Gypsy: The Art of the Tease (19 page)

Selling Striptease

Eliot Elisofon’s cookbook,
Food Is a Four Letter Word.
Elsewhere she described herself as a “homebody,” although the Gypsy Rose Lee–style homebody might have eluded the housewife in Peoria.

Or perhaps Gypsy gave this housewife an ideal to aspire to. In an episode of Edward R. Murrow’s television show
Person to Person
Gypsy entertains Murrow at home. Wearing one of her Charles James gowns, she flirts: “Why don’t you come upstairs to my tackle box?”

Unlike Mae West, Gypsy never aspired to be a “sexagenarian.”

Gore Vidal’s
Myra Breckinridge
was not for her. The plays she starred in during this era, many of which June directed, were homecomings, journeys down 1930s lane, comfort food for

McCarthy-era America: she rewrote
The Naked Genius
for a production in Bermuda; she played Sylvia, the gossipy wife in a revival of Clare Booth Luce’s play about female rivalry,
The
Women,
in Syracuse, New York, and Norwich, Connecticut; she starred in Ben Hecht’s
Twentieth Century
at the Palm Beach Playhouse, and in Anita Loos’s
Darling, Darling,
an adaptation of a Parisian farce about two women who love the same man, at the Pocono Playhouse. Outside of Manhattan, and away from the

carnivals, Gypsy evoked a Faustian bargain with her audience: if in the middle of the Cold War she could conjure a simpler time through costume, set, laughter, and sex, she would give back their youth.

But when Gypsy played Vegas she engineered a return to her 156

Selling Striptease

striptease self by way of Liberace: a dress from her carnival and nightclub act weighed ninety-seven pounds and dripped with layers of silver bugle beads. A silver lame gown opened to reveal Capri pants, suggesting transvestism, or, at least, liberation from femininity. “Gypsy Rose Lee . . . is sufficiently sock marquee to put ropes up both shows nightly,”
Variety
judged.

Even though she earned $10,000 a week in Vegas, Gypsy’s fear of being penniless drove her to scrimp. Erik recounts that she once responded to his request for a new wardrobe by comment-ing that “Harry Truman could find time to rinse out his socks and underpants every night.” Other saving measures included giving Erik the Depression-era suits of her Broadway show producer friend, Leonard Sillman, cooking on a hot plate while traveling instead of spending money on room service, and turning down the heat in her Sixty-third Street house to a point where her son complained about the cold.

But when it counted, Gypsy spent lavishly so that, despite hoarding until the musical bearing her name became her annu-ity, she was often living beyond her means. “When it counted”

centered on Gypsy’s image, whether that involved her two-tone Rolls Royce with a tea service and a crystal vase on the dash-board, her designer costumes and clothes, or her houses on the Upper East Side and in Beverly Hills.

But no investment could protect her from communist hunters.

Because she had stripped for the Spanish Loyalists years earlier, 157

Selling Striptease

in 1950 Gypsy’s name made it into the anti-Communist pamphlet
Red Channels.
Along with Arthur Laurents, Lillian Hellman, Marc Blitzstein, Josh White, and other theater artists, actors, and intellectuals, Gypsy,
Red Channels
reported, was “a dear and close associate of the traitors to our country.” The pamphlet cited as proof one speech Gypsy gave to the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in 1941, as well as three mentions in Eugene

Lyons’s exposé book,
Red Decade,
which described her striptease performance for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and called her a

“political neophyte.”

Gypsy was angry. She had already defended actress Jean Muir after McCarthyites had succeeded in getting television show sponsor General Foods Corporation to blacklist her. And the network supported Gypsy. When American Legionnaire Ed

Clamage—a man whom Studs Terkel called “the Joe McCarthy

of Chicago”—wired Robert Kintner, then president of ABC,

to demand that Kintner cancel
What Makes You Tick?,
Gypsy’s new radio talk show, Kintner replied with his own demand:

where was proof ? The only “proof ” Clamage could offer was
Red Channels.

Gypsy told
Time:
“Look at me—I haven’t slept in four nights.

I have a terrible case of laryngitis from screaming my innocence at people.” To the allegations of “front” activity she repeated what she had said when the Dies Committee investigated her in 1938:

“Should we wire our Congressman to investigate before we do a 158

Selling Striptease

benefit performance? I’m not a Red and never have been.” Eventually, Gypsy signed a document swearing to that effect.

After the Red Scare, Gypsy began appearing regularly on television. Unlike many former vaudeville and burlesque stars whom TV obliterated, her larger-than-life presence suited the golden age of talk. She emceed
What Makes You Tick
in 1950 and appeared on
Think Fast
and also on
What’s My Line?,
where she was the mystery guest, whose identity the panelists had to guess while blindfolded.

