Gypsy: The Art of the Tease Read online

  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

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  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

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  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.

  Two of the four Thompson children died young. Hurd, the boy, drowned in the summer of 1897 in Lake Union, near the family’s house. (Years later, according to June, Mina, Rose’s sister, then a young woman, would overdose.) A search party found Hurd’s

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  naked body under a log in the middle of the lake. Also according to June, after Hurd’s death Big Lady put Rose in a convent to protect her. But in 1910 she married Jack Hovick, a reporter and newspaper advertising salesman of Norwegian descent who was also brother-in-law of Seattle Times business editor Fred Ham-mons. The Hovicks settled in West Seattle, an area west of the Puget Sound that Seattle had annexed in 1903. For a few years the family moved from one house to another and Jack Hovick changed jobs nearly as often: one year he was selling newspaper ads, the next year it was real estate ads.

  Rose herself was no finalist for Parent of the Year. Gypsy was born in a blizzard in a roofless house with no running water. The newborn weighed twelve pounds. “The midwife picked you

  up . . . and washed you with snow,” Rose told her daughter later.

  You don’t have to be a Freudian to imagine that that moment might inform Gypsy’s adult iciness. Around 1916 Rose, Jack, and Louise moved to Vancouver, where June was born. Rose and Jack divorced and Rose and the girls returned to Seattle the following year. They stayed briefly with Rose’s father, and then they hit the road. Rose would remarry three more times, although none of the husbands stuck as much as her notion—which was in her blood and reinforced by movie magazines—that the family was going to be famous.

  Rose was not the only American housewife enamored of show-

  biz. In the silent film and vaudeville era women all over the coun-15

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  try were deserting their husbands and hitting the road in search of glamour and freedom. Early on it became clear that June, Louise’s cute, talented, younger, and blonder sister, could toe dance. Rose called June’s first stage act “Baby June,” but renamed it “Dainty June” after June’s baby teeth grew in. As late as 1926

  theaters conflated the two acts, sometimes billing her as “Dainty Baby June,” although by that time the star could not be called a baby. ( June refers to herself by that name long after she had stopped touring.)

  By our standards, there is something grotesque—even porno-

  graphic—about June’s acts, but they were typical of the time.

  Wearing a thigh-length frilly dress and white kneesocks, June stood on her toes and sang sentimental or risqué songs. She auditioned for the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova but failed to make much of an impression. In Hollywood, film producer Hal Roach cast June in bit parts. According to June, Roach was not interested in her Dainty act at all. He wanted her to play a street urchin in Harold Lloyd comedies like Hey There! After Hollywood, Baby June and company toured on the Orpheum Circuit, a string of vaudeville theaters in larger western towns. The less dainty June became, the more people Rose added to the act so that, by the early 1920s, they were traveling in a pack and billing themselves as “Dainty June and Her Newsboy Songsters.”

  Louise had remained home with Rose’s father until age seven, when she joined her mother and sister. Like June, in one of her 16

  Gypsy Rose Lee as a child, ca. 1922. Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

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  first numbers, “Hard Boiled Rose,” she played a bad-girl that, despite the era’s Victorianism, was de rigueur. A photo of Louise doing this number shows an ugly duckling who, even at this age, interested herself in undressing for the camera.

  “Plug,” as she was called, wears a feathered hat, a short-sleeved turtleneck, and white gloves. Arms akimbo, one leg cocked so that it sticks out of a slit in a skin-tight skirt, Plug is sneering. A girl who strips cannot be nice. A stage direction on the sheet music for “Hard Boiled Rose” instructs, “Pull skirt up.” And she does. Louise also played “The Living Doll,” or “the Mechanical Doll,” a modern-day Coppelia who danced across the stage as though on an assembly line. Offstage, while June sported perox-ide ringlets, a white (often dirty) rabbit fur coat, and full makeup.

  Louise wore knickers and a boy’s cap and coat.

  The life of the traveling vaudeville troupe was not easy. Dainty Baby June and company played all sorts of theaters, mob-run nightclubs, Shriner halls, and other B, C, and D list venues. They stole blankets and silverware from hotels. They slept in their car. In 1923, when child labor authorities seized Louise and June in Rochester, Rose telegrammed her father to wire good references from Seattle so she could get the girls back. During flush periods the family played in bigger theaters, where they met the stars of the day, like Eva Ta
nguay, the “I Don’t Care” Girl, whose human fire-cracker act announced her indifference to the status quo. Perhaps this indifference impressed Louise, if her mother’s had not already.

