Gypsy: The Art of the Tease by Rachel Shteir Page A

effortless than ever, as exemplified in the “Zip” number in Pal Joey, which opened during the 1940 Christmas season. A few years later Rita Hayworth teased in the film Gilda: “I’m not very good at zippers.” That she never finished unzipping her evening gown provided a glimpse of Hollywood’s double standard about the American striptease. No respectable actress could do one on screen—but every gorgeous woman was about to un-snap her garters.
    The 1939–40 New York World’s Fair exemplifies these changes.
    Held in Queens at what is now Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, the Fair promised “The World of Tomorrow,” with exhibits of all kinds. As scholars have observed, the Fair offered several different visions of the American of “tomorrow.” One was sanitized and technological. The other—the midway—was lascivious and 98
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    vulgar. The midway included Norman Bel Geddes’ “Crystal
    Lassies,” topless women posing in G-strings, and the Cuban Village, where a completely nude girl did a voodoo act. Rosita Royce did her dove striptease. The press compared the area to Minsky burlesque.
    In a “Reporter at Large” piece published in the New Yorker in the winter of 1939, Joseph Mitchell diagnosed a problem with the Fair’s first season: Fair director Grover Whalen had not hired enough striptease performers. Particularly, Whalen had not hired Gypsy, which, he concluded, was “un-American.” But Gypsy was not appearing at the Fair because she had received only one offer, and it was unacceptable. With the help of gallery owner Julian Levy, Salvador and Gala Dali had designed their own exhibit,
    “Dream of Venus,” for the Fair’s first season, and they invited Gypsy to star in it. At this moment the Dalis were in the middle of a love affair with American popular entertainment and especially with Hollywood celebrities. Salvador adored Groucho Marx, Buster Keaton, and Cecil B. DeMille films. Gypsy turned down the offer. No records remain of what she actually said, but perhaps the stripper intuited that although she and Dali may have shared a sense of publicity’s function in twentieth century America, their ideas about how to do it differed.
    The slogan the Dalis proposed to advertise Gypsy—“Come
    and See Gypsy Rose Lee’s Bottom of the Sea”—drowned her in kitsch. And “Dream of Venus” would have cast Gypsy in a more 99
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    outrageous role than any she had performed in, including the Irving Place. Fairgoers entered the Dalis’ pastel-colored stucco pavilion, which was supposed to represent a dream, between a giant cast of a woman’s spread legs. Inside, the Dalis had designed several rooms: in one, “mermaids” cavorted and drank champagne. In another, the Dalis installed a couch resembling Greta Garbo’s lips, tossed in some Dali surrealist watches, and hired showgirls to play Botticelli’s Venus. The Dalis imagined Gypsy as “the modern Venus,” lounging in a boudoir filled with mirrors and mermen.
    Having escaped the Dalis, Gypsy got cast in a crowd-pleaser—
    a Saratoga Circuit production of Burlesque, the 1927 Arthur Hopkins/George Manker Watters tear-jerker about Bonny King, a masochistic burlesque performer who makes it on Broadway and then becomes humbled and slinks back to her own genre.
    The Saratoga Circuit, an off-Broadway summer stock route,
    drew musical comedy actors like Vivian Vance and, now, Gypsy.
    Barbara Stanwyck had made the role famous in the original production, and by 1939 Burlesque had already been adapted to film twice. The stage revival, which hit Saratoga Springs the first week in August, during racing season, would have attracted many wealthy New Yorkers who traveled upstate to bet on the horses and take in the spa. Burlesque also gave Gypsy her first experience starring in a theatrical anti-rags-to-riches tale.
    But in Saratoga Gypsy also got her first real taste of life among 100
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    bohemians, as