American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (49 page)

Immediately upon taking office,
Moss issued a sort of Hays Code for burlesque—some old restrictions, some new, all unreasonable. Stripteasers couldn’t mingle with the audience or take off their bras but offer only the briefest flash of breast at the end. No more encores in which the girls slipped the curtain between their legs and whisked the velvet back and forth. No vulgar language or overtly suggestive double entendres. And, as the coup de grâce, a thorough dismantling of all lighted runways. Like their burlesque colleagues, Morton and Herbert obeyed only the final edict, feeling melancholy as the wood was stripped and the footlights darkened, thinking about Abe and his brilliant Parisian importation, and the distance that still festered between them.

Yet burlesque seemed to thrive in direct proportion to threats of its demise. Editorials pondered what would become of the “
Minsky masterpieces” without the benefit of nudity. The painter Reginald Marsh created a series of sketches that captured what Morton loved most about his business, its phalanx of contradictions: the exquisite crudity;
the mechanical spontaneity; the wicked innocence; the hodgepodge audience and its palpably vacant gaze. During an extended visit to New York, sex researcher Alfred Kinsey took in several shows. “
Burlesque at Broadway,” he wrote, “has the most gorgeously thrilling girls I ever expect to see—and they stop at nothing. The g-strings to which they finally strip are half as wide as your little finger and not a button wider at the strategic spot. When the audience insists strenuously enough, she will remove even the string—slipping a finger in place (to live up to the law) with more damaging effect than the complete exposure of a nudist camp.” A cadre of anonymous New York men calling themselves “
The Mysterious Messieurs X” threw a “burlesque ball” for society hostess Elsa Maxwell. Hundreds of prominent New Yorkers, including Condé Nast and Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., packed the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria to watch a production titled
Gone with the Winski
, after the upcoming film with a similar name.

M
orton remembered when he and Herbert opened their last burlesque house at 1662 Broadway, near 51st Street. They instructed the press to call them the “
real, living Minskys” so as to distinguish themselves from Abe, who was “
a renegade from the true Billy Minsky tradition.” Minsky’s Oriental Theatre would be different from anything else in burlesque’s past or future, with spacious lounges, air-conditioning, and a “Park Avenue Row”—two hundred seats raised above the orchestra level and earphones for the dowagers, so they wouldn’t miss the punch lines. Wait, there was more: an art gallery with “original oils” of nudes; a roof solarium complete with free lending library, so the girls could both sun and educate themselves in between shows; someone named Adrienne the Psychic offering free fortune-telling in the lobby; kimono-clad ladies serving fine champagne; and, in respectful homage to Billy, a cooch dancer, limber as a noodle, gyrating within the tight confines of a clear glass cage.

Everyone should come to the grand opening, scheduled for Christmas night 1936, to see for themselves. Formal attire, please.

A reporter asked about the schism from Abe.

Morton dropped his smile, rearranged his features into an expression of calm, and held up a hand. “
We are on the most friendly terms with Abe,” he insisted, and promptly changed the subject. “This house is going to be very different. Now it will be from the
Follies
to Minsky’s.” He thought about the ex-
Follies
girl he’d love to steal most of all. “
Maybe,” he added, “Gypsy Rose Lee will come back to us. You know she always said she could make more money in burlesque.”

She did come back but for one night only, long enough to crack a bottle of champagne over the box office and launch her smile at the cameras.

T
here was a run of good luck, weekly box-office receipts of $19,000 at Minsky’s Oriental and the chance for an unprecedented publicity coup. Representative Samuel Dickstein, Democrat from New York and one of the founders of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, introduced a bill to restrict foreign theatrical performers from entering the United States and stealing jobs from citizens. On February 18, 1937, Morton and Herbert dispatched a telegram to the congressman’s office:

One week later, the brothers arrived in the nation’s capital to discuss stripteasing with the country’s most powerful men.

“
Strange as it may seem to you gentlemen,” Herbert began, “the striptease is a highly developed form of art.… It’s not altogether what you take off, but how you take it off.”

“And,” Morton added, “
who
takes it off.”

Herbert pulled an envelope from his pocket, offering it up as evidence. Hundreds of young American girls, he said, were “knocking at the doors of burlesque.” And by concentrating on exotic dances, the
European performers often ruined the striptease, missing its nuances, vanquishing its humor.

“
The American stripper,” Morton said, “doesn’t do that. She goes to school. Sometimes it takes twelve months just to learn how to peel off three garments.”

“Maybe there aren’t enough American strippers to go around,” one congressman suggested.

