American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (23 page)

But the lines, spoken aloud, seem twice removed from dialogue that might occur in real life; the plot more Dalí than Eugene O’Neill. Kaufman sits in the front row, grinning oddly—a nervous muscular reaction, it turns out, rather than an expression of pleasure or approval. Gypsy tries to be positive, praising Joan’s ebullient delivery and Kaufman’s sure-handed direction, but each rehearsal is worse than the last. It is a slow-motion unraveling that recalls the worst phase of her life, the unspeakable stretch of time before she broke away from Mother, those lost days when she went places and did things that no one associates with Gypsy Rose Lee, slippery memories she can’t bear to relive.…

One morning Gypsy wakes up and decides not to return to the theater.

Mademoiselle Fifi, another of Billy Minsky’s brilliant creations.
(photo credit 17.1)

It was true that a certain sect of uptown snubbed the Minskys, and that certain detractors gleefully reported that their “
bold invasion of Broadway is all over,” but as soon as the Hawaiian octet disbanded and the uncharacteristically svelte chorines shuffled away, the brothers turned out the lights on the Park Music Hall and found a rightful home north of 14th Street. Billy Minsky was eager to open as soon as possible; mourning his failures merely got in the way of learning from them. The experiment at Columbus Circle would neither define nor destroy his name.

This latest venture of
“
les frères
Minsky,” as the press dubbed the brothers, was called Minsky’s Apollo (
not to be confused with
the
Apollo, which had yet to debut). Located in Harlem on 125th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, Minsky’s Apollo shared the block with Brecher’s Opera House, where Fanny Brice and Sophie Tucker often ruled the stage, and another burlesque palace,
Hurtig & Seamon’s, a venue exclusively serving the Columbia Wheel.

One soup-thick afternoon in August, Billy stood outside surveying his new building, eager to tell his main investor, Joseph Weinstock, about his plans for Minsky’s Apollo. Like Billy, Weinstock was a cunning opportunist, once having bid $50 at an auction for a vacant seat on the New York Stock Exchange—and winning it. Several plainclothes officers and uniformed members of the exchange had to guard its doors to prevent Weinstock from entering until a judge finally deemed the price “
grossly inadequate.” After the debacle on Broadway, Weinstock was taking a risk by backing the Minskys, and Billy wanted to soothe any lingering misgivings.

He felt a tap on his shoulder. This time he wasn’t in Lee Shubert’s neighborhood, and Billy expected to find one of two people when he turned around: the Columbia Wheel producers, Jules Hurtig or Harry Seamon.

“
You won’t last four weeks,” Hurtig warned.

Billy smiled through a gauzy hoop of cigar smoke and let the old man believe he was right.

W
hen time permitted, Billy explored the local streets, strolling past Harlem Hospital and the twenty-cent-shave
corner barbershops, the thrift stores and cheap Chinese restaurants, the pet shop where
a monkey had escaped and killed a flock of canaries. There was serious talk, finally, of
a triborough bridge that would link together Queens, the Bronx, and Manhattan. Clearly it would take years to open—some things even New York couldn’t hurry along—but he expected it to boost patronage at Minsky’s Apollo when that day finally came. He’d picked a bustling block in a diverse neighborhood—Jewish between 110th and 125th Streets and black further north, with Jungle Alley along 133rd Street between Lenox and Seventh Avenues.
The area boasted the densest concentration of nightclubs and cabarets in New York, luring the sort of people who shaped the city’s ethos and manipulated its mood, the very folks whose business Billy courted and whose accolades he craved.

If the rules had been rewritten at the end of the Great War, they
were now abandoned altogether. Mores were discarded and manners dismissed at every level of society. New York’s cultural arbiters no longer hailed from the Social Register or the Four Hundred; nightlife had turned fluid and democratic. Closed circles cracked open and made room. “
There’s no such thing as a set anymore,” Carl Van Vechten wrote in his novel
Parties
. “Everybody goes everywhere.”

They went to side streets around Jungle Alley to buy cocaine and marijuana, ten joints for a dollar, and to basement speakeasies where a silent man granted entry by yanking a long chain attached to the door. Down a steep flight of stairs elite uptowners and Greenwich Village bohemians and blacks crowded together at wood tables and sipped bootleg liquor with street names like “smoke” and “lightning.” They climbed upstairs to
rent parties, where jazz musicians and piano “professors” raised money to help friends pay their landlords; marveled at the Clam House’s lesbian headliner, a 250-pound crooner clad in a top hat and tuxedo; and were charmed by
A’Lelia Walker, Harlem’s foremost hostess and heiress, the daughter of the first black female self-made millionaire. They ran into an infamous
character called “Money,” a hunchback who served as an unofficial tour guide for white interlopers. The final stop, invariably, was a dive run by
Sewing Machine Bertha, who showed pornographic films as a preview to an after-hours live sex show featuring actors of all races.

