Gypsy: The Art of the Tease (20 page)

In 1954, having befriended Colonel Elliott White Springs, the iconoclastic chairman of Springmaid Linens, Gypsy starred in an ad campaign for the company, the tagline: “You love those slow burning Springmaid sheets.” The ad outraged Madison Avenue. After that, Gypsy became the company’s spokeswoman. In a second ad in the same campaign she lounged on a bed and

swore that Springmaid Candycale sheets were her “favorite nite spot.”

If only Gypsy’s theatrical roles had gone so smoothly. Most stars flail around when the culture changes. Studio executives considered Katharine Hepburn box office poison until she tri-163

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umphed in
The Philadelphia Story.
Frank Sinatra struggled after the war before trading ebullience for 1950s cool. When, in 1957, twenty years after Gypsy had replaced Merman in
DuBarry was a
Lady,
she stepped into the lead role in
Happy Hunting,
something seemed wrong. Part of the awkwardness was the musical itself.

Lindsay and Crouse wrote
Happy Hunting
for Merman, who referred to it as a “jeep among limousines.” The plot is uninspired: Wealthy widow Liz Livingstone accompanies her daughter to

Monaco, where she contrives to marry her off to a rich suitor.

The team crammed the musical full of topical references.

But it wasn’t just one bad play. The year Jack Kerouac wrote
On the Road
was the year Americans lost interest in Gypsy’s sophisticated parody of striptease.

The Death of Striptease

Touring in Europe in the early 1950s, Gypsy got mixed reviews.

In Sweden she wrote: “Audiences watch me with their mouths wide open, but not longing for me. After all, they seem to be saying, ‘we show more than that on the beach,’ and indeed, with nude sunbathing, they certainly do.” After a 1951 London

engagement, the
News Chronicle
damned her: “At one stage she has a singular lack of clothes and at the same time a singular lack of wit.”

Americans were often more polite. But during the Cold War, the striptease as Gypsy had introduced it—a witty, sexy act—had 164

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vanished. Save for a few louche niteries on “Stripty-Second Street,” Fiorello La Guardia had shut down burlesque in New York in 1939. A version of striptease flourished in Las Vegas, once the Minsky Brothers, the burlesque impresarios whom

Justice Brennan had chased out of Newark, New Jersey, went west. Striptease staggered on in Atlantic City, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, and San Francisco, and at clubs like the Crazy Horse in Paris. But in New York the Minskys’ petitions to bring back

“clean” burlesque (and with it striptease) met with good-humored indifference. Also, by the early 1950s cities where burlesque striptease had staggered on during wartime razed the slums where these theaters sat. Rumors of burlesque’s mob connections and of links between striptease and prostitution made it more marginal still.

Whatever striptease was in the 1950s, it was rarely funny.

Gypsy leapt onto the scene when Hollywood honored screwball comics like Carole Lombard, Claudette Colbert, Jean Arthur, and Rosalind Russell. But by the 1940s, femmes fatales, pinup girls, and love goddesses had replaced these funny ladies as though, once the economy improved, no one wanted to see women laughing.

Thanks to years of suppression by the Hays Office, no bur-

lesque striptease exists in a studio-made film. The advent of
Playboy
and other “pin up” magazines, as well as Alfred Kinsey’s books on sex, diminished striptease’s taboo by giving Americans access to the naked female body in ways that had hitherto been 165

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possible only at a burlesque show. Yet although
Playboy
founder Hugh Hefner initially ran photos of pinup girls and strippers in his pages, he considered striptease too old-fashioned to be of much interest; in any event, Gypsy by that time was too old for his pages.

After the war Americans preferred either Lili St. Cyr’s ascetic lavish pantomime takeoffs or the avuncular sugar mama style of Blaze Starr. We were still a few years away from the moment when
Notes on Camp
would explain how to revive obsolete forms of culture by adding wit.

