Gypsy: The Art of the Tease (11 page)

“Hollywood Tames Gypsy Rose Lee,” read a headline in the

Chicago Daily Tribune
at the beginning of May. Breen was not going to allow Gypsy to strip in the movies, just as he had ensured that Mae West would no longer sing her double entendres.

Fearing that Zanuck was scheming to fashion his star into “a new Mae West,” as well as hearing rumors that another striptease performer, Ada Leonard, would play Princess Zarina, a stripper, in the upcoming RKO production
Mrs. America,
Breen developed a sense of urgency in dealing with Gypsy. Twentieth Century Fox had forbidden Royer, its costume designer, to sew Gypsy anything risqué. A press release reported that the stripper had come down with “a case of the jitters” and that director Norman Taurog had to shut down the set. It appeared that Zanuck had lost this battle—or had he? When the studio declared Gypsy to be a “dramatic actress” and resurrected the name

“Louise Hovick” (“Gypsy Rose Lee Finds Something Else to

Shed,” one headline read) to appease Breen, critics speculated that the Hays Office’s strategy might backfire if Gypsy herself were to strip in a burlesque house while her first movie,
You Can’t
Have Everything,
was playing nearby. That would fill theaters. To compensate for not allowing Gypsy to strip on screen, the studio gave her twelve changes of costume, along with an elegant

wardrobe for publicity stills. But even a brown suit of shadow-87

To Hollywood and Back

plaited cheviot, a tailored hat, and a full-length mink coat could not make up for the five bad films she would star in.

The Studio’s maneuvering begs the question of why Zanuck

hired what the National Legion of Decency called the “exemplar of what has most unfortunately become highly publicized under the degrading appellation of the striptease act” in the first place.

Knowing Hays’s power, Zanuck likely believed that, even incog-nito, Gypsy would equal box office success. As director Eddie Sutherland, who had tried to convince Paramount to snap her up a year earlier, told the
Los Angeles Times,
“Why if she only took her hat off in a movie it would be good selling propaganda.”

But the Production Code censors wouldn’t even let Gypsy

take off her hat, so although Hollywood was making interesting movies in 1937–38, Gypsy starred in five duds. Of
You Can’t Have
Everything, Time
wrote that it was “bound to disappoint the admirers of Gypsy Rose Lee, whose sultry gifts are confined to such lines as ‘I’ll cut your heart out and stuff it like an olive.’”

Filmed in the late spring of 1937, Gypsy’s second movie,
Ali Baba
Goes to Town,
startles by its campy badness: a hobo (Eddie Cantor) stumbles onto a movie lot producing an Arabian Nights fable. Cantor falls asleep and dreams himself into Baghdad, where, as sultan, he makes a new deal for his city before waking up. Gypsy plays the sultana. Perhaps casting Gypsy opposite Eddie Cantor, then a big star, was meant to soften a Hollywood fantasy about upward mobility’s impossibility or to overturn the 88

To Hollywood and Back

satire she had been doing onstage for the previous ten years—

not to mention her real life story. Coiffed in a flat hairdo, Gypsy does not so much act as spatula her dialogue into the scenes.

Gypsy’s bombs sent a message from the Catholic Church to

American women: doing a striptease, no matter how ironic, not only would prohibit you from playing the ingénue, it would ensure that you would wind up alone. In
You Can’t Have Everything
Gypsy, playing showgirl “Lulu Riley,” the mistress of the roguish George (Don Ameche), loses him to the chirpy, young, idealistic playwright Alice Faye. The blonde next door will always van-quish the brunette in furs. Not only does Lulu cheat on George, she prevents him from becoming a real writer and tries to trick him into marrying her. When one of the Ritz Brothers slaps Gypsy’s character across the face, he does so for a laugh. (Her third movie,
Sally, Mary, and Irene,
was equally punishing.) That the Gypsy who found stardom on Broadway in 1936

flopped in Hollywood a year later is no surprise. With few excep-tions, female sirens typically did. Either they couldn’t subsume themselves into the characters that the studios wanted them to play, or they attracted the morality police’s attention, or both.

Hollywood declines to welcome women specializing in being

sexy and funny and destroys deviations from this rule—think of Marilyn, the sexy-funny girl par excellence.

Gypsy defended herself by becoming a spokeswoman for a

modern attitude toward sex. She called Mae West “the weakest 89

To Hollywood and Back

link in the Vassar daisy chain.” When Zanuck’s lover, the actress Carol Landis, criticized stripping, Gypsy retorted, “I am sure no one will mind if she does Salome in long underwear and a fire helmet.” And Gypsy’s failure in Hollywood may have also made her more sympathetic to women. In America, then as now, mass appeal could come only with the fairer sex’s Good Housekeep-ing Seal of Approval; women bestow that seal more easily on a woman who has lost as well as won.

The studio rewarded Gypsy for her cinematic failures. The

Los Angeles Times
listed her as one of the biggest money-makers in Hollywood that year. But in a column she wrote for Walter Winchell she complained, “I let them change my name . . . they gave me tragic eyes.”

Only two months into Gypsy’s tenure in Hollywood, scandal

struck back East, and Rose was at the center of it. Before Gypsy left for California she had hired a young schoolteacher and art student named Genevieve “Jean” Augustin and moved her into Witchwood Manor, the lavish country house the stripper had bought for her mother. In June Augustin, whom Gypsy ostensi-bly hired to paint Rose’s portrait and to serve as her driver, died of an apparent self-inflicted bullet wound during a party at the estate in June. The twenty-three-year-old from Kenosha, Wis-consin, returned from a hike, rigged up a revolver at the end of 90

To Hollywood and Back

her bed, and, pulling the trigger with her toe, shot herself in the head. The story received much coverage. (Although Augustin’s death was officially ruled a suicide, in 2003 Gypsy’s son, Erik, told
Vanity Fair
that Rose killed her because she had flirted with Gypsy at a party.) As a result of the scandal, Rose came West.

