chorus line. The main dancer seemed “unacquainted with the art of makeup.” A leading lady wore a hideous outfit while singing “Pretty Clothes,” and the number wasn’t meant to be ironic. Vaudevillian Bob Nelson’s dancing was more St. Vitus than tap. The almost-nude dancing by a single girl seemed exploitative and gratuitous, as though the producers “felt the need to give the boys in the balconies a little spice for their money.” For once, even Billy didn’t know what to give them or how to put it on.
“People,” Morton said, “were staying away in droves.”
The Park Music Hall closed after just twenty-three weeks. Billy returned to the National Winter Garden hazy and unfocused, wondering how his pitch-perfect instinct had failed so miserably. Maybe the very idea was flawed: why would uptowners want a downtown version of glamour when they already had the original, legitimate thing? Maybe the Park Music Hall had offered slumming prices with none of the fun and ambiance of actual slumming. Maybe they would forever be stuck providing toilet humor and fat girls and inflated animal bladders over the head. Maybe some things in New York City were too good for the Minsky brothers, after all.
Chapter Fifteen
By the time you swear you’re his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying—
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.
— DOROTHY PARKER
Gypsy’s Country Home, Highland Mills, New York, August 1942
Gypsy Rose Lee wears black for this wedding, her second, knowing she’ll be in mourning if the ending isn’t a happy one. The ending she hopes for has nothing to do with the gathering downstairs, absurd as a burlesque skit: the famous stripteaser Georgia Sothern as maid of honor; Carl Van Doren as best man; Lee Wright, her editor at Simon & Schuster (and rumored lover), as a bridesmaid; Life magazine as the official photographer; the impressive assemblage of guests, including Carson McCullers (who still recalls, longingly, their time together on Middagh Street), Peggy Guggenheim, Janet Flanner, Christopher Isherwood, Clare Boothe Luce, George Jean Nathan, and Max Ernst; one of her trained Chihuahuas as the entertainment; a chimpanzee as ring bearer; and the minister, who is dozing on the couch. It has nothing, even, to do with the groom, Bill Kirkland, who truly seems to believe he loves her.
Gypsy Rose Lee, preparing for her wedding to Bill Kirkland. (photo credit 15.1)
It has everything to do with the ultimatum she gave another man, Michael Todd, and the clock’s willful march toward her midnight deadline. It has to do with the view outside her bedroom window—no sign of headlights boring through the darkness, no wisp of smoke from his omnipresent cigar, no demand from that booming voice to stop this charade, for God’s sake, he has come to call her bluff.
And how ironic that this wedding has forced a tepid reconciliation with her mother when her first resulted, eventually, in their bitterest estrangement. Rose is downstairs now, in the country estate that she used to call home, laughing with the very people she once derided as “night club bad company, reefers, fags” who brought “unpleasant” things into their lives. It is Gypsy’s turn to deal with Rose, Big Lady, and Aunt Belle; June has made that clear. “Dear Bride Gypsy Rose Lee,” her sister writes,
I shall now explain to you why you will have to wear the whole crowd of vultures—I have worked three weeks out of seven months.… I sent Rosebud fifty bucks a week until I simply couldn’t … you are the moneyballs in the family.… Please write me and tell that man you’re living with that I personally don’t think he has a chance—all the smart money is on a Hovick.
In some ways it’s a shame Gypsy has her genes and temperament and timing, that Bill, through no fault of his own, fails to be her match. The press ca
lls him Hollywood’s most desirable bachelor, describes him as “young, good-looking, successful, and well-endowed.” He seems earnest, smart, considerate, classy. “I don’t think a woman should hold her love back,” he says, “and use it as a means with which to bargain for what she wants of life. I think that is cheapening love. Marriage ought to be on a finer, higher plane than that of barter and trade.”
