American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (22 page)

T
hey continued on their tenuous, makeshift circuit, each theater shabbier than the last,
one-night stands in Buffalo, Sedalia, North Platte, Toledo, Trenton, and Appleton, Wisconsin. At the Folies Bergère on Atlantic City’s boardwalk they were fifth on the bill, below both the
Three Ormonde Sisters (tagline: “A Wee Drop of Scotch of the ‘Grab Bag Show’ ”), and
Evelyn Nesbit, the former Manhattan ingenue—now, at age forty-three, eight years older than Rose. Even Bingo, Bank Night, and Dish Night had higher billing. They had long layoffs in between when the grouch bag got even lighter, the boys angrier, and June more distant and cagey. Rose, perhaps wishing for a self-fulfilling prophecy, decided to change the act’s name for a gig in Albuquerque, New Mexico: “
Dainty June and the Happy Gang Revue” performed at the Kimo Theater.

Rose feigned a positive attitude, insisting that God was watching over their little act, that He wouldn’t “
knock vaudeville out from under us.” But Louise knew her mother better than anyone; she alone could follow the seismic shift of her moods, the weather-vane spin of her thoughts. Improbable as it seemed, she was now nearly Mother’s age when she’d escaped from the convent so long ago, when Rose first learned the importance of timing: when to latch onto someone and when to let go; when to beg and when to threaten; when to yield and when to take charge; when there was no choice left but to disappear. Louise might not sing or dance as well as June but she had inherited Mother’s gifts of timing and tenacity, the ability to walk into a picture just as the shutter clicked and smile until the flash went dim. Rose was falling and Louise would rise to meet her halfway, accept a permanent exchange of innocence for control. It was a matter of both necessity and choice. She wanted to become her mother’s equal, her other, willing half, as much as she had to.

Louise tried on her new role slowly, an inch at a time, since this was one costume she could never take off. When they were out in public,
she looped her arm through Rose’s and whooped and hollered so loudly that June slunk away, mortified, to the other side of the street. Mother loved the attention, and Louise would deliver it to her. When the two girls ran into Gordon by chance in New York City, June jumped into his arms while Louise regarded him, warily, from a distance. “
Mother will be so glad to see you,” June said, breathing into his neck, forgetting, for the moment, that she was now fifteen years old. “She thinks you’re dead.” Gordon set her down and stepped away. “I never want to see her again,” he said. “Never, do you hear me?” June hid her face in her hands and wept, but Louise was thinking of Mother. She decided that Rose should never know the truth. And if any man ever professed his love for her, she would recognize the words as lies.

When Mother finally lost it, when she did the worst thing she’d ever done in her life—so far, at least—Louise willed herself to understand. These were desperate times, their entire world creeping away from them, and Louise had to wonder how she would have reacted in the same situation, if she were the oldest, the mother, the one ostensibly in charge. An unnamed hotel manager in an unnamed city affronted Rose in an unspecified way. He insulted her daughters, or threatened eviction because their room was overrun with boys, or looked at Rose in a way that dredged up every sore moment with Daddy Jack and Daddy Bub and Murray Gordon and the rest she never cared to name. Louise had to ask herself: if she were Mother under these circumstances, would she have stood by passively and withstood yet another indignity? Or would she have allowed her best instincts to meld with her worst, thinking of her daughters, broken and diminished, while she closed her eyes tightly and
pushed that manager out the window?

The why didn’t matter after the fact, only that the police accepted Rose’s alibi of self-defense, and that the murder was never spoken of again. Louise honored this pact even later, when Rose knew all of her secrets and threatened to remember them out loud.

A
nd Louise was there for Rose when the end finally came. On December 28, 1928, after performing at the
Jayhawk Theatre in Topeka, Kansas, Louise heard her mother scream, a fierce, high-pitched keening that sounded vaguely inhuman. A note rested on the windowsill, and Louise saw her sister’s childish scrawl:

Louise let Mother weep into her shoulder and cry for the baby she had once tried to destroy. “
She’s only a baby,” Rose said, over and over. “She’s thirteen, Louise. Thirteen years old! She can’t leave me like this.” Louise didn’t remind her mother of June’s true age or stop her when she reached for her coat. It wouldn’t be Rose without a dramatic denouement, and Louise would be waiting when she returned.

Two detectives arrived, their flashlights sweeping golden streaks across each corner, beneath the gnarled branches of leafless trees. “
She can’t have gone far,” Rose told them, her voice trailing down the street. “She isn’t very bright and won’t know what to do.” Louise pictured her sister hiding in some slim wedge of space, willing herself to be smaller than she was.

Mother never stopped talking. “He’s been in trouble before,” she said. “He’s just a tramp traveling around with burlesque companies. That’s all he’s ever known before—burlesque! My poor baby. Oh, my poor baby! Thank God there are men like you in the world to help a poor widow.”

The officers escorted her to the police station, told her to sit tight. Before long, they returned with Bobby and presented him to Rose. June was nowhere to be found.

“Marriage isn’t the electric chair,” one officer reasoned. “I would like to see you and Bobby shake hands and be friends.”

Bobby took a step toward Rose and extended his hand.
She reached inside her coat and pulled out a small automatic pistol. Ten inches from his chest she fired once, twice. The gun jumped in her hand but no bullet discharged. She hadn’t unhinged the safety lock. The detective
ripped the gun away and locked her inside barrel arms, but she would not be confined. She wrestled free and tackled Bobby, kicking his shins, pounding his head, scratching at his eyes. The entire night staff approached cautiously, as if closing in on a rabid, feral animal, and then it was over. Rose lay flat on her back, the rhythm of her screams ceding gradually, like a tree swing slowing to a stop after a child jumps off.

