by Craig Rice
The G-String Murders
Craig Rice writing as Gypsy Rose Lee
Chapter One
Finding dead bodies scattered all over a burlesque theater isn’t the sort of thing you’re likely to forget. Not quickly, anyway. It’s the little things, incidents that don’t seem important when they happen, that slip your mind.
With me, for instance. As long as I live, I’ll remember seeing that bloated, bluish face, the twisted, naked body, and the glitter of a G string hanging like an earring from the swollen neck. Sometimes, even now, I wake up in a cold sweat with the sound of a body squashing on the stage, and Dolly Baxter’s screams in my ears.
The things that are harder to remember are the incidents leading to the murders. The raid is a good example. How was I to know it wasn’t just another pinch?
Then, Dolly Baxter and Lolita La Verne. They were always fighting anyway, so how could I guess that their ordinary hair-pulling, name-calling differences of opinion were leading to death?
I’ll admit I should have known something was up when the Princess Nirvena opened at the Old Opera. She must have seen the signs backstage; they were all over the place: FULL NET PANTS. NO BUMPS. NO GRINDS. KEEP YOUR NAVEL COVERED. You couldn’t miss seeing them. But when she did her specialty and took off her last pair of pants, I was definitely going to hand in my notice.
I didn’t, of course, but … Well, maybe I’d better start from the beginning. Not when I first went into show business, but from the time I received the telegram in Columbus, Ohio.
GYPSY ROSE LEE, it read,
GAIETY THEATER, COLUMBUS, OHIO
YOU OPEN FEBRUARY TWELFTH OLD OPERA THEATER, NEW YORK CITY. SALARY 125.00 NET. THEATER REAL SHOWCASE FOR BROADWAY DEBUT. WIRE CONFIRMATION. RUSH PHOTOS.
H. I. MOSS
The wire was typical of him. H. I. Moss, owner of six burlesque theaters and undisputed impresario of burlesque, wouldn’t wire “can you open?” And although I’d been working for him for two years, he wouldn’t sign it “best regards,” nor would he write “Herbert” or “Isadore Moss.”
“Burlesque is the poor man’s Follies,” was one of his expressions, but I’m sure he didn’t feel that way about it. He was convinced that an H. I. Moss production meant not only “clean entertainment for the whole family,” but also stood for the very best Broadway could offer. If he thought Eugene O’Neill could write a good burlesque blackout, then O’Neill was the man for him. If he couldn’t write anything but Dynamo and Strange Interlude, Moss would shrug his shoulders and say:
“Who wants to know from such corn? Girls! That’s what the public wants!”
He might have been right at that.
Of all his theaters, the Old Opera was the favorite. It had survived a good many depressions and the policy was GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS! In smaller print they advertised LAFFS! LAFFS! LAFFS! Next in prominence, BOXING THURSDAY NIGHTS.
Moss emphasized the “clean entertainment” part, too. The night I met him, he impressed it on my mind. That was the night he changed my name from Rose Louise to Gypsy Rose Lee.
“That Louise is too refined for a strip teaser,” he said. “Refinement in burlesque we must have, but not too much.”
I really didn’t want to join a burlesque troupe. No vaudeville actor does. If you find one in burlesque you can be sure he got in through the starvation route. I certainly did. Maybe not exactly starvation, but when there’s only one punch left on your meal ticket, it’s close enough. Not only that, but I’d been locked out of an egg crate of a hotel in the thriving city of Toledo!
H. I. Moss didn’t care much whether I wanted to be a strip teaser or not. He thought of himself as a star builder; a sort of cross between David Belasco and Flo Ziegfeld, with a little Napoleon thrown in as an added attraction.
“I will personally see to it that your name is in lights on Broadway,” he told me exactly one half minute after I met him.
It was my closing night in a comfort station that the defunct owners playfully called a night club. The lights were dim and a five-piece orchestra pounded out tune after tune while my new boss outlined my future to me. From the routine he was giving me, it sounded like I was going in training for the ballet, or at least the Olympics.
