American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (6 page)

The incident mortified Louis and Esther Minsky, and they were relieved when their eldest son found a business venture that actually inspired him to work. An abandoned Protestant church in the neighborhood, Abe announced, would make the perfect venue for a nickel theater. The country was newly obsessed with motion pictures, with
more than 45 million Americans attending shows every week—nearly every second person in the United States. “
It amounts practically to a revolution,”
Billboard
opined, “and yet those who are conversant with the inside workings of the business maintain that it is still in its infancy.” For a nickel or dime, customers could watch films that were sweet or silly or lewd, all ingeniously produced: a series of photographs, each with a slight variation, was reflected on a screen in such rapid succession that the images appeared to move, one action flowing seamlessly into the next.

Abe bought the old church, called it the
Houston Street Hippodrome, and opened for business, positioning the screen where an altar
used to be. Customers didn’t complain about sitting on the hard pews; they could wedge salamis, frankfurters, and tongues from nearby
S. Erschowsky & Sons Deli into the racks that had once held hymnals. In the dark, no one could see the New Testament murals that still decorated the walls: a stoic Joseph with staff in hand, Jesus falling for the third time. Nor did the masses mind the pricey 5-cent admission for such racy pictures as
The Butler and the Upstairs Maid
. Between films Abe projected slides in Yiddish and English warning people against spitting, noisemaking, pickpockets, and the rude practice of reading titles aloud.

The Hippodrome prospered for three years without Louis Minsky once passing through its doors. When he inquired about business, his son had a careful answer. “
You know those slides you used to show when you ran for alderman?” Abe asked. “Well, now I show slides, too, and for holidays I hire actors to act out lessons from the Talmud.”

When Louis finally discovered the true nature of Abe’s films, he ordered his son to shut the place down. No member of
his
family would make a living showcasing smut. Abe balked, but they reached a compromise. Louis had his eye on another project: the National Theatre on Houston Street and Second Avenue, a perfect venue for Jewish plays; the area was, in fact, becoming known as the “
Yiddish Broadway.” Abe could show movies on the sixth-floor rooftop, as long as they depicted great dramas—
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Ben Hur, Queen Elizabeth
—and not the randy rompings of butlers and maids. Father and son shook hands.

T
he long silver finger fired, and the gunshot was the loudest sound Billy Minsky ever heard. He lay facedown on his stoop, his immaculate tux now stained with dust and grime, and it occurred to him that if he heard the shot, he must still be alive. Then he heard something else that confirmed it: the sound of running—furious, swift wing-flapping strides that grew fainter, then barely perceptible, then silent. He raised his head an inch, dared to peek through parted fingers. Second Avenue was as peaceful as he’d ever seen it.

First thing next morning, Billy made yet another rash decision, one that would shape not only his life but the life of a toddler living on the
opposite side of the country, a failure as soon as she could walk. He sat down with his father.

“
Listen, Pop,” he said. “You know that deal you’ve been talking to Abe about, showing movies on the National Theatre roof? Well, I think I’m interested in it after all. I think I’ve just about had it with the newspaper business.”

For five months, the entire length of their World’s Fair show, Gypsy devises ways to be near Mike Todd. She finds herself in the unfamiliar process of falling in love, or at least the facade of it; nothing in her past has taught her the difference. They stroll past the Lagoon of Nations, find privacy in the cloistered corner near the Temple of Religion.
They pose for pictures in the photo booth: she behind a cutout of a pregnant woman with voluminous breasts, legs akimbo, scratching at her thigh; he behind a baby clad only in a diaper, one fat fist tucked inside the woman’s shirt and a cigar clamped between his teeth. Besides her mother, he is the only person capable of amusing and angering her at the same time.

“
I am not a stripper,” Gypsy tells him one day between shows. “A stripper is a woman who puts on a sex spectacle. My act is straight comedy.”

“I don’t care what you call it,” Mike says, waving a cigar, “as long as you zip.”

Michael Todd.
(photo credit 4.1)

It’s a familiar misconception, and she checks her temper when she corrects him.

“I never use a zipper,” she explains. “A zipper is cheap and vulgar. And suppose one got stuck? I use ordinary straight pins. I used to toss ’em into the bell of a brass tuba in the band. They would go ping every time I hit the target.” She pauses, adds a punch line; she wants to amuse him too. “But it was too expensive, the guy wanted union wages.”

