Re-reading Lily Burana’s Strip City: A Stripper’s Farewell Journey Across America got me thinking about one of the stripping icons, Miss Gypsy Rose Lee. After Blacklight and I’s last trip to Barnes & Noble was Karen Abbott’s American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee got added right to the Amazon wish list. It’s the same with her fellow vaudevillian Mae West. I’ve read the official autobiography and snap up all the others that come out, even if they really don’t have any truly startling revelations (although the theory Mae West was partly of African-American descent is an interesting one). But until American Rose ends up in the new Biography section at the local libraries or the Amazon gift card fairy visits I’ll just have to make do with the Gypsy Rose Lee biographies I’ve already read.

So let’s start with the official autobiography 1957’s Gypsy, A Memoir. It’s the tale of young Rose Louise (Louise) Hovick, traveling across the country with her mother Rose and her child star sister “Baby June”, the other members of June’s vaudeville act including a rotating group of starstruck boys and assorted animals (Gussie the Goose is awesome, crazy but awesome). Using every trick up her sleeve, Rose manages to keep “Baby/Dainty June”‘s act on the road even when “Baby/Dainty June” turns from angelic blond moppet to a gangly adolescent. Forever decried as the untalented sister, Louise takes refugee in books and the various animals Rose finds a place for in June’s act.

But as June outgrows her “Baby/Dainty June” persona the vaudeville world is shrinking. The act comes to a grinding halt when June elopes with one of the boys, the dancer Bobby. Rose tries to get June back but failing in her mission, turns to her remaining daughter to continue her stage dreams. Louise steps into the role of star but the new act doesn’t succeed even after Louise’s attempt to add glamor by bleaching the girls’ hair blond. The final straw is when Rose Louise and Her Hollywood Blondes are booked into a burlesque theater, the lowest of the low to the vaudevillian set. To grasp the indignity, imagine Alice (Ms Organic Foods Are The Only Foods) Waters working at your local Subway slapping together your 6 inch meatball sub with extra cheese and those heat and eat cookies.

Almost completely broke, Louise turns from vaudevillian to stripper to the shock of the girls in her troupe. Only her act hinges on being a lady versus the usual bump-n-grind burlesque performer. Whipping together a costume from net and fake flowers and assuming the stage name of Gypsy Rose Lee to avoid embarrassing her non-show business family, Louise takes the first step towards stardom. She soon moves from the gritty burlesque house to the American burlesque Mecca working for the legendary Minsky’s Burlesque. Gypsy becomes a phenomenon, becoming fast friends with her childhood idol Fanny Brice and capturing the hearts of the public and the married Eddy. And a second chance at Hollywood beckons…

Gypsy, A Memoir is an interesting read. It certain draws you into a vanished world of vaudeville and the stage. But like an other autobiography and like Lee’s stage act, Gypsy reveals only what Gypsy wants. Somewhere under the stories and pictures and cartoons is the real women just like somewhere under the spirit gum, moleskin and net is the naked flesh.