American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (34 page)

Gypsy remembered the gossip on the circuit about the so-called
inventor of modern burlesque and his brother-partners, two of whom hovered behind Billy now. Herbert was thin, with greased hair and a mustache so tidy and trim it looked like a set of false eyelashes blinking over his lip. The youngest, Morton, was plump and disheveled, the bow tie on his tuxedo askew, his glasses tilted on the bridge of his nose. He seemed in awe of Gypsy, afraid to look at her directly but unable to shift his eyes. She knew Billy had fallen out with the eldest and original burlesque mastermind, Abe, and a part of her couldn’t help but wonder which sibling would win.

Billy had a quick but precise manner about him, and he spoke as if he first ran his words through a blender.

“
How old are you?” he asked.

If Gypsy had to guess, she’d say sixteen; in truth she was twenty.

“Just eighteen,” Rose said, quickly.

“That’s all right, then,” he said. “I can’t take any chances with minors.”

She felt him appraise her. He let his eyes take their time. She was wearing a heavy tweed coat over a dress with a frilly Peter Pan collar. She covered one glove with the other so Billy wouldn’t notice the rip in the finger. His stare stopped at her head, which bore a gray felt hat atop a mound of fuzzy curls.

“Do you wear your hair like that on stage?” he asked.

“Of course she does,” Rose said, impatient now. “Didn’t you see her work?”

He ignored her and dragged a chair from the makeup shelf. Gypsy followed his silent command and sat down. His pulled off her hat and used his fat fingers as a vise, holding her hair flat against both sides of her head.

“
Wear your hair like that,” he said. “It’s more ladylike.”

Even though the straight hair made her look like Rose Louise again, Gypsy decided to take Billy Minsky’s advice. There were certain people in this business whose requests should be honored, and she sensed that he was one of them.

E
very day she rehearsed on the rooftop of the Republic Theatre. A line of Minsky Rosebuds danced a frenzied Charleston, and then parted to let the star take her place. Gypsy wore a mink stole and tight dress, sheer enough to show the sharp outline of each rib. Strutting slowly forward, she unhooked the pins along one side until a sliver of hip was exposed. She spun and walked away, letting the dress fall down to the dip of her back. Another spin and her hands made a choker around her neck, elbows just covering her nipples. She imagined someone in the audience begging her to let her arms fall, just long enough for a look.

“Oh, no,” Gypsy answered out loud, smiling and shaking her head. “I couldn’t do
that.
”

She turned her back to the imaginary crowd again, shrugged the stole from her shoulders, and when she twirled again she held the fur across her breasts.

Again they begged to see her, as much of herself as she could spare.

“Oh, no,” and she laughed, harder this time. “I couldn’t do
that.
”

The Minsky Rosebuds ran and clustered around her, half pretending to strip her, half fighting to cover her up.

O
n Monday, March 30, Gypsy paced the wings of the Republic. This was it, the first real step from her past, her ignominious beginnings. She could hear the barker’s singsong bellow: “
Come in and see her take it off! Gypsy Rose Lee, the one and only! Like a banana, watch her peel! Watch Gypsy Rose Lee take it off, right down to the fruit!” An hour earlier, per the Minsky brothers’ orders, she’d dipped a sponge in a cosmetic called Stage White, which made skin shine like satin under the spotlights, and painted every inch of her body. Rose helpfully pointed out any missed spots and kept her company as she waited for it to dry, stark naked and spread-eagled.

Afterward she attached her pasties and G-string in a complicated, two-stage
process of her own invention. With a dab of spirit gum, she affixed tiny circles of flesh-colored net to her nipples, just large enough to pin on two lacy black bows. She placed another strip of net, lined with hand-sewn snaps, so that it just covered her bikini area and bottom, and then fastened her black G-string over it. She never allowed anyone to stand behind her while she did her act—not only because she was more naked in back than she was in front but because she was a magician of sorts, and she wanted no one to decipher the illusion.

She stepped into a fitted red velvet gown that flared like an open flower below her knees. “
Breasts more like molehills than mountains,” Morton Minsky assessed, but she looked stunning, even with her hair straightened the way Billy had ordered. Black silk stockings, a red garter, gloves that climbed past her elbows, and she was ready for her year—hell, her decade—to begin.

June was in the audience. Apparently she and Bobby had tired, finally, of marathon dancing, and wanted to try their luck as legitimate performers in New York. She had written to Gypsy and Mother to explain the situation and asked, plainly, if she could see them. It was a mature letter, Gypsy thought, devoid of any mention of the way things
had ended, and in turn Rose penned a thoughtful response. “
This is the only place left for real show business,” she wrote. “Come here. We’re living right around the corner from Times Square—we can be together again and you can book all the dates you want from the agents who know who you really are.… Louise is starring in a big musical comedy right on 42nd Street and Broadway … she’s the talk of the town and the most beautiful girl in the United States.”

Gypsy had not seen June since that night in New Bedford when she was shaking in time to the rattle of those newspapers, and she wanted her sister to understand that everything was different now;
she
was different now, as different as if she’d willfully rearranged her cells beneath her skin. When Gypsy took her sister’s hand, she dug in with three-inch crimson nails and let her painted lips graze the air by June’s cheek. She could tell June barely recognized her, which was the biggest compliment of all. “
Louise wasn’t a woman yet,” June said, “but she definitely was no longer a child. She was in the middle of the fight, and she was fighting hard.”

