Gypsy: The Art of the Tease Read online

  Gypsy

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  Gypsy

  T H E

  A R T

  O F

  T H E

  T E A S E

  Rachel Shteir

  ya l e u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s

  n e w h av e n & l o n d o n

  Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this

  book are not available for inclusion in the eBook.

  Copyright © 2009 by Rachel Shteir.

  All rights reserved.

  This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

  Set in Janson type by Integrated Publishing Solutions.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Shteir, Rachel, 1964–

  Gypsy : the art of the tease / Rachel Shteir.

  p. cm.—(Icons of America)

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  isbn 978-0-300-12040-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  1. Lee, Gypsy Rose, 1914–1970. 2. Stripteasers—United States—Biography.

  I. Title.

  pn2287.l29s58 2009

  792.702Ј8092—dc22

  [B]

  2008040303

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992

  (Permanence of Paper).

  It contains 30 percent postconsumer waste (PCW) and is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC).

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For my mother

  I wanted to do business faster than the ordinary

  mercantile transactions would admit.

  —P. T. Barnum

  Contents

  i n t r o d u c t i o n

  “Particles, Legends, Romance” 1

  o n e

  Undressing the Family Romance 10

  t w o

  The Queen of Striptease 31

  t h r e e

  To Hollywood and Back 83

  f o u r

  The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual 103

  fi v e

  Selling Striptease 151

  vii

  Contents

  Conclusion 185

  Acknowledgments

  191

  Notes

  193

  Bibliography

  205

  Index

  211

  Credits

  221

  viii

  Gypsy

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  i n t r o d u c t i o n

  “Particles, Legends, Romance”

  Before the woman who became known as Gypsy Rose Lee ar-

  rived in New York in 1930, striptease took place more frequently on tables in saloon backrooms or in whorehouses than on Broadway or in Hollywood. The police raided the burlesque theaters where strippers performed and arrested them for indecent exposure. Judges determined whether their dances violated obscenity laws and sentenced them to jail time. No one wrote about striptease in chic and serious literary magazines. Society matrons and debutantes never giggled at a striptease (nor tried to do one).

  Nor did Broadway lyricists, Russian choreographers, or Hollywood screenwriters satirize taking it off.

  After Gypsy’s triumph, striptease became more than a crime or a vice. It was now an ironic diversion for middle-class and 1

  Introduction

  wealthy women, a sly commentary on the rags-to-riches myth, the sort of hoax that the New Yorker could write about as a universal ideal. After Gypsy, choreographers and lyricists punctuated the ballets and musicals with stripteases. Novelists used the stripper’s character as a metaphor for American life’s small injustices and hypocrisies. Comedians impersonated strippers and told tales about their dubious pasts. Striptease became a representative American act. Getting naked revealed an American truth. Stars and Stripes and Striptease forever.

  Perhaps it is too much to pin all of these accomplishments on one woman, or to make the claim that this woman’s striptease (or any striptease) was iconic. But Gypsy was the only stripper of her era—of any era—to become a household name, to write detective novels and plays, or to inspire a musical and four memoirs (one her own), a portrait by Max Ernst, and a variety of roses.

  Moreover, she was the only stripper whom intellectuals, bankers, socialites, and ordinary Americans adored.

  How did she do it? For one thing, she turned striptease into what the scholar Robert Snyder described as “respectable thrills,”

  meaning vaudeville acts teetering between prurience and good behavior. That Gypsy could make the act of undressing into such a thrill makes her a girl P. T. Barnum would be proud of in the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t razzle-dazzle twentieth century American showbiz world.

  Whereas men in this world used patriotic songs or feats of 2

  Introduction

  daring to command attention and applause, and to reveal their identities, Gypsy used striptease. She transformed stripping into something more than the banal physical act of taking off her clothes by making it into a fable about her life.

  Americans did not universally applaud Gypsy for her efforts. If one aspect of her status as an icon rests on admiration of her leap from rags to riches doing something as naughty as stripping, another depends on outrage at the same. During her lifetime, reformers and politicians not only continued to advocate for outlawing striptease, they blamed Gypsy for promoting it. It disgusted them.

  But a puritanical attitude toward striptease is ultimately doomed. For one, the physical act of taking it off is associated, however loosely, with self-revelation—an American motif since our nation’s founding. If Gypsy’s rise struck reformers as immoral, to many writers, artists, and ordinary Americans it proved that fun and liberation from Victorian ideas had won. Gypsy: Robber Baroness of Undressing; American Libertine; Glorious Fake. This was also the first era in which people were, to use Daniel Boorstin’s conceit, known for being well known. That Gypsy started as a stripper and then became a joke, a millionaire, a writer, a legend, a brand, a mother, a saleswoman, and a recluse demonstrates her status as an icon, if taking off her clothes for 3

  Introduction

  the American elite while making fun of them fails to accomplish this.

  I had been mulling over Gypsy’s permutations and complications for ten years when, in 2004, I set off on a tour for my first book, Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show. Gypsy had lurked at the heart of that book, although she ultimately played a relatively small role in it. What intrigued me was this: thirty-some years after Gypsy’s death, despite women’s liberation, the sexual revolution, and modern pornography’s ubiquity, her striptease and personae still interest American women as a physical act, a metaphor for self-revelation, a popular art, and a way to immorality.

  What was Gypsy revealing, really? She taunted her audiences and readers, implying that she was about to tell all and then changing her mind. She did this in part by casting doubt on her own story’s credibility; for example, she admitted that she stripped for just fifty weeks altogether. And then she took it back.

  In her act she seemed to veer away from admitting she was a fraud. If what she said was untrue, she could modify it. She saw herself as a work in progress.

  So Gypsy’s striptease was no “ordinary” one by the standards of the day. It was less about sex than it was about class. Rather 4
>
  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

  o n e

  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 wr
ites 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.