A secret, tucked-away part of her heart recognizes how ugly this is, letting a man believe he’s a groom at his own wedding when he is merely leverage, a chip to be turned in if only she wins this hand. From the moment he met Gypsy he adored her, for the same reasons she is adored by both New York’s literati and its longshoremen. She is a strutting, bawdy, erudite conundrum, belonging to everyone but known by none. She has to admit that Bill, for all that he isn’t and for all he’d never be to her, understands her better than most.
A year from this night, after they decide never to consummate their marriage but before it is officially over, he writes a letter that she presses into her scrapbook:
Dearest Gypola,
I’ve been thinking a lot about us. I am proud that we are not very different, you and I—at least fundamentally. You are a lot more scared of failure than I am—a little more anxious for success—I think it all comes from that childhood which would have been so devastating to any person not made of platinum and moral courage like you. Even with all your character it has made you a bit of a lone wolf and strangely enough my weird upbringing has made me one too. So you see I know that even when we are baying most ferociously and looking our fiercest, we are just a couple of lonely and rather frightened “near-dogs.” I know at the present clip we’ll achieve a really sinister old age—solitary. I also know that we can change all that—but I honestly don’t know that we are going to. There are a lot of things that may keep us from finding the answer together.…
Deep down you have the husband-pattern of the women of your family—the marriage pattern. I dislike it intensely. It savors of the Life of the Bee, and I will never willingly be a drone.… I sometimes wonder whether [here Bill crossed out “I” and replaced it with “we”] have the force to break through this life-dream to a really workable marriage for us.… I wish it could be because I love you with a strange deepness—considering that we are both such strong minded jerks. Darling, it would be the easiest thing in the world to stop thinking and tumble through emotions with you, but I am afraid of that little bit of bad in you that would transform me into grandpa (Big Lady’s) and then send you away from me to sell corsets in the Yukon. You wouldn’t love me that way, and that you love me is of the greatest importance to me … well, black angel, that’s enough.
Her mother’s laughter, quick and light as beating wings, climbs the stairs and invades her room. Rose fools even Bill, who says she can “charm the birds out of the trees,” who finds it endlessly amusing when she dances with one of the apes from Star and Garter. She cheers Bill on when he feeds the animal an entire bottle of beer, and cheers the animal on when it then relieves itself down the front of Bill’s lapel. She is in her element, the matriarch of this grand and sardonic charade, and the thought of watching Mother lord over the proceedings gives Gypsy another reason to stall.
With a crimson fingernail, the black angel bride adjusts the twig of grapes entwined in her hair. For once the grapes’ promise of good fortune has failed her. It is half past midnight and she will not tell a direct lie this time, not even to herself. Mike isn’t coming. He might never come again. Time to turn her back to the window, to the driveway that remains silent and unlit. Never in her life has she moved so slowly as she does descending those steps.
Dainty June and Her Newsboy Songsters (including Louise), near the end of the act. (photo credit 15.2)
Chapter Sixteen
Their sincerity was greater than their artistry—their eagerness to please was beyond their capacity to please—but they gave their hearts and their lives and it was not their fault that that was not enough.
—ALFRED LUNT, VAUDEVILLE STAR
On the Vaudeville Circuit, 1925–1928
Louise had watched her sister work through measles and chicken pox and ruined feet, so she was as surprised as anyone when, one morning in Chicago, June literally could not lift her head. Her blue eyes appeared dull and unseeing, her cheeks were leached of color, her limbs as thin as the blinds darkening her room. “I wanted to die,” June said, “just for the vacation.” Nothing Rose tried worked: threats, scolding, praise, promises of extra yaka mein at dinner. Sensibly, she refrained from mentioning what might have caused, or at least contributed to, June’s condition—a recent conversation with a theater manager in New York, who said that June had true talent. With singing, dancing, and acting lessons, she could be a triple threat, a bona fide star, and he was so sure of her potential he’d foot the bill himself, so long as Rose promised not to interfere. “Mind your own business,” Rose told him. “There’s no man in the world going to take my baby from me.… What school on earth can teach her anything she doesn’t already know?”
