February House

by Sherill Tippins

  The manager, of course, was George Davis, then a teenager working to earn enough money to get out of Detroit. Gypsy could still picture how he looked that day, she claimed. He handled the books gently, and his voice was gentle, too. He didn’t seem to mind that she hadn’t yet bought anything, though she had been in the shop every day for a week. No one else seemed to be buying books either, she noted, at least not often. All they were doing was talking about them.

  Young Louise didn’t particularly want a book by Shakespeare, but she did want to be a part of that world. In her most sophisticated voice, she told George that since she worked in the theater she didn’t care much about reading plays. “These are poems,” George explained kindly.

  Louise bought the sonnets and never forgot George’s generosity—or his apparent instant understanding that her search had been not just for a book but for a different way to live, a different person to be. A decade later, the two met again in New York and soon became close friends. By then, Louise had weathered her initiation into burlesque at the age of sixteen, earning $75 a week to strip for men with newspapers in their laps. Desperate to escape this show business ghetto of red-lit clubs and noting that girls with a gimmick got paid a lot more than ordinary strippers, she had developed a burlesque act of her own based on a piece of advice from her mentor, Tessie the Tassel Twirler: “You don’t dump the whole roast on the platter. Always leave them hungry for more.”

  The point was, Louise realized, that men didn’t really want to see another naked woman—they’d rather imagine what was under her clothes. This concept appealed to her innate modesty as well as to her love of a good show. Pursuing the idea, she changed her stage name to “Miss Gypsy Rose Lee,” a name that prepared the audience with just the right bump-and-grind rhythm each time it was announced. Then she designed, as costumes, a number of comically modest, ankle-length dresses with shirtwaists, broad belts, and mutton sleeves, all held together by black-tipped dressmaker’s pins. Slipping demurely onstage, looking freshly scrubbed and blooming, she recited lighthearted song lyrics filled with double-entendres, accompanied by a few musicians in the orchestra pit. As she recited, she smiled primly at the audience, slowly removing the pins, one by one, and dropping them insouciantly into the tuba player’s horn as the drummer emphasized its landing with an exaggerated thump. Making a great play out of discovering yet another pin, Gypsy would allow the larger pieces of clothing to gradually fall away.

  As she pretended to greet the loss of part of her clothing with shock and dismay, her audience responded with laughter and calls to remove the rest. “Darlings, please don’t ask me to take off any more, I’ll catch cold!” she would plead, ducking behind the curtain and peeking out in mock terror. “No, please, I’m embarrassed! . . . No, honestly, I can’t. I’m shivering now.” Then would come more toying with the dress, another exit, and another teasing entrance until the dress was completely off and the patrons were sure that they would finally catch a glimpse of Gypsy’s entire frame. But no. At the last moment, with the sleight of hand of a practiced magician, she managed to drape the remaining bits becomingly over one hip or pull a bit of the curtain in front of her—either way, offering just a glimpse of a G-string but otherwise preserving her modesty. By 1935, when she turned twenty-one, Gypsy had refined her motto to a frank, funny, “Make ’em beg for more—and then don’t give it to them!”

  It was her good luck to make her debut on New York’s burlesque stages just as it was becoming fashionable for the city’s intelligentsia to attend the shows. Gypsy had never lost her desire to count herself among this crowd—a group she might have joined had fate handed her a different childhood and some education. Once she spotted the artists and writers in the back rows of the clubs, she began tailoring her performances just for them. Whatever made them laugh stayed in her act, and she took advantage of every opportunity to invite them backstage. Through Eddy Braun, her socially prominent but married paramour, Gypsy had been introduced to the sophisticated lyrics of Dwight Fiske, a piano player at the Savoy-Plaza. Back downtown, at her own Irving Place Theater—“America’s oldest home of refined burlesque”—Gypsy presented the same sly double-entendres (“Like Eve I carry round this apple every night / Looking for an Adam with an appetite”) to an audience oblivious to its high-camp intentions but more than appreciative of her girlish charm. “Come on, Gyps, take it off, we know ya!” they would yell—always in vain, however, always in vain.

