American Rose

by Karen Abbott

  “Oh, no,” Gypsy answered out loud, smiling and shaking her head. “I couldn’t do that.”

  She turned her back to the imaginary crowd again, shrugged the stole from her shoulders, and when she twirled again she held the fur across her breasts.

  Again they begged to see her, as much of herself as she could spare.

  “Oh, no,” and she laughed, harder this time. “I couldn’t do that.”

  The Minsky Rosebuds ran and clustered around her, half pretending to strip her, half fighting to cover her up.

  On Monday, March 30, Gypsy paced the wings of the Republic. This was it, the first real step from her past, her ignominious beginnings. She could hear the barker’s singsong bellow: “Come in and see her take it off! Gypsy Rose Lee, the one and only! Like a banana, watch her peel! Watch Gypsy Rose Lee take it off, right down to the fruit!” An hour earlier, per the Minsky brothers’ orders, she’d dipped a sponge in a cosmetic called Stage White, which made skin shine like satin under the spotlights, and painted every inch of her body. Rose helpfully pointed out any missed spots and kept her company as she waited for it to dry, stark naked and spread-eagled.

  Afterward she attached her pasties and G-string in a complicated, two-stage process of her own invention. With a dab of spirit gum, she affixed tiny circles of flesh-colored net to her nipples, just large enough to pin on two lacy black bows. She placed another strip of net, lined with hand-sewn snaps, so that it just covered her bikini area and bottom, and then fastened her black G-string over it. She never allowed anyone to stand behind her while she did her act—not only because she was more naked in back than she was in front but because she was a magician of sorts, and she wanted no one to decipher the illusion.

  She stepped into a fitted red velvet gown that flared like an open flower below her knees. “Breasts more like molehills than mountains,” Morton Minsky assessed, but she looked stunning, even with her hair straightened the way Billy had ordered. Black silk stockings, a red garter, gloves that climbed past her elbows, and she was ready for her year—hell, her decade—to begin.

  June was in the audience. Apparently she and Bobby had tired, finally, of marathon dancing, and wanted to try their luck as legitimate performers in New York. She had written to Gypsy and Mother to explain the situation and asked, plainly, if she could see them. It was a mature letter, Gypsy thought, devoid of any mention of the way things had ended, and in turn Rose penned a thoughtful response. “This is the only place left for real show business,” she wrote. “Come here. We’re living right around the corner from Times Square—we can be together again and you can book all the dates you want from the agents who know who you really are.… Louise is starring in a big musical comedy right on 42nd Street and Broadway … she’s the talk of the town and the most beautiful girl in the United States.”

  Gypsy had not seen June since that night in New Bedford when she was shaking in time to the rattle of those newspapers, and she wanted her sister to understand that everything was different now; she was different now, as different as if she’d willfully rearranged her cells beneath her skin. When Gypsy took her sister’s hand, she dug in with three-inch crimson nails and let her painted lips graze the air by June’s cheek. She could tell June barely recognized her, which was the biggest compliment of all. “Louise wasn’t a woman yet,” June said, “but she definitely was no longer a child. She was in the middle of the fight, and she was fighting hard.”

  “I’m sorry I’m so busy, darling,” Gypsy cooed, “but it’s just one thing after another. It’s exciting and I love it, but it is exhausting.”

  She told June there would be tickets waiting for her at the Republic’s box office—complimentary, of course. She insisted; it was the least she could do for June after all the hardship and humiliation she’d been through.

  Now the curtain lifted on the “cowboy production number,” as the Minskys called it, and Gypsy watched the chorus girls square off, some dressed as cowboys and others as Indians, wearing bows and paper arrows and brandishing pop guns that hurled cotton bullets into the audience. For the grand finale, the curtains spread to reveal two white geldings—billed as stallions—prancing on a rotating platform as the orchestra struggled through the Poet and Peasant Overture. Two starlets, naked from the waist up, rode bareback, while the rest of the cast danced and whooped from behind. The audience greeted this spectacle with ho-hum indifference until one of the horses had an accident, at which point they broke into wild applause—that is, until the platform rotated once again and faced upstage. The first five rows were doused with manure, the girls clung to the terrified animals for dear life, and the velvet curtain dropped so the stage could be cleared, quickly, for the next performer, the headliner.

