American Rose

by Karen Abbott

  June had finally gotten her break.

  Sitting at the table, sipping tea, they remembered the highlights they had filched from June’s career. Child prodigy on the Orpheum Circuit, earning $1,500 at just seven years of age. Sought in Hollywood by everyone from Mary Pickford to Charlie Chaplin.

  When June arrived, Gypsy was bent over a web of golden thread, her knitting needles clicking softly. Mother sat at the head of the table. She cleared her throat, signaling that this was business. “We know you are on dinner break, dear, so I’ll be quick,” she said. “You know, dear, no one ever expected this freak reappearance of yours. I made this big success for your sister, and of course we needed interesting things for her background—the interviews and all of that—she had to have someone to be, so it was the most natural thing in the world. We used the Baby, then the child-star vaudeville background. It’s been very successful. That’s what everybody believes, now, so you can see it’s too late to try to take any of the stories back, dear.”

  Gypsy could feel June’s eyes on her, but she kept her head down, focusing on the needles. She was thrilled for June, she really was; her sister deserved her own break from the past. But some of the history had been Gypsy’s for so long there was no easy way to return it. June didn’t need those stories to help her; she could sing and dance and act. It was only fair. And Gypsy was, after all, the original Ellen June.

  “You mean,” June said, “I can’t ever say I was—I am—”

  “We never said you weren’t there, too, June,” Rose explained. “Only, if you are going to actually be back in show business with us, dear, you must find someone else to be. Just find a good story and stick with it.… We’ll get together, and maybe some part that hasn’t been used can be twisted back for you.”

  They were all at the elevator now. Gypsy propped the door open with her foot. She dropped the golden cap on June’s head, the head Mother claimed was once small enough to fit into a teacup. The thread matched her hair color precisely. “There,” Gypsy said, satisfied, and the elevator slowly lowered June out of sight. Gypsy felt Rose at her back, the swipe of her breath, the coolness of her skin. At moments like this she remembered. She had never loved anyone like she loved her mother, until Gypsy Rose Lee was born.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Whenever La Guardia talks I can’t see anything but his tongue.

  — O. O. MCINTYRE

  New York City, 1932–1936

  Herbert had always preferred to let Billy speak for him, and now, in his brother’s overbearing absence, he found it difficult to speak at all. Sitting shiva at Billy’s home in Brooklyn, he tried to execute the mechanics of forming words—gathering a gust of breath, pursing his lips—only to have the effort sputter and die, an engine that forgot how to start. Morton became a vortex of activity, as if by moving faster than his grief he could somehow elude it, this cold, still loss of “the biggest influence in my life.” He called the stage managers at every Minsky theater, ordered rehearsals to proceed as scheduled, informed all of New York City that it had heard the last from one of its most vibrant citizens. “Billy was dead,” Morton wrote. “The burlesque business, the theater, all the wise guys up and down Broadway, the strippers, the comics, the straight men, the stagehands, all knew something had gone out of their lives.”

  The family was still sitting shiva when he got a call from the stage manager at the Republic.

  “I don’t know how to tell you this, Mr. Morton,” he said, “but I don’t think we can work this deal without a Minsky. Things just aren’t going right.”

  Morton sighed. With raised eyebrows he glanced at Herbert, who nodded. It was Billy’s last show, and they owed him at least this.

  “Okay,” Morton said. “Call a full-cast rehearsal after the show on Monday night. We’ll work until we get it right. I’ll pay time and a half if I have to.”

  Morton crammed work into every moment of his life. When not overseeing rehearsals he tended to minutiae at the Republic. As soon as he arrived at 10:30 A.M., he locked himself in his office, reviewed the mail, checked in with one of Billy’s press agents (a man with the improbable name of Georgia Alabama Florida) to discuss the placement and content of ads. He made phone calls about structural changes, prop deliveries, and potential legal problems from John Sumner and his allies. In late afternoon, after the leading Minsky Rosebud conducted her preliminary interview, Morton summoned Herbert and held auditions, watching the girls line up on the stage. With a wave of his hand, the dance director signaled the girls to raise their skirts waist high, and the brothers leaned in for leg inspection. They kept their assessments impersonal and terse, just as Billy had taught them: the words “You’re acceptable” or “You’re not” sufficed. Agents from across the Midwest, especially Chicago, sent photographs and reviews, hoping to make one of their clients the next star stripteaser at Minsky’s Republic, and Morton sifted through them all.

