American Rose

by Karen Abbott

  Morton remembered when he and Herbert opened their last burlesque house at 1662 Broadway, near 51st Street. They instructed the press to call them the “real, living Minskys” so as to distinguish themselves from Abe, who was “a renegade from the true Billy Minsky tradition.” Minsky’s Oriental Theatre would be different from anything else in burlesque’s past or future, with spacious lounges, air-conditioning, and a “Park Avenue Row”—two hundred seats raised above the orchestra level and earphones for the dowagers, so they wouldn’t miss the punch lines. Wait, there was more: an art gallery with “original oils” of nudes; a roof solarium complete with free lending library, so the girls could both sun and educate themselves in between shows; someone named Adrienne the Psychic offering free fortune-telling in the lobby; kimono-clad ladies serving fine champagne; and, in respectful homage to Billy, a cooch dancer, limber as a noodle, gyrating within the tight confines of a clear glass cage.

  Everyone should come to the grand opening, scheduled for Christmas night 1936, to see for themselves. Formal attire, please.

  A reporter asked about the schism from Abe.

  Morton dropped his smile, rearranged his features into an expression of calm, and held up a hand. “We are on the most friendly terms with Abe,” he insisted, and promptly changed the subject. “This house is going to be very different. Now it will be from the Follies to Minsky’s.” He thought about the ex-Follies girl he’d love to steal most of all. “Maybe,” he added, “Gypsy Rose Lee will come back to us. You know she always said she could make more money in burlesque.”

  She did come back but for one night only, long enough to crack a bottle of champagne over the box office and launch her smile at the cameras.

  There was a run of good luck, weekly box-office receipts of $19,000 at Minsky’s Oriental and the chance for an unprecedented publicity coup. Representative Samuel Dickstein, Democrat from New York and one of the founders of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, introduced a bill to restrict foreign theatrical performers from entering the United States and stealing jobs from citizens. On February 18, 1937, Morton and Herbert dispatched a telegram to the congressman’s office:

  FEEL WE COULD GREATLY INFLUENCE PUBLIC OPINION AS WELL AS COMMITTEE ON YOUR BILL STOP WOULD BE PLEASED COME TO WASHINGTON TO AID YOU

  One week later, the brothers arrived in the nation’s capital to discuss stripteasing with the country’s most powerful men.

  “Strange as it may seem to you gentlemen,” Herbert began, “the striptease is a highly developed form of art.… It’s not altogether what you take off, but how you take it off.”

  “And,” Morton added, “who takes it off.”

  Herbert pulled an envelope from his pocket, offering it up as evidence. Hundreds of young American girls, he said, were “knocking at the doors of burlesque.” And by concentrating on exotic dances, the European performers often ruined the striptease, missing its nuances, vanquishing its humor.

  “The American stripper,” Morton said, “doesn’t do that. She goes to school. Sometimes it takes twelve months just to learn how to peel off three garments.”

  “Maybe there aren’t enough American strippers to go around,” one congressman suggested.

  “There are plenty of Americans,” Herbert replied. “You’ve all heard of Gypsy Rose Lee. She started with us six years ago and now she is the greatest publicized star of today. I made every effort to get her to testify before this committee, but she was tied up with a contract and unable to come down.”

  A general sigh of disappointment looped around the committee table.

  “About this bill,” Herbert concluded, “we want to say that foreign governments have been stripping Uncle Sam for a long while. Now it’s time to strip them, and we American Minskys should take care of the stripping.”

  From then on, Morton announced, the Minsky motto would be “The Stars and Strips Forever!”

  Laughter and applause rushed through the hall, loud and gratifying as an opening-night ovation, so sweet and far removed from the trouble looming, inevitably, back in New York.

