American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (48 page)

On March 13, June calls and tells her she has hired a lawyer, that they are not to visit or talk. “
I am ill and so confused by it all,” Gypsy writes, but neither one of them can, nor wants to, shut the other out. One afternoon, as Laurents leaves Gypsy’s home after another fruitless fact-finding mission,
he notices a petite figure turn the corner on 63rd Street. Clad entirely in black, a heavy tulle veil shading her face, she tiptoes toward number 153, delicately, as if her footsteps might be heard above the clamor of the city. The string from a patisserie box coils like a bracelet around her wrist. The door swings open, slowly, before she has a chance to press the bell with her gloved finger, and Gypsy pulls her inside.

June never reveals what they discussed that day, but she sends a letter Gypsy doesn’t have the capacity to answer:

The following month, June signs the release. She signs after begging to be written out entirely. She signs even though
she is not guaranteed a royalty for the show past the first run. She signs even though, in the end, the play still opens with an amateur contest and has her run away with the boy Gypsy loves. She signs even though she’s embarrassed that her own sister is “
screwing me out in public.” She signs even though the release is, she says, an “
example of a nonlove that I don’t understand.” She signs because she knows what the play means to Gypsy. It is not only her monument but her surest chance for monumental revisionism. “
It realizes,” June says decades later, “who she wanted to be before the burlesque thing happened. She wanted to be this beautiful, idealistic, romantic person with dreams.”

On May 21, a Thursday, Gypsy works on her rock garden and
sends Erik to the home of producer Leonard Sillman, an old friend, to borrow a tuxedo. It is impossible to concentrate on anything but the rising of the curtain in a few short hours. When she has to, she sets down her tools, takes a long bath, and dresses in a full black taffeta skirt, white silk blouse, and sable jacket.
She thinks, for a moment, of her mother. How sad that Rose isn’t here to see Ethel Merman play her, to make her famous, an archetype, an icon in her own right. It would’ve been the greatest night of Mother’s life.

She pins up her hair and hangs antique diamond pendants from her delicate seashell ears. She drives the Rolls-Royce to the theater and loops her arm through Erik’s. They take their time walking down the aisle. Never have so many eyes stared so intently when she wasn’t on stage, when she wasn’t rolling down a stocking or peeling off a glove. And when little Louise strokes her lamb’s soft head and wonders how old she is, Gypsy Rose Lee begins to cry.

On the last weekend in June, Morton Minsky sat down at his desk to indulge in his favorite hobby, writing letters to
The New York Times
. He was sixty-seven and would live for eighteen more years, long enough to witness his beloved city thrive and decay and will itself back to life, long enough to realize his favorite swath of it, Broadway, was always being built but would never be finished, long enough to appreciate its fiercely tender gift for retaining the spirit of those who shaped it along the way.

In 1942, he admired Gypsy Rose Lee and Michael Todd for doing the impossible and bringing back old-time burlesque with
Star and Garter
, right under Fiorello La Guardia’s nose. He despaired as one theater after another closed its doors in the 1950s,
the worst serial shuttering since the height of the Depression. In 1962, he scoffed at another license commissioner’s vow to eliminate “
lurid and flamboyant” sidewalk displays. He followed the career of a revolutionary comedian named Lenny Bruce, who, in 1964, was barred from New York stages for being “
obscene, indecent, immoral, and impure.” He heard that 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues was the worst block in the city, overrun by “
deviant” males who wore teased hair and painted faces. He watched Minsky’s Republic morph from a second-run movie house to a “grind house,” showing pornography for twenty straight hours a day. He marveled when the State Supreme Court allowed the word “burlesque” to return to Times Square marquees and naked girls to its stages. “
Given the nature of modern American life and letters,” the
Times
asked, “do we need,
really
need, all those breasts and bellies and buttocks to feed our fantasies?”

Bud Abbott (standing) with Lou Costello (left) and Mayor Fiorello La Guardia.
(photo credit 35.1)

Morton would have happily answered that question, but on this occasion he wished to address the recent debut of
Oh! Calcutta!
The play featured comedic sketches and full-frontal nudity and, more than anything in recent memory, brought to mind his three beloved, long-gone brothers and those glorious, maddening last days when Broadway still shined their name.

He rolled a piece of paper into his typewriter and began:

He paused a moment, read over what he’d written, and added a tagline:

Morton remembered; for the remainder of his years he’d do little else. He thought his city should remember, too, even after he was no longer there to remind it.

H
e remembered feeling a shift as the country tumbled into the thirties, a fin-de-siècle louche decadence yielding to grim sincerity. Beyond New York, far from Mayor La Guardia’s frothing rants against Tammany and organized crime and imbecilic employees, tent preachers flourished in small towns of the South and Midwest, delivering the message that
the ills of the Depression were God’s protests against the wicked and unrighteous. Evangelists Gypsy Smith and Billy Sunday traveled from city to city, exhorting God’s word and warning of His wrath to overflow crowds in ballparks and auditoriums. Every night, in every city, the Salvation Army invaded street corners and wooed passersby with tambourine music and curbside gospel.

The Catholic Church, along with a lay organization called the Legion of Decency, turned its considerable might toward Hollywood, demanding stricter adherence to the Hays Code, which, to Morton, read like an exceptionally uptight version of the Ten Commandments: No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it. No picture shall ridicule religion, and ministers of religion shall not be represented as comic characters or villains. No picture shall contain nakedness or suggestive dances. No picture shall portray “
excessive and lustful kissing” or any other activity that might “
stimulate the lower and baser element.” All this, he scoffed, from the same geniuses
who believed that by changing Gypsy Rose Lee’s name they could obscure who and what she really was.

M
orton remembered that John Sumner began invading his thoughts each night as soon as the curtain rose. He drove Morton crazy with his pious rhetoric and self-serving hyperbole, declaring that 1935 was the year “
burlesque commenced to run wild.” Was he out there in the audience, scribbling away on his little pad, paraffin whistle pursed by his lips? Did he have men stationed in all the Minsky theaters, monitoring each inch of bared skin?

Indeed he did, as Morton soon found out. On the night of June 22, 1935, one of Sumner’s watchdogs attended the late show at the Republic, noting that during stripteaser Wanda Dell’s encore she “dropped her dress to the floor, exposing her whole body, except her private parts, which were covered by a thin string of beads, leaving the cheeks of her rectum exposed,” and that one of the Minsky comics defined a baby as “
nine months’ interest on a small deposit.” This, Morton asked himself, was supposed to send audiences out in the streets “slavering to relieve themselves” at a nearby taxi-dance hall? “
You’d think,” he wrote, “we were holding a Roman orgy there.”

Minsky “Rosebuds” and comic, shielding their faces after a raid.
(photo credit 35.2)

He remembered Fiorello La Guardia joining the fray, giving a radio press conference that began with the melodramatic line, delivered in his trademark shriek, “
This is the beginning of the end of incorporated filth.” (“
I wish,” Morton wrote in 1986, the year before he died, “he could have lived to see [Times Square] as it is today, with open hard-core sex acts and no pretense at theater, comedy, or humor.”) Of course, La Guardia then turned to John Sumner for counsel and assistance, imploring the reformer to link burlesque to the city’s myriad problems and introducing him to the new license commissioner, Paul Moss. To Morton, the commissioner was something even worse than a reformer—an erstwhile “legitimate” Broadway producer.