Gypsy: The Art of the Tease (9 page)

Always aware of who she was stripping to, Gypsy used more

erotic and opulent costumes and props than she had used downtown: garters and a long décolleté and backless velvet dress whose detachable mink sleeves could be turned into muffs as big as the Ritz. Yet although garters stood for sex, fur stood for wealth, and both would have amused and titillated a Depression-era Follies 69

The Queen of Striptease

audience, neither of these props sent the same message that tossing pins and petticoats to working people did. You could say Gypsy depoliticized her act for the bourgeoisie or that using the muff and the garters—symbols from the world of the high-end brothel and the music hall—stripped her striptease of its most daring attributes. (This was the era of James Agee’s
Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men
and some of the most devastating poverty America has known.)

Still, in “A Stripteaser’s Education” the Queen of Striptease did maintain one comic signature from the Irving Place—she kept the polka-dotted ribbons on her nipples. Overall, though, the number half-seriously asserted that the stripper was a universal ideal. As Chaplin transformed his tramp into Everyman, Gypsy turned the stripper into a democratic heroine. Like the Marx Brothers, Gypsy crashed high society’s party, except

whereas the upwardly mobile tuxedo-wearing jokesters who in-filtrated the upper-class fete bounced to the curb, the Queen of Striptease was the guest who overstays her welcome.

Gypsy also performed a wide variety of comic supporting

roles. In “Of Thee I Spend,” a burlesque
Of Thee I Sing,
the 1931

Gershwin musical about presidential politics and sex, she played the incredulous Miss Gherkin. She sang “The Economic Situation”—a satire about the difficulty of getting a man during the Depression—and the Eve Arden part in her Gershwin duet with Bob Hope, “I Can’t Get Started with You.” Gypsy’s take on “I 70

The Queen of Striptease

Can’t Get Started with You” was typical. Whereas Arden had treated the Gershwin tune as a romantic number, Gypsy warbled her half of it for laughs. Bobby Clark sang the other half and the two ended in an acrobatic “burlesque kiss” which in Chicago became too acrobatic, and left Gypsy with a sprained ankle. Other roles included Fanny Brice’s mother in “Baby Snooks Goes to Hollywood” and Dolores Del Morgan, a dame dancing “The

Gazooka.” Yet none of these roles ever became identified with Gypsy the way her striptease did. Throughout her career, whatever acts the Queen of Striptease tried, sooner or later in the evening the curtain closed and she came out front and took off her clothes, alone, sing-talking into a microphone. That was what audiences wanted to see.

Like all signature numbers, “A Stripteaser’s Education” was a blessing and a curse. It condemned Gypsy to a career as an A-List B-List-er, a benchwarmer whom producers and directors could rely on to step into a celebrity role. Besides “A Stripteaser’s Education” and its progeny, Gypsy performed mostly songs the great lyricists and composers had written for other stars. That she was always “singing someone else’s song” lent her an air of comedy or tragedy, depending on the venue and the audience. Like Mae West, if she wanted her own tunes, she had to commission them or write them herself. Her failure to reveal herself made her words sound like impersonations.

Conceived as a gimmick, “A Stripteaser’s Education” became 71

The Queen of Striptease

Gypsy Rose Lee and Bobby Clark. The Shubert Archive

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a sexy joke, swelled into satire, and dissolved into camp where, because of age, much sexuality is forced to go. But the consis-tency of “Education” fails to console since it comes from a Peter Pan hope that neither she nor we will ever grow old.

When other performers took on “A Stripteaser’s Education,”

the number became ordinary. Blonde chorus girl and Marx Brothers sidekick Marion Martin performed “A Stripteaser’s Education” after she replaced Gypsy in the Follies in 1937, but no reviewers remarked on it.

As for Gypsy, no sooner did the Follies open than the press tore her down. “She undressed her way to fame,” a headline read.

Gypsy responded by distancing herself from striptease. She said it was dead. She rejected the honorific the “number one stripper.” She said that her act “tickled peoples’ funny bones” and that there was “nothing sensuous” about it. “I play my striptease for laughs,” she told a reporter, as if by unsexing herself she could avoid rebuke. Here the impression is that she protests too much.

By this time Gypsy had developed a sixth sense for stroking the kingmakers. According to Erik, when she first arrived in New York she wrote Walter Winchell a thank-you note for mentioning her in his column after seeing her perform, but also confessed that he made her so nervous she would like him to see the act another night. Winchell obliged. Gypsy transformed her number into a three-dimensional version of his daily column.

The publicity hound had met his match.

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In 1936, when the Earl of Gosford, a guest of the Chicago

“bluebloods” (as the press called wealthy Americans) the Otis Chatfield-Taylors, asked Gypsy out after a show, she made up an excuse about having to get up early the next morning to go to “an ethnological dance lesson.” Gypsy added: “I was pleased with my performance.” She regretted some of the things she had to learn to do for her new role, such as drink cocktails—she lacked the stomach for this—and smoke marijuana. But she never shirked her responsibility to her public.

