Gypsy: The Art of the Tease (13 page)

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The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

which is
ecdysis.
This word produces . . .
ecdysiast.
” Describing striptease as “molting” was like calling the middle class the Booboisie. What else could Gypsy do but rush to defend

striptease’s reputation? “Ecdysiast, he calls me! Why, the man is an intellectual slob! We don’t wear feathers and molt them off. . . . What does he know about stripping?” she asked H. Allen Smith of the
World Telegram.
Mencken knew that Americans were turning away from striptease as Gypsy had defined it in 1936: as an amusing bauble and a critique of rags-to-riches tales.

Another incident from that same spring reveals a Gypsy out of touch with her public. In her memoir,
Talking Through My Hats,
the milliner-to-the-stars Lily Daché tells how, in May, one month after Mencken and Gypsy tangled, the stripper was the guest of honor at a benefit for the United Committee for French Relief. Held in New York’s chic Ritz Carlton Hotel, the event promised to be “one of the great fashionable occasions of the season.” Frank Crowninshield, the editor of
Vanity Fair,
emceed.

Society matrons, debutantes, and celebrities from all milieus attended. Gypsy wore a striped silk dress with removable panels, but it does not seem that the entertainment committee had

planned for her to strip. The evening was proceeding calmly until, as Daché told it, “someone whistled.” From then on, no one could stop Gypsy from taking off her clothes. Even Mary Pickford, who at one point offered her $700 if she would keep her skirt on, failed to dissuade her. But in the middle of her im-105

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

promptu striptease, Gypsy suddenly stopped stripping and strode backstage. Daché, who followed her, recalled: “there she was, in a mink coat, a hat on her had and one in each hand. ‘Look I’m ready,’ she said. ‘Ready for what?’ I asked. She threw open her coat and there she stood in her famous G string and bejeweled brassiere. On each side of the brassiere she had pinned a hat, and another in the middle of the G string.” It was at that moment, Daché adds, as though to contrast the narcissistic stripper and the world-shattering political events in Europe, that the radio broadcast the news that Germany invaded Holland.

Gypsy next signed with the young entrepreneur Mike Todd,

who was looking for a star to replace Carmen Miranda, the

“Brazilian Bombshell,” in
Streets of Paris,
the hit revue that the Shuberts had produced at the Broadhurst Theatre the previous year.

It was a tough act to follow. At that time Miranda, with her flamboyant fruit headdresses and aggressive cha-chas, commanded the highest salary of any female star in America. To make audiences forget her, Todd plastered Gypsy’s image on a forty-foot-high billboard and boasted that she was “bigger than Stalin” (that remark had not yet become an atrocity). He charged audiences $1

to see her, more than the price of admission for any other show.

Gypsy succeeded at the Fair not just because of her forty-foot billing, Todd’s absurd publicity claims about her, or the exorbi-tant price of admission. She succeeded because she was able to transform her high/low persona from the 1936 Follies into a 106

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

patriotic-comedic one to tell a fresh, yet familiar, story. At the time, Germany was occupying France, and Gypsy proposed an

evening of diversion by reprising some of her old burlesque routines and introducing new ones to update her fans about her own story. She did an abbreviated version of her signature striptease, which
Time
magazine described as “absent-minded.” She was by now a master at turning rumors into revelations about herself, especially those that poked fun at her legend.

Whereas in real life Gypsy played a stripper sprinkling her routine with French phrases, in
Streets of Paris
she played an American pretending to be French in “The French Have a Word for It.”

That she mangled the language cast doubt on her “elite” image, or at the very least presented it while winking—“
Voos ette aytrainjeer a
Paree?
” (Are you familiar with Paris?), she asks the other equally clueless dame. In another number, as “the widow” in one of burlesque’s most famous skits, “Floogle Street,” playing opposite the young comic geniuses Bud Abbott and Joey Faye, Gypsy torments the delivery boy with a bump before smashing one of the hats he is trying to find a home for. (The gag is that everyone the boy meets goes nuts when he says “Floogle Street” and destroys a hat, so that at the end of the skit he has no hats to deliver.) And in “Robert the Roue from Redding, Pa,” which Bobby Clark had sung in
Streets of
Paris
the previous year on Broadway, Gypsy satirized a rube who came to the city to become a “wolf.”

