American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (52 page)

Michael Todd and Gypsy at the World’s Fair.
(photo credit 36.2)

Only she can transform a subdued return into a grand entrance. No one will look at her and think she is less than what she’d been, or that she regards tomorrow as warily as she does her recent yesterdays. She steps into the city and wraps it tight around her, comfortable and sleek as one of her old ermine coats, Gypsy Rose Lee wholly intact underneath.

She is everywhere at once, remaking her life as it was before she left it: the East Side apartment with a calculated jumble of antique furniture, the chorus line of nosy cherubs, the lascivious portraits of naked women, the thousands of erudite books teetering on shelves—some for reading, some for show. She settles back into her good-natured jousting with H. L. Mencken and her boldface status with Walter Winchell. She continues her political activism,
performing a strip to benefit the United Committee for French Relief at the Ritz-Carlton, strolling out onto the stage clad in a skirt, a few strings of beads, and a bolero. German banking heir Paul Felix Warburg scores her red garter for $50, and Mary Pickford offers $400 if she’ll keep her costume on. She references her recent time in Hollywood under her old name as if it were passé, a tired
sketch she’d quickly outgrown; she’d much rather seduce a live audience than a phalanx of cameras, and it was all for a lark, anyway. “
I guess my Fourteenth Street burlesque technique wasn’t so good,” she explains, shrugging. “There was never any Stanislavski in my methods. I just got up and said my lines.… I came back with a swell collection of autographs.” She announces, with the subtlest touch of irony, her plan to strip to the song “I Want a Girl Just Like the Girl That Married Dear Old Dad.”

She speaks of who she might become—Gypsy Rose Lee, author of mysteries—but says nothing about her plan to chronicle her life, a narrative every bit as mysterious as any she could invent. A page of notes is already tucked away in her scrapbook. “
When I was a little girl,” she’s written in her boisterous, looping scrawl, “I was the #1 custodian of the family scrapbook. News photographers covered the first important event in my life—that was in Seattle, Wash when I won a healthy baby contest—then my sister June came along and could dance on her toes when she was 2½ years old. I was four and couldn’t do anything.”

On rare occasions she even speaks with candor, interviews that carry the burden of ulterior motives. “
I want to do something serious and important in the theater some day,” she admits, wistfully, to one columnist. “My sister is an actress. She’s a real actress. She’s been doing serious, important things for some time now.”

“She has?” the columnist asks. “What’s her name?”

June Havoc, Gypsy thinks but her mouth disobeys: “
Jane Hovick.”

Of course the columnist has never heard of her.

She and June are closing in on each other again, reshuffling their dynamic, wondering how best to fit into each other’s lives. They are still the Duchess and the wunderkind—those original roles can never be stripped away—but they are nuanced and layered now, unafraid to step out of character. When June sent her that rabid, vicious letter after the murder at Highland Mills, Gypsy finally understood. June loves her in the same way she herself loved Mother: fiercely and irrevocably, and often against her better judgment.

June comes one day to visit while Gypsy is getting her usual “ass pounding,” the masseuse chopping at her midsection while she lies
spread-eagle across her mattress, her hands strangling the bedposts. “All that garbage, censor this, censor that,” Gypsy mutters. “Well, I am Gypsy Rose Lee from now on, and the Ladies Mutual Admiration Society can stuff it up their noses.” Her tone softens. “I don’t know when I’m going to work again.… God alone knows what’s next. Look over there—that’s all I’ve been offered since I came back covered with glory.” She pushes the masseuse away and sifts through a pile of paper, coming up with a sheet of music. “Wait a minute,” she says. “There’s a great song there. The writers are wonderful, June.” She thrusts the page into her sister’s hands. “They don’t know I can’t sing this, and I’ll be damned if I’ll prove I can’t in public. Why don’t you do it?” She has been taking from June for so many years, filching chapters from her life and diverting its path, and in a small, tentative way she seeks to atone.

June does do it. Through this project she meets Michael Todd and repays Gypsy the favor, suggesting that her sister be his star attraction at the New York World’s Fair. Just like that Gypsy’s grand reentrance is valid; she is no longer an impostor in her own skin.