  Home at 5 P.M. for dinner and back to the Republic by 7:30. He watched the curtain rise, scanned the audience for famous faces, and invited any attending celebrity to have a drink with him during intermission; in these waning days of Prohibition, people still appreciated a glass or two of superior whiskey. At least three times a week, Morton noticed, Milton Berle slipped into the audience with a pencil and pad, laughing to himself, scribbling down the best sketches and jokes. The brothers didn’t mind. Berle was a solo stand-up comedian, not a burlesque star. And besides, every worthwhile Minsky joke had already been stolen at least once. As Abe always said, “Not one new burlesque skit has been written in the last twenty years.”

  Billy’s death had yanked Abe back into their lives. Their private family entanglement became suddenly and rudely public, and all of their eldest brother’s furtive plans came tumbling to light. Just one month after Billy was buried, Abe called a press conference to announce that he was splitting, officially, from his family.

  It was about time he branched out on his own, Abe said; Billy had held him back all those years, distorting the original Minsky vision. He planned his own theater, operated for and by himself. Minsky’s Gaiety at 46th and Broadway would compete with both the Republic and the Central. Abe’s comedians would be funnier; his decor, classier; his stripteasers, prettier and more inventive. Furthermore, after the Gaiety got rolling, Abe planned a theater called the New Gotham in Harlem, just up the street from Minsky’s Apollo. “I go my own way,” Abe said, “and Morton and Herb can do as they please.”

  Morton considered these words and all of the messy, complicated history laced through them. He tried to align his thinking with Billy’s, to conjure up his brother’s most likely response: one that would downplay Abe’s ambitions without dismissing them outright, and make clear that only Billy’s theaters offered the authentic Minsky experience (the definition of which, Morton was beginning to realize, was both subjective and malleable). After consulting with Herbert, Morton called his own friends in the press.

  “He thinks he can fill a burlesque house with smart-aleck stuff like George S. Kaufman,” Morton said. “It doesn’t pay to shoot above their heads. Abe will find that out.” He thought for a moment and then added a line he knew would scrape at Abe’s considerable ego, a line that technically wasn’t true: “We’re the originals.”

  Already Morton could sense how this “battle of burlesque,” as the press called it, would evolve. His eldest brother would learn soon enough that Depression-era audiences preferred the obvious over the subtle, cooch over class—the most efficient tools to blunt the edges of their endless, jagged days. When Abe opened the Gaiety and the New Gotham, Morton and Herbert would encourage their girls to shake faster and strip further than they had ever previously dared. It was no longer just a matter of validating Billy’s legacy, but of creating and defining their own.

  A daring stance, the brothers knew, especially with their old friend Jimmy Walker no longer in City Hall, let alone among the audience at their theaters. Mayor La Guardia was busy overturning time-honored tradition
s and codes, flinging unmasked contempt at the way things had always been done. “His puritanical streak, that sense of moral outrage,” said one observer, “was so highly developed that he could make no distinction between a truly original theatrical genre, only one part of which featured the unadorned female breast, and ordinary prostitution.” The Minskys kept close watch on La Guardia’s arrests of underworld kingpins, his proclamations against indecent entertainment, and, most disconcerting, his installation of new commissioners, all of whom were regarded as experts in their particular fields (itself a significant change from municipal politics as usual) and one of whom, Paul Moss, would soon turn his attention to a certain burlesque house in Times Square.

