American Rose

by Karen Abbott

  She decided she both agreed and disagreed with her mother. A boy couldn’t get you pregnant just from a kiss; how silly and naïve that sounded, now that she was older. But Mother was right about the power they held as women, about the one currency that never lost its value. She would give it away whenever and to whomever she saw fit, but always—and only—for something in return.

  They continued on their tenuous, makeshift circuit, each theater shabbier than the last, one-night stands in Buffalo, Sedalia, North Platte, Toledo, Trenton, and Appleton, Wisconsin. At the Folies Bergère on Atlantic City’s boardwalk they were fifth on the bill, below both the Three Ormonde Sisters (tagline: “A Wee Drop of Scotch of the ‘Grab Bag Show’ ”), and Evelyn Nesbit, the former Manhattan ingenue—now, at age forty-three, eight years older than Rose. Even Bingo, Bank Night, and Dish Night had higher billing. They had long layoffs in between when the grouch bag got even lighter, the boys angrier, and June more distant and cagey. Rose, perhaps wishing for a self-fulfilling prophecy, decided to change the act’s name for a gig in Albuquerque, New Mexico: “Dainty June and the Happy Gang Revue” performed at the Kimo Theater.

  Rose feigned a positive attitude, insisting that God was watching over their little act, that He wouldn’t “knock vaudeville out from under us.” But Louise knew her mother better than anyone; she alone could follow the seismic shift of her moods, the weather-vane spin of her thoughts. Improbable as it seemed, she was now nearly Mother’s age when she’d escaped from the convent so long ago, when Rose first learned the importance of timing: when to latch onto someone and when to let go; when to beg and when to threaten; when to yield and when to take charge; when there was no choice left but to disappear. Louise might not sing or dance as well as June but she had inherited Mother’s gifts of timing and tenacity, the ability to walk into a picture just as the shutter clicked and smile until the flash went dim. Rose was falling and Louise would rise to meet her halfway, accept a permanent exchange of innocence for control. It was a matter of both necessity and choice. She wanted to become her mother’s equal, her other, willing half, as much as she had to.

  Louise tried on her new role slowly, an inch at a time, since this was one costume she could never take off. When they were out in public, she looped her arm through Rose’s and whooped and hollered so loudly that June slunk away, mortified, to the other side of the street. Mother loved the attention, and Louise would deliver it to her. When the two girls ran into Gordon by chance in New York City, June jumped into his arms while Louise regarded him, warily, from a distance. “Mother will be so glad to see you,” June said, breathing into his neck, forgetting, for the moment, that she was now fifteen years old. “She thinks you’re dead.” Gordon set her down and stepped away. “I never want to see her again,” he said. “Never, do you hear me?” June hid her face in her hands and wept, but Louise was thinking of Mother. She decided that Rose should never know the truth. And if any man ever professed his love for her, she would recognize the words as lies.

  When Mother finally lost it, when she did the worst thing she’d ever done in her life—so far, at least—Louise willed herself to understand. These were desperate times, their entire world creeping away from them, and Louise had to wonder how she would have reacted in the same situation, if she were the oldest, the mother, the one ostensibly in charge. An unnamed hotel manager in an unnamed city affronted Rose in an unspecified way. He insulted her daughters, or threatened eviction because their room was overrun with boys, or looked at Rose in a way that dredged up every sore moment with Daddy Jack and Daddy Bub and Murray Gordon and the rest she never cared to name. Louise had to ask herself: if she were Mother under these circumstances, would she have stood by passively and withstood yet another indignity? Or would she have allowed her best instincts to meld with her worst, thinking of her daughters, broken and diminished, while she closed her eyes tightly and pushed that manager out the window?

  The why didn’t matter after the fact, only that the police accepted Rose’s alibi of self-defense, and that the murder was never spoken of again. Louise honored this pact even later, when Rose knew all of her secrets and threatened to remember them out loud.

