American Rose Read online

  ALSO BY KAREN ABBOTT

  Sin in the Second City

  (photo credit i.1)

  Copyright © 2010 by Karen Abbott

  All rights reserved.

  Jacket design: Lynn Buckley

  Jacket images: Getty Images (Gypsy Rose Lee), Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images (Times Square), Jessica Hische (hand-lettering)

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Alfred Publishing Co., Inc., and Imagem Music for permission to reprint “Zip” from Pal Joey, words by Lorenz Hart and music by Richard Rodgers, copyright © 1951, 1962 (copyrights renewed) Chappell & Co., Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Alfred Publishing Co., Inc., and Imagem Music.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Abbott, Karen.

  American rose : a nation laid bare : the life and times of Gypsy Rose Lee / by Karen Abbott.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-679-60456-3

  1. Lee, Gypsy Rose, 1911–1970. 2. Stripteasers—United States—Biography. 3. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. I. Title.

  PN2287.L29A63 2011

  792.702’8092—dc22

  [B]

  www.atrandom.com

  ——————

  FRONTISPIECE: Rose Louise Hovick posing as “Hard-boiled Rose.”

  v3.1_r1

  For my grandmother,

  Anne Margaret Scarborough,

  another indomitable lady of the Depression

  Genius is not a gift, but the way a person invents in desperate circumstances.

  —Jean-Paul Sartre

  May your bare ass always be shining.

  —Eleanor Roosevelt to Gypsy Rose Lee, 1959

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Chapter One: New York World’s Fair, 1940

  Chapter Two: Seattle, Washington, 1910s

  Chapter Three: New York City, Late Spring 1912

  Chapter Four: New York City, Fall 1940

  Chapter Five: Hollywood, California, 1916

  Chapter Six: Paris, France, Summer 1916

  Chapter Seven: Brooklyn, New York, Fall 1940

  Chapter Eight: Seattle, Washington, and on the Vaudeville Circuit, 1917–1920

  Chapter Nine: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, December 1940

  Chapter Ten: New York City, 1917–1920

  Chapter Eleven: Chicago, Illinois, 1941

  Chapter Twelve: On the Vaudeville Circuit, 1920–1924

  Chapter Thirteen: New York City, 1942

  Chapter Fourteen: New York City, 1920–1924

  Chapter Fifteen: Gypsy’s Country Home, Highland Mills, New York, August 1942

  Chapter Sixteen: On the Vaudeville Circuit, 1925–1928

  Chapter Seventeen: Highland Mills and New York City, 1942–1943

  Chapter Eighteen: New York City, 1925–1928

  Chapter Nineteen: On and Off the Set of The Naked Genius, 1943

  Chapter Twenty: On the Vaudeville and Burlesque Circuits, 1928–1930

  Chapter Twenty-one: New York City, 1943

  Chapter Twenty-two: New York City, 1928–1930

  Chapter Twenty-three: Hollywood and New York City, 1944

  Chapter Twenty-four: On the Burlesque Circuit, 1930–1931

  Chapter Twenty-five: New York City, 1930–1931

  Chaper Twenty-six: England, 1952

  Chapter Twenty-seven: New York City, 1931–1932

  Chapter Twenty-eight: New York City, 1931–1932

  Chapter Twenty-nine: New York City and Nyack, New York, Winter 1953–1954

  Chapter Thirty: New York City, 1932–1936

  Chapter Thirty-one: New York City, 1932–1936

  Chapter Thirty-two: New York City, 1956–1959

  Chapter Thirty-three: Hollywood and New York City, 1937–1940

  Chapter Thirty-four: New York City, 1958–1959

  Chapter Thirty-five: New York City, 1969

  Chapter Thirty-six: Los Angeles, California, 1969–1970

  Chapter Thirty-seven: New York World’s Fair, 1940

  Acknowledgments

  Notes and Sources

  Bibliography

  Illustration Credits

  About the Author

  Author’s Note

  My interest in Gypsy Rose Lee stemmed not from the movie or play based on (part of) her life but from television—reality television in particular—a medium and genre that didn’t even exist when a girl named Rose Louise first talk-sang lyrics on a stage. In our current cultural norm, where the route to fast (if fleeting) fame is to package and peddle moments once considered in the private domain, there is something compelling about a woman who achieved lasting, worldwide renown without letting a single person truly know her. The “most private public figure of her time,” as one friend eulogized Gypsy, sold everything—sex, comedy, illusion—but she never once sold herself. She didn’t have to; she commanded every eye in the room precisely because she offered so little to see.

  Trying to discover Gypsy the person, as opposed to Gypsy the persona, became the sort of detective story she herself could have written. Her memoir contains nuggets of truth—the rotating collection of pets, the struggles during the Depression, the family’s wary views of men—but these were tempered throughout by invention and fantasy, whatever Gypsy decided would best benefit the character she’d so meticulously created. It was fitting that Gypsy the musical—a production Frank Rich of The New York Times called “Broadway’s own brassy, unlikely answer to ‘King Lear’ ”—was and is billed as a “fable”: Gypsy had always preferred stories that favored ambiguity over clarity, humor over revelation.

  I spent many hours thoroughly engrossed in Gypsy’s archives at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and after a while even the most prosaic bits of information (or lack thereof) became suspect: Were the New Year’s goals listed in her diary (“Speak well of all or not at all,” “I will try to live each day as tho I’m meeting god that night,” “To be right too soon is to be in the wrong”) written honestly in the moment, or with an eye toward posterity? Wasn’t it odd that she spent a month detailing her mother’s hospice care, yet recorded her death in four succinct words? (“Mother died at 6:30.”) Wasn’t it odder still that she was similarly terse in noting the death of Michael Todd, the one great love of her life? (“Mike was killed in a plane [crash] at 4:30.”) And how could an iconic sex symbol write a memoir without once mentioning her own sex life?

  So I read and reread and fact-checked everything I could, tasks that helped me clarify supporting characters and timelines but did little to unravel the layers of Gypsy’s mystique. To that end, I was incredibly fortunate to connect with the two persons who knew Gypsy best: her only son and her only sister. The relationship a woman has with her child vastly differs, of course, from the one she has with a sibling, and the intensely personal anecdotes and insights Erik Preminger and June Havoc were kind enough to share went a long way toward revealing parts of Gypsy I would otherwise never have seen. From Erik, I gathered that his mother was an array of complexities and contradictions: a “madly self-assured” woman who hid her nerves and insecurities; an avid student of Freud who disdained introspection; a “fairly sad person” and “wounded soul” despite a desperate need to “keep her heart close”; an authority figure capable of inspiring awe and exasperation and loyalty and fury and love, often within
the very same moment.

  June’s memories are darker and more melancholy, which I attributed partly to the fact that she’d expected to die relatively young, just like her mother and sister before her. It is hard to fathom that the brave, brilliant girl she knew as Louise has been gone, now, for forty years—nearly half of June’s remarkably long and wonderfully rich life. I first met June in March 2008, exactly two years before she passed away, hoping she would guide me through Gypsy’s mythology, peeling away the punch lines and fanciful digressions to reveal a core of truth.

  When I arrived at June’s Connecticut farm I found her lying in bed, her hair done up in pert white pigtails, a snack of Oreos and milk arranged on a side table. Her eyes were a bold shade of blue and painfully sensitive to light; she couldn’t go more than a few moments without moaning and clenching them shut. She was ninety-four years old, give or take (her mother, the infamous “Madam Rose,” was a prolific forger of birth certificates), and the legs that once danced on stages across the country were now motionless, two nearly imperceptible bumps tucked beneath crisp white sheets. She painted a deceptively frail picture, I learned soon enough; this wisp of a woman had retained her survivor’s grit, her cannonball voice, her savvy instinct to question any stranger prying so deeply into the past. A part of me believed, all physical evidence to the contrary, that, if so inclined, she could leap up and strangle me with quick and graceful hands.

