Read American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee Online
Authors: Karen Abbott
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Historical, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #Women
American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (47 page)
“
Louise,” Rose wrote,
do you ever stop to
think
how much of the stuff in that house really belongs to me? Where did it all come from? How did most of it get there? I was your slave and colored maid for years and years, there I was a house keeper for you. I was never paid a salary I was given just enough to run your house on the few pennies I scraped together after expenses were taken care of I put back into your house never dreaming I would some day be turned out.… I am begrudged $37.00 a week to live on, even called a thief and made out a leper.
And if Gypsy were being honest, she would take responsibility for the darker edges around their days, all of those strangers who stepped in and tinkered with their lives. Gypsy was fooling herself, feeling “so perfect” and turning everyone against Rose: Bob Mizzy, June, even Jack Hovick and his new family, who had the nerve to pretend they cared for
Gypsy more than did her own mother. Rose addressed all of it in the same handwritten letter, the force of her rage evident in every heavy word, the point of her pencil breaking several times: “
What have I ever done that you haven’t done twenty fold worse … you even advised the last fatal party that took place.… I mention all this because I want to know why am I so unwanted all of a sudden. It’s a pretty tough time to let me down Louise.”
No response, and Rose tried again, contrite and martyred. “
I will regret as long as I live the unfortunate unhappiness I caused you through the Ginny affair that I was helpless to avoid,” she wrote. “You can’t hurt anything you love dear and I adore and love you.… Do you think you would feel better about me if I came to Cal. to live dear?”
Rose would not be ignored. She showed up in California, wielding a rifle no one knew was unloaded, and
chased Bob around the house until she was tackled and restrained. For the first time Gypsy hired a lawyer to put some official space between them, but she knew she’d always feel the pull of her mother’s hand, and hear the tune of her mad song.
S
he realized, too, that her Hollywood career as Louise Hovick was as insubstantial as her marriage. The studio never gave her a chance to do straight drama, and she couldn’t rely on her striptease or its inherent humor. Her next four movies under contract—
Ali Baba Goes to Town, Battle of Broadway, My Lucky Star
, and
Sally, Irene and Mary
—were all critical and commercial failures.
GYPSY FLOPPED IN HOLLYWOOD
, one headline trumpeted, and she distracted herself by reconnecting with her activist friends. She became a fixture at Communist United Front meetings and charity events. The Dies Committee, so called after Representative Martin Dies, chairman of the House committee investigating un-American activities, began a dossier on Gypsy and issued her a subpoena to testify. “
With my act and Dies’ publicity,” she joked to the press, “we could bring back vaudeville.… Sure, we gave parties in Hollywood to help poor Spanish kids. I thought it was American to help the downtrodden.”
Some of her colleagues weren’t quite sure what to make of her approach, especially when she reprised her role in the
Follies
for a roomful of sedate dowagers. She meant no offense; her act was the truest, easiest way she knew to raise money, and wasn’t that the point? One of the offended ladies happened to be her mother-in-law, Ruth Mizzy, who afterward sent Gypsy a stern reprimand.
Dear Louise,
I realize now how very stupid I was not to have understood that when you were being advertised as Gypsy Rose Lee that you would appear in the role you played at the
Follies
. I have been trying to find a reason for your having given the Strip Tease performance at the Mecca Temple and to save my soul I really cannot find one. Perhaps you thought we would not mind seeing that it was a benefit for Spain … it was a serious Faux Pas.… I gather you are planning to continue in the show business doing the Strip Tease.… You have but a short time in which you can continue with this type of work—and as you definitely have a great deal of knowledge about the theatre and histrionic talent it would seem that with a very little bit of specialized training you could very easily find a most suitable and desirable place in the theatre which deals with drama. At this time you should make every effort to find the best material possible as a vehicle for your talent. Now, while you are still young, you can pass from one type of work to another.
Gypsy decided to cast aside Louise Hovick—for good this time. She didn’t have it in her to argue; striptease
was
her talent, her theater, her drama, the one way she knew to get accolades and attention, and there was no room for it here. She left Bob and Hollywood and the memory of every failed take and awful review. Teaming up with Jimmy Durante, she launched a tour called the
Merry Whirl Review
and stripped her way back east, incorporating a parody of a character named “Mr. Censor.” When reporters asked her what she thought about Sumner’s battle against the Minskys, she deemed it “
silly and rather provincial. If anyone’s morals could possibly be jeopardized by burlesque, he’s pretty far gone anyway.”
She performed in every grand and musty old vaudeville theater across the country, spotting ghosts from that sad, sweet part of her life before she was anyone at all. New York was her final stop, the city that discovered her, and the only place she knew that offered redemption along with heartache.
Wish I had a town I belonged to. All the towns we drive through I see the lights on in the windows … it looks as though it would be warm and friendly inside—but I’m outside.
—
GYPSY ROSE LEE, WRITING ABOUT HER CHILDHOOD
, 1956
Despite June’s resistance, David Merrick and his team move forward with plans for the musical. One afternoon, Gypsy lounges in her drawing room, smoking a cigarette and sipping tar-thick tea, anticipating the arrival of Arthur Laurents. His last work,
West Side Story
, was nominated for a Tony Award, and she is thrilled he’s adapting her memoir for the stage. He wants to ask a few questions, fill in some gaps about her life, and she tells him to come over, darling, anytime, she’ll be happy to chat. Even his short walk through her front courtyard grants him insights not to be found in Walter Winchell’s column or the
Police Gazette
. In one section of her mansion on East 63rd Street, she rents out several rooms to tenants on the condition that they leave their doors open. “
Closed doors,” Laurents notes, “meant she was running a multiple dwelling which meant permits and taxes, which meant money. Like mother, like daughter.”
