Gypsy: The Art of the Tease (2 page)

Introduction

than reveal her flesh, Gypsy, chatting about high culture, disguised herself. She took off a few pieces of clothing with studied hauteur. She was not the Circe of undressing—she was, as I have written elsewhere, its Dorothy Parker.

Long after Gypsy stopped stripping, she continued to mime

taking it off, promising to reveal long after she had nothing left to reveal, teasing the audience that somewhere in the folds of her gowns lurked a new place of discovery. But ultimately Gypsy was too savvy (or too stingy) to give away new secrets.

All of this inspired (and sometimes infuriated) writers. Among the most memorable of striptease’s describers is Roland Barthes, who, in 1957, the same year that Gypsy’s memoir was published in America, characterized it as “particles of eroticism” “trans-plant[ing] the body into legend and romance.”

I don’t know if Gypsy counted Barthes among her favorite authors, as she did Proust. But she would have agreed that taking off her clothes in public could be understood as both metaphor and social reality.

In our era, thanks to Gypsy, striptease has come to be discussed in two ways: it is either an empowering event or an anxiety-making one. It either liberates women or oppresses them. As in her era, striptease performers still argue about how much they should take off. (And how much they are taking off, which is not always 5

Introduction

the same question.) Also as in Gypsy’s era, when ex-stripper Anna Nicole Smith’s sudden (and allegedly mysterious) death in 2007

attracted more news coverage than that devoted to any other story except the Iraqi war, some commentators interpreted it as a sign of our culture’s decadence.

A main difference between Gypsy’s time and our own is sup-

posed to be that women (by which is meant white, middle-class women) have other options. But when a woman who does not

need to strip (for money) still strips, there is thought to be something distasteful about it, as when Diablo Cody, who began life as Brook Busey Hunt, wrote
Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper,
a memoir about stripping in Minneapolis. The following year she wrote the screenplay for
Juno
(and won an Academy Award for her effort), and critics applauded and attacked, which demonstrates the hold that striptease has on the American psyche. Today women continue to write about their experiences stripping. Some take cardio-striptease classes, where they gyrate, shimmy, and lose weight. A few brave souls install striptease poles in their bedrooms. I strip, therefore I am.

Strippers maintain their own listservs, blogs, unions, and Web sites, and they create and sell their own CDs, magazines, and t-shirts. The Burlesque Hall of Fame crowns “Miss Exotic World”

at a yearly contest, held most recently at The Palms in Las Vegas.

The idea that striptease divided the sexes continues to haunt us as well. Back in Gypsy’s era, some writers worried that taking 6

Introduction

off one’s clothes in public for money would bring down Western civilization or at least marriage as we know it. In 1935 John Erskine, literary scholar, light novelist, colleague of Mark van Doren, composer, and Juilliard’s first president, complained that at a striptease performance the guy never gets the girl.

A Marxist version of Erskine’s sentiment appeared shortly

after Gypsy retired. In his 1960 essay “The Socratic Strip,” Umberto Eco reckoned that striptease was bad for the proletariat.

“The striptease unconsciously teaches the spectator, who seeks and accepts frustration, that the means of production are not within his reach.” In the twentieth century’s last decade, some Third Wave Feminists seized upon striptease as an “empowering” act, arguing that women should toss bras offstage, not burn them. The most recent backlash against striptease charges that the eager young feminists who say they are expressing themselves while taking it off are girls in voyeurs’ clothing. In
Female
Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture
Ariel Levy writes, “Some odd things were happening to people in my social life, too. People I knew (female people) liked going to strip clubs.”

Gypsy, whose early admirers called her “The Queen of Striptease,” the way Ella Fitzgerald’s called her “The Queen of Jazz,”

launched Americans into this fascination the way JFK launched 7

Introduction

Americans into space. The pioneer of undressing sheds light on our enduring obsession with the phenomenon (and our enduring interest in casting it as something bad and bad for us or good and good for us) because of her ability to mesmerize a room and give pleasure by undressing.

