by Karen Abbott
New York City, 1932–1936
We take great pride in presenting the star of our show, the one and only Miss Gypsy … Rose … Lee!
The brazen swing of the spotlight rendered the audience unseen, but she could picture their faces—so many faces!—shining like tangles of jewelry. How hard she’d worked to collect them: publishing mogul Condé Nast, playwright George S. Kaufman, the bisexual bon vivant Tallulah Bankhead. Writers and critics and cultural arbiters gleamed from every corner of the Irving Place Theatre: William Saroyan and Edmund Wilson, Carl Van Doren and Carl Van Vechten (the latter of whom once derided burlesque audiences as “childishly leering”), Leonard Lyons and Brooks Atkinson, H. L. Mencken (who would coin the word “ecdysiast” in her honor) and George Jean Nathan (who called her a “kimonophobe”), and a representative from The New Yorker, who admitted he “went for Miss Lee, so to speak.” Over there sat Jean Cocteau, visiting from Paris, who took one look at Gypsy and murmured, “How vital!” and the pseudonymous Squimpfenhuppels, a New York society couple whose blood, according to one insider, was “three stains bluer than a Duke Ellington rhythm.” All Gypsy’s personal baubles to flaunt and to flash, and she never felt so pretty as when they were covering her.
Wearing a chartreuse costume adorned with flittered leaves, she swanned languidly across the stage, as though on her way to see La Traviata at the Met. In one hand she held a ripe apple aloft, and the orchestra began the sweet soft strains of her song. She talk-sang her words, pinning their ends between her lips, a humming effect she had learned from her prestigious new friends:
I’m a lonesome little Eve
Looking for an Adam
Gee I wish I had him
Cuddling me, ’neath the shade of a tree
And in our garden we would be so happy.
Gypsy recognized the pattern she’d come to establish, at once buoyant and hopeless: exchanging every certain triumph for an unobtainable dream.
She quit the Republic just before her original benefactor, Billy Minsky, died unexpectedly. He’d been furious, especially after all he’d done, discovering and rescuing her from those backwoods burlesque venues, molding her into an American icon. He’d predicted she’d return to Minsky’s—for the money, if not the glory—and he knew that, despite himself, he’d happily take her back.
She left for her old gangster benefactor, Waxey Gordon, who’d secured her a spot in a Florenz Ziegfeld show called Laid in Mexico. Finally, here was her chance to join a Ziegfeld show—a real, legitimate Broadway show—but Laid in Mexico was hardly the Follies. The Depression had broken the producer, both financially and literally; Ziegfeld was deathly ill from pneumonia and resigned to borrowing money from Waxey and other gangsters. “Don’t ask questions,” Waxey ordered Gypsy. “Just do as you’re told.”
Rose hoped they would change the title of Laid in Mexico, which sounded too “Minskyish,” and Ziegfeld coincidentally obliged. Hot-Cha! was a full-scale musical production, with Ziegfeld’s customary barbaric bombast and splendor. When the choreographer asked for her name, Gypsy hesitated, and then confessed, “Rose Louise.”
“The moment I said it I was sorry,” Gypsy admitted. “He knew who I was, and he’d think I was ashamed of my burlesque name. I wanted to take it back but I didn’t. I was ashamed and the realization made it worse.” She was given the role of “Girl in Compartment,” a weekly salary of $60—$840 less than at Minsky’s Republic—and no solo introduction as Gypsy Rose Lee.
Hot-Cha! closed after only twelve weeks, a flop blamed on the “depressing times.” She wasted weeks, in her mother’s words, scouring Broadway for another role before she headed back to the money at Minsky’s. Herbert and Morton were now in charge of the Republic. Like Billy, the younger Minsky brothers hadn’t been too happy when she left, but they let her make her case to rejoin the fold. What, they asked, made her so popular among the Minsky audience? Why was she considered the best stripteaser in the business?
“I don’t know myself what it is,” she replied. “I don’t feel any spark of genius here.” She splayed her hands over her breasts. Morton laughed. Okay, okay—she could have her old job back. “Let’s see now,” he said. “You were getting $60 up with those big shots; we’ll give you $90.” She had no choice but to take it, even though it was a 93 percent pay cut from her original Minsky salary.
