Mother Finds a Body

Mother
Finds
a Body

 FEMMES

FATALES

Femmes Fatales restores to print the best of women's writing in
the classic pulp genres of the mid-twentieth century. From hard-boiled
noir to taboo lesbian romance, these rediscovered queens of pulp
offer subversive perspectives on a turbulent era.

Faith Baldwin
SKYSCRAPER

Vera Caspary
BEDELIA
LAURA

Dorothy B. Hughes
THE BLACKBIRDER
IN A LONELY PLACE

Gypsy Rose Lee
THE G-STRING MURDERS
MOTHER FINDS A BODY

Evelyn Piper
BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING

Olive Higgins Prouty
NOW, VOYAGER

Valerie Taylor
THE GIRLS IN 3-B
STRANGER ON LESBOS

Tereska Torres
WOMEN'S BARRACKS
BY CECILE

Mother
Finds
a Body

GYPSY ROSE LEE

FOREWORD BY ERIK LEE PREMINGER

Published by the Feminist Press
at the City University of New York
The Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406
New York, NY 10016

feministpress.org

First Feminist Press edition

Foreword copyright © 2012 by Erik Lee Preminger
Text copyright © 1942 by Gypsy Rose Lee and
© 1981 by Erik Lee Preminger
Originally published in 1942 by Simon and Schuster, Inc.

No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Cover and text design by Drew Stevens
Cover photo by Michael Maynard

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lee, Gypsy Rose, 1914-1970.
 Mother finds a body / Gypsy Rose Lee.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-55861-802-2
I. Title.

PS3523.E3324M68 2012
813'.52--dc23

2012004491

M
y mother's greatest creation was Gypsy Rose Lee, the persona she first adopted as a stripper at Billy Minsky's Republic Theater in New York City in the 1930s. While her fame was rooted in her career as a stripper in burlesque, it flowered into legend through her writing: two successful mystery novels,
The G-String Murders
and
Mother Finds a Body
; several magazine articles for the
New Yorker
,
American Mercury
,
Flair
, and others; and culminated with her memoir
Gypsy
, which became the landmark film and Broadway musical through which Gypsy Rose Lee lives on today.

The progression seems so natural that it must have been easy, but of course it wasn't. She had no formal education, no informal education either for that matter. She spent her childhood trouping in vaudeville with her sister; they never stayed in one place long enough to attend school. Their mother only hired the occasional tutor when there was an overzealous child welfare inspector lurking backstage. When the inspector left, so did the tutor.

So how did she learn to write? She began by reading. Books were her escape from dirty dressing rooms and dismal theatrical hotels, her escape from feeling like a failure because her sister could sing and dance but she could do neither, her escape from the loneliness that she experienced because she couldn't relate to the other children in the act. She didn't know it at the time, but she was, quite simply, smarter than all of them.

She read any book she could buy or shoplift, which resulted in an eccentric range of topics and authors:
Decameron
,
The Blind Bow Boy
,
Painted Veils
,
Das Capital
and
Droll Stories
to name a few. She read them over and over again. She collected so many books that the bottom fell out of her theatrical trunk. After that, her mother made her give up one book for every one she added. My mother used to say that leaving even a bad book was worse than leaving a good friend.

Gradually she learned to be more selective. The manager of the Seven Arts bookstore in Detroit, George Davis, became her first teacher. My mother describes him as “young and delicately handsome. He walked softly on the toes of his feet and when he took the books from the shelves he handled them gently. His voice was gentle, too, and his eyes were sympathetic and warm.” Davis suggested she read Shakespeare's sonnets. The next day, the show's engagement in Detroit was over, and she left town with the family troupe.

Skip ahead eight years. Her fortunes had peaked. She had been the toast of New York while at Minsky's, went on to star in the
Ziegfeld Follies
with Fanny Brice, and signed a seven-year contract with Twentieth Century Fox. Then her fortunes plummeted. Will H. Hays—Hollywood's censorship czar—refused to allow the name Gypsy Rose Lee on America's movie screens. Darryl Zanuck, the head of Fox, fulfilled the minimum terms of her contract by putting her in four mediocre, B-grade pictures using her real name—Louise Hovick—and then let her contract option expire at the end of one year. Throw in a marriage to burnish her image for the studio, followed by a divorce as soon as her option was dropped, and she returned to New York demoralized and broke. Stripping was no longer a possibility since Mayor LaGuardia had closed all the burlesque theaters.

Re-enter George Davis. During the same eight years, his fortunes, too, had ebbed and flowed. He had written a wildly successful first novel, but squandered the advance for his second novel on a year's debauch in Paris. He got off the boat with only the clothes on his back, one shoe . . . and the idea to add serious fiction to women's magazines. He created a job for himself
as the fiction editor of
Harper's Bazaar
, and introduced to American readers some of the finest writers of the age, among them Carson McCullers, Christopher Isherwood, and Stephen Spender.

