by Karen Abbott
Lead to ecstatic nights of passion elsewhere as
You pick your blonde out neatly through the smoke.
Always you wait for someone else though, always
(Then rush the nearest exit through the smoke.)
Last but not least, in sauntered Mayor James J. Walker, pointing a greeting at the Minskys with a walking stick, his showgirl mistress, Betty Compton, on his arm. Everyone raised a glass to toast “Beau Jimmy,” the “Night Mayor,” the “Jazz Mayor,” favorite son of Tammany Hall, a Democrat’s Democrat and a New Yorker’s New Yorker, as ambitious and clever and flawed as the city that raised him. They thudded Walker’s bony back as he strolled to his seat, stretched to pump his little hand, tossed admiring questions and unstinting praise. Look at that suit—his entire wardrobe was custom-made: a hundred ties with a hundred matching handkerchiefs, dozens of pairs of two-toned shoes, an entire closetful of spats. Did he really plan to slip an illuminated wristwatch upon the Statue of Liberty’s upraised arm? Would he throw his perfect first pitch at the Yankees, Giants, or Dodgers game? Which first night on Broadway had he enjoyed most—Noël Coward in The Vortex, Humphrey Bogart in The Cradle Snatchers, George S. Kaufman’s Strike Up the Band? What other mayor would activate the siren of his limousine so he could scythe through Times Square traffic? Who else could speak cordially with Governor Roosevelt one minute and underworld kingpin Arnold Rothstein the next? How brazen that he called the gangster Owney Madden’s nightclub, the Central Park Casino, “Jimmy Walker’s Versailles,” and how apt that he was more productive there than at City Hall. When were he and Betty taking their next romantic rendezvous to Florida? Oh, and how they loved Walker’s retort when Congressman Fiorello La Guardia attacked him for raising his own salary by $15,000. “Why, that’s cheap!” the mayor said. “Think what it would cost if I worked full-time!”
He belonged to them and to this time, not only a product of the era but its living expression, and nothing in his insouciant grin or jaunty, wing-tipped lope suggested it wouldn’t last.
For some National Winter Garden regulars, especially the ever-evolving membership of the Algonquin Round Table, the night could end only at Polly Adler’s place, New York’s finest brothel. Madam Polly modeled her house—not a home, she always clarified—after the long-defunct Everleigh Club of Chicago. Aside from the traditional whorehouse decor—gilded mirrors and oil nudes, Louis Quinze competing with Louis Seize—Madam Polly had a few signature pieces, including a Chinese Room where guests could play mah-jongg, a bar built to resemble the recently excavated King Tut’s tomb, and a library stocked with classic and contemporary works, compliments of Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley, two of her most devoted patrons. The late-night revelers sipped champagne and traded tales of Minsky antics: the obscenity trial the brothers treated like an opening night, inviting Lady Astor and Mrs. Charles Dana Gibson to sit in the front row; the time Billy Minsky ordered a chorus girl to drink a vial of poison—the real thing, it was said—in homage to Rudolph Valentino’s death; and the bevy of “horizontal coochers,” whose onstage gyrations would make even Madam Polly’s courtesans blush.
But such success fostered distrust and resentment among the brothers. The rift happened slowly, imperceptibly, a fault line sliding by inches until the halves no longer met. One day Abe woke up and would not speak to Billy. He forbade his wife, two children, and extended family to mention Billy’s name in his presence.
Fine, Billy thought. If that was how Abe wanted to behave, he wouldn’t stop him. His work schedule didn’t leave him with any time to care.
It was jealousy, of course—it couldn’t be easy for Abe to realize he was no longer the brains behind the Minsky empire, the family wunderkind. For all of the apocryphal stories about the invention of striptease, Billy truly was marking new territory. He believed that the way a slinger shed her clothing mattered, that the means to the end should be as enticing as the end itself. What he offered was an art form, one as vital and uniquely American as baseball and jazz, not a mere naked bump and grind but characters, honed characters, each with a personal history, all of them capable of telling stories rawer and more intimate than anything offered on Broadway.
