American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (32 page)

When Billy wasn’t busy at the Apollo or checking on his brothers down at the National Winter Garden, he scoured the trade papers, made phone calls, and took long strolls through Times Square. It was clear, already, that the Depression was having a profound effect on
Broadway.
The number of productions declined from 239 in 1929–1930 to 187 in 1930–1931, and would continue to drop throughout the decade. “
By 1930,” wrote one historian, “the boom that had engulfed New York for nearly 30 years was over.… [In] no sphere of urban life was the Depression more accurately mirrored than in Times Square, the center of its theater and entertainment world.” Billy walked along 42nd Street, past the hot dog stands reeking of rubbery meat, the nomadic pitchmen unloading broken watches and rusty shears, the hobos and migrants shuffling along in a melancholy chorus line. In the lobby of the Hotel Marguery a man could turn a crank and watch a peep show of odalisques.

Billy stopped halfway in between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. Next door Noël Coward’s stilted satire
Private Lives
played to a dwindling audience, and down the street Fred and Adele Astaire—antiquated relics from an obsolete time—pranced for rows of empty seats. If the legitimate houses succumbed entirely and offered themselves up, one by one, to burlesque, Billy would cheer each transformation, each step into Broadway’s new and inevitable future. And this, number 209 West 42nd Street, would be the first.

Built in 1900 by Oscar Hammerstein, the Republic Theatre had been home to Broadway’s longest-running production,
Abie’s Irish Rose
, a sappy, sentimental tale about a nice Jewish boy who marries a Catholic girl.
By the time the show closed in October 1927, it had played in New York a record 2,327 times without interruption, nearly double the previous longest run of any production in America. Currently, the Republic was operating as a movie house, showing shorts all day for a quarter admission.

Billy also knew that one of
Abie’s Irish Rose’s
principal financiers was none other than gangster Arnold Rothstein, who, one week before the mayoral election between Jimmy Walker and Fiorello La Guardia, had been
shot in the groin while leaving a card game at the Park Central Hotel.

Rothstein survived for a week in the hospital, wandering into and out of consciousness, and every time he roused the cops were hovering over his bed, shouting questions.

“
Who shot you?” one detective asked.

“Got nothing to say,” Rothstein whispered. “Nothing, nothing. Won’t talk about it.”

On election day, when Franklin D. Roosevelt narrowly beat Al Smith for governor and Jimmy Walker trounced Fiorello La Guardia for mayor, Arnold Rothstein died, his assailant still a mystery.

Billy followed the case closely; his gangster source back from his newspaper days, Beansie Rosenthal, had mentored Rothstein and initiated him into the underworld. But Billy was most interested in Jimmy Walker’s reaction to the shooting. On that evening, the mayor had ventured in his chauffeured, silver-trimmed Duesenberg to a nightclub in Westchester. An associate approached and whispered the news into Walker’s ear. The mayor called for his car and apologized to the bandleader for leaving so early. It was only just past midnight, but he must return to Manhattan at once.

“
Arnold Rothstein has just been shot,” Walker explained. “This means trouble from here on.”

The mayor surely realized that any investigation into the kingpin’s empire and untimely demise would lead to the door of City Hall. Throughout the mayoral campaign La Guardia had done his best to paint Walker as a puppet of Tammany Hall and an advocate of New York’s underworld, to no avail; New York still yearned to believe in its mayor and all he represented, the raucous vulgarity and gleeful rapacity of the precrash days. As a son of a former Tammany politician, Billy understood the depth and force of the organization’s reach, and how fiercely it would fight to maintain its grip when the wrong sorts of questions were asked; what would happen if Tammany, for once, couldn’t dictate the answers? He wondered how the city might look, stripped of its familiar mores and codes, and if it would still have room for the Minskys.

B
illy called Joseph Weinstock, who told him that another burlesque producer, Izzy Herk, was also angling for the Republic’s lease. They had no time to waste. Weinstock gathered his money, Billy called the press, and it was official: the Minskys were back on Broadway. The Republic
would have a two-a-day policy, he announced, $1 admission for matinees and $1.50 for evenings.

The lease, Billy revealed with relish, was
for twenty long years.

In a tacit, and—although Billy would be loath to admit it—nostalgic nod to Abe, the original family Francophile, he decided to model the Republic Theatre after the old music halls of Paris, but with upscale touches lacking at the Apollo or National Winter Garden: an intimate, plush lobby where burgundy curtains pooled on the floor; a velvet drape that circled the hot dog concession like a gilded waterfall; a complimentary gardenia corsage for the ladies; male ushers whisking about imperiously, all dressed in the ornate, braided uniforms of French gendarmes; female ushers costumed in maids’ outfits with rigid black skirts and lace stockings, spritzing each patron with perfume as she led him to his seat. At Billy’s behest, Herbert installed the standard red-light warning system, a precaution borne more of habit and superstition than genuine fear, and a construction crew removed a hundred seats from the auditorium. There would be not one but two illuminated runways, all the better for intimate interaction between the audience and the girls. Finally, Billy had the Republic’s drab facade repainted in a sleek checkerboard pattern, onto which he pasted floor-to-ceiling, near-nude likenesses of his headlining slingers as soon as he found them.

He decided to start with some old favorites, Mae Dix and Carrie Finnell. Dix had left burlesque, briefly, to marry an undertaker and then returned after her divorce. She was bitter and therefore feistier than ever, an attitude that only improved her act. “
Three years it took me to learn his business,” she grumbled, “then the sonovabitch gets jealous because I’m a better embalmer than he is.”