She glided back toward the wings of the stage, pouting now, the spotlight’s thin finger grazing her face:
I’m a lonesome little Eve.
All I do is sit and grieve.
Like Eve I carry round this apple every night
Looking for an Adam with an appetite
Soon after Gypsy’s return to the Republic she lost the Rego Park house. All of her furniture was repossessed save for Waxey’s dining room set, which Rose shipped to a large, ramshackle apartment on West End Avenue, leased under Aunt Belle’s name. A taxi arrived at midnight, and Rose quickly tied to the roof all the relics of their past: the cow head, tent, dancing dolls, gilded guns. Gypsy debated asking Waxey Gordon for a loan, but, in an unfortunate bit of timing, the FBI declared the bootlegger “Public Enemy Number One” and arrested him on charges of tax evasion.
Waxey sent a letter: could she do her old friend a favor, and come visit him at Northeastern Penitentiary? It would so impress his fellow inmates. She agreed, but how she dreaded the slow walk to his table in the visiting room, the amplified whistles inside those thin tight walls, the leers that clawed at her back. It was a runway leading to a place out of her control, with no reward at the end. After two visits, she decided she would never go back. “It made me uncomfortable,” she said, “being on display that way.”
The Minskys finally relented and restored her old salary, but once again she left burlesque—this time for a role in Melody, the new production by George White, of Scandals fame. Another drastic pay cut, to just $100 per week. “I guess I wasn’t used to so much money,” she said of burlesque, “because the more I got the more ambitious I became to land on Broadway.” She had just six lines but padded her part by exclaiming “Ouch!” when her bustle caught in the door. Her salary dropped to $50 during the national bank moratorium, and when the show closed in April 1933, her funds were once again depleted.
Down the circular staircase now, slowly, long legs taking their time, her shoes precisely matching her skin—all the better to camouflage her large feet. Her eyes coasted to a bald man in the second row, and she strolled toward him, offering the apple, letting his imagination fill the pauses in her refrain.
Would you … for a big red apple?
Would you … for my peace of mind?
Would you … for a big red apple,
Give me what I’m trying to find—
Of course the Minskys welcomed her back, their Prodigal Strippeuse. They dubbed her the “Queen of Women” and booked her solid at three of their theaters: the Republic, Billy Minsky’s Brooklyn, and the new Park Theatre in Boston, where the overarching philosophy was described as “burlesque moderne.” She accompanied Herbert and Morton to a celebratory luncheon at the Hotel Touraine and posed for pictures, the brothers’ arms linked around her back. The Minskys vowed to provide work for a “sizable group” of Boston’s unemployed while honoring the city’s puritanical roots; their show would attract the “limousine trade” and be fit for “your wife, sweetheart, or aunt from Dubuque.” Gypsy would even wear a rhinestone in her navel.
Boston’s censor nevertheless denounced such Minsky productions as Wander Over from Back Bay and Irma Fish from Brookline, but audiences were enthralled, especially by Gypsy Rose Lee. Every evening, before she strolled onto the stage, she instructed the stage manager to shush the crowd. It always obeyed. She repaid the Minsky brothers for their loyalty, defending them in the press. “Burlesque pays well,” she reasoned. “I’d rather work for good dough in burlesque than sit around waiting for something to come up … and the dears who reveal their peeled forms at Minsky’s are never within reach of the audience as they
are in popular Broadway floor shows, where the drunks paw you, and you don’t have to sit with customers who get gay.”
This was the part of her Eve routine that the men, bald or hirsute, waited for—the slinky, torturously slow strut, the apple balanced in the elegant curve of her palm, the fruit rolling forward along her fingertips, stopped by a pair of puckered lips. The first man took a bite and then Gypsy backed away, scanning the crowd. Who was worthy of the second, the third, the bite that would strip it to its core?
Despite her speech in Boston, Gypsy once again left burlesque, partly because her prescient, pragmatic, ever-resourceful mind told her burlesque might not always be there to take her back. After Mayor Jimmy Walker resigned from City Hall, his old nemesis—and complete political antithesis—took over in 1934. Fiorello La Guardia would not roll dice with the neighborhood boys, or take appointments at an underworld nightclub in Central Park, or shake hands and propose toasts at Minsky’s Republic on opening nights. Instead he was busy turning New York inside out, ordering, within one minute of his official swearing-in, the arrest of gangster Lucky Luciano, followed up by a threat to the entire police department to “Drive out the racketeers or get out yourselves” and the violent, sledgehammer destruction of hundreds of confiscated slot machines.
