Gypsy: The Art of the Tease (22 page)

The Gypsy Rose Lee Show mixed glamour with homespun-

ness. The lead-in music “va-va-vooms” as though paving the way to a nightclub circa 1961. Although an ornate chandelier hung from the set’s ceiling, Gypsy herself wore an unassuming wardrobe. More important, the
Gypsy Rose Lee Show
—and its spinoffs—helped Gypsy adapt to the 1960s freewheeling, loose-lipped mode. But sometimes she went too far. In 1966, when she announced her cancer diagnosis on the show—broadcast live—

the studio “had a fit,” as she put it.

The show also helped Gypsy get cast again. Some of these

roles celebrated her past, and others took an ironic stance toward it. Often it was enough for her to make an appearance and prove that she had survived. In 1966 she had a walk-on role in
The Pruitts
of Southampton,
a sitcom about a wealthy family that suddenly went broke when they were made to pay their back taxes. On the TV sitcom
Batman
the following year she played a newscaster. Finally, Gypsy played herself in
Fractured Flickers,
the spoof of silent films created by Chris Hayward and Jay Ward, who also imagined the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon characters.

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Selling Striptease

Throughout her life Gypsy had been most motivated by work.

She was always a taskmaster, but toward the end she became even more stern. While writing and sometimes while performing she would rise at five a.m. Her journals from this era include both rep-rimands and pep talks. “I’ve worked so hard and I am not at all pleased with the outcome,” she noted about one show. Another did not get well reviewed, but “I think I gave a good performance.”

A dark mood also emerged: “Facing a blank wall is like facing my future,” she wrote. One morning, she “wakes up with a pre-monition of evil.”

But although she was shy and worried that when being interviewed she sounded “like a juke box,” in public Gypsy refused to be bullied into common wisdom about herself, burlesque, or striptease. When journalists sought her opinion about the “new”

stripping and Broadway “nudicals,” like
Hair
and Kenneth Tynan’s
Oh! Calcutta!
she did not always give the answer they wanted. In 1966 a reporter tried to corner her into saying that the sexual revolution had made stripteasing obsolete: “I asked what she thought of kids doing those weird dances on TV: bumps and

grinds are less offensive with kids than with the older ones.

Wasn’t that the kind of stuff that killed burlesque? ‘No,’ said Gyp. ‘It was real estate that did that. The burlesque theatres were in the slums and there aren’t any slums any more.’”

Gypsy’s myth-making intelligence at the end of her life recalls the conclusions she had arrived at years earlier. That she could 182

Selling Striptease

distinguish between herself and her legend proves her ability to see herself not just as a person but as a figura. Her dedication to revising her own story shares the improvisatory verve of a character in the Pirandello play
Six Characters in Search of an Author,
which had premiered in New York shortly before Gypsy arrived there. A more lowbrow comparison might be to reality television shows.

Gypsy never harbored illusions about her success: “Sometimes you have no specific talent. I have a talent for life, for living. Oh, I could have been a second rate actress . . . instead I’ve channeled my mediocrity.” Or: “All people play roles . . . eventually the act you put on becomes such a good one that you convince yourself. . . . What began as pretense finally becomes a reality,” she told the
Sunday News
in 1968, two years before she died.

Even after doctors operated on Gypsy for cancer in 1966, she trouped on. Three years later, she traveled at least twice to Vietnam to visit wounded soldiers in small, out-of-the-way hospitals.

She brought them “dirty kosher Chinese fortune cookies” containing jokes by Steve Allen, Morey Amsterdam, and herself. She climbed into bed with them and posed, as she described it, like “a sexy grandmother.” What about the antiwar effort? a reporter asked. “I think sometimes, those boys feel deserted, left alone, forgotten, because they think we don’t support them. Whether we’re for or against the war, we’ve got to support them,” she replied.

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Selling Striptease

In 1969, asked by another reporter about her mother, she

threw off one of the lines Laurents gave her character. “All I’ve got to say is that most people aren’t as lucky as I was to have a mother who had grit. If it weren’t for her, I wouldn’t be where I am today.”

When Gypsy died a little over a year later, she provided two revelations. One, according to Erik, was the identity of his father. On her deathbed Gypsy told her son, then seventeen, that his father was not her second husband, Alexander Kirkland, as he had always thought, but the movie director Otto Preminger. The other was: she still liked to perform her striptease.

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Conclusion

Not having finished the job in her first memoir, June followed with a second volume,
More Havoc
and a one-woman show,
An
Unexpected Evening with June Havoc.
Erik’s more amused version of events,
Gypsy and Me,
was published in 1984. Whereas Erik bragged that his mother’s entire life was fabliaux, June played the role of the aggrieved sister compelled by her superior moral character to “set the record straight.” Of these perspectives I find Gypsy’s reckless attitude toward the truth to be most charming—a dimension of the American penchant for self-invention and self-aggrandizement. Gypsy didn’t sell snake oil.

She wasn’t deceiving sick people. Her goal was to amuse, to make people laugh.

Even today I am not the only one to forgive Gypsy’s dissem-185

Conclusion

bling. Today her lies make the corners of our mouths turn up. At first I thought this was simply because lying in showbiz doesn’t evoke the same outrage it does in journalism or in memoir of politics. Then I believed Americans tolerate Gypsy because she lied so prettily, never insisting that the listener believe the truth of her story. Then I arrived at the following theory: when you strip away Gypsy’s witty veneer, what you get instead of a cracked foundation is a glimpse of the narrow line between self-invention and the tragedy emerging from lost souls. And you find here that, whether or not she is telling the truth, Gypsy is neither a puppet nor someone’s wallflower daughter forced to take it off—

she is a complex and ravishing creature whose act and life reveal self-invention, poignancy, and street smarts.

Gypsy’s explanations of her life appeal not just because she is less modern and psychological than June, but because she is less angry. June’s revelation, a quarter century after Rose’s death and two decades after the musical, that their mother was a gay alcoholic kleptomaniac and a murderer is less interesting than the fable Gypsy told or the musical hinted at.

Yet until recently, critical interest in the Sondheim musical has continued to focus on Rose and her tyranny. In 2003, on the occasion of Sam Mendes’s Broadway revival, the brilliant former theater critic Frank Rich—the heir to Brooks Atkinson’s 186

Conclusion

mantle—described
Gypsy
as “one of the most enduring creations in the American theatre,” as “the American musical theatre’s answer to King Lear” and on a par with
Death of a Salesman
and
Glass Menagerie.
The reason is Rose, whom Rich sees less as a monster than as an uncommon woman. Gypsy and the striptease did not concern him.

Then, four years later, HBO announced the filming of a new drama about Gypsy. Ten years in the making, this drama will star Gypsy, as played by Sigourney Weaver, and not Rose, as played by Ethel Merman. Its source is Erik’s memoir,
Gypsy and Me: On
the Road and Backstage with Gypsy Rose Lee,
not
Gypsy. Gypsy and
Me
begins in 1956, when the stripper and her nine-year-old son were touring the Straw Hat Circuit and Gypsy was writing

her memoir, and it moves forward until Gypsy’s death. By telling more explicit stories about his mother than the ones that his mother told about Rose, Erik connects Gypsy’s pathologies to her mother’s. But
Gypsy and Me
is sometimes a less satisfying read than
Gypsy
for an unfair reason: unlike his mother, Erik never becomes a star. And whereas the reviews pointed out that Erik is too nice,
Gypsy
suffers more from lack of distance from the subject. It remains to be seen whether it will make good television.

Ultimately, the meaning of Gypsy’s striptease is hard to pin down. Gypsy never took it all off, yet she invented modern strip-187

Conclusion

tease. She made it possible for women to strip on television and in nightclubs without being arrested, yet what kind of accomplishment is that? She imagined—or maybe a better word is

constructed—an entire genre of popular culture, and by doing so created a new ideal of American womanhood. She exposed

Americans’ longing for fun and sensuality but also predicted our pathological urge to reveal everything.

Before the term
sex symbol
or its modern apotheosis, Marilyn Monroe, came onto the scene, Gypsy represented what author and social critic Camille Paglia refers to as “the sizzle of outlaw sexuality.” Gypsy capitalized on that sizzle and made a lot of money, which outraged some observers.

It still does. In 1997 Frank Rich wrote that the “JonBenets of America are the cultural inheritors of Gypsy Rose Lee, who, unlike her sister, did not have the talent to become either a vaudeville star or legitimate actress and so became a stripper instead.”

This misses the point. The gods endowed Gypsy with one of the only talents required of a great striptease artist: understanding how one’s movements and actions seduce others. This talent rewards the mastery of taking off one’s gloves and gracefully walking and swinging one’s hips at the same time. Striptease schools notwith-standing, these are not, generally speaking, teachable talents.

Gypsy displayed another American talent, too: the talent of being sexy and funny at the same time. Despite her disavowal of that potent combination, she blended the two attributes and, 188

Conclusion

having begun as an outlaw, used them to get herself to the inner sanctum. Unable because of the times and her own limitations to become a movie star, she settled for being a personality and a brand.

Gypsy not only championed the idea that sex sells, she presented its far-flung possibilities and a casual, indifferent, mischievous striptease. Although we claim—more than ever of

late—to crave the star who bares it all, we long for the mystery that Gypsy provided. We want the rush that striptease brings us, the thrill that Gypsy gave us.

But what price are we willing to pay? While we are awash in strippers today, it is hard to think of one who started at the bottom and rose, via teasing and irony, to the top. That is no longer what contemporary American striptease icons are made of.

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Acknowledgments

I’d like to thank my stellar editor, Jonathan Brent, for shepherd-ing
Gypsy
from start to finish and for his patience and sense of humor about the subject. Thanks, also, to his assistants, Annelise Finegan and Sarah Miller, each of whose calm and speedy responses made the process sweeter. Newspaper and magazine editors too numerous to name have indulged my obsession with Gypsy over the years, and I thank them for doing so. My agent, Denise Shannon, and her colleague Nanci McCloskey supported the project.

Thanks to Jeffrey Schier, Kent Garber, Nancy Hulnick, and

Kathy Barber. And the anonymous readers who improved the

manuscript.

Special thanks to Gioia Diliberto, Larry Maslon, and my

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Acknowledgments