American Rose

by Karen Abbott

  Gypsy didn’t disappoint. She had more power and pull than June had imagined, securing her a six-to-eight-week contract sight unseen. June expected to be a chorus girl, dancing in the first-act finale just before the horses, but it was clear the Minsky brothers expected another Gypsy Rose Lee. “Gypsy assured us she’d show her sister the ropes,” Morton said. “Maybe she did and maybe she didn’t. Maybe she didn’t want her sister competing with her, although I really think the fact was that as far as stripping was concerned, Gypsy had a certain instinct for it and June didn’t.”

  June both wouldn’t and couldn’t do it. She hadn’t Gypsy’s sophisticated presence, but she did have shame. She couldn’t say that to her sister, of course, since Gypsy was this “big important person, and I was picking up pennies from the street.” In the middle of the first week Billy explained, kindly, that they had to let her go due to “fast turnover,” although they would pay her in full. Gypsy helped her sister pack her few things in the dressing room and walked her to the Republic’s door. She watched June’s slow retreat down Broadway, her lips pulled into a faint, stingy smile, thinking how she’d won a bet wagered only in her mind.

  But June sensed another chance when Gypsy met her in Manhattan one night and told her there was someplace she needed to go. June agreed; something might turn up if she slipped into Gypsy’s world for another moment to have a look around.

  Gypsy held out a plain white card. It looked like a business card save for the fact that an address was the only thing printed across it, in unembellished black lettering. She weighed her motives for saying what she was about to say. It would help June, the same way it had helped her. It would shock June, strip off another layer of her cumbersome naïveté. And, in a silent yet unmistakable way, it would dare June to judge her once again.

  She pressed the card into June’s hand, curled her sister’s slim fingers around the edges.

  “There are a lot of influential people here, show business and otherwise,” Gypsy said. “And if you behave well, and as expected, it’ll do you good.”

  June thanked her sister and began counting down the streets to her destination.

  She couldn’t recall, decades later, exactly where the party was or what sort of building she entered to find it—a private apartment, maybe, or the secret floor of a nightclub. There was a garland of smoke and chatter around the room’s periphery, and a complicit silence at its core. She made her way through the tangle of the crowd, the vivid Florentine hats and subdued felt fedoras, the hands gripping tumblers of Scotch and gin, and found the party’s engine, what was making it go. It was a circus party—she learned the term later—an old backroom tradition. A public display of sex as if it were competition, both participants and spectators keeping score: men with unnatural desires and women who fulfilled them, blowing cigarette smoke rings with their privates, feasting on themselves and each other, forcing animals into their vulgar games. One man in particular made his way around the circle, never sated, never tired, all of them working and being worked with grim focus and fierce intent, outdoing the others or their own personal bests.

  Did the crowd know who June was, and who had referred her? Did they expect June to be Gypsy Rose Lee?

  “It was a society,” June later said, “and she felt that she had to—she had no shame.”

  Before June saw anything else she turned and fled. She left her hat on the rack. She never voiced the thought she held the rest of her life: if Gypsy could send her baby sister to such a place, she didn’t really love her. She might not be capable of any love—outside of herself—at all.

  Gypsy herself recognized the truth in that, at least in this unholy limbo, caught between the Gypsy Rose Lee she currently presented and the ideal version that still lived exclusively in her head, the one who would never barter her pride in exchange for security and success. In the interim she would box up her shame and tuck it away, somewhere high and deep and unreachable, where no one but she even knew it existed. And she would be perceptive enough to mock her own ambition, to realize that she would inhabit this perfect world—this perfect self—only by admitting she didn’t belong.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  There are three things a man must do alone. Be born, die, and testify.

  — MAYOR JIMMY WALKER

  New York City, 1931–1932

  On her first day Gypsy Rose Lee stood in Billy Minsky’s office, peering down at him. Beneath her cheap tweed coat and tattered gloves she was blank and shapeless, and she bowed down to accept his hands upon her head.

  He pressed her hair against the sides of her face, framing it, and then leaned back to judge what he had done.

  Billy could feel the girl’s mother’s eyes on him—not on Herbert or Morton, just him—and sense the huffy indignation that pooled around her silence. She had to be nearing forty, Billy assessed, young enough to remember how to use what she had but old enough to recognize its limits. Fifteen, twenty years ago, he might’ve gone for those fierce, ravenous eyes and deftly carved bones, but such fanciful speculation ceased the moment she opened her mouth. “Where is the green room?” she asked snidely, and seemed pleased and triumphant that he didn’t know what a green room was.

  He raised his hands from Gypsy’s face and her hair released itself, springing back into a mass of frizz. The mother’s presence closed in on him again, but when he turned to face her those flinty eyes shifted sideways, as if she couldn’t decide whether to act as predator or prey. When Billy spoke he pointed his words directly at Rose.

  “Remember now,” he said, “anything you need just come to me.”

  How could he market this Gypsy Rose Lee and her singular, cerebral act, this Dorothy Parker in a G-string and her burlesque of burlesque? She needed an unprecedented publicity campaign, one as innovative and original as her persona itself. No matter that her body was more Ziegfeld than Minsky—a flat bust, but long and sleek as a panther—because her body, ironically, was almost beside the point. “She had mastered the art of the tease to such an extent that no one minded,” as Morton put it. “Her costumes were suggestive and seductive rather than the flowery, pseudo-virginal frocks assumed by the less imaginative. She used black silk stockings, lace panties, red garters, and mesh netting. In a manner new to burlesque, she turned her essentially shy feelings about disrobing onstage into a mocking, spoofing jest.” She could take a full fifteen minutes to peel off a single glove, and such was her hold over the audience that they would gladly have granted her fifteen more.

  Billy declared that every year the Republic would showcase a new girl, and the theater’s inaugural year belonged to her. GYPSY ROSE LEE, read the banner from the marquee, THE MOST BEAUTIFUL GIRL IN THE WORLD! For the first time in burlesque history a stripteaser—not a comic—would have top billing. Gypsy Rose Lee would perform directly before the Act I and Act II finales—the surest way to incite anticipation, to make the audience beg before giving it to them. He told the press about his latest find, a Miss Seattle beauty contest winner who was also a gifted painter, having completed portraits of Fanny Brice, speakeasy proprietress Texas Guinan, and notorious serial wife and actress Peggy Hopkins Joyce. This refined lady undresses using pins, a practice heretofore unheard of in stripteasing, and anyone lucky enough to catch one can redeem it for future free admission.

  The city fairly shouted her name. An unemployed ex-vaudevillian climbed onto seventeen-foot stilts and wore an illuminated shirtfront announcing the coming of Gypsy Rose Lee. He was joined by a “mechanical man” named Jose Lisso who discovered, quite by accident, that he had a gift for holding rigid poses over long periods of time. Wearing a monocle, Eustace Tilley style, over one blind but staring eye, he jerked his body down Broadway, paused, jerked some more, and stopped before the Republic’s front door. Some of the gawking crowd followed him in and bought tickets to see Gypsy Rose Lee, which, of course, was the point. One afternoon a curious spectator crept up and sank a straight pin into Lisso’s skin, and still he didn’t flinch. “I stuck
a pin into you,” the man said. “Didn’t you notice it?” For the first and only time, the Minskys’ mechanical man broke character. “I noticed it,” he replied, “and if you do it again, I’ll knock your block off.”

  Overhead, a plane seared across the Manhattan skyline, trailing a banner bearing gypsy rose lee in letters bold enough to be read from every corner of the city. And for his most daring scheme of all Billy brought striptease outside, setting up a sidewalk cooch show that hinted at the raunchy splendor beyond the Republic’s doors.

  Gypsy seemed to appreciate the efforts, following the stilt walker down 42nd Street, gaping at her name chiseled in bold yellow bulbs across the marquee. But most of the time she holed up with her mother in her dressing room. None of the Minskys knew what to make of Rose, who was alternately haughty and prim and coarse and vindictive.