  “And now, ladies and gentlemen,” the announcer called, “the girl of the year! The unforgettable, the fabulous, Gypsy Rose Lee!”

  By now the applause was part of her, as vital and necessary as a muscle, a thing to flex and stretch and use to climb higher. It was what she’d remember most about that night, the way it leapt after her as she worked the stage, unfurling her gloves, shedding her dress one pin at a time, pausing with each muted plink inside the tuba. She had coached the tuba player during rehearsals, telling him exactly where to stand and how to position his instrument, a meticulous, private ritual between the two of them. At the finish, when other slingers invited the audience to come closer, Gypsy pulled away and looked down, as if shocked to see so much of her own skin. “How did this happen?” she seemed to ask; proper Gibson Girls, even those living well into the twentieth century, do not end up on New York stages wearing nothing but an open dress and sheer net panties. Backing up against the curtain, standing tall and regal and unobtainable, she gripped its velvet edge and made herself a cape. “And suddenly,” she whispered, like the end to a fairy tale, “I take the last … thing … off!” She hurled her dress into the air, a vivid velvet flag of surrender. A female plant in the audience screamed, the laughter crested over the stage, and the clapping galloped faster than her heartbeat.

  “Seven minutes of sheer art,” Billy Minsky told her, and the rest of New York agreed with him. Maybe not the most beautiful girl in the world, but oddly striking, her large, lush features a refreshing contrast to the chiseled precision of the Follies girls. More than that, she was funny, with flawless comedic timing—how many strippers could make that claim? “Gypsy Lee was a riot with her specialty,” one critic raved. “She has a style all her own. She knows what to do and when to do it.”

  She matched Billy Minsky’s publicity prowess and began lamenting her “fan trouble.” Within five weeks of starring at the Republic, she received six proposals of marriage, one live bunny, a dozen bouquets of American Beauties, numerous boxes of candy, forty-four mash notes, and a case of ginger ale. On the afternoon of April 10, when a complaint by John Sumner prompted a raid on the Republic, Gypsy was one of six arrested for giving an “indecent performance.” But only she had a ready quip: “I wasn’t naked,” she insisted. “I was completely covered by a blue spotlight. Just ask my mother, who is always with me.”

  She had another when they carted her off to jail and tossed a blanket at her in the cell: “Help!” she cried. “I’ve been draped!” Rose loved the rides in the paddy wagon, the screaming headlines in the Police Gazette; even in June’s best years show business had never been so thrilling. “My baby,” Rose insisted, “is innocent and pure.” She clenched Gypsy’s hand and gave her daughter her brightest, loveliest smile, as if to seal a pact that they were in this together, and Rose would always come along for the ride.

  The postraid fan mail kept coming, countless telegrams all pledging devotion and support:

  GYPSY ROSE LEE=REPUBLIC THEATRE=

  YOU DON’T DESERVE THE CHEAP PUBLICITY BUT PAY NO ATTENTION WISH I COULD HELP=

  ADMIRER.

  GYPSY ROSE LEE=REPUBLIC THEATRE=

  NEVER MIND GYPSY YOUR [SIC] A LILLY AMONG WEEDS ONE OF MANY ADMIRERS=GOOD LUCK.

 
GYPSY ROSE LEE=REPUBLIC THEATRE=

  OFFER MY SERVICES FOR FRIENDLY OR FINANCIAL AID DIRTY TRICK TO PLAY ON YOU YOUR [SIC] ADORABLE GLADLY HELP YOU. SIGNED, F. SHANLIN.

  And two notes scrawled on business-size, heavyweight blank cards, accompanied by flowers:

  YOU NEED A PROTECTOR MISS LEE. DON’T WORRY YOUR [SIC] 100% WONDERFUL AT DOOR TONIGHT.

  QUEEN OF ALL. ANSWER WITH A SMILE AND A CIGARETTE TONIGHT. 3RD ROOM LEFT. YOUR [SIC] GORGEOUS.