  Morton remembered a wave of sex crimes across the city, and the way the newspapers divulged every detail with lurid, voracious glee. A four-year-old girl was strangled in the cellar of a deserted house in Staten Island. An eleven-year-old Brooklyn girl was raped and assaulted. An eight-year-old was raped and left to die in her old baby carriage, stored in the basement of her family home. A ten-year-old girl was attacked in a movie theater. A nine-year-old Catholic schoolgirl was raped and murdered in the back room of a Brooklyn barbershop. A thirty-four-year-old writer named Nancy Evans Titterton, wife of an NBC radio executive, was raped and murdered in their Beekman Place apartment. Her battered body was found facedown in the bathtub, nude save for a slip, rolled-down stockings, and the pajama top used to strangle her.

  Pundits and politicians suggested all manner of punishments for “criminal sexual perverts”—the electric chair, sterilization, segregation—and cast blame without discretion or direction. It was parents’ fault for not teaching proper “sex hygiene.” It was the state’s fault for its lenient parole policies. It was the fault of every burlesque producer who allowed “salacious” performances, especially the Minsky brothers and, on one particular occasion, especially Abe.

  How well Morton remembered that day in April 1937 when he and Herbert decided, five long years after Billy’s death, to stand in the same room with their brother, especially since that room was in the Criminal Courts Building downtown. It had been so easy to push Abe to the periphery of their lives, to jab him with sly, subtle insults passed along through the press, to forget that the eldest Minsky, for all of his foibles and failures, was the one who first put the family name in lights. Morton knew it was a risk to show up on Abe’s behalf—his brother could just as easily punch him as shake his hand—and also that, precisely because of the unknown outcome, the wild, hovering possibility of disaster, Billy would want him to do it.

  So they showed up, he and Herbert, and took their seats in the courtroom where Abe would be accused of violating the penal code during a certain performance the prior August—a brilliant performance, Morton had to admit, with a girl swinging high from a trapeze, dropping a piece of clothing with every tantalizing to and fro. Abe, the brothers well knew, had violated the penal code numerous times—who hadn’t?—but John Sumner and Commissioner Moss were determined to win this round.

  Morton remembered his favorite part of the trial, when the district attorney examined a regular New Gotham patron, asking, in a powder-dry voice, “At any time during the performance were you excited?” and the guy’s incredulous, no-shit look that served as his wordless reply. He remembered the unsettled, quicksand feeling in his gut when the judge found Abe guilty, and how it churned lower, faster, when the judge announced the revocation of Abe’s license not just for a week but for months, until the fall.

  At that news his brother stood. Abe’s mouth curled and retracted into itself, like an earthworm poked with a stick, and he hurled his words with a vigorous, muttering fury.

  “You think you are running the whole country,” he said, stopping Commissioner Moss in midstride. “This has been going on for twenty-five years and you have been in office for three years and you haven’t done anything.” He stepped closer, situating his body inside the frame of the door. The courtroom fell into a prickled hush behind him. He lifted his chin.

  “If you want to close them,” Abe said, “close them.”

  The commissioner looked down at him and said, “Good-bye, Mr. Minsky.”

  Morton and Herbert formally reconciled with Abe, now using the press as a salve instead of a weapon. Morton kept his comments politic, impersonal. “In our case brother was pitted against brother,” he said, “and that meant divided profits.” Billy had been the fulcrum that kept them all in balance, and they had to learn how to work without him. They conferred, shared secrets and theories. It was obvious, now, why John Sumner and Commissioner Moss had pos
tponed the trial against Abe for eight months; they wanted it to occur as closely as possible to May 1, 1937, when all burlesque licenses came up for renewal. Moss might not have the authority to padlock a theater without a conviction, but he could achieve the same end by refusing to issue a simple piece of paper.

  On the afternoon of April 28, a Wednesday, the brothers convened in Moss’s office at 105 Walker Street, aware that all forces were converging against them. Mayor La Guardia declared that “even the word striptease sounds dirty.” A Brooklyn district attorney called burlesque dangerous to schoolchildren, lamenting how they “go into these places with their books under their arm.” A man calling himself “a good Jewish subject” penned an adamant missive to the mayor: “For gods sakes,” he wrote, “eliminate the most dangerous evil in the stage field. Do away with that name that has always spelled filth to the theatre-going public, and that is the name Minsky.” Burlesque houses, said another city official, were the “habitats of sex crazed perverts.” There was, the brothers noticed, a marked difference in tone between 1932 and now. Apparently burlesque no longer attracted degenerates and perverts but created them from scratch.