Whites also went to clubs meant for them and them alone, Connie’s Inn and Small’s Paradise and the Cotton Club, the last the most exclusive destination of all. There the gangster Owney Madden sold his personal brand of beer,
Madden’s No. 1, and denied blacks entry unless they were light enough to pass. He hired Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway and produced every kind of black show that whites might want to see: the smiling black, the shuffling black, the blackface black, and a mandatory jungle number where a line of chorus girls,
no darker than “high yellow,” shimmied until their costumes slipped off.

Billy knew Minsky’s Apollo would have to distinguish itself in order to siphon customers from the more established clubs; the Minsky name was still unproven in this part of town. Hurtig & Seamon’s did a few things right, catering to the neighborhood with a mixed-race production called
Super Black and White Sensation
featuring “70½ People: 35
Whites and 35½ Blacks,” and an all-colored company,
Lucky Sambo. At Minsky’s Apollo, black performers and customers would be just as welcome as whites, and he’d encourage them to interact and play off each other, just as they did at the National Winter Garden.

The brothers placed ads for chorines, coochers, comedians. One comic, a young man named Joey Faye, had some of the freshest sketches Billy had seen in a very long time.

“
You got any more material?” Billy asked.

“I got a lot of material,” Faye said, “but it’s all stolen—most of it, anyway.”

“Stolen?” Billy asked, smiling.

“From the
First Little Show
, from the
Second Little Show
, George White’s
Scandals
, Ziegfeld’s
Follies
, the Palace Theatre, the Greenwich Village
Follies
—all the shows around.”

“Well, let me see some of the stuff,” Billy prodded, and the comedian obliged.

“Can you put one of these on for Friday?” Billy asked. “For every sketch you put on, I’ll give you twenty-five extra bucks in addition to your salary.”

“Won’t you get sued? After all, it’s not our material.”

Billy leaned in close. “How can I get sued?” he reasoned. “We open on a Friday. We do the show Saturday and Sunday. They can’t sue me until Monday. Tuesday I go to my lawyer. By Wednesday, we answer the suit, Thursday the show is finished, and Friday we put on a new one. No show, no suit.”

Faye finally understood, and smiled back.

F
or his chef d’oeuvre Billy discovered a stripteaser working at the Olympic theater, and lured her away. He intended to rotate her appearances between the Apollo and the National Winter Garden and began remaking her into his own creation. By the time he finished
she was no longer Mary Dawson from Philadelphia, born to a devout Catholic mother and Quaker father who worked, improbably, as a cop. Instead she was
Mademoiselle Fifi, late of Paris, “an Oriental dancer” of astonishing
magnificence and skill. Billy held full-scale press conferences to introduce his exotic star, instructing reporters to direct all questions to him.

“Mademoiselle Fifi,” Billy explained haughtily, his arm wrapped around the girl’s waist, “does not speak so good the English. So I will be her spokesperson.”

Next he placed cryptic signs in the subway—
SHE DANCES TONIGHT
—
WHO?
—
FIFI
—and mailed a perfumed letter to every business owner in Harlem. He penned each word himself in delicate, looping cursive:

On the Apollo’s opening night, the promise of Mademoiselle Fifi’s splendor had customers lining up around the block,
a queue that reached as far as Hurtig & Seamon’s marquee. Mademoiselle Fifi delivered her finest performance to date, stepping onstage in her “
gorgeous golden cape” only to drop it at the first note of her song. No union suit covered her flesh. She gave the crowd spins and kicks “
with a few cooch movements thrown in,” cooch movements so brazen and raw that policemen began filing up the aisle, no doubt summoned by John Sumner and his cadre of prudes.

Billy had always shared his city’s intolerance of timidity and hesitation, the belief that pausing to consider your place meant you were already far behind. During the Jazz Age the pace was doubled, the challenges amplified. He’d expected reformers at the Apollo’s debut but declined to activate Herbert’s red-light warning system—a tactical decision he hoped would pay off, yielding a just reward for being as bold and quick as the era demanded.

The furor over Mademoiselle Fifi only lasted long enough for Billy to
make his point: nudity on his stage was no more offensive or illegal than on Broadway. The rules should not change for burlesque, be it north or south of 14th Street. Recalling one critic’s assessment of the Apollo’s debut—“
burlesque red hot off the grid and well-spiced with double entendre sufficiently suggestive to be understood by the blind and the deaf and dumb alike”—he decided to make his point again, this time with such theatrics and disdain for subtlety that no one would ever forget it, a plot worthy not only of New York’s attention, but also of its history.