American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (17 page)

Drastic change was encroaching on vaudeville, too, and even the best insurance bits were no guarantee against the growing new threat. Since KDKA in Pittsburgh broadcast the 1920 presidential election returns, radio, though still an inchoate and primitive medium—one would be lucky to tune in and hear a harmonica played by whomever, wherever—seemed poised to revolutionize every aspect of daily life. It could cure disease, solve crimes, soothe the lingering tensions with Europe.
And to say nothing of the entertainment possibilities!
Mme. Luisa Tetrazzini, standing in her apartment in Manhattan’s Hotel McAlpin, gave an opera concert for hundreds on board naval ships cruising the Atlantic Ocean.
The Park Avenue Baptist Church, where John D. Rockefeller, Jr., worshiped every Sunday, had an evening service broadcast by station WJZ. An engineer in Ossining, New York, hosted a “
wireless vaudeville” performance from the comfort of his own home. Music and comedy soared invisibly across prairies and lakes to reach audiences in Connecticut, Illinois, Arkansas, Ohio, and Colorado. A family could enjoy a night out without paying a single dime for admission.

“
Those earphones will never take the place of vaudeville,” Rose insisted, but she consented to tweak the act. A cow would join them, she announced. Yes, a cow. It had appeared to her in a dream and told her exactly what to do. Gordon understood that such omens were not to be ridiculed, and immediately ordered the cow to be made. It had a papier-mâché head with nostrils the size of rabbit holes, a brown-and-white body made of felt, trousers for legs, and leather spat hooves. One boy occupied the head, two crouched inside its torso, and one controlled the hind legs. Louise, contrary to the myth she would one day create, never played any part of the cow’s body. In June’s opinion, “
she couldn’t dance that well.”

“
I’ve got a cow and her name is Sue,” June sang, while the cow pranced and dipped alongside her, “and she’ll do most anything I ask her to.” The cow became an Orpheum headliner in its own right. “
Bring the kiddies,” the advertisements exhorted, “to see Dainty June and the Funny Dancing Cow.”

The cow helped, but Rose still relied on her own version of insurance: stealing from other performers’ acts (although she was now more selective about who was worthy of the effort). When she learned they would be on a bill with the great Fanny Brice, on break from the
Ziegfeld Follies
, during an upcoming stop in San Francisco, she reminded the girls to watch every single show, and closely.

Fanny Brice was a star not easily copied, a true original with a honed philosophy about her craft, and she would have scoffed at Rose’s plan to spy on her act. “
Every successful artist, no matter what his medium,” Fanny wrote, “has his own individual methods of getting his result, and
anyone who attempts to borrow another’s method becomes a mere impersonator.… You never can tell what an audience is going to do. That is what makes the search for the feel of the audience such a fascinating and lucrative pastime.”

But Rose forgot her spying scheme when the manager of the Orpheum in San Francisco approached her. Did Madame Rose have anyone in her act who could do a scene with Fanny Brice? The role called for a teenage girl, able to speak five lines, and he needed her right away.

She decided that Louise, now thirteen, would do the part. Not a natural like June, but she handled herself reasonably well onstage and knew how to deliver a joke. Besides, June was still a baby and could never convincingly play a teenager, not even when she became one.

Louise could scarcely believe her luck. All those nights spent ducking in the shadows of the stage, resenting June’s talent and her own irrelevance. All those rehearsals where it became clear she was interchangeable, her characters not truly her own. All that time wasted hating the act simply because it could carry on, indefinitely, without her. And now, finally, performing was an opportunity rather than an obligation, a chance to prove she was an intrinsic part of their future, that Mother had been wise not to leave her behind.

A
dozen years later, when Gypsy Rose Lee considered Fanny Brice her mentor and best friend, she would recall nearly everything about the day they first met, the day she had her first solo without June or the Newsboy Songsters. Fanny looked different than she’d expected, clothed in a plain black dress, no bustle or fur or feathers, not even a glint of jewelry. She invited Louise to sit in her dressing room so they could discuss the scene: Louise is the drunken flapper, a know-it-all kid named Mary Rose, and she struggles while a cop tries to arrest her. Fanny talks him out of it, then steps in and delivers a lecture about her gutter ways. Louise listened to every word Fanny said, each one amplified in the intimate space of the dressing room, and told her she was sure she could do it, even though she wasn’t sure at all.

She tried on her costume, a bejeweled orange chiffon dress with a floaty skirt of feathers. “
I can’t wear this in front of an audience,” Louise whispered. “It isn’t modest.” Fanny shook her head, and noticed
that the girl looked scared to death. “Look, kid,” she said. “
You can’t be too modest in this business.” Louise slipped into a pair of gold brocade heels that pinched her growing feet—so badly she had to retrieve the clunky oxfords from her newsboy costume, and hope the feathers would hide them.

She felt June watching her and heard her sister’s question—“
Does Mother know you’re wearing a dress like that?”—accompanied by a wise little smile; for once, the Baby played the big sister. With each moment an internal shutter clicked, imprinting everything: the numbness in her legs; the grace of the conductor’s hands, waving like “
pink wax birds” over the black expanse of audience; the remote, untamed sound of her voice as it recited each line. What Louise remembered most of all was how the spotlight felt hotter, somehow, when it had only her to shine on.

A few weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, while 2,500 Japanese residents are being rounded up and shipped to Ellis Island, Gypsy receives a phone call from Michael Todd.

