Gypsy: The Art of the Tease (16 page)

sical music might be modern and fun.) Gypsy mocks “high-brow culture” and suggests that, though she can now afford champagne and caviar, she prefers ordinary American fare. But her costumes were hardly ordinary. In
Star and Garter,
more than in any previous spectacle, she abandoned the Victorian for the circus, nostalgia for fantasy.

Offstage, back in the 1930s Gypsy had gone to a lot of trouble to dress well, ordering her clothes from Paris. When the war made such extravagance impossible, she commissioned Hollywood designer Edith Head, ballet costumier Karinska, or her old friend Pavel Tchelitchew. Mr. John made some of her hats. In an era when many American women wore extravagant hats, Gypsy went out of her way to outdo them. Charles James—the American couturier worn by Mrs. Vincent Astor and Diana Vreeland—contributed to Gypsy’s style, designing the “New Look,” suits and sculpted ball gowns that offset her onstage pizzazz with timeless elegance.

At the same time, Gypsy also began to steal the designs of couturiers she adored. But this was not simply a case of sartorial pla-giarism. She copied with impunity the dresses and suits James (and others) had made for London or New York or Hollywood

royalty. Besides her desire to save money, this impulse reveals Gypsy’s wish—was it by this time a perversion?—both to invent herself and to fit in. Mixing carnival and haute couture in differ-ing proportions, according to the time, the place, and the venue, increased her appeal to the women in her audience.

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The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

If
Star and Garter
also gave Gypsy a wide range of comic and erotic roles, a good number of these roles presented her as fantastical. In one number she glided onstage in an outfit, designed by Karinska, that included three starched petticoats and cro-cheted pasties in the shape of flowers. If she touched them they unraveled. For “The Girl on the Police Gazette,” an Irving Berlin number from the film
On the Avenue.
Gypsy adorned herself in a full net body stocking with a silver spangled bikini and silver epaulets. The costume looks like a silver birdcage. A silver jewel is stuck in her belly button. An enormous tulle train drags behind her, and on her head rests a wide feathered hat. She carries a wand punctuated with a large star. The baroque set for this number was composed of a scrim with the logo from the
National Police Gazette,
the 1890s pink tabloid devoted to sports and burlesque. Reverting to luxury (her “real” self ) for the finale, Gypsy wore a Charles James evening gown the designer called “La Sirene.” Compared to Georgia Sothern—the stripper whom Todd hired to take it off to

“Hold That Tiger”—Gypsy was positively demure.

Star and Garter
revived critics’ accusations that Gypsy’s class act betrayed her humble burlesque origins. That
Star and Garter
tickets cost $4.40 inspired Damon Runyon to complain in his syndicated column that “the poor man has been robbed” by striptease’s gentrification. Gypsy, Runyon argued, had abandoned the working man who supported her before anyone else did.

After
Star and Garter
Gypsy performed “Stripteaser’s Educa-133

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

tion” or “I Can’t Strip to Brahms” for the next two decades, tweaking them only for fashion’s sake by adding the obligatory coda about her success or a line acknowledging rock and roll.

The rags-to-riches tale of a stripper who loved to read, listen to classical music, and think about sex still interested Americans.

Gypsy’s offstage life moved to the center. While secretly carry-ing on with Todd in the summer of 1942, she married Alexander

“Bill” Kirkland, who was then starring on Broadway in the comedy
Junior Miss.
A successful Hollywood actor during the early 1930s as well as a member of the Group Theatre, Kirkland also happened to be gay. Peggy Guggenheim, who attended the wedding, wrote that Kirkland was “hardly suitable as a husband.” But was Gypsy a suitable bride? She scheduled the ceremony at midnight in Highland Mills to give Mike Todd more time to rush in and rescue her from this marriage. She wore a black dress designed by Pavel Tchelitchew. Grapes hung in her hair.

Her costume was not the only thing that made the wed-

ding seem like a burlesque show. There was also the cast: literati and famous guests from the showbiz and art worlds. Max Ernst was there, as was Gil Maison, the circus performer who played the shill when Gypsy took off her clothes onstage. Carl Van Doren, who had introduced the couple, was the best man. A

chimpanzee was the ring bearer.
Life
magazine did a photo spread 134

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

on the wedding, and some of the smaller papers announced that the real event was the reconciliation between Gypsy and Rose, the mother-daughter sideshow.

If weddings can auger a marriage’s future, this one suggested disaster. The chimp peed on Kirkland. A photo in which the groom is slipping the ring on Gypsy’s finger shows the star gazing at her hand as though posing in a hand cream ad. Todd never showed up. Kirkland and Gypsy took a one-day honeymoon.

The marriage cracked into an annulment after three months.

Published that fall, Gypsy’s second thriller,
Mother Finds a
Body,
also cracked. Set mostly in Ysleta, a Texas border town, the novel is best read as a psychological working out of the events of 1937, when Rose’s weird behavior reached its apotheosis. The heroine, Gypsy Rose Lee, skips through dope fiends, burlesque, and dead bodies for over three hundred pages before helping to solve the murders. The most amusing scenes describe stripteases or costumes, or relate anecdotes about “Evangie,” the Rose character. The
New York Times
wrote that “we are glad to note that Gypsy Rose Lee does not lean quite so heavily on vulgarity as she did in
The G-String Murders.
”

Perhaps the lukewarm critical reception to
Mother Finds a Body
inspired Gypsy to seek a new arena to conquer as she had done in the 1930s. Or perhaps she wanted to spend money conspicuously. Either way, she began to dabble in the art world; bidding on paintings by Degas and Dufy at Sotheby’s, she bought them as 135

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

an investment. At first she harbored the idea that having owned these paintings would cause their value to appreciate, but just as she genuinely loved books so she grew to genuinely love art and artists. Her taste ranged from the great moderns to her great friends: O’Keeffe, Ernst, Miró, Chagall, Cocteau, Picasso, Fan-nie Brice, and Marcel Vertes all hung on her walls. Her taste was not, as Todd’s biographer Art Cohn claims, vulgar. When Mike Todd offered her a choice of three paintings, she chose a large female nude by Bouguereau, the academic French painter. Cohn makes a point of saying that the other two paintings were by Gauguin and Rousseau, but rather than proving her bad taste this demonstrates her interest in extending her persona into a brand.