  And Louise was there for Rose when the end finally came. On December 28, 1928, after performing at the Jayhawk Theatre in Topeka, Kansas, Louise heard her mother scream, a fierce, high-pitched keening that sounded vaguely inhuman. A note rested on the windowsill, and Louise saw her sister’s childish scrawl:

  We were married two weeks ago in North Platte so you can’t have it annulled. Please don’t try to find me. I can’t go on doing the same act all my life. I’d rather die. Bobby loves me …

  Louise let Mother weep into her shoulder and cry for the baby she had once tried to destroy. “She’s only a baby,” Rose said, over and over. “She’s thirteen, Louise. Thirteen years old! She can’t leave me like this.” Louise didn’t remind her mother of June’s true age or stop her when she reached for her coat. It wouldn’t be Rose without a dramatic denouement, and Louise would be waiting when she returned.

  Two detectives arrived, their flashlights sweeping golden streaks across each corner, beneath the gnarled branches of leafless trees. “She can’t have gone far,” Rose told them, her voice trailing down the street. “She isn’t very bright and won’t know what to do.” Louise pictured her sister hiding in some slim wedge of space, willing herself to be smaller than she was.

  Mother never stopped talking. “He’s been in trouble before,” she said. “He’s just a tramp traveling around with burlesque companies. That’s all he’s ever known before—burlesque! My poor baby. Oh, my poor baby! Thank God there are men like you in the world to help a poor widow.”

  The officers escorted her to the police station, told her to sit tight. Before long, they returned with Bobby and presented him to Rose. June was nowhere to be found.

  “Marriage isn’t the electric chair,” one officer reasoned. “I would like to see you and Bobby shake hands and be friends.”

  Bobby took a step toward Rose and extended his hand. She reached inside her coat and pulled out a small automatic pistol. Ten inches from his chest she fired once, twice. The gun jumped in her hand but no bullet discharged. She hadn’t unhinged the safety lock. The detective ripped the gun away and locked her inside barrel arms, but she would not be confined. She wrestled free and tackled Bobby, kicking his shins, pounding his head, scratching at his eyes. The entire night staff approached cautiously, as if closing in on a rabid, feral animal, and then it was over. Rose lay flat on her back, the rhythm of her screams ceding gradually, like a tree swing slowing to a stop after a child jumps off.

  When Rose returned, Louise was waiting. She took her mother back into her arms and held her upright. “You’re all I have now, Louise,” Rose whispered, breathing hot against her neck. “Promise me you’ll never leave me. Promise me that, dear.” She gripped Louise’s arms and pulled back far enough to look at her directly. “Say you’ll never leave me! Promise me!”

  Louise stared back. They were even, now, shoulder to shoulder, eye to eye.

  “No, Mother,” she said. “I can’t promise that.” Rose fell into her arms again, but Louise was already gone—thinking of orange chiffon and ostrich feathers, the sweet refrain of “Me and My Shadow,” the spotlight’s halo encircling her every spin and stride. She thought of June, lost but free, and in that moment wanted only to be one step ahead of her.

  Gypsy with Mike Todd and George S. Kaufman. (photo credit 16.3)

  Chapter Seventeen

  All I ever wanted was to have one husband and one house and one garden and a lot of children.

  —ACTRESS JOAN BLONDELL

  Highland Mills and New York City, 1942–1943

  The slow descent down those steps finally ends, and in the roomful of spectators she becomes Gypsy Rose Lee again. At the makeshift altar, she jokes about feeling like “an Aztec virgin being prepared for sacrifice” and cries as the service concludes. “My Gawd,” Georgia Sothern s
ays, patting her back, “what a performance!”

  Gypsy doesn’t smile when she cuts the cake with a knife the length of a machete, and smiles hugely, falsely, when she and her new husband, Bill Kirkland, pose for a photograph with their mothers that will soon appear in Life magazine. Gypsy wrenches away from Rose, as if her mother’s skin is painful to the touch, and Rose leans in, resting her chin on Gypsy’s shoulder, closing a hand around her daughter’s neck.

  After removing the grapes from her hair, Gypsy dresses in flannel, slathers herself with Vicks VapoRub, and picks up a book, ignoring the champagne and flowers Bill sets by the bed. Ten months later gossip columnist Walter Winchell is the first to break the news. The demise of their relationship makes him so disillusioned, Bill Kirkland claims, that he will “stay a bachelor forever.” Rose, as always, offers her own unsolicited opinion. “Sorry you are having trouble with Bill,” she writes. “It must be your fault.”

