American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee

by Karen Abbott

  One night their father was walking home with a friend. The two men passed the home of one of the Minsky cousins, a floor manager at the store. “How can you stand it?” the friend asked, shaking his head. “Look in those windows—the velvet drapes, the crystal chandelier. How can a man live like that if he isn’t stealing you blind?”

  “It’s like this,” Louis Minsky answered. “If I fire him, I’ll have to hire a new man. This schmendrick has stolen so much already that he doesn’t need any more. But if I hire a new man, he’ll have to start robbing me from scratch. I’ll lose twice as much!”

  The Minsky patriarch continued to study the Talmud in his spare time, but the old country was loosening its grip. He filled his closet with hand-tailored suits, fastened a diamond stickpin to his lapel, and carried a silver-topped cane. Tammany Hall, the unabashedly corrupt political machine that had ruled New York since the end of the Revolutionary War, took notice of Louis and asked him to run for alderman of the Sixth Ward—what better way to secure the Jewish vote than to make a hero of one of their own? “The politicians used to come fishing on the East Side,” one resident recalled, “because they had a raw crowd—a crowd that was not polished yet. They could make them into a frenzy. They would talk about capitalism, and socialism, and sweatshops. The problems were always there, and Tammany Hall was always on your tongue.”

  Louis Minsky knew that the Tammany politicians, who put a price tag on every city position from janitor to judge and collected millions of dollars in graft, were largely responsible for the horrific conditions in the Lower East Side. But if elected, he could ensure that his fellow Jews and neighbors—the future songwriters George and Ira Gershwin and actor Eddie Cantor among them—received their share of the ten thousand pounds of turkey, six thousand pairs of shoes, and eight hundred tons of coal Tammany doled out annually to supporters. He won handily, and supporters dubbed him the “Mayor of Grand Street.”

  The new alderman began his tenure confident he could mend a broken system from within. Never once did Louis suspect his own constituents of contributing to the disrepair, until one of them, a poor tailor from his hometown back in Russia, duped the alderman into supporting his wife after he’d allegedly abandoned her and their five children. The tailor and his wife, a witting accomplice, lived off the alderman’s own dime until neighborhood gossips ratted them out.

  Alderman Minsky was hurt—“I would spend $10,000, if I had it, rather than pay that alimony,” he said—but the incident marked his transformation into a true Tammany man, with all the cunning and treachery that title implied. A few years later, Louis declined to run for reelection but kept his connections, and then devised a scam of his own. A friend hired him to solicit accounts for the Grand Street branch of the Federal Bank, promising a kickback on all new deposits. In March 1904, another poor tailor from the neighborhood wandered into the bank.

  “Hello,” Louis greeted him. “Do you know who I am?”

  “No.”

  “Why, I am the ex-Alderman, and I supposed everybody on the East Side knew me. I am the boss of this bank … and my bank is the safest in the world. You ought to put your money in it.”

  The tailor deposited his entire savings of $555, and Louis found dozens more just like him. The kickbacks having been duly handed over, the bank failed within weeks, and Louis was arrested on a charge of grand larceny. The ex-alderman swiftly put his marketing savvy to work, announcing that he himself had made a deposit in the bank just a half hour before it went under. Furthermore, he would pay 50 cents on the dollar to all customers who had accounts of $100 or less.

  “I will have stories in all the papers about my philanthropy to the poor people,” Louis confided to his lawyer. “And I will have pictures of myself, and everybody will think I am a very fine man.”

  A fellow Tammany man posted bail, the press let the story drop, and the scandal fizzled, especially in the Minsky household. To his sons and two daughters Louis Minsky was always above reproach, fully within his right to dispense advice and pass judgment on their respective paths in life. In the coming years, his eldest son, Abraham, endured the brunt of parental scrutiny. The boy clearly understood what money could buy, that much was clear, but he showed neither interest in nor aptitude for making it.

