American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (44 page)

S
ubtle or not, Gypsy Rose Lee was still the biggest name in the business, and Morton wanted nothing more than for her to return, permanently, to the Minsky fold. But she had moved on, this time for good, to their biggest competitor, the Irving Place Theatre in Union Square. The brothers abhorred the Irving Place, whose owners—unlike the Minskys themselves—were hardly household names, and the infuriating distinction, made by some, that “real” writers (not to be confused with the Minskys’ devoted cadre of critics) preferred 14th Street to Broadway.

And it was at the Irving Place in Union Square that Gypsy
developed an activist conscience to complement her literary airs, walking through throngs of Communist protestors and getting an earful about proper wages and working conditions, all those topics Billy had outlawed during her early days at the Republic. When burlesque performers demanded their own union—how could they implement President Roosevelt’s ideas about fair labor laws without one?—Gypsy got herself named to the executive board. And when, in the fall of 1935, Minsky stagehands, chorus girls, and stripteasers went on strike, it was Gypsy who organized the effort against her former bosses.

“
Gypsy called our theater,” one stripper remembered, “and asked for some pickets. All of us strippers put robes on over our G-strings and paraded outside the theater flashing passersby and shouting, ‘Don’t go in there, boys.’ ”

The Minskys settled that night.

O
ne day, while Morton was sitting in his upstairs office at the Republic, “mulling over the vicissitudes of the burlesque business and the characters in it,” he heard a forceful rapping on his door. He looked up to find his wife Ruth’s Aunt Mae, a proper old dowager married to a renowned astronomy professor. She had an air of hurried concern, and began speaking as soon as she sat across from him.

“
Morton,” she began, “I have a problem you may be able to help me with. One of my good friends is a Mrs. Mizzy. Her son, Bob, has been courting one of the young ladies in your employ—a certain Miss Gypsy Rose Lee. Do you know anything about her?”

Morton rustled some papers and cleared his throat, stealing a moment to compose his reply. He had never seen this Mizzy boy around the theater when Gypsy worked here, nor sneaking backstage to visit her in between shows. Most likely, Mizzy met her at one of her famous and exclusive parties, where preeminent writers and artists and socialites romped about with strippers and a smattering of shady mobsters. He didn’t know anything “really terrible” about Gypsy, just about some of the people and situations she tolerated along her way, the shifting,
dubious nature of the steps that had carried her up. “
If you eliminated Waxey Gordon and his four green-hatted henchmen,” he thought to himself, “and the fact that she showed porno movies in her dressing room and encouraged her monkeys in their obscene antics, and the fact that some of her claims to being a great reader and aficionado of the opera were nonsense, I guess she was okay.” What he did know was this: if this Mizzy boy, whoever he was, had fallen for Gypsy, nothing he could say would talk him out of it.

Aunt Mae rested her face against her slight, elegant hand, a code gesture for growing impatience.

“I can tell you this, Aunt Mae,” he said. “Miss Lee is a very intelligent woman.”

She clasped her hands together now, clearly relieved, and leaned forward. “Oh, Morton! Is she really intelligent? Can I tell Mrs. Mizzy that
she’s
really
intelligent?”

“She’s
really
intelligent, Aunt Mae,” he confirmed. “I assure you.”

A
fter Aunt Mae left, Morton thought about their exchange and about Gypsy, who, through her publicity and her persona and, let’s face it, her mother, had boosted and hindered burlesque in equal measure. A writer named H. M. Alexander, at work on a book about the business, had spent quite a bit of time backstage at the Republic, chatting with slingers and Minsky Rosebuds, noting their habits and probing their backgrounds, and offering his opinion on what had already happened and what was yet to come. “
If the striptease is an indecent performance today,” he wrote, “it was as much so five years ago. Then, however, the owners, limiting their advertising to word of mouth, tried to avoid attention from the reformers. Their attitude was changed by a certain Mrs. Hovick. She was ambitious; she had a daughter; the child’s stage name was Gypsy Rose Lee. When Mrs. Hovick still had to make Gypsy’s costumes herself and cook all their meals on an electric plate, she somehow managed a rented limousine, a chauffeur, a bodyguard … publicity made Gypsy.”

Morton remembered the day, four years ago, that he met Gypsy, and
the way Billy palmed her face inside his small hands, filling them up. He’d had a gift for finding people who could build his dreams, and arranging them, one by one, in the most lovely, efficient way. His editing was equally deft, adjusting and extracting when necessary, whenever a single part threatened to consume the whole. One of the last things Billy did before he died, Morton would never forget, was to hang signs in every Minsky theater, declaring, in bold lettering:

Clearly Gypsy shared that skill with Billy, the ability to collect and assemble and discard people when necessary, including versions of herself, with such a fluid touch it was as if they’d never grazed her life at all. And it occurred to Morton that he, too, shared something with Gypsy: the terrifying responsibility of carrying out someone else’s dreams, and the dank gray fear of what might befall them after you finally make them your own.

The story of Gypsy’s life is a fable before Broadway bills it as such, a myth she wants to sell not only to the public but to herself. Once upon a time there was a girl with many names: Ellen June, Rose Louise, Plug, Hard-boiled Rose, Louise Hovick, and the one she liked best, Gypsy Rose Lee. She would grow up and wear that name as if it were a cape made of orchids, a vision no one had seen before, and try to forget everything she did to make it fit just right.

