Gypsy: The Art of the Tease (14 page)

Seven Middagh’s heady intellectual atmosphere would not have been new to our heroine. Since Gypsy first arrived in New York 114

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

she had cultivated a diverse group of friends and acquaintances, including gangsters, their molls, Broadway producers, illustrators, columnists, and designers. That she still continued to consort with gangsters reveals the attraction that the underworld held. According to McCullers, Waxey Gordon, the thug-turned-bootlegger who had gotten Gypsy her first Broadway role, showed up at Seven Middagh upon his release from Leavenworth in

1940. He stationed his bodyguards in the street next to his black Packard, spent the night, and stashed money for Gypsy under the doormat.

But until Seven Middagh the majority of Gypsy’s intimates

came from theatrical circles: Ward Morehouse, the theater critic George Jean Nathan, the illustrator Marcel Vertes, whose sketch of Gypsy at her typewriter on her stationery defined her. At Seven Middagh Auden presided over the meals, but Gypsy

served joie de vivre and gave domestic advice. She installed her cook, Eva, a former Cotton Club chorine, in the kitchen, to cook roast beef. A six-foot cardboard cutout of Gypsy from the Irving Place Theatre decorated the living room. Gypsy “came around for meals like a whirlwind of laughter and sex,” wrote Louis MacNeice, a frequent guest at the many raucous dinner parties at the house. Gypsy excelled at parlor games like Charades and the Yaddo favorite, Murder. During a Thanksgiving party she perched on the lap of Benjamin Britten’s patron and friend Michael Mayer, holding a bottle of gin.

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The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

Besides being a good sport, Gypsy contributed financially to Seven Middagh’s upkeep. In contrast to the writers and composers there, she was a wealthy woman. But she nonetheless spent her days at Seven Middagh hard at work on her first

thriller,
The G-String Murders.
The house inspired the stripper to get the story of her life down on paper in a way that—though still fiction—was more truthful than any skin she had flashed on stage.

Gypsy would spend the next two decades retelling this story: first as a detective novel; then as autobiographical tales in the pages of the
New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar,
the
American Mercury,
and elsewhere; and finally, much later, as her full-length memoir,
Gypsy.
From the first she approached her new craft the same way that she had approached her old one: as a comic striptease where she withheld most of what she knew while dangling a few choice limbs in front of her audience. She called writing “mak[ing] with the book words.”

Writing exhausted Gypsy. Plus, Mike Todd continued to woo

her. He wrote, “I left too early to wake you, darling.” And, “your mind is more beautiful than your body. Or vice versa,” he wrote from Chicago, shortly after Thanksgiving. And, “I’m lonesome.”

Around the holidays Gypsy gave in. She headed for Chicago

to star at Todd’s Theatre Café, a profitable venue that Todd had opened in a jai alai palace in a decrepit part of town. Until June, when the authorities decided that gangster Frank Nitti had 116

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

bankrolled it, the red, white, and blue café, located at the corner of Clark and Lawrence Streets, featured vaudeville shows, sat 3,700, and employed 190 waitresses, 100 entertainers, 2 dance bands, and 25 bartenders who manned a 400-foot-long balcony bar. Todd served dinners for 75 cents and a champagne cocktail for a quarter, although he banned dice games and “B-girl” hostesses. Gypsy described stripping there as a family event: “I’d be out there doing the number and the kids were swinging back and forth on the railing.”

While Gypsy was pleasing the family crowd, the culture was hardening against striptease. Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s
Pal Joey,
which opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York, illustrated how sympathy shifted from Gypsy. Written by John O’Hara, the work, originally published as a short story in the
New Yorker,
became the musical that kept Gypsy in the public eye. But it also showed how Americans were coming to see

striptease as a gimmick. The casting was also a Hovick family affair. June played Gladys Bumps, the corrupt chorus girl. According to June, Rose called on the producer, George Abbott, accompanied by, as the younger daughter wrote, “a les.” Rose wept and complained of hunger, deprivation, and daughterly abandonment.

Besides offering a stage for the Hovick women to play out the roles they had constructed offstage,
Pal Joey
presented the strip-117

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

tease intellectual as a hoax. Rodgers and Hart give Gypsy’s number to the journalist Melba Snyder, to sing in the number “Zip,” just after Joey, the sleazy emcee, has told his own series of whoppers about his wealthy past. Melba doesn’t take off anything. (No one does in the musical.) Instead, she responds to Joey’s chicanery with a tale about the “funniest” person she has interviewed—

Gypsy Rose Lee, whose striptease is a gimmick. The point of the pissing contest: Striptease is a less vile con than the others occurring onstage right in front of her.

Zip! Walter Lippman wasn’t brilliant today.

Zip! Will Saroyan ever write a great play?

Zip! I was reading Schopenhauer last night.

Zip! And I think that Schopenhauer was right.