  Abe was a rotund mama’s boy, moody and mercurial. Nothing—not his sartorial elegance, not his Tammany pedigree, not his growing bank account—made Louis Minsky feel as American as having a child with a sense of entitlement, this strange belief that one could be idle and still prosper. Abe had inherited his father’s penchant for fine things but none of his work ethic. And Esther, doting mother that she was, developed a cyclical pawning system to ensure he didn’t have to. She gave her favorite child watches, rings, and silver hairbrushes, which he promptly hocked in favor of suits, cologne, and dinner dates at Rector’s and Delmonico’s, a different woman on his arm each time. He married one of them in 1907, a union as short-lived as one of his cherished Havana cigars and not nearly as pleasurable—owing mainly to his scheme to defraud his father-in-law of $150,000, which earned him a $500 fine and five months in prison.

  The incident mortified Louis and Esther Minsky, and they were relieved when their eldest son found a business venture that actually inspired him to work. An abandoned Protestant church in the neighborhood, Abe announced, would make the perfect venue for a nickel theater. The country was newly obsessed with motion pictures, with more than 45 million Americans attending shows every week—nearly every second person in the United States. “It amounts practically to a revolution,” Billboard opined, “and yet those who are conversant with the inside workings of the business maintain that it is still in its infancy.” For a nickel or dime, customers could watch films that were sweet or silly or lewd, all ingeniously produced: a series of photographs, each with a slight variation, was reflected on a screen in such rapid succession that the images appeared to move, one action flowing seamlessly into the next.

  Abe bought the old church, called it the Houston Street Hippodrome, and opened for business, positioning the screen where an altar used to be. Customers didn’t complain about sitting on the hard pews; they could wedge salamis, frankfurters, and tongues from nearby S. Erschowsky & Sons Deli into the racks that had once held hymnals. In the dark, no one could see the New Testament murals that still decorated the walls: a stoic Joseph with staff in hand, Jesus falling for the third time. Nor did the masses mind the pricey 5-cent admission for such racy pictures as The Butler and the Upstairs Maid. Between films Abe projected slides in Yiddish and English warning people against spitting, noisemaking, pickpockets, and the rude practice of reading titles aloud.

  The Hippodrome prospered for three years without Louis Minsky once passing through its doors. When he inquired about business, his son had a careful answer. “You know those slides you used to show when you ran for alderman?” Abe asked. “Well, now I show slides, too, and for holidays I hire actors to act out lessons from the Talmud.”

  When Louis finally discovered the true nature of Abe’s films, he ordered his son to shut the place down. No member of his family would make a living showcasing smut. Abe balked, but they reached a compromise. Louis had his eye on another project: the National Theatre on Houston Street and Second Avenue, a perfect venue for Jewish plays; the area was, in fact, becoming known as the “Yiddish Broadway.” Abe could show movies on the sixth-floor rooftop, as long as they depicted great dramas—Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Ben Hur, Queen Elizabeth—and not the randy rompings of butlers and maids. Father and son shook hands.

  The long silver finger fired, and the gunshot was the loudest sound Billy Minsky ever heard. He lay facedown on his stoop, his immaculate tux now stained with dust and grime, and it occurred to him that if he heard the shot, he must still be alive. Then he heard something else that confirmed it: the sound of running—furious, swift wing-flapping strides that grew fainter, then barely perceptible, then silent. He raised his head an inch, dared to peek through parted fingers. Second Ave
nue was as peaceful as he’d ever seen it.

  First thing next morning, Billy made yet another rash decision, one that would shape not only his life but the life of a toddler living on the opposite side of the country, a failure as soon as she could walk. He sat down with his father.

  “Listen, Pop,” he said. “You know that deal you’ve been talking to Abe about, showing movies on the National Theatre roof? Well, I think I’m interested in it after all. I think I’ve just about had it with the newspaper business.”

  Chapter Four

  He was just a taker. She was a taker in her way too. They were taking each other, and they loved each other for that.

