American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (40 page)

One mottled leg slides from the mattress, hangs limply over the side. Her nightgown gapes open. Her old suede grouch bag, still strung around her waist after all these years, now dangles next to a colostomy bag. The sight brings to mind Gypsy’s favorite piece of family lore, the
great-great-grandmother and her sash of “horsemeat,” waiting for everyone around her to die. Rose clutches at the money bag and teeters, losing her balance.

“
You’ll fall,” Gypsy says and reaches to steady her.

“No! You can’t have anything back! Just because I’m letting go—it’s mine! My house, my jewelry …” Her body sways from the force of her voice. Gypsy tries to lower her gently, as if putting her down for a nap. Rose grips her daughter’s forearm and kicks beneath her, torso writhing, spittle collecting in the corners of her mouth. There is a sudden shift in power, and Rose twists and heaves herself upward. Gypsy lets her body wilt, allows her mother to take the lead. Gypsy lies on her back now, the headboard knocking hard against the curve of her skull, swatches of her hair captured in Rose’s fists. For the first time she turns toward June, who has been watching, wordlessly and utterly still. Now June rushes at her.

“No,” Gypsy says, and means it. “Don’t. No.”

June had her showdown with Mother twenty-five years ago. It is Gypsy’s turn now, at long last.

For several moments mother and daughter lie together, perfectly aligned, symmetrical, limbs twining, eye to eye, chest against chest, breath blowing hot on skin, addressing each other in a language only they understand. She owes Mother one last moment like this, when no one else clamors for attention or even exists, when the person Gypsy loved first—unconditionally, without knowing the consequences—is the one she still loves best. She damaged this woman back when she was young, when the original Ellen June, weighing in at twelve pounds but without an ounce of talent, left her body and the one became two. That was forty-three years ago, and now it is Mother’s turn as much as it is hers.

When Rose speaks this time, her cadence is steady, a soft, unbroken moan.

“
You’ll never forget,” she says, “how I’m holding you right this minute, Louise, holding you as strongly as I can, wishing with all my heart I could take you all the way with me—all the way down!”

Gypsy doesn’t move. She waits, and waits, until the bony fingers uncoil from her hair and the breath stops tickling her cheek, until their
bodies separate for the very last time. The violet eyes close again, stripping Mother’s face of any color or life. She seems to relax, then, sinking into herself, the foundation of an old house settling. Another stretch of quiet, and Rose Hovick hisses the last words Gypsy will hear her say:

“
This isn’t the end. Wherever you go, as long as either of you lives, I’ll be right there.… So go on, Louise, tell all your classy friends how funny I was, how much smarter you were than me. When you get your own private kick in the ass, just remember: it’s a present from me to you.”

Gypsy and one of Rose’s neighbors are the only ones to attend her funeral Mass, held at St. Ann’s Catholic Church in Nyack, New York. After the service, Gypsy tucks a few dollars into the collection box and slips quietly out the door. Neither she nor June attends the burial at Oak Hill Cemetery, where Rose is laid to rest
without any marker bearing her name.

We take great pride in presenting the star of our show, the one and only Miss Gypsy … Rose … Lee!

The brazen swing of the spotlight rendered the audience unseen, but she could picture their faces—so many faces!—shining like tangles of jewelry. How hard she’d worked to collect them: publishing mogul Condé Nast, playwright George S. Kaufman, the bisexual bon vivant Tallulah Bankhead. Writers and critics and cultural arbiters gleamed from every corner of the Irving Place Theatre: William Saroyan and Edmund Wilson, Carl Van Doren and Carl Van Vechten (the latter of whom once derided burlesque audiences as “
childishly leering”), Leonard Lyons and Brooks Atkinson, H. L. Mencken (who would coin the word “ecdysiast” in her honor) and George Jean Nathan (who called
her a “
kimonophobe”), and a representative from
The New Yorker
, who admitted he “
went for Miss Lee, so to speak.” Over there sat Jean Cocteau, visiting from Paris, who took one look at Gypsy and murmured, “How vital
!” and the pseudonymous Squimpfenhuppels, a New York society couple whose blood, according to one insider, was “
three stains bluer than a Duke Ellington rhythm.” All Gypsy’s personal baubles to flaunt and to flash, and she never felt so pretty as when they were covering her.