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  Fat enough as a teenager to be called “The Duchess,” Louise did a walk-on appearance opposite Fanny Brice, by then a comic star. In her memoir Gypsy played down this meeting’s importance, asking, “How could I learn anything when I was just atmosphere?” But to be “just atmosphere” is exactly the skill that Louise mastered, later modulating it the way people used to adjust the volume on the radio: by twirling.

  During her adolescence, Louise discovered what would later become her trademark: books. Stories of how much and what she read would later provide much material for the press. But in 1924

  Rose hired a tutor for the girls, one Olive Thompson (Gypsy calls her “Tompkins” in her memoir lest readers conclude that the two Thompsons were related). According to June, her sister not only remembered every one of the five classes they attended as children, she read The Decameron and Rabelais on her own. (It is hard to imagine better training for the Striptease Intellectual.) Gypsy’s son Erik attributes a highbrow reading list to his mother: “Brontë and Browning, George Sand and Lytton Stra-chey.” Gypsy, Gypsy’s memoir, strikes a more credible note by focusing less on specific titles than on Louise’s love of books and the people who read them. Escaping her mother and the theater in Detroit, at age fourteen Louise found herself in a bookstore-cafe managed by the young George Davis, whom she would meet 19

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  again in New York in the 1940s. About the readers she saw she wrote: “They were all talking about books and their authors.”

  By her own account, the young burlesque comedian already

  loved to read. “My books had already broken the bottom out of the trunk June and I shared for our toys,” she wrote. In this story, books are important not just for their own merits, but because they can help you reinvent yourself. When Louise stands in front of a copy of Marius the Epicurean, Davis steers her to Shakespeare’s sonnets. Gypsy buys the sonnets, sneaks off to a corner of the hotel, and, in a prelude to one adult self, tries to write a play. But the author/star gets only as far as “I enter” before she wads up the paper and throws it in the trash. Still, though she has momentarily abandoned her literary career, Louise grasps

  books’ other function. When, a little while later, Stanley, a newsboy in the act, hit on her, she asked, “Do you like to read?” and quoted from one of the sonnets. He kissed her.

  By the age of fifteen, Louise had cycled through more roles than some people play in a lifetime: Hard Boiled Rose; Plug; the Duchess; Living Doll; intellectual; playwright; and ingénue.

  Later, when she reprised these roles, she seemed like a pro.

  What’s in a Name?

  June eloped with one of the newsboys around the time vaudeville died. The Hovicks ate dog food, lived in a tent at the town dump, and pawned their belongings. But from deprivation came inven-20

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  tion. Louise renamed the troupe “Louise and Her Hollywood

  Blondes” and made herself the star. Rose anted with “Rose

  Louise and Her Hollywood Blondes,” the banner under which

  Gypsy would tour until she went solo in 1930.

  According to Gypsy, the next chapter occurs when Louise was about to do her first striptease in burlesque. The star of “Rose Louise and Her Hollywood Blondes” renamed herself “Gypsy

  Rose Lee,” hanging onto “Rose” as a remembrance of thorns, just as Erik would later keep “Lee” as a reminder that he was related to his mother by bile and betterment alike. The etymology of Gypsy Rose Lee is more than a hit parade of childhood resent-ments, however. Gypsy’s memoir places her christening at the Gaiety Theatre in Toledo, the night of her first striptease. Gypsy writes that she chooses her name for the most ordinary of reasons: as an alias. She wanted to hide her new career from her grandfather. But if the name is a disguise, it is also her destina-tion. She sensed that striptease belonged to her. “I knew that everyone was going to hear about us,” she wrote.

  In that era, the practice of women renaming themselves on

  Broadway and in Hollywood was hardly uncommon. Theodosia

  Goodman became Theda Bara. Mary Pickford was born Gladys

  Smith. But “Gypsy” conjured unique properties. A gypsy is also a fortune-teller, a reader of tea leaves, which Gypsy became, and the name also implies all varieties of impermanence, including the most literal one. For the rest of her life, Gypsy would always 21

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  be moving. She chose a popular entertainer’s lonely, peripatetic life over any other. “We’re usually on the road,” she lamented—

  or bragged—in 1957, reeling off the places she and her son Erik had touched down at Christmas in the past decade.