While walking along 42nd Street, he tells her, he was struck by an idea. He wants to revive burlesque, transform the tired old bump and grind into a flashy, expensive Broadway musical—a brilliant marriage of Minsky and Ziegfeld on a grand and opulent scale; Americans crave nothing in times of hardship so much as the distractions of beauty and noise. He’ll call the production
Star and Garter
and stage it at the Music Box Theatre. Mayor La Guardia won’t dare interfere with one of Broadway’s most prestigious venues.

Gypsy is intrigued. She’ll be the lead in her own Broadway show as well as a producer, roles she never played before. Even better, she’ll get to work with Mike again.

Souvenir program from
Star and Garter
, 1942.
(photo credit 13.1)

They stay up nights perfecting skits and sharpening jokes, but as the June 24 premiere date approaches, he is still $25,000 short. He knocks on Gypsy’s dressing room door to tell her
Star and Garter
is finished before it even starts.

“
You have to open,” she protests. “I bought two gallons of body paint. Two gallons, Mike. That’s enough for years!”

“One of my backers, Herb Freezer, wants his G’s back. And I’m tapped out.”

“I’ll buy Freezer’s interest,” she says, casually.

“I said G’s, not G-strings.”

“I heard you.”

“Twenty-five big ones, Gypsy. You can’t dig up that kind of scratch in twenty-four hours.”

She bends her lips into a smile. “One hour.”

It is that easy and it isn’t. Gypsy has the money, but it’s stashed in banks throughout Manhattan. Right on schedule she meets Mike and his lawyer, Bill Fitelson, with $25,000 in hand.

“How much percentage do I get?” she asks.

Mike’s lawyer seems incapable of speaking in words, just fractions and numbers. Gypsy might have forced her way through Proust’s oeuvre, but she still uses her fingers to count. She sighs, exasperated.

“Can’t you just give me a pie?” she says.

“A pie?” Fitelson asks, confused.

But Mike understands right away. “For chrissakes!” he yells. “The dame wants a pie, give her a goddamn pie.” He draws the pie himself, slicing up each investors’ share, shading in her cut until she is satisfied.

Star and Garter
premieres to mixed reviews, but the show is sold out far in advance. “
It was wartime,” Gypsy said, “and it was the first girlie show that had been done on Broadway in a long time—beautiful girls, scanty costumes, low comics.… It was beautiful, lush, extravagant, and wonderful. I remember one matinee, one of the ladies was leaving—my dressing room faced the street—and there were some friends waiting for her when she came out. She said, ‘Mabel, I have just seen
without a doubt the dirtiest, filthiest show I’ve ever seen in all my life. Don’t miss it.’ ”

She has yet to regret her investment in Mike, personally or professionally. The time has come, she decides, to go all in, to push her last coin across the counter.

I’ve never been close enough to anyone to share an honest feeling, she tells him, let alone an intense one, and now I’m sharing both with you. Get a divorce, and marry me.

Once it leaves her hands there is no taking it back, even when he says he could never divorce Bertha—not because he loves her, of course, but because he loves his son. She asks again in different ways with different words but receives the same answer. No one misses their raucous fights behind the curtain of the Music Box Theatre after each closing. Pleas morph into demands, anger into desperation. After two months, in August, she decides to withdraw her offer and bluff. Fine, Gypsy tells Mike. If he won’t marry her, she’ll find someone who will.

She doesn’t have to find William Alexander Kirkland, a perfectly nice, blandly handsome, closeted bisexual actor, known as Alexander in business and Bill in private. He is already there, calling her
his “princess,” courting her in his patient, sensible way. At a party for her
Star and Garter
costar Bobby Clark, she decides to hurry things along. Climbing atop a crate, she calls for everyone’s attention and makes her announcement: she and Bill Kirkland are getting married.

Gypsy looks directly at Mike as she speaks. Around her the room fills with movement and noise, whistles and applause and men rushing to shake Bill’s hand. Mike remains the only still thing, pinning her with unblinking eyes, until he rises without a word and leaves her alone with the crowd.

As midnight approached on January 16, 1920, Billy Minsky prepared to meet the new needs of his patrons and his city, stocking his office at the National Winter Garden with ice buckets, crystal tumblers, bottles of the finest whiskey, scotch, bourbon, and cognac, fruit juices to make Orange Blossoms and Old-Fashioneds and Sidecars, sugar cubes and maraschino cherries and lemon peels for garnish. Outside his windows New York was in the throes of a citywide wake, up and down every avenue, across every street. Black-bordered invitations had been dispensed weeks before, announcing “
Last rites and ceremonies attending the departure of our spirited friend, John Barleycorn.” The death was premeditated and met with sadness and gaiety, mockery and contempt, and few predicted the resurrection soon to come.

The ice-slicked streets did little to deter the “
mourning parties,” which began at dinnertime and multiplied as the hours advanced. Guests paid their respects at the Waldorf-Astoria, hip flasks peeking from waistbands, champagne glasses kissing in farewell toasts. Park Avenue women in sleek ermine coats and cloche hats gripped bottles of wine with one hand and wiped real tears with the other.
Uptown at Healy’s, patrons tossed empty glasses into a silk-lined casket, and eight waiters at Maxim’s, clad entirely in black, carried a coffin to the center of the dance floor. Reporters on deadline tapped out eulogies for John Barleycorn and imagined his final words. “
I’ve had more friends in private and more foes in public,” quoted the
Daily News
, “than any other man in America.”