American Rose

by Karen Abbott

  Gypsy (left) and June, 1959. (photo credit 34.1)

  Gypsy knows it is Mother, in fact, who most intrigues Laurents, all those stories he’s heard out in the Hamptons from some woman who claims Rose Hovick was her very first lover. Oh, she says, that Rose was curvaceous and charming and manipulative as Clytemnestra, somehow convincing a crew of women to work for nothing at her cottage upstate; she operated that place like a slave farm. Apparently, Mother confided to this lover all of her greatest hits. There was the time she took her ladies to a Chinese restaurant, crashed into another car, and blackmailed the other driver into paying for damages; the girls all vowed to be her witnesses. And the time, so long ago now, when she pushed a hotel manager out of the window. And of course the time she shot a girl who’d made a pass at Gypsy, and for this story Rose invented a twist ending: she buried the body in the backyard, and then asked, ever so sweetly, if some of the girls might like to hoe the dirt. She acted so surprised when she saw what turned up …

  Erica, Gypsy’s longtime and devoted secretary, leads Arthur Laurents into the drawing room. Gypsy can handle him, she knows. She learned her lesson with Mike Todd about telling men things that are better left unsaid.

  “Was your son,” Laurents asks, “named after your secretary?”

  A clear reference, Gypsy thinks, to rumors that she is a lesbian, just like Mother, rumors she doesn’t mind but sees no need to confirm or deny. She laughs and slips past the question, telling him that Erica is like a member of the family, darling, she doesn’t know what she’d do without her.

  Laurents tries again.

  “Did the fifteen-year-old Hollywood Blondes your mother booked into a burlesque house ever appear partially nude?” he asks.

  Gypsy crosses her legs. That was so long ago, a piece of that time she will never discuss. “I wouldn’t know,” she says.

  She can see him replaying the answer in his head: she wouldn’t know. Really?

  She smiles at him, sweetly, showing the slightly bucked teeth he later describes as “endearing.” She adds, “Wasn’t Mother something?”

  Laurents moves on. “What got you into stripping?” he asks.

  Gypsy cocks her head, lets her gaze wander to the doorway. “Wasn’t that the phone?” she says.

  He stares at her and tries one more time.

  “Where did you get your name?”

  Gypsy laughs. “Oh, darling,” she says, “I’ve given so many versions, why don’t you make up your own?”

  Laurents realizes that she is a much better actress offstage than on. He rises to leave and asks if he might come back to try again. “Anytime, darling,” she says, and tells him she cares only about two things: that the show go on, and that it be called Gypsy.

  By the end of 1958, Laurents delivers the first draft of the play. It is perfect, Gypsy thinks, tracking the course of her life precisely as she wishes she’d lived it. Of course, June feels differently. Who is this awful Baby June, this shrill, manic caricature of the child she remembers being? She headlined the most prestigious circuit in vaudeville at the age of seven—why does the first scene show her at an amateur contest? And why must she be the villain, eloping with the boy Gypsy loved, when in truth her sister never looked twice at Bobby?

  Furthermore, does Gypsy think anyone will buy this little Louise? This frail, meek lamb who craves nothing more than her sister’s talent and her mother’s love? Where is the haughty Duchess who memorized Voltaire? Who doodled the word “Money” and dreamt of marrying kings? Who decided to perform that very first striptease out in Kansas City? Who has now stolen her little sister’s past not once but twice?

  “You want the world to believe that your credo says to hell with craft, with talent, with integrity, ‘all you gotta have is a gimmick’?” June asks. “Is that your message? Do you really believe that?”

  “Listen, June,” Gypsy says, “you’re the one who trusts all that craft stuff. I tried it, didn’t I? Nothing worked but my gimmicks. That’s what they bought, that’s what they wanted. Wouldn’t I be a stupid son of a bitch to disappoint them now?”

  Gypsy pleads with her sister, makes promises that sidle away from the truth without being outright lies. June’s concerns can be addressed through casting and direction. She will keep an eye on things, make sure June’s interests are protected. Trust her, Gypsy says.