  Honoring Billy’s tradition, the brothers made frequent trips to theaters in neighboring states, discovering, at the Trocadero in Philadelphia, a stripteaser named Margie Hart. An odd amalgamation of hot and demure, Margie kept a Bible tucked under her arm while she pranced across the stage, stopping occasionally to brandish the Good Book and shout, “If I shake it’s for my mother’s sake!” (a literal defense, as it turned out; once finding success in New York, she imported her entire family from rural Missouri and ensconced them in a sprawling apartment on the Upper West Side). In another act, the one that would make her famous, Margie never took anything off at all.

  Wearing a “trick” breakaway dress made of narrow strips of silk, she disturbed the panels with casual flicks of her fingers, exposing a smooth expanse of thigh and waist, and, quite possibly, in the words of Morton Minsky, “that promised land the audience was yearning to see.” Yet one couldn’t be certain: was she wholly naked, without even the slightest G-string for modest accompaniment? Or was her G-string a trick worthy of Houdini—a Chicago G-string, they called it, made of monkey fur or wool, identical, for all intents and purposes, to a strip of pubic hair?

  Even the Minskys were flummoxed, but they never asked Margie the truth. The less they knew, the more difficult it would be for John Sumner or the new puritans in City Hall to harass them. The brothers offered Margie $750 a week to headline the Republic, and the same New Yorkers who hoped to catch one of Gypsy’s stray pins debated the true extent of Margie’s revelations.

  Unlike Gypsy, Margie Hart never developed a taste for booze and smoked only nicotine-free cigarettes, but she, too, understood the value of publicity. She hired her own press agent, who promptly informed Margie’s admirers that she was a sweet, pure country girl at heart, and instead of perfumes and furs she preferred cultivators and pigs. Margie received her desired gifts, but other stunts were less successful. A “strip-duel” challenge with swimmer Eleanor Holm (whom Margie accused of padding her bathing suit) was politely declined, and her attempts to join Gypsy in the ranks of the literati proved frustrating and fruitless. Despite her agent’s gentle prodding, she couldn’t begin to get through Schopenhauer, and Bryn Mawr College saw no reason to establish her proposed “Margie Hart Scholarship for an Ambitious Burlesque Girl.” Abandoning her highbrow aspirations altogether, Margie remained friendly with Gypsy but, given the chance, slyly critiqued her style.

  “Gypsy Rose Lee’s act is too subtle,” she said. “You have to bang them in the eye in burlesque.”

  Subtle or not, Gypsy Rose Lee was still the biggest name in the business, and Morton wanted nothing more than for her to return, permanently, to the Minsky fold. But she had moved on, this time for good, to their biggest competitor, the Irving Place Theatre in Union Square. The brothers abhorred the Irving Place, whose owners—unlike the Minskys themselves—were hardly household names, and the infuriating distinction, made by some, that “real” writers (not to be confused with the Minskys’ devoted cadre of critics) preferred 14th Street to Broadway.

  And it was at the Irving Place in Union Square that Gypsy developed an activist conscience to complement her literary airs, walking through throngs of Communist protestors and getting an earful about proper wages and working conditions, all those topics Billy had outlawed during her early days at the Republic. When burlesque performers demanded their own union—how could they implement President Roosevelt’s ideas about fair labor laws without one?—Gypsy got herself named to the executive board. And when, in the fall of 1935, Minsky stagehands, chorus girls, and stripteasers went on strike, it was Gypsy who organized the effort against her former bosses.

  “Gypsy called our theater,” one stripper remembered, “and asked for some pickets. All of us strippers put robes on over our G-strings and paraded outside the theater flashing passersby and shouting, ‘Don’t go in there, boys.’ ”

  The Minskys settled that night.

  One day, while Morton was sitting in his upstairs office at the Republic, “mulling over the vicissitudes of the burlesque business and the characters in it,” he heard a forceful rapping on his door. He looked up to find his wife Ruth’s Aunt Mae, a proper old dowager married to a renowned astronomy professor. She had an air of hurried concern, and began speaking as soon as she sat across from him.

  “Morton,” she began, “I have a problem you may be able to help me with. One of my good friends is a Mrs. Mizzy. Her son, Bob, has been courting one of the young ladies in your employ—a certain Miss Gypsy Rose Lee. Do you know anything about her?”

