Gypsy: The Art of the Tease (7 page)

No female writer regarded Gypsy as a worthy subject, and it is hard not to wonder what Gertrude Stein or Anaïs Nin or even Dorothy Parker or Anita Loos would say about the Queen of

Burlesque. The first women to mention Gypsy in print, the gossip columnists of the 1940s, did so in the spirit of promotion, not criticism. Women writers’ silence continued. Where is Simone de Beauvoir or Germaine Greer on striptease? But these questions raise another one: what would the writing about Gypsy be like if she stripped today, when taking it off is so much more a phenomenon by, for, and of women than it used to be?

In the spring of 1935 Gypsy took up with Rags Ragland, a brilliant alcoholic burlesque comic, former truck driver, and boxer whom she had first met at Minsky’s. A few years earlier, Ragland, who would die of uremia at age forty in 1946, was romantic and fun. He sent Gypsy rhyming kiddie-grams. “I would like to kiss you if I could because you have been so very good.” No matter how hard Gypsy tried to edit Ragland out of the picture, he remained in the frame. That spring, when she was admitted to the PolyClinic Hospital for what Ragland called a “bum uterus,” he sent her a love letter from Baltimore, which began with rows of kisses and included the promise that, if she didn’t write him, “I’ll 51

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have to come back there and pick you up and take you up some dark alley and give you the old razzle dazzle.”

Later, Gypsy would try to capture Rags’s mischievous voice and style in her plays.

Highbrow magazines continued to profess confusion as to how Gypsy became a star. As the “Talk of the Town” section of the
New Yorker
put it in June of 1935, “all she did was off her clothes.”

It was, the magazine concluded in a not altogether satisfying or satisfied way, the way that she did it. Even the
New Yorker
had to admit that there was no method for quantifying striptease or explaining how its allure worked, what made one woman better than another. There was no language to describe it without resorting to either euphemism or obscenity.

But the Irving Place became more than just a laboratory where Gypsy worked out undressing’s physical properties—let’s call her efforts the theory of relative striptease. The Irving Place was also the crucible where Gypsy’s political conscience was born. It would be easy to dismiss this conscience as silly. If you are enamored of the left-leaning 1930s you could mistake Gypsy for an antecedent of the American celebrities flirting with Kabbalah and Iraq today. Gypsy did flirt. But she also deflated Socialist pieties as energetically as she deflated conventional attitudes toward sex.

Communists, who noticed her wearing her mink coat over her 52

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strip gown as she passed through Union Square on her way from her Gramercy Park apartment to the theater, mistook her for a doyenne and heckled her. She responded: taking off her clothes five times a day on stage was more work than squawking political slogans from a soapbox.

Beneath her “I’m more proletarian than you” pose, Gypsy

harbored a more serious political commitment. As one of the few female members of the short-lived burlesque union, the Burlesque Artists’ Association, she participated in a three-day strike in September of 1935 that closed the theaters. Newspapers put her picture in the paper. But she was not just a figurehead. When Minsky’s locked out the stagehands, the former stripper Red Tova Halem recalled: “Gypsy called our theater and asked for some pickets. All of us strippers put robes on over our G-strings”

and “paraded outside the theater flashing passersby and shouting

‘Don’t go in there, boys.’” The Minskys settled with the stagehands that night.

Never one to romanticize her sister’s beginnings, June saw the Irving Place less as a worker’s paradise than as what used to be called a “blue theater.” The younger sister asked whether “all”

Gypsy wanted was to be a fad—the real actress was always lord-ing it over her untalented sister in retaliation for accepting the handouts she got. “I want to be a legend. A fad is just one step along the way,” Gypsy responded. But, she informed her sister, she had no illusions. The place where she was becoming a legend 53

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was not the Statue of Liberty or the Chrysler Building. Some New Yorkers, she said, made the pilgrimage there not only to see striptease or burlesque comedy, but to watch men masturbating under newspapers. “All the stuff they bring in with them—It’s an education,” said Older Sister to shock the woman formerly

known as “Dainty Baby June.”

But in addition to noting demographic details about her audience, Gypsy is also making a powerful social observation: striptease forced Americans to confront a greater degree of sexual voyeurism than many were ready to grapple with in public except as a “scare” or a perversion. Gypsy’s understanding of the exhibitionists at the burlesque theater anticipates an icy decadence that is more at home in our era than it was in hers. Before she became famous, talking about stripping she sometimes

sounds as though she has donned a suit of ill-fitting clothes. Or like Clark Kent complaining about having to be Superman. Yet the knowing quality in some of her confessions resonates more in our era than in hers.

The rise of café society buoyed Gypsy and pointed her social satire at the rich. Like the stripper’s origins, those of café society are in dispute: the most popular version dates it to 1919, after World War I ended. Café society extolled public relations and nightlife over discretion and old money, going out over staying at home, fame over family, gossip over fact. By the crash, café society sent showbiz celebrities and old money, debutantes, 54

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wealthy men and women, movie stars, and musicians born on the Lower East Side to ferocious partying at Sherman Billingsley’s Stork Club and El Morocco, as well as downtown at “the wrong places for the right people” like the eponymous Café Society. As Walter Winchell put it, “social position is now more a matter of press than prestige.” In the Depression, photojournalism and gossip columns stoked the hunger for prestige and made breadlines recede to the horizon the way the cowboy does at the end of the Western. While Americans starved and Okies wandered

through the dustbowl, the
New York Times
reported a rumor that

“fashion plate,” ex-actress, and gay socialite Lady Mendl spent $40,000 a year on clothes. The new weekly pictorial,
Life
magazine, covered Brenda Frazier cavorting in New York and Coco Chanel wearing her couture in Paris. That in an era of extreme poverty a stripper should become the darling of café society—

that she should become famous for joking about extreme elegance—not only illustrates our escapism; it also proves how opposites attract in popular culture.

