American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (14 page)

Gordon tried to break Rose of her bad habits as well, insisting that
she stop
chewing the animals’ food before feeding it to them. Impossible, Rose countered. How else could her darling pup Mumshay eat, since all of her teeth were gone? Gordon sighed and gave up, but Rose must start taking better care of Louise and June. Their usual breakfast of rolls and coffee was forbidden—“
It’s a wonder their stomachs aren’t ruined,” Gordon scolded—although Rose still sneaked them each a mug if he stepped out. Their teeth, however, were practically beyond repair. “
The toothbrush,” June said, “was something we had never considered.” While trouping in Milwaukee, Gordon made appointments with a dentist. “
Why, they are only little kids, Rose,” Big Lady protested from Seattle when she heard the news. “That man has them brushing the enamel off their teeth twice a day just like they were sick or something.”

For once a man prevailed against the Hovick clan. June nearly had to be knocked out in order to have eleven cavities filled. Louise had just as many cavities, two fanglike incisors pushing through her top gums, and a severe case of
trench mouth. The doctor removed and replaced the offending incisors and instructed Rose to swab her mouth with iodine every day. But the problem persisted, and Louise grew more self-conscious, memorizing the angle of each wayward tooth, noticing a slight lisp that sounded, to her ears, as forceful as a crashing wave. In photos from that era she smiles with her mouth closed, lips gripped and upturned tightly, as if holding hostage a secret not ready to be told.

L
ouise and June met vaudeville’s characters and learned its rules. They recorded everything, taking mental snapshots and filing them away. Certain memories resonated only later. The kindly stagehands who acted like uncles hung pictures of Klan rallies and lynchings backstage. One of them hoisted June on his lap and presented her with
a gold pendant etched with the letters “KKK”—an image that “chilled” her, though she didn’t yet understand why. The sisters noticed that the colored and foreign vaudevillians disappeared after the shows, heading to their own
“special” bars and restaurants and hotels. They heard the colored artists talk about a separate vaudeville circuit, as well, an organization known formally as the Theater Owners Booking Association and informally as “
Tough on Black Asses.”

Dainty June and Co., top billing on the vaudeville circuit.
(photo credit 12.1)

They encountered the strangest hotel mates along each of their stops: the man who sold leeches as a cure for black eyes; a brash, redheaded hooker and her pimp; a man who carried tiny dead babies in glass bottles. “Look at the umbilical cord hanging on this one,” he boasted.
They met a performer named Gentle Julia, who one day made a bold proclamation neither girl ever forgot: she was pregnant and saw no reason to tell anyone who the father was, not even the father himself. They learned that proud and true vaudevillians turned to déclassé burlesque only if bookings on the circuit were scarce. And it came to them, piece by broken piece, that they would never be normal, everyday people, and that they had lost their childhoods while they were still children.

The act had steady offers now, just as Gordon had promised, including a
booking in Buffalo for $750 per week, about $32,000 today. Rose clutched the contract to her chest and wept. It was unclear whether she was moved by the astonishing sum of money, or the shock that a man had finally kept his word to her. From now on, Gordon said, they would ride to the theaters in taxicabs instead of streetcars. And instead of just one hotel room, they would rent a suite. Still, Rose haggled over prices, once arguing with a hotel manager for an hour when the bill was $7 more than expected. “It’s not the principle of the thing,” she explained. “It’s the money.”

Rose vowed to follow each rule of the contract (
no profane language, no intoxication, no impromptu lines or jests interpolated into the dialogue) and began packing the props and costumes and animals, an ever-growing and ever-shifting menagerie that included, at one time or another, Mumshay, her favorite dog, June’s beloved NeeNee, Bootsie the poodle, guinea pigs, rabbits, chameleons, white mice, rats, turtles, a poisonous horned toad, a goose, a lamb, and Louise’s monkey, Gigolo, who kept constant vigil on her shoulder, turning heads wherever she went.

The guinea pigs and rats slept in dressing room drawers or in the girls’ pockets, leaving them wet and filled with droppings—
“licorice
buttons,” Rose called them. When a pet died on the circuit, Louise and June insisted on great pomp and ceremony, and tiny makeshift graves were scattered across the country.
Mumshay was one of the more spectacular casualties, squashed in the crevice of a folding bed in Syracuse, and June’s elderly guinea pig,
Samba, perished after a nightlong threesome with a magician’s lady pigs. (June cried for hours, and Rose pressed cold towels onto her eyes to reduce the swelling before her performance.) The animals, more than anything else, gave Louise, June, and the boys a sense that every budget hotel and cramped train car was home, even if windows never offered the same view twice.

Most of their fellow vaudevillians loved Louise and June and the boys, but there were exceptions. Some of the other kiddie acts grew suspicious when, seemingly out of nowhere, things began to go wrong: props were destroyed, wigs and wardrobes disappeared, the sheet music got lost. Rose expressed sympathy and joined in the search, and occasionally found the missing item—always too late. “They shouldn’t have left the things lying around so carelessly,” she’d scold. One performer known as “The Darling Devina—Female Adonis” warned others not to breathe too deeply when passing by their room and called Louise and June “
imitation children.” Another played on the same bill with them several times and insisted that Dainty June was a midget, since no actual child could dance that well. Rose took a particular dislike to her, and conferred with her daughters over coffee.

“
She needs a lesson,” she said. “A good scare, that’s what she needs.”

“She’s mean,” Louise said. “I don’t think you ought to tackle someone so mean.”

Mother smiled, and she spoke her next words in a blunt whisper. “Tackle? Oh, no … I’ll write a letter she won’t forget. I’ll say, ‘Someone is following you, and within two weeks your body will be found floating in the river.’ ”

L
ouise was the only child who’d spent any time, no matter how brief, in a formal classroom, but Rose believed the circuit taught everything they—and she—needed to know. Consistency was the key to success in
vaudeville, polishing an act until it became the prettiest, shiniest version of itself. Consider how many times
Chaz Chase, the “Eater of Strange Things,” consumed lit matches in order to make the trick appear effortless, or the practice schedule of
Hadji Ali, the master regurgitator, famous for swallowing a gallon of water followed by a pint of kerosene. After his assistant set up a small metal castle a few feet away, Hadji Ali spat the kerosene in a six-foot stream and set the structure ablaze. He then opened his throat and, with the aim and velocity of a fire hose, purged the water and killed every flame.

These sorts of acts dominated the circuit, vaudevillians possessed of talents invented rather than innate. The man who guzzled hot molten lava and belched up coins, the man who swallowed a goldfish and a baby shark and asked the audience which should reappear first, the man who lit gunpowder on his tongue, the man who discovered that his sneeze made audiences laugh and worked it into his routine, honing, over the course of a year, the mechanics of twitching his nostrils and cranking his jaw, the exaggerated intake of breath and sputtering of lips. A performer called “
The Human Fish” ate a banana, played a trombone, and read a newspaper while submerged in a tank of water. Another had
a “cat piano,” an act featuring live cats in wire cages that meowed Gregorio Allegri’s
Miserere
when their tails were pulled (in reality the performer yanked on artificial tails and did all the meowing himself). Alonzo the Miracle Man lit and smoked a cigarette, brushed his teeth and combed his hair, and buttoned his shirt—miracles since he had been born without arms. Louise and June were particularly fond of
Lady Alice, an old dowager who wore elegant beaded gowns and performed with rats. The runt settled on the crown of her head, a miniature kazoo clenched between teeth like grains of rice. He breathed a tuneless harmony while the rest of the litter began a slow parade across Lady Alice’s outstretched arms, marching from the tip of one middle finger to the other. The girls never understood how Lady Alice controlled the rodents—their own animals weren’t quite so obedient—until one day she revealed her secret: a trail of Cream of Wheat slathered on her neck and shoulders.

Vaudevillians called these signature bits “
insurance,” gimmicks they kept tucked away in their repertoire, always close at hand if a new routine
failed. (Fred Astaire once learned this lesson the hard way, when he was replaced by a dog act.) Child performers were considered the surest bet of all; “
kids,” June said, “were an automatic gimmick.” Her mother sifted through identities for the Baby and added layers to her history, each more impressive and fantastic than the last. Once again Rose renamed the act, settling on “Dainty June and Her Newsboy Songsters.” They were playing the big time now, the Orpheum Circuit.
It meant something when Martin Beck, the Orpheum’s manager, believed in an act; he had discovered Houdini and booked the phenomenal
Sarah Bernhardt at the New York Palace for $7,000 per week. No more lodge halls or the indignity of decay, the frayed traditions of worn plush and peeling sequins, the old piano just barely in tune.

June was now the “
sophisticated little miss” of the Orpheum Circuit, dubbed “
Pavlova’s Own” by the famous diva herself, at least according to Rose; an “infant prodigy”; both “the greatest of all juvenile screen notables” and star of “
the greatest juvenile musical comedy on the American stage.” One columnist—aided, perhaps, by suggestions from Rose—could barely contain his exuberance. “
I have seen and talked with the Eighth Wonder of the World! She is a tiny creature, weighing about 75 pounds when all dolled up.” Three nuns went blind sewing her $1,000 dress, which blinked with the brilliance of a million rhinestones. When she wasn’t dazzling audiences with her preternatural talent,
Dainty June dabbled in politics, advocating on behalf of a proposed bill that would raise wages for postal workers. Carrying the bill to every stop on the Orpheum Circuit, she vowed to collect enough signatures to present the petition to Speaker of the House Frederick Gillett.
Dainty June and Her Newsboy Songsters would soon set sail on the SS
Olympic
and tour abroad in England, France, Belgium, South Africa, and Australia. When the time came, Rose would know exactly how to doctor the passport applications.

She encouraged Gordon to contribute to June’s persona, as well. “
She is the most tender-hearted child you ever saw,” he said. “It distresses her to see anything suffer.” Sometimes June spoke for herself. “
I love everybody,” she announced, and the papers assumed she meant her mother most of all, who “taught her virtually everything she knows.” Dainty June, in fact, had become such a hot commodity that
she needed
a patent: “DAINTY JUNE (Hovick), The Darling of Vaudeville, Reg. U.S. Patent Office.” Even the pronouncement of the patent became part of June’s official persona.