  “All of us were fidgeting in the back row,” Morton said, “irritated and embarrassed by all this ridiculous testimony.… Moss asked us over and over again if we had any defense, but none of us had anything to say.”

  Nothing he and his brothers tried worked: not the stays, writs, mandamuses, or superseding writs; not the pleas to La Guardia that thousands of actors, comics, chorus girls, stagehands, musicians, and stripteasers needed their jobs. Every Minsky theater now operated sporadically, in fits and starts. Mayor La Guardia vowed to “fight to the finish,” a fait accompli with his landslide reelection in the fall.

  “We tried to elevate burlesque,” Morton told the press, “and look where it got us.”

  He remembered the eulogies from those who truly understood the loss, not only the brothers’ but all of New York’s. “As a patron of burlesque for more than forty years,” wrote George Jean Nathan, “it is difficult for me to understand how the peculiar Mosses arrived at their concupiscent philosophy. If ever there was a male over sixteen years of age who, after giving ear to two hours of uninterrupted smut, felt otherwise than going right back straight home and getting a little relief by reading Alice in Wonderland, I haven’t heard of him. Nothing so purges the mind of indecency as too much indecency. The most moral force in this world is a really dirty burlesque show.”

  At one of the Minsky Republic’s final shows, a redheaded slinger named Ann Corio sheathed herself in gauzy organdy and performed a funeral dirge for her profession:

  The old days forever are through

  When we showed everything we had to you

  ’Cause now they’ve got us with our clothes on

  No more will you see us strip

  We can’t even shake a hip

  You’ll see a little but that’s your loss

  That’s by order of Commissioner Moss

  Mr. Striptease is dead

  And I’m his widow

  He’s gone but not forgotten

  I’ll just try to be brave

  You should see the celebrities

  Gathered at his grave

  La Guardia, Moss were in the crowd

  They had come by thousands to see the shroud

  Herk was crying and so was Minsky

  While music on a g-string was played by violinsky

  Mr. Striptease is dead.

  For her encore, she emerged from the curtain wearing a black negligee and a padlock encasing her hips.

  Herbert fell into a deep depression, the days unraveling empty and endless before him. In 1942, he filed for bankruptcy, describing himself as a “theatrical manager, presently unemployed.” He died in December 1959, of heart failure.

  Morton remembered when Abe was on his deathbed ten years earlier, in late summer 1949. “Kid,” he told Morton, “you’re going to be the one to see the Minsky name in lights, I know it, and I want you to make every effort.” In the end Abe was right. How Morton wished his brothers lived to see The Night They Raided Minsky’s, based on Mademoiselle Fifi and that fabulous, fictitious raid of 1925, back when court hearings made for good publicity and even better jokes. In the film, a proper, pious Louis Minsky had neither ties to Tammany Hall nor a criminal record, and Billy was flamboyantly, magnificently alive.

  Most of all he remembered what the city did to their name, banning the word “Minsky” from appearing anywhere on a marquee, anywhere in public, as if the brothers never defined or owned it at all. Yet for a long time those six letters remained visible across the Republic’s facade, stubborn and deeply etched, brilliant even in the dark.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Some people say that my collection is really quite rare

  and I can see the envy in their eyes

  But if they only knew what I’ve been through, all that wear and tear

  I’m sure they wouldn’t think it such a prize.

  This key is to the cabinet where I keep my liquor

  And here’s one to a Hope chest I had in my youth

  Feels like yesterday …

  Though this ring holds every key, there is still no ring for me

  But I’ve had a lot of fun. And that’s the truth.

  —GYPSY ROSE LEE, “THAT’S ME ALL OVER”

  Los Angeles, California, 1969–1970

  June always says Gypsy is built like those cars of her heyday, a 1931 Chevy coupe or a Stutz, with a sleek, vibrant exterior unable to withstand the force of the engine within. Her body began turning on her long ago and she accepts her role in its demise: all those years of chain-smoking and chugging brandy, of sleeping either twelve hours a day or not at all, of telling herself that nothing matters as long as her accounts are full and her legend secure, of living in an exquisite trap she herself has set.