She also owned a collection of Charles Dana Gibson plates.

Just as reading led to writing, and wearing clothes led to making them, collecting led to creating art that puzzled out her identity. Her chosen genre was the collage;
Self-portrait
articulates the failure of Gypsy’s cobbled-together selves to cohere. In a shadow box, she tops her
Star and Garter
–costumed body with a photo of a dog’s head. A photo of a woman’s body in a Victorian bathing suit is stuck on another head shot. A newspaper photo of her face above Walter Winchell’s name suggests that her mind and her dreams could meet only under the sign of publicity. All of the figures float above seashells at the bottom of the frame. Maybe Gypsy meant
Self-portrait
to repeat the joke she had played as the Queen of Striptease, when she pretended to be an American aris-136

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

tocrat. It pops up in the background of a photo in which Gypsy is posed in Grecian robes, in profile, in front of her art collection.

Self-portrait
was not just a vanity project. It asked viewers: where is the striptease? In January of 1943 it, along with another of Gypsy’s works, hung in the “Exhibition of 31 Women,” the

“fantastical” art exhibit housed in Peggy Guggenheim’s new gallery, “Art of This Century,” on West Fifty-seventh Street.

The jury for this famous exhibit included Marcel Duchamp,

Ernst, and André Breton. Djuna Barnes showed in it as did

Dorothea Tanning, Meret Oppenheim, Frieda Kahlo, and Louise Nevelson. (According to John Cage, Joseph Cornell “idolized”

Gypsy, whom he met after she bought one of his works.)

Like her stripping, her acting, and her writing, Gypsy’s collage invited ridicule. One reader wrote to the
New York Times
art critic, “If she’s an artist, I’ll send you a pound of coffee.” But the collage appeared, along with the rest of the exhibit, in the lavish surrealist periodical
VVV,
which sculptor David Hare edited that year. On the same page was a photo of her in her
Star and Garter
costume and a portrait she commissioned Ernst to paint of her, as if by piecing together different images one could find the real person, or at least
a
real person.

Max Ernst’s portrait of Gypsy is unlike any other existing image of her. You might say that it creates a separate illusion—

the Gypsy who might have been. More mermaid or ghost than

human, Ernst’s
Gypsy,
a phantasmagoric creature covered with 137

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

either feathers or scales, floats through macabre, mossy landscapes.

Ernst divorces Gypsy from her burlesque past and striptease and sends her into flight like the Loplops—the made-up birds whose identities he adopted and who appear in so much of his prewar work. These elements’ absence is itself noteworthy in that without them Gypsy gets transformed into a supernatural being.

“Doing a Striptease in Which She Doesn’t Take Off a Thing”

In the real world, Gypsy’s romance with Todd dragged on. Although he had let her marry another man, he continued to woo her. “I miss you so don’t marry any actors, not even a butcher,”

read one telegram, dated 1943, months after her wedding, referring to the “candy butcher”—the vendor who strolled up and down the aisles at the burlesque theater selling hotdogs, choco-late, and racy picture books. But whether she was a ghost or a mermaid, an intellectual or a piece of Americana, in love with an actor or a butcher, one thing was certain: Gypsy was no longer a sex symbol. In a March 1943 article she wrote for
Mademoiselle
titled “What’s New in War Wolves,” she complains about her transformation from sex object to household name. Although she describes herself as wearing a skin-tight, red-sequined dress slit up to her thigh, she wrote that the sexy merchant marines that come to see her escort Vassar grads as opposed to Ladies of the Night. The punch line involves a merchant marine introducing Gypsy to his mother.

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The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

Gypsy’s success in the 1940s contains many of these “I used to be a sex symbol” comic bits. The naughty self that she had constructed had gotten her to Hollywood and Broadway, but, upon her arrival those places divested her of her sex appeal. To succeed she would have had to tone it down. So when the film version of
The G-String Murders
was released in the spring of 1943, the first American movie written by and about a stripper lacked a striptease. During the production process Gypsy even coached director Hunt Stromberg on how the character based on her could strip “without actually doing so.”

A movie that teased about a strip without a strip: that was typical Hollywood sleight of hand. The
New York Times
criticized
The
G-String Murders
—which the studio retitled
Lady of Burlesque
—

for lacking glamour, then turned around to say that burlesque by its very nature was unglamorous.
Lady of Burlesque
grossed $1.85

million on a promise to give audiences a glimpse of Gypsy’s backstage life and her striptease. But it never delivered. Instead of answering the question Gypsy had asked a decade earlier—

were women who took off their clothes onstage thinking about sex?—as the
New York Times
noted, in
Lady of Burlesque
Barbara Stanwyck “threatens to revolutionize the entire undress industry with a striptease in which she doesn’t take off a thing.”

This was not quite the situation in the movie version of
Stage
Door Canteen,
but it was close. A legendary war effort, featuring such stars as Tallulah Bankhead, Katharine Cornell, Katharine 139

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual