American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (2 page)

It took another visit for June, just as private as Gypsy, to share bits of memories she’d never written about or pressed into a scrapbook, memories that defined her life even as they long lay dormant and unspoken. Money was Gypsy’s “god,” and she would do anything to anybody, including
June, to make more of it—and not just with regard to the musical. Gypsy did in fact do things, not only to June but to herself—“terrible” and “awful” and “shocking” things, things beneath her sister’s formidable intellect and keen wit, things that made June believe, to that day, that love (even love fraught with competition and jealousy) never existed between them at all.

I asked and listened, for as much time as June gave me. I asked until her patience wore thin and her eyes watered with the effort to stay open.

“I hope I didn’t upset you today,” I whispered, bending down to her ear. “That’s not my intention.”

“I know,” June said. Those startling eyes found their focus, settling on mine. “I know you’re on a story … and I’m sorry I couldn’t be more open about some things. Some things are just … I’m still ashamed for her. I’m still ashamed. I wish they hadn’t happened.”

“Would Gypsy wish the same?” I asked.

“She had no shame.”

A pause, and I said, feebly, “You were a good sister to her.”

One of those quick and graceful hands emerged from the sheet. She coiled long, blade-thin fingers around my wrist.

“I was no sister,” June said. “I was a knot in her life. I was nothing.”

She retracted her hand, gave her eyes permission to close. I kissed her cheek and crept out the bedroom door. I was grateful she let me inside—even on the periphery, even briefly—and I suspected she was saving her own questions for the day she reunited with the sister she did profess to love, the one she still called Louise.

What follows is my story of the legendary Gypsy Rose Lee and the people lucky enough to have known her, in any capacity. These pages relate tales of deception and betrayal, triumph and tragedy, ambition and failure and murder—much of it sensational, and all of it as true as I could tell it. Anything that appears in quotation marks, dialogue or otherwise, comes from a book, archival collection, article, journal, government report, or interview. When I occasionally slip inside Gypsy’s head, I do so using the most careful consideration of my research, and with the tantalizing, agonizing knowledge that there is certainly more
to the story. Gypsy Rose Lee, herself a master storyteller, knew better than to give everything away.

K
AREN
A
BBOTT
N
EW
Y
ORK
C
ITY
M
AY 2010

In late spring, across a stretch of former wasteland in Flushing Meadows, Queens, a quarter-million people pay 50 cents each to forget and to dream. In the last decade they lost jobs and homes and now they face bleaker losses in the years to come: fathers and sons and husbands, a fragile faith that the worst has passed, the hope that America will never again be called to save the world. They come by boat and train and trolley and bus, hitchhike across four states in as many days, engagement rings tucked deep inside pockets along with every dollar they own. Not one inch of the fair’s 1,216 acres
betrays its inglorious past as a dump, Gatsby’s valley of ashes come to life, where towering heaps of debris meandered in an ironic skyline. Instead, beyond the gates, a “World of Tomorrow” beckons, offering flamboyant distractions and bewitching sleight of hand, a glimpse of fantasy without the promise that it will ever come to pass.

They have never seen anything like the Trylon, its gaunt steel ribs stretching
seven hundred feet high, carrying bodies skyward on the
largest escalator in the world. They chase salty scoops of Romanian caviar with swigs of aged Italian Barolo. On one soft spring day they admire
Joe DiMaggio as he accepts the Golden Laurel of Sport Award. At the Aquacade exhibition they watch comely “aquabelles
” perform intricate, synchronized routines, the water kept extra cold so as to stimulate goose flesh and nipples. They hear Mayor Fiorello La Guardia boom with optimistic predictions: “
We will be dedicating a fair to the hope of the people of the world. The contrast must be striking to everyone. While other countries are in the twilight of an unhappy age, we are approaching the dawn of a new day.” The
Westinghouse Time Capsule, to remain sealed until
A.D
. 6939, contains fragments of their lives: microfilm of
Gone with the Wind
, a kewpie doll, samples of asbestos, a dollar in change. At night, when fireworks begin, they fall silent watching the colors crisscross overhead, hot tails branding the sky, imprinting a patchwork of lovely scars.

They wait in lines for hours to glimpse a reality that seems both distant and distinctly possible. Revolving chairs equipped with individual loudspeakers transport them through
General Motors’ Futurama exhibit, a vast model of America in 1960, where radio-controlled cars never veer off course on fourteen-lane highways and “
undesirable slum areas” are wiped out.
They witness a robot named Elektro issue commands to his mechanical dog, Sparko. They marvel at an array of new inventions: the fax machine, nylon stockings, a 12-foot-long electric shaver. One thousand of them watch the fair’s opening ceremonies on NBC’s experimental station, W2XBS. “
Sooner than you realize it,” advertisements for the telecast predict, “television will play a vital part in the life of the average American.”

But this World of Tomorrow can’t obscure the dangers of the world of today, despite the fair committee’s efforts. The new official slogan, “
Peace and Freedom,” is absurdly incongruous with the
hourly war bulletins that blare over the public address system. Visitors who brave the
foreign section find only a melancholy museum of things past. The Netherlands building is dark and vacant, the Danish exhibit downsized into smaller quarters. Poland, Norway, and Finland still have a presence, but fly their flags at half-mast and display grim galleries that show photographs of demolished historical buildings and list names of the distinguished
dead. The Soviet Pavilion is razed and replaced by a space called the “
American Common,” complete with “I Am an American Day.”
Fairgoers line up at the Belgium Pavilion when that nation falls to Germany, as if waiting to pay their respects at a wake. They wish this slim wedge of time between troubles past and future could pause indefinitely, but understand that New York is capable of everything but standing still.