One thing that is unique about the Houdini of Take Off is that she is a hybrid in American popular culture: a funny-smart sex symbol that became a star for mythic reasons and antimythic ones, too. Gypsy was the most eminent, sophisticated practitioner of what her producers labeled an “American” art. But she became an icon in large part because of one specific preposterous claim: she liked to read great books, listen to classical music, and take off her clothes onstage. This makes her a Confidence Girl, heir to American tricksters in Melville, Poe, and Twain. In
Huckle-berry Finn
the Duke and the Dauphin pose as royalty and do a naked dance to defraud a man’s heirs. When the family discovers the deceit, the pair get tarred and feathered. Arguments about whether Gypsy was really smart or not became arguments about what it meant to be American and what Making It cost women.

The Art of the Tease
is divided into five sections. The book is chronological. I start with the real Gypsy and her family. Chapter Two records her arrival in New York and her efforts to forge a new identity. Chapter Three describes her botched trip to Hollywood and her return to New York. Chapter Four spans the forties and recounts how “The Queen of Striptease” transformed 8

Introduction

herself into “The Striptease Intellectual,” and the backlash against her. This chapter is the largest part of the book, and it tells of the entertainment world’s changing demands and of Gypsy’s affinity with twentieth century American writers and artists. Chapter Five traces Gypsy’s use of striptease to sell products including sheets, furs, and liquor. This section contains an analysis of the eponymous 1959 musical, and of the memoirs—

her own, her son’s, her sister’s—which retold her story from their perspectives. I cannot think of another American family that has produced so many memoirs. I end with a brief description of an HBO movie currently in production about Gypsy, starring Sigourney Weaver.

Before modern pornography’s rise, Gypsy moved the phe-

nomenon of taking it off from America’s margins to Broadway, Hollywood, and Main Street. For that Sisyphean task, she should get her own plaque in Union Square in New York City or a

G-string in the striptease hall of fame.

9

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Undressing the Family Romance

To Broadway aficionados, the name Gypsy Rose Lee recalls the 1959 eponymous musical (based on her memoir) created by

Arthur Laurents, Stephen Sondheim, Jule Styne, and Jerome

Robbins. These men saw Gypsy as a victim of Mama Rose, the stage-door mother who forced her daughter into a life of

striptease. But the truth about Gypsy is more complicated than anything the musical or the memoir reveals. It is also more complicated than the three memoirs Gypsy’s sister and son wrote about their extraordinary relative. No one could invent this woman who tore herself and her profession down at every opportunity. “The stage is 6 feet by 2 feet which is dandy for a coffin but not dandy for me,” she complained about the San Francisco nightclub where she stripped in 1941.

10

Undressing the Family Romance

If Gypsy was quick to deride the venues she played in, she was equally quick to apologize after putting on airs. In 1949 the Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper published a catty remark

Gypsy made about the lack of intelligence of a certain “Monkey Girl” in the carnival in which the stripper was then starring. The Monkey Girl writes an angry letter to Hopper, who forwards it to Gypsy. The stripper responded to her friend: “It makes me feel like a heel if I’ve really hurt her feelings.
.
. . She might have an M.A. for all I know.”

The overall arc of Gypsy’s life—the bare facts, as it were—is a first-class rags-to-riches story. But the closer you get to that life, the loopier the arc gets—it would have to, as her story itself is a tease. Even something as straightforward as Gypsy’s birth date is uncertain. Some sources say that she was born Rose Louise Hovick in 1914, while others list 1911 as the year of her birth. In 1923 a Seattle doctor claimed that Mama Rose altered her birth certificate and that Gypsy was actually born in 1908. All stories about Gypsy’s early life do agree that she spent her first years in Seattle in a family of domineering women who had meek or absent husbands, and that as a young child she toured on small-time vaudeville circuits in the West. She first stripped in 1929, endured vaudeville’s death, burlesque’s death, Hollywood’s hu-miliation, the Depression, World War II, and television’s rise.