  One night Gypsy’s act was followed by sixteen chorus girls dressed in silver wings and glittering G-strings, their breasts fully exposed, hands clasped in prayer, eyes turned piously skyward. The angels had just started to shimmy when Rose came bounding downstairs into Billy’s office. He looked up from his desk to find her standing in the doorway, slight shoulders heaving, violet eyes flattened to slits, pink slash of a mouth trembling in fury.

  “No religious act is following my daughter’s specialty,” she said, and the words, in both depth of tone and sureness of delivery, seemed to come from someone twice her size. “Take out the number or we’ll quit.”

  Billy puffed a ring of smoke in Rose’s direction and considered her threat.

  No, he told her. The angel bit stays.

  Rose shot him a look of raw, skinless crazy. She spun on her heel and stomped back upstairs, but Billy was sure that wasn’t the end of it.

  It wasn’t. The following day he got a call from Walter Winchell. Did Mr. Minsky know, asked the columnist, that a number of churchgoing Republic patrons (apparently the two weren’t mutually exclusive) were threatening a citywide boycott of the theater if Billy didn’t take out a certain number featuring nude angels? Did Mr. Minsky have any comment?

  Billy didn’t believe the citywide boycott extended beyond Rose Hovick, but the angel bit wasn’t as important to him as his new star slinger. Besides, he would put nothing past Rose. Morton had it dead right when he said that woman’s “river did not run to the sea.” Sighing, Billy told Winchell the number would be eliminated by the next show.

  When he saw Rose again she caught him in her searchlight beam of a smile, and he couldn’t decide if she was more disturbing—and disturbed—when she was angry or pleased.

  Privately, the brothers wondered what sort of toll a mother like that could take on a young girl. Gypsy was incredibly bright, no doubt about that, but, as Morton noted, she “had her idiosyncrasies.” Her personality skipped like a damaged record, stuck by chance on notes high or low, struggling to find the place where the song should resume.

  Her sly sophistication onstage belied her barbaric behavior off. “She used foul words all of the time,” observed fellow stripteaser and Minsky relative Dardy Minsky. “And for no reason. She would talk about ‘that effing chair.’ She had a very un-lady-like manner about her, very crude.” A day riding the Ferris wheel at Coney Island with Georgia Sothern was followed by a night in the most sordid corners of Manhattan. No one could miss her talk about those “circus parties,” featuring strippers with forty-six-inch bosoms and a man who never got tired. “He could keep a hard-on for hours—do all those acrobatic sex gigs, and still go on and on,” Gypsy reported. “But was he satisfied? Oh, no! He had to go and get that damned silicone pumped into his penis, so he could be even more spectacular.”

  Then there was her monkey, Woolly Face, who followed her everywhere, swigging brandy from her flask and sitting on her bare lap while she primped at her dressing room mirror. One day Morton—perhaps inadvertently, perhaps not—walked in on Gypsy conducting a strangely intimate routine with the animal. “She had a monkey,” he said, “trained to do things that would have driven any of our license commissioners up the wall. However, she decided not to use that material in her act.”

  In one area, at least, their new star was remarkably consistent. With every raid, every ride in the paddy wagon, every witty quip to the gossip columnists, Billy realized he had never before met someone like Gypsy, whose natural ability for getting and shaping attention—any kind of attention—matched his own.

  More than eleven thousand people a week came to see Gypsy Rose Lee and her elegant, brainy joke of a strip. Clearly burlesque was thriving on Broadway—not only at the Republic but at the Eltinge, across the street—and Billy figured the Great White Way could make room for one more Minsky theater. He had Joseph Weinstock buy out the Shubert brothers’ lease on the Central Theatre at 48th and Broadway, another white flag of surrender from the beleaguered legitimate crowd. The depression that afflicted the rest of the country only buoyed the business of burlesque, no longer relegated to the alleyways of fringe neighborhoods but in demand on the greatest street in the world. Billy offered the simplest explanation, which also served as his personal formula: burlesque gave the people something else to think about. He was so focused on expanding his Broadway presence that he didn’t even attend the final night of the National Winter Garden on September 19, 1931, when the curtain fell—finally, officially—on the last sweet memory he shared with his brother Abe.