The story means everything to her, especially since she is no longer living it. On New Year’s Eve 1956, a half hour before she is to go onstage at the Cavern in Fort Lauderdale, her hands begin trembling. She sets her straight pins down on the vanity and forces herself to listen to thoughts that have been circling her mind all year.

She is at the height of her fame, “
the most publicized woman in the world,” in her agent’s words, photographed, painted, and interviewed more than any other, and therein lies the heart of her problem: “
There is,” she concedes, “nothing left for me to show.”
Her entire act now revolves around the idea of passing the mantle, dressing burgeoning burlesque stars and teaching them the proper etiquette of stripteasing.
Younger audiences who never saw burlesque in the 1930s don’t appreciate her satire and parody. She seethes if she doesn’t get top billing. To her embarrassment, she finds herself disparaging Josephine Baker to a nightclub manager, calling the expat entertainer moody and difficult, cataloguing her anti-American statements. She of all people should know better, having been named as a Communist sympathizer on the Red Channels a few years earlier, along with Orson Welles, Dorothy Parker, and Leonard Bernstein. “
Is a performer justified in rapping another performer under these circumstances?” she writes in her journal, and notes she’s broken one of her resolutions:
Speak well of all or not at all.

Sitting in her dressing room in Florida, she decides it’s over. She says it out loud, making it real. “
I’ve had it,” she tells Erik, who has just turned twelve. “I’m forty-two years old. Too old to be taking my clothes off in front of strangers … never again.” She doesn’t even want to consider her more probable age of forty-five. After the curtain falls, she eats twelve grapes at the stroke of midnight, hitches her trailer to the back of the Rolls-Royce, and heads home with her son to New York.

Her usual worries about money amplify. To conserve oil for her furnace, she turns the thermostat off at night and sets it at just 62 degrees during the day. She cancels her newspaper subscriptions, cuts her drunken cleaning lady down to once a week, stops her massages altogether. She frets over the fact that her one-woman show—“A Curious Evening with Gypsy Rose Lee”—is still only a pile of film reel in the corner of her living room. She scolds Erik for asking for new clothes: wasn’t he satisfied with the socks and underwear she bought him a few months ago? And if Harry Truman, as president of the United States, had time to wash his own socks and underwear every night, Erik could certainly do the same. “Good God, Erik
!” she shouts. “Isn’t it obvious? Without the act, I haven’t the faintest idea of how we’re going to survive.” Her sleep is invaded by disconcerting dreams, Freudian and heavy with symbolism. In one, she sits on stage with comedian Jack Paar, opens her mouth to talk, and a long, green mass unfurls from her tongue, twisty and slick as a snake, no end of it in sight.

She always knew she would write a memoir, and now the time has come: Mother is dead and no longer a threat, and Erik sparks her memory
with persistent questions: How old was she when Aunt June ran away? Would Grandma have found a place for him in the act, even though he can’t sing or dance?

“
I couldn’t sing or dance, either,” Gypsy tells her son, “but she found a place for me.”

He thinks about that for a moment. “Your mother must have been a very nice woman,” he says.

Gypsy smiles but doesn’t respond.

She sequesters herself in her library and drafts the events of her life partly as she remembers them, partly as she wishes they’d been. She and June were comrades and confidantes from the beginning, Mother was eccentric but never cruel, and there was no long, secret black season between then and now.

Harper Brothers has scheduled her memoir’s release for May 1, 1957, and she takes charge of the publicity campaign, sending an advance copy and personal note to every entertainment columnist in the country. She won’t—can’t—let
Gypsy
fail; the book is her personal mono-myth, her chance to study each one of her thousand faces and decide how to best present them to the world.

The book is an instant commercial and critical success—“
an honest, unsparing document, extraordinary Americana,” proclaims
The New York Times
—and Gypsy’s lawyers begin negotiations for film rights. MGM and Warner Brothers each offer $200,000, but she has a gut feeling about David Merrick, a former lawyer from St. Louis with a roadkill toupee and a gift for publicity. He wants to turn
Gypsy
into a Broadway musical and is offering $4,000 against a percentage of the box-office gross. A risk, but his energy reminds her of Michael Todd, and business was the one arena in which he’d never been a disappointment.

There is one significant problem: June. She’s working on her own book, a gritty and harrowing portrait of Mother, the vaudeville years, and marathon dancing during the Great Depression. For the first time the sisters’ intrinsically opposing worldviews are going to be laid out for public consumption and judgment. June objects to the way Gypsy winks at the truth and even rewrites it entirely, how she softens not only Mother’s edges but her own.

Gypsy knows she needs June’s cooperation, if not her blessing, in
order for the memoir to make a successful transition to the stage. She remembers one of the dinners she and June shared nearly twenty years ago. They met at their favorite Chinese restaurant in New York, still awkward, still strangers, and Gypsy wondered, as she always did, what would come next.

“
From Hard-boiled Rose to Gypsy Rose,” she said. “The story of my life.”

“Why don’t you aim at that?” June asked. “Writing a story, I mean. Or a book or a play. I’ll bet you could do it, Weese.”

When the bill came, June stopped Gypsy from opening her wallet.