American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (31 page)

“Well, my goodness,” June said. “Why not?” And she meant it.

June believed that her sister, her clever, brilliant sister—the voracious reader, the haughty Duchess, the greedy collector of lush dreams and exotic words—could somehow get away with being
in
burlesque without being
of
burlesque, without doing any of its dirty work. Maybe Louise just walked out and posed onstage as she often had in vaudeville, making a beautiful picture, the Doll Girl, or a funny one, the Bowery Tough. Maybe she did just drop a shoulder strap, peel off a glove, spin so that her skirt bloomed around her.

Settled in the back row, waiting for her sister to appear, June heard a rustling noise. She turned and a man bent down, leveling his head with hers. “
Would you like a cup of coffee?” he asked, each word a rank hiss of breath. She shook her head no and turned away, waiting for the sound of receding footsteps.

Then it came to her:
My god, she thought. That was code. He thinks I’m a prostitute, just for being in this theater.

And then Louise stepped out from behind the curtain and she wasn’t … Louise. June didn’t know
who
this girl was, stark naked, thrusting her hips, crouching on the runway, her silhouette stained by sallow light. She watched for as long as her eyes would let her. “
I couldn’t stand it,” June said. “I didn’t even go backstage afterwards. I was in horror.”

Gypsy watched her leave and thought, How dare June judge her? What does she know, where has she been? What does her marathon audience bring in with them? Picnic baskets, most likely, so they can munch while watching a bunch of rejects have sex standing up and keel over from exhaustion. Her audience was no scabbier or sicker than June’s, and one day someone who mattered would be in the front row. Poor naïve June probably didn’t even understand the sound of all those rattling newspapers.

June stayed long enough to watch Louise leave too, waiting for the
slow, bedraggled scat singing of “Minnie the Moocher” to stop, hiding in the alleyway’s shadows. She heard shouting, something about costumes, and then saw bodies tumbling out a side door. There was Mother, furious, indignant, dragging spangled bits of clothing onto the sidewalk and stuffing them, unpacked, into an idling taxi. Louise stood nearby, hugging herself, wearing only a pair of glittering heels. She didn’t move until
Mother dropped a coat around her shoulders and led her, gently, into the backseat.

G
ypsy seized control of what she could—her weight, for one. She ate only one meal a day, but every few hours she sipped
a vegetable “essence” of her own invention:

It worked. She was still no bombshell; her breasts were small and her rear pear-shaped, but her waist was tiny and her legs epic, two pillars astride the entrance to some secret, exclusive city. Five feet nine and a half inches and 130 well-distributed pounds. Rose delighted in her daughter’s new shape and image and name; they were true partners and equals now, complicit in both what had already happened and what was yet to come. In preparation for new press photos, Mother fluffed Gypsy’s hair into a soft auburn cloud and painted delicate teardrops in a cascade down her cheeks. She also sent Gypsy flowers each night over the footlights, addressing the cards to “The Fairest of Them All,” “My Queen,” “Stageland’s Loveliest,” and “The One and Only Gypsy.” She signed them from “a secret admirer.” When Gypsy discovered her mother writing one of the cards, she was mortified.

“
You should have told me,” she said. “It makes me feel like a fool—and unless you want to wind up in jail you’d better stop writing those letters, too. There’s a law against that.”

“Law?” Rose asked. “Don’t make me laugh. A mother’s love knows no law!”

Some of the venues were almost respectable, nudging the limits of obscenity statutes without breaking them, and in those places Gypsy felt safe leaving the stage to interact with the audience. At the Latchia Theatre in Cincinnati, she sashayed up to a man in the front row and “
gave him a lesson in the art of kissing,” in the words of the local newspaper, “such as only a red-haired lady knows how to do.” She sewed a few more costumes for her wardrobe, a set of pink pajamas and a dark blue bathing suit among them, and proved a natural at speaking to the press.

“You’d ought to read some of the funny letters I get from fellers who think because I ogle at them from the stage that I have a crush on them,” she said. “I received a letter from a drugstore clerk once who enclosed a stick of gum in the letter just to show he wasn’t a cheap guy. He promised to buy me a whole box if I would go out with him. Then I received an invitation to go riding from a parachute jumper who enclosed various pictures of himself taken in various poses while he was clinging to a parachute.”