  –JUNE HAVOC

  New York City, Fall 1940

  For five months, the entire length of their World’s Fair show, Gypsy devises ways to be near Mike Todd. She finds herself in the unfamiliar process of falling in love, or at least the facade of it; nothing in her past has taught her the difference. They stroll past the Lagoon of Nations, find privacy in the cloistered corner near the Temple of Religion. They pose for pictures in the photo booth: she behind a cutout of a pregnant woman with voluminous breasts, legs akimbo, scratching at her thigh; he behind a baby clad only in a diaper, one fat fist tucked inside the woman’s shirt and a cigar clamped between his teeth. Besides her mother, he is the only person capable of amusing and angering her at the same time.

  “I am not a stripper,” Gypsy tells him one day between shows. “A stripper is a woman who puts on a sex spectacle. My act is straight comedy.”

  “I don’t care what you call it,” Mike says, waving a cigar, “as long as you zip.”

  Michael Todd. (photo credit 4.1)

  It’s a familiar misconception, and she checks her temper when she corrects him.

  “I never use a zipper,” she explains. “A zipper is cheap and vulgar. And suppose one got stuck? I use ordinary straight pins. I used to toss ’em into the bell of a brass tuba in the band. They would go ping every time I hit the target.” She pauses, adds a punch line; she wants to amuse him too. “But it was too expensive, the guy wanted union wages.”

  After the closing ceremonies they watch workers dismantle the World of Tomorrow, artifact by artifact, returning the future to dust. Mike announces he’s heading back to Chicago, his hometown, to discover what he’ll become next. Gypsy wants to keep seeing him, but also let him miss her. After all, she has a murder mystery to write, her own image to update.

  She’s been in relationships before, with a comic, a socialite, a salesman, and a gangster, but stayed on guard in all of them, as modest with her emotions as she is onstage—in these later years, at least. But Mike is, to Gypsy’s frustration, exactly her type. “I like my men on the monster side,” she confides to a friend, not entirely in jest. “A snarling mouth, an evil eye, broken nose—if he should happen to have thick ears, good! And I like a little muscle, hair on the chest, none on the head. A nervous tic excites me and if with all these things he wore green suits—BANK NIGHT!”

  Certainly part of the attraction is that they come from the same place. He, too, remembers the Great Depression’s long plain brown days, the light pockets and empty stomachs, the desperate things one did to fill them. As a kid he daydreamed about money. When he was nine his tonsils were removed, and he convinced his classmates to pay two cents each to peer down his throat. He hawked newspapers, shined shoes, played the cornet in a boys’ band, worked as a roustabout at a carnival where he rigged the games of chance, and became an expert craps player before the age of twelve. As a teenager during Prohibition, he partnered with his neighborhood pharmacist to sell illegal alcohol. Michael Todd is his own creation just as Gypsy Rose Lee is hers; he’d said to hell with “Avrom Goldbogen” a long time ago. He understands why she never stops moving, her fear that the past will come galloping forward and override the present.

  The past is already too close, panting against her neck, lurking inside her mailbox.

  “Dear Louise,” Mother wrote recently from Tucson, while on the road with her female lover.

  Well I waited for you to write to me.… and as I told you I only had ten dollars left. We sold our radio for six dollars got a second hand tire and drove as far as we could.… Now for God’s sakes get me some money here as soon as you can.… I had to sleep in the car and I have had darn little to eat in the last three days. No matter how you feel about me or my plans right now I must have help and at once. I would not ask you unless it was absolutely necessary. Love, Mother.

  Gypsy doesn’t quite trust Mike’s endearments—Mother taught her well in the ways of both money and men—but the sound of them still lands soft in her ears, looks lovely typed across the page. “I thought you would like to know that your mind is more beautiful than your body,” reads one missive from Chicago. “Will see you Wednesday. Be good—but only till Wednesday.” It is the last thing she needs right now, to get involved with a married man who already has one girlfriend on the side, especially since she’s still technically married herself. Matters of the heart are not immune to her pragmatic judgment, and she revels in the irony that most defines her: the great sex symbol is, at her core, asexual. She has to be; one can’t discover the comedy in sex unless observing it from a wide, safe distance. It is smarter to make a living from sex than to incorporate it into her life, but she makes careful exceptions: sex for protection, sex for position, sex for power—sex for any purpose that will further her creation while leaving the girl inside it alone.