Each new girl who entered the industry now did so with a challenge: find someone to be and then become her, never once looking back. The savvier stripteasers developed personalities that had nothing to do with who they once were, filling in their pasts with high adventures and charming lies, all the glorious or sardonic reasons why their names belonged in lights. And each girl understood, as well as Billy himself, that the encore should end only when she had nothing left to strip. These days, when shocking behavior rose in inverse proportion to one’s ability to be shocked, patrons could not live by stylized routines and imaginative pedigrees alone.
It didn’t matter if John Sumner was tucked away in the back row, that silly whistle hovering at his lips. Everything the reformers did, or were thought to have done, ended up being a boon for burlesque: the spectacular, fictitious raid at the National Winter Garden; the real raids at the National Winter Garden; the occasional restriction Sumner and his vice goons managed to coax from elected officials.
Shuttered theaters reopened to sellout crowds. Police who made the arrests skipped the court proceedings, thanks, in part, to the Minskys’ generous “presents” to certain members of the force. And the city, by and large, had little use for Sumner and his squad of self-appointed moralists. New Yorkers did not tolerate the spineless or prudish, let alone limits on popular culture from those ill equipped to judge it. The only true crimes were poverty and earnestness, the need to believe in a world beyond the immediate and ephemeral, past the next drink or joke or thrill. New York glided along the glib, shiny surface of things, the rest of the country following closely behind, all content to ignore the growing rot beneath.
Billy Minsky was at the head of the pack, tending to ambition as if it alone kept him alive, surging blood through his veins and propelling the pulse of his heart. He never listened to Morton, who still spoke of their dear, now-departed mother in the present tense: “Remember what Mama says, Billy,” his little brother warned. “A wise man does not put his head into a tiger’s mouth to prove the tiger roars.” Billy still dreamt of Broadway, determined to prove that his failure at the Park Music Hall was an aberration. His weekly windfall from Minsky’s Apollo went directly into the stock market.
Billy wasn’t alone in his orgy of speculation; investing had become a national sport. Everyone from the barber to the street conductor to the mailman boasted about being “in the market”—called the “Hoover market” when particularly bullish—and even those safe on the sidelines kept a daily tally of its dizzying surges and temporary plummets. Everyone had a friend-of-a-friend story detailing a lucky take. Brokerage offices sprang up around the country. Most outfits had direct wire connections to New York and appeared outwardly respectable. Others, called “bucket shops” and “boiler factories,” operated out of vacant storefronts or hotel suites. Confidence men barked into rented telephones, convincing one sucker after another to invest in unknown, unlisted, and nonexistent securities.
During the third weekend of October 1929, brokers sent out thousands of margin calls. Some customers responded but many didn’t or couldn’t, and their holdings were dumped on the market. Panicky investors decided to get out while they still could. Billy Minsky was not one of them. “Any day now,” he told Morton, “I’m going to sell my holdings out, make a killing, and start the theater.” He trusted his sense of timing, and it pulled him back, counseled him to wait.
His mistake was apparent on Monday, when 6 million shares were sold. Six million more on Tuesday, 8 million on Wednesday, prices in wild free fall. The New York Times index lost fifteen to twenty points each day. The tickers ran two hours behind. On October 24, what would become known as Black Thursday, United States Steel, General Electric, and RCA all dropped by dozens of points before noon. No one believed the soothing dispatches from Washington and New York about t
he “fundamental soundness” of the market and the economy. In the span of two months, from the peak of the bull market in September 1929 to October’s crash, more than $32 billion worth of equities simply disappeared, Billy Minsky’s entire personal fortune included.
He had just turned forty-one years old, and had every reason to believe this was the worst thing that would ever happen to him.
Chapter Twenty-three
I only fucked Gypsy Rose Lee once.
