American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (20 page)

Now there, Rose said. The Baby had never let anything stop her before, and she wouldn’t now, would she? Not when she knew how Mother and Louise and the boys and Big Lady and Aunt Belle and Grandpa depended on her?

June stared at her, quiet and rigidly still. She willed her mouth to pry itself open, then had no energy left to give it words.

“
Go and do it,” Rose said, “and we’ll talk about it later.”

I
t occurred to Louise that her sister was losing herself, in quick but agonizing stages. First the death of Samba, her cherished guinea pig. Then closing her contract on the Orpheum Circuit, with no guarantee she’d ever make it back, and losing the only chance she might ever have to study acting. And now this, her body turning on her just when she—and Mother—needed it most.

Louise grew more conscious of her own problems, as well. She was
fourteen now and 165 pounds, not yet tall enough for the weight to settle evenly around her frame. No bust or waist to speak of, just thighs and a bottom that appeared larger every time she looked. She studied her legs, pinched at the loose skin. Fanny Brice had told her it was nothing personal, but she was taking Louise’s scene out of the show and wouldn’t need her again. “
Don’t feel bad about it,” Fanny said. “It was too much to ask of a kid your age, with no experience.” Louise thanked her for the opportunity, returned that gorgeous orange Creamsicle of a dress, and pulled on her old long underwear with the baggy knees. Now, with this body, she feared she would never again have the stage all to herself.

Louise, around age fourteen.
(photo credit 16.1)

She blamed this development entirely on their vaudeville act; her body changed because nothing else had. June was no longer a baby or even dainty, and Louise was no longer a demure Doll Girl or a tomboy Bowery Tough. Turnover was so fast that they now rehearsed in the wings, and the Newsboy Songsters who remained barely fit into their costumes. Yet, night after night, they performed the same old routines. They dressed up like rough Tenderloin kids and “shook the bones,” cavorted with Susie the Dancing Cow, and encircled June during the big finale, all of them pointing down at her as if depending on their star to do something.

Louise knew her sister sensed the expectation. June drew all of her strength and “
nutrition,” as she called it, from the boys in the act and
her audience, and she was too much of a pro to let either of them down.

True, the crowds had thinned a bit. Lately the applause merely crackled instead of thundered, and even the most prestigious theaters had clusters of empty seats. Panic seized managers and booking agents across the country.
No fewer than 540 broadcasting stations now provided Americans with entertainment inside their homes,
playing the scores of the same shows currently in production throughout the country. “
There is no more important question before the theatre than the radio,” declared the president of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers during an emergency meeting in New York. “I want to warn all present against the peril of ridiculing or underestimating its effect on the theatre.” Vaudeville impresario
E. F. Albee went so far as to forbid his acts from appearing on radio, or from even mentioning radio onstage unless the remarks were scathing.

Advances in the film industry were no less troubling. The ten-minute short “flickers” that had once rounded out a vaudeville bill were now the main attraction, and, one by one,
old-time vaudeville houses succumbed to the enemy. In 1921, a quarter of the theaters that had played both films and vaudeville dropped the vaudeville shows, and by 1925 only a hundred “straight,” no-flicker theaters remained. Dozens of talented vaudevillians followed Charlie Chaplin’s lead and made forays into film: W. C. Fields, Buster Keaton, Will Rogers, Harry Houdini, Rudolph Valentino.

The “film peril,” as theater managers called it, delivered another blow to vaudeville with Warner Bros.’
introduction of Vitaphone, a device that synced sound recording with films. The following year, in 1927, the studio released
The Jazz Singer
, the first feature-length “talkie,” starring erstwhile vaudevillian Al Jolson. Though
only five hundred theaters nationwide were wired for sound, it was the best-selling film of the year, and other major singers and comedians signed on for talkies.

Members of the American Federation of Musicians amassed a
$1.5 million “defense fund” to prevent the installation of Vitaphone in more than a thousand additional theaters. Their concern, shared by other artists’ agencies, was as cultural as it was mercenary. If this modern technology were implemented nationwide, wouldn’t the American theater
and musical traditions stagnate and die? A change in public taste was one thing, they argued; purposeful, absolute lack of choice was quite another.

Still, for now, the century-old art form of vaudeville—“
that big boisterous American wench,” as one critic put it—limped along. People continued to pay 50 cents to see vaudeville acts of every provenance and scope, including Jean Boydell, the “
Unique Pepologist,” Nancy Decker, “
The Joy Girl of Syncopation,” and, of course, Dainty June and Her Newsboy Songsters, a “
festival of splendor, fun, music, and dance.” June was a trouper in every sense of the word, and Louise sensed that she would make a move at the last possible moment, only when she had to—when her performance ceased to please herself or, consequently, her audience, and when Mother was looking the other way.

