American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (18 page)

A grand finale at the National Winter Garden, “slumming” destination for uptowners.
(photo credit 14.1)

Past and future purveyors of vice marked the night with anticipation, a sense of déjà vu, or no feeling at all. The “Lester sisters”—two former madams exiled from Chicago—spent a quiet evening in their Upper West Side brownstone, sipping champagne and marveling at the lunacy of the reformers. A Brooklyn boy named
Alphonse Capone, considered a minor player in the old Five Points Gang (or what remained of it), had been discharged from the army the previous year. The dawn of Prohibition fell, coincidentally, on his twenty-first birthday, but all of its possibilities had not yet occurred to him. One of his Five Points cohorts, twenty-three-year-old Charles Luciano—soon to earn the nickname “Lucky”—had served time as a teenager for trafficking cocaine and heroin and knew precisely how to take advantage of the new law. “
I never was a crumb,” he said, meaning a common workingman, “and if I have to be a crumb I’d rather be dead.”

Arnold Rothstein, pawnbroker to the underworld and future inspiration for
The Great Gatsby
’s Meyer Wolfsheim, was deep into a card game on the night Prohibition struck. He was no stranger to grand schemes, having fixed the World Series of 1919, and would soon join bootlegging forces with a Lower East Side gangster named Irving Wexler. Better known as Waxey Gordon, Wexler stood poised to become one of the country’s premier rum runners. On at least one occasion he would use his resulting fortune for an ostensibly benevolent purpose: ordering a New York City dentist to fix Gypsy Rose Lee’s teeth.

A
ll across the city,
speakeasies sprouted in unexpected places: tucked behind receptionists’ desks in office buildings; amid the rubble and machinery of construction sites; in the cellars of fashionable hat shops and the back rooms of pricey town houses; across from police stations; and even at the top of the Chrysler Building. Revelers bet one another who could find the oddest location for their next libation. In one apocryphal story, a young man spent hours drinking at a speakeasy that felt “
vaguely familiar.” Slowly, it came to him that he was standing in his childhood home, in the very room that had once been his nursery. Two federal agents named
Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith, donning disguises that ranged from fishermen to firefighters, football coaches to bums, sophisticated operagoers to matronly Italian women, made bartenders faint when their true identities were revealed.

The Minskys welcomed every new speakeasy that graced their neighborhood.
Dozens lined East First, East Fourth, Rivington, Chrystie, and Stanton Streets, the Bowery, and Second Avenue. The best in the neighborhood, and perhaps all of New York, was Manny Wolf’s at Forsyth and Grand, just a few hundred yards away from the National Winter Garden’s door. Moneyed uptowners arrived in their Cadillac limousines, afflicted with, as one reformer noted, “
an itch to try new things.” Drinking now required cunning, an urbane wit, the code to a secret and thrilling language. “
Give me a ginger ale,” they said, and waited for the bartender’s wink and knowing reply: “Imported or domestic?” The correct answer, imported, earned the customer a regulation pre-Prohibition highball.

Occasionally, Billy noticed, these uptown visitors wandered over to the National Winter Garden, sufficiently sober to make it up to the sixth floor but tipsy enough to enjoy the show. They sat among the factory workers and longshoremen and blacksmiths, all of them grimacing at the comics (
WAITER: Would the lady like some tongue? WOMAN: Sir, I’ll have you understand that I never eat anything that comes out of an animal’s mouth. WAITER: Then how about a couple of eggs?) and ogling the girls. It was fine by Billy if those uptowners thought they were “slumming” at his theater, if they made jokes about needing a passport to venture so far south on the island. Instead of being insulted he invited such guests to his office for a postshow nightcap
and frank, enlightening conversation about what they most wanted to see onstage. A hefty wallet and a string of numerals after his name didn’t prevent a man from enjoying the more vulgar sketches. Often such patrons laughed hardest when a comic
shook a bottle of seltzer and squirted the contents into a girl’s waiting buttocks, or when she perched herself on a toilet seat and burbled lines about going to Flushing and buying stock in Consolidated Gas.

“
Burlesque, like Broadway, is changing in its ever-vacillating clientele,”
Billboard
observed. “This is especially applicable to Minsky’s National Winter Garden, for no more do we see the ever-yawning smokers of hop and dreadful degenerates, [but] out-of-town slumming parties and would-be sporty boys and girls who demand an indecent thrill.”

At the same time, Billy wanted the interlopers to know that the National Winter Garden was superior to the rest of the neighborhood’s stock burlesque houses, that the brothers were familiar enough with the so-called legitimate producers to parody them properly. To that end, he took out pointed
half-page ads in the
New York Clipper:

Billy also sought the services of
Anne Toebe, widely acknowledged as the burlesque industry’s first stripper, and
Carrie Finnell, the first teaser (despite Mae Dix’s fortuitous wardrobe mishap back in 1917 as
she exited the Minsky runway). The monikers were self-defining. A teaser sashayed, strutted, winked. She exited the stage each time she showed skin, even if just a square of collarbone or the dip of her waist, and returned until adorned only in her girdle and brassiere and G-string, offering, if the men begged sufficiently, a flash of breast at the end.

