American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee by Karen Abbott Page B
Authors: Karen Abbott
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“My father was unavoidably detained,” he says. “He has asked me to take you to dinner.”
The kid is eleven years old.
He orders Gypsy’s favorite dish and brand of champagne, discusses his burgeoning business philosophy. At the end of the meal, he drops his hand over the check.
“Dad is paying for dinner, Miss Lee,” he says, “but your split of champagne, that’s on me.”
Gypsy thinks, not for the first time, that Mike would be a good father to her own child, should she ever decide to have one.
With the Theatre Cafémaking $55,000 per week, Mike takes an extended business trip to New York, seeking a show to produce on Broadway. In his absence, Gypsy notices one of the managers making some curious changes. A pinup-pretty girl now stands behind a green felt box and encourages patrons to play a dice game. He also raises drink prices, imposes a minimum, and fires half of the waitresses.
Mike is furious upon his return and demands that everything revert to the way it had been. The manager explains that certain business “connections” demanded the changes, connections who could not be reasoned with. The next day, two henchmen for the Chicago Mafia stop by to underscore that point. Mike withdraws his name from the Café, sells it to the Mob for one dollar, and flees the city.
Gypsy leaves with him and takes the act on the road, traveling across the country, three shows a day, six days a week. In August, as the tour nears its end,Bertha Todd bursts into her dressing room in Syracuse, weepy and wild-eyed. She aims a shaking finger at Gypsy.
End your affair with Mike, she demands. Immediately.
There is no affair, Gypsy says, her tone calm and cool.
She has her superstitions, developed during childhood and deepening as she ages. Eat twelve grapes on the twelve strokes of midnight every New Year’s Eve. Never lay your hat on your bed. Don’t whistle in the dressing room. No hint of the color green backstage. And truth is malleable, something to be bent or stretched or made to disappear, but direct lies always find the path back to the one who tells them.
Dainty June, at the height of her career. (photo credit 11.1)
Chapter Twelve
Forty-five weeks of two shows a day, seven days a week, in states that permitted Sunday shows. And if you made good you stayed on the wheel, show after show, until you were too old and shaky to play any part at all.
— SOPHIE TUCKER
On the Vaudeville Circuit, 1920–1924
By now Louise was nine and June seven, but Rose Hovick didn’t need the calendar to tell time. She had a private clock, set precisely to her needs and preferences, years tacked on and stripped away within mere moments.Birth certificates were forged and forged again: locations chosen at whim; dates substituted or invented entirely, always younger for train travel and older for evading child welfare. Had she not wished so desperately for her girls to be seen, they might not have existed at all.
Murray Gordon—“Gordon” to Rose, “Uncle Gordon” to June, and still a nonentity to Louise—applied a veneer of order over the chaos, slowing time just enough to establish rules and routines. He would sleep separately and alone; the girls never once caught him trying to enter their mother’s room. “We never saw or heard a thing about them being intimate,” June said. “It was strictly hidden.” Andno salary for theboys in the act, an edict Rose found brilliant. “The experience they’ll get,” he told their parents, “is worth more than money.” He discovered the boys in hotel courtyards and small-town alleyways during stops on the circuit, and their parents, for the most part, were happy to be rid of them.
One singer, from Shamokin, Pennsylvania, had never owned a pair of underwear or socks. He sang in clear, pitch-perfect Italian, but was so deformed he couldn’t straighten his legs. Gordon positioned him close to the wings, in near darkness, with a pin spot illuminating only his face. The
“My father was unavoidably detained,” he says. “He has asked me to take you to dinner.”
The kid is eleven years old.
He orders Gypsy’s favorite dish and brand of champagne, discusses his burgeoning business philosophy. At the end of the meal, he drops his hand over the check.
“Dad is paying for dinner, Miss Lee,” he says, “but your split of champagne, that’s on me.”
Gypsy thinks, not for the first time, that Mike would be a good father to her own child, should she ever decide to have one.
With the Theatre Cafémaking $55,000 per week, Mike takes an extended business trip to New York, seeking a show to produce on Broadway. In his absence, Gypsy notices one of the managers making some curious changes. A pinup-pretty girl now stands behind a green felt box and encourages patrons to play a dice game. He also raises drink prices, imposes a minimum, and fires half of the waitresses.
Mike is furious upon his return and demands that everything revert to the way it had been. The manager explains that certain business “connections” demanded the changes, connections who could not be reasoned with. The next day, two henchmen for the Chicago Mafia stop by to underscore that point. Mike withdraws his name from the Café, sells it to the Mob for one dollar, and flees the city.
Gypsy leaves with him and takes the act on the road, traveling across the country, three shows a day, six days a week. In August, as the tour nears its end,Bertha Todd bursts into her dressing room in Syracuse, weepy and wild-eyed. She aims a shaking finger at Gypsy.
End your affair with Mike, she demands. Immediately.
There is no affair, Gypsy says, her tone calm and cool.
She has her superstitions, developed during childhood and deepening as she ages. Eat twelve grapes on the twelve strokes of midnight every New Year’s Eve. Never lay your hat on your bed. Don’t whistle in the dressing room. No hint of the color green backstage. And truth is malleable, something to be bent or stretched or made to disappear, but direct lies always find the path back to the one who tells them.
Dainty June, at the height of her career. (photo credit 11.1)
Chapter Twelve
Forty-five weeks of two shows a day, seven days a week, in states that permitted Sunday shows. And if you made good you stayed on the wheel, show after show, until you were too old and shaky to play any part at all.
— SOPHIE TUCKER
On the Vaudeville Circuit, 1920–1924
By now Louise was nine and June seven, but Rose Hovick didn’t need the calendar to tell time. She had a private clock, set precisely to her needs and preferences, years tacked on and stripped away within mere moments.Birth certificates were forged and forged again: locations chosen at whim; dates substituted or invented entirely, always younger for train travel and older for evading child welfare. Had she not wished so desperately for her girls to be seen, they might not have existed at all.
Murray Gordon—“Gordon” to Rose, “Uncle Gordon” to June, and still a nonentity to Louise—applied a veneer of order over the chaos, slowing time just enough to establish rules and routines. He would sleep separately and alone; the girls never once caught him trying to enter their mother’s room. “We never saw or heard a thing about them being intimate,” June said. “It was strictly hidden.” Andno salary for theboys in the act, an edict Rose found brilliant. “The experience they’ll get,” he told their parents, “is worth more than money.” He discovered the boys in hotel courtyards and small-town alleyways during stops on the circuit, and their parents, for the most part, were happy to be rid of them.
One singer, from Shamokin, Pennsylvania, had never owned a pair of underwear or socks. He sang in clear, pitch-perfect Italian, but was so deformed he couldn’t straighten his legs. Gordon positioned him close to the wings, in near darkness, with a pin spot illuminating only his face. The
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