American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (29 page)

In September,
Gypsy sequesters herself in Reno, Nevada, where she finally files for divorce from Bill Kirkland. It takes just over a month for the split to be official. He knows as well as she does the value of maintaining a facade, and agrees to play her game.

“
People here ask when the baby’s coming,” he writes, “and I say Dec. or Jan. and try to look like a proud papa, without talking like one … be a good fat girl and get lots of sleep and rest so that everything will be fine and dandy.”

June plans a baby shower, inviting twenty of Gypsy’s friends, who bring a bassinet, blankets, knitted sweaters with pockets the size of a fingertip. “
The cake and tea were good, but not worth the price of admission,” Gypsy notes. “Only one or two of the presents are bankable, in case the baby is anything like his grandmother.”

By chance Otto Preminger travels to New York in December and calls Gypsy, curious to know why she departed so abruptly. He discovers she is at Woman’s Hospital at 110 Street and Amsterdam Avenue, waiting to give birth to his child. She does,
prematurely, on December 11. Her son weighs just five and a half pounds and she names him Erik, using the traditional Norwegian spelling; Daddy Jack and his family will be proud. Otto appears by her bedside. “
I can support my son myself,” she tells him. “I want to bring him up to be my son only.” She asks that he keep his paternity a secret, and he agrees.

A radio newscast informs Rose Hovick that she has a grandson. She calls the hospital at once, and the operator refuses to connect her to Gypsy’s room. She calls again, to no avail. She weeps and scribbles in her diary: “
O please God help her to forget the foolish past and let me be with her again. I am so lonesome to hug and kiss her I am starving to death inside.” She tries a third time. Gypsy accepts this call and tells her mother she can see the baby, but only through glass.

Rose arrives at Woman’s Hospital and is led to the maternity ward. She waits, pacing, kneading the hem of her fur coat. Gypsy stays in bed where her mother can’t see her and imagines the scene, the nurse holding Erik up to the window, close enough for his quarter-sized heel to tap
the pane. Mother will see his red-brown hair and long, restless legs and be struck by the resemblance. She will press her palm against the glass and align her skin with his, making contact without touching. He looks just like little Louise, the child whose earliest memory is disappointing her own mother, and Gypsy is grateful for the divide.

Rose Louise Hovick, shortly before becoming Gypsy Rose Lee.
(photo credit 23.1)

And so here she was, still living with her mother, still a virgin—not even past her first kiss, at that—learning what had taken the place of vaudeville, the only life she’d ever known. She couldn’t yet decide what to make of the lesson. It wasn’t just the dressing room at the Gayety: cigarette butts and greasy towels and body makeup sluiced across the floor, gnats swarming half-full glasses of warm beer, a sink clogged with dirty underwear, rhinestones glinting in all directions like pairs of beady eyes. It wasn’t just “Tessie the Tassel Twirler,” older and softer and kinder, somehow, than Louise expected, telling her she “
got a certain class about yourself, in a screwball kind of way. You just got to learn to handle it.” Nor was it the acts: a showgirl dressed in an octopus costume complete with roving black tentacles, shaking like a wet dog; another emerging
from a seashell, wholly naked save for a strand of faux pearls; Tessie’s own rare talent—shared by a famous stripteaser named Carrie Finnell—to make her bare breasts rotate, one at a time, with no other movement or effort at all. It was the realization that she’d found a secret slit in the curtain, one that led far past backstage to another universe altogether, at once spectacular and foul and terrifying, made all the more so by the silent, shameful feeling that she could belong here.

The burlesque folk recognized it, and recognized it inside her, and nudged Louise along in ways both sly and bold. “
The quicker you forget what you used to be,” Tessie told her, “the better off you’ll be. Start thinkin’ about what you’re goin’ to be tomorrow—not what you were yesterday.”

For the moment, at least, Louise was still the head of the Hollywood Blondes, the act meant to deter the cops from raids and shutdowns—“
a troupe a silly virgins,” as Tessie called them. Rose’s scorn for burlesque lasted “
all of five minutes,” according to June. “As long as it brought in the money, she didn’t care.” The Hollywood Blondes began rehearsing their same old routines, while Sam the agent assured the manager that the girls looked much better with proper lighting and full makeup and short costumes. The manager seemed unconvinced, until one day he took a long look at Louise and asked if the “big one could talk.” He was short of talking women, he explained, and Tessie refused to do comedic scenes.

The next thing Louise knew, she was wearing a hula skirt that parted in the front, two frothy bits of fabric over her breasts, a bright red jewel in her navel, and strappy gold high heels—a marked difference from the Hollywood Blondes’ customary bobby socks and Mary Janes, and she’d never realized her legs were so long. It came to her that she resembled Big Lady when her grandmother was still young and ravishing, before she missed her chance to flee Seattle for good.

“
For a kid, you got a lot of sex in your walk,” Tessie said with genuine admiration, and shoved Louise through the slit in the curtain, back to the other side.

“You
are
real!” the comic cried when he spotted her. “You’re not an illusion—”

From somewhere in the dark her mother hissed: “Louise! Hold in your stomach!”

