American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (43 page)

June had finally gotten her break.

Sitting at the table, sipping tea, they remembered the highlights they had
filched from June’s career. Child prodigy on the Orpheum Circuit, earning $1,500 at just seven years of age. Sought in Hollywood by everyone from Mary Pickford to Charlie Chaplin.

When June arrived, Gypsy was bent over a web of golden thread, her knitting needles clicking softly. Mother sat at the head of the table. She
cleared her throat, signaling that this was business. “
We know you are on dinner break, dear, so I’ll be quick,” she said. “You know, dear, no one ever expected this freak reappearance of yours. I made this big success for your sister, and of course we needed interesting things for her background—the interviews and all of that—she had to have someone to be, so it was the most natural thing in the world. We used the Baby, then the child-star vaudeville background. It’s been very successful. That’s what everybody believes, now, so you can see it’s too late to try to take any of the stories back, dear.”

Gypsy could feel June’s eyes on her, but she kept her head down, focusing on the needles. She was thrilled for June, she really was; her sister deserved her own break from the past. But some of the history had been Gypsy’s for so long there was no easy way to return it. June didn’t need those stories to help her; she could sing and dance and act. It was only fair. And Gypsy was, after all, the original Ellen June.

“
You mean,” June said, “I can’t ever say I was—I am—”

“We never said you weren’t there, too, June,” Rose explained. “Only, if you are going to actually be back in show business with us, dear, you must find someone else to be. Just find a good story and stick with it.… We’ll get together, and maybe some part that hasn’t been used can be twisted back for you.”

They were all at the elevator now. Gypsy propped the door open with her foot. She dropped the golden cap on June’s head, the head Mother claimed was once small enough to fit into a teacup. The thread matched her hair color precisely. “There,” Gypsy said, satisfied, and the elevator slowly lowered June out of sight. Gypsy felt Rose at her back, the swipe of her breath, the coolness of her skin. At moments like this she remembered. She had never loved anyone like she loved her mother, until Gypsy Rose Lee was born.

Herbert had always preferred to let Billy speak for him, and now, in his brother’s overbearing absence, he found it difficult to speak at all. Sitting shiva at Billy’s home in Brooklyn, he tried to execute the mechanics of forming words—gathering a gust of breath, pursing his lips—only to have the effort sputter and die, an engine that forgot how to start. Morton became a vortex of activity, as if by moving faster than his grief he could somehow elude it, this cold, still loss of “the biggest influence in my life.” He called the stage managers at every Minsky theater, ordered rehearsals to proceed as scheduled, informed all of New York City that it had heard the last from one of its most vibrant citizens. “
Billy was dead,” Morton wrote. “The burlesque business, the theater, all the wise guys up and down Broadway, the strippers, the comics, the straight men, the stagehands, all knew something had gone out of their lives.”

The family was still sitting shiva when he got a call from the stage manager at the Republic.

“
I don’t know how to tell you this, Mr. Morton,” he said, “but I don’t
think we can work this deal without a Minsky. Things just aren’t going right.”

Morton sighed. With raised eyebrows he glanced at Herbert, who nodded. It was Billy’s last show, and they owed him at least this.

“Okay,” Morton said. “Call a full-cast rehearsal after the show on Monday night. We’ll work until we get it right. I’ll pay time and a half if I have to.”

M
orton crammed work into every moment of his life. When not overseeing rehearsals he tended to minutiae at the Republic. As soon as he arrived at 10:30
A.M.
, he locked himself in his office, reviewed the mail, checked in with one of Billy’s press agents (a man with the improbable name of Georgia Alabama Florida) to discuss the placement and content of ads. He made phone calls about structural changes, prop deliveries, and potential legal problems from John Sumner and his allies. In late afternoon, after the leading Minsky Rosebud conducted her preliminary interview, Morton summoned Herbert and held auditions, watching the girls line up on the stage. With a wave of his hand, the dance director signaled the girls to raise their skirts waist high, and the brothers leaned in for leg inspection. They kept their assessments impersonal and terse, just as Billy had taught them: the words “
You’re acceptable” or “You’re not” sufficed. Agents from across the Midwest, especially Chicago, sent photographs and reviews, hoping to make one of their clients the next star stripteaser at Minsky’s Republic, and Morton sifted through them all.

Home at 5
P.M
. for dinner and back to the Republic by 7:30. He watched the curtain rise, scanned the audience for famous faces, and invited any attending celebrity to have a drink with him during intermission; in these waning days of Prohibition, people still appreciated a glass or two of superior whiskey. At least three times a week, Morton noticed, Milton Berle slipped into the audience with a pencil and pad, laughing to himself, scribbling down the best sketches and jokes. The brothers didn’t mind. Berle was a solo stand-up comedian, not a burlesque star. And besides, every worthwhile Minsky joke had already
been stolen at least once. As Abe always said, “
Not one new burlesque skit has been written in the last twenty years.”

Billy’s death had yanked Abe back into their lives. Their private family entanglement became suddenly and rudely public, and all of their eldest brother’s furtive plans came tumbling to light. Just one month after Billy was buried, Abe called a press conference to announce that he was splitting, officially, from his family.