George rented a beautiful house in Brooklyn Heights, which he couldn't afford, so he took in boarders to share the rent. At one time or another, his housemates included the poet W.H. Auden; the composer Benjamin Britten; the writers Carson McCullers, Paul Bowles, and Gypsy Rose Lee, and a trained chimpanzee. Everyone was under thirty-five and touched by genius. Inspired by all this talent, Mother began her first mystery.

Her writing was interrupted by the dynamic Broadway showman Mike Todd. He wanted my mother to headline a star-studded review at the New York World's Fair, and she resumed her most lucrative vocation—stripping. A girl's got to make a living you know. Between shows, she wrote in her dressing room, and eventually
The G-String Murders
was published on December 7, 1941. It was not an auspicious debut. The publisher took out full-page ads in newspapers around the country, but that day no one got past the front-page story: Pearl Harbor.

The G-String Murders
made the
New York Times
best-seller list, a rare accomplishment at the time. As soon as it did, its authorship was questioned. How could a stripper write such an entertaining, witty book—a best seller no less? Then Mother and George Davis had a falling out over an antique mantle. Mother took the mantle, so he took credit for her book. At the same time, a rumor circulated that mystery writer Craig Rice was the author, a rumor that survives to this day despite the fact that Rice denied it at the time. Mother was furious and frustrated. How does one disprove a negative? She did it by writing another book.

She was the central character in
The G-String Murders
. It was set in a burlesque theater reminiscent of Minsky's, and the characters were thinly veiled representations of the strippers and comics she had worked with. She would also be the central character in her next mystery,
Mother Finds a Body
, and it would also draw on her own experience. The novel is set
in a trailer park during her honeymoon—my mother did honeymoon in a trailer—and is populated with burlesque comics, vaudeville actors, and her own mother, whose behavior in the novel was authentic. This novel was not quite as successful so no one else claimed credit for writing it, but her mother did sue her over the book. What's fascinating is that she didn't object to the way she was portrayed; she simply felt she was owed money for acting, so to speak, in the book.

So you may wonder, what was my grandmother really like? My mother said she was “charming, courageous, resourceful, and ambitious. She was also, in a feminine way, ruthless . . . A jungle mother.” During interviews I conducted for my memoir,
My G-String Mother
, I was told repeatedly that my grandmother had killed two people: a hotel manager who “fell” out of a window during an argument with her (Arthur Laurents used this as the basis for a scene in the musical
Gypsy
), and her lesbian lover whom she allegedly shot after the woman made a pass at my mother. This was arranged to look like a suicide.

I only met my grandmother a few times; the most time I spent with her was when I was five. It was my job to answer the front door of the twenty-eight-room New York City townhouse where my mother and I lived. One day I opened it to a small, plain woman with curly hair. She asked to see my mother.

“Who shall I say is calling?” I asked. Mother had trained me to be very polite.

“Tell her it's her mother,” she answered.

Now my instructions were very clear. I wasn't to let anyone into the house who I didn't know. But this was my mother's mother, and given the high regard in which I held my own mother . . . Well, I invited her to have a seat in the foyer, and then I ran up the three flights of stairs to my mother's room and told her who was waiting.

“Oh, no,” my mother said. She waved her hand as if swatting away a fly. “I can't be bothered. Tell her I'm busy.” Then, as an afterthought, she asked, “You didn't let her in the house, did you?”

“Well, yes,” I admitted.

“Well for God's sake, get back downstairs and make sure she hasn't clipped the Picasso.”

I ran back downstairs, checked that the Picasso was in place, and politely told her that my mother was “occupied and couldn't see her.”

“Oh, that's all right. I didn't think she'd see me,” she said sadly. Then her whole demeanor lightened and she said, “You must be Erik. Come, sit and talk with me for awhile.”

So we had one of those long adult/child chats about school and pets, which ended with her saying, “I bet you like guns.”

“You bet,” I said. Hopalong Cassidy and The Lone Ranger were the heroes of my childhood, and I played with toy pistols galore.

She reached into her purse. “I was cleaning out my attic the other day and ran across this. I thought you'd like to have it.”

She pulled out a real .45 caliber army automatic and handed it to me. It was very heavy, and I could hardly lift it, but I was very excited and couldn't wait to play with it, so it came as a disappointment when I showed it to my mother who promptly confiscated it.

Many people have wondered: How much of
Mother Finds a Body
is true? Ultimately, all of mother's writing was based on her life, so by the time she got to
Gypsy
she was comfortable with the characters. Ironically, she waited until after her mother died to write it because she wanted to avoid another lawsuit, but she got sued anyway. This time by her sister. Like the earlier suit by her mother, it was settled with money. To call our family mercenary would be an understatement.