  Eight days later, the production team convenes at her house.

  “Grim,” Gypsy scribbles in her journal. “I have to spend all my time and contractual points fighting for June’s rights.”

  They are at an impasse. Laurents finds himself making a pilgrimage to the other Hovick sister, tracking June down in Stratford, Connecticut, where she is appearing as Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He finds her in her dressing room, face shining with glitter dust.

  “You didn’t come to see me act,” she says. “You came to get my name on a piece of paper.”

  Laurents has to admit it’s true.

  “What’s a sensitive playwright like you doing writing this? It’s vulgar! She’s vulgar!”

  “I found her funny,” Laurents answers, “and rather touching.”

  “I’m touching! She’s so cheap, she eats out of tin cans!”

  Laurents leaves without June’s signature and reports back to Gypsy, finding her at her home, hunched over a table, surrounded by doilies and bright construction paper hearts. She is preparing a Valentine’s Day gift for her sister, a collage of June’s recent clips, and she sighs as Laurents delivers the bad news. While he speaks, she arranges the glowing reviews around the perimeter and pastes the lone scathing notice on top, front and center, so the eye has no choice but to find it first.

  On March 13, June calls and tells her she has hired a lawyer, that they are not to visit or talk. “I am ill and so confused by it all,” Gypsy writes, but neither one of them can, nor wants to, shut the other out. One afternoon, as Laurents leaves Gypsy’s home after another fruitless fact-finding mission, he notices a petite figure turn the corner on 63rd Street. Clad entirely in black, a heavy tulle veil shading her face, she tiptoes toward number 153, delicately, as if her footsteps might be heard above the clamor of the city. The string from a patisserie box coils like a bracelet around her wrist. The door swings open, slowly, before she has a chance to press the bell with her gloved finger, and Gypsy pulls her inside.

  June never reveals what they discussed that day, but she sends a letter Gypsy doesn’t have the capacity to answer:

  You see, I love you but you don’t let me very close. It’s true … you are too pre-occupied. You don’t know that I feel underfoot and damn boring to you unless I can grab and hold your attention, which makes a genuine exchange between us rare. We are “on”—the honest things aren’t “BIG” enough to focus on. After I leave you I realize how superficial the hours were. And I never tell you that I love you.… I don’t believe you fully realize what you are to me and I want so much to make you know.

  The following month, June signs the release. She signs after begging to be written out entirely. She signs even though she is not guaranteed a royalty for the show past the first run. She signs even though, in the end, the play still opens with an amateur contest and has her run away with the boy Gypsy loves. She signs even though she’s embarrassed that her own sister is “screwing me out in public.” She signs even though the release is, she says, an “example of a nonlove that I don’t understand.” She signs because she knows what the play means to Gypsy. It is not only her monument but her surest chance for monumental revisionism. “It realizes,” June says decades later, “who she wanted to be before the burlesque thing happened. She wanted to be this beautiful, idealistic, romantic person with dreams.”

  On May 21, a Thursday, Gypsy works on her rock garden and sends Erik to the home of producer Leonard Sillman, an old friend, to borrow a tuxedo. It is impossible to concentrate on anything but the rising of the curtain in a few short hours. When she has to, she sets down her tools, takes a long bath, and dr
esses in a full black taffeta skirt, white silk blouse, and sable jacket. She thinks, for a moment, of her mother. How sad that Rose isn’t here to see Ethel Merman play her, to make her famous, an archetype, an icon in her own right. It would’ve been the greatest night of Mother’s life.

  She pins up her hair and hangs antique diamond pendants from her delicate seashell ears. She drives the Rolls-Royce to the theater and loops her arm through Erik’s. They take their time walking down the aisle. Never have so many eyes stared so intently when she wasn’t on stage, when she wasn’t rolling down a stocking or peeling off a glove. And when little Louise strokes her lamb’s soft head and wonders how old she is, Gypsy Rose Lee begins to cry.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Broadway is New York intensified—the reflex of the Republic—hustling, feverish, crowded, ever changing. How the ranks and antagonisms of life jostle each other on that crowded pave!

