American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (33 page)

Billy offered Georgia double her current salary, and she became his. It was the highest salary Billy had ever granted a female performer, but Philadelphia prices were not New York prices, and he expected, sooner or later, to find someone worth even more.

And he did.

On March 19, 1931, Billy caught a revue at the Empire Theatre in Newark, New Jersey, called
Wine, Women, and Song
. The headliner took her time emerging from behind the curtain, peering out as if slightly wary about what she might find, and with her first step, even before she said a word, she made it clear to Billy Minsky that he had never seen anyone like her and never would again.

She didn’t strut or skip or move in any of the usual ways but sashayed, rather, with leisurely grace, and when she acknowledged the audience it was with faint surprise, as if she were rustled from some deep and intimate solitude and had expected to remain alone.

Then she began to talk.

Clearly she was shy—ironically, most of the slingers were—but this
girl had a way of teasing her own trepidation, mocking it, turning it inside out like the fingers of a glove. Stripteasers rarely spoke two syllables on stage, but this one couldn’t
not
talk, as if each twirl of the wrists, every stride of those legs, deserved narration. She wielded a powder puff on a stick and swiveled her strangely exquisite neck like a periscope, seeking a secret hidden somewhere in the crowd. “Darling! Sweetheart!” she exclaimed. “Where have you been all my life?”

She wasn’t addressing him, but those words, and the girl who spoke them, were already his. The name on the marquee outside read
GYPSY ROSE LEE
, but she was nobody until Billy Minsky said so.

Before Gypsy Rose Lee performs her famous routine for the very last time, but long after she has begun to tire of it, she finds herself, one day, facing the task of writing a letter to her sister that no sibling would ever wish to send. She thinks about their strange, peripatetic childhood, those days when June felt loved—by strangers, if not their mother—and Gypsy felt happiest alone. They have been distant, in both miles and affection, and then reunited, regarding each other with cagey eyes and pricked senses; this dance of rancor and reconciliation will continue for the rest of their lives, and even beyond.

For too long Mother was their lone common denominator. Over the years she dipped in and out of their lives, advancing and receding like a wave, ferocious when she flowed and pitiful when she ebbed but exhausting either way. They took turns fielding her requests and enduring her intrusions. During June’s run in
Pal Joey
Mother stormed the office of director George Abbott, stinking drunk, with
a “big lesbo” by her side. No charming damsel in distress this time, but a fierce and furious vortex, heard clear through every wall and floor.

Oh, how she loved her girls, she cried, and yet those ungrateful “heels” were “starving” her. Would Mr. Abbott mind getting her something to eat and, perhaps, two tickets for the show? He did, just to be rid of her.

“I hate like hell
to give that dreadful person a cent,” June wrote to Gypsy. “Jeepers that old bag ought to go to work—not at the job she picked out for us naturally … she’s too old. But something like digging ditches … she is such an Amazon it would be like playing marbles for her.”

Gypsy advised June to hire a lawyer, and to communicate with Mother in that way as much as possible, for as long as possible.

Once Gypsy and June gathered some distance from Rose they could make room for each other, and for the first time the present superseded the past. In the early 1940s, Gypsy invited June to live at the house on 63rd Street and to take a trip around the world. “
I’d like you even if we weren’t sisters,” Gypsy told her, a confidence June cherished even as she struggled to believe it. Now, ten years later, they speak often about their husbands, Julio De Diego (Gypsy’s third and favorite, an acclaimed Spanish painter she married four years after divorcing Bill Kirkland) and Bill Spier (June’s third, and true love); about their children, Erik and April; about work or the lack thereof; about Gypsy’s ever-growing menagerie of pets, especially her Chinese crested hairless dogs; about anything at all as long as their words have sweetly dull edges, and don’t threaten this fragile thing they’ve made.

At the moment, Gypsy is across the Atlantic on an extended European tour, and June has tentative plans to join her. She will be good company during this old grind, night after night of applying body makeup from neck to feet and gluing black lace bows to her breasts, seven-year-old Erik watching while she primps without a stitch of clothing on. She tells everyone who questions his presence that she believes a child belongs with his mother, and that Erik has been her constant companion on the road since he was six months old. Of course he receives an education; he’s enrolled at the prestigious Professional Children’s School, designed for children in the performing arts, which permits students to complete lessons by correspondence while on the road. He counts the future star
Christopher Walken among his classmates.
Sure, there is trouble occasionally, like the time
Erik swallowed one of her straight pins while she was onstage and had to be rushed to the hospital. She was furious and never played that theater again, nor did she thank the owner for saving him.

But Erik is mostly an asset, a constant and reliable piece of her life, and as soon as he is capable of holding a camera or helping her change between acts, Gypsy plans to put him to work. He already does his share, in a way. Any problem—a contract dispute, inadequate advertising, a mechanic who insists he can’t fix her Rolls—and she grabs Erik’s hand to pull him close; he is the evidence that wins every case. “
I’m a woman alone in the world with a child,” she says, hearing her mother inside each word, “and I’ll do whatever I must to survive.”