—OTTO PREMINGER
Hollywood and New York City, 1944
She knows him when she sees him. It isn’t his looks, although he is not unhandsome. He has a perfect smooth oval head and jewel blue eyes so deeply set they seem to await excavation. His lips purse in a permanent half smile that never bares teeth, an expression that both mocks and charms. He has a presence that makes an empty room feel unbearably crowded and a voice that slaps the air: “You always louse things up, don’t you? Lousing things up and getting in the way is your particular specialty, isn’t it?” He is a terror, a tyrant, and a talent—in short, perfect. Technically she’s still married to Bill Kirkland, but he is hardly the man for this job. As she told her sister years ago, “I’m going to have a baby someday, June, but I’m not going to just have a baby. I am going to pick the toughest, meanest son of a bitch I can find, somebody who’s ruthless, and my child will rule the world.”
Before she knows him she knows of him; Otto Preminger was a theater actor and director in his native Austria. He immigrated to America and is now in preproduction of his noir masterpiece, Laura, while Gypsy is filming Belle of the Yukon, a Western musical set in the days of the Alaskan Gold Rush. She plays Belle de Valle, a vampy, world-weary showgirl, and looks glorious in every shot: a young Big Lady with a scooped-out waist and legs so long she has her stockings specially made, or so she claims. But on film she appears strangely unable to move, as if her corset stretches the length of her body, and her delivery—that odd, imperious lilt that works so well onstage—stunts even her best comedic lines. “The best thing’s to get mad,” she says, when asked what heals a broken heart. “Break something. Over the guy’s head, if possible.” No chance of critical acclaim, she knows, but at least she’s billed as Gypsy Rose Lee. She is here on her terms, and ready to set her plan in motion.
Like Michael Todd, Otto is married, but, unlike Mike, he has an arrangement with his wife, Marion, a would-be actress who shares many traits with Gypsy: long legs, glossy dark hair, more ambition than talent, and a penchant for reimagining her past. She transformed her impoverished family into nobility and gave herself a title: the “Hungarian Baroness.” As long as Otto dutifully plays host for her parties and promises not to seek a divorce, he is free to do as he wishes.
But Gypsy, unlike Otto’s previous conquests, has no interest in his “delectable Viennese manner” or his belief that “sexual pleasure belonged to him” or his (somewhat contradictory) renown as a “good lover.” One night, during a party at the home of studio executive William Goetz, Gypsy approaches Otto. She speaks about art and literature and her historic mansion in Manhattan. She spins funny stories about her mother, knowing that Rose, too, has a reputation that precedes her. She brings him home just once, because once is all it will take and she is nothing if not economical. When she leaves Hollywood she does not bother to say good-bye.
She knows that the baby, be it a boy or a girl, will be flecked with little bits of Mother, that Rose Hovick is too potent to be diluted in just one generation. Once again it’s time to carve some space away from Rose; Gypsy wants her style of mothering to be entirely her own. She can’t tell Rose the news, since saying the words aloud will extend an invitation she can’t rescind. Surely Mother will hear anyway from Belle and Big Lady, the latter of whom makes a joke that can be considered witty only in their family: “Louise dear,” she writes, “please have a boy. HA HA.”
In September, Gypsy sequesters herself in Reno, Nevada, where she finally files for divorce from Bill Kirkland. It takes just over a month for the split to be official. He knows as well as she does the value of maintaining a facade, and agrees to play her game.
“People here ask when the baby’s coming,” he writes, “and I say Dec. or Jan. and try to look like a proud papa, without talking like one … be a good fat girl and get lots of sleep and rest so that everything will be fine and dandy.”
June plans a baby shower, inviting twenty of Gypsy’s friends, who bring a bassinet, blankets, knitted sweaters with pockets the size of a fingertip. “The cake and tea were good, but not worth the price of admission,” Gypsy notes. “Only one or two of the presents are bankable, in case the baby is anything like his grandmother.”
By chance Otto Preminger travels to New York in December and calls Gypsy, curious to know why she departed so abruptly. He discovers she is at Woman’s Hospital at 110 Street and Amsterdam Avenue, waiting to give birth to his child. She does, prematurely, on December 11. Her son weighs just five and a half pounds and she names him Erik, using the traditional Norwegian spelling; Daddy Jack and his family will be proud. Otto appears by her bedside. “I can support my son myself,” she tells him. “I want to bring him up to be my son only.” She asks that he keep his paternity a secret, and he agrees.