On May 20, thousands of them—a crowd
larger than the turnout for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie combined—find temporary solace at the Hall of Music, where they wait to see Gypsy Rose Lee in her World’s Fair debut. A forty-foot-tall billboard flaunting her image looms above the entrance, those skyscraper legs and swerving hips a respite from the hard lines and stark angles of this futuristic fantasy. She wears an expression both impish and imperious, a baited half smile that summons them closer yet suggests they’ll never arrive.

Inside her dressing room, Gypsy reclines on a chaise longue and holds a glass of brandy in shaking hands. The smoky-sweet scent of knockwurst drifts over from her hot plate, but her appetite is gone. She can hear them, the dull thrum of their expectations, the drumbeat chants of her name. Gypsy Rose Lee, voted the most popular woman in America,
outpolling even Eleanor Roosevelt. Gypsy Rose Lee, who boasts that her own billboard is “
larger than Stalin’s.” Gypsy Rose Lee, the only woman in the world, according to
Life
magazine, “with a public body and a private mind, both equally exciting.” Gypsy Rose Lee, whose best talent—whose
only
talent—is becoming whatever America needs at any given time. Gypsy Rose Lee, who, at the moment, is as mysterious to herself as she is to the gathering strangers outside.

She sips her brandy, lights a Murad cigarette. The voices beyond these four tight walls grow louder still, but can’t overtake her thoughts. At age twenty-nine, she stands, precisely and precariously, on her own personal midway, cluttered with roaring secrets from her past and muted fears for her future, an equal number of years ahead in her life as behind. A half-dozen scrapbooks are fat with clippings from vaudeville and burlesque, her first marriage and Hollywood career, her political activism and opening nights; a half-dozen more, blank and empty, wait
for her to fill the pages. Not a day passes without her retelling, if just to her own ears, the densely woven and tightly knotted story of her own legend, and not a day passes when she doesn’t wonder how its final line will read.

She senses that the next chapter might begin with Michael Todd, the man who said he’d give his right ball to hire her, who granted her the Stalin-sized billboard and a second chance with New York. Earlier that afternoon, he banged on her dressing room door, and she took her time letting him in.

“
What’s the matter in there?” he asked, pushing his way inside. “Can’t you read?” He pointed his cigar toward a sign on the notice board:
NO COOKING BACKSTAGE
.

“Of course I can read. It saves money,” Gypsy said in that inimitable voice. She’s worked for years on that voice, scrubbing the Seattle out of it, ironing it smooth, tolling her words like bells: “rare” became
rar-er-a
. It is both charming and affected and, when either raised a decibel or compressed to a whisper, positively terrifying. It makes
babies cry and one of her
dogs urinate in fear.

“On your salary,” Mike responded, “I can’t afford to have you stinking up the theater.”

Gypsy invited him to try her knockwurst, and he sat down across from her. She smiled at his singular philosophy about money and success: “I’ve been broke but I’ve never been poor,” he told her. “Being poor is a state of mind. Being broke is only a temporary situation.” She noted his graceful, fluid movements, strangely at odds with his features: rectangular, filet-thick hands dead-ending into tubular fingers, a head that sat atop a brick of a neck. He nearly licked the plate, and afterward ripped down the sign.

A cheapskate, Gypsy thinks, but not a hypocrite. Just like her, on both counts. She suspects they’ll work well together now and in the future, since they both understand that ambition comes first and money matters most.

She sets her brandy down on her vanity, making room amid a
Roget’s Thesaurus
, millipede-sized pairs of false eyelashes, an ashtray, a typewriter. Whenever she’s not performing she plans to work on her novel, a murder mystery set in an old burlesque theater; the book counts as
one bold step into her blank and waiting future. She’s told favored members of the press about her literary ambitions, confessing that she’s lousy at punctuation due to her limited schooling and sharing her theories about storytelling. “
I don’t like poison darts emerging from the middle of the Belgian Congo,” she says, “and I think there is no sense having people killed before the reader is acquainted with them.”

She doesn’t mention that she has a few authentic, true-life murders in her past, or that the person responsible has recently resurfaced, sending a terse, cryptic note that concludes: “
I hope you are well and very happy.”

Which, coming from Mother, signals another gauntlet thrown.

The four syllables of her name thrash inside her ears. It’s time, now, and she makes her body comply. One last review in the full-length mirror, a slow turn that captures every angle and inch. She knows the crowd outside doesn’t care who she plans to be. They want the Gypsy Rose Lee they already know, the one whose act has remained unchanged for nearly ten years; they delight in the absence of surprise. They’ll look for her trademark outfit: the Victorian hoop skirt, the Gibson Girl coif, the plume hat slouching over one winking eye, the size 10½ brocade heels, the bow that makes an exotic gift of her long, pale neck. They’ll wait for the slow roll of stocking over knee, strain to glimpse a patch of shoulder. They’ll beg for more and will be secretly pleased when she refuses. She knows that what she hides is as much of a reward as what she deigns to reveal.

The curtain yields and admits her to the other side. She senses the spotlight darting and chasing, feels it pin her into place. Voices circle one last time and collapse into silence, waiting.