  Morton rustled some papers and cleared his throat, stealing a moment to compose his reply. He had never seen this Mizzy boy around the theater when Gypsy worked here, nor sneaking backstage to visit her in between shows. Most likely, Mizzy met her at one of her famous and exclusive parties, where preeminent writers and artists and socialites romped about with strippers and a smattering of shady mobsters. He didn’t know anything “really terrible” about Gypsy, just about some of the people and situations she tolerated along her way, the shifting, dubious nature of the steps that had carried her up. “If you eliminated Waxey Gordon and his four green-hatted henchmen,” he thought to himself, “and the fact that she showed porno movies in her dressing room and encouraged her monkeys in their obscene antics, and the fact that some of her claims to being a great reader and aficionado of the opera were nonsense, I guess she was okay.” What he did know was this: if this Mizzy boy, whoever he was, had fallen for Gypsy, nothing he could say would talk him out of it.

  Aunt Mae rested her face against her slight, elegant hand, a code gesture for growing impatience.

  “I can tell you this, Aunt Mae,” he said. “Miss Lee is a very intelligent woman.”

  She clasped her hands together now, clearly relieved, and leaned forward. “Oh, Morton! Is she really intelligent? Can I tell Mrs. Mizzy that she’s really intelligent?”

  “She’s really intelligent, Aunt Mae,” he confirmed. “I assure you.”

  After Aunt Mae left, Morton thought about their exchange and about Gypsy, who, through her publicity and her persona and, let’s face it, her mother, had boosted and hindered burlesque in equal measure. A writer named H. M. Alexander, at work on a book about the business, had spent quite a bit of time backstage at the Republic, chatting with slingers and Minsky Rosebuds, noting their habits and probing their backgrounds, and offering his opinion on what had already happened and what was yet to come. “If the striptease is an indecent performance today,” he wrote, “it was as much so five years ago. Then, however, the owners, limiting their advertising to word of mouth, tried to avoid attention from the reformers. Their attitude was changed by a certain Mrs. Hovick. She was ambitious; she had a daughter; the child’s stage name was Gypsy Rose Lee. When Mrs. Hovick still had to make Gypsy’s costumes herself and cook all their meals on an electric plate, she somehow managed a rented limousine, a chauffeur, a bodyguard … publicity made Gypsy.”

  Morton remembered the day, four years ago, that he met Gypsy, and the way Billy palmed her face inside his small hands, filling them up. He’d had a gift for finding people who could build his dreams, and arranging them, one by one, in the most lovely, efficient way. His editing was equally deft, adjusting and extracting when necessary, whenever a single part threatened to consume th
e whole. One of the last things Billy did before he died, Morton would never forget, was to hang signs in every Minsky theater, declaring, in bold lettering:

  THE MOTHER OF GYPSY ROSE LEE IS NOT ALLOWED BACKSTAGE

  Clearly Gypsy shared that skill with Billy, the ability to collect and assemble and discard people when necessary, including versions of herself, with such a fluid touch it was as if they’d never grazed her life at all. And it occurred to Morton that he, too, shared something with Gypsy: the terrifying responsibility of carrying out someone else’s dreams, and the dank gray fear of what might befall them after you finally make them your own.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  History is fables agreed upon.

  —VOLTAIRE

  New York City, 1956–1959

  The story of Gypsy’s life is a fable before Broadway bills it as such, a myth she wants to sell not only to the public but to herself. Once upon a time there was a girl with many names: Ellen June, Rose Louise, Plug, Hard-boiled Rose, Louise Hovick, and the one she liked best, Gypsy Rose Lee. She would grow up and wear that name as if it were a cape made of orchids, a vision no one had seen before, and try to forget everything she did to make it fit just right.

  The story means everything to her, especially since she is no longer living it. On New Year’s Eve 1956, a half hour before she is to go onstage at the Cavern in Fort Lauderdale, her hands begin trembling. She sets her straight pins down on the vanity and forces herself to listen to thoughts that have been circling her mind all year.