A radio newscast informs Rose Hovick that she has a grandson. She calls the hospital at once, and the operator refuses to connect her to Gypsy’s room. She calls again, to no avail. She weeps and scribbles in her diary: “O please God help her to forget the foolish past and let me be with her again. I am so lonesome to hug and kiss her I am starving to death inside.” She tries a third time. Gypsy accepts this call and tells her mother she can see the baby, but only through glass.
Rose arrives at Woman’s Hospital and is led to the maternity ward. She waits, pacing, kneading the hem of her fur coat. Gypsy stays in bed where her mother can’t see her and imagines the scene, the nurse holding Erik up to the window, close enough for his quarter-sized heel to tap the pane. Mother will see his red-brown hair and long, restless legs and be struck by the resemblance. She will press her palm against the glass and align her skin with his, making contact without touching. He looks just like little Louise, the child whose earliest memory is disappointing her own mother, and Gypsy is grateful for the divide.
Rose Louise Hovick, shortly before becoming Gypsy Rose Lee. (photo credit 23.1)
Chapter Twenty-four
I’m really a little prudish, which people may think incongruous. I’m not as broadminded as I sound, with my boisterous way of talking. I’m not easily shook, but I do take a prudish point of view on certain films, books, and trends. Then, I pull myself up short and ask myself how Gypsy Rose Lee could possibly be this way.
—GYPSY ROSE LEE
On the Burlesque Circuit, 1930–1931
And so here she was, still living with her mother, still a virgin—not even past her first kiss, at that—learning what had taken the place of vaudeville, the only life she’d ever known. She couldn’t yet decide what to make of the lesson. It wasn’t just the dressing room at the Gayety: cigarette butts and greasy towels and body makeup sluiced across the floor, gnats swarming half-full glasses of warm beer, a sink clogged with dirty underwear, rhinestones glinting in all directions like pairs of beady eyes. It wasn’t just “Tessie the Tassel Twirler,” older and softer and kinder, somehow, than Louise expected, telling her she “got a certain class about yourself, in a screwball kind of way. You just got to learn to handle it.” Nor was it the acts: a showgirl dressed in an octopus costume complete with roving black tentacles, shaking like a wet dog; another emerging from a seashell, wholly naked save for a strand of faux pearls; Tessie’s own rare talent—shared by a famous stripteaser named Carrie Finnell—to make her bare breasts rotate, one at a time, with no other movement or effort at all. It was the realization that she’d found a secret slit in the curtain, one that led far past backstage to another universe altogether, at once spectacular and foul and terrifying, made all the more so by the silent, sha
meful feeling that she could belong here.
The burlesque folk recognized it, and recognized it inside her, and nudged Louise along in ways both sly and bold. “The quicker you forget what you used to be,” Tessie told her, “the better off you’ll be. Start thinkin’ about what you’re goin’ to be tomorrow—not what you were yesterday.”
For the moment, at least, Louise was still the head of the Hollywood Blondes, the act meant to deter the cops from raids and shutdowns—“a troupe a silly virgins,” as Tessie called them. Rose’s scorn for burlesque lasted “all of five minutes,” according to June. “As long as it brought in the money, she didn’t care.” The Hollywood Blondes began rehearsing their same old routines, while Sam the agent assured the manager that the girls looked much better with proper lighting and full makeup and short costumes. The manager seemed unconvinced, until one day he took a long look at Louise and asked if the “big one could talk.” He was short of talking women, he explained, and Tessie refused to do comedic scenes.
The next thing Louise knew, she was wearing a hula skirt that parted in the front, two frothy bits of fabric over her breasts, a bright red jewel in her navel, and strappy gold high heels—a marked difference from the Hollywood Blondes’ customary bobby socks and Mary Janes, and she’d never realized her legs were so long. It came to her that she resembled Big Lady when her grandmother was still young and ravishing, before she missed her chance to flee Seattle for good.
“For a kid, you got a lot of sex in your walk,” Tessie said with genuine admiration, and shoved Louise through the slit in the curtain, back to the other side.
“You are real!” the comic cried when he spotted her. “You’re not an illusion—”
From somewhere in the dark her mother hissed: “Louise! Hold in your stomach!”