“Experience. That’s what you need.” His eyes, peering at me through bifocal glasses, closed dreamily. “And clothes; velvets with feathers, diamonds in your hair.” The red and blue overhead lights reflected on his bald head as he raised his voice above that of the singer with the band.
When he really interested me was when he got down to cases, a play-or-pay contract. Diamonds in my hair is well and good, but at that moment I was a little hungry.
“First you play my circuit, then you play a year in stock here in Toledo. If at the end of that time I, H. I. Moss, feel that you are ready for Broadway, you play the Old Opera!”
He waited for me to gurgle, “Not the Old Opera!” with awe in my eyes. Unfortunately, I had never heard of the theater, so all I could give him was, “What is the salary?”
“With a twenty-week guarantee, and H. I. Moss personally grooming you for stardom, we don’t talk money.” With a grand gesture he handed me the contract. It was a blurred carbon copy, the salary the blurriest part of all, but I signed it. Twenty weeks is twenty weeks and it sounded like a chance to get my laundry out of hock.
That had all happened two years before the telegram arrived. In that time I had signed many more blurred carbon copies and, with the exception of a raise every six months, the contracts were all alike.
One hundred and twenty-five dollars! That was folding money. And I had also learned to get the awed look in my eye when the Old Opera was mentioned. My hand shook a little as I reread the wire. At the time I thought it was from the excitement of reaching a goal. Now I know it was a presentiment.
Not that I try to live up to the name of Gypsy, but I do occasionally read tea leaves. And aside from having the Girdle of Venus in my right palm, I was born with two cowls.
That very morning I had seen a knife in the bottom of my cup!
“Violent death,” I said to Gee Gee Graham, my roommate and best friend. She laughed at me as usual. “And a trip,” I said.
She didn’t laugh at that. With a quick gulp she finished her tea and handed me her cup. “Tell mine, Gyppy. No knives, but see if you can find a trip for me, too.”
“If it’s there or not,” I said, “a trip for me is a trip for you.”
We had worked together since the year … Well, it was when we were kids that Gee Gee and I both joined the “Seattle Kiddies Revue.” We had done boy-and-girl team numbers then. Because Gee Gee was small and blonde and dainty, she was the girl. I wasn’t as graceful as I might have been, and the braces on my teeth didn’t help my beauty any, so I was the boy.
Since then Gee Gee had gone through several transformations. At the moment she was a redhead and she had developed a temper to go with it. But I could still only think of her as the Gee Gee who had trouped with four guinea pigs, a white rat, and a chameleon.
There was no knife and no trip in her cup, but the tea leaves aren’t always true. We sent H. I. Moss a wire describing Gee Gee’s versatility. Naturally she got the job. A singing, dancing, guitar-playing strip teaser is a good bet at seventy-five a week in any business.
We packed happily for our Broadway debut.
The Old Opera wasn’t exactly the show place that Moss had affectionately called it, but it was one of the choice burlesque theaters. In the nineties, when only opera was performed there, it must have been considered elegance personified.
The façade was gray marble, the lobby long and spacious. To the right, there was a wide staircase that led to the balcony and loges. The red carpeting was frayed and worn,
the gold leaf peeling symbolically enough from the cherubs that decorated the ceiling. In places, the marble had cracked and had been repaired clumsily with plaster. Full-length, handtinted pictures of girls in various forms of undress graced the walls. The one of me, wearing a sunbonnet and holding a bouquet of flowers just large enough to bring the customers in and keep the police out, was third from the left.
Opposite the staircase was the candy butcher’s counter, piled high with cigars, cigarettes, and candy bars. An automatic Coca-Cola dispenser stood next to the counter.
Moey, an ex-racketeer, ran the concession. He had never been an important racketeer, just a relative of one who found it cheaper to put Moey to work than to support him. He wore a white wash coat when he was working, dazzling checks when the show was over. Strictly a green-fedora guy, but he gave us a ten per cent discount on our cokes, so he was popular enough backstage.
Some pretense had been made toward keeping up the front of the theater, but, aside from an occasional sweeping backstage, no one gave much thought to the actors.
