American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (5 page)

Rivington Street on the Lower East Side, circa 1912.
(photo credit 3.1)

Beneath the ceaseless clamor of the Lower East Side,
the most crowded neighborhood in the world, Billy Minsky heard the cock of the gun. The silver finger quaked and lowered, pointed directly at his forehead. Billy dropped to the pavement.

I
f Billy were a spiritual man—as his father, the son of a rabbi, wished—he might have taken that moment to reflect on how he’d made it this long, this far. He spent all of his twenty-three years operating at only one speed and in one direction, furious and forward, convinced that a collision could only improve the ride. As a child he played in the alleyways of the Lower East Side, outrunning his brothers and outwitting his friends. He learned the nuances and advantages of pitting people, and even entire blocks, against one another: Rivington Street hated Allen, Allen scoffed at Delancey, Delancey considered Forsyth a band of savages, and they all looked down on Uptown—except for Billy.

A chronic fugitive, he skipped school, fled to the Houston Street station (always dodging the attendant), and took the El to 42nd Street, watching the neighborhoods shift, the East Side’s murky scrim yielding to Broadway’s gaudy brilliance. He took frequent trips to the grand old mansions along Fifth Avenue. Not his style, he decided, though he certainly appreciated the money required to live there. When the time came for his bar mitzvah, he addressed his beaming relatives with eloquence beyond his years.

“
As I enter a new phase of my life,” he said, “the New World I live in enters a new phase too, its twentieth century.… I will take from the new century what is good, and just, and right.… I will give to the new century what is mine to give, my gifts from the past, the gift from my parents, from all my people since the days of Abraham. I will take and I will give.”

He meant the last words literally, having cribbed his entire speech from a book he’d found in the public library titled
Anthology of Orations for All Occasions
, and then given to it his singular flair for showmanship. His mother wept, convinced that her unruly boy—“such a trouble,” she
called him—had finally come around, and his father, though he’d be loath to admit it, knew all too well which parent was responsible for Billy’s dramatic gifts. A few years later, the boy dropped out of high school. It didn’t matter, he insisted, since he’d earned something more useful than a GED—a GE, his “
gutter education.”

He had already grown into his
adult height of barely five feet four, a short, squat doorstop of a man, and gave the impression of being too big for himself. He approached work with the same relentless energy he’d applied to everything else, tending to the jumble of schemes in his head careening along like overloaded freight cars, threatening to veer off track, always one more charging around the bend. A Wall Street firm hired him as a messenger boy, the New York Stock Exchange let him answer telephones, and Joseph Pulitzer’s
New York World
decided he’d make a fine journalist.

He did. He was the only reporter who talked his way into the office of J. P. Morgan, Sr., hoping to get the financier’s opinion on President Theodore Roosevelt’s decision to remove “
In God We Trust” from American currency. For hours Billy sat in a leather chair in Morgan’s office, waiting. He filched a cigar from a humidor on the desk, lit up, puffed away, and waited some more. The smoke from the Havana clogged the air, and Billy’s empty stomach began to churn.
I’m going to be sick
, he thought, and couldn’t find a trash can. Indeed, the only available receptacle was Mr. Morgan’s silk hat. Fleeing from the office, clutching the cigar with one hand and his mouth with the other, Billy recounted the story often and with great verve to anyone who would listen. A week later, J. P. Morgan issued a statement declaring his thoughts on the matter: he liked God and he liked money, and saw no reason to separate the two.
Billy counted it as a win.

He also crashed
Gladys Vanderbilt’s wedding to Count László Széchenyi of Hungary. While the choir from St. Patrick’s Cathedral serenaded the couple, Billy slipped into the Vanderbilts’ Fifth Avenue mansion wearing his old messenger-boy uniform. After the reception, twenty of his colleagues hoisted him up on their shoulders and carried him to the Plaza Hotel, eager to hear tales of what went on
behind the event’s barred doors. Impressed, his editor made him a society reporter, and every night from then on the high school dropout wore a crisply
pressed tuxedo no matter where he went or whom he talked to, including underworld characters such as Beansie Rosenthal and shadowless, armed thugs who followed him home.

B
illy was lucky, really, that the neighborhood itself hadn’t already killed him. The city that would one day make Gypsy Rose Lee was filled with people who wouldn’t make it to tomorrow. At the turn of the century, Jews fled pogroms in Russia only to find that life in New York’s Lower East Side was scarcely safer. Two thousand people to an acre, fifteen people squeezing into tenement apartments measuring just 325 square feet, all connected by a dingy web of
laundry lines. Dead-eyed women stood half naked in streets, babies suckling openly at breasts. Children were warned never to enter the Orchard Street lairs of the Gypsy women, with their billowing skirts and gold flashing from ankle to teeth; no fortune in this neighborhood was worth hearing, anyway.
Hit men abided by a strict pay scale: $10 for the administering of a sound beating, including discoloration of eyes and, perhaps, the loosening of teeth; $50 for breaking the subject’s nose or blinding him; $100 for preparing him for delivery to a hospital; and $500 for murdering him outright.

Billy’s father had faced certain death himself when, in 1883, he was conscripted into the army of Russian Tsar Alexander III. Panicked, he made inquiries and connections among his fellow Jews and finally found a man who was willing to sell his identity card. A private meeting, a discreet exchange, and, just like that,
Louis Salzberg became Louis Minsky.