Gypsy (left) and June, 1959.
(photo credit 34.1)
Gypsy knows it is Mother, in fact, who most intrigues Laurents, all those stories he’s heard out in the Hamptons from some woman who claims Rose Hovick was her very first lover. Oh, she says, that Rose was curvaceous and charming and manipulative as Clytemnestra, somehow convincing a crew of women to work for nothing at her cottage upstate; she operated that place like a slave farm. Apparently, Mother confided to this lover all of her greatest hits. There was the time she took her ladies to a Chinese restaurant, crashed into another car, and blackmailed the other driver into paying for damages;
the girls all vowed to be her witnesses. And the time, so long ago now, when she pushed a hotel manager out of the window. And of course the time she shot a girl who’d made a pass at Gypsy, and for this story Rose invented a twist ending: she buried the body in the backyard, and then asked, ever so sweetly, if some of the girls might like to hoe the dirt. She acted so surprised when she saw what turned up …
Erica, Gypsy’s longtime and devoted secretary, leads Arthur Laurents into the drawing room. Gypsy can handle him, she knows. She learned her lesson with Mike Todd about telling men things that are better left unsaid.
“
Was your son,” Laurents asks, “named after your secretary?”
A clear reference, Gypsy thinks, to rumors that she is a lesbian, just like Mother, rumors she doesn’t mind but sees no need to confirm or deny. She laughs and slips past the question, telling him that Erica is like a member of the family, darling, she doesn’t know what she’d do without her.
Laurents tries again.
“
Did the fifteen-year-old Hollywood Blondes your mother booked into a burlesque house ever appear partially nude?” he asks.
Gypsy crosses her legs. That was so long ago, a piece of that time she will never discuss. “I wouldn’t know,” she says.
She can see him replaying the answer in his head: she wouldn’t know.
Really?
She smiles at him, sweetly, showing the slightly bucked teeth he later describes as “endearing.” She adds, “Wasn’t Mother something?”
Laurents moves on. “What got you into stripping?” he asks.
Gypsy cocks her head, lets her gaze wander to the doorway. “
Wasn’t that the phone?” she says.
He stares at her and tries one more time.
“Where did you get your name?”
Gypsy laughs. “
Oh, darling,” she says, “I’ve given so many versions, why don’t you make up your own?”
Laurents realizes that she is a much better actress offstage than on. He rises to leave and asks if he might come back to try again. “Anytime, darling,” she says, and tells him she cares only about two things: that the show go on, and that it be called
Gypsy
.
By the end of 1958, Laurents delivers the first draft of the play. It is perfect, Gypsy thinks, tracking the course of her life precisely as she wishes she’d lived it. Of course,
June feels differently. Who is this awful Baby June, this shrill, manic caricature of the child she remembers being? She headlined the most prestigious circuit in vaudeville at the age of seven—why does the first scene show her at an amateur contest? And why must she be the villain, eloping with the boy Gypsy loved, when in truth her sister never looked twice at Bobby?
Furthermore, does Gypsy think anyone will buy this little Louise? This frail, meek lamb who craves nothing more than her sister’s talent and her mother’s love? Where is the haughty Duchess who memorized Voltaire? Who doodled the word “Money” and dreamt of marrying kings? Who decided to perform that very first striptease out in Kansas City? Who has now stolen her little sister’s past not once but twice?
“
You want the world to believe that your credo says to hell with craft, with talent, with integrity, ‘all you gotta have is a gimmick’?” June asks. “Is that your message? Do you really believe that?”
“
Listen, June,” Gypsy says, “you’re the one who trusts all that craft stuff. I tried it, didn’t I? Nothing worked but my gimmicks. That’s what they bought, that’s what they wanted. Wouldn’t I be a stupid son of a bitch to disappoint them now?”
Gypsy pleads with her sister, makes promises that sidle away from the truth without being outright lies. June’s concerns can be addressed through casting and direction. She will keep an eye on things, make sure June’s interests are protected. Trust her, Gypsy says.
Eight days later, the production team convenes at her house.
“
Grim,” Gypsy scribbles in her journal. “I have to spend all my time and contractual points fighting for June’s rights.”
They are at an impasse. Laurents finds himself making a pilgrimage to the other Hovick sister, tracking June down in Stratford, Connecticut, where she is appearing as Titania in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. He finds her in her dressing room, face shining with glitter dust.
“
You didn’t come to see me act,” she says. “You came to get my name on a piece of paper.”
Laurents has to admit it’s true.
“What’s a sensitive playwright like you doing writing this? It’s vulgar! She’s vulgar!”
“
I found her funny,” Laurents answers, “and rather touching.”
“I’m touching
! She’s so cheap, she eats out of tin cans!”
Laurents leaves without June’s signature and reports back to Gypsy, finding her at her home, hunched over a table, surrounded by doilies and bright construction paper hearts. She is preparing a Valentine’s Day gift for her sister, a collage of June’s recent clips, and she sighs as Laurents delivers the bad news. While he speaks, she arranges the glowing reviews around the perimeter and pastes the lone scathing notice on top, front and center, so the eye has no choice but to find it first.