The entire chorus dressed in one room just off the stage, the principal women and show girls in a room upstairs, and the men’s dressing room was on the top floor. A ventilating pipe ran from the basement room, a small, damp, airless, unused place, through the chorus dressing room, ours, the men’s, and right up to the roof of the theater.
We used this pipe as a sort of telephone when we had something to shout from one floor to another, but when we were talking among ourselves we would stuff a make-up towel in it. Otherwise our voices would carry to every room in the theater.
It was Friday of my twenty-eighth week at the Old Opera when we were talking about how to romance Moss into installing a new toilet. It was a subject that came up from time to time, but never before as urgently, and we hadn’t thought it confidential enough to stuff the ventilating pipe.
None of the girls had had a really bright idea when Biff Brannigan, the first comic, yelled down, “Look. To keep you tomatoes from squawking so much, we guys are chipping in a buck each for the down payment on a new throne. How’s that strike you?”
If Biff had been in any other business and I had been anything but a strip teaser, we would be going steady, or he might have been my beau. In burlesque, romances seem to be different; we eat night lunch together. But that didn’t mean that I felt unromantic about Biff. Only at that moment I felt, well, sort of funny. Having him talk about a throne. Even if it had to be talked about.
The old one was by rights a museum piece. It was probably the first one to be built indoors; a collector’s item but we weren’t collectors, so Biff’s suggestion was greeted with enthusiasm. Fourteen of us gathered around the pipe and shouted our thanks to Biff and the boys. The fifteenth, Lolita La Verne, billed as “The Golden-Voiced Goddess,” started writing down the names to see how much of a contribution we could depend upon.
“I’ll start with the men,” she said. It sounded natural coming from her. Moey, the candy butcher, was the only man in the theater she hadn’t given the glad eye to and I can’t see why she skipped him. He certainly was prettier than Louie Grindero, her saloonkeeper favorite.
Not that I object to a girl taking her sex life seriously, but La Verne overdid it. Maybe it was all right when she was younger, but even though she kept herself well groomed and dressed to the teeth, the bags were under the eyes and the neck hung like an empty salt sack. Her hands gave her away, too. They were bony, greedy-looking hands, and they clutched the pencil as though it were diamond studded.
“Russell Rogers,” she said as she wrote.
He was our new straight man, a “Meet chu in the moonlight, m’boy” type. Thought he was too good for burlesque, and made Sardi’s his hangout instead of the Peerless or the Baron’s, where we all went. He always carried a brief case full of scripts. “A sensational play that is being tried out in Woodstock this summer,” or “the American rights to a terrific thing they did in London last year.”
I never saw the manuscripts and always suspected the brief-case bulge of being a couple of old telephone books. But I’m naturally skeptical.
“Russell Rogers,” La Verne repeated, with a little twist to her mouth.
Gee Gee looked up from a bedspread she was crocheting. “You said that once, dear. We all caught it.”
“Then there’s Mandy,” La Verne said quickly. He was the second comic and had been shell-shocked in the war. He had a round, happy face and a wife and three kids. La Verne made a fast job of writing his name.
“And there’s Joey, and Phil, and—oh yes—Biff.” She paused and gave me a look as though we were sharing some secret.
“Biff ought to pay double,” she added with a sly smile. “He’s in here all the time.”
“If you’re going to figure it that way, don’t forget Louie, even if he doesn’t work here. And while you’re at it, you’d better put Russell down for his whole salary,” I said. “The guys upstairs are forgetting what he looks like.”
“Is that so?” La Verne said sarcastically. “Well, someone else had better forget what he looks like, too. Some dames never know when a guy is fed up.”
I would never have mentioned Russell’s name if I had seen Dolly Baxter standing in the doorway. She was still jealous of him, even though they had sort of split up. The first week La Verne was in the theater she had marked him as her “next.” During the weeks following, she had dropped hints that they were splitting their room rent.
Up to now Dolly had ignored them, but tonight there was a tenseness to her mouth and bluish splotches on her cheeks that made me nervous.
