American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (39 page)

Ten days later, the mayor arrived at the Tweed Courthouse, his haberdashery impeccably, if ostentatiously, coordinated: shirt, tie, pocket handkerchief, socks, one-button, double-breasted suit, and the stone in his pinky ring all complementary shades of blue. Five thousand spectators lunged to touch the sleeve of his coat, strained to see him wink beneath the cerulean brim of his fedora. Some wore shirts with beer for prosperity stitched across the front, and they hiccupped and belched in between shouts of “Atta boy, Jimmy
!” and “You tell ’em, Jimmy!” A dozen women stationed by the entrance doused him with fresh rose petals, and swooned when he disappeared behind the door.

O
ne week after the fall Billy’s condition had worsened. He could hobble on his leg but his shoulder was a throbbing knot of pain. It hurt just to turn over in bed. No one could even guess at the cause; surely any injuries sustained from his fall should have been healed by now. He worried about the theaters and got angry whenever Morton or Herbert appeared at his bedside. “Who’s minding the store, brothers?” he asked, and ordered them to get back to work.

The West Side Court, on 54th Street near Ninth Avenue, was a dour, plain block of a building, as dingy as the Tweed Courthouse was stunning. Morton and Herbert arrived for their hearing indignant and angry, tired of John Sumner’s class-based rhetoric, the accusation that the Minskys catered to perverts and degenerates indigenous to the Lower East Side, the implication that the brothers were no better themselves. They listened to a stream of government witnesses natter on senselessly. The secretary of Franklin Savings Bank insisted that he would not recommend a loan on any parcel of real estate near Minsky’s Republic. A prominent rabbi condemned “the commercialization of filth and sex depravity by Jews” (a comment that made Morton long to retort, out loud,
“Presumably by a
goy
it was okay”).

The commissioner decided he would return their license on one condition: stripteasers would have to wear brassieres—an absurd, untenable mandate, the Minskys knew, in both letter and spirit. A girl and her audience existed together alone, negotiating and compromising, both pretending to offer more than they claimed.

H
ow surreal, how ironically and cruelly odd, for Billy to be onstage like this—the performer for once, under scrutiny and awaiting judgment. Morton wondered if his brother sensed the heat of staring eyes, the rush of focused light. They kept their voices soft now, tepid and receding,
and no longer spoke words Billy refused to hear.
Paget’s disease, the doctors said, a bone malignancy for which there was no cure, but no one quite understood the how or why or when; perhaps it had lain dormant inside his body and been rattled to life by his fall. Morton studied what was left of his brother, imagined what Billy felt: the illness trudging with bleak purpose across the map of his small body, detouring to command every inch, until his body collapsed inside him and pain was all that was left.

Billy turned in his bed to look at each one of them, matching dulcet, blurry words with faces—father Louis, wife Mary, son Irving, brother Herbert—and then settling, finally, on Morton. There was an empty chair where Abe, the first and once Billy’s best brother, should have been. Billy hated empty seats more than anything else in the world; they inserted absence into the fullest experience, marred the symmetry of the flawless. For the first time in his life Billy couldn’t tell what the audience wanted, comedy or tragedy, and because he was Billy and because he was a pro, he decided to give them both.

“
Never work north of Fourteenth Street, right, Papa?” he asked, and somehow his shrunken gargle of a voice carried to all of their ears. They smiled at him, and Morton prepared himself to watch the final act. Their words grew duller around Billy, flat and blunted around the edges, compressed into one listless, monotonous drone. Quiet crept in, stealthy, taking its time, turning down the volume and unfurling the curtain, lowering it by inches, until the velvet hem teased the floor and the darkness seized his eyes.

Rose Hovick’s deterioration from cancer begins almost imperceptibly, as if her body wants to confront, stage by stage, the thing that dares to kill it. One pound at a time her figure whittles away, the tissue-paper skin of her face fuses to bone, her eyes exchange their quick, bold cunning for fear and rage—the former difficult for her to convey, the latter impossible to suppress.

Her fierce energy burns a shade dimmer, nearly extinguished, and flares again without warning. “
Who is paying for that woman out there?” she whisper-screams, eyeing her nurse. “Gypsy! I don’t need to pay anyone for living in my house, eating my food, and drinking my beer. Taking advantage because I’m down—well, I’m not that down!” That nurse quits and Gypsy finds another, an older woman who shuts off her hearing aid when Rose’s voice booms. One night, while tucking her patient into bed, the nurse hears a feeble plea: “
Closer, please.” She leans forward. Rose slams a metal water pitcher against her face with such force she dislodges the nurse’s bridgework.