  With both the Columbia and Mutual Wheels officially dead, Billy entertained visions of a “Minsky American Wheel,” his specific brand of stock burlesque in thirty theaters from New York to Chicago. Nothing and no one could stop him now. He would expand into Brooklyn. He would form an international burlesque company to compete with the Moulin Rouge and the Folies Bergère, those same iconic institutions he had once aspired to imitate. He contemplated taking over the Metropolitan Opera House for a season of burlesque, and was so enthralled with the idea that he sent his attorney to begin negotiations straight away. And in the spring of 1932 the following ad ran in the personals section of the Times:

  To Whom It May Concern:

  It is not true that Billy Minsky has acquired the lease to the New York Public Library, corner of 5th Avenue and 42nd Street. Signed:

  A Friend of the People.

  Billy neither admitted placing the ad, nor denied that the idea hadn’t crossed his mind.

  In his little black notebook John Sumner documented all of Billy’s rumors and stunts and schemes. He took note when no less vaunted a publication than The New Yorker christened a certain section of Times Square “Minskyville.” This burgeoning New York neighborhood, the magazine declared, ran from 52nd to 42nd Streets on Broadway, and from Sixth to Eighth Avenues on 42nd Street. One couldn’t tour Minskyville without encountering all manner of creative hucksters and moral poison: Indian herb doctors and Gypsy seeresses (both reeking of gin and skilled at picking pockets); divulgers of “golden medical secrets”; strongmen and living statuary; amateur phrenologists who offered to examine people’s heads, looking for certain bumps and lumps that indicated sex drive; bums making obscene overtures to female pedestrians; and, of course, the main attraction, Hubert’s Flea Museum, featuring its two-headed suckling pig and acrobatic insects. Minskyville, in short, had more in common with Coney Island than Manhattan. “Lose a few hundred infants in Minskyville,” The New Yorker concluded, “scatter broken glass around to cut your feet on, and you might easily confuse the one with the other.”

  Manhattan’s leading citizens were disturbed by what had become of “the crossroads of the world.” Burlesque and its accompanying detritus could flourish down on the Lower East Side, but not under the bright lights of Broadway. The Forty Second Street Property Owners’ and Merchants’ Association, concerned about declining real estate values, also objected to burlesque in its backyard. Without prompt and decisive action, the indecent and unseemly pockets of the city threatened to invade every street and avenue.

  John Sumner monitored these latest developments with keen interest
and smug delight. He’d been waiting for such a convergence of forces, for respectable and respected New Yorkers to lend a voice to his cause. During his entire tenure, Jimmy Walker had been aiming disparaging comments at Sumner, like “I have never yet heard of a girl being ruined by a book” and “a reformer is a guy who rides through a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat.” Now the embattled mayor would be put on the defensive, forced to speak beyond his usual pithy jokes and glib talk. An old, forgotten official known as the license commissioner was thawed out and dusted off, and he vowed to launch a round of hearings on burlesque—especially Minsky burlesque.

  The mayor, meanwhile, prepared to answer to another force for decency and righteousness, the Honorable Judge Samuel Seabury, whose corruption probe had developed into a rollicking farce worthy of Broadway itself.

  On a Friday night in early May 1932, Billy was standing near the protruding edge of the stage—the apron, it was called—when the rig of a traveler curtain wiggled loose and came crashing down. Startled, he lurched backward into the orchestra pit and landed awkwardly, his left leg splayed beneath him in a limp, unnatural angle. He heard himself make a strange noise, a coarse, primitive gargle, and looked up to see a semicircle of faces fanned around him, mouths screaming noiseless words, arms beckoning to someone or something just out of his sight. He tried to speak. His leg. Yes, his leg hurt, but his shoulder … goddammit, his shoulder … this was all he needed after the week he’d had, what with his star stripteaser up and quitting without any notice, making a liar out of his marquee. You’ll be back, he’d told Gypsy. She didn’t know how good she had it with the Minsky brothers.