Louise stood at June’s bedside until the hotel doctor arrived and declared that the twelve-year-old had suffered a breakdown. For two straight weeks she must lie in bed in perfect quiet with no outside visitors—not Louise, not the boys, not Uncle Gordon, not even Mother. Rose nodded at the doctor’s instructions, clasping his hand and thanking him for taking such good care of her baby, and when he left she sat by June’s head and stroked her daughter’s hair.
Now there, Rose said. The Baby had never let anything stop her before, and she wouldn’t now, would she? Not when she knew how Mother and Louise and the boys and Big Lady and Aunt Belle and Grandpa depended on her?
June stared at her, quiet and rigidly still. She willed her mouth to pry itself open, then had no energy left to give it words.
“Go and do it,” Rose said, “and we’ll talk about it later.”
It occurred to Louise that her sister was losing herself, in quick but agonizing stages. First the death of Samba, her cherished guinea pig. Then closing her contract on the Orpheum Circuit, with no guarantee she’d ever make it back, and losing the only chance she might ever have to study acting. And now this, her body turning on her just when she—and Mother—needed it most.
Louise grew more conscious of her own problems, as well. She was fourteen now and 165 pounds, not yet tall enough for the weight to settle evenly around her frame. No bust or waist to speak of, just thighs and a bottom that appeared larger every time she looked. She studied her legs, pinched at the loose skin. Fanny Brice had told her it was nothing personal, but she was taking Louise’s scene out of the show and wouldn’t need her again. “Don’t feel bad about it,” Fanny said. “It was too much to ask of a kid your age, with no experience.” Louise thanked her for the opportunity, returned that gorgeous orange Creamsicle of a dress, and pulled on her old long underwear with the baggy knees. Now, with this body, she feared she would never again have the stage all to herself.
Louise, around age fourteen. (photo credit 16.1)
She blamed this development entirely on their vaudeville act; her body changed because nothing else had. June was no longer a baby or even dainty, and Louise was no longer a demure Doll Girl or a tomboy Bowery Tough. Turnover was so fast that they now rehearsed in the wings, and the Newsboy Songsters who remained barely fit into their costumes. Yet, night after night, they performed the same old routines. They dressed up like rough Tenderloin kids and “shook the bones,” cavorted with Susie the Dancing Cow, and encircled June during the big finale, all of them pointing down at her as if depending on their star to do something.
Louise knew her sister sensed the expectation. June drew all of her strength and “nutrition,” as she called it, from the boys in the act and her audience, and she was too much of a pro to let either of them down.
True, the crowds had thinned a bit. Lately the applause merely crackled instead of thundered, and even the most prestigious theaters had clusters of emp
ty seats. Panic seized managers and booking agents across the country. No fewer than 540 broadcasting stations now provided Americans with entertainment inside their homes, playing the scores of the same shows currently in production throughout the country. “There is no more important question before the theatre than the radio,” declared the president of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers during an emergency meeting in New York. “I want to warn all present against the peril of ridiculing or underestimating its effect on the theatre.” Vaudeville impresario E. F. Albee went so far as to forbid his acts from appearing on radio, or from even mentioning radio onstage unless the remarks were scathing.
Advances in the film industry were no less troubling. The ten-minute short “flickers” that had once rounded out a vaudeville bill were now the main attraction, and, one by one, old-time vaudeville houses succumbed to the enemy. In 1921, a quarter of the theaters that had played both films and vaudeville dropped the vaudeville shows, and by 1925 only a hundred “straight,” no-flicker theaters remained. Dozens of talented vaudevillians followed Charlie Chaplin’s lead and made forays into film: W. C. Fields, Buster Keaton, Will Rogers, Harry Houdini, Rudolph Valentino.
The “film peril,” as theater managers called it, delivered another blow to vaudeville with Warner Bros.’ introduction of Vitaphone, a device that synced sound recording with films. The following year, in 1927, the studio released The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length “talkie,” starring erstwhile vaudevillian Al Jolson. Though only five hundred theaters nationwide were wired for sound, it was the best-selling film of the year, and other major singers and comedians signed on for talkies.