  –JUNIUS HENRI BROWNE, THE GREAT METROPOLIS, 1869

  New York City, 1969

  On the last weekend in June, Morton Minsky sat down at his desk to indulge in his favorite hobby, writing letters to The New York Times. He was sixty-seven and would live for eighteen more years, long enough to witness his beloved city thrive and decay and will itself back to life, long enough to realize his favorite swath of it, Broadway, was always being built but would never be finished, long enough to appreciate its fiercely tender gift for retaining the spirit of those who shaped it along the way.

  In 1942, he admired Gypsy Rose Lee and Michael Todd for doing the impossible and bringing back old-time burlesque with Star and Garter, right under Fiorello La Guardia’s nose. He despaired as one theater after another closed its doors in the 1950s, the worst serial shuttering since the height of the Depression. In 1962, he scoffed at another license commissioner’s vow to eliminate “lurid and flamboyant” sidewalk displays. He followed the career of a revolutionary comedian named Lenny Bruce, who, in 1964, was barred from New York stages for being “obscene, indecent, immoral, and impure.” He heard that 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues was the worst block in the city, overrun by “deviant” males who wore teased hair and painted faces. He watched Minsky’s Republic morph from a second-run movie house to a “grind house,” showing pornography for twenty straight hours a day. He marveled when the State Supreme Court allowed the word “burlesque” to return to Times Square marquees and naked girls to its stages. “Given the nature of modern American life and letters,” the Times asked, “do we need, really need, all those breasts and bellies and buttocks to feed our fantasies?”

  Bud Abbott (standing) with Lou Costello (left) and Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. (photo credit 35.1)

  Morton would have happily answered that question, but on this occasion he wished to address the recent debut of Oh! Calcutta! The play featured comedic sketches and full-frontal nudity and, more than anything in recent memory, brought to mind his three beloved, long-gone brothers and those glorious, maddening last days when Broadway still shined their name.

  He rolled a piece of paper into his typewriter and began:

  To the editor:

  Was burlesque bad in the days of Minsky?

  I doubt very much whether the status of the contributors to Oh! Calcutta! is above that of the comedy skit writers for Minsky Burlesque in the 20’s and 30’s, so admired by Nathan, Mencken, Edmund Wilson, and other respected critics of that era.

  In the days before La Guardia’s extinguishment of Minsky entertainment (for political expediency), the earthy comedy, delivered by such greats as Abbott and Costello, Rags Ragland, and Joey Faye, brought the wrath of the gods down on our heads. Nudity, bare bosoms à la Ziegfeld, popularized by Minsky’s, was deemed shocking.

  Yes, I saw Oh! Calcutta!. If permitted to run, it will be a sad commentary on the injustice rendered to the art form of burlesque so courageously developed by the Minskys, only to be banished by the great liberal, Fiorello La Guardia.

  There was an honesty in early burlesque nowhere apparent in the current rash of “nudies.”

  Morton Minsky

  He paused a moment, read over what he’d written, and added a tagline:

  Of the Minsky Brothers. Remember?

  Morton remembered; for the remainder of his years he’d do little else. He thought his city should remember, too, even after he was no longer there to remind it.

  He remembered feeling a shift as the country tumbled into the thirties, a fin-de-siècle louche decadence yielding to grim sincerity. Beyond New York, far from Mayor La Guardia’s frothing rants against Tammany and organized crime and imbecilic employees, tent preachers flourished in small towns of the South and Midwest, delivering the message that the ills of the Depression were God’s protests against the wicked and unrighteous. Evangelists Gypsy Smith and Billy Sunday traveled from city to city, exhorting God’s word and warning of His wrath to overflow crowds in ballparks and auditoriums. Every night, in every city, the Salvation Army invaded street corners and wooed passersby with tambourine music and curbside gospel.

