Read Online American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee by Karen Abbott - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Karen Abbott
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took seventy-three shows on tour to eighty-one theaters from New York to Omaha, playing to about 700,000 people. The wheels supplied a different road show every week, including costumes, scenery, jokes, and music, and the theater owner simply had to open the doors, sell tickets, and sweep up.
Nothing to it, the Minskys thought, soin late spring of 1916, Abe and Billy booked a show from the American Wheel. The night before the grand opening, a tawdry procession slinked down Houston Street, blackface comics in clown shoes, zaftig derrières peeking from leotards (belonging to shiksas, naturally, since Jewish girls did not engage in such scandalous behavior), and cardboard cutouts of tenement buildings almost as tall as the originals. Perfect, all of it, except the brothers realized too late that there was no way to transport the enormous stage sets up to the sixth floor in their tiny elevator. Plan B involved piano movers, who tried to haul the sets up via the roof, only to smash the windows of the adjacent building.
Undeterred, Billy—with Abe’s consent—canceled the show and postedfliers proclaiming that the National Winter Garden would reopen in the fall with a live burlesque show—stock burlesque, which meant autonomous burlesque, unencumbered by any rules or any wheel. They should regroup, Billy said, and take the summer to strategize. He recruited their little brother Herbert and ordered him to study classic comedy, the works of Cratinus and Menander and Aristophanes. Billy ventured up and down the East Coast, scouting out every burlesque show he could find, noting what flopped and what deserved to be stolen. And Abe set off at once for Paris, where he now sat in an overstuffed armchair watching the curtain lift, just like wrapping falling away from the gift he wanted most.
The girls were magnificent, red lace hugging thighs, peacock tail feathers rising from bottoms. Their heads reared back like thoroughbreds’. Legs kicked in flawless unison, high at first, knees almost meeting noses, and then level with hips, a line so straight and perfect you could have set a table across the shins. His fellow New Yorker Irving Berlin was sadly mistaken, singing “Why do they rave about beautiful France … we can enjoy all their joys here at home,” because Abe saw one idea, one
brilliant
idea, that he’d never spotted at home—not along Broadway, not in any music halls, not even in the old, short-lived, New York–style Folies Bergère, wherea woman dressed as the Statue of Liberty mounted a pedestal to flirt with the audience. The Parisian Folies Bergère had a
runway
, of all things, and when the music neared its crescendo those glorious legs stepped closer and closer still, a bracelet of spotlights following each stride. The men hollered and stretched their arms, every curve of ankle and spike of heel just out of reach. It was a revelation: Abe had traveled 3,504 miles to see the best girls in Paris, but now they were coming to him.
Gypsy Rose Lee, working on her novel backstage. (photo credit 6.2)
Chapter Seven
You have made your stake, you would kill anyone who tried to steal from you; you ache to accumulate more and more.
– GEORGE DAVIS TO GYPSY ROSE LEE
Brooklyn, New York, Fall 1940
After the World’s Fair, after Michael Todd leaves for Chicago, she moves in with some of the most important writers and artists of the time: Carson McCullers, W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Chester Kallman, and George Davis, the openly gay fiction editor of
Harper’s Bazaar
and an old friend—the only one who knew her before she became Gypsy Rose Lee. After all, she is a writer now, too, although her work on
The G-String Murders
proves sporadic and frustrating. “If I have night lunch with a smarty pants like Saroyan,” Gypsy confesses to a friend, “I want to spit on the whole damned manuscript.”
This sleepover literary salon was George’s idea, something positive to counter the increasingly grim news
Nothing to it, the Minskys thought, soin late spring of 1916, Abe and Billy booked a show from the American Wheel. The night before the grand opening, a tawdry procession slinked down Houston Street, blackface comics in clown shoes, zaftig derrières peeking from leotards (belonging to shiksas, naturally, since Jewish girls did not engage in such scandalous behavior), and cardboard cutouts of tenement buildings almost as tall as the originals. Perfect, all of it, except the brothers realized too late that there was no way to transport the enormous stage sets up to the sixth floor in their tiny elevator. Plan B involved piano movers, who tried to haul the sets up via the roof, only to smash the windows of the adjacent building.
Undeterred, Billy—with Abe’s consent—canceled the show and postedfliers proclaiming that the National Winter Garden would reopen in the fall with a live burlesque show—stock burlesque, which meant autonomous burlesque, unencumbered by any rules or any wheel. They should regroup, Billy said, and take the summer to strategize. He recruited their little brother Herbert and ordered him to study classic comedy, the works of Cratinus and Menander and Aristophanes. Billy ventured up and down the East Coast, scouting out every burlesque show he could find, noting what flopped and what deserved to be stolen. And Abe set off at once for Paris, where he now sat in an overstuffed armchair watching the curtain lift, just like wrapping falling away from the gift he wanted most.
The girls were magnificent, red lace hugging thighs, peacock tail feathers rising from bottoms. Their heads reared back like thoroughbreds’. Legs kicked in flawless unison, high at first, knees almost meeting noses, and then level with hips, a line so straight and perfect you could have set a table across the shins. His fellow New Yorker Irving Berlin was sadly mistaken, singing “Why do they rave about beautiful France … we can enjoy all their joys here at home,” because Abe saw one idea, one
brilliant
idea, that he’d never spotted at home—not along Broadway, not in any music halls, not even in the old, short-lived, New York–style Folies Bergère, wherea woman dressed as the Statue of Liberty mounted a pedestal to flirt with the audience. The Parisian Folies Bergère had a
runway
, of all things, and when the music neared its crescendo those glorious legs stepped closer and closer still, a bracelet of spotlights following each stride. The men hollered and stretched their arms, every curve of ankle and spike of heel just out of reach. It was a revelation: Abe had traveled 3,504 miles to see the best girls in Paris, but now they were coming to him.
Gypsy Rose Lee, working on her novel backstage. (photo credit 6.2)
Chapter Seven
You have made your stake, you would kill anyone who tried to steal from you; you ache to accumulate more and more.
– GEORGE DAVIS TO GYPSY ROSE LEE
Brooklyn, New York, Fall 1940
After the World’s Fair, after Michael Todd leaves for Chicago, she moves in with some of the most important writers and artists of the time: Carson McCullers, W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Chester Kallman, and George Davis, the openly gay fiction editor of
Harper’s Bazaar
and an old friend—the only one who knew her before she became Gypsy Rose Lee. After all, she is a writer now, too, although her work on
The G-String Murders
proves sporadic and frustrating. “If I have night lunch with a smarty pants like Saroyan,” Gypsy confesses to a friend, “I want to spit on the whole damned manuscript.”
This sleepover literary salon was George’s idea, something positive to counter the increasingly grim news
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