American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (41 page)

Gypsy saw bits of herself, too, in the new mayor, the way he was an outsider in his chosen world: five feet two; disproportionately corpulent; sartorially inept; a mouth that spat words at a frenetic, machine-gun pace; a singular, strangely falsetto voice that, in moments of rage, climbed the scales and slid into a prehistoric screech. One of his own advisers dismissed him as “
Half Wop, Half American, Half Republican.” La Guardia was intent on reinventing not himself but the city that had made her, and he was well aware of Gypsy’s place in it. He insulted her, comparing her unfavorably to an opera singer, boasting that the new airport under construction in Queens “
will be to Newark as Kirsten Flagstad is to Gypsy Rose Lee.” He made quips about her need to “take her clothes off,” to which she had a fast retort: Why, Mr. Mayor, she said, “
you know I’d never end a sentence with a preposition.” At a roast in City Hall, he even dressed like Gypsy, donning a slinky gown and cape, calling himself “
Gypsy Rose Lee Guardia.” She was safe enough to satirize, but her industry was a menace to New York; burlesque, La Guardia declared, was “
incorporated filth.”

So Gypsy left burlesque again while she still could, this time at the behest of another Broadway showman, Billy Rose, then-husband of Fanny Brice, her childhood idol. He needed an emcee for his nightclub on 54th Street, the Casino de Paree, which he described as “
the usual 50 showgirls in 49 costumes.” She lasted only two months and blamed her dismissal on the night she flubbed her lines, unnerved by Fanny’s presence in the audience.
Would Fanny recognize me?
Gypsy wondered.
Would she even remember me?
And then she opened her mouth and said, “
And now in Jimmy Savo’s opinion, the world’s greatest pantomimist, Jimmy Savo,” when she meant to say “in Charlie Chaplin’s opinion.” “
Get your money,” Billy Rose told her when she returned to the wings. “You’re through.”

That was that, and once again she returned to burlesque, but not to any house run by the Minskys. She was now the featured performer at their greatest competitor, the Irving Place Theatre, located in Union Square and known (to the Minskys’ perpetual ire) as the “Metropolitan Opera of Burlesque.” She knew that the owners were, one might say, “
connected,” and that they paid her highest salary to date, $1,000 a week, and that they’d let her take off for important openings and parties anytime she pleased. Herbert and Morton hated to see her go, but they seemed to understand. Gypsy emphasized it was her, not them. She had to leave the ones who made her what she was in order to become what she was meant to be. It wasn’t personal. Then again, she now understood that not much about her was.

B
y now the apple was bitten down to the core, and with a grand flourish she tossed it to a man leaning over the railing in the lower box. He lunged for the fruit and fell directly into the orchestra pit. A hushed silence, and then laughter and applause as he sprang up and waved the core in the air, triumphant. Turning to the rest of the audience, she vowed to keep searching for her Adam. And yet she had a confession to make, if this wonderful, darling crowd would be kind enough to listen: what she
really
wanted to do, her dream of dreams, was to perform in the
Follies
. Could a lowly stripteaser, one who’d always been
snubbed by the “café girls,” be so chosen? If one were mortified by the Minskys, could she be glorified by Ziegfeld?

She continued her soliloquy, at once articulating and ridiculing her ambition, and the orchestra launched into a chorus of “Lullaby of the Leaves.” Time to unpin her leaves, one by one, toss them to the audience, slip back behind the curtain, wait for them to roar her name. They never let her down. Peeking out, she protested, “
Darlings, please don’t ask me to take off any more. I’ll catch cold. No, please, I’m embarrassed. No, honestly, I can’t. I’m almost shivering now,” smiling so they could see every one of her hard-earned teeth. In the end she yielded, as she always did, emerging long enough to unpin the three last, vital leaves, her final figments of control. For one eternal second she stood wholly exposed, without even a layer of innuendo for cover, and then the lights snuffed out, blanketing her.

Once again she stepped out of sight, truly shivering now, needing a brandy, craving a cigarette, feeling her ulcer flare like a lit match, and she puzzled at the moment the mood changed, that subtle, nearly imperceptible shift: did the crowd turn on her, or she on it? Not this night in particular but
every
night, all of those gilded faces melding into one seething mass, a rutting animal so deftly biding its time. All of them—
it
—expected something she was disappointed they wanted, her disappointment compounded by the fact that she had nothing left to give.

A
t long last she knew who Gypsy Rose Lee was. She had found someone to assemble her final pieces with calculated care, her whole more polished than each individual part. His name was
Edwin Bruns, “Eddy,” she called him. He was the youngest member of the New York Stock Exchange and an active participant in the Friars Club, and he would never be seen at one of those backroom “circus parties.” Nine years earlier, in 1925, he had married a Miss Margaret Offerman of Brooklyn in the Italian Garden of the Ambassador Hotel, a venue so prestigious and posh it seemed more suited to Monte Carlo than Atlantic City. One journalist investigated his illicit romance with Gypsy to no avail, concluding that Eddy was a “
mythical admirer from New Jersey, with a great deal of money, whose identity no one on Broadway really knows.” Gypsy, wanting to keep his cover, offered a cryptic explanation:
“He’s so
darned handsome,” she said, “that I have to keep him under cover so no one else will go for him.” Worth $2 million,
he promised to take care of Gypsy so she’d never have to worry about money again, if that were even possible.

Eddy came to matinees only, so as not to arouse the suspicions of his wife, and taught Gypsy where and how to be seen. It wasn’t enough to attend the premiere of
Jumbo
,
Billy Rose’s gaudy circus spectacle at the Hippodrome, or the opening night of the Met. She had to be even more fantastic than the shows, dressed in a floor-length cape made entirely of orchids. At just the right moment she emerged from a limousine and let the cameras douse her with light—“
ignoring the others,” she noted later, “wearing the same old things.” The gossip columnists applauded her ingenuity:

“
Among the death watch at first nights recently,” wrote O. O. McIntyre in the
Journal-American
,

One critic, though, dubbed her “
the hillbilly’s Juliet,” which only proved the past still kept too quick a pace behind her.