Gypsy took up her most serious political cause in this era: the performers’ union. In 1949, already one of a few women nominated to the national board of the American Guild of Variety Artists (AGVA), she became editor of the
AGVA News.
In her inaugural editor’s letter, Gypsy wrote a manifesto exposing the appalling con-ditions burlesque performers had endured before the union. She recalled that, when she had tried to organize in 1935, Billy Minsky had told her that “no actor should join a union. It isn’t artistic.

Unions are for laborers, people who dig ditches. You’re an artiste.

You should have star dust in your eyes and music in your heart.”

Gypsy spoke openly about burlesque troupers’ hard lives in a way that her films, stage shows, and novels never had:

seven days a week four shows a day, forty-five hours of

rehearsals a week for fifteen dollars. No contracts, no secu-159

Selling Striptease

rity bond, supply your own shoes and keep smiling. . . .

Who wants to know from stardust in your eyes when your

feet hurt? Twenty-five percent of our weekly salary was

paid to us in i.o.u’s, but I used mine to plug up the rat holes in the dressing room. That was in 1933. In 1934, a group

of burlesque actors formed the burlesque artist’s associa-

tion. Two months later the variety actors formed their

union, later to be known as the agva, and the first strong union of vaudeville actors since the White Rats.

Gypsy goes on to recount how, although actors got fined for refusing to play for “no money,” she was one of the first to do so.

She expresses her commitment to making sure producers re-

spected actors “like people.” Although she could neither stem the corruption plaguing AGVA nor convince other performers in the union that strippers were entertainers and not prostitutes, during her short tenure there she demonstrated that she was on the working person’s side.

In 1948 Gypsy met Julio de Diego, a Latin artist who would become her third husband, at a party she attended with the
Life
photographer Eliot Elisofon. It was love at first sight. De Diego remembered that “he met a beautiful girl whose black petticoat edged with red ribbon swirled at the bottom of her dress.”

The couple settled into relative domesticity—which for Gypsy 160

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meant traveling around the country in a trailer. De Diego

painted a surrealist mural on the trailer walls:
What Are Your
Dreams?
But ultimately, although the de Diegos enjoyed both each other’s company and dreams, neither one could sustain marriage.

De Diego balked at being Mr. Gypsy Rose Lee. “I am not cut out to be a prince consort,” he said, explaining why their marriage ended in divorce in 1955, after several years of separation.

As with Kirkland, the seeds of discontent may have been planted on the wedding day. “It was a very beautiful occasion . . . it was the simplest wedding possible, only our party of four, the Fox Movie-tone news and the newspaper photographers,” de Diego said. Still, it takes two to tangle. De Diego saw his wife less as a woman than as an embodiment of a surrealist ideal. A collage he did pasted headless photographs of Gypsy’s torso atop images of her legs pinwheeling from her dress, as though she were a real-life incarnation of a Busby Berkley musical. Around the margins de Diego scrawled bits of celebrity-inspired graffiti. A poem he wrote about Gypsy ended with the lines that he had:

Strangled her

To shut off

Her torrent

of

verbal

abuse

161

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Even after they divorced, though, de Diego and Gypsy corresponded for years. But romantically Gypsy was restless. She behaved—as she always had—in a way that came into vogue for women only in the 1960s. She once said that she supported

polygamy, but at the very least she was suspicious of domesticity.

“The first year of marriage you’re exploring everything new together. The second year you’re reliving the first year. The third year it’s just plain normal married life: I never made it through that,” she said.

Gypsy’s most serious and enduring relationship was with her mother even though, for the last ten years of Rose’s life, the two spoke only through lawyers. Gypsy paid many of her mother’s bills as a bribe to keep Rose out of her life. In 1951, three years before Rose’s death, she wrote: “Haven’t heard anything from mother recently, thank God.” After Rose died, Gypsy noted in the appointment book she was using as her journal: “Mother died at 6:30.” It is easy to see her jottings’ brevity as reflective of a chilled temper and attitude. But could it not also reflect implaca-bility, the trouper’s stoicism, her devotion to the show going on?

A New Year’s resolution that year was to “speak well of all or not speak.” When Mike Todd, the love of her life, died tragically four years later, Gypsy was similarly terse. “Mike was killed in a plane [crash] at 4:30.” (She did draw a box around the sentence.) 162

Selling Striptease

Gypsy had always promoted herself but since the late 1940s she had shifted her energy from the theater to advertising. This transformation from actress to saleswoman was hardly unheard of among female stars, but Gypsy’s success importing her striptease persona to marketing reveals how hungry Americans were in this to talk about sex. She was a female Alfred Kinsey, pre-scribing for Americans a franker, more commercial idea of sex (as long as it wasn’t too frank). Typical of her approach was her speech at the Formfit Merchandise Clinic in 1950. Introduced as a “posture expert,” she cracked jokes and recommended that lingerie makers make dressing rooms more attractive.

“And what about wired brassieres?” she asked. “Some of them are so loaded that you have to join the pipe fitters union to wear it. I like a little more wire, sure, but not a cyclone fence.”