American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (46 page)

Even worse, her life back east kept intruding. Only her mother’s hand could reach three thousand miles to clench her shoulder, only her mother’s voice could burrow so deeply in her mind, an ear worm with an ominous bass line. Since Gypsy sent Rose back to New York she’d been waiting—for what, exactly, she wasn’t sure—but when she received a peculiar letter from one of Mother’s boarders, she knew that she should ready herself, that Rose wasn’t content unless she laid claim to a piece of all her days.

The letter began oddly, addressing her as “
My dear Miss Hovick” and
alluding to reports Gypsy might have received concerning the girl’s character—“detrimental” reports, replete with “false statements.” The girl was anxious to clear her name, which was Genevieve Augustin, “Jean” or “Ginny” for short, and she insisted she had no “bad habits” and only two important interests at Witchwood Manor: assisting Rose Thompson Hovick in any way she might be of use to her (a task she rather enjoyed) and painting. The farm was everything an aspiring artist could want: she found the atmosphere ideal and Gypsy’s family “very wholesome.” Next week she planned to begin work on a life-size portrait of Rose—what did Gypsy think her mother should wear? Rose was leaning toward slacks and a simple colored smock, but Ginny was angling for something more conservative, more dignified. Next she’d paint Big Lady and Aunt Belle, who, as Gypsy surely knew, were at Witchwood Manor on an extended visit. She could see Big Lady “being done in the Monet style,” while Belle lent herself to a Picasso version. “Miss Louise,” the letter concluded, “I want you to know that I enjoy being here, and I love doing anything I can to make life more comfortable for your mother and your family, and I hope to continue doing so as long as I can be of assistance to any one of them.”

And now Ginny Augustin was dead.

T
he reports were nebulous, but repeated certain details until they took on the sheen of truth. Ginny Augustin was
a twenty-nine-year-old woman from Kenosha, Wisconsin, who had moved to Chicago and then to New York City. She was slim and pretty, with straight blond hair that swept her neck and pouty rosebud lips. She taught art classes at the Textile High School in Manhattan and displayed her work at the Municipal Art Gallery on West 53rd Street, watercolors that were deemed “
a credible though not at all momentous showing.” She had a history of depression and suicide attempts, most recently slashing her wrists with a razor blade. When she heard about the farm named Witchwood Manor up in Highland Mills, she knew she had to live there. She arrived and painted and tended to Rose and her family for months, without incident.

On the afternoon of Tuesday, June 1, 1937, Ginny Augustin went hiking in the woods around the property. Upon her return, she locked herself in her bedroom.
She wore a white, short-sleeved blouse, black shorts, and thick cotton socks. Somehow she managed to point a rifle at her temple and pull the trigger. She landed on her back, her right leg folded under her in a limp, rag-doll pose. Blood soaked the carpet and spread as far as the door, but not one splatter marred the walls. She left no note. The body was discovered by Rose Thompson Hovick, and
the coroner pronounced the death a suicide.
Gypsy Rose Lee, former striptease artist, known as Louise Hovick in motion pictures, was not present at the cottage at the time of the shooting.

Maybe she was, and maybe she wasn’t. Her old Minsky comrade
Georgia Sothern would swear Gypsy had been there, as would a deputy sheriff named
E. Sergio. Either way, she had to get involved. Mother and daughter, keepers of each other’s secrets, hoarders of a devastating currency they couldn’t afford to trade. Gypsy had never said a word about certain incidents from their vaudeville days—the unfortunate cow that wasn’t really a cow at all, the hotel manager who “fell” from a window—and neither would she say anything about Ginny Augustin. The rumors would linger past Gypsy’s lifetime, rumors she never confirmed or denied: there was a party attended by Rose’s six boarders, numerous neighborhood men, assorted friends, and Gypsy.
Ginny Augustin made a pass at Gypsy, which infuriated Rose; she did not want to compete for attention or affection with either one for either one.

Rose followed Ginny into her bedroom and shot her, once, in the head. She burned the girl’s diary, full of what she called “crazy lies” that could hurt Gypsy’s Hollywood career, and concocted her story.

“
I didn’t do a thing,” Rose confided to June, and then contradicted the coroner’s report of a shot through the temple. “She took the shotgun out of my hand, put the nozzle in her mouth, stepped on the trigger, and pow! I didn’t actually offer the gun, don’t you see? I just had it, that’s all … she was deceitful and—and bad. With your sister trying so hard to be a Hollywood star, and that fool girl blowing the whole top of her head off.… I’ve never been able to stomach a poor loser. I never told her she was moving in with me. Why would I clutter up my life with a wild tramp like that? I’m tired of getting into other people’s
muckups, just because I know what loneliness is.… Abandoned, ignored. Sometimes I think I’d be better off dead, too. I told her that, I did. I said, ‘Why not just check out if you’re that unhappy?’ And there was the gun, and—well, I think she knew what she was doing.”

Rose sat back and trusted the incident would be covered up because of Gypsy, and it was. Sheriff Sergio took charge of quieting things down. Ginny Augustin’s mother, unconvinced that her daughter committed suicide, demanded an investigation. Members of a grand jury descended upon Witchwood Manor. They walked the grounds, toured the little theater room decorated with cutouts of Gypsy, saw the studio where Ginny painted portraits of Rose and Aunt Belle and Big Lady, sat on the bed where the girl got her final night’s sleep. Four days later, they issued a report that the Orange County district attorney deemed “
tantamount to refusal to indict.”