Finnell’s remarkable pectoral muscles had only grown stronger and more agile, or perhaps they were aided by a new burlesque trick: fish swivels affixed to her pasties. The mechanism allowed Finnell to pinwheel her tassels in any direction, from any position, at any speed, so effortlessly that she began billing herself as the “
Remote Control Girl.” As she stood perfectly still, the tassel on one breast began to rotate slowly, then faster, then furiously, the other dangling limp and forgotten. One smooth, deft pop and it sprang to life, catching up with the first, the two of them propelling with such vigor she resembled a twin-engine
bomber. For her grand finale, Finnell lowered herself to the ground—back first, limbo style—and even when she was fully supine both tassels spun at maximum power. “
She has trained each generous bust,” raved one critic, “to twitch on cue, jump to attention, and do just about everything except sing ‘April Showers’ in Swahili.”

M
ayor Jimmy Walker might not have made it to his office in City Hall on the day of February 12, 1931, but that night he was among a thousand patrons congratulating Billy Minsky on the new Republic Theatre. Men in tuxedos and women in evening gowns clustered inside the lobby, praising one another’s fine looks, exposing their necks for a squirt of perfume, wondering what they might expect from a production entitled
Fanny Fortsin from France
, thankful that this odd little venue, with its downtown roots and bourgeois ambition, offered a respite, no matter how brief, from what the world had become.

They watched the
horizontal coochers strut to the end of the runways, spacing themselves evenly under the lights. Slowly, gently, as if preparing for bedtime, the girls lay down on their backs and then executed moves never before seen on a Broadway stage: a shimmying and grinding and thrusting of hips that evoked, equally, sexual intercourse and an epileptic seizure. It was daring and brilliant and raw, and the audience was rapt, motionless, unsure if they should laugh or applaud or try, futilely, to avert their eyes. Billy anticipated the critics’ responses—the usual ho-hum complaints about the humorless comedy, the raunchiness of the stripteasers, the heavy, sea-lion waddle of the chorus girls—but his audience recognized the show for what it was: entertainment for a fair price, with the appropriate mood for a specific time; a show meant not for the Broadway of old but for the Broadway of the Depression. “
The only trouble with the performances,” confessed writer L. Sprague de Camp, “was that, when time came to go, standing up presented a problem.”

The Republic was at full capacity every night, as many people turned away as admitted, half of them representing the city’s political and cultural elite, the other half its most weary and desperate.
“In the unnatural
blaze of lights over Times Square marquees at eight in the morning,” wrote critic Alfred Kazin, “there were already lines of men waiting outside the burlesque houses … people sat glued together in a strange suspension, not exactly aware of each other, but depending on each other’s presence.” The legitimate producers seethed, watching their rightful slice of New York invaded by swarms of the undesired and the uncouth, and Billy, at every opportunity, claimed another inch for himself.

Directly across the street, Earl Carroll presented a new edition of
Vanities
, his long-running “
dazzling and superabundant revue,” this time with a twist: in
Murder at the Vanities
, a young woman is killed backstage in the midst of a conventional musical. It was a curious amalgamation of comedy and mystery, with the occasional “nasty innuendo” and parade of “Minsky-ized” beauties, and Billy responded by dangling a two-story banner from the Republic’s roof that read
SLAUGHTER AT MINSKY’S
. Earl Carroll was not amused.

Neither was George White, the esteemed producer who had discovered Ethel Merman, W. C. Fields, and the Three Stooges. White always took the same route to work, and one afternoon, Billy stood directly in his path. Billy gave him a slow, wolfy smile, unwrapping the expression as if it were a gift, a sweet, mock lament for the fact that no one was paying $5.50 to see his rusty old
Scandals
, now twelve years in the running.

The producer came at him fast and with purpose. Billy saw the flash of White’s fist, his fat, pale fingers aligned like the slats of a miniature picket fence. There was a popping, shallow explosion in his head, and the absurd, horrifying feeling that his nose had collapsed against his face.

In the end he was just bloodied and swollen, no major damage done. In fact, the encounter was a gift, a New York–style rite of initiation into the big time, proof that Minsky’s burlesque was finally being taken seriously not only as entertainment, but as a threat.

B
illy decided to celebrate by finding a new crop of slingers, girls who would elevate him even higher in the ranks of Broadway producers,
girls who would make Ziegfeld want to break his legs and the Shuberts to wring his neck. He ventured ninety-nine miles south to the Trocadero Theatre in Philadelphia and took a seat, waiting through the stale comics and lumbering, thundering chorines until the emcee announced the headliner, a girl named Georgia Sothern, who stood no more than five feet tall.

She didn’t have a gimmick so much as a double-jointed torso that was able to, in the words of one observer, “
bump so vigorously and incessantly and speedily that her act transcended the boundaries of obscenity into the domain of unmannered eccentricity.” Another fan marveled that she “
strips like she just had dynamite for lunch”; she even fainted during one particularly frantic convulsion. Billy knew Georgia was just starting out, another child vaudevillian who turned to burlesque when the Orpheum Circuit died, leaving behind her real name and “Hazel Anderson” for good. An Atlanta native, she began calling herself “Georgia Sothern,” after her home state and region. She scrawled her name so quickly on her first burlesque contract that she omitted the “u” in “Sothern.”
If she took too long to sign, she feared, the manager might change his mind.