American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (19 page)

T
he Park Music Hall would require much time and effort, but the Minskys couldn’t neglect their flagship burlesque theater. Billy suggested that Herbert stay downtown and make sure the National Winter Garden kept attracting ethnics and uptowners alike. To keep an eye on audience rowdies and drunks, Abe hired Albert and Walter,
two retired Pinkerton detectives with barrel-sized arms and convincing costumes—gold-plated badges and stiff-brimmed police caps filched from the Minskys’ props department. Patrolling the rooftop, they smacked billy clubs against beefy palms and tossed out “sleepers,” bums inclined to loiter until the next day’s matinee. They also kept an eye on the oddball who engaged in loud,
intense conversations with his penis during the show.

Billy devoted his energy to the Park Music Hall and offered the youngest Minsky brother a proposition: how would Morton like to work the Park’s outdoor box office, where patrons could buy premium seats closest to the girls? It was time for Morton to stop hanging around aimlessly and bothering the soubrettes (his crush on Ethel De Veaux, for instance, was cute but wearisome; he was always offering to escort her to the subway and staring, entranced, as she cracked her wad of Juicy Fruit gum). With some tutoring and hard work, Morton could be an asset to the growing Minsky franchise. Morton immediately dropped out of New York University, and begged Billy to teach him everything he knew.

N
o one, unfortunately, mistook the new Minsky theater for the old Hammerstein Victoria. “
The long-awaited uncorking of the Park Music Hall,” wrote the
New York Clipper
, “was attended by a loud
pop!
it is true, but the ensuing flow of its contents proved it to have no new flavor.”
The list of complaints was long as a chorus line. The main dancer seemed “unacquainted with the art of makeup.” A leading lady wore a hideous outfit while singing “Pretty Clothes,” and the number wasn’t meant to be ironic. Vaudevillian Bob Nelson’s dancing was more St. Vitus than tap. The almost-nude dancing by a single girl seemed exploitative and gratuitous, as though the producers “felt the need to give the boys in the balconies a little spice for their money.” For once, even Billy didn’t know what to give them or how to put it on.

“
People,” Morton said, “were staying away in droves.”

The Park Music Hall
closed after just twenty-three weeks. Billy returned to the National Winter Garden hazy and unfocused, wondering how his pitch-perfect instinct had failed so miserably. Maybe the very idea was flawed: why would uptowners want a downtown version of glamour when they already had the original, legitimate thing? Maybe the Park Music Hall had offered slumming prices with none of the fun and ambiance of actual slumming. Maybe they would forever be stuck providing toilet humor and fat girls and inflated animal bladders over the head. Maybe some things in New York City were too good for the Minsky brothers, after all.

Gypsy Rose Lee wears black for this wedding, her second, knowing she’ll be in mourning if the ending isn’t a happy one. The ending she hopes for has nothing to do with
the gathering downstairs, absurd as a burlesque skit: the famous stripteaser Georgia Sothern as maid of honor; Carl Van Doren as best man; Lee Wright, her editor at Simon & Schuster (and rumored lover), as a bridesmaid;
Life
magazine as the official photographer; the impressive assemblage of guests, including Carson McCullers (who still recalls, longingly, their time together on Middagh Street), Peggy Guggenheim, Janet Flanner, Christopher Isherwood, Clare Boothe Luce, George Jean Nathan, and Max Ernst; one of her trained Chihuahuas as the entertainment; a chimpanzee as ring bearer; and the minister, who is dozing on the couch. It has nothing, even, to do with the groom, Bill Kirkland, who truly seems to believe he loves her.

Gypsy Rose Lee, preparing for her wedding to Bill Kirkland.
(photo credit 15.1)

It has everything to do with the ultimatum she gave another man, Michael Todd, and the clock’s willful march toward her midnight deadline. It has to do with the view outside her bedroom window—no sign of headlights boring through the darkness, no wisp of smoke from his omnipresent cigar, no demand from that booming voice to stop this charade, for God’s sake, he has come to call her bluff.