The clamor subsided, Ginny Augustin was forgotten, but the aftershocks rumbled in Gypsy’s ears. Mother was on the other side of the country, but Gypsy could sense the ominous jumble of her thoughts, anticipate her growing cache of trouble and threats.

S
he craved success so fiercely that she betrayed herself again: 20th Century–Fox suggested she marry a nice, ordinary man, a civilian, just to make her “
more like everyone else.” His name was Arnold “Bob” Mizzy. He was a dental supply manufacturer from New York and, at age twenty-five, just one year younger than she. He was also a friend of Eddy, who still darted in and out of her life;
when the three of them were out together Bob pretended to be her date. Gypsy had dated Bob occasionally when Eddy was off with his wife and even developed a genuine affection for him, despite the fact that he was not at all her type.

Bob came from a wealthy family, had attended elite schools and summer camps, spoke proper English, possessed a full head of hair and no rough edges. She liked his “intriguing frown” and regarded his normal childhood upbringing with a mixture of wonder and skepticism, as if it were some ancient artifact with dubious authenticity. “
Think, June,”
she mused to her sister, “the same two parents all along the line. Mother, father.” She reconnected with her own father, Daddy Jack Hovick, still living in Los Angeles and with his second family. He wrote her letters, calling Gypsy his “
sweet lovely datter.” Gypsy’s stepbrother, Jack, and stepmother, Elizabeth, wrote, too, reminding her of the conventional civilian family she’d never known. “
I remember when I was pregnant with Jack [your father] hoped it would be a girl,” she wrote. “He did miss you and June so very much.… It is a sad thing when boys and girls have to be deprived of their dads.”

The ceremony was scheduled for Friday the thirteenth of August, 1937, which Gypsy told the press was her lucky day. “
I wanted to be married on the high seas,” she said, and threw in a fib for the sake of publicity: “My father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all married there … our name is a contraction of ‘Ho, Viking!’ But to keep all the records straight, we’ll be married again—on land this time.” On their first wedding night, after the water taxi pulled back to shore, Gypsy returned to her beachfront home in Santa Monica and Bob to his Hollywood hotel room,
both of them alone.

Darryl Zanuck doubted the legality of the maritime marriage and ordered another wedding. On August 17, a Tuesday afternoon, Gypsy and Bob wed again, saying their vows before a justice of the peace on Santa Ana land.

Rose promised to meet the newlyweds at the Highland Mills cottage, along with a photographer from
Life
magazine. Two months had passed since the Ginny Augustin tragedy, and Gypsy and Rose maintained a cautious, deliberate peace, as if a sudden move by either might ruin both of them at once. Their letters were light and hazy, their endearments frequent but rote. Rose telegrammed when she couldn’t make either of Gypsy’s weddings to Bob—“
Darling cant make trip call me at twelve heartsick love=Mommy”—and cracked jokes about the union, calling the newlyweds “Mr. and Mrs. Ha Ha High Tide.”

But another shift began between Gypsy and Rose, deeper than any in the past, unfolding slowly and imperceptibly, a fever that cooled by fractions of degrees. Maybe it was prompted by a letter from June, who knew more than she cared to about her sister and mother’s poisonous bond, about the suspicious deaths and questionable characters floating
into and out of their world, about how vulnerable Gypsy became when a crack surfaced in her creation.

“Colossol [sic] Stupidity,” June called her sister by way of greeting,

Neither June nor Gypsy specified what that “appetite” was for.

Gypsy kept the letter, tucking it away along with her scrapbooks of press clippings, but she saw herself, perhaps for the first time, through June’s eyes. There were disgust and outrage on those pages, yes, but also concern and, of all things,
disappointment
. It was that sentiment that bothered Gypsy most, this utter reversal of roles—the unbright, naïve Baby casting haughty judgment on the maddeningly self-assured Duchess—and the subtext, as obvious as it was undeniable: it was time once again to distance herself from Mother, or risk becoming her.

After a cross-country honeymoon drive, and after a brief stay at Witchwood Manor (during which Gypsy baked biscuits for Bob and treated her status as newlywed like a movie role, telling the press, “
A gal has to know something besides wearing a jewel studded G-string if
she’s going to hold her husband”), she and Bob headed back to Hollywood, leaving Mother behind.

From then on, when Gypsy turned her attention back to Rose her eyes were sharply focused, her ears attuned to nonsense passed off as fact. For the first time the three-thousand-mile distance began to do its job, and far away, on the east side of that divide, Rose could feel her grip slipping, her hold weakening, finger by clenched finger. She grasped and felt nothing, shouted and heard no response.

At last, in spring 1938, Gypsy ordered Rose and her lesbian harem to leave Witchwood Manor but
continued an allowance that paid for a rental—for Mother only—two miles up the road. To Rose this meant war, and her mind began preparing for battle, tallying slights both recent and old. Her daughter had a habit of claiming and denying ownership at whim, whichever reaction was convenient in the moment, thinking always of how it would serve her image and never of the truth. How dare Gypsy complain when Rose went back to Witchwood Manor to collect certain items: antiques, books, dogs, even Waxey Gordon’s thirty-piece dining room set. Those were Rose’s things, by God, and it was time Gypsy admitted it.