American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (38 page)

P
rivately, the brothers wondered what sort of toll a mother like that could take on a young girl. Gypsy was incredibly bright, no doubt about that, but, as Morton noted, she “
had her idiosyncrasies.” Her personality skipped like a damaged record, stuck by chance on notes high or low, struggling to find the place where the song should resume.

Her sly sophistication onstage belied her barbaric behavior off. “
She used foul words all of the time,” observed fellow stripteaser and Minsky relative Dardy Minsky. “And for no reason. She would talk about ‘that effing chair.’ She had a very un-lady-like manner about her, very crude.”
A day riding the Ferris wheel at Coney Island with Georgia Sothern was followed by a night in the most sordid corners of Manhattan. No one could miss her talk about those “circus parties,” featuring strippers with forty-six-inch bosoms and a man who never got tired. “
He could keep a hard-on for hours—do all those acrobatic sex gigs, and still go on and on,” Gypsy reported. “But was he satisfied? Oh, no! He had to go and get that damned silicone pumped into his penis, so he could be even more spectacular.”

Then there was her monkey, Woolly Face, who followed her everywhere, swigging brandy from her flask and sitting on her bare lap while she primped at her dressing room mirror. One day Morton—perhaps inadvertently, perhaps not—walked in on Gypsy conducting a strangely intimate routine with the animal. “
She had a monkey,” he said, “trained to do things that would have driven any of our license commissioners up the wall. However, she decided not to use that material in her act.”

In one area, at least, their new star was remarkably consistent. With every raid, every ride in the paddy wagon, every witty quip to the gossip columnists, Billy realized he had never before met someone like Gypsy, whose natural ability for getting and shaping attention—
any
kind of attention—matched his own.

M
ore than eleven thousand people a week came to see Gypsy Rose Lee and her elegant, brainy joke of a strip. Clearly burlesque was thriving on Broadway—not only at the Republic but at the Eltinge, across the street—and Billy figured the Great White Way could make room for one more Minsky theater. He had Joseph Weinstock buy out the Shubert brothers’ lease on the Central Theatre at 48th and Broadway, another white flag of surrender from the beleaguered legitimate crowd. The depression that afflicted the rest of the country only buoyed the business of burlesque, no longer relegated to the alleyways of fringe neighborhoods but in demand on the greatest street in the world. Billy offered the simplest explanation, which also served as his personal formula: burlesque gave the people something else to think about. He was so focused on expanding his Broadway presence that he didn’t even attend
the final night of the National Winter Garden on September 19, 1931, when the curtain fell—finally, officially—on the last sweet memory he shared with his brother Abe.

With both the Columbia and Mutual Wheels officially dead, Billy entertained visions of a “
Minsky American Wheel,” his specific brand of stock burlesque in thirty theaters from New York to Chicago. Nothing and no one could stop him now. He would expand into Brooklyn. He would form an international burlesque company to compete with the
Moulin Rouge and the Folies Bergère, those same iconic institutions he had once aspired to imitate. He contemplated taking over the Metropolitan Opera House for a season of burlesque, and was so enthralled with the idea that he sent his attorney to begin negotiations straight away. And in the spring of 1932 the following ad ran in the personals section of the
Times:

Billy neither admitted placing the ad, nor denied that the idea hadn’t crossed his mind.

I
n his little black notebook John Sumner documented all of Billy’s rumors and stunts and schemes. He took note when no less vaunted a publication than
The New Yorker
christened a certain section of Times Square “
Minskyville.” This burgeoning New York neighborhood, the magazine declared, ran from 52nd to 42nd Streets on Broadway, and from Sixth to Eighth Avenues on 42nd Street. One couldn’t tour Minskyville without encountering all manner of creative hucksters and moral poison: Indian herb doctors and Gypsy seeresses (both reeking of gin and skilled at picking pockets); divulgers of “golden medical secrets”; strongmen and living statuary; amateur phrenologists who offered to examine people’s heads, looking for certain bumps and lumps that indicated sex drive; bums making obscene overtures to female pedestrians; and, of course, the main attraction, Hubert’s Flea Museum, featuring its two-headed suckling pig and acrobatic insects. Minskyville, in short, had more in common with Coney Island than Manhattan. “
Lose a few hundred infants in Minskyville,”
The New Yorker
concluded, “scatter broken glass around to cut your feet on, and you might easily confuse the one with the other.”