W
hen Rose returned, Louise was waiting. She took her mother back into her arms and held her upright. “
You’re all I have now, Louise,” Rose whispered, breathing hot against her neck. “Promise me you’ll never leave me. Promise me that, dear.” She gripped Louise’s arms and pulled back far enough to look at her directly. “Say you’ll never leave me! Promise me!”

Louise stared back. They were even, now, shoulder to shoulder, eye to eye.

“No, Mother,” she said. “I can’t promise that.” Rose fell into her arms again, but Louise was already gone—thinking of orange chiffon and ostrich feathers, the sweet refrain of “Me and My Shadow,” the spotlight’s halo encircling her every spin and stride. She thought of June, lost but
free
, and in that moment wanted only to be one step ahead of her.

Gypsy with Mike Todd and George S. Kaufman.
(photo credit 16.3)

The slow descent down those steps finally ends, and in the roomful of spectators she becomes Gypsy Rose Lee again. At the makeshift altar, she jokes about feeling like “
an Aztec virgin being prepared for sacrifice” and cries as the service concludes. “My Gawd
,” Georgia Sothern says, patting her back, “what a performance!”

Gypsy doesn’t smile when she cuts the cake with a knife the length of a machete, and smiles hugely, falsely, when she and her new husband, Bill Kirkland, pose for a photograph with their mothers that will soon appear in
Life
magazine. Gypsy wrenches away from Rose, as if her mother’s skin is painful to the touch, and Rose leans in, resting her chin on Gypsy’s shoulder, closing a hand around her daughter’s neck.

After removing the grapes from her hair, Gypsy dresses in flannel, slathers herself with Vicks VapoRub, and picks up a book, ignoring the champagne and flowers Bill sets by the bed. Ten months later gossip columnist Walter Winchell is the first to break the news. The demise of their relationship makes him so disillusioned, Bill Kirkland claims, that he will “
stay a bachelor forever.” Rose, as always, offers her own unsolicited
opinion. “
Sorry you are having trouble with Bill,” she writes. “It must be your fault.”

Mike Todd is still married to Bertha and seems intent on remaining so, but he never stops teasing Gypsy with his letters: “
I miss you,” he writes, “so don’t marry any actors.” The situation brings to mind her mother’s easy gift for uprooting men, the same way Grandpa Thompson used to weed his garden. Rose’s ruthless instinct lives inside Gypsy, to both her occasional frustration and frequent relief, but with Mike its edges are softened, its sting mild. She has no idea how to unweave him from her life, or even if she wants to.

They are together again, on his terms, and he is producing her play,
The Naked Genius
, titled after the way she signs off letters to her editor. It strikes Gypsy that the saga behind
The Naked Genius
is more compelling than the play itself, what with its plot that manages to be at once semiautobiographical and contrived—yet another instance of her mining her past to ensure she’ll never relive it. A stripper named Gypsy hires a ghostwriter to pen her memoirs, a surprise critical and commercial hit, and she becomes the unlikely toast of New York’s literati. She falls in love with her slick, unavailable press agent and, to spite him, decides to marry her wealthy book publisher, who promises to save her from a lowly life in burlesque.

By now Gypsy is a literary force, a self-fulfilling prophecy she finds both thrilling and ludicrous. Here she is, the author of two novels,
The G-String Murders
and
Mother Finds a Body
(the latter also based on true events), several
New Yorker
articles, and now a Broadway-bound play, her only academic degree a “
Doctor of Strip Teasing” issued by the Minsky brothers. After the successful adaptation of
The G-String Murders
into the movie
Lady of Burlesque
, Hollywood has kept a close eye on her literary efforts. Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright George S. Kaufman signs on to direct the play. Gypsy hopes Mike will give her the lead, but he has someone else in mind: the movie star Joan Blondell.

A marquee name, Gypsy has to admit, and she understands Joan instinctively just as she understands Mike. Their ambitions grow from the same restless place, tick to the same frenzied clock. Joan’s parents trouped the vaudeville circuits she remembers all too well, tucking their daughter into a stage trunk instead of a crib, telling her the road
was education enough. When vaudeville died she turned not to burlesque but to beauty pageants, winning the 1926 Miss Dallas crown under the stage name Rosebud Blondell. Three years later, back to being Joan, she scored her break in the movie
Penny Arcade
and went on to star in twenty-seven films in thirty-six months. She calls herself “
the fizz on the soda,” a nickname that is as fitting offscreen as on. Stories abound about catfights backstage—cursing, hair pulling, choking, head banging, all of it—and
she once bashed a producer with a silver hand mirror. But she has four key things Gypsy lacks: blond ringlets, a large bust, blue eyes that dominate a petite kitten face, and acting talent. Gypsy soothes herself the best way she knows how, by imagining the size of her royalty checks.

Rehearsals begin in August 1943, at the old Maxine Elliott’s Theatre on 39th Street, and at first all of the principals are in good spirits. Joan looks ravishing if somewhat incongruous, like an amorous kewpie doll. Kaufman has doctored the script—it’s
less of a collaboration than Gypsy would have liked, but who is she to argue with the master?—and on paper,
The Naked Genius
works.