Gypsy: The Art of the Tease (6 page)

But Gypsy’s act brings out something else that I would call courage. I do not put her in the same rank as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, nor is she a feminist in the first-wave sense of the word, although to my mind she anticipates Gloria Steinem. At the Irving Place, Gypsy created a sexy, smart persona to protest both burlesque’s crassness and puritanism’s mean-spiritedness. She is more Sister Carrie than Carrie Bradshaw. In the 1920s many striptease acts looked like melodrama or tragedy. The character of the vamp flung herself about the stage undressing or lurked, like a spider, to trap her male victim. Jazz Age stripteasers played 43

The Queen of Striptease

the fly in “spider and fly” numbers literalizing the vamp’s situation, or virgin maids caught in the act of striptease “unawares.”

In a photo from 1929 Gypsy poses as one of these vamps, in chains. But besides that she rarely borrowed from female entertainers of an earlier generation who sang melancholy songs about their men or did Apache dances in which at the finale the male partner knocked them out to punish them for expressing their sexuality.

At the Irving Place Gypsy’s numbers (performed solo) were

elegant and comic, or simply comic. Some were downright goofy.

One was a “reverse” striptease in which she took off her under-garments but kept on her dress, dramatizing the principle that, in striptease, what lay beneath was more exciting. In other numbers Gypsy disabused her audiences of the notion, handed down from fin-de-siècle France, of the “accidental” striptease, which titillated along the lines of the peep show. Although you were in a theater, if you suspended disbelief, you happened upon Yvette

“going to bed” or Celine “finding” a flea in her lingerie. Gypsy’s approach made striptease American, intentional, and friendly. At a time when couples dancing was in vogue, Gypsy remained still or paraded regally across the stage.

Gypsy was able to enact these dramas at the Irving Place Burlesque Theatre, located off of Irving Place, in part because pro-44

The Queen of Striptease

ducer Allan Gilbert aspired to be the Billy Minsky of Fifteenth Street. Not much is known about the fellow who promoted

Gypsy as his number one stripper.

In one solo, when Gypsy sashayed onstage wearing long

white opera gloves and a tight red velvet dress that flared at the hips, her walk—the so-called parade up and down the stage—

was devastating. Even more devastating was the moment when she broke the languorous pace to rip off her “breakaway”

dress—as dresses with removable panels were called—with

startling rapidity.

In Gypsy’s most written-about and enduring striptease from this era, she wears a polka-dotted blouse and long, black taffeta skirt as though she were a Sunday School teacher circa 1890.

Gypsy ended this number in a distinctly un-schoolteacher way, flashing polka-dotted bows on her breasts. The number, which lasted for a record-breaking ten minutes, included an encore in which Gypsy, peeping from behind the stage curtain, dangled her garter in front of the audience the way a man might dangle a bone in front of a dog. Gypsy inverted the peep show—she was peeping at the peepers. Also during this period Gypsy transformed the act of throwing pins into the audience into a metaphor about the sexes. Tossing her petticoat over the tuba player’s head (or sometimes into the tuba)—as if giving a man femininity’s accoutrements—she could make the audience laugh at striptease’s come-hither-do-not-touch-me attitude.

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The Queen of Striptease

By 1933 the audience needed that laugh, even if it came out as a choke. At the Depression’s nadir, the unemployment rate

had soared to nearly 25 percent nationwide, and breadlines, soup kitchens, and shantytowns were everywhere. Americans sought refuge in burlesque theaters; the pin dropping and petticoat tossing might distract them momentarily from their hunger. (Always looking for a way to raise the stakes, Gypsy later determined that the audience could redeem the pins at the box office for a free show.)

After the New Deal began to stabilize the economy, Gypsy

widened the gap between herself and all other strippers by im-mersing herself further in the past. She eschewed the lingua franca of striptease—the bump and grind—the weaving of the hips that would, in a year or two, contribute to politicians’ opinion that burlesque was driving the wave of sex crimes sweeping the city. Gypsy’s immobility made her less threatening and even suggested the
tableaux vivantes
of the 1890s or the betighted burlesque troupes of the 1860s rather than the strippers who, elsewhere, the tabloids reported, sometimes “forgot” to wear their G-strings. At a moment when Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were gliding together through space, Gypsy stood still, alone on stage, reciting her lyrics like a schoolgirl at a poetry competition.

Gypsy likewise rejected the zipper—only then coming into wide usage in women’s clothing. Whereas stripping by unzipping was thought to encourage sexual intimacy, using pins allied Gypsy 46

The Queen of Striptease

with a more modest era and canceled out—or tried to cancel out—her stripping in the first place.

Critics often ridiculed strippers for not being able to dance or sing. Gypsy boasted that she became a stripper
because
she could do neither—a good example of how she used misdirection to distract her audience. But her most consequential innovation is that she talked while disrobing. This era’s burlesque made only one other role available to women besides stripping: “The Talking Woman,”

a phrase that sounds odd to our ears since it can suggest that strippers, by not speaking, lack “a voice,” to use the modern feminist description. Gypsy’s patter distracted from her pageant of undressing, as it confused categories and made her a modern funny girl.

