Gypsy: The Art of the Tease (8 page)

friends. The admiration was mutual. A photo dated 1936 in the Gypsy Rose Lee Papers shows her mugging with female impersonators. Julian Eltinge, the Jazz Age female impersonator, asked for her autograph. Gypsy’s use of Empire and Regency furniture, and her collision of highbrow and lowbrow elements in her act, owe a debt to her gay admirers. Other female stars were also influenced by (and themselves influenced) gay style.

But whereas, say, Mae West burlesqued the female imperson-

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ator, Gypsy covered up, gesturing at revealing all, but then drawing back. (Both women elicited rumors that they were actually men in drag.)

Still, when gay men praise Gypsy, they sometimes sound as if they envy the ease with which she appeared to strip away social convention. Probably the nakedest airing of this emotion occurs in a
Vanity Fair
article written by Gypsy’s gay friend George Davis early in 1936. Davis, whom she had first met in his Detroit bookstore ten years earlier, described the striptease star as “the dark young pet of burlesque” who “wins you at once, with her absurd Gibson girl coiffure, shirt waist, broad belt and flaring skirt, as she slips into the spotlight to twitter her sly way through Dwight Fiske’s account of the marital misfortunes of Mrs. Pettibone.”

Davis moved from ridiculing Gypsy’s costume and voice to exposing her as a not terribly bright poseur. “It is Gypsy Rose’s fancy that the public of the Irving Place . . . revels in the double meanings of Park Avenue’s favorite camp.”

But Davis’s take on his subject belies the glamour shot accompanying the essay. Hair in a French twist, Gypsy wears an off-the-shoulder Vionnet gown. Chin in hand, she tosses a sultry gaze at the camera, as if to say that she is only who you imagine her to be.

In the spring of 1936, a more enduring homage to Gypsy ap-

peared in George Balanchine’s ballet
Slaughter on Tenth Avenue,
a 60

The Queen of Striptease

play within a play, and the sexy, violent act 2 finale to the Richard Rodgers/Lorenz Hart/George Abbott musical
On Your Toes.
Having arrived from Russia two years earlier, Balanchine was working in a showbiz idiom. Like other Russian émigrés, he had been fascinated with American popular culture from his student days in Paris. But
Slaughter on Tenth Avenue
is unique in its celebration and satire of a “Striptease Girl” (danced by Broadway star and ballerina Tamara Geva), a tap dancer (played by real-life tap dancer Ray Bolger), a murder, and the seedy club where she took it off.

“This was a takeoff of Gypsy Rose Lee, the stripper,” Geva said in a 1978 interview with dance curator Nancy Reynolds. So when scholars of Broadway praise
On Your Toes
as the first musical where ballet and jazz function not just as virtuosic stunts or pretty sounds but as storytelling devices, they should also say that Balanchine made the striptease in
Slaughter on Tenth Avenue
into an archetypal American gesture. As critic James Harvey said of Ginger Rogers, who epitomized Balanchine’s feminine ideal,

“The Striptease girl is that mixture of displayed flesh and averted eye, both presenting and withholding itself at the same time.”

That mixture in
Slaughter on Tenth Avenue
makes it a coming-to-America story too. The Striptease Girl begins as a Russian émigré ballerina and ends doing a wild American striptease. But if you do a striptease, you cannot live happily ever after: The Striptease Girl’s gangster-boyfriend, trying to shoot her lover, the hoofer, accidentally “slaughters” her. Everyone dies.

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The real Gypsy preferred a twentieth century capitalist ending. That summer she judged a striptease contest at Leon and Eddie’s nightclub on Fifty-second Street. Dressed as though she were going to a funeral—black veil, orchids diamond clip—Gypsy evaluated six contestants.
Variety
observed that striptease du jour was a “tormentedly yearning . . . type of dancing,” with whiteface makeup and a red gash of lipstick. To one critic these strippers parodied modern dance of a few years earlier, except that they bumped.
Variety
concluded: “GRL has raised the standard of striptease.”