  June and Gypsy, 1964. (photo credit 36.1)

  In the year leading up to the end she catalogues the minutiae of her days. She appears on Hollywood Squares, bleaches her hair, lunches with Merv Griffin, prepares for USO tours, interviews for The Dating Game, works in her aviary, itemizes even the smallest expenditures (a $2 tip for the grocery man, $2.25 on ashtrays), declines to appear with Frank Sinatra, Jr., because “I can’t quite see myself with him,” and marks the onset of the headaches. They are unlike any she’s had before, the pain both sluggish and fierce, like a cement truck churning inside her skull. She makes this diary entry retroactively, perhaps realizing later that it represents a shift—the date her illness becomes a tool by which she measures her life. “Headaches begin about now,” she writes on August 3, 1969. Her hand still has the strength to form bold letters across the page.

  Never once does she write “cancer” in her very last journal, nor does she speak it aloud. Instead she veers around the word, as if acknowledging it directly will grant it power enough to win. “They’ve found a spot on my lung,” she tells Erik, now a parent himself. “They took one look and sewed me back up. It has spread too much for them to operate. They’ve told me not to worry … yet. There’s a good chance they’ll be able to knock it out with radiation.” In the meantime, would he mind calling Arm & Hammer for her? She did a commercial for them last month, soaking in a tub of baking soda and marveling at how smooth it made her skin. If word of her condition gets out, they’ll never use the spot and she won’t be paid her $10,000. God knows when she’ll be able to work again. She wishes she had the time for one last face-lift.

  Erik comes for a visit. He knows his Aunt June will be there, too, and he vows to keep the peace for his mother’s sake. June was always trying to rip Gypsy off, once selling her a Rolliflex camera for more money than what it had cost in the store. He also never forgot what June told him, pointedly, when he was just eight years old: “All the men in this family never amounted to anything.” Together, he thinks, Gypsy and June inherited all of Rose’s characteristics—his mother got the good ones and Aunt June the re
st. His mother’s life was not an easy one, he realizes. She was “a wounded soul”—wounded by her mother, by Michael Todd, by June, and by Erik himself. He recalls their many disputes about money, about his thieving and disrespect, about the unconventional, exacting way she’d raised him. “We’ve never had a family,” he told her once. “Families are supposed to love each other, and there’s no love here. I can’t even remember the last time we hugged or kissed good night.”

  Gypsy was taken aback but had her answer ready: “Well, you can hardly blame me for that. You never were a demonstrative little boy.”

  He knew his mother expected everyone to behave in ways that were bigger than human—herself included—and was always disappointed in the end. Now, as he leans in to kiss Gypsy, she shares one last confidence with her son. “After I go,” she whispers, “don’t let June in the house. She’ll rob you blind.”

  June is working as the artistic director of the New Orleans Repertory Theatre, and as soon as a play opens she boards the next plane to Los Angeles. Nearly thirty years have passed since they lived together in Gypsy’s double mansion on the Upper East Side, and the fragile thing between them is stashed, at least for the moment, in a place where it can’t be harmed. “She was wonderful,” June remembers, “she was gallant.” June brings gifts, African violets and purple towels. Neither of them has ever seen purple towels—aren’t they so lush, so cheerful?—and June cooks every meal. During the first few visits she actually convinces her big, fat sister to eat something, and they chatter about the kind of everything that means nothing real at all.

  When the conversation changes, when it takes on weight and shape, it is Gypsy’s doing and Gypsy’s choice, and it lasts only as long as she allows. They are together in the bathroom, of all places, because Gypsy is too weak to stand on her own. June carries the enema bag and clasps Gypsy’s waist, handling her as if she might tear. “Isn’t this terrible, June?” she asks in a voice that has lost its exaggerated timbre and haughty trill, a voice that no longer speaks like Gypsy Rose Lee.