Back when I was a very young Gwendy, flush with excitement of having an adult library card, I was in the S-bury Public Library new non-fiction section and stumbled across a book with a hot pink cover and curious title, Gypsy & Me: At Home And On The Road With Gypsy Rose Lee. So I checked it out. And gobbled it up that very night, staying up way past my bedtime. What’s bedtime? It’s a strange and terrible thing that children had way back in the 1980s…

Now what made me risk being caught breaking my bedtime? Remember, the Gwendy Dadster and Mommy were strict! Forbidden delights of course! Written in the golden age of celebrity spawn’s life with my famous parent memoirs (think Mommy Dearest, My Mother’s Keeper, Haywire), Erik Lee Preminger cracked open the door into the life that his burlesque legend mother kept concealed. We first meet Gypsy on the night she gives the last performance of her 1950s strip act on New Year’s Eve 1956. Gypsy stands down the local mobster to get her money and shows no fear to the public. But in private she’s penny-pinching, demanding and uses her son as just another crew member. Her pets get more coddling.

And that’s basically the theme of the book. Life with Gypsy if you’re not a cuddly animal isn’t peaches and cream. Gypsy will push you as hard as she pushes herself. She’ll pinch pennies for the things that don’t last or the public doesn’t see (ie her habit of staying in the cheapest places and cooking every meal while on the road) but will make sure to spend her money carefully on things that will last. But you’re only valuable to her when you can fulfill some function, there’s no free ride even if she gave birth to you. You’re just a thing. And she will evade the truth to maintain her image.An underage Erik wants an Ohio driver license? Fine, Gypsy will go to DMV with him, be vague about his date of birth.

Life with Gypsy may have been extremely frustrating for a child who wanted in some ways to be like everyone else and have things like his fellow students at Riverdale. But Erik wasn’t a saint and doesn’t shy away from telling the things he did wrong (smoking, stealing money/booze/car from his mother, writing bad checks, etc). The combination of a rebellious child and a mother who didn’t have a good example of how to be a decent mother was a recipe for disaster.

But like any feel good movie, Erik and Gypsy come to a reconciliation of sorts. Gypsy finds herself creatively when she moves back to California in the 1960s. Erik joins the Army and meets his biological father Otto Preminger. Gypsy becomes ill and dies much too young but with Erik, the loving son, there to the bitter end.

At times you want to shake Erik. And at times you’ll want to scream at Gypsy. Or stick the both of them in intensive therapy. But even when you’re fustrated, Erik Lee Preminger does  show parts of his mother that the Mr and Mrs Joe Q Public never saw from the audience. If you want the full scoop, Gypsy & Me is just removing the gloves and hat versus standing bare under a blue light, but sometimes that’s all you need.