  Mike Todd is still married to Bertha and seems intent on remaining so, but he never stops teasing Gypsy with his letters: “I miss you,” he writes, “so don’t marry any actors.” The situation brings to mind her mother’s easy gift for uprooting men, the same way Grandpa Thompson used to weed his garden. Rose’s ruthless instinct lives inside Gypsy, to both her occasional frustration and frequent relief, but with Mike its edges are softened, its sting mild. She has no idea how to unweave him from her life, or even if she wants to.

  They are together again, on his terms, and he is producing her play, The Naked Genius, titled after the way she signs off letters to her editor. It strikes Gypsy that the saga behind The Naked Genius is more compelling than the play itself, what with its plot that manages to be at once semiautobiographical and contrived—yet another instance of her mining her past to ensure she’ll never relive it. A stripper named Gypsy hires a ghostwriter to pen her memoirs, a surprise critical and commercial hit, and she becomes the unlikely toast of New York’s literati. She falls in love with her slick, unavailable press agent and, to spite him, decides to marry her wealthy book publisher, who promises to save her from a lowly life in burlesque.

  By now Gypsy is a literary force, a self-fulfilling prophecy she finds both thrilling and ludicrous. Here she is, the author of two novels, The G-String Murders and Mother Finds a Body (the latter also based on true events), several New Yorker articles, and now a Broadway-bound play, her only academic degree a “Doctor of Strip Teasing” issued by the Minsky brothers. After the successful adaptation of The G-String Murders into the movie Lady of Burlesque, Hollywood has kept a close eye on her literary efforts. Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright George S. Kaufman signs on to direct the play. Gypsy hopes Mike will give her the lead, but he has someone else in mind: the movie star Joan Blondell.

  A marquee name, Gypsy has to admit, and she understands Joan instinctively just as she understands Mike. Their ambitions grow from the same restless place, tick to the same frenzied clock. Joan’s parents trouped the vaudeville circuits she remembers all too well, tucking their daughter into a stage trunk instead of a crib, telling her the road was education enough. When vaudeville died she turned not to burlesque but to beauty pageants, winning the 1926 Miss Dallas crown under the stage name Rosebud Blondell. Three years later, back to being Joan, she scored her break in the movie Penny Arcade and went on to star in twenty-seven films in thirty-six months. She calls herself “the fizz on the soda,” a nickname that is as fitting offscreen as on. Stories abound about catfights backstage—cursing, hair pulling, choking, head banging, all of it—and she once bashed a producer with a silver hand mirror. But she has four key things Gypsy lacks: blond ringlets, a large bust, blue eyes that dominate a petite kitten face, and acting talent. Gypsy soothes herself the best way she knows how, by imagining the size of her royalty checks.

  Rehearsals begin in August 1943, at the old Maxine Elliott’s Theatre on 39th Street, and at first all of the principals are in good spirits. Joan looks ravishing if somewhat incongruous, like an amorous kewpie doll. Kaufman has doctored the script—it’s less of a collaboration than Gypsy would have liked, but who is she to argue with the master?—and on paper, The Naked Genius works.

  But the lines, spoken aloud, seem twice removed from dialogue that might occur in real life; the plot more Dalí than Eugene O’Neill. Kaufman sits in the front row, grinning oddly—a nervous muscular reaction, it turns out, rather than an expression of pleasure or approval. Gypsy tries to be positive, praising Joan’s ebullient delivery and Kaufman’s sure-handed direction, but each rehearsal is worse than the last. It is a slow-motion unraveling that recalls the worst phase of her life, the unspeakable stretch of time before she broke away from Mother, those lost days when she went places and did things that no one associates with Gypsy Rose Lee, slippery memories she can’t bear to relive.…

  One morning Gypsy wakes up and decides not to return to the theater.

  Mademoiselle Fifi, another of Billy Minsky’s brilliant creations. (photo credit 17.1)

  Chapter Eighteen

  When a burlesque producer is asked in court about the morals of his workers, the answer always is, “Some virgins, no professionals.”