For
Streets of Paris
Gypsy attracted a less elite audience than the 107

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

one that had carried her to fame in 1936. Upper-class New Yorkers came to see Gypsy but so did the character that
Time
called

“Elmer,” meaning the average American citizen, although it is unlikely that Elmer recognized the black gown with a padded fishtail as a Schiaparelli that Diana Vreeland had loaned her. The haute couture mermaid/populist stripper inspired
New York Times
theater critic Brooks Atkinson to call her “tall, sleek and mischievous”

before he withdrew to pronouncements about the dangers of

making light of sex: “Humor in strip-teasing is in questionable taste. Some things are too sacred to be kidded.” The
New Yorker
disagreed. Kidding sacred things was the point. “We want to watch . . . Gypsy Rose Lee return as nearly as possible to the con-dition of her birth. At the end of a strip tease we demand spiritual comfort, not H. V. Kaltenborn,” the magazine opined, referring to the radio commentator who had become “the voice of the war.”

Streets of Paris
also gave Gypsy her first opportunity to put her dreams of reinventing herself as a literary figure into practice. In August she guest-wrote Walter Winchell’s column while he was on vacation, satirizing the sentimental ideas about men and romance circa 1940. She divided the column into sections: “The Men I Love” (those who had given her starring roles); “Orchids and Notes” (presents); “First Breaks on Broadway” (career). She would later cite the column as giving her the confidence to write her first book.

Gypsy also met the next “man she loved”—the short, swag-

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gering impresario Mike Todd—at the Fair. Until 1990, when

Erik Preminger donated his mother’s papers to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Todd’s children and biographer Art Cohn denied the affair. Since the Gypsy Rose Lee Papers contain Todd’s love notes, their relationship is irrefutable.

I have often wondered if the denials are so vehement because Gypsy was a stripper.

Todd was no choirboy. He was one of those larger-than-life figures in the American theater who have vanished with the egg cream. Born in Minneapolis around 1907, Todd sold newspapers, shined shoes, played a cornet in a boys’ band, ran a general store, and became an excellent craps player before he was twelve.

When the Todds moved to Chicago, Mike worked as a carnival pitchman, shoe salesman, soda jerk, pharmacist, and president of the “Bricklaying College of America.” He ran a road show whose star was a trained penguin and wrote gags for a vaudeville team.

At the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair Todd produced a striptease act

“the Moth and the Flame,” in which a ballerina in a tiny costume (moth) threw herself at a flame. He also was a salesman who leased “Kute Kris Kringle”—a miniature Santa Claus—to department stores. His idea was that children could peer inside a dollhouse window, see Santa inside, and speak to him on the phone. But Todd was not just a hack. He was also interested in Ferenc Molnar, the Hungarian writer whose play
Liliom
later became the musical
Carousel.

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In the first season of the 1939 World’s Fair Todd produced an updated version of
The Mikado,
with Bill (“Bojangles”) Robinson.

During this time (Todd was still married to his first wife, who would shortly die under mysterious circumstances) along came Gypsy. It is often said that Gypsy saw in Todd a male version of herself, as though her story reset that of Narcissus and Echo on the Great White Way. One story tells how Todd fell in love when he caught Gypsy cooking knockwurst in her dressing room to save money. But while the two carnivorous skinflints were both larger-than-life showbiz people who scrambled up from nothing and triumphed in the golden age of Broadway, their attraction revolves around more than a taste for Jewish deli food and for gazing at each others’ reflections. Todd’s savvy and ma-chismo won Gypsy. She fell so hard in love with him that, for her, she did the unthinkable—in addition to marrying someone else to make him jealous, that is—she lent him money. She would agree to be an angel for the 1942 musical
Star and Garter,
which they co-produced and in which she starred. As usual, June explained her sister’s attraction in mercantile terms: “Mike picked up the myth machine where Eddy had left it” and quoted Todd’s marveling that “a stripper who don’t strip” could attract so much attention as though it proved his disregard for her sister. Such cynicism overlooks Gypsy’s passion for the man who bore more than a passing resemblance to Edward G. Robinson. Why didn’t they marry? Since the two were married to showbiz, perhaps nei-110

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

ther one was interested in breaking up. Or perhaps, as Erik once wrote, his mother knew that Todd had a mean streak. Nonetheless, the affair continued for almost four years, and letters and telegrams in the Gypsy Rose Lee Papers confirm Todd’s sweet-ness and passion.

The G-String Murders

Just before he set off across America in the fall of 1940, Henry Miller wrote, “Gypsy Rose Lee (burlesque queen) saying to me at World’s Fair, N.Y. on eve of trip: ‘I could think of a lot better things to do than tour America.’”

She found that thing in the world of letters. After the Fair ended in the summer of 1940, Gypsy left her apartment on East Fifty-seventh Street, her antiques, and her Chinese maid for the third floor of a house on Seven Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights. Many writers, including Sherill Tippins, the house’s biographer, have since described it as an artist’s colony—even Yaddo South (it was torn down in 1945 to make room for Robert Moses’s Brooklyn Queens Expressway). But although Yaddo

shares with Seven Middagh the berthing of a wide range of literary and artistic luminaries—David Diamond, W. H. Auden, and Benjamin Britten all spent time at Seven Middagh—and a reputation for sexual shenanigans, to my knowledge Yaddo has never welcomed a neighborhood character nicknamed “Ginger Ale,”

who played ragtime piano nude, a lit cigarette in his butt. Also, 111

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

Gypsy Rose Lee autographing copies of her novel
The G-String Murders,
ca.

1941. Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

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The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

compared to Yaddo’s totalitarian administration at the time, the management at Seven Middagh was positively louche.

Lincoln Kirstein wrote a small check to pay rent. But the muse behind the impresario was George Davis, Gypsy’s friend, a magazine editor who embraced with such fervor the idea of bringing serious writers to popular magazines in the 1930s that he was fired from every editorial post he held—well, that and his di-sheveled comportment in the offices of
Harper’s Bazaar
and elsewhere.
New Yorker
correspondent Janet Flanner described him as

“a sulky, extra sensitive character and a deadly wit.” Other deni-zens of Seven Middagh included, not all at once, Carson McCullers, Richard Wright, Paul and Jane Bowles (recovering from Morocco), as well as Thomas Mann’s son Golo. Salvador and Gala Dali, George Balanchine, and Kurt Weill dropped by, as did Flanner, who would introduce Gypsy to her publisher, Simon and Schuster. The portrait photographer Louise Dahl Wolfe, another photographer who did her part in immortalizing Gypsy in domestic settings, met the stripper there. Thomas Mann’s other children, Klaus and Erika, spent a festive Thanksgiving dinner at the house and may have at least partly inspired Gypsy to donate some of her papers to Princeton University’s Firestone Library.

Reactions to Seven Middagh oscillated around Gypsy or

George, who told the poet Harold Norse how he liked the

Brooklyn port and the Bucket of Blood bar on nearby Sands

Street, where he chatted up sailors and then seduced them. Car-113

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oline Seebohm wrote that Seven Middagh was “odd but it was lively.” Peter Pears called it “sordid beyond belief,” and Louis Untermeyer noted that Seven Middagh was “gay (in both senses of the word)” and that “Gypsy did not strip, but Auden did plenty of teasing.”

Seven Middagh may have both stifled and inspired Gypsy. In 1941, back on the road and working hard, she complained about late nights giving her “the Yaddo pallor.” More of a home than Gypsy had ever cozied up to thus far, Seven Middagh was no Party Central or not just Party Central. Gypsy got work done and became a muse to Carson McCullers, who had already published
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
to much acclaim by the time she arrived there. McCullers finished
The Bride and Her Brother,
the working title for
The Member of the Wedding,
after a fire woke everyone in the middle of Thanksgiving night. Running down the street holding Gypsy’s hand to see the fire truck and the burning building, McCullers realized what was missing from the novella. She shouted: “Frankie is in love with her brother and his bride and wants to become a member of the wedding.” According to Carlos Dews, a McCullers scholar, the relationship between the two women went further than hand-holding house-mates. But I think it is more likely that the fragile writer imagined the affair.