1957–59: Gypsys

When Gypsy published her autobiography,
Gypsy,
in 1957, it was not a new story. She had been teasing readers with it for over a decade the way she teased audiences by removing one item of clothing at a time and then vanishing before taking everything off, leaving the rest to the imagination. So when Erik says that his mother wrote
Gypsy
in nine months between starring in a revival of the Ben Hecht play
Twentieth Century
at the Palm Beach Playhouse and doing her striptease act at the Sans Souci Hotel in Miami Beach, what he is really saying is that she picked up her clothing from the stage and sewed it into an almost new dress.

Gypsy
tells her story in flashback, beginning in 1957 and then jumping to her childhood. It tours her early days on the road, rambles through 1930s burlesque, and ends in 1936 with her tri-166

Selling Striptease

Gypsy Rose Lee and Ethel Merman during rehearsal for
Gypsy,
1959.

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

umph in the Follies as she is en route to Hollywood. As with
G-String Murders, Gypsy
pleased fans and alienated critics, who used the book as an opportunity to deride striptease and the author’s credentials. One reviewer found the book “depressing and undependable.” Others raised the old objection about Gypsy’s spurious literary claims. “This Stripper Can Write!” a headline proclaimed. Still others accused her of being mean. Allen 167

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Churchill complained: “Her clever remarks have a raucous edge that rob[s] them of humor.” When the
Chicago Tribune
serialized the book, some readers wrote in to say that the newspaper, celebrating a stripper’s success, was doing the Devil’s work. But Gypsy’s memoir preceded a slew of female celebrity tell-alls that would appear in the next few years.

Broadway producer David Merrick bought the rights to
Gypsy,
and, after unsuccessfully wooing the lyricist /composer team of Betty Comden and Adolph Green, convinced the quartet of

Arthur Laurents, Stephen Sondheim, Jule Styne, and Jerome

Robbins to tackle the project. Set in the Jazz Age and the Depression,
Gypsy,
a
Musical Fable,
focuses on Mama Rose, the stage-door mother who flings her daughter into a life of undressing with all of the sentimentality of a spider devouring its young.

Loud, ambitious, thwarted, and materialistic, Rose pushes June into a vaudeville career and thus drives her away. Vaudeville dies.

In act 2, Rose tries to work her magic on the wallflower, Gypsy, who proceeds to both exceed and destroy the mother by becoming a stripper in the Ziegfeld Follies, the
American Idol
of its day.

As Laurents put it: “The story of a woman who became the

striptease queen of America did not interest me.” In 1957 what did interest Laurents and his collaborators, entwined in Cold War morality and their own
meshugas,
was Rose. The Sondheim-Laurents-Styne-Robbins
Gypsy
ends on Broadway, after the ugly duckling becomes the swan, when the Mean Queen “recognizes”

168

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her creation and regrets subsuming her own talents. Gypsy’s journey from “Queen of Striptease” to “Striptease Intellectual” is less important than Rose’s bitter, thwarted hopes. But she does accuse her daughter of being a fraud who “reads book reviews like they was books.”

In 1959, when the musical premiered on Broadway, America’s Most Famous Stripper was not concerned about whether it was documentary, fiction, or memoir. Gypsy saw
Gypsy
as (just) another vehicle with which to promote herself. Unlike June, who fought the musical’s opening to try and get Sondheim and Co. to make her character more sympathetic, Gypsy didn’t care how the boys presented her, so long as the show had her name on it and tickets got sold. Gypsy was thinking about what was to her a more central problem than the truth: the amount of exposure that was desirable. “I must not play Casa Cugat,” she concluded in her journal, referring to the nightclub where she had agreed to headline at the time of the musical’s opening. “It is wrong for me to be shaking the beads in a saloon while the ‘myth’ is on Broadway. The original must live up to the story.”

But who was the original? Gypsy had answered Laurents’s

query about the genesis of her name with a classic evasion: “Oh darling, I’ve given so many versions, why don’t you make up your own?” Her continuous voguing and teasing helped Gypsy keep much in her personal life private. Still, one of her most throw-away statements reveals much about her interior, the way the 169

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pins she tossed into the tuba in the 1930s revealed a lot about her act’s intention. “I don’t mind working awfully hard but I work hard to keep it light,” she told a reporter in 1957.

Let Me Not Strip for You

In 1959 Merman made Rose, just like Brando had made Stanley Kowalski. Broadway’s (and later Hollywood’s) most flamboyant actresses and musical comedy divas—Rosalind Russell; Angela Lans-bury; Tyne Daly; Bernadette Peters, Bette Midler, Patti LuPone—

have really only ever been contenders. Yet whereas Rose conjured Merman, the ingénue evoked tabula rasa. Marilyn Monroe was never considered for the role of the young Gypsy. Sophia Loren, Jane Seymour, and Elizabeth Taylor were never dreamed about, and not just because they couldn’t sing. The actresses who have played Rose’s daughter are variations on the Audrey Hepburn theme: Sandra Church, Natalie Wood, Christine Ebersole.

Kenneth Tynan’s
New Yorker
review of the Broadway premiere criticized Church as “too chaste in demeanor to reproduce the guileful, unhurried carnality with which the real Gypsy undressed.” Arthur Laurents blamed Church for these qualities, but the young Gypsy’s lack of va-va-voom was not solely the actress’s fault. During the Cold War the idea that a woman would warm up to being a stripper would have been too daring for Broadway audiences to consider. This was not France, or even 170

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Great Britain. It was the America of Saul Bellow, Norman

Mailer, Phillip Roth, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Senator Joseph McCarthy, and Hugh Hefner. It was essentially a masculine

rather than a feminine era, one where a stripper on the Broadway stage was most likely a sex kitten or a joke.

As for the sexy comic hijinks Gypsy embodied in real life, the musical boils them down to three numbers implying that allure cultivated between men and women while laughing was in and of itself a con. Gypsy herself said, as early as 1937, “You can’t sell sex and humor at the same time.” The number Gypsy became famous for in the 1930s was both smarter and more demure than

“Let Me Entertain You,” whose brashness epitomized the 1950s.

“You Gotta Have a Gimmick” uncovers less about the “real”

Gypsy than it does about Cold War ambivalence toward female carnality. Finally, the finale, “Rose’s Turn,” though not technically a striptease, forces the true star of the show to reveal the ambition and rage she had spent her entire life hiding.

During the musical’s creation, Laurents and Robbins had tangled over how risqué Gypsy’s act 2 striptease should be. In 1959, still a few years before the sexual revolution made onstage nudity chic, Laurents was leery of alienating his middle-class audience.

As Deborah Jowitt tells it in her biography of Jerome Robbins, 171

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Laurents wrote the choreographer a note to dissuade him from making the striptease too vulgar:

We are all absolutely convinced that the moment she

[Gypsy] steps out of the dress, she is cheapened and vul-

garized. The audience does not want to see it. They want

to see her tease and love her when she does. But the

moment is vulgar, the rolling up in the curtain is vulgar—

terribly so—the movement makes her cheap, common,

ordinary—and hurts both Louise and Rose for the rest of

the show. About the tease, she was always a lady. If you feel that she must be nude, please restrict to a flash when she is in the white furs. Perhaps if it is as though the furs were slipped back without her knowledge, and she pulls them

back with a smile, that would be acceptable. . . . Please

keep her a lady.

It is not known how Robbins replied. But Gypsy’s striptease in the musical is all about her mother. “Mama, I’m pretty,” is her famous line as she looks in the mirror right before she is about to take off her clothes. At first her mother eggs her on from backstage, shouting, “Sing out, Louise.” Not too long after that, Gypsy begins to insert her own flirty touches. She designs her own risqué costumes. But if her striptease established her as