I said, “Er—I was just joking with La Verne about how much money we can get out of upstairs for the …”
“Yeah. I caught the end of it.” Except for those two splotches, Dolly’s face was ashen. She had just finished her number and the skirt of her costume was thrown over her shoulders. Crisp, pinkish hair fell over her puffy eyes and her body paint was streaked with sweat. She was known as “Dynamic Dolly” because she worked so hard and fast, with bumps and grinds that shook the second balcony.
There was something pathetic about her as she unpinned a grouch bag from her G string and took out a five-dollar bill. “I’ll put up the money for Rus,” she said, glaring at La Verne. “I’ve sorta got the habit.”
“Good thing you have, girlie,” drawled La Verne. “You sure couldn’t hold a guy unless you did pay up.”
Dolly moved so fast that we couldn’t have stopped her if we’d wanted to. All I could see was her arm flashing through the air, the dull gleam of a nail file, then a streak of blood on La Verne’s shoulder.
“You baby-faced bitch! I’ll mash you to a pulp!”
Gee Gee and I grabbed her, pulling her toward the hall.
La Verne slumped over the make-up shelf, the blood dripping into a powder box. A photograph of a woman, posed like the Saint Cecilia painting, even to the veil and the roses falling on the organ, smiled up at her. La Verne directed her remark to it.
“She tried to disfigure me,” she whimpered. “She’s always been jealous of my beauty. Oh, my face, my face.”
If it had been anyone else but La Verne, it might have made a touching picture. We all knew the picture was her mother, who had died when La Verne was born. La Verne never let the photo out of her hands. When she left the theater at night she took it with her and brought it back the next day.
The picture wasn’t the only memento she carried around. Aside from her bankbook which was her Bible and Koran rolled into one, she had her mother’s gallstones preserved in alcohol and they were on the shelf, too. At first the gallstones made me a little sick. Later I pretended they were marbles and let it go at that.
This wasn’t the first time La Verne had talked to the picture, either. Whenever she was tight, she had long, intimate conversations with it. She wasn’t the type for sentimentality, but maybe she was sincere about this one thing. I don’t know. I do know that it got pretty tiresome at times and this was
one of the times.
Dolly was struggling to get free and shouting so loudly that even Stachi, the doorman, was alarmed enough to join the crowd at the door. Most of the stagehands were in the group and I asked one of them to help me hold Dolly. Gee Gee had to go down to do her number so we were short of hands.
“Jealous of her beauty,” Dolly shouted. “Who in hell would be jealous of a sewer-mouth son of a bitch like her?”
A couple of men grabbed Dolly, but then we had La Verne to handle. She had jumped up from her chair and was making a dive for Dolly.
“It’s only an expression,” I kept saying. “She doesn’t mean that your mother was …”
La Verne winced with pain as I touched her shoulder. She dropped weakly into her chair. Sandra, one of the strippers, handed me Gee Gee’s bottle of gin.
“Here. Clean it with this,” she said. “It’s alcohol. You know, like they use in hospitals.”
When I poured on the gin, La Verne’s screams were partly for the sting, but mostly to keep the center of the stage for herself. Dolly was getting altogether too much attention from the men who were trying to restrain her from rushing back into the room.
“Dirty hypocrite!” Dolly yelled. “Carrying her mother’s picture around all the time. You don’t see any sign of a father, do you?”
One of the men put his hand over her mouth but it was too late. They started dragging her upstairs, urging her to have a drink and forget it.
Her voice, hoarse with anger, came through the ventilator. “She’s a whore and her mother was a whore.”
I quickly stuffed a towel in the pipe, but within a few seconds that wasn’t necessary. The stagehands were setting the “Under the Sea” ballet and the show was going on as usual.
La Verne stopped sobbing, but she was going into another number: the tragic queen, Mary of the Scots, and a little Joan of Arc thrown in for good measure.
“Thank God, Mother, I still have my voice.”
“Yes, and you still have your fatal beauty.” I was too bored with her to spare her feelings. My voice was cold. “This is only a scratch. Anyway, you had it coming to you. If you don’t stop tormenting Dolly, she really will get you one of these days.”