Ten weeks later, having finished filming
Ali Baba,
Gypsy married husband number one, the handsome Bob Mizzy, who gets a bad rap in the various accounts of the Queen of Striptease’s life.

Not much is known about Mizzy except June’s claim that Zanuck arranged the wedding to convince the Hays Office and the National Legion of Decency that his property (Gypsy) was no threat to American womanhood. June described Mizzy as “a lean, hungry wolf in the Disney tradition” and quoted her sister as calling her first husband “the most legitimate publicity I ever had.” The press treated the wedding like what today we would call a starter marriage. Gypsy had to explain that she wed Mizzy on a boat to cir-cumvent California law, which required couples to wait three days before getting a marriage license. But news stories covering the marriage reported that she was “too busy” to get married ashore, leaving the truth, whatever it was, to readers’ imaginations.

My conclusion is that the wedding was more than a gimmick

and that Gypsy’s feelings for Mizzy were less venal than June claimed. Gypsy needed this man. When she overdrew her bank account, Mizzy transferred money into it. He was loyal, standing by her during all sorts of family dramas. He endured Rose’s 91

To Hollywood and Back

shenanigans even as he endured pressure from his own parents to stop fooling around with a stripper and take over the family dental supplies company.

Rose was worse. According to June, dressed in whiteface and rags she paid a visit to Zanuck to inform him that Gypsy was letting her starve. She also took to waving around a gun. But more consequential than Rose’s dress-up act or her erratic behavior was the publication of a book holding her accountable for killing burlesque by promoting striptease. In this era, impresarios and writers reminisced about pre-striptease burlesque to announce their own virtue and decry contemporary venality, just as some Broadway aficionados wax nostalgic about musicals from the 1950s. The writer H. M. Alexander identified the villain. In
Strip
Tease: The Vanished Art of Burlesque
(the most complete exposé of the burlesque industry), Alexander wrote that burlesque’s golden age “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, and an ex-newspaperman who saw that it wasn’t kept a secret from any-body. Publicity made Gypsy. When the stripper left Allan

Gilbert’s show at the Apollo to matriculate as a principal in the Follies, her former employers took startled notice, made a few inquiries, and hired press agents for themselves.”

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Thus, in one paragraph Alexander smites the mother and

daughter team for destroying old-fashioned American values and for popularizing striptease—for turning something “sincere”

into something “phony.” A
Life
magazine photo taken on Gypsy’s wedding day shows Rose, a brunette Medea in a housecoat,

standing next to the newlyweds. Was this meek-looking woman with a pudgy chin and cruel mouth capable of destroying one theatrical genre and creating another? Wearing a beret and trench coat as though auditioning for a part in the gumshoe thriller that she would later write, Gypsy looks across her husband toward Rose and smiles. She appears to be listening to her mother.

After Gypsy’s wedding, the family drove back to New York in her trailer. “At the request of Miss Augustin’s mother” a grand jury investigation convened in Highland Mills. Nothing came of it, and Gypsy returned to Hollywood.

More bad films rolled out of Hollywood. Released in the

spring of 1938,
Battle of Broadway
makes Gypsy the object of ridicule. Although she enters wearing a chic hat and a tight skirt, and an entire regiment shouts “wow,” the joke is that the legion-naires mistake her character, chanteuse Linda Lee (two Lees!), for the girlfriend of the boss’s son. Linda delivers the line “always a bridesmaid never a bride, but I love it.” To make sure the audience gets that the old-maid singer is just a cinematic Gypsy, when the camera zooms in on Linda’s photo album, there are photos of . . . Gypsy.

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With Gypsy three thousand miles away, Rose deteriorated.

The groundskeeper at Witchwood Manor complained about

items disappearing. “I am not at all well the change of life is playing hard on me,” Rose wrote to her daughter to justify taking the

“oil stove from the living quarters, white wicker set from living quarters, garden hoe, rake, stove in basement, which was there to keep the tank from freezing, . . . electrical wire, . . . garage lawn chairs, lamps.” The letters from Gypsy become icy while the ones from Rose seesaw between pleading and accusing.

“I was your slave and colored maid for years. I was never paid a salary,” Rose wrote. “What did you tell June to make her hate me?” Gypsy replied in a telegram: “I have no desire to repeat last year’s scenes. Your so called loneliness is of your own choice. . . .

We just don’t see eye to eye and that is final.”

Hollywood failed to console Gypsy. Released that September, the Queen of Striptease’s last movie,
My Lucky Star,
plotwise reprises her 1937 bomb
You Can’t Have Everything.
As Marcelle Laverne, the woman who loses Cesar Romero to the ice skating champion Sonja Henie. She played the same shrew as she did in her first film. Just before Thanksgiving Gypsy decided to leave the West Coast for good. “After I’d taken a good long look at myself on the screen, I didn’t like myself so well,” she told a reporter. She further complained to a friend, the writer Douglas Gilbert, that all she had to show for her two-year sojourn was “a swell collection of autographs.”

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As usual, Gypsy’s wit hides a piece of the story. She had also collected a good deal of material. But where to perform it?

While she was making bad films in Hollywood, many burlesque theaters had closed due to anti-burlesque campaigns and the sour economy. Gypsy decided to launch a transcontinental tour,

“the Merry Whirl Revue,” in movie theaters and converted

vaudeville houses. The tour began in San Bernardino and moved east. In Chicago, at the Palace Theatre for a week, she made $22,000 doing what
Variety
described as “a modified version” of her “Stripteaser’s Education” number. The tour snaked through western and Midwestern towns destroyed by hard times.