I don’t want to see Zorina,

I don’t want to meet Cobina.

Zip! I’m an intellectual.

I don’t like a deep contralto,

Or a man whose voice is alto.

Zip! I’m a heterosexual.

Zip! It took intellect to master my art.

Zip! Who the hell is Margie Hart?

“Can you draw sweet water from a foul well?” Brooks Atkin-

son famously asked about
Pal Joey.
You could ask the same question about Gypsy. When
American Mercury,
the magazine founded 118

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, named Gypsy “The

Striptease Intellectual” in a feature article, this new moniker evoked a version of that question: was the phrase an oxymoron or did it expose a rags-to-riches truth?

Gypsy either ignored these debates or exploited them. To show support for the troops she wore a net bodysuit spangled with stars, or a Merry Widow with stars sewn in the bra. In this costume on New Year’s Day of 1941 at a benefit for the British War Relief at the Astor Hotel in New York, Gypsy made the cover of
Life.
A photo inside the magazine showed the industrialist William Rhine-lander Stewart plucking a star from her bodysuit, as the caption described it, “for $10.” But the following week the mayor of Youngstown, Ohio, wrote in to inform the editors that he was banning that issue from his city.

Americans appreciated Gypsy most in this era, when, reprising her prewar act, she contrasted her fake elegance and her vulgar surroundings. Comparing her to the torch singer Marion Colby, Cecil Smith, who would later become the
New Republic
’s music critic, praised her refusal to invest striptease with what he called “phony emotionalism.” He meant that she did not pretend that she liked to strip. Maybe Gypsy took his advice to heart. On the road, finishing
The G-String Murders,
Gypsy invested letters to her editor Lee Wright and her publicist Charlotte Seitlin with an irreverent quality. In these letters, which Simon and Schuster would later send to reviewers, she does what she did best: casting 119

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

herself as an ingénue in a sordid setting for comic effect. But she also used gender: in one letter to Wright in 1941, she both flirted and complained as she discussed her detective story in which burlesque people used showbiz jargon, yet her editors wanted her characters to talk like Park Avenue doyennes. Would they have asked that of Damon Runyon? she wondered. She signed

off, “The Naked Genius,” or “The Girl with the Diamond Studded Navel.” She poked fun of the particular ironies of her double-casting. From Chicago she joked that “you see it takes almost an hour to soak off my body paint so I do my rewriting while I wait” and that using a blue ribbon on her typewriter en-hanced her sex appeal. But Gypsy also stood up for herself, objecting when Wright tried to turn the murderer in
The G-String
Murders
into a madman. “That annoys
me
too much when I’m reading a mystery.”

While the press coverage of Gypsy often blamed literature for her intimate life’s failures, those close to her relied on amateur psychology to explain the same. After her divorce from Bob Mizzy was finalized in March, Gypsy was quoted as saying that the couple parted ways because of a difference in temperament: whereas Mizzy wanted to go nightclubbing, she wanted to sit home and read Somerset Maugham. That made her sound silly or insincere. But in a letter June’s then husband, Jesse, ventured her the-120

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

ory about the separation. “Bob’s inferiority complex was pretty heavy. . . . And when one of the two [married people] is an actress, the other must accept that fact and be generous with his patience, and occasionally forget that arrogance and noise are not necessar-ily virile.” It’s more likely that Gypsy was a work in progress.

That summer, when Gypsy asked the International Longshore-

man’s and Warehousemen’s Union for $500 for the war effort, Harry Bridges, the union’s controversial Communist leader, said he had to investigate the USO campaign before parting with the money. Gypsy stood up, shook her fist, and shouted: “Our men need the money now.” Bridges called her a “political menace.”

The anti-Communist press reported on her action as a kind of patriotism. Otherwise most of Gypsy’s efforts for the war had gone smoothly. She performed at benefit events for starving children and at a rally to support striking cosmetic plant workers. She uncomplainingly sold war bonds and did USO tours to boost soldiers’ morale. In 1940 Gypsy had judged a beauty contest in Harlem and performed at the Apollo Theatre alongside stars including Billie Holiday and Ethel Waters, and she also gave money to the Red Cross. But Gypsy’s fit of pique at the Longshoremen’s Union reveals a woman in search of a new role.

She had not yet become a writer. But she was no longer a stripper, even an aristocratic one.

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Just before
G-String
was published, photojournalist Eliot Elisofon documented Gypsy’s transformation from the Queen of

Striptease to the Striptease Intellectual for
Life
magazine. Elisofon, who, according to gossip columnists was dating Gypsy, shoots the celebrity in what, for her, would have been an unconventional setting. She is neither backstage nor taking off her clothes onstage. She is turning the boring and unphotogenic act that intellectuals all over the world do—writing—into performance art avant la lettre. Sheets of paper cover the Aubusson rug.