Every night, she and Rose huddled together in their hotel room and
helped themselves to June’s history, appropriating and editing her scrapbooks until they fit the story of Gypsy as a born talent and star. It was she who had been called “Baby June,” who had headlined the Orpheum Circuit, who had ventured out to Hollywood to star in pictures with Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin. When Gigolo died she had vowed never again to take anything that didn’t belong to her, but Louise had made that pact, not Gypsy Rose Lee.

O
n March 19, 1931, a Thursday night, she performed in a revue at the Empire Theatre in Newark, New Jersey. Called
Wine, Women, and Song
, it was one of her cleaner shows by far, and even the trade magazines
seemed relieved by the temporary reprieve from early-bird acts. “
No filth,”
Zit’s Weekly
wrote appreciatively, “just great entertainment and clever performers.” The press and audience alike were most enthralled by the “new find” named Gypsy Rose Lee, a “
brunette of unusual face and form” with a “charming personality” and “flirty eyes.”

By now she knew how to mark herself as different, how to put on as she was taking off. She played the prude who showed her skin almost by accident and always as a lark, a self-professed “
daytime person living in a nighttime world.” Here she came with her powder puff on a stick, walking the aisle slowly, her long, elegant neck craning left and right, settling on the winner.
“Darling! Sweetheart!” she exclaimed. “Where have you been all my life?” She rushed to him, left a bright red imprint on his gleaming skull. He panicked and fled. She shook her head and
tsk-tsked
while she watched him go. “Lost him,” she murmured, and her eyes swept over the crowd. In the smoky thick of it, chomping on a cigar fat as a baby’s arm, stood a short, blocky man whose eyes pinned her down, recognizing not who she was but who he’d make her become.

When America awakened from the crash its citizens had no idea what to do with themselves. In the span of one week the blinding clamor and deafening glare of the past eight years fell silent and dark. Every morning Billy Minsky read of another tragedy, hoping to soothe the sting of his own.
The founder of a coal firm in Providence, Rhode Island, shot himself in his broker’s office while watching the ticker.
The president of the Rochester Gas and Electric Corporation, who lost $1.2 million in a single month, locked himself in his bathroom and inhaled gas from a wall jet.
The head of a major brokerage firm in St. Louis guzzled poison.
A man slit the throats of his wife and seven sons before turning the knife on himself.
The owner of a wholesale produce firm jumped from a seventh-floor window of the Munson Building on Wall Street.
A Scranton man doused himself with gasoline and struck a match.
In the Bronx, a man who lost his life savings of $30,000 leapt in front of a Jerome Avenue subway train.

Politicians began finger-pointing and public posturing. Newly elected New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt decried the “
improper schemes and questionable methods” that had fed the crisis. Mayor Jimmy Walker urged movie executives to show pictures “
that will reinstate courage and hope in the hearts of the American people.”
More than four hundred leaders representing every branch of industry, commerce, trade, and finance convened in Washington, D.C., to discuss President Herbert Hoover’s plans to stimulate and stabilize the economy. The president himself offered one last word of advice: “
work.”

Minsky’s Republic, circa 1931.
(photo credit 25.1)

New York donned a stoic face and obeyed. Brokers, bankers, and clerks filed downtown even on Sundays. Restaurants kept their doors open past normal hours. Tour buses made special trips through the district, pointing out “
where all that money was lost.” The employees of one brokerage house, which stayed open until anywhere from ten at night to five in the morning, adopted the unusual custom of singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” before heading home, often so loudly that police came to investigate.
A sixteen-year-old messenger boy for the New York Stock Exchange did a brisk business in boutonnieres, since proper brokers considered it uncouth to trade without a flower adorning their lapel, no matter the circumstances.

B
illy Minsky, too, turned his focus toward rebuilding what was lost. He no longer had the capital to buy his own Broadway theater but he still had his investor Joseph Weinstock, who had emerged from the crash with both his bank account and his faith in Billy intact. Weinstock agreed it was time to make another run on Broadway. These days a man couldn’t spare
$5.50 for legitimate theater, not even if he wanted to, but for just $1.50 he could see pretty women taking off their clothes—prettier, now, than ever before; all of those aspiring actresses who once dreamt of applause on a stage were now settling for whistles along a runway. They should be grateful, Billy thought, just to have anyone, any voice, caring to call for more.