Gypsy: The Art of the Tease (21 page)

“not” her mother, it never enters the world of adult sexuality.

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My mother—who got me into this business—

(she is pulling up her dress)

always told me—make them beg for more.

And then don’t give it to them.

(drops the dress)

But I’m not my mother.

Gypsy
was not the only musical from this era using striptease to add texture. The year before
Gypsy
opened, Bob Fosse had choreographed the
Damn Yankees
number “Whatever Lola Wants”

for Gwen Verdon and showed Lola stripping with verve. Verdon glides across the stage, shaking her body in a half-sexy, half-satiric number. Striptease for adults: now it caricatures desire, now it incarnates it.

Without the real Gypsy and her burlesque career, Fosse’s

striptease would never have appeared in a musical about baseball.

Yet compared with Verdon’s striptease,
Gypsy
’s look hokey. Only in the 1960s did the stripper as a character became erotic in the modern sense, as in Jane Fonda’s space-age striptease in Roger Vadim’s
Barbarella.

Asked by a journalist about her mother on the eve of the musical’s premiere, Gypsy responded, “I can’t think of Rose as being dead.” Neither could critics. When
Gypsy
opened on May 21, they fastened more on Rose’s complexity than on Gypsy’s

striptease. Walter Kerr described her as a “mastodon”; Kenneth 173

Selling Striptease

Tynan compared her to “a nightmare incarnation of Mrs. Worthington,” Noël Coward’s stage-door mother, and
New York Times
theater critic Brooks Atkinson wrote that she was a “juggernaut.”

California

Even after the musical, Gypsy dreamed of new ways to sell her story. In 1958 she had begun to compile “A Curious Evening with Gypsy Rose Lee” from movie clippings and stills, with the idea that she do a lecture tour and make a lot of money. There are no extant copies. But according to Erik, the history of his mother was also a history of the twentieth century, complete with news-reels and footage of sporting events. When Gypsy brought
Curious Evening
to New York in 1961, critics greeted her warmly. Taken by the merry-go-round of Gypsy’s life, the jazz writer Whitney Balliett observed at the New York premiere, “Folklore doesn’t become folklore all by itself.” He added that Gypsy, in a tight V-necked black gown, white foxtail wrap, and gloves, was “pretty intact too.” The
New York Times
agreed: “We love you, Gypsy.”

Not everyone felt the same way—especially not the surviving family members. In 1959 June’s first memoir,
Early Havoc,
appeared to correct Gypsy’s whitewashed portrait of their mother and their childhood. The
New York Times
review compared the sisters to the Brontës. But Gypsy herself was more interested in real estate than in continuing the war-between-the-Hovicks over their past. The same year she toured
Curious Evening
she sold her New 174

Selling Striptease

York house and moved to 1240 Cerrocrest Drive in Beverly Hills, which she referred to as “Naked Acres,” or “early Gloria Swan-son.” Originally owned by the Dohenys, the wealthy oil family, the house served as a different kind of stage. When Gypsy bought the Spanish-style villa overlooking Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, and Hollywood, she made it even more lavish than her New York

home. The interior assimilated many of the different venues she had played on over the years, but mostly it evoked the carnival.

“It was like an Italian palazzo,” said Barbara Preminger, Erik’s former wife. Set on two acres, the palazzo boasted a swimming pool, a screening room, and a moat stocked with goldfish. Gypsy painted the drawing room walls green and the ceiling gold, which gave it an “unworldly” quality, according to social chronicler David Patrick Columbia, who visited the estate. The harp from
Threepenny Opera
sat in one corner. A portrait of Gypsy lounging on a recamier hung above the real recamier. She had painted the dining room ceiling with a trompe l’oeil of blue sky and clouds. Less-public rooms, such as the kitchen, were less dramatic. That the press treated “Naked Acres” as camp—really the only picture of aging female Hollywood stars—failed to diminish its power.

After Gypsy’s death, in 1971 Sotheby’s would auction most

of the house’s furniture and objets. A short list of the museum-quality items includes: velvet and satin Pullman chairs; peacock fans; a parasol that used to belong to Sarah Bernhardt; and a papier-mâché table with a mother-of-pearl model of the Windsor 175

Selling Striptease

Castle attached to it. Gypsy’s G-strings were missing, but according to the
New York Times
a mink one turned up at a second auction held in 1979, where a London banker bought it. Convinced that Gypsy’s ghost haunted the house, later owners had it torn down.

When
Gypsy
opened on Broadway, Gypsy was dating Billy Rose, who had fired her thirty years earlier. I do not think that this relationship was sexual, but even so it was the last time she would try to make a go of it with a man. In California Gypsy abandoned her romantic life for a domestic one, with her friends, her speaking engagements and her TV shows, interior decorat-ing, and a menagerie of dogs, canaries, goldfish, peacocks, and the obligatory monkeys. Several photos from this era show the dogs and monkeys posed as people, wearing suits, riding bicycles, or holding barbells. Gypsy was not the first or only female star to keep a menagerie. Josephine Baker, Sarah Bernhardt, and Doris Day all had pets. When Mae West was making
I’m No Angel
in 1934, she traveled with a chimp. Fans expected female celebrities to keep animals and to dress them up as people, as either compensation for not having children (or not having enough of them) or proof of their primitive character. (Michael Jackson, after all, acquired a zoo.) In the vaudeville days the Hovicks had traveled with a chimp, a horned toad, dogs, a white rat named Molly, and a guinea pig named Sambo. When money was tight, they would sell the creatures. But at her California home Gypsy harbored only rare species, as if she were constructing her own 176

Selling Striptease

Gypsy Rose Lee feeding a puppy. Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

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luxury ark. She turned one section of her house into an aviary and another into an aquarium. She began to breed the species of toy dogs known as Chinese Crested Hairless, joking that she had an affinity for them because they were “bare.”

Gypsy referred to her animals as her “family.” For an aging stripper to dress up monkeys and breed tiny dogs suggests nostalgia for her childhood on the road. It also evokes
Sunset Boule-vard.
Still, Gypsy’s journey to old age was smoother than that of other female stars because she had stopped insisting that audiences consider her a sex symbol decades earlier. Now even more like Garbo, Gypsy had always wanted to be alone (with pets) as though proving the cliché that, in our culture, to buy respite from the clamor you have to be famous.

Hollywood only offered Gypsy roles referencing her image as the Queen of Striptease. In 1958 she played a saloon owner in
Screaming Mimi,
which starred Anita Ekberg as a young stripper working at El Madhouse Nightclub in Los Angeles. Gypsy shimmies to the song that Rita Hayworth had made famous in
Gilda,

“Put the Blame on Mame.” In 1963 she played “Madame Olga”

in
The Stripper,
based on the William Inge play,
A Loss of Roses,
which starred Joanne Woodward as the ingénue.

She did even less well in the theater. In 1960, when Gypsy played
Auntie Mame
on the Straw Hat Circuit, she looked tired.

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Wrinkled from gardening in the California sun, she had aged.

Plugging comedy more than sex appeal was not new, but some of the gestures Gypsy had relied on—like taking off her wig at the finale—now read as grotesque rather than charming and sexy.

A remarkable bit of miscasting occurred in 1961, when pro-

ducers Carmen Capalbo and Stanley Chase convinced Gypsy to play Pirate Jenny in a thirty-five-week national tour of Bertolt Brecht’s
Threepenny Opera.
They had already enlisted June to direct. On the surface, Gypsy as Pirate Jenny was not a terrible idea. Written in 1928 by Brecht and Kurt Weill,
Threepenny
premiered in New York in 1933, when Gypsy was performing at the Irving Place. By the time Gypsy was cast, Marc Blitzstein’s adaptation of
Threepenny
had already run for six years at the Theatre de Lys off-Broadway and starred Lotte Lenya, whom George

Davis—her then husband and Gypsy’s old friend from Seven

Middagh Street—had dragged out of retirement.

Rewrites of Pirate Jenny added a striptease. But that Gypsy was unable to sing Weill’s music at a time when Bobby Darin and Louis Armstrong had both done dazzling recordings of it doomed the production even though the stripper offered to supplement Pirate Jenny’s wardrobe from her personal costume

stock. As she put it, “Rehearsals have been quite an experience especially the day they tried to discover the key I sang in.” The show opened in Toronto and closed two weeks later. Gypsy took home a harp instead of her $3,000-a-week salary.

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The Saleswoman of Striptease

Gypsy spent much of the last ten years of her life endorsing products. Some campaigns exploited her luxury “striptease”

image, such as the 1962 Smirnoff vodka print campaign, in

which Gypsy, stuffed into a champagne-colored satin evening gown, holds a lorgnette and winks. “The hostess with the most-ess,” the copy reads. But Gypsy also hawked pedestrian goods.

Her last gig was for Voila Gourmet Dog Food in 1968. The

woman who, in her youth, ate dog food on the road was now

selling French beef burgundy and Irish kidney stew for esoteric canine breeds. For Gypsy the connection was clear: a passion as well as a charity, the dogs made money for her and fit into the public idea of an aging star’s responsibility to take care of less-fortunate creatures. The dogs also fulfilled her most important requirement for a cause: they were a sound decision business-wise.

Just like many of today’s over-forty female stars in search of a venue, Gypsy became a star again on television. She hosted her first talk show, the
Gypsy Rose Lee Show,
in 1965, from San Francisco. Her warmth drew out Hollywood and New York luminar-

ies in part because Gypsy did not just gossip: she got Ginger Rogers, Truman Capote, Pearl S. Buck, Omar Sharif, Tammy

Grimes, Judy Garland, Michael Caine, Andy Warhol, and Tom

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Wolfe to talk about serious things. Gypsy was the friendly ex-stripper next door, accessible and domestic. It is to her credit that she held her own in a male field crowded with eminences like Jack Paar and Johnny Carson.