Still, her success inspired swift and furious backlash. Even before the Follies opened, Alfred Eisenstadt, who photographed Gypsy for
Life
magazine on three occasions over the years, captured her leaning into the mirror, putting on her lipstick for a radio interview. Portraying Gypsy getting made up for a venue where no one could see her strip catches her dependence on artifice. But after the Follies opened, critics took umbrage to Gypsy’s claim of being well read. It was one thing for a stripper to put on lipstick where no one could see her and make fun of café society, or to enjoy yachts and dining at chic restaurants. But it was too much to expect anyone to believe that she was reading the classics backstage. “It’s said she discusses Joyce and Santayana at every opportunity—although I am at a loss to know just with whom she discussed these fellows with at Minsky’s,” one feature sniffed.

In an article in
Town and Country
titled “She Stoops to Conquer,” Otis Chatfield-Taylor defends his friend as “the Gene 74

The Queen of Striptease

Tunney of Burlesque,” after the Jazz Age boxer, friend of George Bernard Shaw, Yale lecturer on Shakespeare, and reader of
The
Way of All Flesh.
He was not Gypsy’s only supporter. Many news-papermen gave Gypsy the benefit of the doubt: she might not have read
Remembrances of Things Past
cover to cover, but she could talk about it at a party. Sometimes articles described her books as though they were stage props. She displayed copies of e. e. cummings and Joyce in her East Thirty-sixth Street duplex; the
New York Post
reported that she owned “5,000 volumes.”
Life
magazine mentioned that Gypsy read Proust and Karl Marx in her dressing room, and another reporter noticed Dreiser’s
The
Genius,
Sherwood Anderson’s
Dark Laughter,
and Vincent Shee-han’s
Personal History
as occupying her bookshelves.

When Gypsy responded to the press’s accusations, she brought up her working-class roots. “They think I’m some kind of freak,”

she told
Collier’s
magazine shortly after the Follies of 1936 opened, referring to the American aristocrats who had made her famous and who were now turning on her. Gypsy’s surface insouciance masks her understanding of a radical fact: the wealthy adore and resent being called out by the tough girl and guy personalities whose authentic American-ness they can only steal. The
New
York World
reported that Minsky’s, hoping its former star would come back, “installed earphones for the dowagers” supposedly flocking to the theater. Having succeeded on Broadway, the Queen of Striptease never wanted to go downtown again.

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Slamming the People She Didn’t Grow Up With

New York in the mid-1930s was full of rage against the American aristocracy, and nowhere more so than in the world of theater.

The Group Theatre staged plays in which the working-class hero triumphed. Other groups invented new theatrical styles whose intention was to get the audience more involved; agitprop cast cartoon characters and stock settings to direct the audience’s sympathy toward the ordinary man. Living newspapers used headlines to draw attention to the economic and social injustices of the day. The stage was a pulpit on which actors preached social-ism. Clifford Odets’s
Waiting for Lefty
premiered in 1935 and elicited a standing ovation for its depiction of working people suffering. But Gypsy’s particular brand of beating up on wealthy Americans while flirting influenced the musical theater of this era as much as anyone in the serious theater. Take Harold Rome’s 1937 revue,
Pins and Needles,
performed by and about the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. I find it difficult to look at Rome’s title without thinking of Gypsy throwing her pins into the audience at the Irving Place. The revue included a skit making fun of a wealthy woman telling strikers, “It’s not cricket to picket,” and a Vassar co-ed “reduced” to working at Macy’s.

In 1937 Rome was apparently taken enough with Gypsy to

sell her one song, “For Charity, Sweet Charity,” whose refrain includes the line “I Strip for Charity.” I don’t believe she ever 76

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sang it. But the following year Rome’s revue
Sing Out the News
features a song about an anti–New Dealer “reduced” to eating domestic caviar that sounds like it is right out of Gypsy’s play-book.

When Marc Blitzstein, who considered writing a show for

Gypsy, describes what he was aiming for in this era, he noted: “I was slamming the smug people and traditions I grew up with.” In an unpublished essay Gypsy described the socialite Anna Della Winslow advising her, “To satirize the rich you must know the rich.” But because she was American, Gypsy never became La Pasionaria of showbiz. If she had been born in Berlin she would have become a serious theatrical presence like Lotte Lenya, who had arrived on our shores in 1935 along with Bertolt Brecht, already famous for
Threepenny Opera.
Known for talk-singing numbers, Lenya juggled high and low and sang of social corruption; Gypsy, with her fake past, mapped the difference between Europe and America. The Queen of Striptease reflects Americans’

hunger for all kinds of revelations but particularly those linking flesh and commerce. The logical conclusion to striptease is con-stant: the performer ends up naked. So, like some captain of industry, Gypsy had to think about how to resell the same product every year while meeting consumer demand for novelty. In the 1930s she hired a shill to scream at the climax of her striptease to prove that, even if audiences called her a lady, she could play a tramp; in 1940, stripping for Mike Todd, having decided that the 77

The Queen of Striptease

scream failed to convince, she added a waiter dropping a tray of dishes.

Gypsy was too interested in the anthropology of undressing to focus on something she considered irrelevant, like the color of someone’s skin. She never achieved Paul Robeson’s status, nor did she advocate for civil rights (unless you count those that her mother was always trying to take away from her). After 1936 she did perform at charity events in Harlem. And Gypsy also gave her maid, Eva, a part in her legend that was bigger than what most white celebrities of the time were willing to do. The story—that impresarios had offered Eva a role as a stripper but she turned it down—