Which was all well and good for those who had tired of the old regime—journalist Heywood Broun, for one, declared the city “stands in need of scathing sunlight, fresh air and a fine and rousing wind to cleanse its lungs and vitals”—but there were indications that La Guardia’s “rousing wind” would be more akin to a tornado, that he wouldn’t reform the city’s character so much as raze it completely. From what Gypsy knew of him, he sounded a lot like Mother—volatile and vicious (once telling an underling, “You let them shit all over you and pee all over you and you like it so much you lick it up”); obstinate and unyielding; and strangely, anachronistically prudish, insisting, for instance, that his secretary stay in hotels where residents had a midnight curfew.
Gypsy saw bits of herself, too, in the new mayor, the way he was an outsider in his chosen world: five feet two; disproportionately corpulent; sartorially inept; a mouth that spat words at a frenetic, machine-gun pace; a singular, strangely falsetto voice that, in moments of rage, climbed the scales and slid into a prehistoric screech. One of his own advisers dismissed him as “Half Wop, Half American, Half Republican.” La Guardia was intent on reinventing not himself but the city that had made her, and he was well aware of Gypsy’s place in it. He insulted her, comparing her unfavorably to an opera singer, boasting that the new airport under construction in Queens “will be to Newark as Kirsten Flagstad is to Gypsy Rose Lee.” He made quips about her need to “take her clothes off,” to which she had a fast retort: Why, Mr. Mayor, she said, “you know I’d never end a sentence with a preposition.” At a roast in City Hall, he even dressed like Gypsy, donning a slinky gown and cape, calling himself “Gypsy Rose Lee Guardia.” She was safe enough to satirize, but her industry was a menace to New York; burlesque, La Guardia declared, was “incorporated filth.”
So Gypsy left burlesque again while she still could, this time at the behest of another Broadway showman, Billy Rose, then-husband of Fanny Brice, her childhood idol. He needed an emcee for his nightclub on 54th Street, the Casino de Paree, which he described as “the usual 50 showgirls in 49 costumes.” She lasted only two months and blamed her dismissal on the night she flubbed her lines, unnerved by Fanny’s presence in the audience. Would Fanny recognize me? Gypsy wondered. Would she even remember me? And then she opened her mouth and said, “And now in Jimmy Savo’s opinion, the world’s greatest pantomimist, Jimmy Savo,” when she meant to say “in Charlie Chaplin’s opinion.” “Get your money,” Billy Rose told her when she returned to the wings. “You’re through.”
That was that, and once again she returned to burlesque, but not to any house run by the Minskys. She was now the featured performer at their greatest competitor, the Irving Place Theatre, located in Union Square and known (to the Minskys’ perpetual ire) as the “Metropolitan Opera of Burlesque.” She knew that the owners were, one might say, “connected,” and that they paid her highest salary to date, $1,000 a week, and that they’d let her take off for important openings and parties anytime she pleased. Herbert and Morton hated to see her go, but they seemed to understand. Gypsy emphasized it was her, not them. She had to leave the ones who made her what she was in order to become what she was meant to be. It wasn’t personal. Then again, she now understood that not much about her was.
By now the apple was bitten down to the core, and with a grand flourish she tossed it to a man leaning over the railing in the lower box. He lunged for the fruit and fell directly into the orchestra pit. A hushed silence, and then laughter and applause as he sprang up and waved the core in the air, triumphant. Turning to the rest of the audience, she vowed to keep searching for her Adam. And yet she had a confession to make, if this wonderful, darling crowd would be kind enough to listen: what she really wanted to do, her dream of dreams, was to perform in the Follies. Could a lowly stripteaser, one who’d always been snubbed by the “café girls,” be so chosen? If one were mortified by the Minskys, could she be glorified by Ziegfeld?
