Gypsy: The Art of the Tease (5 page)

In the months that followed, Gypsy worked around town and

toured with her old show, “Girls from the Follies.” But Midwestern audiences scorned a stripper who took off only one or two garments. When “Follies” hit Chicago,
Variety
wrote: “Gypsy Rose Lea [
sic
] has no following locally for her disrobing talent and she’s hardly likely to acquire one, since she impresses as being a sentimental, old-fashioned sort of a strip-tease dancer.”

Back in New York, the “sentimental, old-fashioned” dancer

bought her first house, in Rego Park, then part of Long Island. It was big enough for Rose and June.

While stripping for Minsky, Gypsy had befriended, or been

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The Queen of Striptease

befriended by, bootlegger Waxy Gordon. It is not clear whether she was Gordon’s lover or just “arm candy,” but the two shared rags-to-riches stories later immortalized in Broadway musicals.

As Albert Fried, a historian of gangsters, put it, although Gordon had started out as a thug in the Jazz Age, in the Depression

“he was reborn Irving Wexler, free-spending New York business-man, owner of real estate and stocks and other properties of a vaguer nature . . . a gentleman about town conspicuous by his fancy dress and limousine and companions.”

By 1932, it was hardly uncommon for gangsters to fund Broadway shows and nightclubs. The Great White Way was a mess.

None of the producers that had flourished in the Jazz Age had any money. Broke and ill with pneumonia, Florenz Ziegfeld, who had made his name in the 1920s with the beloved Follies revues, borrowed funds to produce his last original show,
Hot-Cha,
from Wexler and his colleague Dutch Schultz, the “King of Beer.” The cast included Bert Lahr, sexy movie star Lupe Velez, dancers Yolanda and Velez, and Eleanor Powell. The artistic team com-prised Joseph Urban, Charles LeMaire, and Mark Hellinger. But
Hot-Cha
(whose subtitle,
Laid in Mexico,
was contributed by Wexler) is no Follies. The vacuous plot concerns a Brooklyn waiter (Lahr) who, on his Mexican vacation, gets transformed into a matador.

After Gypsy stripped in a benefit performance for Wexler, he paid for her dental work and introduced her to
Hot-Cha
’s song-36

The Queen of Striptease

writer, Lew Brown. Waiting in line at the audition, Gypsy made the acquaintance of the Titian-haired Hope Dare, the girlfriend of Dutch Schultz’s lawyer, Richard Dixie Davis, whom she would later help hide upstate. The producers cast Gypsy in several minor roles, including “Girl in Compartment.”

Gypsy failed to save the show.
Hot-Cha
ran for only fifteen weeks. The real drama was backstage. Even though the credits list Gypsy as “Rose Louise,” the cast somehow learned of her Minsky’s past. When
Hot-Cha
opened in February 1932 in Washington, D.C., the showgirls complained that they had to share a dressing room with a stripper until publicist Bernard Sobel saved Gypsy from this showbiz snobbery: “I fired my first shot by placing Gypsy’s picture in every important paper in the capital,”

he recalled. When
Hot-Cha
arrived in New York the following month, Sobel continued playing White Knight. He got Gypsy

invited to a party attended by John Farrar, the founder of Farrar and Rinehart and, later, Farrar, Straus, and Co., and his wife, Margaret, the syndicated crossword puzzle columnist. “The meal had scarcely begun when I noticed to my surprise that the con-versation concerned books with Gypsy taking the lead,” he

wrote. Despite her literary savvy, Gypsy could not find work on Broadway.

Twelve months passed before George White cast Gypsy in his
Melody,
a romantic comedy with music by Sigmund Romberg and lyrics by Irving Caesar. Although White, a former dancer with 37

The Queen of Striptease

the Ziegfeld Follies, had by that time garnered a following for the yearly revue he produced—George White’s
Scandals—Melody
was not a hit. The fluffy, old-fashioned operetta spanning the years between 1880 and 1933 ran for about fifty performances at the Casino Theatre. Set in Paris,
Melody
begins as an aristocratic woman cuckolds her aristocratic husband with the composer she really loves. The plot then leaps forward to show that act’s effect on the heroine’s heirs. One critic called it “delight-fully melodious.” “Rose Louise” plays “Claire Lolive, Pierre’s Mistress,” in the first act. Years later Gypsy recalled how she interpolated her shtick into the nondescript role, crying “ouch” as, exiting, her bustle stuck in the door (playing this role may have given her the idea of starting her striptease numbers in Gay Nineties costumes). Although Bernard Sobel compared Gypsy’s performance to that of the torch singer Helen Morgan (she sang one number), other critics panned her. “Gypsy Rose Lee’s career has not been spectacular,” wrote Irving Drutman in 1935.

But Gypsy nourished her own ideas about “spectacular”: she wanted to use her Broadway persona uptown to inform her stripteases downtown, and vice versa. Some gave in to her charms, especially when doing so could tweak intellectuals. Recounting her activities, the
New York Times
observed: “Miss Lee panicked the guests by a cool appreciation of
The Good Earth.
” (Pearl Buck’s book had recently won the Pulitzer Prize.) Panicked? The only stripper to modify her sex appeal with a deadpan appreciation for 38

The Queen of Striptease

culture, Gypsy figured out that Depression era Broadway and Hollywood were full of tough guys and acid-tongued girls who talked as though they had read Proust. A woman from nowhere could exceed these stars by adding striptease to the mix.

What about the private life of the young stripper on her way up?

