Gypsy: The Art of the Tease (17 page)

Hepburn, Harpo Marx, and George Raft as well as Gypsy,
Stage
Door Canteen
was released in the summer of 1943 after a successful theatrical run. Produced by Sol Lesser, the film is a patriotic love story between a soldier and a hostess as well as a star-studded gala. It also contains the only existing film version of Gypsy’s striptease, which ensured that it would receive a “B” rating from the Legion of Decency. The striptease begins with the camera panning the crowd, which is full of soldiers and their girlfriends.

Everyone is having a good time. The emcee introduces Gypsy,

“who went from without rags to riches.” A laugh track responds.

The star enters, wearing one of her archetypal costumes: the picture hat, the voluminous skirt with a Harlequin pattern; the blouse with Leg of Mutton sleeves. She has threaded rags through her hair, tying it in two Pippi Longstocking braids. She looms above the soldiers, who are gathered around her like children waiting for their bedtime story.

And what a bedtime story it is. Gypsy begins to recite her number, pressing her palms in front of her like a nun. Using her fingers she ticks off all the things she is not thinking. A minute goes by and she has not removed a stitch of clothing. She begins to unbutton her blouse and unties the ribbon around her neck.

She flashes her clavicle. She cocks her head and raises her skirt to her thighs. She takes off her garter and, bending from the waist, unrolls her stocking, teasing the soldiers with her white garter belt. Continuing her patter, Gypsy removes her hat, rolls up her 140

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

sleeve, and flashes her forearm. She takes off her petticoat and throws it over one of the soldiers’ heads. Like a ballerina on top of a music box when the music stops, she ends the striptease with a funny little curtsy. But before she can exit another solider shouts: “Take off what you did in
Star and Garter,
” and Gypsy replies, “Take that off, boys? I’ll catch cold!” To make up for saying no, as she exits she tosses her garter into the audience. A fight breaks out.

Besides prolonging the fantasy that Gypsy’s act could incite a riot among the troops, what emerges out of
Stage Door Canteen
is that she is hiding her real striptease from the camera. That would take place elsewhere, behind closed doors and for a private audience. In the hall of mirrors world of American popular entertainment, there is always time for one more imitation, one more striptease. No one ever gets to see anything real.

When a new round of imitations appeared, it was more bur-

lesque-y than any prior one. In the summer of 1943 the film version of Irving Berlin’s musical revue
This Is the Army
includes a drag parody of Gypsy in
Stage Door Canteen.
Berlin’s patriotic tale of former showmen putting on a show to raise morale made hundreds of thousands of dollars for the war effort. After opening on Broadway during the previous summer, it toured the

country and then the world. Berlin celebrated every genre of entertainment and every soldier in the armed forces. But Julie Oshins’s impersonation of Gypsy—mincing across the stage in a 141

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

ruffled gown and a garden hat—was extraordinary. As with
Lady of
Burlesque,
reviewers raved. But this time the imposter was a female impersonator, and reviewers commented that a man could do a better striptease than the striptease original herself. The
New York
Times
wrote: “The Great Private Oshins out-Gypsys Gypsy.”

So when
The Naked Genius,
the Striptease Intellectual’s second play, opened on Broadway in the fall of 1943, it never stood a chance. A woman whose striptease could be outdone by that of a soldier dressed as a stripper could not possibly be a writer. Any-way, by the time it reached the Plymouth Theatre,
The Naked
Genius
had a tormented history. In 1942 Gypsy had begun to work on the script, first called
The Ghost in the Woodpile.
Next it became
The Seven Year Cycle
as an homage to astrological cycles.

Finally Mike Todd, who was producing, insisted that the word

“naked” appear in the title. When
The Naked Genius
picks up Gypsy’s story after her success with
G-String Murders,
it casts her as a fake. Stripper Honey Bee Carroll pens a well-received book and almost marries the publisher’s handsome son, but then, like some of the heroines Gypsy played in the late 1930s, she dumps the literary guy and returns to “her place” on the burlesque stage.
The Naked Genius
contains some good one-liners defending Gypsy’s career as well as a wedding lampooning her real one to Alexander Kirkland a year earlier:

“Ironic isn’t it . . . I write a best seller so I can get two thousand a week in a burlesque house in Philadelphia?”

142

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

(About the novel Honey Bee has published) “It wasn’t a gimmick . . . I had something to say and I said it.”

“Every time I try to get out of burlesque . . . try to do something different, it turns out to be a gimmick.”

Gypsy’s co-writer, the playwright and script doctor George S.

Kaufman, was so sure that
The Naked Genius
would bomb that he famously asked Mike Todd, the producer, to change his credit on the show to Jed Harris (whom he despised). Having managed to make
Naked Genius
the first play to be sold to Hollywood (for $350,000) while still in rehearsal, Todd refused. (The play had to run for three weeks for him to get his fee.) New Yorkers were buying tickets, and journalists were covering the backstage drama.

What else could a producer want? Todd did not care whether critics panned the show in out-of-town tryouts. “No one expected her to write a first class drama. No one expected her to miss the bus by half a block,” the
Boston Post
critic wrote.