Manhattan’s leading citizens were disturbed by what had become of “the crossroads of the world.” Burlesque and its accompanying detritus could flourish down on the Lower East Side, but not under the bright lights of Broadway. The Forty Second Street Property Owners’ and Merchants’ Association, concerned about declining real estate values, also objected to burlesque in its backyard. Without prompt and decisive action, the indecent and unseemly pockets of the city threatened to invade every street and avenue.

John Sumner monitored these latest developments with keen interest and smug delight. He’d been waiting for such a convergence of forces, for respectable and respected New Yorkers to lend a voice to his cause. During his entire tenure, Jimmy Walker had been aiming disparaging comments at Sumner, like “
I have never yet heard of a girl being ruined by a book” and “
a reformer is a guy who rides through a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat.” Now the embattled mayor would be put on the defensive, forced to speak beyond his usual pithy jokes and glib talk. An old, forgotten official known as the license commissioner was thawed out and dusted off, and he vowed to launch a round of hearings on burlesque—especially Minsky burlesque.

The mayor, meanwhile, prepared to answer to another force for decency and righteousness, the Honorable Judge Samuel Seabury, whose corruption probe had developed into a rollicking farce worthy of Broadway itself.

O
n a Friday night in early May 1932, Billy was standing near the protruding edge of the stage—the apron, it was called—when the rig of a traveler curtain wiggled loose and came crashing down. Startled, he lurched backward into the orchestra pit and landed awkwardly, his left leg splayed beneath him in a limp, unnatural angle. He heard himself make a strange noise, a coarse, primitive gargle, and looked up to see a semicircle of faces fanned around him, mouths screaming noiseless words, arms beckoning to someone or something just out of his sight. He tried to speak. His leg. Yes, his leg hurt, but his
shoulder
 … goddammit, his shoulder … this was all he needed after the week he’d had,
what with his star stripteaser up and quitting without any notice, making a liar out of his marquee. You’ll be back, he’d told Gypsy. She didn’t know how good she had it with the Minsky brothers.

“
Do you think anything’s broken?” he managed to ask. No one could say. Morton and Herbert carried him to his car, lowering him like a sleeping child into the backseat. Mary heard the car pull up and met her husband at the door, wondering why he was home so early. She summoned a doctor for an emergency house call. No broken bones, he said, just a “pulled muscle” in the leg and “probably a bruise” on the shoulder. He gave Billy a sedative and ordered him to lie flat.

Billy obeyed until the sun seared through the window and poked him awake. He hopped to the car on one leg and drove himself back to Manhattan in time for rehearsals at the Republic. He scavenged through the prop room until he found a cane, and hobbled about on that until it became tiresome. He developed a lurching Quasimodo walk,
stomp
drag
stomp
drag, that folded him into half of his already Lilliputian size. The leg he could handle, but it felt like someone had exploded a bomb inside his shoulder. He told himself it would go away if he ignored it long enough.

C
olloquially known as the “
Tweed Courthouse,” owing to Boss Tweed’s embezzlement of large sums of money during its construction, the building at 52 Chambers Street was one of Manhattan’s most majestic structures, with Corinthian pillars that bowed into graceful archways and an octagonal rotunda awash in brilliant sheaths of light. Judge Samuel Seabury appreciated the irony of trying the Walker administration—the last in the old Tammany Hall tradition, if he handled the case properly—in a venue named for its most notorious and reviled leader.

Serious implications aside, the corruption trial was improbably entertaining—so much so that portions of testimony would inspire the Pulitzer Prize–winning 1959 Broadway musical
Fiorello!
Take, for instance, Seabury’s questioning of a New York County sheriff and member of Tammany Hall who had somehow managed to accumulate nearly a half-million dollars in six years on an annual salary of $8,500: