Gypsy: The Art of the Tease (12 page)

But Gypsy did not do the tour just to remind Americans that she had become famous for her striptease. She had a more personal agenda: to redeem her time in Hollywood. As part of her routine, she sent an actor onstage to read a telegram: “she’s been detained in Hollywood.” She projected stills from her movies on a screen and then leapt through it as if to do via acrobatics what she had been unable to achieve via celluloid. Sharing the bill with Jimmy Durante, she played towns she had not seen since her childhood days in vaudeville.

Like Dorothy, who that same year enchanted American film-

goers with her desire to go home in the
Wizard of Oz,
Gypsy wanted to tell Americans that she had only ever intended to use

“Oz” to get back to Broadway. She introduced comic roles that inverted the usual Hollywood stories—such as the business-95

To Hollywood and Back

woman “making advances at a timid male seeking a film test.”

Despite mediocre reviews, Gypsy’s fans thronged to see her.

Small Town Farm Girl or Siren of the Burlesque Stage?

Back in New York in 1939, Gypsy needed more than the slip of a strap or a leap through a screen to reclaim her status as Queen of Striptease. Obsessed by the events in Europe, Americans had turned away from the arts in general and burlesque in particular.

While Gypsy dallied in Hollywood, Mayor La Guardia closed all the burlesque theaters in New York and banned the word
striptease
from the marquees. The strippers who had plied their trade in burlesque in the mid-1930s had migrated to nightclubs. The acts had become more theatrical and more demure. Strippers performed gimmicks that would have been unheard of two years earlier, such as taking it off behind doves, balloons, snakes, or parakeets. But higher production values among strippers was not the only challenge that Gypsy faced: by this time, thanks to the talkies’ growing popularity, the American theater had lost its place as the nation’s primary form of entertainment.

Still, Gypsy put striptease to a good cause: helping the Spanish Loyalists, she joined artists and writers including Paul Robeson, Ernest Hemingway, and Robert Capa to raise money for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the mostly Communist American

volunteer army fighting against Franco and Mussolini, and for Spanish refugees. At one benefit Gypsy told the crowd: “I have 96

To Hollywood and Back

not come to lift my skirts, but to lift the embargo on Spain.”

When Gypsy headed a clothes drive at the Greenwich Village theater, the accompanying ad showed a photo of the half-naked stripper. The copy read: “Clothes? Any new clothes? Old clothes?

Gypsy Rose Lee appeals for clothing for Spanish refugees . . .

and she’s not teasing. The artist who has given her all on stage and screen now asks you to give.” Gypsy went on to describe barefoot, shirtless children.

What Gypsy saw as a gesture for a good cause, others re-

garded as a genius for the avant-garde. Barney Josephson told the
New Yorker
jazz critic Whitney Balliett that Gypsy had inspired Café Society, the soigné nightclub he would found the following year: “I’d seen Gypsy Rose Lee doing a political striptease at fundraising affairs in New York for the Lincoln Brigade. I con-ceived of the idea of presenting some sort of satire and alternat-ing it with jazz music.”

Intimates of the Striptease-Queen-turned-leftist-activist-muse were less impressed. Mizzy’s mother scolded her daughter-in-law that she had “promised” to give up stripping, not to mention stripping for Communists. But La Gyp had no intention of giving up anything besides her marriage. She and Mizzy separated, and documents from 1938 (as well as press clippings) cite “extreme cruelty” as the reason.

Like many other left-leaning intellectuals and artists who helped the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Gypsy attracted the atten-97

To Hollywood and Back

tion of the Dies Committee, which had convened that year to ferret out Communists, especially those associated with the theater. But when the committee sought to question Gypsy, she wielded puns about her profession the way a lion tamer uses a chair. “I’ll bare all if they come to Columbus,” she told the press.

The committee dropped its investigation, and at least one newspaper ran a story claiming that, by targeting Gypsy, committee co-chair Martin Dies revealed his own hunger for publicity. Perhaps he wanted to make it in Hollywood too.

Gypsy’s reinvention during the war has sartorial and social roots. Thanks to the zipper’s advent, getting out of one’s clothes was more effortless than ever, as exemplified in the “Zip” number in
Pal Joey,
which opened during the 1940 Christmas season. A few years later Rita Hayworth teased in the film
Gilda:
“I’m not very good at zippers.” That she never finished unzipping her evening gown provided a glimpse of Hollywood’s double standard about the American striptease. No respectable actress could do one on screen—but every gorgeous woman was about to un-snap her garters.

The 1939–40 New York World’s Fair exemplifies these changes.

Held in Queens at what is now Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, the Fair promised “The World of Tomorrow,” with exhibits of all kinds. As scholars have observed, the Fair offered several different visions of the American of “tomorrow.” One was sanitized and technological. The other—the midway—was lascivious and 98

To Hollywood and Back

vulgar. The midway included Norman Bel Geddes’ “Crystal

Lassies,” topless women posing in G-strings, and the Cuban Village, where a completely nude girl did a voodoo act. Rosita Royce did her dove striptease. The press compared the area to Minsky burlesque.

In a “Reporter at Large” piece published in the
New Yorker
in the winter of 1939, Joseph Mitchell diagnosed a problem with the Fair’s first season: Fair director Grover Whalen had not hired enough striptease performers. Particularly, Whalen had not hired Gypsy, which, he concluded, was “un-American.” But Gypsy was not appearing at the Fair because she had received only one offer, and it was unacceptable. With the help of gallery owner Julian Levy, Salvador and Gala Dali had designed their own exhibit,

“Dream of Venus,” for the Fair’s first season, and they invited Gypsy to star in it. At this moment the Dalis were in the middle of a love affair with American popular entertainment and especially with Hollywood celebrities. Salvador adored Groucho Marx, Buster Keaton, and Cecil B. DeMille films. Gypsy turned down the offer. No records remain of what she actually said, but perhaps the stripper intuited that although she and Dali may have shared a sense of publicity’s function in twentieth century America, their ideas about how to do it differed.

The slogan the Dalis proposed to advertise Gypsy—“Come

and See Gypsy Rose Lee’s Bottom of the Sea”—drowned her in kitsch. And “Dream of Venus” would have cast Gypsy in a more 99

To Hollywood and Back

outrageous role than any she had performed in, including the Irving Place. Fairgoers entered the Dalis’ pastel-colored stucco pavilion, which was supposed to represent a dream, between a giant cast of a woman’s spread legs. Inside, the Dalis had designed several rooms: in one, “mermaids” cavorted and drank champagne. In another, the Dalis installed a couch resembling Greta Garbo’s lips, tossed in some Dali surrealist watches, and hired showgirls to play Botticelli’s Venus. The Dalis imagined Gypsy as “the modern Venus,” lounging in a boudoir filled with mirrors and mermen.

Having escaped the Dalis, Gypsy got cast in a crowd-pleaser—

a Saratoga Circuit production of
Burlesque,
the 1927 Arthur Hopkins/George Manker Watters tear-jerker about Bonny King, a masochistic burlesque performer who makes it on Broadway and then becomes humbled and slinks back to her own genre.

The Saratoga Circuit, an off-Broadway summer stock route,

drew musical comedy actors like Vivian Vance and, now, Gypsy.

Barbara Stanwyck had made the role famous in the original production, and by 1939
Burlesque
had already been adapted to film twice. The stage revival, which hit Saratoga Springs the first week in August, during racing season, would have attracted many wealthy New Yorkers who traveled upstate to bet on the horses and take in the spa.
Burlesque
also gave Gypsy her first experience starring in a theatrical anti-rags-to-riches tale.

But in Saratoga Gypsy also got her first real taste of life among 100

To Hollywood and Back

bohemians, as the town is home to the artist and writers’ colony Yaddo. Founded in 1900, Yaddo was then run by Elisabeth Ames, who was known for her puritanism. Marc Blitzstein, whom

Gypsy knew from New York, had holed up to work there, and he hosted a cocktail party in her honor. Fearing Ames’s wrath, he held it at a studio known as the Tower, which was out in the woods, far from the main house. But perhaps Ames would have had nothing to disapprove of. According to the writer Jerre Mangione, who attended, Gypsy looked like “a wholesome small

town farm girl” rather than “a siren of the burlesque stage.” The party inspired Gypsy and drove her to seek out a similar life when she was trying to write her own book.

Wholesome small town farm girl? Siren of the burlesque stage?

Who was Gypsy, really? At the very least, she was increasingly someone the cognoscenti wanted to tear down. In the fall of 1939

Gypsy became the third star of
Du Barry Was a Lady,
replacing the African-American mezzo-soprano Betty Allen, herself a replace-ment for Ethel Merman, who had joined
Panama Hattie
’s cast
.

With lyrics by Cole Porter and a book by DeSylva and Her-

bert Fields,
Du Barry,
which had opened the previous December, was a popular hit (and a critical bomb) in part because it stole from burlesque. “One of the roughest books that ever headed uptown from Minsky,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in the
New York
Times.
Like
Burlesque,
the show Gypsy had starred in on the Saratoga Circuit a year earlier,
Du Barry
proposes the opposite 101

To Hollywood and Back

moral of the stripper’s real life story: America is not a place of social mobility. Cloakroom attendant Louis Blore (Bert Lahr) pursues May (Merman, then Gypsy), a nightclub singer, until he unwittingly drinks a drug-laced Mickey Finn and conks out.

Dreaming that he is Louis XV, he finds himself in the same romantic situation: he chases May, now Madame Du Barry, around

“Versailles.” When Blore wakes up, he realizes that he and May should just be friends and that he should marry the cigarette girl who loves him.

The show demanded an actress who could approximate Mer-

man’s mix of wholesomeness and sex appeal in the contemporary scenes and also evoke the eighteenth century courtesan Madame La Comtesse Du Barry’s naughty costume-drama hilarity. Although critics continued to dismiss
Du Barry
as a burlesque show in musical’s clothes—Porter’s “But in the Morning, No,” was the kind of “sex” song Gypsy might have tried out downtown a few years earlier—Gypsy got good reviews: “lovely to look at and the comic sequences are good,” one noted. Still,
Du Barry
was not the answer for an ex–populist stripper, ex–Hollywood starlet, ex–

Follies star looking to reinvent herself. The Queen of Striptease needed a third act.

102

f o u r

The Rise and Fall of the

Striptease Intellectual

An emblematic attempt to decrown the Queen of Striptease—to strip striptease of its elegant pose—occurred in the spring of 1940, when H. L. Mencken dragged Gypsy into a linguistic quar-rel about her profession. This was classic Mencken: by calling attention to Gypsy’s role in domesticating striptease, he would expose her and the “Booboisie”—his word for the aspirational middle class that had created her—as hypocrites. The spat began playfully enough when Gypsy’s friend, the stripper Georgia Sothern, known for taking it off to the song “Hold That Tiger,” set out to find a synonym for “striptease,” as La Guardia had banned that word from New York burlesque marquees three years earlier.

Sothern was Gypsy’s striptease opposite. She neither pretended to 103

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

be thinking about luxury products nor claimed to have attended Vassar. She got onstage and shook her body to loud music.

Sothern’s campaign to play the amateur grammarian must

have struck Mencken as even more ridiculous than Gypsy’s intellectual striptease. Sothern sent letters to three intellectuals (Mencken would later claim her press agent, Maurice Zolotow, sent them): Stuart Chase and S. I. Hayakawa, popularizers of general semantics, a kind of analytic philosophy, and Mencken.

The letter, in which Sothern cast herself as a stripper-in-distress, began: “I am a practitioner of the art of
strip-teasing
. . . there has been a great deal of . . . criticism leveled against my profession.

Most of it . . . arises from the unfortunate word strip-teasing, which creates the wrong connotation. . . . [I]f you could coin a new and more palatable word to describe this art, I and my colleagues would have easier going. I hope . . . [you] can find time to help the . . . members of my profession.”

Having first charted slang’s direction in
The American Language
in 1921, Mencken had since been collecting words for inclusion in a second volume. Known by the 1940s as a lexicographer, Mencken aimed—as always—to eliminate pretension

everywhere he found it. So he replied to Sothern’s letter, which he would publish alongside his quips in his 1941 supplement to
The American Language
in high sarcasm. “I sympathize with you in your affliction. It might be a good idea to relate strip-teasing in some way to the . . . zoological phenomenon of molting
. . .