Still more outrageous, Gypsy’s performing voice—and recordings exist from radio, television, and LPs such as the 1962
Gypsy
Rose Lee Remembers Burlesque
or the 1958
That’s Me All Over
—did not use Brooklynese street-smart language; she spoke in rounded Mid-Atlantic tones, sprinkling French phrases and mots justes throughout. Gypsy would also pair ingenuous, cloying sentimental lyrics with her striptease. For example, here is the first stanza of her number “I’m a Lonesome Little Eve”:

I’m a lonesome little Eve

Looking for an Adam

Gee I wish I had him,

Cuddling me, ’neath the shade of the tree

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The Queen of Striptease

And in our garden we would be so happy

I’m a lonesome little Eve

All I do is sit and grieve

Munching an apple, Gypsy would mince down the circular

staircase the Irving Place Theatre had installed after the License Commissioner had outlawed its runway. She would toss the core to the audience, where she had arranged for a shill to fall out of his box while grabbing for it. A spotlight caught his pratfall. And suddenly “Lonesome Little Eve” becomes a man-eating heroine who strips the apple eater of his humanity and exposes him as a pervert.

In her take on the 1930s brutality between men and women,

Gypsy’s numbers sometimes recall Mae West and Jean Harlow in their most ferocious screen roles. She took “Powder My Back,”

which she stole from an unknown ingénue in 1929, and stretched it into a Thurberesque battle of the sexes. Armed with a powder puff on a long stick, she wandered up and down the runway, inviting customers to powder her back “every morn.” But this was no scented invitation to the boudoir. As in “Lonesome Little Eve,” she seemed to avenge herself against the men who powdered too hard (even if accidentally). She pranced down the aisle and kissed the “bald heads,” leaving a lipstick imprint and braided comb-overs on their scalps. The joke was on them. Gypsy’s striptease numbers—even the ones in which she stripped to the waist 48

The Queen of Striptease

or leapt onto customers’ laps—toyed with these contrasts in one way or another.

For all the Minskys’ aspirational stunts, the Republic had only ever attracted theater columnists. By contrast, the Irving Place drew American writers, who found in burlesque a squalid authenticity. Writers’ interest in these theaters goes beyond the adage that sex sells; they were seeking literary realism and a new way to explain the swirling action and the happy-unhappy relations between men and women in 1930s New York. Among the

most famous writers in this category was Henry Miller, who described Gypsy in March 1935 at a Sunday matinee at the Irving Place Theatre, where she was starring in “Give Me a Lay”: “She had a Hawaiian lei in her hand and she was telling how it felt to get a good lay, how even mother would be grateful for a lay once in a while. She said she’d take a lay on the piano, or on the floor.

An old-fashioned lay, too, if needs be.” I am a little suspicious of Gypsy’s “Hawaiian” period, as no other account of it appears. But more important, Miller’s blasé reaction to Gypsy’s candor—her brand of frank sexual revelation was hardly the norm in 1935—

indicates that he had spent too much time in Paris with Anaïs Nin.

Miller went on to the other performers. “In the first half hour everyone moves down to the good seats in the front. The strippers talk to their customers as they do their stunt. The coup de 49

The Queen of Striptease

grace comes when they having divested themselves of every inch of clothing, there is only a spangled girdle with a fig leaf in front, sometimes a little monkey beard, which is quite ravishing. As they draw towards the wings, they stick their bottoms out and slip the girdle off. Sometimes they darken the stage and give a belly dance in radium paint. It’s good to see their bellies glowing in the dark or them holding their boobies, especially when said boobies are full of milk.”

Other writers played Margaret Mead (
Coming of Age in Samoa
had been published a few years earlier) and wrote about Gypsy as an urban primitive with some of the condescension implied by such an approach.
New Yorker
contributor and
World Telegram
newsman Joseph Mitchell went into the heart of burlesque dark-ness and came back with a story about a piece of the real New York few people had visited. In his 1936 collection of essays from the
New York Herald-Tribune,
titled
My Ears Are Bent,
he wrote,

“Gypsy Rose Lee . . . is fond of working with a lot of clothes. At the Irving Place, she used to come out dressed in a big white fur coat. She would glide languidly across the stage, a sort of bound-for-the-opera walk. On her way back into the wings she would twitch the coat open with a negligent gesture, and the customers would go crazy, the bums.” Mitchell’s use of the past indicative allows him to distinguish himself from “the bums” more than Miller’s present tense. But journalists were not the only ones watching. In a 1942 letter to Gypsy, the critic Carl van Doren re-50

The Queen of Striptease

called that at the Irving Place she was an American original, “a princess taking off her pants.”