After the closing ceremonies they watch workers dismantle the World of Tomorrow, artifact by artifact, returning the future to dust. Mike announces he’s heading back to Chicago, his hometown, to discover what he’ll become next. Gypsy wants to keep seeing him, but also let him miss her. After all, she has a murder mystery to write, her own image to update.

She’s been in relationships before, with a comic, a socialite, a salesman, and a gangster, but stayed on guard in all of them, as modest with her emotions as she is onstage—in these later years, at least. But Mike is, to Gypsy’s frustration, exactly her type. “
I like my men on the monster side,” she confides to a friend, not entirely in jest. “A snarling mouth, an evil eye, broken nose—if he should happen to have thick ears, good! And I like a little muscle, hair on the chest, none on the head. A nervous tic excites me and if with all these things he wore green suits—BANK NIGHT!”

Certainly part of the attraction is that they come from the same place. He, too, remembers the Great Depression’s long plain brown days, the light pockets and empty stomachs, the desperate things one did to fill them. As a kid he daydreamed about money.
When he was nine his tonsils were removed, and he convinced his classmates to pay two cents each to peer down his throat. He hawked newspapers, shined shoes, played the cornet in a boys’ band, worked as a roustabout at a carnival where he rigged the games of chance, and became an expert craps player before the age of twelve. As a teenager during Prohibition, he partnered with his neighborhood pharmacist to sell illegal alcohol. Michael Todd is his own creation just as Gypsy Rose Lee is hers; he’d said to hell with “Avrom Goldbogen” a long time ago. He understands why she never stops moving, her fear that the past will come galloping forward and override the present.

The past is already too close, panting against her neck, lurking inside her mailbox.

“
Dear Louise,” Mother wrote recently from Tucson, while on the road with her female lover.

Gypsy doesn’t quite trust Mike’s endearments—Mother taught her well in the ways of both money and men—but the sound of them still lands soft in her ears, looks lovely typed across the page. “
I thought you would like to know that your mind is more beautiful than your body,” reads one missive from Chicago. “Will see you Wednesday. Be good—but only till Wednesday.” It is the last thing she needs right now, to get involved with a married man who already has
one girlfriend on the side, especially since she’s still technically married herself. Matters of the heart are not immune to her pragmatic judgment, and she revels in the irony that most defines her: the great sex symbol is, at her core, asexual. She has to be; one can’t discover the comedy in sex unless observing it from a wide, safe distance. It is smarter to make a living from sex than to incorporate it into her life, but she makes careful exceptions: sex for protection, sex for position, sex for power—sex for any purpose that will further her creation while leaving the girl inside it alone.

Business with Mike is pragmatic, but not so a romance. She knows she should listen to her instincts and not his sweet, sly promises. Besides, no matter what his letters say, she can’t shake the sense that he is never more absent than when he is by her side.

Here they were again, Rose and June, two states away from home, where the Baby’s star could begin its rightful ascent. After her debut at Grandpa Thompson’s Knights of Pythias Lodge, she performed for the Elks and Masons and Shriners and every fraternal organization around Seattle, tumbling across hard linoleum, split-leaping from wall to wall, collecting calluses along the knuckles of her toes. Each time, Rose talked Charlie Thompson into playing the piano and convincing his lodge brothers to attend, although he remained skeptical about the whole enterprise. For these local bookings Louise trouped, too, occasionally scoring bit parts independent of June’s developing vaudeville act. In a stage production of
Blue Bird
she played a frog, while June was a good fairy and Rose a witch. Usually, though, Louise shuffled along in her too-tight striped skirt and labored through “Hard-boiled Rose,” the points of her teeth spiking her bottom lip as she talk-sang.

Baby June in her toe shoes, age three.
(photo credit 5.1)

Small concerts and benefits clogged their calendar, and at one of the latter Rose gripped June’s forearm and pulled her to the front entrance. “
Come quickly, darling,” she said. “She’s standing in the wings waiting to go on. She watched you.” She crunched June’s curls, tugged at her dress. “Stop breathing so hard … when I speak to her, be sure you stand directly in front of her. Then look up and smile.”

June was just over three years old, and when she lifted her head she stared directly into stiff pink layers of tutu. The edges tickled the tip of her nose.

Anna Pavlova.