Gypsy: The Art of the Tease (15 page)

Gypsy wears pants rolled up to her knees, and she is barefoot.

Her hair is pulled back into a messy bun. She is holding a cigarette, and ashes overflow from the ashtray onto her desk.

Although Gypsy mastered this photo opportunity with the

same sure hand that she had mastered previous ones, I do not think that she ever imagined that
The G-String Murders
would be such a wild commercial success. But Gypsy may have intuited what kind of book that she could turn into a hit. Rather than aspire to serious literary fiction, she had the good sense to write a thriller at a moment when Americans considered that genre less literature than burlesque for readers. Published in October 1941,
The G-String Murders
is a memoir posing as a thriller, revealing Gypsy’s life in peekaboo glimpses. The heroine, “Gypsy,” refers to herself, among other things, as “the dazzling star,” a phrase that she stole from a tabloid account of her arrest in 1931. Gypsy disguises the theater and many of the other characters’ names, 122

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

but only barely. There is a greedy burlesque owner, a lesbian policewoman, and Princess Nirvana, a stripper with intellectual pretensions.

Critics complained that the book’s content was risqué, and for the time it was: Gypsy describes how the strippers keep their breasts from sagging (splash ice water on them, resort to danger-ous paraffin implants). The murderer strangles several victims with a G-string. But more interesting than the naughty bits is that Gypsy tells the story in the first person, as though rehearsing for the memoir she would later write.

Although
The G-String Murders
immediately hit the best-seller list, was reviewed more than five hundred times, and eventually sold about twenty-six thousand copies, more than any other thriller at the time except
The Thin Man,
Simon and Schuster initially promoted it as “well constructed.” This shows about the same degree of confidence in Gypsy as Stephen Sondheim did when he described Ethel Merman as a “talking dog.” But in one of her many deft moves of that era, Gypsy herself quipped, in a review of her own book for the “Down the Aisle” column, that she didn’t know why critics were making such a fuss.
The G-String
Murders,
she wrote, flashing her literary knowledge even as she covered it up, “isn’t even
Crime and Punishment.
”

Whereas Gypsy’s success on Broadway had inspired the press to doubt her claims about reading, her success in publishing made them doubt her past itself. Reviewing the book for the
New
123

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Yorker,
Clifton Fadiman characterized it as better read “with eyebrows raised.”
Daily News
theater critic Burns Mantle wrote that since the book was “readable,” Simon and Schuster “wrote
G-String
and Gypsy checked it.” (He retracted this statement after Gypsy wrote him an angry letter.) Never a fan, the
Daily
Worker
called the book “a stunt.”

But in March 1942 Gypsy, along with many other celebrities, performed for the opening ceremony of the Victory Book Campaign, which donated copies of books (including Gypsy’s) to the troops. It is testament to how thoroughly Gypsy had become mainstream that, reversing his criticism of the star at the 1939

World’s Fair, Brooks Atkinson commended her for making striptease “as American as hot dogs . . . Gypsy had as much right to speak from the steps of the library during the Victory Book Drive as many other authors less famous for their pleasing style,”

he wrote.

Still, no matter how Gypsy sparkled in public, she could never overcome the suspicion that she was faking her literary talent.

That may have been part of the appeal. Assaulting received wisdom about the stability of class and gender, the phrase “Striptease Intellectual” inspired snickers and glee. “Gypsy Rose Lee has not only written books, but read them,” the
New York Herald
Tribune
opined in 1942. But Gypsy did read books, although her taste sometimes wavered according to her social compass. She liked Tennessee Williams’s play
Camino Real,
as well as
Waiting
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The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

for Godot, Desire Under the Elms,
and the sentimental novel
I
Can Get It for You Wholesale,
by her friend Jerome Weidman.

This last choice is interesting. In Weidman’s novel, a Depression-era immigrant makes it out of the ghetto. Harry Bogen succeeded by his wits—the “act” that Weidman writes about is a kind of male, Jewish Stripteaser’s Education. Maybe every American novel is.

The charge that
The G-String Murders
was ghostwritten, which has haunted the book since it was first published, strikes me as absurd. To be sure, Gypsy had help. George Davis edited her. Lee Wright sent her pages of detailed notes and set her up with Craig Rice, the Chicago reporter and mystery writer. She was no Proust. But the “Striptease Intellectual” is more than a mass culture fantasy. Besides her radio and TV charisma, Gypsy did things in private that suggest an attention to literature more enduring than that of most other stars I can think of, and certainly more enduring than most strippers I’ve read about before or since. Throughout her life Gypsy snipped “Great Minds”—

a newspaper feature describing intellectual giants’s lives—and saved them with the idea of interpolating them in her numbers.

A great synthesizer, she coined aphorisms such as “God is love, but get it in writing.”

But most of all, Gypsy wrote about herself at a time when few women entertainers—few women of any kind—were doing so.

Titled “Christmas on the Keith Family Circuit,” her first auto-125

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

biographical piece appeared in
Harper’s Bazaar
the same year her book was published. From that moment she regarded her book’s heroine “Gypsy” as an extension of her onstage persona. Sometime after the fictional character she created in
The G-String
Murders
eclipsed the renown of the one she played onstage, a reporter asked if she would star in the Broadway adaptation of the novel. She responded: “I’d be a dope to play for $350 a week the part of a Chicago stripteaser when I can
be
the Chicago stripper for $2000.”

A force in Gypsy’s transformation from Queen of Striptease to Striptease Intellectual was women. Though in burlesque in the early 1930s she had appealed to “bald head” burlesque goers, gay men, the intelligentsia and the dates they dragged along, a few members of the Algonquin Round Table, and prostitutes, once she crossed over to the Follies the number of middle-class women in her fan pool increased. These women followed Gypsy to the stage door, demanded her autograph, and critiqued her costumes and furs. Gypsy always liked to lead her audiences to believe that these women scorned her, but the truth was that some of them saw her as an ideal. After the publication of Gypsy’s novel, photos of
G-String Murders
signings show lines of women snaking out the door and into the street.

In Hollywood directors were more interested in the Queen of Striptease than ever, but only if her story got a fairytale ending.

Released in January 1942, the Billy Wilder/Howard Hawks film 126

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

Ball of Fire
is commonly understood to be based on
Snow White
and the Seven Dwarves.
But the film also domesticates the street-wise stripper. Wilder pits Barbara Stanwyck (Sugarpuss O’Shea) against Gary Cooper (a Mencken-type figure researching American slang) in a Pygmalion story sentimentalizing Gypsy’s rise to fame. The “stripteaser’s education” inverts Gypsy’s—Cooper is the intellectual here—although Stanwyck does teach him a thing or two about sex. The story ends happily ever after.

A Palace for the Striptease Intellectual

If
G-String
established Gypsy as an author, it also brought her real financial success. From 1930 to 1940 the stripper had lived at four New York addresses that roughly map her social peregrina-tions: Rego Park; East Thirty-sixth Street, north of Gramercy Park; a Fifty-seventh Street railroad flat; and Seven Middagh Street in Brooklyn.

With the money Gypsy made from
The G-String Murders,
she bought the four-story “Rutherford Palace” at 151 (now 153) East Sixty-third Street in New York. Named after Barbara Rutherford, Cornelius Vanderbilt’s granddaughter, the building was erected in 1919. Gypsy decorated the rooms with homey touches such as Gibson girl drawings, a Bouguereau oil, a present from Mike Todd, and her own signature touches such as a mink toilet seat cover. She put living room chairs she had re-covered with her own needlepoint designs on top of the elegant marble floor and scattered 127

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

plastic and ceramic cherubs around. She also hung her framed tattoo collection on the wall and maintained a collection of rare trees. Reporters noted the mansion’s lavishness and Gypsy’s bedroom in particular, characterizing it as “prim,” despite plush mauve velvet armchairs and the ornate oak bed that once belonged to President William Henry Harrison. Photographers posed Gypsy in profile against her fine china or in her library wearing a pink taffeta Charles James “tree gown,” so called for the bouffant skirt that spread out around her ankles like the roots of a banyan tree.

The backdrop—her paintings and sculpture, and a zebra-skin rug inspired by the ones on the banquettes at El Morocco—projected wealth. She now lived the life she had invented.

Although Sixty-third Street between Third and Lexington

Avenues was home to many New York City notables, it became known as “the Gypsy Rose Lee block.” The neighbors’ responses to Gypsy’s plan to widen the house sound as though she is bump-ing them offstage.

From Star and Garter to Self-portrait and Max Ernst

In 1942 three men from Peoria wired the army to say that they would like to join the Office of Civilian Defense. Since they were not Gypsy Rose Lee, they wondered, was that possible? “Is this a war or a burlesque show?” they asked. The press got hold of their wire and published it as news. If Gypsy had seen the wire, she might have answered, “Both.” But she was too busy recycling 128

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

her number from the mid-1930s to worry about critics. A photo from a performance she gave that year at the Music Box Theatre is nearly identical to ones from the Irving Place in the mid-1930s: at the penultimate moment of her act, her blouse slides off her shoulder, she holds her strip skirt in front of her, and she covers one breast with her hand as she looks away from the camera.

In Gypsy’s defense, it is difficult to escape the banality of striptease. Everyone looks the same, more or less, when they take off their clothes. Striptease is not an art form, or at least not in the sense that painting is. Or at the very least we perceive nakedness as original at some times and pornographic at others. The closest we get to thinking about striptease as an original art is when someone else has made the naked woman into a nude and she has been hung in a museum. If the woman is undressing onstage, and if she is to be considered artistic, her props must be so outrageous and her jokes so funny as to set her apart from all other imitations. Gypsy needed to come up with something new to indicate that undressing was a wartime original. She needed a come-back vehicle that would please a publicity-wary country im-mersed in a European war.

Once again Mike Todd rescued her—or was it the other way

around? Todd was producing an old-fashioned revue,
Star and
Garter,
and Gypsy would star. The revue opened in June as an ex-ercise in nostalgia, a love letter to a more innocent time—Todd 129

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

Gypsy Rose Lee in
Star and Garter,
1942. Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

130

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

borrowed the revue’s name itself from a turn-of-the-century burlesque show. When a backer withdrew, Gypsy stepped in. As part of the agreement, the show initially was to be called “The Gypsy Rose Lee Follies.” With music by Harold Rome and the Ray Sinatra Orchestra,
Star and Garter
presented a naughty lineup of vaudeville acts and stripteases, but the apotheosis of the evening was “I Can’t Strip to Brahms,” Gypsy’s updated version of her 1936 number “Stripteaser’s Education.”

“Brahms” differed from “Stripteaser” in at least one way.

Whereas “Stripteaser” describes Gypsy’s “elite” childhood,

“Brahms” tells of her “failures” to clean up burlesque. If “Stripteaser” is about what Gypsy was, Brahms is about what she was not. The two songs both begin with stanzas about her fake past performing at the opera and the ballet, but by the second stanza

“Brahms” has given up any pretense of gentility. Instead, the song uses music to explain why Gypsy cannot make striptease respectable. So rarified is this song’s narrator that, as she strips, the arrangements quote from the composers that she “cannot” strip to. She sings that she “can’t do the bumps to Puccini. . . . I could never take a corset off to the music of Rimsky-Korsakov. . . .

Gawd knows I would play to an empty house if I had to strip to the music of Johann Strauss.” (In the LP Gypsy added sound effects, such as clinking armor, to show how difficult it was to take it off to Wagner. After a few stanzas, the music speeds up and a big band sound takes over, allowing that strip tease without clas-131

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