“There are plenty of Americans,” Herbert replied. “You’ve all heard of Gypsy Rose Lee. She started with us six years ago and now she is the greatest publicized star of today. I made every effort to get her to testify before this committee, but she was tied up with a contract and unable to come down.”

A general sigh of disappointment looped around the committee table.

“
About this bill,” Herbert concluded, “we want to say that foreign governments have been stripping Uncle Sam for a long while. Now it’s time to strip them, and we American Minskys should take care of the stripping.”

From then on, Morton announced, the Minsky motto would be “The Stars and Strips Forever!”

Laughter and applause rushed through the hall, loud and gratifying as an opening-night ovation, so sweet and far removed from the trouble looming, inevitably, back in New York.

M
orton remembered a wave of sex crimes across the city, and the way the newspapers divulged every detail with lurid, voracious glee.
A four-year-old girl was strangled in the cellar of a deserted house in Staten Island.
An eleven-year-old Brooklyn girl was raped and assaulted.
An eight-year-old was raped and left to die in her old baby carriage, stored in the basement of her family home.
A ten-year-old girl was attacked in a movie theater.
A nine-year-old Catholic schoolgirl was raped and murdered in the back room of a Brooklyn barbershop.
A thirty-four-year-old writer named Nancy Evans Titterton, wife of an
NBC radio executive, was raped and murdered in their Beekman Place apartment. Her battered body was found facedown in the bathtub, nude save for a slip, rolled-down stockings, and the pajama top used to strangle her.

Pundits and politicians suggested all manner of punishments for “
criminal sexual perverts”—the electric chair, sterilization, segregation—and cast blame without discretion or direction. It was parents’ fault for not teaching proper “
sex hygiene.”
It was the state’s fault for its lenient parole policies. It was the fault of every burlesque producer who allowed “
salacious” performances, especially the Minsky brothers and, on one particular occasion, especially Abe.

How well Morton remembered that day in April 1937 when he and Herbert decided, five long years after Billy’s death, to stand in the same room with their brother, especially since that room was in the Criminal Courts Building downtown. It had been so easy to push Abe to the periphery of their lives, to jab him with sly, subtle insults passed along through the press, to forget that the eldest Minsky, for all of his foibles and failures, was the one who first put the family name in lights. Morton knew it was a risk to show up on Abe’s behalf—his brother could just as easily punch him as shake his hand—and also that, precisely because of the unknown outcome, the wild, hovering possibility of disaster, Billy would want him to do it.

So they showed up, he and Herbert, and took their seats in the courtroom where Abe would be accused of violating the penal code during a certain performance the prior August—a brilliant performance, Morton had to admit, with a girl swinging high from a trapeze, dropping a piece of clothing with every tantalizing to and fro. Abe, the brothers well knew, had violated the penal code numerous times—who hadn’t?—but John Sumner and Commissioner Moss were determined to win this round.

Morton remembered his favorite part of the trial, when the district attorney examined a regular New Gotham patron, asking, in a powder-dry voice, “
At any time during the performance were you excited?” and the guy’s incredulous, no-shit look that served as his wordless reply. He remembered the unsettled, quicksand feeling in his gut when the judge found Abe guilty, and how it churned lower, faster, when the judge announced
the revocation of Abe’s license not just for a week but for months, until the fall.

At that news his brother stood. Abe’s mouth curled and retracted into itself, like an earthworm poked with a stick, and he hurled his words with a vigorous, muttering fury.

“
You think you are running the whole country,” he said, stopping Commissioner Moss in midstride. “This has been going on for twenty-five years and you have been in office for three years and you haven’t done anything.” He stepped closer, situating his body inside the frame of the door. The courtroom fell into a prickled hush behind him. He lifted his chin.

“
If you want to close them,” Abe said, “close them.”

The commissioner looked down at him and said, “Good-bye, Mr. Minsky.”

M
orton and Herbert formally reconciled with Abe, now using the press as a salve instead of a weapon. Morton kept his comments politic, impersonal. “
In our case brother was pitted against brother,” he said, “and that meant divided profits.” Billy had been the fulcrum that kept them all in balance, and they had to learn how to work without him. They conferred, shared secrets and theories. It was obvious, now, why John Sumner and Commissioner Moss had postponed the trial against Abe for eight months; they wanted it to occur as closely as possible to May 1, 1937, when all burlesque licenses came up for renewal. Moss might not have the authority to padlock a theater without a conviction, but he could achieve the same end by refusing to issue a simple piece of paper.