  The Catholic Church, along with a lay organization called the Legion of Decency, turned its considerable might toward Hollywood, demanding stricter adherence to the Hays Code, which, to Morton, read like an exceptionally uptight version of the Ten Commandments: No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it. No picture shall ridicule religion, and ministers of religion shall not be represented as comic characters or villains. No picture shall contain nakedness or suggestive dances. No picture shall portray “excessive and lustful kissing” or any other activity that might “stimulate the lower and baser element.” All this, he scoffed, from the same geniuses who believed that by changing Gypsy Rose Lee’s name they could obscure who and what she really was.

  Morton remembered that John Sumner began invading his thoughts each night as soon as the curtain rose. He drove Morton crazy with his pious rhetoric and self-serving hyperbole, declaring that 1935 was the year “burlesque commenced to run wild.” Was he out there in the audience, scribbling away on his little pad, paraffin whistle pursed by his lips? Did he have men stationed in all the Minsky theaters, monitoring each inch of bared skin?

  Indeed he did, as Morton soon found out. On the night of June 22, 1935, one of Sumner’s watchdogs attended the late show at the Republic, noting that during stripteaser Wanda Dell’s encore she “dropped her dress to the floor, exposing her whole body, except her private parts, which were covered by a thin string of beads, leaving the cheeks of her rectum exposed,” and that one of the Minsky comics defined a baby as “nine months’ interest on a small deposit.” This, Morton asked himself, was supposed to send audiences out in the streets “slavering to relieve themselves” at a nearby taxi-dance hall? “You’d think,” he wrote, “we were holding a Roman orgy there.”

  Minsky “Rosebuds” and comic, shielding their faces after a raid. (photo credit 35.2)

  He remembered Fiorello La Guardia joining the fray, giving a radio press conference that began with the melodramatic line, delivered in his trademark shriek, “This is the beginning of the end of incorporated filth.” (“I wish,” Morton wrote in 1986, the year before he died, “he could have lived to see [Times Square] as it is today, with open hard-core sex acts and no pretense at theater, comedy, or humor.”) Of course, La Guardia then turned to John Sumner for counsel and assistance, imploring the reformer to link burlesque to the city’s myriad problems and introducing him to the new license commissioner, Paul Moss. To Morton, the commissioner was something even worse than a reformer—an erstwhile “legitimate” Broadway producer.

  Immediately upon taking office, Moss issued a sort of Hays Code for burlesque—some old restrictions, some new, all unreasonable. Stripteasers couldn’t mingle with the audience or take off their bras but offer only the briefest flash of breast at the end. No more encores in which the girls slipped the curtain between their legs and whisked the velvet back and forth. No vulgar language or overtly suggestive double ent
endres. And, as the coup de grâce, a thorough dismantling of all lighted runways. Like their burlesque colleagues, Morton and Herbert obeyed only the final edict, feeling melancholy as the wood was stripped and the footlights darkened, thinking about Abe and his brilliant Parisian importation, and the distance that still festered between them.

  Yet burlesque seemed to thrive in direct proportion to threats of its demise. Editorials pondered what would become of the “Minsky masterpieces” without the benefit of nudity. The painter Reginald Marsh created a series of sketches that captured what Morton loved most about his business, its phalanx of contradictions: the exquisite crudity; the mechanical spontaneity; the wicked innocence; the hodgepodge audience and its palpably vacant gaze. During an extended visit to New York, sex researcher Alfred Kinsey took in several shows. “Burlesque at Broadway,” he wrote, “has the most gorgeously thrilling girls I ever expect to see—and they stop at nothing. The g-strings to which they finally strip are half as wide as your little finger and not a button wider at the strategic spot. When the audience insists strenuously enough, she will remove even the string—slipping a finger in place (to live up to the law) with more damaging effect than the complete exposure of a nudist camp.” A cadre of anonymous New York men calling themselves “The Mysterious Messieurs X” threw a “burlesque ball” for society hostess Elsa Maxwell. Hundreds of prominent New Yorkers, including Condé Nast and Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., packed the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria to watch a production titled Gone with the Winski, after the upcoming film with a similar name.