Rose Thompson Hovick’s unmarked grave, Oak Hill Cemetery, Nyack, New York.
(photo credit 29.1)

Dealing with Mother is another full-time job, one that doesn’t pay. Gypsy can’t eat. Sleep is elusive. Her stomach feels like a clenched fist; it is just a matter of time before her ulcer lights a fire in her core. In lucid moments Mother toys with her and June, sending them on scavenger hunts in the backyard storage shed, knowing full well what they’ll find: a dozen radios, eight television sets, boxes of electric blankets, shopping bags overflowing with watches, rings, underwear, fur coats—artifacts from a lifetime spent bilking them both. Rose Hovick is now sixty-two, but for Gypsy the whole ordeal is like having another child, and ten-year-old Erik causes trouble enough.
He’s been stealing money from her purse since he turned five, $25 here and there, running up charges in neighborhood stores. It’s been sixteen years since Gypsy started communicating with Mother through a lawyer—off and on, anyway—and she has done her best to keep Rose away from Erik, from seeping into him. She succeeded for a long time, but Mother found her ways, as she always did, like the afternoon she appeared at the front door of the house on 63rd Street.

Erik was five at the time, a precocious little boy wearing short pants and cowboy boots, and it was his job to greet company. He looked up to see an unfamiliar woman in a ruffled dress, with dark, curly hair sheared close to her head. She had a clown’s smile, overbright and vaguely menacing, wide enough to show every perfect white tooth. She bent down to his level.

“
Is your mother home?” she asked.

“Whom shall I say is calling?”

“Tell her it’s her mother.”

Erik knew the house rule: if you don’t know a visitor, ask her to wait outside. But this was an exception, Erik thought, his mother’s mother, and he swung open the door. The woman stepped inside, and Erik scuttled up the stairs to find Gypsy.

“Your mother’s downstairs,” he said, “and would like to see you.”

Gypsy looked up from her work. She was preparing for her Royal
American Show, the largest traveling carnival of the day, a grueling but lucrative thirty-nine weeks. The company provided the tent and the carneys, she provided the entertainment, and her husband, Julio, had designed a “peep show”—a secondary act titled “What Are Your Dreams?” featuring nearly naked women posing in still-life tableaus—an homage, with Freudian underpinnings, to the
Ziegfeld Follies
and Minsky’s interpretation thereof.

“Did you let her in the house?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She should handle it, she knew, but she didn’t have the time. Besides, Erik had to learn to deal with people like Mother if he were going to rule the world.

“For god’s sake,” Gypsy said, and sighed. “Hurry up and make sure she hasn’t clipped the Picasso.”

He ran downstairs and found his grandmother in the foyer.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but my mother’s very busy right now and she can’t see you.”

He waited for her to leave, but instead she sat down on the sofa and patted the spot next to her.

“Sit down and talk to me,” she said. “You must be Erik.”

He sat and she leaned in closer, whispered into his ear.

“I bet you like guns, don’t you?”

She opened her purse and pulled out a Colt .45. She placed the gun in his hands, so heavy he could barely lift it. It took all his strength to climb back upstairs to show his mother his prize, only to have her confiscate it immediately. That particular gun hadn’t killed anyone in their past, but Gypsy understood the meaning behind the gesture, felt the panic of that time lodge deeper inside her memory. Mother loved to remind her of what they once had been, both alone and together.

Now, five years later, Gypsy can’t believe their sick, sweet game is nearing its final play. She admits Rose to a place called Tender Elms, paying for ten days in advance. “
So very elegant,” Gypsy notes in her diary. “Expensive but wonderful.” She dares to think the matter settled, but two weeks later, after dinner at June’s house, she learns Mother went on a rampage and is no longer welcome at Tender Elms. It takes two full days to find another home that will accept her. “
I hope this is
for the good of all concerned,” Gypsy writes, “but I know there is more to come.”

And so there is. One day the phone rings and Erik picks up,
answering “Miss Lee’s residence,” just as he’s been taught. “Who may I say is calling?”

He listens.

“It’s your mother’s nurse,” Erik calls up the stairs to Gypsy.

“I can’t be bothered,” Gypsy answers.

“My mother is busy right now,” Erik reports.

“Tell her her mother is dying.”

Erik relays the message.

“My mother is
always
dying,” Gypsy says.

“Tell her it’s real this time,” the nurse replies, and Erik does.

The remainder of Gypsy’s 1953 diary is sparse and quotidian—hairdresser appointments, bill tallies for food and cigarettes, an interview for
American Weekly
—and then the notations stop altogether, until the last week of the first month of the new year. The entry for January 28 reads, simply, “
Mother died at 6:30.”

She does not write what came before, how Mother got her final wish, the one they’d denied her for years: the three of them together again in one room, close as they could be. June stands at the window. Outside a light snow falls, frost speckling the glass, the only movement among them for a long time. Gypsy sits at the foot of Mother’s bed, watching her breathe, the timid sinking and swelling of her chest. She has braced herself for this, practiced her stance and stoic face, her posture of defense. The violet eyes flip open, and Mother pulls herself up on her elbows, grunting with the effort, veins twitching, tiny exposed wires beneath translucent skin. She shimmies toward the end of the bed, toward Gypsy, her breath now coming in dry rasps. “
I know about you,” she says, a catch between the words, making each stand on its own. “Greedy, selfish! You want me to die. I’m the only one who knows all about you.”