  But she was welcoming and funny (lamenting a life steeped in “rumorsville”), and genuinely appreciative of my gift—a video of her four-year-old self performing in a 1918 silent film. She gave canned answers to certain queries—answers I’d heard or read elsewhere that nevertheless seemed illuminating when delivered face-to-face, by that deep and resonant voice. If her sister had shown any talent at all, she, June, would never have been born. Her vaudeville audience was like a “big, warm bath,” and the closest thing she had to family. Her mother was by turns tender and pathetic and terrifying, broken in a way that no one, in that time or place, had any idea how to fix. The musical Gypsy distorted her childhood so thoroughly it was as if “I didn’t own me anymore.” The tone of her fan mail changed overnight, from sentiments of “loving affection” to “what a little brat you must have been.” June realized her sister was “screwing me out in public,” and that, in the end, there was no stopping either Gypsy or Gypsy; the play was both her sister’s monument and her best chance for monumental revisionism.

  It took another visit for June, just as private as Gypsy, to share bits of memories she’d never written about or pressed into a scrapbook, memories that defined her life even as they long lay dormant and unspoken. Money was Gypsy’s “god,” and she would do anything to anybody, including June, to make more of it—and not just with regard to the musical. Gypsy did in fact do things, not only to June but to herself—“terrible” and “awful” and “shocking” things, things beneath her sister’s formidable intellect and keen wit, things that made June believe, to that day, that love (even love fraught with competition and jealousy) never existed between them at all.

  I asked and listened, for as much time as June gave me. I asked until her patience wore thin and her eyes watered with the effort to stay open.

  “I hope I didn’t upset you today,” I whispered, bending down to her ear. “That’s not my intention.”

  “I know,” June said. Those startling eyes found their focus, settling on mine. “I know you’re on a story … and I’m sorry I couldn’t be more open about some things. Some things are just … I’m still ashamed for her. I’m still ashamed. I wish they hadn’t happened.”

  “Would Gypsy wish the same?” I asked.

  “She had no shame.”

  A pause, and I said, feebly, “You were a good sister to her.”

  One of those quick and graceful hands emerged from the sheet. She coiled long, blade-thin fingers around my wrist.

  “I was no sister,” June said. “I was a knot in her life. I was nothing.”

  She retracted her hand, gave her eyes permission to close. I kissed her cheek and crept out the bedroom door. I was grateful she let me inside—even on the periphery, even briefly—and I suspected she was saving her own questions for the day she reunited with the sister she did profess to love, the one she still called Louise.

  What follows is my story of the legendary Gypsy Rose Lee and the people lucky enough to have known her, in any capacity. These pages relate tales of deception and betrayal, triumph and tragedy, ambition and failure and murder—much of it sensational, and all of it as true as I could tell it. Anything that appears in quotation marks, dialogue or otherwise, comes from a book, archival collection, article, journal, government report, or interview. When I occasionally slip inside Gypsy’s head, I do so using the most careful consideration of my research, and with the tantalizing, agonizing knowledge that there is certainly more to the story. Gypsy Rose Lee, herself a master storyteller, knew better than to give everything away.

  KAREN ABBOTT

  NEW YORK CITY

  MAY 2010

  The “City of Light” was the world’s largest diorama, containing four thousand buildings that stretched three stories high and filled an entire city block. During two seasons of the 1939–1940 World’s Fair, the exhibit drew more than 11,400,000 visitors eager to observe the cycle of the city (“the great stone skyscrapers,” E. L. Doctorow wrote of the experience, “the cars and buses in the streets, the subways and elevated trains, all of the working metropolis, all of it sparkling with life”) compressed into twelve-minute intervals—a meticulous and spectacular illusion, just like Gypsy Rose Lee herself. (photo credit 1)

  Chapter One

  Everybody thinks it’s all so easy. Sure. Mother says I’m the most beautiful naked ass—well, I’m not. I’m the smartest.