A stripper was more focused in her approach, unhooking clasps and hooks with connect-the-dots predictability until clad in her “union suit,” a one-piece garment designed to look like bare flesh. The chubby, redheaded Toebe engaged in “rough” flirtation with the audience, imprinting scarlet kisses on the pates of bald jewelry salesmen. One of her most popular songs went, in part:

Carrie Finnell, years after her heyday at the National Winter Garden.
(photo credit 14.2)

Finnell, by contrast, performed in baby blue silk and rabbit fur boots, and was known as “
the girl with the $100,000 legs” after her manager, in a well-publicized move, had them insured. The teaser, Billy figured, would do much to dispel the unfortunate nickname the Minsky runway had earned since its inception: “
Varicose Alley.”

Last but far from least, Billy brought back Mae Dix, who was by now one of the biggest draws in burlesque, demanding $175 per week and top billing. Wearing nothing over her union suit but a handkerchief, the point falling strategically between her legs, Dix announced the following week’s attractions and invited the audience to share suggestions. “
I’ll do anything at all for you,” she said, adding with a wink, “within reason.” She had a supporting cast of chorus girls who specialized in cooch dancing, a tradition derived from Little Egypt’s slinky undulations during the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and one that had come to burlesque to stay.

Sex, Billy predicted, would soon be the predominant component of burlesque, edging out the corny comics and suggestive repartee and animal-bladder bashings, and he would do everything in his power to hasten that change along.

B
illy celebrated success with his customary zealous focus. He zipped a brand-new Stutz Bearcat sports car through the Lower East Side’s narrow streets and bought a vacation house in Seagate, a private, exclusive community on Coney Island. He sent his wife, Mary, and their young son to live there permanently; she wouldn’t like the theater, he insisted. Too vulgar for her refined tastes, and she should take her exclusion as a compliment. In truth, he and Abe—by now remarried—spent most of their downtime competing for the affections of various
Minsky “Rosebuds.”

The brothers also continued to spy on the big uptown productions. One night, Billy ventured to a Shubert theater on Broadway and settled, as inconspicuously as possible, into a back row. Critics had raved about
Cinderella on Broadway
, calling it “
a lavish and bounteous extravaganza.” At the close of the first act, a great silver slipper transformed into a staircase, down which paraded an impressive cast of beauties.

Billy was watching closely, noting which set designs and physiques would work downtown, when he felt a finger drill into the back of his neck. He turned and found himself staring at the bedraggled brows of Lee Shubert, obsidian eyes glaring beneath them.

“
Look out, Minsky,” he said. “Don’t let me catch you using any of this stuff in your show at the National Winter Garden.”

Billy smiled. “Too late,” he said.

I
t was time, the brothers decided, to bring the Minsky name to Broadway. The press greeted the news with enthusiasm and praise. “
They are far seeing youths,” the
Times
wrote of the Minskys, “and have old heads on young shoulders.” The new venture would be housed in the Park Theatre at Columbus Circle. Billy envisioned an entirely new type of show, a superior sort of burlesque—“
Burlesques,” he called it, emphasis on the final
s
, a brand that would become as recognizable as the
Follies
. Calling it the Park Music Hall instead of the Park Theatre would evoke a more elegant age, the height of Old New York.
The company consisted of an English pony ballet (in which sixteen girls danced on the backs of live ponies), fifteen leading actors (called “principals”), and forty chorus girls, who must weigh less than 170 pounds—the first time Billy imposed such a restriction, never having forgotten the mean-spirited review that described the Rosebuds as “
hulking.” No unsightly veins, either; Broadway wouldn’t tolerate a Varicose Alley.

A jazz orchestra of twenty began rigorous rehearsals, and a Hawaiian octet set up in the foyer to play during intermissions. The Minskys would keep the same company but change the show every week. Two dollars and twenty cents per ticket was several times the cost of their shows downtown, but a bargain compared to the overpriced and overrated
Follies
at $6.60. Forget the New Amsterdam or the Winter Garden, the Park Music Hall would be the new Victoria, Oscar Hammerstein’s opulent, grand old theater that set a standard back in 1899. “
The Victoria,” the
New York American
wrote that year, “at a bird’s eye view, looks like a big twinkling pearl, all white and gold with the opals of electricity studding it in profusion.… Gorgeous carpets, splendid lounges and all the ultra-elegance the metropolis loves were to be seen everywhere.” Better to forget the Victoria’s ultimate disgrace at the hands of Hammerstein’s
son Willie, who took over operations in 1904 and turned it into a freakshow venue, booking acts like “
Sober Sue—You Can’t Make Her Laugh.” Willie posted a $1,000 reward and several of the best comics of the day tried their best, but all failed. When the engagement ended, it was discovered that it was physically impossible for Sober Sue to laugh since her facial muscles were paralyzed.