American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (35 page)

A
lthough Billy Minsky didn’t like Rose and her meddlesome, nitpicky ways, he let her accompany Gypsy to rehearsals and hide out (along with Woolly Face) in the dressing room, a heady clutter of rhinestones and feathers, spirit gum and Sterno, stale coffee and spilled brandy, cigarette butts and sweat and the musk of dirty stockings. Rose made it clear that Gypsy still needed her; who else would warn the girl about developing friendships and fraternizing with other performers on the bill? Who else would have protected her from that unscrupulous, craven Tade Styka, who wanted to paint Gypsy in the nude? Rose made such a scene that three Minsky stagehands rushed in and tossed the artist out. “
You know,” she told Gypsy, “I’m a good judge of character.”
Her daughter could trust her and no one else. That’s how it had always been, and always would be.

Under Rose’s watchful eye and with her grudging consent, Gypsy discovered she loved the way a cigarette felt cradled between her fingers and clamped between her lips, the wispy frame of smoke around her face. A Minsky comic named Rags Ragland became her benefactor behind the stage. He, too, had chronic dental ailments: a full set of lowers but just two teeth on top, one long incisor on each side. He kept his false upper plate not in his mouth but in a wad of newspaper, stashed away inside the cash register of a Third Avenue bar. He was rumored to be well endowed and a chronic womanizer, methodically making his way through the Minsky Rosebuds and a few select slingers.

Rags taught her how to drink, spiking her coffee with brandy in the morning and filling her flask at night. “
Gypsy could really put it away,” Morton Minsky noted, “and she often did, even between her acts … according to everyone who knew her, she used every form of chemical stimulation on earth, not the least of it champagne.” She tried smoking marijuana a few times but found it “revolting,” mostly because it made her too passive. “
I’m not giving anything away,” she reasoned. “I’m selling it. Sweet? Submissive? May as well be a housewife … it dims my luster, makes me resemble others—that’s the worst thing that could happen.” Cocaine was next, and the buzz was more to her liking. At one party
she accidentally spilled her lines on the rug, a faux pas quickly forgiven by her host and fellow guests; she was the absent-minded stripper, after all, whose whimsical, choreographed mistakes were as anticipated as the slow, deliberate peeling of her gloves.

She eavesdropped on the stripteasers’ chatter in the dressing rooms; of course their theories on men and sex contradicted everything Mother had taught her. Every once in a while the house doctor stopped by to ask the girls if anything hurt or itched.
No one could afford to get married these days—the marriage rate had dropped by 22 percent since the onset of the Depression—but
seven out of ten single men and women were sexually active. It was illegal to advertise birth control products, so the girls perused women’s magazines and read between the lines: various jellies, powders, liquids, suppositories, foaming tablets, and even Lysol addressed “
feminine hygiene” and “marriage hygiene”
issues. If all else failed, they could try the newly developed, pontiff-sanctioned rhythm method, or insert
a 14-karat gold button into the uterus to serve as an IUD.

Gypsy made one enemy: a stripteaser who called herself Electra but whose real name was Goldie Grey. Five feet tall, with blond hair that curled like commas about her head, Electra wore a small pouch around her waist stuffed with batteries. With a flick of her finger, she controlled clusters of blinking lights that covered her breasts and bottom, a gimmick she used on the burlesque circuits for seventy-two straight months (and that would make her famous as a character in the musical
Gypsy
). She, too, was friendly with Rags Ragland, and when he needed a talking woman for one of his comedy sketches, she and Gypsy competed for the job. As much as Rags liked Gypsy, she was too tall for the part, and so began a feud that lasted as long as they were both in the business.

But, despite Mother’s warnings, Gypsy befriended a few of the girls, particularly the redhead who hailed from Atlanta and called herself Georgia Sothern. When Gypsy met her at Minsky’s Republic, Georgia Sothern was just fourteen years old, and she told Gypsy what had happened the day Billy Minsky learned her true age.

The boss collapsed into his office chair and sank his head into splayed hands. “
Fourteen?” he moaned. “FOURTEEN! Four-TEEN! This kid is only fourteen years old!” Georgia soothed him by producing an official-looking birth certificate that made her eighteen, drawn up specially by her Uncle Virgil, who used to thwart suspicion by telling people she was a midget.

“
I’ll put this in the file with your contract,” Billy decided. “If anybody ever asks me questions, I’ll tell them I didn’t know your age when I hired you and that you gave me this as proof that you were old enough. I’ll swear I never heard what you just told me today.”

The forged papers were sufficiently authentic to facilitate Georgia’s marriage to one of the Republic’s straight men, who, she said, attacked her “
like an animal” on their wedding night. She reported to Billy’s office the following afternoon to explain what had happened. He took one look at her blackened eye, her mottled, bruised peach of a face, and decided the only way to overcome the situation was to exploit it. He ordered his wardrobe woman to sew a custom eye patch flecked with
rhinestones and called a press conference. The demand was such that Billy booked four extra shows. The audience was more eager to see Georgia’s eye than any other part of her body, and for her encore she removed the patch and lifted her face to the lights.

Gypsy came to trust Georgia implicitly. The girl’s opinions were as forceful and blunt as her onstage antics, and, most important, she did not try to copy Gypsy’s technique. “
Gypsy had a style far removed from mine,” Georgia said. “She did nothing but walk sedately back and forth across stage in time to the music as she removed her costume. It was stripping in its simplest form and a gimmick without really being a gimmick at all. Her act was a complete contrast to my fast strip, and because of it we were both able to appear on the same stage as stars. Together we packed the Republic to the rafters.”

