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

the town is home to the artist and writers’ colony Yaddo. Founded in 1900, Yaddo was then run by Elisabeth Ames, who was known for her puritanism. Marc Blitzstein, whom
    Gypsy knew from New York, had holed up to work there, and he hosted a cocktail party in her honor. Fearing Ames’s wrath, he held it at a studio known as the Tower, which was out in the woods, far from the main house. But perhaps Ames would have had nothing to disapprove of. According to the writer Jerre Mangione, who attended, Gypsy looked like “a wholesome small
    town farm girl” rather than “a siren of the burlesque stage.” The party inspired Gypsy and drove her to seek out a similar life when she was trying to write her own book.
    Wholesome small town farm girl? Siren of the burlesque stage?
    Who was Gypsy, really? At the very least, she was increasingly someone the cognoscenti wanted to tear down. In the fall of 1939
    Gypsy became the third star of Du Barry Was a Lady, replacing the African-American mezzo-soprano Betty Allen, herself a replace-ment for Ethel Merman, who had joined Panama Hattie ’s cast .
    With lyrics by Cole Porter and a book by DeSylva and Her-
    bert Fields, Du Barry, which had opened the previous December, was a popular hit (and a critical bomb) in part because it stole from burlesque. “One of the roughest books that ever headed uptown from Minsky,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in the New York Times. Like Burlesque, the show Gypsy had starred in on the Saratoga Circuit a year earlier, Du Barry proposes the opposite 101
    To Hollywood and Back
    moral of the stripper’s real life story: America is not a place of social mobility. Cloakroom attendant Louis Blore (Bert Lahr) pursues May (Merman, then Gypsy), a nightclub singer, until he unwittingly drinks a drug-laced Mickey Finn and conks out.
    Dreaming that he is Louis XV, he finds himself in the same romantic situation: he chases May, now Madame Du Barry, around
    “Versailles.” When Blore wakes up, he realizes that he and May should just be friends and that he should marry the cigarette girl who loves him.
    The show demanded an actress who could approximate Mer-
    man’s mix of wholesomeness and sex appeal in the contemporary scenes and also evoke the eighteenth century courtesan Madame La Comtesse Du Barry’s naughty costume-drama hilarity. Although critics continued to dismiss Du Barry as a burlesque show in musical’s clothes—Porter’s “But in the Morning, No,” was the kind of “sex” song Gypsy might have tried out downtown a few years earlier—Gypsy got good reviews: “lovely to look at and the comic sequences are good,” one noted. Still, Du Barry was not the answer for an ex–populist stripper, ex–Hollywood starlet, ex–
    Follies star looking to reinvent herself. The Queen of Striptease needed a third act.
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    The Rise and Fall of the
    Striptease Intellectual
    An emblematic attempt to decrown the Queen of Striptease—to strip striptease of its elegant pose—occurred in the spring of 1940, when H. L. Mencken dragged Gypsy into a linguistic quar-rel about her profession. This was classic Mencken: by calling attention to Gypsy’s role in domesticating striptease, he would expose her and the “Booboisie”—his word for the aspirational middle class that had created her—as hypocrites. The spat began playfully enough when Gypsy’s friend, the stripper Georgia Sothern, known for taking it off to the song “Hold That Tiger,” set out to find a synonym for “striptease,” as La Guardia had banned that word from New York burlesque marquees three years earlier.
    Sothern was Gypsy’s striptease opposite. She neither pretended to 103
    The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual
    be thinking about luxury products nor claimed to have attended Vassar. She got onstage and shook her body to loud music.
    Sothern’s campaign to play the amateur grammarian must
    have struck Mencken as even more ridiculous than Gypsy’s intellectual