S
he was someone who had learned her mother’s most useful lessons. A thing worth having was a thing worth stealing, and if you were crafty enough the original owner would believe it should have been yours all along. Such was the case when Eddy escorted her one night to the
Savoy Plaza, the grand Art Deco hotel that lorded over the midtown entrance to Central Park. There in the Café Lounge, Dwight Fiske, an openly gay member of the now-defunct Algonquin Round Table, presided over a piano and talk-sang his salacious ditties.

Gypsy became a regular, sitting at a table by the stage, chain-smoking as she jotted down the lyrics to her favorite songs: “Mrs. Pettibone,” which recounted three failed marriages; “Anthony and Cleopatra” (Gypsy especially appreciated the heroine’s motto, “
Keep them waiting, and they always weaken in the end”); and “Ida, the Wayward Sturgeon,” the tale of an adulterous love affair, as told by a fish. From then on, every time she performed one of those songs at Irving Place, dressed in girlish petticoats and bows, Dwight Fiske himself sat in the front row, thinking that no one but Gypsy Rose Lee could have made his jokes her own.

S
he was someone who finally lived alone. No more huddling under the sheets with Mother, burying secrets in the safety of the dark, secrets that belonged to Louise Hovick only. She didn’t even want Rose to visit her at
81 Irving Place in Gramercy Park, a distinguished brown brick building where gargoyles perched on Romanesque archways and she never had to open her own front door.

She decorated the apartment herself, with just the slightest assistance from the antique dealers on Third Avenue. It was an ebullient mix of periods and styles: blackamoors guarding the front door; a Chippendale sofa; a few chairs covered with her own needlework; Victorian settees upholstered in a muted salmon; crimson satin draperies held back by brass angels in flight. Metal and plaster cherubs kept watch in every corner, and on the walls she hung a smattering of Charles Dana Gibson plates, a collage of her programs and press clippings, a series of Marcel Vertes watercolors (including several portraits of herself), a white elephant from Florenz Ziegfeld, and a hodgepodge of Victorian tattoo designs, all elaborately framed with colored velvet mattings and a wreath of gold leaf. Each piece could prompt a conversation—whether or not nudity was innocent or risqué, whether tattooed skin was naked or concealed, whether societal notions of such matters had advanced or stagnated or regressed. Nothing matched, but it was hers. It was
her
.

To attend to her every need, Gypsy hired a cook and maid,
Eva Morcur, another of Eddy’s brilliant ideas.
Every star had one, he told her, and she needed to start behaving as such. A former singer for the Cotton Club in Harlem, Eva too craved publicity and knew how to get it, waiting until the cameras were poised before draping Gypsy with her silk robe. On Friday nights Gypsy threw exclusive soirees, her invitations coveted by those on the social register (including the aforementioned Squimpfenhuppels as well as the
Otis Chatfield-Taylors), artists, writers, and gangsters alike. Eva fretted over every detail, preparing several
courses of comfort food—roast beef and liver smothered in gravy, platters of vegetables, boiled potatoes, homemade chocolate cake—while Gypsy ran about in a frenzy, wearing nothing but a sheer negligee, three-inch fingernails, and $25,000 worth of jewelry, soon to be stolen during a holdup in her apartment vestibule by six men who apologized and told her, “
We’re broke or we wouldn’t do this, Gyps.” She tried to swallow her pear-shaped diamond ring, but one of the thugs punched her so hard she spat out the diamond and
loosened a few of her Waxey Gordon-sponsored teeth, as well. She instantly recognized the thugs—old acquaintances from her underworld days—and knew better than to say a word.

After the guests arrived and collected flutes of champagne, the talk turned to art and books and theater and, inevitably, to Gypsy Rose Lee herself. What did she think about
Strip Girl
, the show on Broadway that told the story of a burlesque dancer? Was it based on her life? “
I consider that show an insult,” Gypsy replied, “not only to me but to the many stars who have been in burlesque. The author should have his eyes opened and his mind washed.” Did everyone hear that Mae West called her “Lady Peel”? Gypsy’s retort: “
Mae West,” she said, “is the weakest link in the Vassar daisy chain.” When another actress, Carole Landis, criticized “leg art,” an informal term for burlesque, Gypsy feigned offense. “Leg art requires no protection from Miss Landis,” she purred. “I am sure no one will mind if she does
Salome
in long underwear and a fire helmet.” When Yale boys informed Gypsy she placed second to Ann Sheridan in a campus popularity poll, they asked for her opinion of the actress. “
I think he was a swell general,” she said sweetly.

Did everyone see her picture with the Princeton football team,
where her position was given as “
Right End”? How clever she is,
seasoning her conversation with French
—comment beau, comment special, comment futé
—and to think she had so little formal education. Did they hear Gypsy once attended a publishing party with playwright and publisher John Farrar? She took charge of every conversation, tossing off casual references to Shakespeare and Karl Marx, to Dorothy Parker’s
Death and Taxes
and Damon Runyon’s
Guys and Dolls
, to the recent autobiographies published by Emma Goldman and Lincoln Steffens. Isn’t it darling when she tilts her head self-consciously and inquires, “
Whither the New Negro?” Have they heard that Gypsy is a drug addict? A lesbian? A damn good female impersonator? Aren’t her stories about her mother hilarious—bilking all those lodge men, stealing blankets and wigs and entire sketches, shooting at her sister’s boyfriend, threatening the late, great Billy Minsky?