  Business with Mike is pragmatic, but not so a romance. She knows she should listen to her instincts and not his sweet, sly promises. Besides, no matter what his letters say, she can’t shake the sense that he is never more absent than when he is by her side.

  Chapter Five

  However paradoxical this may seem, a child is at the mother’s disposal. The mother can feel herself the center of attention, for her child’s eyes follow her everywhere. A child cannot run away from her as her own mother once did. A child can be brought up so that it becomes what she wants it to be.

  —ALICE MILLER, THE DRAMA OF THE GIFTED CHILD

  Hollywood, California, 1916

  Here they were again, Rose and June, two states away from home, where the Baby’s star could begin its rightful ascent. After her debut at Grandpa Thompson’s Knights of Pythias Lodge, she performed for the Elks and Masons and Shriners and every fraternal organization around Seattle, tumbling across hard linoleum, split-leaping from wall to wall, collecting calluses along the knuckles of her toes. Each time, Rose talked Charlie Thompson into playing the piano and convincing his lodge brothers to attend, although he remained skeptical about the whole enterprise. For these local bookings Louise trouped, too, occasionally scoring bit parts independent of June’s developing vaudeville act. In a stage production of Blue Bird she played a frog, while June was a good fairy and Rose a witch. Usually, though, Louise shuffled along in her too-tight striped skirt and labored through “Hard-boiled Rose,” the points of her teeth spiking her bottom lip as she talk-sang.

  Baby June in her toe shoes, age three. (photo credit 5.1)

  Small concerts and benefits clogged their calendar, and at one of the latter Rose gripped June’s forearm and pulled her to the front entrance. “Come quickly, darling,” she said. “She’s standing in the wings waiting to go on. She watched you.” She crunched June’s curls, tugged at her dress. “Stop breathing so hard … when I speak to her, be sure you stand directly in front of her. Then look up and smile.”

  June was just over three years old, and when she lifted her head she stared directly into stiff pink layers of tutu. The edges tickled the tip of her nose.

  Anna Pavlova.

  “Madame, if you please,” Rose said in a reverent voice, straight from her convent days. “I would like your opinion.… Would you say my baby was a natural dancer?”

  June peered into the ruffles, her teeth dry from her unbroken smile. She couldn’t see Madame Pavlova, but heard her stilted reply.

  “
One cannot tell such a things. She is not even yet borned. Her feets have not formed enough to hold her.” She spun and glided away, her toe shoes rasping across the floor. June released her mouth from the smile.

  “Foreigners,” Rose muttered. “I could hardly understand a word she said.”

  Nevertheless, she quickly forgot the ballerina’s slight. When they left for Hollywood, Rose announced her daughter’s new billing: “Baby June, the Pocket-sized Pavlova.”

  They had been down to Hollywood before for minor vaudeville shows and benefit concerts; the write-ups had made every trip worthwhile. “Baby June Hovick, whose three years weigh lightly on her dainty shoulders,” wrote the Los Angeles Times, “has danced on her toes since she learned to walk, and is altogether the most adorable little creature in captivity.” Most satisfying, the press bought into Rose’s marketing scheme: “Baby June delighted the large crowd last night, a baby Pavlova,” the Seattle Times reported. “Her little legs and feet speak poetry.” Los Angeles society women elected June the queen of their annual carnival, where the “little tot” led a parade of Tommy Tuckers, Cinderellas, Aladdins, and Little Bo Peeps and performed “a toe dance as dainty as Pavlova ever dreamed of.” Rose saved every clipping, underlining the most flattering phrases with red pencil, beginning a scrapbook she would keep for the rest of her life. The Baby’s toe shoes didn’t last nearly so long. Blood gathered in the tips, hardly wider than thimbles, spreading across the satin like a blooming rose. At night, Rose dabbed salve on June’s cuts and calluses and taped the tips of her cracked nails. There was always a new pair of shoes waiting to be broken in.