Gypsy: The Art of the Tease (10 page)

may be just another gimmick. But Eva functioned as Gypsy’s dresser, played her confidante, and became involved in many aspects of her life—including the critical task of keeping Rose away.

In the months after the Follies opened, Gypsy scrambled between uptown and downtown, between her private and public

roles. While she recited Noël Coward’s “Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Worthington” for the Fleischman Yeast Hour, Rose was busy turning the Hovicks’ past into sound bites.

When June emerged, pregnant and broke, Rose, who had writ-

ten off her younger daughter as dead when she eloped nine years 78

The Queen of Striptease

earlier, engineered a tabloid story announcing “the confession of Gypsy Rose Lee’s second sister.” (In Rose’s version June had not abandoned the family; the family had misplaced her in the hinterlands.)

The Queen of Striptease spent her nights polishing her para-doxical reputation. She attended columnist Heywood Broun’s birthday party and frequented Sardi’s, the Broadway celebrity restaurant on Forty-fourth Street, where she whispered salacious tales about her past in columnists’ ears. She both consorted with and made fun of her old pal, Nudina, the Minsky’s snake dancer, for wearing green gloves. When Billy Rose tried to lure her to his new nightclub, Casa Mañana, she declined. After hours, Gypsy gravitated downtown to “cafeteria society.” She often finished evenings at the Howdy Club, a Greenwich Village drag club, or at Child’s Restaurant on Fourteenth Street, a popular late night spot for gay men and theater people.

At the end of one of these nights Gypsy and Bob Mizzy, arriving home at 122 East Thirty-sixth Street, found robbers waiting for them in the foyer. The thieves absconded with $25,000 worth of jewelry, plus Gypsy’s $16,000 mink coat. What is striking is not just that Gypsy was wearing that much jewelry (and so valuable a coat). It was that the press treated the theft less like a crime than like a new act the Queen of Striptease was trying out: “The bandits adroitly stripped Miss Lee of her jewelry,” the
New York
Times
wrote, as though the entertainer had made up the crime 79

The Queen of Striptease

the way she made up her identity. Charles Bochert, a press agent, wrote to the paper to complain that the press’s response to the theft revealed a shallow celebrity culture that had transformed a stripper into a socialite. “Had Miss Lee been robbed during her Minsky appearance, the incident would have been dismissed.”

That fall the
New York Times
and other papers mentioned Gypsy each time another society jewel theft occurred—and many did.

Each mention dwelled on Gypsy’s stolen jewelry, including a sixty-nine-carat sapphire ring and a fifteen-carat diamond and sapphire bracelet. Years later Gypsy would quip in her memoir that the jewel theft sold tickets to the Follies. But at the time the theft had a more immediate function: establishing the existence of Gypsy’s diamonds and sapphires, it provided an overture to her next performance.

This time the stage was high society. Only a few days after the theft, Gypsy starred in the Beaux Arts Ball, an annual pageant for two thousand of the city’s wealthy and privileged citizens, including Eleanor Roosevelt, the Vanderbilts, and the Morgans.

Mrs. Stanwood Menken spent thousands of dollars on her costume and exhausted New York’s supply of silver fringe. Held annually at the Hotel Astor, the charitable event donated proceeds to young architects. But as A. J. Liebling observed in a
New
Yorker
“Talk of the Town” piece, what distinguished this ball from previous ones was publicity: it was funded by “an advertising man named Reimars, representing the American Enka Corp.”

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The Queen of Striptease

The ball hired many celebrities to entertain: John Gielgud and Gertrude Lawrence rode in on horseback. But the Queen of Striptease starred. For that year’s theme—“the elements”—

Gypsy wore a chiffon dress with a train representing “Eclipse of the Sun.” Against a set of “the starry night sky,” she took off the dress, which was festooned with paillard sequins as big as quarters, to Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Valse Fantastique.”

Would the reign of the Queen of Striptease never end? In December the
New York Times
warned readers about the “future Gypsy Rose Lees of this unembarrassed age.” Just as the Statue of Liberty had become a symbol for freedom, Gypsy Rose Lee had become a symbol for striptease.

The Shuberts sent the symbol on tour with the Follies of

1936. When she arrived in Chicago this time, the Second City welcomed her. The
Chicago Daily Tribune
included Gypsy in its pictorial “What the Best Dressed Woman Is Wearing,” caption-ing her “at work” to distinguish her from the other ladies of leisure depicted therein. But another picture from the same visit is captioned “The Duchess of Few Clothes.” A review of her act observed that her striptease was “brief and cold blooded.”

Gypsy was thirty-five, more or less. She did not match the

“flapper” ideal of beauty, as arbiters of taste declared it in the 1920s, nor was she a curvaceous blonde like Mae West or Jean 81

The Queen of Striptease

Harlow. A word reporters often used to describe Gypsy was

“statuesque,” or, in the slang of the day, they referred to her

“streamlined chassis.” Or they wrote that she was “ethereal,”

which I think was supposed to be a synonym for smart. Her physical appearance was unlike any other actress on the scene. Her angular face never conformed to perky Broadway standards. Her sister writes that she disliked her long, elegant neck. But she glowered, darkly beautiful, flat-chested, and big hipped.

That year pictures of Gypsy project mischief. Maurice Sey-

mour, the Russian émigré cum celebrity photographer, would take several cheesecake photos of the star that double as comic portraits. In one she hides her bare breasts with gloved hands while a black lace mantilla covers her head and shoulders, and she gazes away from the camera as though she were thinking wistful but important thoughts. In a newspaper photograph from the same era she wears a cutaway dress with red fringe covering her breasts, and she smiles like a grammar school teacher. What Gypsy wore in these photos deserves special mention because she became who she was in large part because of it. Since the Follies, her costumes leaned toward circusy spangles whereas her street clothes were haute couture. Entertaining reporters in 1937, she dressed in a pink and gray Rodier tea gown. Royer, who designed Shirley Temple’s clothes, made for Gypsy a silver ball gown slit to the thigh.

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To Hollywood and Back

Going to Hollywood raised Gypsy’s status and alienated the Shuberts, who immediately placed an advertisement for a stripper—“no experience necessary”—in
Variety.
But many other Americans—especially New Yorkers—lampooned and celebrated

Gypsy’s ubiquity. Seniors at the prestigious Peddie School named her the “most prominent woman today,” over Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart. Comparing the stripper unfavorably to a well-known opera singer of the day, New York City Mayor

Fiorello La Guardia bragged that the new airport being built in Queens “will be to Newark what Gypsy Rose Lee is to Kristen Flagstad.” At a roast in City Hall, La Guardia, dressed as Gypsy,

“tossed off the various clothes of the various political offices the mayor has been affiliated with.”

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To Hollywood and Back

Gypsy’s success on Broadway attracted a more diverse group of impersonators. Female comics took it off, as they had in the mid-1930s, but now drag queens and African Americans joined them. Stumbling across the stage in Vincent Minnelli’s 1936 revue
The Show Is On,
Beatrice Lillie hurled her garters, stockings, bra, and finally her wig into the audience from behind a chorus line.

New versions of Gypsy emerged: an African-American Gypsy, a South American Gypsy, a drag Gypsy. As additional ersatz Gypsys popped up, popular opinion turned against the original. The
New Yorker
wondered if the
Daily News
was doing something treasonous by plastering the Sunday edition cover featuring her color photo on its trucks at the same time that La Guardia was outlawing burlesque in New York. The
Daily Worker
went even further, dismissing her as “a young lady who proves that the capitalist system is in the last stages of very beautiful decadence . . .

she is what is quaintly known as a stripteaser, an art which has blossomed under the Depression whilst all else declined.” Writer H. M. Alexander—who could be considered the Bill O’Reilly of his day—complained that after the Follies played in Kansas City, a department store’s junior miss department sold a Gypsy Rose Lee zipper dress.

It was at the very moment that Gypsy supposedly destroyed

striptease that writers began to see in it—and her—something quintessentially “American.” The first pairing of the words “American” and striptease occurred that spring as something of a joke, 84

To Hollywood and Back

when the Minskys testified before Congress that taking it off should be declared a national pastime, like baseball. “Stripping is definitely an American art,” said Herbert Minsky, when he spoke before the House of Representatives House Immigration Committee. He and his brother Morton were called to testify at the request of Rep. Samuel Dickstein, the anti-Nazi activist from New York who had proposed two bills that would limit the number of foreign performers allowed to enter the United States.

Many notable representatives from the arts and popular entertainment industry had already weighed in on both sides of the issue.

Herbert Minsky identified burlesque as “really the only school left for talent in the U.S.” He concluded his testimony with a list of burlesque performers who had crossed over to Broadway and Hollywood, naming “last, but not least, Gypsy.” According to him, the more Parisian chorus girls the government let perform their stripteases (as they were doing that very moment at the French Casino Theater in New York), the more difficult it would be for American stripteasers to achieve success. The press treated his testimony as a gimmick; opposed by both the Actors Equity Association and Sam Goldwyn, Dickstein’s bills died in committee. But striptease and America were inexorably linked.

What about Hollywood? If Gypsy had stripped during her first sojourn there, her history—and that of striptease—might look 85

To Hollywood and Back

entirely different. But in April of 1937 the woman whom Darryl Zanuck bought from the Shuberts for $20,000 arrived in Tinseltown to find that the Hays Office—the organization responsible for establishing censorship guidelines for the motion picture industry—was going to be as sympathetic to her as it had been to Mae West—that is, not sympathetic at all. A few years later, Gypsy recalled that Zanuck had sat her down and showed her “a stack of 20,000” letters from women who thought they were better qualified to act in the movies. (That the official number was 4,000 is one good index of Gypsy’s relationship to the truth.)

But there is no exaggerating her failure. Gypsy arrived in Hollywood at a bad time for women. The longer the Depression

dragged on, the more the Hays Office’s so-called Production Code forced female stars to tone down the tough-girl personas they had developed in the earlier part of the decade. The problem began three years earlier, when the Hays Office passed the Production Code leadership to Joseph Breen, whose focus was on taming female stars. He enlisted a Catholic ally, the National Legion of Decency, and the hard times of the Depression to assist in his heavy-handed efforts. Mae West, who before 1934 had managed to evade the code by writing her own plays, found herself in its maw. The stripper who announced that her G-string was “diamond studded,” a joke meant to allude to heiress Barbara Hutton’s jewel of choice, was going to run up against the 86

To Hollywood and Back

code—especially because this particular stripper had become famous by manufacturing her aristocratic pedigree.