  Gypsy was also a vagabond in terms of where she belonged: to showbiz? To the literati? To her mother? To burlesque? To what we would now call the sex industry? While Gypsy’s rootlessness helped her crossover appeal, it also predicted that she would, like most famous female celebrities of her era, wind up alone. The name Gypsy took reflected this irony. But it also distinguished itself by simple elegance at a time when other strippers called themselves by their given names or took showy monikers like

  “the Golden Girl.” Then there is the Freudian point of view:

  “Gypsy Rose Lee” achieves its aura by stitching together bits of Gypsy’s past in ways that expose its holder’s unconscious. Rose, which is feminine and a flower, doubles as her mother’s name and hers—Gypsy might as well have called herself “Gypsy My

  Mother Myself Lee.” Lee, like Louise, begins with “L,” plus it adds a homespun quality to Gypsy Rose that would have en-hanced her appeal to the working-class burlesque audience of that era. If you subtract her last name, the phrase “Gypsy Rose”

  suggests her material ascent. (Later in life Gypsy would sign letters “Gypola,” which sounds more like a product than a person, as well as a 1950s-style con.) Gypsy used names to separate herself from her family in other ways, too. According to one story, 22

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  she dropped “Hovick” because the public confused it with

  “Havoc,” the name her sister took.

  Twice in her life American puritanism forced Gypsy to revert to her given name, Louise Hovick, to hide her burlesque past.

  This was not simply an inconvenience or a career setback. The second time, in 1937 in Hollywood, “was absolute misery,” she confessed in a letter to her friend Hedda Hopper, as though being denied her name erased the self she had worked so hard to build and left her with a stranger.

  Gypsy Reinvents Striptease: Burlesque

  and Illusion, 1927–29

  When Gypsy first took off her clothes onstage, striptease had only been around for a year or two. The woman formerly known as Rose Louise Hovick was as prescient as those nerds who became Silicon Valley millionaires before anyone knew about the Internet. Or to understand the significance of Gypsy’s undertak-ing, one could go back to the early Jazz Age, when the Algonquin Round Table and other intellectuals “discovered” burlesque.

  Celebrated by Edmund Wilson in the pages of the New Republic or by Hart Crane in The Bridge, or by e.e. cummings or anyone in the New Yorker, burlesque (the lowest form of entertainment) in the 1920s had two things going for it: half-dressed women dancing and comics wearing enormous rubber phalluses. Burlesque made sex real and funny. “Burlesque . . . centered,” wrote Doug-23

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  las Gilbert in his history of vaudeville, “about the apertures of the human body.”

  In the 1920s, too much of an aperture was a good thing. Burlesque’s savaging of high culture and Victorian ideas about sex inspired the Timothy Greenfield-Sanderses of their day to invent pop
ulist slogans about democratic ideals in entertainment—“the poor man has a right to depravity as much as the rich.” But these slogans also indicate how seriously intellectuals took burlesque: they considered it a popular form of entertainment that was as vital as the circus, comic books, and silent films.

  Striptease became burlesque’s main event the same year as

  talkies were born. The love affair soured, and burlesque impresarios doubled the number of shows and performers. Three striptease shows a day was the downside of Taylorism. Intellectuals wondered: could women taking off their clothes on an “assembly line” truly count as popular entertainment? It was odd enough that a white Jewish comedian in blackface singing “Mammy”

  decimated silent film. But odder still that whereas in Hollywood the talkies made silent film actors irrelevant, in New York the strippers made burlesque comedy obsolete by adding their undressing, shimmying bodies.

  Burlesque theaters were not our nation’s most glamorous

  spaces. In her description of the backstage at the Missouri Theatre—the Kansas City theater where, according to her memoir, she acted in her first burlesque scene in 1927—Gypsy wrote: 24

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  “Cigarette butts and empty coffee containers and old newspapers were all kicked together with dirty frayed satin shoes under the make up shelf. Gnats swarmed around a half empty container of beer resting on the edge of a filthy sink that was filled with laundry left overnight to soak. Sticky red lip rouge smudges en-circled the top of the container. Under each lip-rouge smudge, penciled in with eyebrow pencil, was an initial. The mirrors were broken. Their jagged edges reached out like claws. Shreds of net and bits of rhinestone and beads hung by thin strings on nails behind mirrors.”

  The film close-up showed Americans actors’ and especially actresses’ faces in greater detail than ever before, but in burlesque women stripped on a runway just above the audience—a corpo-real rendering of the blown-up faces the camera displayed. If you reached out you could touch the performers. The male comics played scenes far away on the proscenium stage as if to announce their irrelevance. But burlesque did not exactly deliver what it advertised. Gypsy’s first burlesque scene was called “Illusion.”