  Every week the name of the show changed—Yetta Lostit from Bowling, Lotta Schmaltz from Greece, Iva Schnozzle from Red Hook—but Gypsy’s name was always on top. She earned every cent of her weekly $900 salary, 25 percent of which was paid in IOUs; she stuffed the squares of paper up the rat holes in her dressing room. It was an astronomical sum (about $40,000 in today’s dollars), yet she and Rose lived as simply and cheaply as possible, renting a small room with a kitchenette at the Cameo Apartments, across from the Republic, for just $12.50 a week. They spent their late nights huddled together, whispering beneath the sheets, speaking ill of the past and gloriously of the future.

  Gypsy accelerated her dieting efforts, temporarily forgoing her essence mix to try every popular fad, eating nothing but lamb chops and pineapple one day, bananas, sauerkraut juice, and lettuce the next. Every night she pressed her thumb against her teeth because Mother told her it would help straighten them. When the big, legitimate Broadway boys came in, Florenz Ziegfeld or Lee Shubert or George White or Earl Carroll, Gypsy would be ready. “I wish she was in another sort of show,” June told Bobby, but she never said a word to her sister. Gypsy could hear June’s voice anyway, a silent judgment that flogged her ears raw: she might be making burlesque better, but she was better than burlesque.

  Although Billy Minsky didn’t like Rose and her meddlesome, nitpicky ways, he let her accompany Gypsy to rehearsals and hide out (along with Woolly Face) in the dressing room, a heady clutter of rhinestones and feathers, spirit gum and Sterno, stale coffee and spilled brandy, cigarette butts and sweat and the musk of dirty stockings. Rose made it clear that Gypsy still needed her; who else would warn the girl about developing friendships and fraternizing with other performers on the bill? Who else would have protected her from that unscrupulous, craven Tade Styka, who wanted to paint Gypsy in the nude? Rose made such a scene that three Minsky stagehands rushed in and tossed the artist out. “You know,” she told Gypsy, “I’m a good judge of character.” Her daughter could trust her and no one else. That’s how it had always been, and always would be.

  Under Rose’s watchful eye and with her grudging consent, Gypsy discovered she loved the way a cigarette felt cradled between her fingers and clamped between her lips, the wispy frame of smoke around her face. A Minsky comic named Rags Ragland became her benefactor behind the stage. He, too, had chronic dental ailments: a full set of lowers but just two teeth on top, one long incisor on each side. He kept his false upper plate not in his mouth but in a wad of newspaper, stashed away inside the cash register of a Third Avenue bar. He was rumored to be well endowed and a chronic womanizer, methodically making his way through the Minsky Rosebuds and a few select slingers.

  Rags taught her how to drink, spiking her coffee with brandy in the morning and filling her flask at night. “Gypsy could really put it away,” Morton Minsky noted, “and she often did, even between her acts … according to everyone who knew her, she used every form of chemical stimulation on earth, not the least of it champagne.” She tried smoking marijuana a few times but found it “revolting,” mostly because it made her too passive. “I’m not giving anything away,” she reasoned. “I’m selling it. Sweet? Submissive? May as well be a housewife … it dims my luster, makes me resemble others—that’s the worst thing that could happen.” Cocaine was next, and the buzz was more to her liking. At one party she accidentally spilled her lines on the rug, a faux pas quickly forgiven by her host and fellow guests; she was the absent-minded stripper, after all, whose whimsical, choreographed mistakes were as anticipated as the slow, deliberate peeling of her gloves.

  She eavesdropped on the stripteasers’ chatter in the dressing rooms; of course their theories on men and sex contradicted everything Mother had taught her. Every once in a while the house doctor stopped by to ask the girls if anything hurt or itched. No one could afford to get married these days—the marriage rate had dropped by 22 percent since the onset of the Depression—but seven out of ten single men and women were sexually active. It was illegal to advertise birth control products, so the girls perused women’s magazines and read between the lines: various jellies, powders, liquids, suppositories, foaming tablets, and even Lysol addressed “feminine hygiene” and “marriage hygiene” issues. If all else failed, they could try the newly developed, pontiff-sanctioned rhythm method, or insert a 14-karat gold button into the uterus to serve as an IUD.