1936: A Stripteaser’s Education

All celebrities have a vehicle in which they ride to embody their personality and the era and to fuse truth and fantasy in some new—or apparently new—way. For Al Jolson it was
The Jazz
Singer;
for Ethel Merman it was “I Got Rhythm.” Marilyn Monroe found
Some Like It Hot.
These vehicles elicit magic, a mysterious melding of circumstances and personality. For Gypsy, her ditty “A Stripteaser’s Education,” in the 1950s sometimes called, after Freud, “The Psychology of a Stripteaser,” or, at least once,

“The Fine Art of Striptease,” is this vehicle. Written by the lyricist Edwin Gilbert (and possibly Gypsy), “A Stripteaser’s Education” became so associated with Gypsy that sometimes the program just read “Gypsy Rose Lee Specialty.” Everyone knew what she was going to do. Gypsy first sang “A Stripteaser’s Edu-62

The Queen of Striptease

cation” after replacing Josephine Baker and Eve Arden in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1936. That she was said to be stepping in for both women reveals how big her range was supposed to be.

“A Stripteaser’s Education” is many things: a stand-up act, a confession, Gypsy’s most public revelation to date. Or should I say “revelation.” That Gypsy put on a genteel approach to

telling, using a sieve to allow bits of truth and falsehood to drip through the holes, elevated the mingling of a star’s onstage and offstage life to a new complexity.

Thanks to the talkies, the 1930s were the first era in which stars could be “like us,” and so Gypsy’s tangling of intimacy and realism was not unique. But her offhand style, combined with stripping while confessing, made her exceed the revelations of many other 1930s stage and screen personalities, just as Paul Poiret’s couture freed women’s bodies more than corset designers ever imagined. Yet Gypsy’s success would also entrap her, as all successes of this kind do. What liberates one generation en-slaves the next. Gypsy talked about herself the same way she had circa 1936 after the charming gestures and static pose became stale. But that year despite her popularity, Gypsy was not an ob-vious choice to star on Broadway. But from one angle she was perfect for the role: she was a savior. The Ziegfeld Follies needed her as desperately as burlesque did six years earlier, for the Follies—

the Jazz Age standard of revues—was on its way out.

The Shubert brothers (who had bought the Follies from Zieg-63

The Queen of Striptease

Gypsy Rose Lee in the Follies. The Shubert Archive

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feld’s widow, Billie Burke) had gotten themselves into trouble.

Failing to see that times had changed, the brothers conducted business as usual, stuffing the first edition of the Follies of 1936

with reliable old-school talent: Josephine Baker, the Nicholas brothers, Eve Arden, and Gypsy’s old pal Fanny Brice. George Gershwin wrote the lyrics, Vernon Duke the music. George Balanchine did the ballets and Robert Alton the jazz dances. Yet only two hummable tunes emerged from the show: “Words

Without Music,” and “I Can’t Get Started with You.” The Follies ran one hundred performances and attracted mediocre reviews. Brice got sick; the show closed in May.

Another reason for the Follies of 1936’s middling reception was that the Shubert’s female lead, Josephine Baker, bombed. The Shuberts had overestimated New Yorkers’ ability to accept sophistication in a female African-American performer. Critics judged Baker’s costume as both too scant and too ornate. Whereas Baker had performed bare breasted in Paris, she wore pasties in New York, which might have reminded audiences of burlesque.

Balanchine choreographed Baker in one number in a chorus of white men in Zouave uniforms. Another number, his
ballet d’action
“Five AM,” cast the expatriate as an upper-class woman singing Gershwin’s lyrics about longing, inspiring reviews be-moaning her ordinariness and decrying the possibility that a black woman could feel such delicate sentiments.