Georgia Sothern.
(photo credit 27.1)

In between performances, Gypsy played pinochle with the Minsky comedians (including one “
Lew Costello”), who had a game running for months. They kept score on the dressing room walls, and the numbers stretched out into the hallway. Georgia felt indebted to Billy, but Gypsy learned that most of the Minsky employees despised the brothers. One comic boasted about a trick he had taught his dog. Hanging an old coat on the wall,
he yelled “Minsky!” and praised the animal when it lunged and tore the garment to shreds. The Minsky Rosebuds complained about the lousy pay, just $21 for an eighty-hour workweek—plus they had to supply their own G-strings. Billy called his policy tradition, a necessary stepping-stone, since most of the big burlesque stars began their careers as chorus girls.

“No actor should join a union,” Billy told Gypsy one day. She could have rested her elbow on his head, and he had to forcefully launch his words upward in her direction. “It isn’t artistic. Unions are for laborers, people who dig ditches. You’re an artiste. You should have stardust in your eyes and music in your heart.” He even used his thriftiness as a publicity stunt, advertising that his chorines were “good girls” because they were too exhausted to misbehave. One of them confided the truth of this theory to Gypsy. “
It takes time to be bad,” she reasoned, “and who the hell’s got time?”

Gypsy despised Billy’s rationale, even though it was one that had defined her childhood, with Mother always refusing to pay the Newsboy Songsters or the Hollywood Blondes when times were tight, reasoning that the experience on the road was compensation enough. She made notes of every missed paycheck and indignity suffered by her burlesque colleagues. “
Seven days a week four shows a day,” she wrote, “forty-five hours of rehearsals a week for fifteen dollars. No contracts, no security bond, supply your own shoes and keep smiling.… Who wants to know from stardust in your eyes when your feet hurt?” She vowed that
no one would ever take such advantage of her, especially once she knew exactly who Gypsy Rose Lee was, and what she was worth.

Luckily she could perpetrate her sleuthing with relative ease, since Billy seemed unusually distracted of late, conferring in hushed tones with Morton and Herbert or retreating to his office carrying the latest issue of every newspaper, the stack so tall it obscured half of his face. Gypsy overheard enough to know that business had declined at the Minskys’ flagship burlesque house, the National Winter Garden, and that the brothers were casting about for people and circumstances to blame. It was the fault of Abe, the oldest, having vanished into his private cache of resentment or jealousy or whatever angry sentiment he’d clenched in his small, silly mind. It was “
all those down-and-outers,” as Morton put it, loitering around the plazas at Allen Street and Second Avenue. It was the fault of other cheap forms of entertainment—talkies and the radio, the same forces that had destroyed vaudeville.

Gypsy read the same daily newspapers as Billy, mostly skimming for gossip and book reviews, but she understood how the page-one headlines might unravel his nerves. Gangster Arnold Rothstein’s murder was still officially “unsolved,” but everyone knew the true meaning of that classification: the city’s police, courts, and prosecutors were all either on the take or looking the other way, stalling in an attempt to keep the wrong pair of eyes from peering too deeply into Mayor Walker’s administration. Those eyes belonged to a patrician, pedantic, courtly judge named Samuel Seabury, who, in August 1930, was appointed by the New York State Supreme Court to head what was—and still is—
the largest investigation of municipal corruption in American history.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt had approved Seabury’s appointment and would be expecting regular updates; the case was major national news, and the governor’s political future depended on its outcome. Roosevelt hadn’t forgotten how Mayor Walker stood by him and rallied the faithful for his gubernatorial campaign, yet now here he was, monitoring an investigation that threatened to expose corruption at every level of the vaunted Tammany organization. A New York governor with presidential aspirations had to be mindful not only of who helped him along the way but also of how those associations could be interpreted across the
country. To become the thirty-second president of the United States, he had to prove himself capable of independent action without provoking Tammany Hall to work against him. “
When you’re in politics,” Roosevelt reasoned, “you’ve got to play the game.”

With that in mind, Roosevelt drew upon his legal training and adopted a pragmatic, indifferent stance toward the investigation. The State Supreme Court, he reasoned, was well within its rights to order the inquiry, and “
by virtue of the Constitution and statutes of our state,” Roosevelt felt compelled to sanction it. Judge Seabury was free to turn out the pockets of Manhattan’s denizens and examine their contents in unstinting detail, even if the process indelibly changed the character of New York City itself.

W
ithout asking Gypsy or even telling her, Rose dipped into their savings and bought a house out in Rego Park, Queens. It was the end unit in a development done in neo-Flemish style, a tall, slim home with spires and a doorbell that chimed the
first few notes of “Ave Maria.”
It cost $8,888, a significant leap from their little room at the Cameo Apartments, and they had not one piece of furniture to put in it. They did, however, have an 8mm projector and a trunkful of blue movies, which Rose watched as if they were soap operas. Lounging on a blanket in front of the screen, her hand buried in a deep bowl of popcorn, she laughed softly to herself
at the “funny parts.”

One night, when Rose was home alone,
Gypsy lost her virginity to a man named Ed Grimble. She’d worried that she was such “a great big sex star” that no one would ever make a pass at her—“
I’m going to have to rape somebody,” she moaned—but Ed saved her the trouble. Not particularly handsome, but wealthy and connected on Broadway and in literary circles, he was friendly with people she wanted to know, familiar with places she longed to see.
“She
had
to get rid of her virginity,” June said, “because she was moving in very fast company.” Next she fell into a fling with her friend and drinking buddy Rags Ragland, who taught her how to kiss as if the man weren’t a stranger. He called Gypsy “pumpkin” and sent her love letters in verse: “
I would like to kiss you if
I could because you have been so very good.” She moved on to faster company, a crooked Broadway cop—perhaps the would-be “protector” from her fan telegrams—and then to one of New York’s most notorious and dangerous criminals.