And how ironic that this wedding has forced a tepid reconciliation with her mother when her first resulted, eventually, in their bitterest estrangement. Rose is downstairs now, in the country estate that she used to call home, laughing with the very people she once derided as “
night club bad company, reefers, fags” who brought “unpleasant” things into their lives. It is Gypsy’s turn to deal with Rose, Big Lady, and Aunt Belle; June has made that clear. “
Dear Bride Gypsy Rose Lee,” her sister writes,

In some ways it’s a shame Gypsy has her genes and temperament and timing, that Bill, through no fault of his own, fails to be her match. The press calls him Hollywood’s most desirable bachelor, describes him as “
young, good-looking, successful, and well-endowed.” He seems earnest, smart, considerate, classy. “
I don’t think a woman should hold her love back,” he says, “and use it as a means with which to bargain for what she wants of life. I think that is cheapening love. Marriage ought to be on a finer, higher plane than that of barter and trade.”

A secret, tucked-away part of her heart recognizes how ugly this is, letting a man believe he’s a groom at his own wedding when he is merely leverage, a chip to be turned in if only she wins this hand. From the moment he met Gypsy he adored her, for the same reasons she is
adored by both New York’s literati and its longshoremen. She is a strutting, bawdy, erudite conundrum, belonging to everyone but known by none. She has to admit that Bill, for all that he isn’t and for all he’d never be to her, understands her better than most.

A year from this night, after they decide
never to consummate their marriage but before it is officially over, he writes a letter that she presses into her scrapbook:

Her mother’s laughter, quick and light as beating wings, climbs the stairs and invades her room. Rose fools even Bill, who says she can “
charm the birds out of the trees,” who finds it endlessly amusing when she dances with one of the apes from
Star and Garter
. She cheers Bill on when he feeds the animal an entire bottle of beer, and cheers the animal on when it then relieves itself down the front of Bill’s lapel. She is in her element, the matriarch of this grand and sardonic charade, and the thought of watching Mother lord over the proceedings gives Gypsy another reason to stall.

With a crimson fingernail, the black angel bride adjusts the
twig of grapes entwined in her hair. For once the grapes’ promise of good fortune has failed her. It is half past midnight and she will not tell a direct lie this time, not even to herself. Mike isn’t coming. He might never come again. Time to turn her back to the window, to the driveway that remains silent and unlit. Never in her life has she moved so slowly as she does descending those steps.

Dainty June and Her Newsboy Songsters (including Louise), near the end of the act.
(photo credit 15.2)

Louise had watched her sister work through measles and chicken pox and ruined feet, so she was as surprised as anyone when, one morning in Chicago, June literally could not lift her head. Her blue eyes appeared dull and unseeing, her cheeks were leached of color, her limbs as thin as the blinds darkening her room. “
I wanted to die,” June said, “just for the vacation.” Nothing Rose tried worked: threats, scolding, praise, promises of extra yaka mein at dinner. Sensibly, she refrained from mentioning what might have caused, or at least contributed to, June’s condition—a recent conversation with a theater manager in New York, who said that June had true talent. With singing, dancing, and acting lessons, she could be a triple threat, a bona fide star, and he was so sure of her potential he’d foot the bill himself, so long as Rose promised not to interfere. “
Mind your own business,” Rose told him. “There’s no
man in the world going to take my baby from me.… What school on earth can teach her anything she doesn’t already know?”

Louise stood at June’s bedside until the hotel doctor arrived and declared that the twelve-year-old had suffered a breakdown. For two straight weeks she must lie in bed in perfect quiet with no outside visitors—not Louise, not the boys, not Uncle Gordon, not even Mother. Rose nodded at the doctor’s instructions, clasping his hand and thanking him for taking such good care of her baby, and when he left she sat by June’s head and stroked her daughter’s hair.