Nor were Gypsy’s affectations in this era just mute admiration. The Queen of Burlesque adjusted her burlesque of the rich as though it were a corset that could be loosened, tightened, or unlaced. An important way to change the fit was the soundtrack.

Whereas other strippers continued to disrobe to jazz and blues standards, by the end of 1934 Gypsy had added the “blue” lyrics of the gay Algonquin Round Table writer Dwight Fiske to her 55

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repertoire. This small adjustment, it turned out, would change her life. Born in 1892, Fiske (a.k.a. “King Leer”) is worthy of his own book. He went to Harvard in 1912, then moved to Greenwich Village a few years later and began writing piano numbers for nightclubs. The Algonquin Round Table adopted him, and he became a hit at restaurants and clubs such as the Savoy Plaza, the Persian Room, and the Mayfair Yacht Club on Sutton Place.

Time
magazine described Fiske in 1933 as “lean, hatchet-faced, with hands like carefully manicured claws and a bald-spot on his narrow skull . . . hunched scornfully in front of a grand piano, in-toning his unique compositions with an air at once chipper, elegant and insulting.”

Time
called Fiske’s most famous numbers “sadly cruel little narratives of the aristocracy.” There was “Mrs. Pettibone,” a story of three failed marriages, and “Ida the Wayward Sturgeon,”

who, though a “modern woman,” concluded: “There must be

more to this sex-life than just swimming over each other’s eggs.”

“Clarissa the Flea” told a story about an aristocratic flea who, after many travels, died when, as
Time
summed it up, “she tried to come between two happy lovers.”

Dragging Fiske’s songs downtown recharged Gypsy’s act. Carmel Snow, the legendary editor of
Harper’s Bazaar,
asked Gypsy if she would pose for the magazine. Leonard Silliman cast her in his intimate revue,
New Faces.
After Gypsy performed in a benefit for the progressive City and Country School alongside celebri-56

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ties such as George S. Kaufman, the
New York Times
called her

“The Artist in burlesque.”

“The Artist” became a fad. Critics deemed her speaking voice more compelling than that of Gladys Cooper, the British Shake-spearean whom Aldous Huxley thought of as “stiff.” She was

“quicker on the uptake” than “naughty but nice” comedienne Beatrice Lillie, who specialized in Noël Coward revues and Cole Porter songs. But one review from the Irving Place era, in
Billboard,
mischaracterizes Gypsy by calling her the “Mae West of Park Avenue.” Although the two stars both draw from the 1890s to deflect sexuality, they share little else. Whereas West used double entendres, Gypsy used the mot. Drawing on blackface minstrelsy, and drag, and encased in her hourglass dress, West painted seduction by numbers, while Gypsy, for all her acknowledgments of “thinking about sex,” interested herself in acquisition rather than how-to. That same year,
Billboard
compared Gypsy to silent screen heroine Mary Pickford, acknowledging that nostalgia, as much as sex, drove the stripper’s popularity.

By the fall of 1935, dressing the part helped secure Gypsy’s role as a member of the cognoscenti. In November, at the opening night of Billy Rose’s musical
Jumbo,
she wore a full-length ermine cloak, outdoing the New York and Hollywood stars who

attended. In a publicity photo from that same era, she is wearing a hat of birds’ wings that vanishes into her coif as if she were a hippogriff, which in a way she was. Or the stripper wears a 57

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lorgnette. O. O. McIntyre, in his column “New York Day-by-

Day,” reported that Gypsy is a “self-possessed lady with a cough drop voice and a dress suit accent who might have run up from Bryn Mawr for a prom.”

Others scrambling up the social ladder may have been smart.

But only Gypsy exploited American ambivalence about the intellect to satirize her carnality and her brain and her audience’s expectations at every turn.

Gypsy’s Imitators

Imitation is as much an idée fixe in American popular culture as is authenticity. But few other performers inspired so many different imitations so quickly in so many different mediums as Gypsy.

In the 1934 Broadway season Fanny Brice and Imogene Coca had each portrayed goofy strippers with mysterious pasts. The following season, two bad plays about strippers opened there too. Yet artistic or box office merit is not the point. These qualities’ absence proves that Gypsy’s allure was linked less to artistry and more to an idea of how life was really lived in America. Robert Rossen, who would later direct
The Sting,
wrote
The Body Beautiful,
which
Time
praised for “contain[ing] some of the toughest talk heard on the Broadway stage this season, a trace of burlesque atmosphere, a strip queen . . . who takes pride in her work.”

The idea that striptease could reveal more than just the body haunted writers. In several short stories published over the next 58

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year or so, Damon Runyon and John Cheever each used the

figure of the striptease performer to demonstrate class injustice or other manifestations of hypocrisy.

In addition to the contributions of imitators and writers, the Queen of Striptease could not have been crowned without the effeminate gay men who were known at the time as “pansies.”

In the early 1930s, pansies had begun to congregate in burlesque theaters, where, as historian George Chauncey has documented, they met for liaisons. What Chauncey calls the “pansy craze” coincided with a vogue for female impersonation—gay men and

women doing drag acts and singing and dancing and impersonating celebrities in 1930s New York. Gypsy knew that if one piece of her allure “pie”—the word she used to describe any financial deal—was slumming aristocrats, another was gay men who saw in her, as Broadway historian Ethan Mordden recently put it in an interview, “their poor, misfit selves” as well as a way to be “fabulous.”

Gypsy solicited gay men’s opinion and counted them as her