Gypsy: The Art of the Tease (18 page)

In the spring of 1944, while making
Belle of the Yukon,
the first film Gypsy performed in under her own name, she encountered the director Otto Preminger at the Beverly Hills home of Elsie de Wolfe Mendl, the actress, gay interior decorator, and socialite, whom she had known since the 1930s. Gypsy and Kirkland had finally gotten around to divorcing. The then-married Preminger had directed the psychological thriller
Laura
to much acclaim the previous year. Film critics write about the archetypal European director as a rake, as someone who ignored social niceties and taboos both on screen and in his personal life. In the 1950s he would become involved with Dorothy Dandridge.

As recounted by Erik, the relationship between his mother

and Preminger, which took place in March of that year, sounds less like a white-hot passion than it does cozy domesticity. “She used to make dinners for me on a little hot plate,” Preminger told his son in 1970. “One day I phoned her and the studio told me she had gone back to New York,” he said. But then, as Erik 147

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

tells it, Preminger plus Gypsy equaled a family, Gypsy style. The next time Preminger called, Gypsy was in the hospital. Erik had been born. According to Erik, on her deathbed Gypsy told her son that she wanted it that way.

D-Day brought with it economic prosperity and a sense of well-being, especially in New York. New ways of stirring high and low art emerged, and Gypsy’s act—fresh and literate before the war—

now seemed even less so. The Broadway musical
On the Town
provided a more modern take on striptease, alluding to it as though it were a corrupted dream and not a critique of the distribution of wealth or a measure of anyone’s morality.

Hollywood remained stuck in the Paleolithic era. When
Belle
of the Yukon
was released at the end of 1944, the former Queen of Striptease did not strip. “This is a period picture,” Gypsy informed reporters who asked about it. Tinseltown’s reluctance to let Gypsy take off her clothes was not that surprising. One of its strategies is to toss sirens into the past so that audiences can ogle them and still be virtuous. Playing Belle de Valle, the head of a troupe of showgirls, the ex-girlfriend of Randolph Scott and the rival of Dinah Shore, Gypsy resembles Mae West in that star’s later roles. There is something ossified about her. Gypsy gets in some good lines, such as, when advising Shore about how to deal with a broken heart: “Time. Diamond bracelets speed 148

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

things along. A new hat. The best thing’s to get mad. Break something. Over the guy’s head, if possible.” But “her usual earthiness and humor are buried under a ton of plumes, big hats, and bustles,” the
New York Times
complained.

The film’s real star is Gypsy’s costumes. Swaddled in hues of brown, gray, and white, the other actors fade next to Gypsy, whose dresses, designed by Don Loper, are larger and more vivid than anything else on-screen: a forest-colored scroll-shaped velvet hat topped with a bunch of fake violets; a strapless magenta taffeta gown with a train; a mint tulle negligee festooned with an enormous tulle rose on one shoulder; a gold lame evening dress trimmed in fur. Striding down Main Street next to Randolph Scott, dog under her arm, Gypsy and her clothes crackle. Hopper’s column published the dollar values of Gypsy’s costumes so that filmgoers could know that the woman who became famous taking it off would now spare no expense to get dressed.

With the end of the war came American prosperity but not a family cease-fire. Rose accelerated her pleas that her daughter stop telling tales about her. “Can’t you write about other people?” she asked. Gypsy could not. She was supporting Aunt Belle and Big Lady. The Gypsy Rose Lee Papers family correspondence folders from the mid-1940s are full of demands for money forwarded to Gypsy from the Welfare Office in Seattle, from doctors, from 149

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

dentists. Gypsy sometimes paid, but by D-Day she refused, via lawyers, to allow her family to hold her hostage for telling the truth. When, in 1945, the prodigal daughter visited what remained of the Hovicks in Seattle for the first time, she brought them red shoes and black lace strip panties. In letters recounting this visit to Rose, Aunt Belle and Big Lady complain that Gypsy is nice to them only when newspaper reporters are around.

“Out-Gypsying” Gypsy once again picked up, as though the

postwar generation needed to exert its own efforts to strip the veneer from Gypsy’s unsettling striptease. In 1946 future novelist Jacqueline Susann starred as “ladylike” stripper Fudge Farrell in a touring production of Charles Raddock’s play
Between the
Covers,
which the author was inspired to write after Gypsy’s publisher rejected his book. Thriller writer Craig Rice sent Gypsy a telegram: “current time magazine credits me with having written mother finds a body. I wish I had. I have sent them and [
sic
]

indignant message regarding the error and hope you will do the same.”

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Selling Striptease

Despite the postwar generation’s expansive flair, at times a Victorian prudishness surged. At Christmas 1948 Gypsy performed on a live CBS television variety show from Madison Square Garden.

Everything went smoothly as a parade of stars did their numbers.