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Although the Shuberts were desperate for a new female star, they were unsure that Gypsy could command a New York audience.
Variety
announced the Follies’ reopening in September, with Gypsy listed as supporting Fanny Brice, and told of the Shuberts’ intention to send the show on the road, where audiences demanded less. When the Follies opened at the Winter Garden Theatre, many critics were surprised at how good Gypsy was.
Variety
wrote, “Her striptease specialty is rather decorous but it rings the bell.” Striding onstage in a picture hat with roses pinned to the crown, and wearing a floor-length skirt, “The flower of 42nd Street,” as Gypsy called herself that year, sang-talked, spoofing sex, striptease, and her persona. Here are the lyrics to her signature number:

Have you the faintest idea of the private life of a strip-

Teaser? My dear, it’s New York’s second largest industry.

How a strip-teaser’s education, requires years of

concentration.

And for the sake of illustration, take a look at me.

I began at the age of three, learning ballet at the Royal

Imperial

School in Moscow. And how I suffered and suffered for

my Art.

Then of course, Sweet Briar, Ah those dear college days,

And after four years of Sociology,

Zoology, Biology, and Anthropology,

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My education was complete.

And I was ready to make my professional Debut on 14th

Street.

Now the things that go on, in a strip-teaser’s mind

Would give you no end of surprise,

But if you are psychologically inclined,

There is more to see than meets the eye

For example—when I lower my gown a fraction,

And expose a patch of xxxx shoulder.

I am not interested in your reaction,

Or in the bareness of that shoulder.

I am thinking of some paintings,

By Van Gogh, or by Susanne [
sic
].

Or the charm I had in reading, Lady Windemere’s Fan.

And when I lower the other side, and expose my other

shoulder.

Do you think I take the slightest pride,

In the whiteness of my shoulder?

I am thinking of my country house,

And the jolly fun in shooting grouse,

And the frantic music changes, then off to my cue,

But I only think of all the things, I really ought to do.

Wire Leslie Howard, Cable Noel [
sic
] Coward

Go to Bergdoff’s [
sic
] for my fitting, buy the yarn for mother’s knitting

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Put preserves up by the jar, and make arrangements for

my church bazaar.

But there is the music and that’s my cue,

There is really only one ting left for me to do, so do it.

And when I raise my skirts with slyness and dexterity,

I am mentally computing just how much I’ll give to

charity.

Though my thighs I have revealed, and just a bit of me

remains concealed,

I am thinking of the life of Duce,

Or the third chapter of “the Last Puritan”

None of those men whose minds are obscene,

They leave me apathetic, I prefer the more Aesthetic,

Things like drams by Rossino . . . “Gone With The Wind.”

And when I display my charms, in all their dazzling

splendor,

And prove to you conclusively, I am of the female gender.

I am really thinking of Elsie de Wolff, and the bric-a-brac I saw.

And that lovely letter I received from Mr. Bernard Shaw.

I have a town house on the East River, because it’s so

fashionable

To look at Weflare [
sic
] Island, coal barges, and garbage scows.

I have a Chinchilla, a Newport Villa,

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And then I take the last thing off,

And stand there shyly with nothing on at all.

Clutching an old velvet drop, and looking demurely at

every man.

Do you believe for a moment, that I am thinking of sex?

Well I certainly am

Most later versions of “A Stripteaser’s Education” cleaned up the spelling and justified the margins. But in all versions, Gypsy teased Americans for believing her story about her origins and reminded them that she had become a success thanks to their suspension of disbelief. Most of the truths about her identity and origins were still too outrageous to be revealed while she was taking off her clothes, or at any other time. Even “A Stripteaser’s Education”’s punch line, at which Gypsy claimed to be “thinking about sex,” is itself a tease. Although at first it sounds like she replaces Victorian coyness with desire, sex is not the song’s real subject; she always delivered this line with a wink. “A Stripteaser’s Education” is less “Let’s Do It” than it is “Song of Myself with Status Accessories.”