Louis fled Russia and settled in New York’s Lower East Side with his wife, Esther, and young son Avrum (“Abraham” in his new country). He worked as a peddler and saved enough money to buy a building on Grand Street. A natural marketing savant, he sewed a string of bed-sheets to use as a screen, projecting images of his dry goods interspersed with old Jewish proverbs and neighborhood gossip, complete with English subtitles. He offered free matzohs during Passover and a soda fountain for customers, who arrived parched and weary after riding
cramped Manhattan El cars or the Brooklyn ferry. Soon Minsky’s Department Store was luring customers from long-established emporiums such as Arnold Constable, Lord & Taylor, and Milgrim’s. He told his sons a story that would shape the way they came to view the nature of business in general, and of thievery in particular.

One night their father was walking home with a friend. The two men passed the home of one of the Minsky cousins, a floor manager at the store. “
How can you stand it?” the friend asked, shaking his head. “Look in those windows—the velvet drapes, the crystal chandelier. How can a man live like that if he isn’t stealing you blind?”

“It’s like this,” Louis Minsky answered. “
If
I fire him, I’ll have to hire a new man. This
schmendrick
has stolen so much already that he doesn’t need any more. But if I hire a new man, he’ll have to start robbing me from scratch. I’ll lose twice as much!”

The Minsky patriarch continued to study the Talmud in his spare time, but the old country was loosening its grip. He filled his closet with hand-tailored suits, fastened a diamond stickpin to his lapel, and carried a silver-topped cane. Tammany Hall, the unabashedly corrupt political machine that had ruled New York since the end of the Revolutionary War, took notice of Louis and asked him to run for alderman of the Sixth Ward—what better way to secure the Jewish vote than to make a hero of one of their own? “
The politicians used to come fishing on the East Side,” one resident recalled, “because they had a raw crowd—a crowd that was not polished yet. They could make them into a frenzy. They would talk about capitalism, and socialism, and sweatshops. The problems were always there, and Tammany Hall was always on your tongue.”

Louis Minsky knew that the Tammany politicians, who put a price tag on every city position from janitor to judge and collected millions of dollars in graft, were largely responsible for the horrific conditions in the Lower East Side. But if elected, he could ensure that his fellow Jews and neighbors—the future songwriters George and Ira Gershwin and actor Eddie Cantor among them—received their share of the ten thousand pounds of turkey, six thousand pairs of shoes, and eight hundred tons of coal Tammany doled out annually to supporters. He won handily, and supporters dubbed him the “
Mayor of Grand Street.”

The new alderman began his tenure confident he could mend a broken system from within. Never once did Louis suspect his own constituents of contributing to the disrepair, until one of them, a poor tailor from his hometown back in Russia, duped the alderman into supporting his wife after he’d allegedly abandoned her and their five children. The tailor and his wife, a witting accomplice, lived off the alderman’s own dime until neighborhood gossips ratted them out.

Alderman Minsky was hurt—“
I would spend $10,000, if I had it, rather than pay that alimony,” he said—but the incident marked his transformation into a true Tammany man, with all the cunning and treachery that title implied. A few years later, Louis declined to run for reelection but kept his connections, and then devised a scam of his own. A friend hired him to solicit accounts for the Grand Street branch of the Federal Bank, promising a kickback on all new deposits. In March 1904, another poor tailor from the neighborhood wandered into the bank.

“Hello,” Louis greeted him. “
Do you know who I am?”

“No.”

“Why, I am the ex-Alderman, and I supposed everybody on the East Side knew me. I am the boss of this bank … and my bank is the safest in the world. You ought to put your money in it.”

The tailor deposited his entire savings of $555, and Louis found dozens more just like him. The kickbacks having been duly handed over, the bank failed within weeks, and
Louis was arrested on a charge of grand larceny. The ex-alderman swiftly put his marketing savvy to work, announcing that he himself had made a deposit in the bank just a half hour before it went under. Furthermore, he would pay 50 cents on the dollar to all customers who had accounts of $100 or less.

“
I will have stories in all the papers about my philanthropy to the poor people,” Louis confided to his lawyer. “And I will have pictures of myself, and everybody will think I am a very fine man.”

A fellow Tammany man posted bail, the press let the story drop, and the scandal fizzled, especially in the Minsky household. To his sons and two daughters Louis Minsky was always above reproach, fully within his right to dispense advice and pass judgment on their respective paths in life. In the coming years, his eldest son, Abraham, endured the brunt
of parental scrutiny. The boy clearly understood what money could buy, that much was clear, but he showed neither interest in nor aptitude for making it.

A
be was a rotund mama’s boy, moody and mercurial. Nothing—not his sartorial elegance, not his Tammany pedigree, not his growing bank account—made Louis Minsky feel as American as having a child with a sense of entitlement, this strange belief that one could be idle and still prosper. Abe had inherited his father’s penchant for fine things but none of his work ethic. And Esther, doting mother that she was, developed
a cyclical pawning system to ensure he didn’t have to. She gave her favorite child watches, rings, and silver hairbrushes, which he promptly hocked in favor of suits, cologne, and dinner dates at Rector’s and Delmonico’s, a different woman on his arm each time. He married one of them in 1907, a union as short-lived as one of his cherished Havana cigars and not nearly as pleasurable—owing mainly to
his scheme to defraud his father-in-law of $150,000, which earned him a $500 fine and five months in prison.