  Gypsy made one enemy: a stripteaser who called herself Electra but whose real name was Goldie Grey. Five feet tall, with blond hair that curled like commas about her head, Electra wore a small pouch around her waist stuffed with batteries. With a flick of her finger, she controlled clusters of blinking lights that covered her breasts and bottom, a gimmick she used on the burlesque circuits for seventy-two straight months (and that would make her famous as a character in the musical Gypsy). She, too, was friendly with Rags Ragland, and when he needed a talking woman for one of his comedy sketches, she and Gypsy competed for the job. As much as Rags liked Gypsy, she was too tall for the part, and so began a feud that lasted as long as they were both in the business.

  But, despite Mother’s warnings, Gypsy befriended a few of the girls, particularly the redhead who hailed from Atlanta and called herself Georgia Sothern. When Gypsy met her at Minsky’s Republic, Georgia Sothern was just fourteen years old, and she told Gypsy what had happened the day Billy Minsky learned her true age.

  The boss collapsed into his office chair and sank his head into splayed hands. “Fourteen?” he moaned. “FOURTEEN! Four-TEEN! This kid is only fourteen years old!” Georgia soothed him by producing an official-looking birth certificate that made her eighteen, drawn up specially by her Uncle Virgil, who used to thwart suspicion by telling people she was a midget.

  “I’ll put this in the file with your contract,” Billy decided. “If anybody ever asks me questions, I’ll tell them I didn’t know your age when I hired you and that you gave me this as proof that you were old enough. I’ll swear I never heard what you just told me today.”

  The forged papers were sufficiently authentic to facilitate Georgia’s marriage to one of the Republic’s straight men, who, she said, attacked her “like an animal” on their wedding night. She reported to Billy’s office the following afternoon to explain what had happened. He took one look at her blackened eye, her mottled, bruised peach of a face, and decided the only way to overcome the situation was to exploit it. He ordered his wardrobe woman to sew a custom eye patch flecked with rhinestones and called a press conference. The demand was such that Billy booked four extra shows. The audience was more eager to see Georgia’s eye than any other part of her body, and for her encore she removed the patch and lifted her face to the lights.

  Gypsy came to trust Georgia implicitly. The girl’s opinions were as forceful and blunt as her onstage antics, and, most important, she did not try to copy Gypsy’s technique. “Gypsy had a style far removed from mine,” Georgia said. “She did nothing but walk sedately back and forth across stage in time to the music as she removed her costume. It was stripping in its simplest form and a gimmick without really being a gimmick at all. Her act was a complete contrast to my fast strip, and because of it we were both able to appear on the same stage as stars. Together we packed the Republic to the rafters.”

  Georgia Sothern. (photo credit 27.1)

  In between performances, Gypsy played pinochle with the Minsky comedians (including one “Lew Costello”), who had a game running for months. They kept score on the dressing room walls, and the numbers stretched out into the hall
way. Georgia felt indebted to Billy, but Gypsy learned that most of the Minsky employees despised the brothers. One comic boasted about a trick he had taught his dog. Hanging an old coat on the wall, he yelled “Minsky!” and praised the animal when it lunged and tore the garment to shreds. The Minsky Rosebuds complained about the lousy pay, just $21 for an eighty-hour workweek—plus they had to supply their own G-strings. Billy called his policy tradition, a necessary stepping-stone, since most of the big burlesque stars began their careers as chorus girls.

  “No actor should join a union,” Billy told Gypsy one day. She could have rested her elbow on his head, and he had to forcefully launch his words upward in her direction. “It isn’t artistic. Unions are for laborers, people who dig ditches. You’re an artiste. You should have stardust in your eyes and music in your heart.” He even used his thriftiness as a publicity stunt, advertising that his chorines were “good girls” because they were too exhausted to misbehave. One of them confided the truth of this theory to Gypsy. “It takes time to be bad,” she reasoned, “and who the hell’s got time?”

  Gypsy despised Billy’s rationale, even though it was one that had defined her childhood, with Mother always refusing to pay the Newsboy Songsters or the Hollywood Blondes when times were tight, reasoning that the experience on the road was compensation enough. She made notes of every missed paycheck and indignity suffered by her burlesque colleagues. “Seven days a week four shows a day,” she wrote, “forty-five hours of rehearsals a week for fifteen dollars. No contracts, no security bond, supply your own shoes and keep smiling.… Who wants to know from stardust in your eyes when your feet hurt?” She vowed that no one would ever take such advantage of her, especially once she knew exactly who Gypsy Rose Lee was, and what she was worth.