They spend at least six months of every year on the road—the house on 63rd Street has become little more than a place to do laundry—and she enjoys the tours, especially abroad. She scores the loveliest souvenirs, another skill inherited from Rose, “
liberating” ashtrays and keys from her favorite restaurants and hotels, slipping them into her Vuitton handbag when no one is looking. And overseas, at least, she can avoid the graying men who insist they skipped high school to see her shows at Minsky’s, to which she always replies, archly,
“Honey, I wasn’t even
born
when you were in high school.”

But Europe presents its own challenges. She has to smuggle her cats into hotels. There are too many drunks on the roads. She loathes Liverpool, where
someone hurls a rock through her dressing room window. In Pompeii she half expects to be murdered in her bed. Each night she retreats to her hotel room and vents in her diary: “
Rehearsal in three languages is something. One girl speaks only Spanish. 2 Swedes speak only Swedish … it is a riot. Leader is a cold fish if I ever saw one. Signs backstage ‘no smoking’ in five languages. No running water in dressing rooms.… Oh Gawd I’m tired.” Her show at the New China Theater in Stockholm, in particular, is a catastrophe. The producers bill her as a sexy American stripper, a surefire strategy for failure. Not a female face in the audience, and the men expect a sex show.

“
Have decided,” Gypsy writes, “that everyone who speaks English has seen the show. Audiences watch me with their mouths wide open, but not laughing. After all, they seem to be saying, ‘We show more than
this on the beach,’ and indeed, with mixed nude bathing, they certainly do.” How she dreads facing rows of “bewildered, disappointed, leering faces.”

And in London, where she is scheduled to appear at the Finsbury Empire Theatre, the county council suffers an untimely bout of prudery, outlawing stripteasing and ordering her show closed by January. A pity for the Brits, but she does wangle some publicity from the decision, calling the council members “fuddy-duddies” and explaining to the wire services why she isn’t a stripteaser at all. “
A stripteaser,” she says, “is a woman who puts on an exotic sexual spectacle. My act is straight comedy and boy, they love it.”

She leaves London and settles in a small city nearby—they all blur together after a while—staying in her usual choice of hotel: any place cheap, with a kitchen, and located close to work. An entire ocean between them, and still Mother can get to her. She rolls a piece of paper into her typewriter, next to which sits an ashtray overflowing with menthol cigarettes smoked to the nub and a mug of hot tea, plenty of cream and sugar. The occasion truly calls for her old favorite standby, coffee with brandy, emphasis on the latter, but alcohol is the lone pleasure she’s agreed to give up.

Gypsy begins to type:

She types the word “Love,” signs “Gypsy,” and realizes that the beginning of Mother’s end is also, somehow, her own.

Gypsy Rose Lee, headliner at the Republic, circa 1931.
(photo credit 26.1)

The city felt different from Gypsy’s time there as a child, back when she toted Gigolo on her shoulder and slunk through the streets with a fur-clad June, the two of them such an odd spectacle that even New Yorkers stopped to stare. Now it seemed as if someone had uprooted an expanse of color and noise and in its place laid tracks of fervent desperation. The street vendors hawked Tijuana Bibles—pornographic comic books featuring crude couplings between Minnie Mouse and Donald Duck and other celebrities, real or cartoon. Police arrested the “
singing beggar” of Broadway for the twenty-ninth time. Flappers were extinct, and once again hemlines grazed ankles. Homeless men loitered in front of Hubert’s Flea Museum, where fleas “juggled” balls
coated in citronella. Two and a half miles north, a “
Hooverville” of shacks sloped along the emptied Central Park Reservoir, sandwiched between several new luxury apartment buildings on Fifth Avenue and Central Park
West. The air smelled of old hot dogs and fresh perm solution, and the lights fell hot and merciless on Gypsy’s face.

In one particular house on 42nd Street, New York wasn’t New York at all but a miniature corner of Paris—how else to explain the doorman’s curlicue mustache and red-lined cape; the female ushers wielding perfume atomizers; and, of course, the Napoleon Bonaparte doppelgänger who called himself Billy Minsky, a century removed from the original but equally in command of his empire. He met Gypsy and her mother at the Republic’s stage door and told them to follow him to their dressing room, up one flight of iron stairs. Not the largest room, but still a decent size, with a clear view of the stage. Once she was settled, Gypsy planned to bring Woolly Face in to keep her company.

Billy Minsky was shorter than both Gypsy and Rose, and he stared up at them through thick glasses. As soon as they’d received his telegram, not so much requesting but ordering Gypsy to work at the Republic, Rose began packing their bags. “He wants us
!” she gasped, skipping around their room. “This is it, Louise. This is the break we’ve been waiting for! The Republic Theatre is the showcase of Broadway. Billy Minsky said so himself. Why, burlesque is the womb that has borne great big stars, and the
Ziegfeld Follies
at the Winter Garden is no different in any way from
Ada Onion from Bermuda
at Minsky’s!”