  —JOSEPH MITCHELL

  New York City, 1925–1928

  It was true that a certain sect of uptown snubbed the Minskys, and that certain detractors gleefully reported that their “bold invasion of Broadway is all over,” but as soon as the Hawaiian octet disbanded and the uncharacteristically svelte chorines shuffled away, the brothers turned out the lights on the Park Music Hall and found a rightful home north of 14th Street. Billy Minsky was eager to open as soon as possible; mourning his failures merely got in the way of learning from them. The experiment at Columbus Circle would neither define nor destroy his name.

  This latest venture of “les frères Minsky,” as the press dubbed the brothers, was called Minsky’s Apollo (not to be confused with the Apollo, which had yet to debut). Located in Harlem on 125th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, Minsky’s Apollo shared the block with Brecher’s Opera House, where Fanny Brice and Sophie Tucker often ruled the stage, and another burlesque palace, Hurtig & Seamon’s, a venue exclusively serving the Columbia Wheel.

  One soup-thick afternoon in August, Billy stood outside surveying his new building, eager to tell his main investor, Joseph Weinstock, about his plans for Minsky’s Apollo. Like Billy, Weinstock was a cunning opportunist, once having bid $50 at an auction for a vacant seat on the New York Stock Exchange—and winning it. Several plainclothes officers and uniformed members of the exchange had to guard its doors to prevent Weinstock from entering until a judge finally deemed the price “grossly inadequate.” After the debacle on Broadway, Weinstock was taking a risk by backing the Minskys, and Billy wanted to soothe any lingering misgivings.

  He felt a tap on his shoulder. This time he wasn’t in Lee Shubert’s neighborhood, and Billy expected to find one of two people when he turned around: the Columbia Wheel producers, Jules Hurtig or Harry Seamon.

  “You won’t last four weeks,” Hurtig warned.

  Billy smiled through a gauzy hoop of cigar smoke and let the old man believe he was right.

  When time permitted, Billy explored the local streets, strolling past Harlem Hospital and the twenty-cent-shave corner barbershops, the thrift stores and cheap Chinese restaurants, the pet shop where a monkey had escaped and killed a flock of canaries. There was serious talk, finally, of a triborough bridge that would link together Queens, the Bronx, and Manhattan. Clearly it would take years to open—some things even New York couldn’t hurry along—but he expected it to boost patronage at Minsky’s Apollo when that day finally came. He’d picked a bustling block in a diverse neighborhood—Jewish between 110th and 125th Streets and black further north, with Jungle Alley along 133rd Street between Lenox and Seventh Avenues. The area boasted the densest concentration of nightclubs and cabarets in New York, luring the sort of people who shaped the city’s ethos and manipulated its mood, the very folks whose business Billy cour
ted and whose accolades he craved.

  If the rules had been rewritten at the end of the Great War, they were now abandoned altogether. Mores were discarded and manners dismissed at every level of society. New York’s cultural arbiters no longer hailed from the Social Register or the Four Hundred; nightlife had turned fluid and democratic. Closed circles cracked open and made room. “There’s no such thing as a set anymore,” Carl Van Vechten wrote in his novel Parties. “Everybody goes everywhere.”

  They went to side streets around Jungle Alley to buy cocaine and marijuana, ten joints for a dollar, and to basement speakeasies where a silent man granted entry by yanking a long chain attached to the door. Down a steep flight of stairs elite uptowners and Greenwich Village bohemians and blacks crowded together at wood tables and sipped bootleg liquor with street names like “smoke” and “lightning.” They climbed upstairs to rent parties, where jazz musicians and piano “professors” raised money to help friends pay their landlords; marveled at the Clam House’s lesbian headliner, a 250-pound crooner clad in a top hat and tuxedo; and were charmed by A’Lelia Walker, Harlem’s foremost hostess and heiress, the daughter of the first black female self-made millionaire. They ran into an infamous character called “Money,” a hunchback who served as an unofficial tour guide for white interlopers. The final stop, invariably, was a dive run by Sewing Machine Bertha, who showed pornographic films as a preview to an after-hours live sex show featuring actors of all races.