American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (16 page)

“
Where did you children get those?” she asked. Clamping a hand on each girl’s shoulder, she turned them around, guided them back into Woolworth’s, and made them confess. “I’m sowwy and I’ll never steal again,” June said. Louise repeated that line, her voice sounding hollow and far away.

An hour later, back in the dressing room, the story came tumbling out. June began to cry and Rose joined in, a raspy gasp chasing each sob. Louise cried into the dip of her mother’s neck and they all rocked back and forth. “We were together,” Louise said. “We were warm and safe from outsiders who didn’t understand us.”

Without warning Rose unclasped Louise’s grip and pushed June aside. She took a step toward Miss Thompson. Her face took on an expression of terrifying calm, those violet, coin slot eyes, that fault line of a mouth.

“
How dare you?” she said. Even the pauses between words carried a threat. “How dare you subject that little bundle of nerves to such a strain?”

June sniffed from the corner. Miss Thompson knew better than to defend herself.

“Get out! You’re fired!”

The door shut behind her. The next time a reporter visited their dressing room, his camera captured the children bent over desks and Rose standing before the blackboard,
posing as Miss Thompson, complete with proper governess uniform and horn-rimmed glasses.

Louise conducted her own private lessons, updating her reading list, carving out private niches of time to scavenge for unfamiliar phrases and exotic words. She replaced
Sarah Crewe, Tanglewood Tales
, and
A Child’s Garden of Verses
with Boccaccio’s
Decameron, Indian Love Lyrics
, and
Das Kapital
, always carrying one or another under her arm. June regarded her with unabashed awe and the boys mocked her playfully. Look at this bookish, haughty version of plain old Louise, the clumsy girl who couldn’t even carry a tune—“
The Duchess,” they now called her. She taught herself to sew, too, a gift passed on from Big Lady, and made costumes for the entire company during long train rides from town to town. They all read tea leaves, a popular pastime for troupers, but Louise insisted she had a true gift for seeing the future; the veil over her face at birth, which Grandma Dottie had pressed between the pages of her Bible, had marked her as special.

“
I’m going to marry a king or somebody,” she boasted to June. “In any case, I’ll be rich.” As reinforcement, she doodled just one word, “
Money,” in her careful child’s cursive script, until the page was filled edge to edge with her intent.

B
y now, Dainty June and Her Newsboy Songsters were so successful other acts spied on them, memorizing Sonny’s solos, imitating June’s steps. There was even a rumor that the Pantages Circuit was developing a new young starlet named “Baby June” to follow Dainty June’s act across the country, a ploy Rose grudgingly admired. Gordon occasionally altered the roster of boys; they succumbed to the grueling schedule or demands of their families back home, but new talent waited in every city. Dainty June played after intermission, a coveted position on the bill, much preferable to opening or closing (called “
playing to the haircuts,” since the audience typically began exiting the theater).
One of their programs featured a cover image of June clad in angel wings, so high on her toes that her feet arch perfectly, improbably, like crescent moons.

Not one false note in any of their performances, according to the critics. George’s dancing was phenomenal—not surprisingly, since
he performed before the royal court in Italy, according to Rose. The
skit done in blackface by two boys named Nixon and Sans was “hilarious.”
Another boy’s solo was made more “interesting” by the fact that his cracking, pubescent voice slid between tenor and bass.
Louise displayed a flair for comedy and character acting, especially during her “excellent” Scandinavian singing impersonation and “Frances, the Bowery Tough” number. They loved everything about Dainty June, especially her rendition of the melody “
Won’t You Be My Husband?,” during which the star, “still in her babyhood,” crossed the footlights to find an elderly gentleman with a gleaming bald head. Reaching into “parts unknown,” she produced a massive powder puff and caressed the man all over, performing as if for him alone.

No one seemed quite sure of June’s age—the guesses ranged from eleven to fourteen to sixteen—and despite the “wealth of chuckles” and “world of laughter,” there was something disturbing, something off, about the whole spectacle.

“
Dainty June and Company,” one critic noted, “are not very childish, with their uncomfortable sophistication. The more meager is the period of childhood, the hastier, relatively, does withering old age creep on.”

It would not be long before Dainty June had her
first nervous breakdown.

O
utside the insular world of vaudeville, the 1920s were updating everything America knew about itself. Sigmund Freud introduced the
idea that all people are born bisexual.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as assistant secretary of the navy, got enmeshed in a scandal when young sailors went undercover to collect evidence against homosexuals in Newport, Rhode Island. President Warren G. Harding met with his mistress, a pretty young blonde named Nan Britton, in clandestine corners of the White House.
There was, she said, “a small closet [where] we repaired many times, and in the darkness of a space no more than five feet square the President of the United States and his adoring sweetheart made love.” America had finally completed her noble task overseas and now anticipated a promising future.

But the future had ominous undertones. The deaths of more than 15 million people, 130,000 of them Americans, ushered in an era of violent change—the great turning point of modern history. A postwar malaise gripped the country. People felt untethered. Their traditions were uprooted, their belief systems unmoored. Two Chicago boys named Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb murdered a neighborhood boy “just for the thrill of it.” On a cloudless September day, a brown wagon draped in canvas and pulled by an old bay horse stopped at 23 Wall Street, the headquarters of J. P. Morgan in lower Manhattan. The driver crept away, and as the clock on Trinity Church struck 12:01 p.m., a blast rattled the entire district. Shards of iron shot through the air, shattering pedestrians’ skulls. Windowpanes blasted out as far as ten blocks away and clerks in sixth-floor offices suffered severe burns.
The property damage neared $3 million, 39 people died, and 130 were injured.
It was the deadliest attack on U.S. soil to date, and the perpetrators would never be discovered. In this new world of random bombings and genocide and poison gas and machine guns that fired six hundred rounds per minute, it wasn’t difficult to believe that young men could kill each other over a truckload of booze.