Todd’s solution? To make girlfriend Joan Blondell, a chorus girl whom he had cast, more like Gypsy herself. When
The Naked Genius
moved to New York, he recostumed Blondell in a “diaphanous negligee” and gave her a powder puff to hold. He added a waterfall to the set and monkeys to the cast. Nothing helped. The
New York
Times
called the show “a polite bore” and marveled at its “love story that was practically girlish in its routine.” Despite Todd’s schemes—or perhaps because of them—
The Naked Genius
fared only slightly better in its movie incarnation,
Doll Face.
“With all 143

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

due respect to Miss Hovick, her talents have been better demonstrated otherwise,” wrote Bosley Crowther in the
New York Times.

But
The Naked Genius
(and
Mother Finds a Body
) may also have failed for other reasons. As Americans became more deeply involved in World War II, they held tight to the view that a stripper who pretended to be a writer was not a suitable icon. (No matter that Gypsy herself went overboard to help out in the war effort: “You’ve got to show the boys what they’re fighting for,”

she told Hedda Hopper that year.) It is also possible that Gypsy was blocked. Maybe she needed a Seven Middagh Street to inspire her, or perhaps she was too mired in despair over Mike Todd’s affair with Joan Blondell to write anything good. (Some articles published at around the time of
The Naked Genius
’s Pitts-burgh tryout quote Gypsy as saying that a movie star could not play a stripper—a charge she denied in a letter to Todd.)

Gypsy’s editor, Lee Wright, blamed “the boys”—by which she meant Kaufman and Todd—for “mashing”
Naked Genius
into “a pulp.” Gypsy herself (whom Todd had banned from rehearsal) pleaded: “You say you can razzle dazzle it . . . can you blame me for wishing that the play should stand on its own without a razzle dazzle?” After
The Naked Genius,
Gypsy wrote one more autobiographical play,
The World on a String,
which crackles. But it never got produced. She stayed away from Broadway for ten years.

I have another theory about Gypsy’s uneven literary output in the 1940s. Because
Mother Finds a Body
and
The Naked Genius
144

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

failed to sing songs about the halcyon past, the public could not interpret them as fables. Both works told stories too close to the present to capture the popular imagination. While the American public is willing to suspend disbelief about a recycled fiction set once upon a time, it is less willing when that story takes place now. It is no accident that Gypsy would publish her next hit in 1957, when enough time had elapsed for her to draw on American nostalgia for the Jazz Age.

The idea that Gypsy was a fake continued to haunt her. In January of 1943 Dorothy Wheelock, a former
Harper’s Bazaar
editor, sued Gypsy for $5,000 and half the royalties for her work on
The
G-String Murders
three years earlier. Wheelock charged that not only had she collaborated with the stripper, she had connected her with Simon and Schuster, which published
The G-String Murders.

Gypsy countered that the editor may have written “a sample book,” but that book was not
G-String.
She settled the lawsuit out of court, but the press had a field day with these accusations.

Shortly after the lawsuit Gypsy managed to both “out-Gypsy”

her imitators and prove herself to be the genuine article by writing a book in what today has become our most discredited literary form: the memoir. Gypsy had been publishing autobiographical pieces since the winter after
The G-String Murders
appeared.

But in the spring of 1943 she placed the first of three of these 145

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

pieces, all of which were about her hard knock childhood in Harold Ross’s
New Yorker.
The other two would appear before the end of the year. “Mothers and the Knights of Pythias”;

“Mother and the Man Named Gordon”; and “Just Like Children Leading Normal Lives,” established her story and cemented her reputation as a writer.

In the late 1930s and early 1940s Ross was publishing whimsical profiles by and about celebrities and eccentrics. But for the
New
Yorker
to publish a stripper’s “real” stories—written by that stripper—was unprecedented. As for Gypsy, selling stories about her nightmarish childhood and her career choice to the
New Yorker
gained her the cachet and credibility that, until that moment, she had grasped only in flashes. After that, she never hesitated to broadcast her authentic authorial pain. “Anyone who writes for the
New Yorker
gets a neurotic stomach. Mine is shot to hell,” she told a reporter while she was laboring over the first of these pieces.

Beyond Gypsy’s stomach, at a time when Freud was in vogue, the memoirs provided an explanation for armchair psychologists trying to understand how she came to perform a striptease: Rose.

Were Gypsy’s
New Yorker
stories true? Does it matter? Would it matter now? Tossing truth with nontruth was not unique to

Gypsy, or even to the Hovicks: but Gypsy excelled at it.

Furious over Gypsy’s
New Yorker
version of their life, Rose submitted her own manuscript to Simon and Schuster, which, according to the columnist Hedda Hopper, if published would 146

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

compel Gypsy to sue. Only one piece of Rose’s version of Gypsy’s story ever got published, albeit in a venue that was several notches below the
New Yorker.
The
New York Journal American
ran

“Gypsy’s Growing Pains,” invoking Gypsy’s teen weight problem and her topless audition, at age fifteen, for Jazz Age porn king Earl Carroll.