Common wisdom about Gypsy says that she was less interested in men than in money. Or that she was gay, which some sociolo-gists in the 1960s insisted that strippers are supposed to be. But these opinions come from her family, or “experts,” or people like Arthur Laurents—not the best sources of information on Gypsy’s sexual taste. Although there was more to Gypsy’s romantic life than noli me tangere, none of these labels describes her relationship with the opposite sex in the 1930s or in any other era.

“Our friend is much too pretty for me. I like my men on

the monster side, a snarling mouth, evil eye, broken nose. If he should happen to have thick ears, good!” Gypsy writes to Charlotte Seitlin, Simon and Schuster publicity director in 1941, after hearing that a mutual acquaintance thought she was witty and wanted to marry her. Gypsy resisted dating men who would compete with her for center stage. Coming from a matriarchy, she may have been wary about binding herself to the opposite sex in general. And men may have been intimidated by her consider-39

The Queen of Striptease

able earning power. In
More Havoc,
June recounts how Gypsy, newly arrived to New York, confided that she was going to have to rape someone to lose her virginity. This is one of the few moments where the truth of the younger sister’s words overrides her bitterness and presents an American paradox: the woman who stripped for a living was a virgin. The great sex symbol was sexless.

Working in burlesque may have aggravated Gypsy’s boy prob-

lem: although she came out of the era of the Stage Door Johnny, in burlesque the Johnnies, “less refined” than those who hung around Broadway theaters, could not catapult a girl to a better life. (Only one stripper married European royalty—Rozelle the Golden Girl.)

But in 1933 Gypsy began seeing a married socialite, “Eddy,”

whom the writer Laura Jacobs outs in a 2003
Vanity Fair
profile as Eddy Braun. Eddy gave Gypsy a copy of
The Waves
as well as some Tiffany bracelets. Supposedly about to divorce his wife, the generous and handsome man inconveniently dropped dead.

Gypsy took up with dental supplies salesman Bob Mizzy, whom Erik Preminger describes was Eddy’s beard.

From Banned in Boston to Kicked Out of the Casino

Gypsy left town. That fall, at Minsky’s in Boston, she stripped to

“Minuet in G.” Boston had long been more puritanical than

New York, and Gypsy’s act, titled “Burlesque Moderne,” was no-40

The Queen of Striptease

table for two reasons. First, a photographer at the
Boston Daily
Record
shot Gypsy taking off her clothes and published the pictures, which attracted the Watch and Ward Society, Boston’s censor. The
Record
called her a star and the society’s director denounced her just as he had denounced Aldous Huxley, Erich

Maria Remarque, H. L. Mencken, Herbert Asbury, and Voltaire.

Second, the
Harvard Lampoon
devoted a page to Gypsy, demonstrating her appeal to the Ivy League.

The heroine and sinner returned to New York and worked

briefly at the Casino de Paree, the gangster-funded cavernous nightclub-sideshow-theater on Fifty-second Street. Launched by the impresario Billy Rose, this club aimed to get around censorship laws by providing “family entertainment.” Gypsy emceed there until she incorrectly introduced the vaudeville team Gomez and Winona. According to Gypsy’s account, she looked at Fanny Brice—then Rose’s wife—at that moment and, hoping that Brice would remember her, jumbled the team’s names. Af-terward, Billy Rose fired her. But according to Rose, he fired Gypsy after she refused to pose naked for him. Rose was outraged that his former employee explained her decision financially as opposed to morally: she made five times as much stripping downtown at the Irving Place Burlesque theatre as she made at his nightclub, she said. Either way, getting kicked out of Boston and fired from the Casino de Paree helped transform a demure stripper into the Queen of Striptease.

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The Queen of Striptease

1934–35: “A Princess Takes Off Her Pants”

Gypsy used her burlesque money to buy distance between her and Rose and, in the summer of 1934, she moved downtown to an apartment on Gramercy Park. With plans to entertain, she placed a chrome bar in the drawing room’s center and a small piano in the corner. Meanwhile, Gypsy installed Rose uptown in a nine-room apartment on Riverside Drive. According to June, Rose—who is generally assumed to have been gay—opened a

lesbian “boardinghouse” and served moonshine, stag movies, and spaghetti on Tuesday and Friday evenings. But uptown wasn’t far enough away.

That same year the stripper bought Rose a two-story brown

colonial mansion in Highland Mills, an hour north of New

York. The press gave Gypsy’s acquisition of this house more coverage than it did her purchase of the one in Rego Park a few years earlier. And for good reason. Witchwood Manor boasted a steeply angled roof, five bathrooms, a stone fireplace, and a huge library with built-in bookcases that she filled with books.

Signed photographs of celebrities hung on the mantel. Gypsy had decorated the seats of the dining room chairs with her own needlepoint designs, and in the basement she had built a small theater complete with a lighting board. She stored the life-size lobby cut-outs of herself there, too. When important guests arrived at her Gramercy Park penthouse she shoved her mother out the servant’s entrance and sent her back to the Upper West 42

The Queen of Striptease

Side or upstate, away from the icon she was transforming herself into.

In 1934, the Irving Place released the huckster in Gypsy, the bunco artist, the shyster, the inauthentic. Or that is how many Americans would have seen it. In this light, Gypsy’s talent becomes facile, and even suspect, as opposed to the honestly won attributes we like to consider natural to American women. For example, her campaign to make striptease respectable, if you want to call it that, which really revs up here, recalls P. T. Barnum’s mid-nineteenth century attempts to convince Americans that a stuffed monkey was the “FeeJee mermaid” and that viewing this monkey was educational. Like Barnum, Gypsy’s Ripley’s Strip-It-or-Not act titillated and angered Americans.