It was about time he branched out on his own, Abe said; Billy had held him back all those years, distorting the original Minsky vision.
He planned his own theater, operated for and by himself. Minsky’s Gaiety at 46th and Broadway would compete with both the Republic and the Central. Abe’s comedians would be funnier; his decor, classier; his stripteasers, prettier and more inventive. Furthermore, after the Gaiety got rolling, Abe planned a theater called the New Gotham in Harlem, just up the street from Minsky’s Apollo. “
I go my own way,” Abe said, “and Morton and Herb can do as they please.”

Morton considered these words and all of the messy, complicated history laced through them. He tried to align his thinking with Billy’s, to conjure up his brother’s most likely response: one that would downplay Abe’s ambitions without dismissing them outright, and make clear that only Billy’s theaters offered the authentic Minsky experience (the definition of which, Morton was beginning to realize, was both subjective and malleable). After consulting with Herbert, Morton called his own friends in the press.

“
He thinks he can fill a burlesque house with smart-aleck stuff like George S. Kaufman,” Morton said. “It doesn’t pay to shoot above their heads. Abe will find that out.” He thought for a moment and then added a line he knew would scrape at Abe’s considerable ego, a line that technically wasn’t true: “We’re the originals.”

Already Morton could sense how this “
battle of burlesque,” as the press called it, would evolve. His eldest brother would learn soon enough that Depression-era audiences preferred the obvious over the subtle, cooch over class—the most efficient tools to blunt the edges of their endless, jagged days. When Abe opened the Gaiety and the New Gotham, Morton and Herbert would encourage their girls to shake faster and strip further than they had ever previously dared. It was no
longer just a matter of validating Billy’s legacy, but of creating and defining their own.

A daring stance, the brothers knew, especially with their old friend Jimmy Walker no longer in City Hall, let alone among the audience at their theaters. Mayor La Guardia was busy overturning time-honored traditions and codes, flinging unmasked contempt at the way things had always been done. “
His puritanical streak, that sense of moral outrage,” said one observer, “was so highly developed that he could make no distinction between a truly original theatrical genre, only one part of which featured the unadorned female breast, and ordinary prostitution.” The Minskys kept close watch on La Guardia’s arrests of underworld kingpins, his proclamations against indecent entertainment, and, most disconcerting, his installation of new commissioners, all of whom were regarded as experts in their particular fields (itself a significant change from municipal politics as usual) and one of whom, Paul Moss, would soon turn his attention to a certain burlesque house in Times Square.

H
onoring Billy’s tradition, the brothers made frequent trips to theaters in neighboring states, discovering,
at the Trocadero in Philadelphia, a stripteaser named Margie Hart. An odd amalgamation of hot and demure, Margie kept a Bible tucked under her arm while she pranced across the stage, stopping occasionally to brandish the Good Book and shout, “
If I shake it’s for my mother’s sake!” (a literal defense, as it turned out; once finding success in New York, she imported her entire family from rural Missouri and ensconced them in a sprawling apartment on the Upper West Side). In another act, the one that would make her famous, Margie never took anything off at all.

Wearing a “trick” breakaway dress made of narrow strips of silk, she disturbed the panels with casual flicks of her fingers, exposing a smooth expanse of thigh and waist, and, quite possibly, in the words of Morton Minsky, “
that promised land the audience was yearning to see.” Yet one couldn’t be certain: was she wholly naked, without even the slightest G-string for modest accompaniment? Or was her G-string a trick worthy
of Houdini—a Chicago G-string, they called it, made of monkey fur or wool, identical, for all intents and purposes, to a strip of pubic hair?

Even the Minskys were flummoxed, but they never asked Margie the truth. The less they knew, the more difficult it would be for John Sumner or the new puritans in City Hall to harass them. The brothers offered Margie $750 a week to headline the Republic, and the same New Yorkers who hoped to catch one of Gypsy’s stray pins debated the true extent of Margie’s revelations.

Unlike Gypsy, Margie Hart never developed a taste for booze and smoked only nicotine-free cigarettes, but she, too, understood the value of publicity. She hired her own press agent, who promptly informed Margie’s admirers that she was a sweet, pure country girl at heart, and instead of perfumes and furs she preferred cultivators and pigs. Margie received her desired gifts, but other stunts were less successful. A “strip-duel” challenge with swimmer Eleanor Holm (whom Margie accused of padding her bathing suit) was politely declined, and her attempts to join Gypsy in the ranks of the literati proved frustrating and fruitless. Despite her agent’s gentle prodding, she couldn’t begin to get through Schopenhauer, and Bryn Mawr College saw no reason to establish her proposed “
Margie Hart Scholarship for an Ambitious Burlesque Girl.” Abandoning her highbrow aspirations altogether, Margie remained friendly with Gypsy but, given the chance, slyly critiqued her style.

“
Gypsy Rose Lee’s act is too subtle,” she said. “You have to bang them in the eye in burlesque.”