  Soon after her reunion with George, to whom Gypsy still looked up with a reverence typical of the hard-working autodidact, he wrote an elaborate tribute that appeared in Vanity Fair and helped establish Gypsy’s name and image in the consciousness of mainstream America. A burlesque star like Gypsy “need not know how to sing, she need not know how to dance,” wrote George, “though, if she wishes, she may take a stab at both.” What she needed was attitude, and Gypsy had plenty of that.

  Davis described her efforts to take part in the city’s Intellectual Life by filling her Gramercy Park apartment with modernist paintings and Empire sofas, devouring books by Proust, Kafka, and Marx, and cocking her head self-consciously mid-conversation to ask, “Whither the New Negro?” If she erred occasionally—calling a new book “skintillating” or falling into overly enthusiastic shop talk with her chorus girl friends—no one could accuse her of not trying her best. She was a whirlwind of energy, nearly all of it aimed at self-improvement.

  “The great thing about Gypsy Rose Lee is her gayety. It is a force with her,” George wrote. Gypsy possessed a rare “sparkle, an honest-to-God joie de vivre.” But he felt obliged to warn readers about her irresistible attraction to men with bald heads. “I don’t know what it is about baldheads,” she was quoted as saying thoughtfully, “but they have been a lifetime habit of mine. I have been chasing them ever since I first started in vaudeville, when I was six.” And chasing them she still was, George added. “‘Darling! Sweetheart!’ she screams, ecstatically, when she spies one in a box or in the front row of the orchestra. ‘Where have you been all my life!’ Everything stops until Gypsy has ornamented his few remaining locks with a bright ribbon, or at the least left the imprint of a kiss on his gleaming pate. If he fights her off, Gypsy’s ardor is only doubled.” No doubt, George concluded, Gypsy’s talent and intellectual bent would soon lead to an affiliation with the highbrow Theatre Guild, the producers of Porgy and Bess and dozens of other groundbreaking shows. “Only, one word of warning to their box-office,” he wrote. “Don’t sell any first row seat in the orchestra to a baldheaded man.”

  Since that time, Gypsy had demonstrated her show business acumen in more ways than were possible to count. She had appeared at the opera in a cape made entirely of orchids; had protested after a police raid, “I wasn’t naked. I was completely covered by a blue spotlight”; had headed the grand march at Columbia University’s senior dance; had encouraged journalists to call her “the bohemian stripper”—a phrase later transmogrified into “the naked genius”; and had had herself photographed half-submerged in a bubble bath while chatting with a reporter about the portrait she planned to commission from Max Ernst. After landing a starring role in Ziegfeld’s Follies along with her friend, the comedienne Fannie Brice, Gypsy left the show without a backward glance when offered a Hollywood contract for $2,000 a week and pretended to ignore the ad—“Experience not necessary”—that an angry Ziegfeld ran for her replacement.

  Hollywood turned out to be Gypsy’s biggest mistake. She had no talent for acting—and even if she had, the mothers’ clubs, church groups, and Legion of Decency would never have allowed “the undisputed queen of the New York strippers” to become an American movie star. The first blow came when the Hays office forbade her employer, Twentieth Century-Fox, from using Gypsy’s stage name in her films. The second came when the studio head, Daryl Zanuck, lost his nerve after receiving four thousand letters of protest and asked her to play down her burlesque background. In a regrettable effort to pacify “the virgins,” as twenty-three-year-
old Gypsy called her outspoken opponents, she very publicly married Bob Mizzy, a dental equipment salesman. It was a stillborn marriage, however, and Gypsy’s mother, Rose, hammered a final nail into the Hollywood coffin when she appeared in Zanuck’s office in an old coat she’d once worn for milking cows, complaining that her daughter had left her to starve and begging for a bowl of warm soup. Accustomed as he was to stage mothers’ shenanigans, Zanuck had no problem ignoring Rose, but there was no way to save Gypsy’s film career. Without her famous name, she was useless to the studio. He assigned her to a series of five forgettable movies and declined to renew her contract at the end of the year. “I’m a Hollywood floppo, that’s what I am,” Gypsy told her sister when she returned to New York sans husband in 1939.

  Fortunately, Gypsy was the kind of trouper who could easily start over. She rented a small, ground-floor apartment on East Fifty-seventh Street and accepted George Davis’s offer to help fill it with Victorian lamps, carnival memorabilia, antique music boxes, porcelain cherubs, and other collectibles with which they were both obsessed. Having made a new home, she signed up for classes at the New School for Social Research and renewed contact with a widening circle of New York artists and intellectuals. Gypsy’s original blend of earthiness and intellect, which still drew plenty of admirers, inspired more than one of her friends to suggest she try her hand at theatrical social satire or even serious drama. Gypsy knew her limitations, however, and passed these opportunities on to her sister. In return, June introduced Gypsy to the nightclub impresario Mike Todd.

  As June wryly remarked later, Gypsy’s meeting with Todd was “money at first sight.” Well known in New York’s show business circles as one of the country’s most promising new producers—basing his formula for success on the idea that a great show for a cheap price would always sell out—the tough-talking theater tycoon was putting together four shows for the New York World’s Fair’s second summer season in 1940, and he still needed a knockout star for one of them. What he was looking for, he had told June, was a flamboyant female crowd-pleaser—a Sally Rand type who could light up the New York fair the way Rand had Chicago. When June suggested Gypsy, Todd laughed and remarked, “That’s a notalent broad worth a million bucks on any midway.”

  While “no-talent” rankled, “a million bucks” caught Gypsy’s attention. Sick as she was of doing midways, the failure of her Hollywood adventure had scared her. She wanted money—in fact, after the childhood she had survived, it was quite possible that she could never have enough. For $4,000 a week, double what she’d made in Hollywood, Gypsy agreed to star in Mike Todd’s extravaganza The Streets of Paris. Six times a day, all summer long, she stalked down a runway in a black Schiaparelli sheath with a padded fishtail for a train (donated by Diana Vreeland) singing “Robert the Roué from Reading, P.A.” Not surprisingly, The Streets of Paris quickly became the fair’s most popular show.

  Mike Todd made Gypsy an enormous amount of money that year and took her to new heights of success, but his tough-guy, cigar-smoking persona—he called women “dames” and sometimes regretted his inability to “make with the words”—proved almost as exciting to Gypsy as a bald head. “I like my men on the monster side,” she wrote the following year, only half in jest, to a friend in New York. “A snarling mouth, 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!”

  Todd and Gypsy came from the same world—two smart, ambitious, self-educated survivors of a devastating Depression. But Todd was not only married, he had a girlfriend as well. Gypsy wanted to play it smart this time around. That year at the fair, Todd had produced or managed not only The Streets of Paris and a number of other full-length shows, but also a ten-acre replica of the New Orleans French Quarter, a Dancing Campus where twelve thousand people danced to the music of Harry James and Les Brown, and some smaller, quarter-a-ticket attractions. For the moment, at least, Gypsy preferred a piece of this action to a place in Todd’s bed.

  It was impossible, as Carson, George, and their friends lingered in the smoky bars of Sands Street, listening to Gypsy’s stories and laughing at her jokes, not to remark on what a wonderful writer she could have been. They were as amused as anyone else by the half-condescending references to Gypsy in the press as “a classic paradox: an intellectual stripteaser,” but Gypsy clearly did possess both a lively imagination and a wonderful sense of narrative. No one could deny the remarkable mental acuity with which she ran her one-woman industry, juggling stage appearances, licensing agreements, film cameos, modeling sessions, and a host of lawsuits and countersuits in which she was always involved. With the money she had earned, she now owned a farmhouse in the country, where her mother tended an assortment of ducks, chickens, goats, pigs, and Gypsy’s pet monkeys; paid the rent on her Manhattan apartment; collected modern art and Victorian antiques; contributed to numerous left-wing arts organizations; and supported her indigent relatives in Seattle, her hometown. How hard could it be for someone like Gypsy to write a novel, too?

  As her friends soon learned, Gypsy had already been working on this question, and as usual George Davis had helped her. It had all started several months earlier, when a nervy public relations associate of Walter Winchell’s had the bright idea of writing a guest column while Winchell was on vacation and signing it with Gypsy’s name. Gypsy retaliated by writing her own guest column the next time Winchell left town—and found that despite the difficulty of typing with three-inch fingernails, she enjoyed the experience. A few weeks later, she followed up with a fifteen-page description of a funny incident that had happened backstage. It was just a bit of burlesque atmosphere, but it gave her a taste for writing stories, and she decided she wanted more.

  As a show business veteran, she already had an idea of what kind of story she could sell, as well as a title that would be sure to capture attention. She’d write a murder mystery set in the world of burlesque, she had told George. The murder weapon would be a chorus girl’s G-string. She would call the book The G-String Murders. She was sure it would make a fortune and enhance her reputation as an “intellectual stripper”—if she could only get it written.

  This was in August, when George was preoccupied by his struggle with Carmel Snow at Harper’s Bazaar, but the idea amused him. The trouble was, Gypsy didn’t know how to write a novel, and George didn’t have time to teach her. Instead, he suggested she hire his new secretary, Dorothy Wheelock, to write a first draft. Though only in her early twenties, Wheelock had already published one paperback mystery and written another. A short story of hers would appear in the magazine’s October issue . Following her boss’s orders—and being too new to the magazine business to know whether it was part of the job—she began churning out chapters for Gypsy Rose Lee.

  But Gypsy found that no matter how hard Dorothy worked, the material failed to satisfy her. Each time the young secretary arrived at her apartment clutching another sheaf of papers, Gypsy could hardly finish reading them before racing to her typewriter to rewrite the entire section from the start. Dorothy didn’t know anything about burlesque—she did! And who knew better how to build up suspense before the final revelation? It was obvious to the younger writer—and finally clear to Gypsy as well—that calling herself an author wasn’t enough. She wanted to write the book as well.

  When Gypsy heard about the household George was creating at 7 Middagh Street, she was intrigued. As in her adolescence in Detroit, she continued to find herself drawn to those “strange, wonderful places” in the world where people talked passionately about books. Serious artists like Auden and McCullers impressed her deeply, despite her own considerable fame. That year, she could afford to take time off to satisfy a desire she had had all her life. Why not join the group at Middagh Street and write a book? George needed money. She could pay him to teach her. And she could rent one of the two-room suites as her Brooklyn atelier.


  Lighting a cigarette, she placed the proposition before the others. They responded precisely as she wished. If her idea for a detective novel was brilliant, the idea of writing it at 7 Middagh Street was even more so. Carson in particular had already become wholly addicted to Gypsy’s stories, and the idea of sharing a house with this warm and lively entertainer was a more exciting development than she could have dreamed up.

  Before they shook hands, however, Gypsy imposed one more condition. She could not tolerate the chaotic conditions of life at 7 Middagh Street, she told the others. If she was going to spend time there, her cook, Eva, would have to come, too. She recommended that they hire a maid as well. In fact, they were all so short of money, she would give them a loan. Two hundred dollars should get the parlor finished and the furnace repaired.

  It was a perfect arrangement for everyone. George would have a job and enough money on which to live. Carson would have Gypsy sharing the third floor. Auden would be most grateful for the services of a professional cook. And Gypsy would finally write her novel. Civilization had come to Middagh Street; now the real work could begin.