Gypsy: The Art of the Tease (4 page)

Striptease became burlesque’s main event the same year as

talkies were born. The love affair soured, and burlesque impresarios doubled the number of shows and performers. Three striptease shows a day was the downside of Taylorism. Intellectuals wondered: could women taking off their clothes on an “assembly line” truly count as popular entertainment? It was odd enough that a white Jewish comedian in blackface singing “Mammy”

decimated silent film. But odder still that whereas in Hollywood the talkies made silent film actors irrelevant, in New York the strippers made burlesque comedy obsolete by adding their undressing, shimmying bodies.

Burlesque theaters were not our nation’s most glamorous

spaces. In her description of the backstage at the Missouri Theatre—the Kansas City theater where, according to her memoir, she acted in her first burlesque scene in 1927—Gypsy wrote: 24

Undressing the Family Romance

“Cigarette butts and empty coffee containers and old newspapers were all kicked together with dirty frayed satin shoes under the make up shelf. Gnats swarmed around a half empty container of beer resting on the edge of a filthy sink that was filled with laundry left overnight to soak. Sticky red lip rouge smudges en-circled the top of the container. Under each lip-rouge smudge, penciled in with eyebrow pencil, was an initial. The mirrors were broken. Their jagged edges reached out like claws. Shreds of net and bits of rhinestone and beads hung by thin strings on nails behind mirrors.”

The film close-up showed Americans actors’ and especially actresses’ faces in greater detail than ever before, but in burlesque women stripped on a runway just above the audience—a corpo-real rendering of the blown-up faces the camera displayed. If you reached out you could touch the performers. The male comics played scenes far away on the proscenium stage as if to announce their irrelevance. But burlesque did not exactly deliver what it advertised. Gypsy’s first burlesque scene was called “Illusion.”

Her punch line, “I’m no illusion. I’m real—Here, take my hand—

touch me. Feel me,” anticipates the quality that she would spend her life developing. More skeptical minds called her illusion a gimmick, a word that had entered the American vocabulary a few years earlier.

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The first striptease. Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations 26

Undressing the Family Romance

In Gypsy’s memoir, the story of her first striptease conflates several stories from showbiz mythology. One concerns the adage

“the show must go on.” In that myth’s burlesque version, Ed Ryan, the producer of “Girls from the Follies,” had hired blonde-haired Gladys Clark, who doubled as a stripper and a musician who could play both the accordion and the clarinet. But Clark went on a bender and disappeared. A star was born. Another myth asserts that striptease appeared in the hinterlands like soy-beans or corn. According to Gypsy’s memoir, she first took it off neither in Paris nor in New York; the location of her inaugural act was either Toledo, Ohio, in the fall of 1929, or just after the New Year of 1930 in Kansas City.

As for why she did it, the musical turns Gypsy into a victim: Rose Louise Hovick is a girl whose mother pimps her into a life of taking off her clothes onstage. Yet in her memoir Gypsy does not protest when Rose suggests that she strip. Was she an exhibitionist or a patsy? How much of the striptease was the result of Gypsy’s desire to strip, and how much of it was the result of her mother’s urging? It is impossible to know. Gypsy contributed to the “my mother made me do it” theory of striptease in her memoir but also suggested that she liked to undress in public.

What is known is that, in the mid-1930s, Gypsy began telling a story about her first striptease—contradicted by the photo of her childhood mugging—that refers to it as an accident. This recycles yet another showbiz myth. Stories about striptease’s 27

Undressing the Family Romance

invention almost always involve the performer standing onstage, caught in the spotlight, her strap slipping from her shoulder. Only when the crowd goes wild does she take off the other strap. The idea of a woman stripping of her own accord is too naughty—the shy creature is reluctant to take off her clothes, until her audience draws her in. She is, in the vulgar phrase, giving the people what they want.

But although Gypsy absorbed these earlier ideas, her story about her first striptease distinguishes itself from the more conventional ones. For one, it emphasizes self-invention. From the start Gypsy designed and sewed her own strip gowns, signaling that she was fashioning her own identity out of tulle and spangles and not accepting one that someone else made for her. The second unique aspect of her story is modesty. By the standards of the day, Gypsy’s first costumes were virginal. In one she stripped to

“ten yards of lavender net and three bunches of violets sewn on a flesh colored leotard.” The costume she wore in her second-act number in Toledo was a full-length gown made of red velvet.

With it she wore the kind of red picture hat that Vivien Leigh would later don. She would hide behind the hat for the encore, in a teddy or a bodysuit or a one-piece bathing suit with lacing up the side.

During this era Gypsy made unfinished seams a part of her act.

The dressmakers’ pins holding together her outfit wound up in 28

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the orchestra pit, as if to comment on her own incompleteness.

Also, she may have been the first stripper to wear a bridal gown onstage.

Even from this early point, Gypsy brings the con in striptease to the surface. When you go to see a striptease, you are going with the understanding that you will see someone take off their clothes, that it will be sexy, that it will titillate. Gypsy was never much interested in this as a goal. She was promising sex but she was delivering its illusion, playing three-card monte with her audience’s desire. She was asking a metaphysical question: What is left when we reveal everything? But she was also laughing. To strip as a bride parodies marriage; to ask all of these highfalutin questions while throwing your garter into the audience parodies the sanctity of matrimony.

Gypsy thought of her striptease as sleight-of-hand. More than anyone else on the scene, she stripped as though the world had drained her of heat and inflated her with whatever force animated “the mechanical doll.”

Gypsy’s striptease coincided with the worst economic crisis in American history. The connection between one woman undressing and the Great Depression, however farfetched it seems, may explain why the few publicity photos of Gypsy from 1929

evoked tragedy. At first I thought that the artificial teardrops on Gypsy’s cheeks in these sepia close-ups signified melancholy, or 29

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perhaps talent, since to cry, being a sign of good acting, could redeem the stripper from the purgatory of being unable to sing or dance. But then I understood: she was crying to express re-morse for her role in the nation’s economic woes.

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The Queen of Striptease

As the Depression settled over the country, Gypsy performed in burlesque theaters across America, from Chicago to St. Louis, from Washington to Newark. By the time she arrived in New

York at the end of 1930, she had dropped her supporting cast the way other strippers dropped their garters onstage.

If striptease started in the Midwest, New York—which is always about the solo act—made taking off your clothes a sophisticated one-woman spectacle. There is something poignant about New York burlesque creating the lone stripper in an era of social-ist fervor. The vulnerable undressing woman onstage mirrored the Depression era American audience in the dark theater; both watcher and watched sat isolated by solitude and hunger. The lone stripper gyrated across the stage and up and down the 31

The Queen of Striptease

runway, so near though untouchable, jerking her way through her halfhearted orgiastic dances. And yet few observers saw it that way.

New York was several years away from electing as mayor

Fiorello La Guardia, who made cleaning up burlesque and striptease one of his most vociferous crusades. To describe burlesque before La Guardia is like evoking the Garden of Eden before the Fall. And yet La Guardia’s crusade also made strippers suddenly aware of their own economic worth. In the early years of the Depression, New York politicians and reformers had only just begun to figure out that targeting the Minsky brothers—the most notorious burlesque theater owners in the city—as evi-dence of the era’s depravity might distract Americans from their economic pain. So when Billy Minsky, the brains behind his family’s success, saw the overdressed Gypsy (billed in Newark, New Jersey, as “Gypsy” Rose Lee), he might have hoped that she would stave off reformers by way of a practical joke. Who would arrest an overdressed stripper?

By then Minsky had exhausted his repertoire of jokes/gestures—

wearing top hats, advertising in the
New Yorker,
costuming ushers in French maid outfits. Looking for a funny way to deflect city officials’ charges that his family was the city’s first flesh mongers, he advised Gypsy to straighten her hair to be “more ladylike.”

She complied. For the rest of her career she wore her hair off her face in an elaborate upsweep—what one critic later described as 32

The Queen of Striptease

the style of “the divine Sarah”—to emphasize restraint. The long, sultry locks of a Veronica Lake were not for her.

But while Gypsy posed as a Victorian stripper, the Minskys wanted audiences to see that her roots were in the Lower East Side. So, in April 1931, they gave her debut striptease at the Republic Theatre on Forty-second Street in a Yiddish inflection meant to make Depression era New Yorkers laugh. The Minskys titled the show that Gypsy starred in “Ada Onion from Bermuda” and advertised it with a phrase that mocked the tagline of the Ziegfeld Follies, New York’s most respectable revue (“Glori-fied American Girls”): “Gypsie Rose Lee: The Most Beautiful Girl in the World.” The
New York Evening Journal
wondered how

“Ada Onion” would succeed given that she was “All Dressed Up for Burlesque?” But another paper asked: “She’s like a breath of spring. How far would she go in show biz?”

Until Gypsy arrived, the question was moot, since no stripper had gone anywhere. Trade papers tended to describe certain numbers as being “almost” good enough for Broadway, but no stripper had made it to the Great White Way. The five burlesque theaters crammed on Forty-second Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues (as well as those in Harlem and downtown)

pulsed with Hollywood and Broadway wannabes, the B-girls and pinups of their day.

Burlesque strippers in these theaters did what
Variety
described as “sex showmanship,” which, though the Minskys might have 33

The Queen of Striptease

claimed it to be artistry, many Americans associated with obscenity. Strippers flashed G-strings or lay down on the stage and crossed and uncrossed their legs. They painted their bodies with radium. They did “marionette” strips, “bubble” strips, and “muff”

strips. They named themselves “Peaches Strange” and “Dy-

namic Dolly.” The stripper would bump and grind or, back to audiences, shake her behind or “quiver”; she would also do the

“tassel twirl,” spinning tiny pieces of fabric from her nipples in circles like airplane propellers. Only one other stripper of this era—Ann Corio—took it off coyly.

What did Gypsy’s striptease circa 1931 look like? Decorum

and the obfuscating Broadway slang of the day makes it difficult to re-create. But a few things about Gypsy’s early numbers (she rotated them) are known. She sometimes stripped to Cab Cal-loway’s “Minnie the Moocher,” before Betty Boop made it her anthem. According to Martin Collyer, in “Seven Minutes of Sheer Art” Gypsy “kidded the lacy underpants off the more earnest of strippers.” Gypsy did not strip to the altogether, at least not at Minsky’s in 1931. When she was arrested at the Republic the morning after her premiere, telegrams offered to protect her as though she were a virgin in distress and not a loose woman. One tabloid quoted Gypsy as explaining that she made the detective wait outside while she dressed. Another claimed that she rode to the precinct in a limo. According to the
New York Evening
Graphic,
the arrest raised her status. Gypsy received “six propos-34

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als of marriage, one live bunny, a dozen bouquets of American beauties, numberless boxes of candy, forty-four mash notes and a case of ginger ale.”

“My baby is innocent and pure,” Rose told the
New York Evening Graphic
when Gypsy made the cover in a body suit with flowers over her private parts. “I wasn’t naked . . . I was completely covered by a blue spotlight,” Gypsy said. “Just ask my mother, who is always with me.” Gypsy was eventually cleared of all charges. The detectives who arrested her admitted that she had not flashed anything obscene. (Except for a mother-daughter love song that would never be heard again. According to Mort Minsky, his brother Billy had banned Rose from the Republic Theater early on, because, as he put it, “her river did not run to the sea.”)