But the minute Gypsy touched her shoulder strap, announcing that she intended to do “Psychology of a Stripteaser,” as
Time
magazine then called it, wavy gray lines appeared and “startled televiewers found themselves staring at nothing but the initials CBS, while in the background, Gypsy’s voice trilled on, and en-thusiastic Air Force veterans shouted the traditional ‘Take it off!

Take it off!’”

At first CBS denied that it had censored the program. Finally, however, the network admitted that “there were no technical 151

Selling Striptease

Gypsy Rose Lee at the Royal American Carnival. Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

difficulties,” and that executives had made a decision to protect the American people from salacious images. Gypsy responded:

“It was nearly midnight. Surely the kiddies aren’t watching at that hour!” When asked why she wore such long gloves, she sent the same message on Clifton Fadiman’s long-running program,
This Is
Show Business:
“So I’d have something to take off on the show.”

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Selling Striptease

When, a year later, Gypsy “ran away” to join the carnival, she was responding to that prudishness. But her elopement also has a familiar ring, recalling previous ones with burlesque, the Follies, and Hollywood. Each time Gypsy’s success depends on her rescuing a vanishing genre of popular entertainment. In the late 1940s the carnival, like burlesque in the 1930s, clung to any act that might draw crowds: girls; feats of strength, freaks, striptease sideshows. The Royal American Carnival was among the most

successful. Run by Carl J. Sedermayr, it toured the West, the Midwest, and Canada.

Some carnival folks speculated that Gypsy’s appearance in

their midst announced her demise: “were she as high and won-derful, whats [
sic
] she joining a carnival for, is it the last straw?”

the Monkey Girl asked Hedda Hopper after she ran a column

about Gypsy and her new profession. It was, in the end, a personal decision. After Sedermayr hired Gypsy to do ten shows a day in towns like Davenport, Iowa, and Saint Louis, she saw it as a homecoming. She missed the smell of greasepaint. The honky-tonk and the glittering lights reminded her of her childhood. “I can hardly wait until I get back with the show,” she wrote to Hopper. Gypsy would travel with the carnival for the next several years, polishing her nightclub act and developing her own touring company, the Royal American Beauties. (The carnival was also child-friendly and allowed her to keep Erik, then six, by her side.) Gypsy loved going to a new midway every day and setting up a 153

Selling Striptease

city of tents in an empty field. The carnival returned her to people that she liked the most: simple country folks. She wrote to Hopper: “in practically every exhibit the whole family works . . . babies and diapers all over the place.” Far from New York, in a new town every night, Gypsy could recycle her act with impunity.

Her name was in lights. Fans fought to buy tickets. During the Korean War crowds of thousands thronged to her shows.

Gypsy changed some aspects of her act, especially her cos-

tumes. In the late 1940s Charles James designed a Merry Widow for her carnival numbers. Her costumes now suggested an effort to revive the contrast between luxury and humor she had honored in the Depression: in the middle of the woods, in front of the Rolls, Gypsy and Les Girls pose as though they were

stranded. A white mink stole slinks around Gypsy’s arms, and the girls wear full net panties, gloves, and high heels. But the danger is not that they are lost: a blond holds a traffic sign that says,

“Curves ahead.”

If the carnival provided the perfect backdrop for “Psychology of the Striptease,” the star for the first time in years launched some new numbers, like the “fairy godmother in a Cinderella striptease.” Lecturing the audience about her profession’s history, she borrowed from her Gay Nineties number from
Star and
Garter
and did a “reverse” striptease, taking off pieces of her gown to dress four half-naked girls. But a
Life
magazine photo best captures her in this incarnation. She stands in front of a giant 154

Selling Striptease

banner displaying her portrait, in which her expression is closer to an Old Testament grimace than anything recognizable as pleasure. The real Gypsy, smaller and more lithe, arms bare and holding on to the tent rope, is smiling.

While staging her own version of
On the Road,
Gypsy was transformed by the 1950s media into the epitome of the domestic, consumerist American woman. This was the age of Doris Day, Elizabeth Taylor, and the lifestyle that would be depicted in
The
Feminine Mystique.
But like much image-making, the transformation contained more than a grain of truth. Gypsy had always been interested in the “womanly” arts. During her marriage to Bob Mizzy she cooked him “city chicken”—lamb chops and

pork chops on a skewer. Her appointment books were filled with recipes. But in the conservative postwar era, a single mother—

especially one who used to be a stripper—needed to take a more active interest in the womanly arts than the happily married homemaker, at least on the surface. A piece Gypsy wrote in 1944, titled “The Things I Want,” listed “a husband, baby, and home”

and then blamed her marriages’ failure on her career.

Gypsy exploited her love of things domestic: she held a weekly quilting bee for actresses Faye Emerson, Hermione Gingold, June, and Celeste Holm, which Alfred Eisenstadt photographed for
Life
magazine. In 1948 she wrote the forward for her friend 155