American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (50 page)

On the afternoon of April 28, a Wednesday, the brothers convened in Moss’s office at 105 Walker Street, aware that all forces were converging against them. Mayor La Guardia declared that “
even the word striptease sounds dirty.” A Brooklyn district attorney called burlesque dangerous to schoolchildren, lamenting how they “
go into these places with their books under their arm.” A man calling himself “a good Jewish subject” penned an adamant missive to the mayor: “
For gods sakes,” he wrote,
“eliminate the most dangerous evil in the stage field. Do away with that name that has always spelled filth to the theatre-going public, and that is the name Minsky.” Burlesque houses, said another city official, were the “
habitats of sex crazed perverts.” There was, the brothers noticed, a marked difference in tone between 1932 and now. Apparently burlesque no longer attracted degenerates and perverts but created them from scratch.

“
All of us were fidgeting in the back row,” Morton said, “irritated and embarrassed by all this ridiculous testimony.… Moss asked us over and over again if we had any defense, but none of us had anything to say.”

N
othing he and his brothers tried worked: not the stays, writs, mandamuses, or superseding writs; not the pleas to La Guardia that thousands of actors, comics, chorus girls, stagehands, musicians, and stripteasers needed their jobs. Every Minsky theater now operated sporadically, in fits and starts. Mayor La Guardia vowed to “
fight to the finish,” a fait accompli with his landslide reelection in the fall.

“
We tried to elevate burlesque,” Morton told the press, “and look where it got us.”

He remembered the eulogies from those who truly understood the loss, not only the brothers’ but all of New York’s. “
As a patron of burlesque for more than forty years,” wrote George Jean Nathan, “it is difficult for me to understand how the peculiar Mosses arrived at their concupiscent philosophy. If ever there was a male over sixteen years of age who, after giving ear to two hours of uninterrupted smut, felt otherwise than going right back straight home and getting a little relief by reading
Alice in Wonderland
, I haven’t heard of him. Nothing so purges the mind of indecency as too much indecency. The most moral force in this world is a really dirty burlesque show.”

At one of the Minsky Republic’s final shows, a redheaded slinger named Ann Corio sheathed herself in gauzy organdy and performed a funeral dirge for her profession:

For her encore, she emerged from the curtain wearing a black negligee and a padlock encasing her hips.

H
erbert fell into a deep depression, the days unraveling empty and endless before him. In 1942, he filed for bankruptcy, describing himself as a “
theatrical manager, presently unemployed.” He died in December 1959, of heart failure.

Morton remembered when Abe was on his deathbed ten years earlier, in late summer 1949. “
Kid,” he told Morton, “you’re going to be the one to see the Minsky name in lights, I know it, and I want you to make every effort.” In the end Abe was right. How Morton wished his brothers lived to see
The Night They Raided Minsky’s
, based on Mademoiselle Fifi and that fabulous, fictitious raid of 1925, back when court hearings made for good publicity and even better jokes. In the film, a
proper, pious Louis Minsky had neither ties to Tammany Hall nor a criminal record, and Billy was flamboyantly, magnificently alive.

Most of all he remembered what the city did to their name,
banning the word “Minsky” from appearing anywhere on a marquee, anywhere in public, as if the brothers never defined or owned it at all. Yet for a long time those six letters remained visible across the Republic’s facade, stubborn and deeply etched, brilliant even in the dark.

June always says Gypsy is built like those cars of her heyday, a 1931 Chevy coupe or a Stutz, with a sleek, vibrant exterior unable to withstand the force of the engine within. Her body began turning on her long ago and she accepts her role in its demise: all those years of chain-smoking and chugging brandy, of sleeping either twelve hours a day or not at all, of telling herself that nothing matters as long as her accounts are full and her legend secure, of living in an exquisite trap she herself has set.

June and Gypsy, 1964.
(photo credit 36.1)

In the year leading up to the end she catalogues the minutiae of her days. She appears on
Hollywood Squares
, bleaches her hair, lunches with Merv Griffin, prepares for USO tours, interviews for
The Dating Game
, works in her aviary, itemizes even the smallest expenditures (a $2 tip for the grocery man, $2.25 on ashtrays), declines to appear with Frank Sinatra, Jr., because “
I can’t quite see myself with him,” and marks the onset of the headaches. They are unlike any she’s had before, the pain both sluggish and fierce, like a cement truck churning inside her skull. She makes this diary entry retroactively, perhaps realizing later that it represents a shift—the date her illness becomes a tool by which she measures her life. “
Headaches begin about now,” she writes on August 3, 1969. Her hand still has the strength to form bold letters across the page.

Never once does she write “cancer” in her very last journal, nor does she speak it aloud. Instead she veers around the word, as if acknowledging it directly will grant it power enough to win. “
They’ve found a spot on my lung,” she tells Erik, now a parent himself. “They took one look and sewed me back up. It has spread too much for them to operate. They’ve told me not to worry … yet. There’s a good chance they’ll be able to knock it out with radiation.” In the meantime,
would he mind calling Arm & Hammer for her? She did a commercial for them last month, soaking in a tub of baking soda and marveling at how smooth it made her skin. If word of her condition gets out, they’ll never use the spot and she won’t be paid her $10,000. God knows when she’ll be able to work again.
She wishes she had the time for one last face-lift.

Erik comes for a visit. He knows his Aunt June will be there, too, and he vows to keep the peace for his mother’s sake. June was always trying to rip Gypsy off, once selling her a Rolliflex camera for more money than what it had cost in the store. He also never forgot what June told him, pointedly, when he was just eight years old: “
All the men in this family never amounted to anything.” Together, he thinks, Gypsy and June inherited all of Rose’s characteristics—his mother got the good
ones and Aunt June the rest. His mother’s life was not an easy one, he realizes. She was “
a wounded soul”—wounded by her mother, by Michael Todd, by June, and by Erik himself. He recalls their many disputes about money, about his thieving and disrespect, about the unconventional, exacting way she’d raised him. “
We’ve never had a family,” he told her once. “Families are supposed to love each other, and there’s no love here. I can’t even remember the last time we hugged or kissed good night.”

Gypsy was taken aback but had her answer ready: “Well, you can hardly blame me for that. You never were a demonstrative little boy.”

He knew his mother expected everyone to behave in ways that were bigger than human—herself included—and was always disappointed in the end. Now, as he leans in to kiss Gypsy, she shares one last confidence with her son. “
After I go,” she whispers, “don’t let June in the house. She’ll rob you blind.”

June is working as the artistic director of the New Orleans Repertory Theatre, and as soon as a play opens she boards the next plane to Los Angeles. Nearly thirty years have passed since they lived together in Gypsy’s double mansion on the Upper East Side, and the fragile thing between them is stashed, at least for the moment, in a place where it can’t be harmed. “
She was wonderful,” June remembers, “she was gallant.” June brings gifts, African violets and purple towels. Neither of them has ever seen purple towels—aren’t they so lush, so cheerful?—and June cooks every meal. During the first few visits she actually convinces her big, fat sister to eat something, and they chatter about the kind of everything that means nothing real at all.

When the conversation changes, when it takes on weight and shape, it is Gypsy’s doing and Gypsy’s choice, and it lasts only as long as she allows. They are together in the bathroom, of all places, because Gypsy is too weak to stand on her own. June carries the enema bag and clasps Gypsy’s waist, handling her as if she might tear. “
Isn’t this terrible, June?” she asks in a voice that has lost its exaggerated timbre and haughty trill, a voice that no longer speaks like Gypsy Rose Lee.

“Just ridiculously terrible,” June answers. It is all she can think to say.

“
This is a present,” Gypsy adds, “from Mother.”

And so the past moves in with them, uninvited but not unfamiliar. In
the past few years Gypsy changed the way she spoke of Rose Hovick, reshaping her mother’s motives, giving her credit for a love she might never have felt. The revisionist version began a few years earlier, during a television interview with Ethel Merman. “
You remind me so much of Mother,” Gypsy said. “You have her warmth and humor.” Now the memories are all preserved inside delicate, gilded frames. June notices but says nothing. She is certain Gypsy has her reasons and also that she won’t be inclined to share them. Maybe redeeming Mother is the fastest route to her own redemption. Maybe she decides the truth can be found somewhere in the shifting spaces between them.