“I’m sorry I’m so busy, darling,” Gypsy cooed, “but it’s just one thing after another. It’s exciting and I love it, but it is exhausting.”

She told June there would be tickets waiting for her at the Republic’s box office—complimentary, of course. She insisted; it was the least she could do for June after all the hardship and humiliation she’d been through.

Now the curtain lifted on the “
cowboy production number,” as the Minskys called it, and Gypsy watched the chorus girls square off, some dressed as cowboys and others as Indians, wearing bows and paper arrows and brandishing pop guns that hurled cotton bullets into the audience. For the grand finale, the curtains spread to reveal two white geldings—billed as stallions—prancing on a rotating platform as the orchestra struggled through the
Poet and Peasant Overture
. Two starlets, naked from the waist up, rode bareback, while the rest of the cast danced and whooped from behind. The audience greeted this spectacle with ho-hum indifference until one of the horses had an accident, at which point they broke into wild applause—that is, until the platform rotated once again and faced upstage. The first five rows were doused
with manure, the girls clung to the terrified animals for dear life, and the velvet curtain dropped so the stage could be cleared, quickly, for the next performer, the headliner.

“
And now, ladies and gentlemen,” the announcer called, “the girl of the year! The unforgettable, the fabulous, Gypsy Rose Lee!”

By now the applause was part of her, as vital and necessary as a muscle, a thing to flex and stretch and use to climb higher. It was what she’d remember most about that night, the way it leapt after her as she worked the stage, unfurling her gloves, shedding her dress one pin at a time, pausing with each muted
plink
inside the tuba. She had coached the tuba player during rehearsals, telling him exactly where to stand and how to position his instrument, a meticulous, private ritual between the two of them. At the finish, when other slingers invited the audience to come closer, Gypsy pulled away and looked down, as if shocked to see so much of her own skin. “How did this happen?” she seemed to ask; proper Gibson Girls, even those living well into the twentieth century, do not end up on New York stages wearing nothing but an open dress and sheer net panties. Backing up against the curtain, standing tall and regal and unobtainable, she gripped its velvet edge and made herself a cape.
“And suddenly,” she whispered, like the end to a fairy tale, “I take the last … thing … off!” She hurled her dress into the air, a vivid velvet flag of surrender. A female plant in the audience screamed, the laughter crested over the stage, and the clapping galloped faster than her heartbeat.

“
Seven minutes of sheer art,” Billy Minsky told her, and the rest of New York agreed with him. Maybe not the most beautiful girl in the world, but oddly striking, her large, lush features a refreshing contrast to the chiseled precision of the
Follies
girls. More than that, she was
funny
, with flawless comedic timing—how many strippers could make that claim? “
Gypsy Lee was a riot with her specialty,” one critic raved. “She has a style all her own. She knows what to do and when to do it.”

She matched Billy Minsky’s publicity prowess and began lamenting her “
fan trouble.” Within five weeks of starring at the Republic, she received six proposals of marriage, one live bunny, a dozen bouquets of American Beauties, numerous boxes of candy, forty-four mash notes, and a case of ginger ale. On the afternoon of April 10, when a complaint
by John Sumner prompted a raid on the Republic, Gypsy was one of six arrested for giving an “
indecent performance.” But only she had a ready quip: “
I wasn’t naked,” she insisted. “I was completely covered by a blue spotlight. Just ask my mother, who is always with me.”

She had another when they carted her off to jail and tossed a blanket at her in the cell: “Help
!” she cried. “I’ve been draped!” Rose loved the rides in the paddy wagon, the screaming headlines in the
Police Gazette;
even in June’s best years show business had never been so thrilling. “
My baby,” Rose insisted, “is innocent and pure.” She clenched Gypsy’s hand and gave her daughter her brightest, loveliest smile, as if to seal a pact that they were in this together, and Rose would always come along for the ride.

T
he
postraid fan mail kept coming, countless telegrams all pledging devotion and support:

And two notes scrawled on business-size, heavyweight blank cards, accompanied by flowers:

Every week the name of the show changed—
Yetta Lostit from Bowling, Lotta Schmaltz from Greece, Iva Schnozzle from Red Hook
—but Gypsy’s name was always on top. She earned every cent of her weekly
$900 salary, 25 percent of which was paid in IOUs;
she stuffed the squares of paper up the rat holes in her dressing room. It was an astronomical sum (about $40,000 in today’s dollars), yet she and Rose lived as simply and cheaply as possible, renting a small room with a kitchenette at the
Cameo Apartments, across from the Republic, for just $12.50 a week. They spent their late nights huddled together, whispering beneath the sheets, speaking ill of the past and gloriously of the future.

Gypsy accelerated her dieting efforts, temporarily forgoing her essence mix to try every popular fad, eating nothing but lamb chops and pineapple one day, bananas, sauerkraut juice, and lettuce the next. Every night she pressed her thumb against her teeth because Mother told her it would help straighten them. When the big, legitimate Broadway boys came in, Florenz Ziegfeld or Lee Shubert or George White or Earl Carroll, Gypsy would be ready. “
I wish she was in another sort of show,” June told Bobby, but she never said a word to her sister. Gypsy could hear June’s voice anyway, a silent judgment that flogged her ears raw: she might be making burlesque better, but she was better than burlesque.