The first time they meet, Gypsy knows Michael Todd instantly and makes an uncharacteristic decision, deciding to let him know her. Years later, after he damages her in places that were already broken, she realizes he also gave her a gift. When he marries Elizabeth Taylor in 1957, Gypsy says simply, “
I hope he’s finally found the person who is right for him” and means it, at long last happy for someone for the sake of it instead of for the show of it. He dies a year later when his private plane,
Lucky Liz
, crashes in New Mexico. Gypsy locks herself in her room at the 63rd Street mansion and cries for three days. (Joan Blondell, the actress he married instead of Gypsy, says, “
I hope the son of a bitch screamed the whole way down.”) Now, at the World’s Fair, she tries not to mind that he calls her one of the two “
greatest no-talent queens in show business”—the other being her Chihuahua, Popsy—or that
in every photograph they take together, she gazes directly at him while he focuses on the lens.

At showtime, though, his eyes are heavy on Gypsy and she can’t see him at all; he is one of thousands collected in the Hall of Music waiting to learn her private thoughts. She has just given an interview that asks her precisely that: what
is
she thinking when she performs her famous
routine “A Stripteaser’s Education”? Reclining on a chaise longue in her dressing room, done floor to ceiling in ivory and gold, Gypsy sips a brandy and considers her answer. “
So, basically, you want to know what I think about?” she says. “Well, I don’t think about love, and I don’t think of marriage, and I truly don’t think too far ahead.… I can’t help but fervently hope that my lines are getting across, and that the audience doesn’t really think I mean what I’m saying.”

And here she is, dressed in an outfit that evokes gaslights and horse cars—a welcome glimpse of nostalgia, on the eve of World War II—the ruffles under her voluminous gown swishing with each step, hands folded primly at her waist, eyes batting beneath the shadow of her hat. Her inside-out strip, as she calls it, is inverted in both deed and word: she first sheds the layers closest to her skin, all the while explaining the aristocratic origins one must possess to become a stripteaser. Like Gypsy herself it is a double-sided creation, the nuances intriguing to many but understood by few, a tragic fable wrapped inside a brilliant joke.

Peeling off white, elbow-length gloves, she cranes her languorous neck and speaks as if the words were a poem:

The crowd roars; she knows to wait for it. Just a hint of a smile, and then she continues:

She ticks each subject off on her fingers.

The laughter rises and falls but never quite dies.

She swans across the stage and offers her hat to the bandleader. Strolling back to the center, she pulls at the shoulder of her gown to reveal a strip of collarbone.

She shakes her head, marveling at such a silly thought.

On to the pins now, dropping one at a time into the orchestra pit, the drummer tapping a cowbell as each one falls. Her blouse sways open just enough to expose her breasts, each covered by a black lace bow. She glances down and notices that one of the bows is askew. “Oh dear!” she exclaims, and adjusts it back into place. More laughter, and the music picks up tempo.

She lifts her skirts and holds the pose, a blooming flower of ruffles and lace, her long, lovely legs the stem.

She leans and rolls down her stockings to the sweet, sliding notes of a violin, her hand imitating the dramatic flourishes of a conductor.

She removes her garter belt and drapes it around the neck of a man in the front row. “
Oh, darling, you look so sweet,” she coos, and turns him around for all to admire. The future fashion critic Richard Blackwell, just eighteen years old, watches, rapt. “
Every slight smile, curved hip, raised arm and seductive thrust created a frenzy among the wide-eyed, open-mouthed men,” he later writes. “She loved her audiences, as animalistic as they were.”

Next she unhooks her petticoats, whirls them in a circle, and sends them soaring into the crowd. Suddenly she’s shy again, realizing just how far she’s gone.

She unfastens her skirt next and dangles it in front of her, a matador teasing with her cape.

The crowd screams a chorus of “No!” and laughs with her. The skirt drops and she tucks herself into the velvet curtain, holding it far enough to one side to show her G-string, lacy and black and adorned with a tiny pink bow, one last illusion for those who know to look. Her voice is a lullaby now, lolling and low, until the final punchline.

She heeds their whistles and calls and reappears just once, giving what she has to, keeping all she can.

First and foremost, thank you to the late June Havoc—a fierce and lovely lady and a true national treasure—who so generously shared her time and her memories. Talking with her was like being magically escorted back to the 1920s and ’30s, and I relish every moment I spent there. And my deepest gratitude to and affection for Tana Sibilio, who invited me into June’s world, answered a million questions, supported me in a multitude of ways that have nothing to do with this book, and introduced me to the sublime grilled-cheese sandwich at the Lakeside Diner. The world is lucky to have you.

To Erik Preminger, for kindly inviting me into his home and sharing anecdotes and insights that made this a much richer book.

To the immensely talented Laura Jacobs, who provided me with every article, note, and interview transcription she used to write her groundbreaking piece on Gypsy, which ran in the March 2003 issue of
Vanity Fair
. I don’t know another journalist who would have been so helpful and generous.