Wearing a chartreuse costume adorned with flittered leaves, she swanned languidly across the stage, as though on her way to see
La Traviata
at the Met. In one hand she held a ripe apple aloft, and the orchestra began the sweet soft strains of her song. She talk-sang her words, pinning their ends between her lips,
a humming effect she had learned from her prestigious new friends:

Gypsy recognized the pattern she’d come to establish, at once buoyant and hopeless: exchanging every certain triumph for an unobtainable dream.

She quit the Republic just before her original benefactor, Billy Minsky, died unexpectedly. He’d been furious, especially after all he’d done, discovering and rescuing her from those backwoods burlesque venues, molding her into an American icon. He’d predicted she’d return to Minsky’s—for the money, if not the glory—and he knew that, despite himself, he’d happily take her back.

She left for her old gangster benefactor, Waxey Gordon, who’d secured her a spot in a Florenz Ziegfeld show called
Laid in Mexico
. Finally, here was her chance to join a Ziegfeld show—a real, legitimate Broadway show—but
Laid in Mexico
was hardly the
Follies
. The Depression had broken the producer, both financially and literally; Ziegfeld was
deathly ill from pneumonia and resigned to borrowing money from Waxey and other gangsters. “
Don’t ask questions,” Waxey ordered Gypsy. “Just do as you’re told.”

Rose hoped they would change the title of
Laid in Mexico
, which sounded too “Minskyish,” and Ziegfeld coincidentally obliged.
Hot-Cha!
was a full-scale musical production, with Ziegfeld’s customary barbaric bombast and splendor. When the choreographer asked for her name, Gypsy hesitated, and then confessed, “Rose Louise.”

“
The moment I said it I was sorry,” Gypsy admitted. “He knew who I was, and he’d think I was ashamed of my burlesque name. I wanted to take it back but I didn’t. I
was
ashamed and the realization made it worse.” She was given the role of “Girl in Compartment,” a weekly salary of $60—$840 less than at Minsky’s Republic—and no solo introduction as Gypsy Rose Lee.

Hot-Cha!
closed after only twelve weeks, a flop blamed on the “
depressing times.” She wasted weeks, in her mother’s words, scouring Broadway for another role before she headed back to the money at Minsky’s. Herbert and Morton were now in charge of the Republic. Like Billy, the younger Minsky brothers hadn’t been too happy when she left, but they let her make her case to rejoin the fold. What, they asked, made her so popular among the Minsky audience? Why was she considered the best stripteaser in the business?

“
I don’t know myself what it is,” she replied. “I don’t feel any spark of genius
here.
” She splayed her hands over her breasts. Morton laughed. Okay, okay—she could have her old job back. “Let’s see now,” he said. “
You were getting $60 up with those big shots; we’ll give you $90.” She had no choice but to take it, even though it was a 93 percent pay cut from her original Minsky salary.

S
he glided back toward the wings of the stage, pouting now, the spotlight’s thin finger grazing her face:

Soon after Gypsy’s return to the Republic she lost the Rego Park house. All of her furniture was repossessed save for Waxey’s dining room set, which Rose shipped to a large, ramshackle apartment on West End Avenue, leased under Aunt Belle’s name. A taxi arrived at midnight, and Rose quickly tied to the roof all the relics of their past: the cow head, tent, dancing dolls, gilded guns. Gypsy debated asking Waxey Gordon for a loan, but, in an unfortunate bit of timing, the FBI declared the bootlegger “Public Enemy Number One” and arrested him on charges of tax evasion.

Waxey sent a letter: could she do her old friend a favor, and come visit him at Northeastern Penitentiary? It would so impress his fellow inmates. She agreed, but how she dreaded the slow walk to his table in the visiting room, the amplified whistles inside those thin tight walls, the leers that clawed at her back. It was a runway leading to a place out of her control, with no reward at the end. After two visits, she decided she would never go back. “
It made me uncomfortable,” she said, “being on display that way.”