She continued her soliloquy, at once articulating and ridiculing her ambition, and the orchestra launched into a chorus of “Lullaby of the Leaves.” Time to unpin her leaves, one by one, toss them to the audience, slip back behind the curtain, wait for them to roar her name. They never let her down. Peeking out, she protested, “Darlings, please don’t ask me to take off any more. I’ll catch cold. No, please, I’m embarrassed. No, honestly, I can’t. I’m almost shivering now,” smiling so they could see every one of her hard-earned teeth. In the end she yielded, as she always did, emerging long enough to unpin the three last, vital leaves, her final figments of control. For one eternal second she stood wholly exposed, without even a layer of innuendo for cover, and then the lights snuffed out, blanketing her.
Once again she stepped out of sight, truly shivering now, needing a brandy, craving a cigarette, feeling her ulcer flare like a lit match, and she puzzled at the moment the mood changed, that subtle, nearly imperceptible shift: did the crowd turn on her, or she on it? Not this night in particular but every night, all of those gilded faces melding into one seething mass, a rutting animal so deftly biding its time. All of them—it—expected something she was disappointed they wanted, her disappointment compounded by the fact that she had nothing left to give.
At long last she knew who Gypsy Rose Lee was. She had found someone to assemble her final pieces with calculated care, her whole more polished than each individual part. His name was Edwin Bruns, “Eddy,” she called him. He was the youngest member of the New York Stock Exchange and an active participant in the Friars Club, and he would never be seen at one of those backroom “circus parties.” Nine years earlier, in 1925, he had married a Miss Margaret Offerman of Brooklyn in the Italian Garden of the Ambassador Hotel, a venue so prestigious and posh it seemed more suited to Monte Carlo than Atlantic City. One journalist investigated his illicit romance with Gypsy to no avail, concluding that Eddy was a “mythical admirer from New Jersey, with a great deal of money, whose identity no one on Broadway really knows.” Gypsy, wanting to keep his cover, offered a cryptic explanation: “He’s so darned handsome,” she said, “that I have to keep him under cover so no one else will go for him.” Worth $2 million, he promised to take care of Gypsy so she’d never have to worry about money again, if that were even possible.
Eddy came to matinees only, so as not to arouse the suspicions of his wife, and taught Gypsy where and how to be seen. It wasn’t enough to attend the premiere of Jumbo, Billy Rose’s gaudy circus spectacle at the Hippodrome, or the opening night of the Met. She had to be even more fantastic than the shows, dressed in a floor-length cape made entirely of orchids. At just the right moment she emerged from a limousine and let the cameras douse her with light—“ignoring the others,” she noted later
, “wearing the same old things.” The gossip columnists applauded her ingenuity:
“Among the death watch at first nights recently,” wrote O. O. McIntyre in the Journal-American,
has been the long-reigning Queen of Burlesque, Gypsy Rose Lee. She is among the celebrity curiosa that collects at smart soirees. An eyeful in a showy way, but not quite the over carmined type one might expect.… Gypsy is of an intelligence belying her calling. Quick on the trigger … as she continues her slink through the Park Avenue drawing rooms there are not many who do not angle for her, and in every instance, to those who have not seen her she proved a surprise package. Those who expected to find Miss Lee over rouged and thickly veined with Rabelaisian repartee, discovered instead a self possessed lady with a cough drop voice and a dress suit accent who might have run up from Bryn Mawr for a prom.
One critic, though, dubbed her “the hillbilly’s Juliet,” which only proved the past still kept too quick a pace behind her.
She was someone who had learned her mother’s most useful lessons. A thing worth having was a thing worth stealing, and if you were crafty enough the original owner would believe it should have been yours all along. Such was the case when Eddy escorted her one night to the Savoy Plaza, the grand Art Deco hotel that lorded over the midtown entrance to Central Park. There in the Café Lounge, Dwight Fiske, an openly gay member of the now-defunct Algonquin Round Table, presided over a piano and talk-sang his salacious ditties.
Gypsy became a regular, sitting at a table by the stage, chain-smoking as she jotted down the lyrics to her favorite songs: “Mrs. Pettibone,” which recounted three failed marriages; “Anthony and Cleopatra” (Gypsy especially appreciated the heroine’s motto, “Keep them waiting, and they always weaken in the end”); and “Ida, the Wayward Sturgeon,” the tale of an adulterous love affair, as told by a fish. From then on, every time she performed one of those songs at Irving Place, dressed in girlish petticoats and bows, Dwight Fiske himself sat in the front row, thinking that no one but Gypsy Rose Lee could have made his jokes her own.