Rose, too, noticed a change in June after her breakdown. She was at a loss to explain this newly defiant, sulking child who no longer appreciated her gift or the mother who so tirelessly developed it. Louise was old enough to distinguish fear from anger, and terror was Rose’s latest and most severe affliction. It weighted her gait like the grouch bag once did, marched with glum purpose behind her eyes. Mother behaved the only way she knew how when she felt threatened: she stomped and yelled and made a horrific scene. One snide word or seething silence and she would raise her hand to June, striking that face, that cherubic, aging face that could no longer rely on its own practiced expressions. Whether she meant to or not, Louise watched her mother carefully, and learned.

“Malcontent
!” Rose yelled at June one night. “After all I’ve gone through for you!” She began to cry, her slight shoulders shaking. “Ungrateful, selfish—oh, God. You were put on earth to make my life a misery.”

Louise rushed to Rose, took her in her arms. She held a handkerchief to her mother’s nose. They switched roles often now, a seamless transition both ways.

“June, it’s bad enough everything’s so rotten,” Mother continued, weeping. “Why must you be a … a … Bolshevik!” She broke free from Louise’s grip and moved forward, cornering her younger daughter. “Undermining the army, challenging the rules!”

June thrust back her shoulders, lifted her chin. Louise saw the words rise inside her sister. A vicious, furtive part of her—the part that once
made her bite June’s favorite stagehand, the part that yearned to be closest to Mother—hoped to God June said them.

She did.

“Yes!” June screamed. “Yes I am!”

That was it. Mother was turned wholly inside out; no sweet traces or soft instincts remained. She raised her fist like a scepter and lowered it like a gavel, connecting with June’s mouth. Louise watched her sister spin—graceful even under the circumstances—careening and landing facedown on the carpet. She spat into cupped hands, and her fingers were slick with blood. Crimson bubbles swelled and popped at her lips.

It was the worst blow yet.

Louise braced herself as Mother took another step, but she kept her hand by her side. “Look at yourself,” Rose said, dicing her words. “You’re going to look just fine on that stage, just fine. See what you made me do!”

A streak of blood carved a marionette line down June’s chin. She grabbed the blanket from her cot and crept to the bathroom.

“You’ll see,” Rose yelled at the back of her head. “God will punish you. He’s started already. You’re a failure—a failure. After I’ve spent my whole life on you, too. I can’t book you anywhere anymore.”

Louise curdled with guilt, as if her own mouth had said those hateful words, as if her own hand had split June’s lip. She stroked her mother’s hair and waited until she fell asleep before following her sister. June lay curled up in the tub, her head resting on the drain. When June looked up, Louise pressed a finger against her lips and locked the door behind her.

“Shhh,” she said. “Mother’s asleep. She is exhausted, June. These fights are getting worse and she can’t stand it.”

She was referring, also, to Mother and Gordon. Louise still didn’t trust him, but she marveled at his patience and restraint. When Mother stole from other acts and from hotels, Gordon said nothing. When Mother piled their laundry for him to wash, he hunched over the bathtub and scrubbed each garment without complaint. Their fights were
frequent but one-sided. “
The kids aren’t babies any longer,” he said recently. “June can’t get by with what she used to get by with—”

Mother lunged at him and rapped at his chest with her fists.

“Shut up!” she said. “She’ll always be a baby. She’ll never grow up. Never, do you hear me?” He stood there and took it, using his forearms as a shield while her nails tore at his skin. Sometimes he disappeared after these episodes, just long enough for Mother and June to miss him. Louise wondered what they would do if one day he didn’t come back.

“
What fights?” June said, bringing her back to the moment. “She just slugs me. It’s always one slug and out. That’s no fight.”

Louise considered her next words, weighing what they might give and what they might take, and the fact that she couldn’t empathize with June without betraying Mother.

“I know how you feel,” she said, finally. “About the act, I mean.”

“You do?” June said. Her mouth widened, cracking the line of drying blood. “But you don’t have to do the act—you never have.”

Louise sighed. As if she needed to be reminded she wasn’t necessary.

“That’s right,” she said. “All that sweating, practicing every minute. I’ve watched you enjoying your broken toes and scratches. Dancing so hard you black out in the wings. No, you do the act because you enjoy all that. I never have and what happens? You don’t enjoy the act any more than I do now. Do you? So, we sit here in the same bathroom with the same problem.”

The sisters regarded each other for a long, silent moment. This was the first confidence they had ever shared.

L
ouise consulted her tea leaves. Peering into the cup, letting all other objects around her recede,
a vision appeared that she couldn’t unsee. A steel beam, like a willful, deliberate streak of lightning, shot from the back of a truck and aimed straight at someone she knew, a former Newsboy Songster traveling in the next car. It pierced him, sheering his tendons and veins, severing his head from his neck. Three days later, through the vaudeville circuit grapevine, she learned the boy had been
in a fatal accident, so similar to her premonition it was as if she’d choreographed the death herself.