The Minskys finally relented and restored her old salary, but once again she left burlesque—this time for a role in
Melody
, the new production by George White, of
Scandals
fame. Another drastic pay cut, to just $100 per week. “
I guess I wasn’t used to so much money,” she said of burlesque, “because the more I got the more ambitious I became to land on Broadway.” She had just six lines but padded her part by exclaiming “Ouch!” when her bustle caught in the door. Her salary dropped to $50 during the national bank moratorium, and
when the show closed in April 1933, her funds were once again depleted.

Down the circular staircase now, slowly, long legs taking their time, her shoes precisely matching her skin—all the better to camouflage her large feet. Her eyes coasted to a bald man in the second row, and she strolled toward him, offering the apple, letting his imagination fill the pauses in her refrain.

Of course the Minskys welcomed her back, their Prodigal Strippeuse. They dubbed her the “Queen of Women” and booked her solid at three of their theaters: the Republic, Billy Minsky’s Brooklyn, and the new Park Theatre in Boston, where the overarching philosophy was described as
“burlesque moderne.” She accompanied Herbert and Morton to a celebratory luncheon at the Hotel Touraine and posed for pictures, the brothers’ arms linked around her back. The Minskys vowed to provide work for a “sizable group” of Boston’s unemployed while honoring the city’s puritanical roots; their show would attract the “
limousine trade” and be fit for “your wife, sweetheart, or aunt from Dubuque.”
Gypsy would even wear a rhinestone in her navel.

Boston’s censor nevertheless denounced such Minsky productions as
Wander Over from Back Bay
and
Irma Fish from Brookline
, but audiences were enthralled, especially by Gypsy Rose Lee. Every evening, before she strolled onto the stage, she instructed the stage manager to shush the crowd. It always obeyed. She repaid the Minsky brothers for their loyalty, defending them in the press. “
Burlesque pays well,” she reasoned. “I’d rather work for good dough in burlesque than sit around waiting for something to come up … and the dears who reveal their peeled forms at Minsky’s are never within reach of the audience as they are in popular Broadway floor shows, where the drunks paw you, and you don’t have to sit with customers who get gay.”

T
his was the part of her Eve routine that the men, bald or hirsute, waited for—the slinky, torturously slow strut, the apple balanced in the elegant curve of her palm, the fruit rolling forward along her fingertips, stopped by a pair of puckered lips. The first man took a bite and then Gypsy backed away, scanning the crowd. Who was worthy of the second, the third, the bite that would strip it to its core?

D
espite her speech in Boston, Gypsy once again left burlesque, partly because her prescient, pragmatic, ever-resourceful mind told her burlesque might not always be there to take her back. After Mayor Jimmy Walker resigned from City Hall, his old nemesis—and complete political antithesis—took over in 1934. Fiorello La Guardia would not roll dice with the neighborhood boys, or take appointments at an underworld
nightclub in Central Park, or shake hands and propose toasts at Minsky’s Republic on opening nights. Instead he was busy turning New York inside out, ordering, within one minute of his official swearing-in, the arrest of gangster Lucky Luciano, followed up by a threat to the entire police department to “
Drive out the racketeers or get out yourselves” and the violent, sledgehammer destruction of hundreds of confiscated slot machines.

Which was all well and good for those who had tired of the old regime—journalist Heywood Broun, for one, declared the city “
stands in need of scathing sunlight, fresh air and a fine and rousing wind to cleanse its lungs and vitals”—but there were indications that La Guardia’s “rousing wind” would be more akin to a tornado, that he wouldn’t reform the city’s character so much as raze it completely. From what Gypsy knew of him, he sounded a lot like Mother—volatile and vicious (once telling an underling, “
You let them shit all over you and pee all over you and you like it so much you lick it up”); obstinate and unyielding; and strangely, anachronistically prudish, insisting, for instance, that his secretary stay in hotels where residents had a midnight curfew.