She produced a Broadway show, wrote two best-selling books (and two flops), toured with her own carnival show, and “retired”

11

Undressing the Family Romance

in 1959 to tend her garden. And host a TV show. And sell dog food.

Gypsy borrowed from Edith Wharton and Horatio Alger. She

was self-made and aspirational. Her friend Janet Flanner once told her that her brilliance was to understand “as common sense what others regard as downright lunacy.” Gypsy’s younger sister, June Havoc, described her as having “a comic savagery in her manner.” Carson McCullers, who met her in 1940, wrote that she was “witty, kind, very sensible, and utterly true to herself.”

Gypsy picked up these attributes from spending time alone in her childhood and from hanging around backstage since the age of four and watching her sister and others perform. And from performing herself. And, surely, here the consummate performer and monster whose alias is her mother deserves credit. Here are a few Dickensian tidbits about life with Mother: Rose declined to change her daughters’ diapers between dusk and dawn; Rose told June that she tried to abort her; Rose made June “go on with the show” while she was sick with chicken pox and mumps.

Later, when Rose pled poverty or cried illness it was prelude to a request for financial consolation. (It should be mentioned, however, that the above stories come from June’s pen in her second memoir, in which the younger sister was playing one of her favorite games: “Let’s even the score.”)

In the stories about Mother that she began to publish in the mid-1940s, Gypsy tempers Rose’s less savory qualities with a 12

Undressing the Family Romance

fierce maternal dedication. In one, later reprinted in her memoir, she recounts how, when she first started stripping in burlesque, other female performers began to receive poison pen letters.

“Why don’t you wise up and get out of the business?” one of these letters, signed “a well wisher,” suggested. Unbeknownst to Louise, backstage Rose was stitching together her daughter’s legend with these memos, as well as with large floral bouquets and mash notes “from an unknown admirer.” When Rose noticed her daughter watching her she did not cringe in shame.

“Get that ribbon and help me tie it around the handle,” Rose commanded. And so at age fifteen Louise helped her mother invent her.

The Hovick Family Tree

Louise actually had already been rehearsing for that role for some time. But I tell this anecdote to suggest that the Hovicks were not the average American family of the time—or any time, for that matter. Rose was just one thorny branch in the Hovick matriarchy, where, as June put it, “men just didn’t seem to last very long.”

The Amazons liked to descend to comic flourishes. According to Gypsy’s son, Erik Preminger, one of his mother’s most menacing claims—about how her great-great-great-grandmother survived the Donner party by strapping human steaks around her torso—

was a joke. “She always told that story with a laugh,” he said. In America, devouring one’s own offspring to survive is more than a 13

Undressing the Family Romance

joke, however. It is a way of forging your identity. Chez the Hovicks, it served as a motif—a badge of honor. Survival of the fittest was an inheritance whose principles could be passed down wher-ever you were—the frontier or showbiz or New York literary life.

But Gypsy’s ancestors were restless. They came to Seattle

from Minnesota in the early 1890s. Known as Big Lady, Gypsy’s maternal grandmother, Anna, a traveling milliner/corset maker/

con artist, sometimes lived in Seattle with her husband, Charlie Thompson, who worked for the Great Northern Expressway,

the tramline connecting Chicago to the Pacific Northwest.

But other times she traveled solo to San Francisco, Alaska, or Nevada. These were regions of the country populated by miners and prostitutes and so were not known for their politesse or family values. Big Lady sold women of easy virtue and saloon dancers embroidered lingerie, hats, and other baubles in person and by mail, although she neglected to tell potential buyers that they were participating in an auction and the woman who paid most for supplies would win the garment that she thought she already owned. Anna had four children. The traveling saleswoman taught her daughter, Rose, some tricks, but otherwise neglected her.