She took a deep breath. “
I’m real,” she murmured, in a voice she’d never heard before. “I’m no illusion—here take my hand, touch me—feel me …”

R
ose Louise and the Hollywood Blondes signed on for a month at the Gayety Theater, all of them—dogs and Porky the Pig and Woolly Face the monkey included—staying at a nearby hotel. They were making $250 a week (about $35 each) in Kansas City, and at the best New York houses—Minsky’s National Winter Garden, Minsky’s Apollo, and Irving Place—
a bottom-billing girl could earn $70 to $125. A lot of big stars worked in burlesque, Rose reasoned, and “it all came under the heading of experience.” Mother looked at her differently now, Louise noticed, as if she were one of the forlorn Christmas trees dragged on the train during their vaudeville days—an inferior but acceptable facsimile of the real thing, a place to hang Rose’s flickering wishes and filmy dreams until every branch was covered, and no one could tell the difference.

More than a year, now, since June’s escape, and Mother had yet to mention her.

In addition to her act with the Blondes, Louise took part in several comedic sketches opposite the straight man, reciting lines like “
Meet me round the corner in half an hour” and “Quick, hide, my husband.” She found ways to make the jokes funnier than they were, holding the ends of certain words to stretch them out, winking at herself as much as at the audience. In some strange, removed way, she felt as if she were acting.

She knew it wasn’t talent, but who needed talent? What did talent get June but broken bones and a broken spirit and a broken life, out there somewhere doing God knows what? Mother was right when she said there was no substitute for flesh, but the axiom applied to burlesque, not vaudeville. Vaudeville, with its sense of sunny, mindless optimism,
no longer spoke to the country’s mood. Burlesque did, loudly and directly.

The Depression affected female workers to the same degree as men, and thousands of them, out of work and other ideas, applied at burlesque houses across the country: former stenographers and seamstresses and clerks, wives whose husbands had lost their jobs,
mothers with children to support, vaudevillians who finally acknowledged the end of the line. Compared to other forms of show business—compared to
any
business—burlesque enjoyed a low rate of unemployment, and
75 percent of performers had no stage experience at all. Pretty girls were finally available at burlesque wages, and the supply equaled the demand.

Burlesque houses from Chicago to Missouri to New York City employed a standard routine.
Each applicant endured an interview conducted by the senior chorus girl, who called herself “the Captain.” Her first question—“Will you pose?”—was essentially an order: a girl should strip as bare as the boss demanded. Don’t worry about the audience, the Captain assured, because no one would be permitted to touch her. “Dance hall girls get handled by those bums,” she added. “There’s no monkey business in this show.” She called the boss over to assess a girl’s face, but she herself examined figures: disrobe, she ordered, and turn around, slowly, pausing left, right, back. The women found kinship with the desperate men who came to watch them, performer and spectator equally naked.

Burlesque, like vaudeville, had its own language and rules, an accidental subculture forged by people who never intended to dwell there. For Louise it was
as easy as memorizing passages from
Das Kapital
or
Remembrance of Things Past
during those long train rides and layoffs in dreary hotels.
She learned that a “skull” is a double-take, delivered by a leering comic, and that
G-strings might have been named for the lowest string on a violin. A provocative stripteaser was known as the “snake type,” and a voluptuous body was a “swell set-up.” When a drummer made a rim shot during a striptease number, he was “
catching the bumps.” If a girl pulled her G-string aside or discarded it altogether, she was “flashing her knish.”

Louise listened to the incessant, cheerful spiels of the candy butchers
and marveled at the Gayety’s runway, the first she had ever seen. She learned it was taboo to watch other strippers’ acts from the wings; everyone worried about rivals copying routines and stealing gimmicks. “
If you were caught watching in the wings,” one stripper warned, “you got a bloody nose.” Backstage, she saw girls rouge their nipples so they turned deep red under the blue spotlights. She encountered the young Jerry Lewis, tagging along with his comedian father and somehow sneaking backstage. “
Oh, I like that,” the kid said, ogling the naked slingers and scampering from dressing room to dressing room until his father found him. “Jerrrryyy,” Dan Lewis called, yanking his son’s arm. “Let’s go.” She listened to the performers lament where they were and boast about where they belonged: in New York, under the direction of the one and only Billy Minsky, the best in the business—on any given night he might be sitting in the audience, waiting to discover them.

She met the “
G-string buyer” who offered each girl $5 for her garment; neither he nor his customers were interested unless they were used. She learned how backstage morals varied with time, place, and people. Sometimes the stripteasers and chorines were churchgoing and chaste, but more often
prostitution thrived at the stage door. Some of the girls suffered
multiple scars from surgeries to remove genital warts, and applied homemade tonics and potions to dull the symptoms of syphilis. Proper treatment for the disease required repeated shots of arsenic compounds alternated with shots of bismuth to reduce the chance of toxic reaction, weekly appointments for more than a year, an ordeal that could cost as much as $1,000.
If a girl couldn’t afford a complete regimen, she skipped appointments and soon suffered a relapse.

Louise came to understand the bartering system, both crude and intricate, internal and external, that allowed someone to take off her clothes for a living. By prescribing explicit rules and regulations of undress and behavior, the censors actually helped those who were inclined to push the limits; anything that wasn’t expressly forbidden was, in effect, sanctioned. The girls knew this, and also that more of their unemployed sisters would be joining burlesque each day. Increased numbers meant fiercer competition, and fiercer competition bullied them into going further than they might otherwise have dared.