  — GYPSY ROSE LEE

  New York World’s Fair, 1940

  In late spring, across a stretch of former wasteland in Flushing Meadows, Queens, a quarter-million people pay 50 cents each to forget and to dream. In the last decade they lost jobs and homes and now they face bleaker losses in the years to come: fathers and sons and husbands, a fragile faith that the worst has passed, the hope that America will never again be called to save the world. They come by boat and train and trolley and bus, hitchhike across four states in as many days, engagement rings tucked deep inside pockets along with every dollar they own. Not one inch of the fair’s 1,216 acres betrays its inglorious past as a dump, Gatsby’s valley of ashes come to life, where towering heaps of debris meandered in an ironic skyline. Instead, beyond the gates, a “World of Tomorrow” beckons, offering flamboyant distractions and bewitching sleight of hand, a glimpse of fantasy without the promise that it will ever come to pass.

  They have never seen anything like the Trylon, its gaunt steel ribs stretching seven hundred feet high, carrying bodies skyward on the largest escalator in the world. They chase salty scoops of Romanian caviar with swigs of aged Italian Barolo. On one soft spring day they admire Joe DiMaggio as he accepts the Golden Laurel of Sport Award. At the Aquacade exhibition they watch comely “aquabelles” perform intricate, synchronized routines, the water kept extra cold so as to stimulate goose flesh and nipples. They hear Mayor Fiorello La Guardia boom with optimistic predictions: “We will be dedicating a fair to the hope of the people of the world. The contrast must be striking to everyone. While other countries are in the twilight of an unhappy age, we are approaching the dawn of a new day.” The Westinghouse Time Capsule, to remain sealed until A.D. 6939, contains fragments of their lives: microfilm of Gone with the Wind, a kewpie doll, samples of asbestos, a dollar in change. At night, when fireworks begin, they fall silent watching the colors crisscross overhead, hot tails branding the sky, imprinting a patchwork of lovely scars.

  They wait in lines for hours to glimpse a reality that seems both distant and distinctly possible. Revolving chairs equipped with individual loudspeakers transport them through General Motors’ Futurama exhibit, a vast model of Ameri
ca in 1960, where radio-controlled cars never veer off course on fourteen-lane highways and “undesirable slum areas” are wiped out. They witness a robot named Elektro issue commands to his mechanical dog, Sparko. They marvel at an array of new inventions: the fax machine, nylon stockings, a 12-foot-long electric shaver. One thousand of them watch the fair’s opening ceremonies on NBC’s experimental station, W2XBS. “Sooner than you realize it,” advertisements for the telecast predict, “television will play a vital part in the life of the average American.”

  But this World of Tomorrow can’t obscure the dangers of the world of today, despite the fair committee’s efforts. The new official slogan, “Peace and Freedom,” is absurdly incongruous with the hourly war bulletins that blare over the public address system. Visitors who brave the foreign section find only a melancholy museum of things past. The Netherlands building is dark and vacant, the Danish exhibit downsized into smaller quarters. Poland, Norway, and Finland still have a presence, but fly their flags at half-mast and display grim galleries that show photographs of demolished historical buildings and list names of the distinguished dead. The Soviet Pavilion is razed and replaced by a space called the “American Common,” complete with “I Am an American Day.” Fairgoers line up at the Belgium Pavilion when that nation falls to Germany, as if waiting to pay their respects at a wake. They wish this slim wedge of time between troubles past and future could pause indefinitely, but understand that New York is capable of everything but standing still.

  On May 20, thousands of them—a crowd larger than the turnout for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie combined—find temporary solace at the Hall of Music, where they wait to see Gypsy Rose Lee in her World’s Fair debut. A forty-foot-tall billboard flaunting her image looms above the entrance, those skyscraper legs and swerving hips a respite from the hard lines and stark angles of this futuristic fantasy. She wears an expression both impish and imperious, a baited half smile that summons them closer yet suggests they’ll never arrive.