Category: Gypsy Rose Lee

Unwrapped: American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee

~ Wendy-Marie ~ Leave a comment

Each biographer reveals another layer of it’s subject. But when your subject is the Queen of Strippers how can there be anything else to reveal? Karen (Sin in the Second City) Abbott rises to the challenge and slips under Gypsy Rose Lee’s body paint and lace bows.  American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee is tells the intertwining stories of four immigrant brothers who created an empire  and the unlovely, lumpy child vaudevillian from a damaged family who grew up to become one of their biggest stars and a household name for most of the 20th century.

American Rose works as a standalone biography, but if you’ve read any other Gypsy Rose Lee biographies (Gypsy, Gypsy & Me, Stripping Gyspy) any suspicions you may have had about Gypsy Rose Lee and her family are supported. Not a member of the extended Hovick clan emerged from childhood without scars, seen and unseen.

Sister June briefly talks about her mother Rose’s boyfriends who crept into her bed at night on the road, a revelation that chills the spine just as much as the descriptions of her battered body after each performance. And you’re left wondering which left the more lasting scars and strengths as young June moves onto to marathon dancing and the legitimate theater world.  The sense that everyone was nothing more than things to Gypsy? What sister would send her younger sibling to a backroom “circus” party to try and get her break into the theater world? Or use her only child as a prop to negotiate everything from car repairs to contracts?

And as the Hovick family acts out it’s drama of damaged generations, the Minsky brothers break free of their respectable retail background and trade in a much more alluring trade, the female form, helping create the DNA of the strip tease that still lingers today. When Minsky meets Hovick, the fireworks that ensue change the very burlesque world.

Fast moving and full of tiny comments and scenes that tear at your heart, American Rose is a must read for the burlesque fan and the curious. The price you pay at the bookstore is nothing compared to the prices the brother Minsky and the Hovick clan paid…

 

Unwrapped: Gypsy & Me: At Home And On The Road With Gypsy Rose Lee

~ Wendy-Marie ~ Leave a comment

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.

Unwrapped: Stripping Gypsy: The Life of Gypsy Rose Lee

~ Wendy-Marie ~ Leave a comment

A complex subject is both a boon and a curse to the biographer. All the biographies that truly intrigued me weren’t written by the person themselves or their families but by a writer who stumbled across the subject, became engrossed and then spent years delving deep. How such a biographer can finish their work without loathing the sight or sound of their subject is a miracle. Noralee Frankel is among those who lost themselves in research and came out on the other side with Stripping Gypsy: The Life of Gypsy Rose Lee.

Gypsy Rose Lee seems on the surface to be an easy subject to chose for a biography. You have a woman who marched to her own drummer, wrote a best selling biography that was turned into a hugely successful musicial and then movie. What could Gypsy Rose Lee conceal? A lot.

A harsh, unstable mother who used her for money, a sister that envied her for getting even a meager education, married lovers, the true identity of her son Erik’s father, her political affiliations, working for and against her public image, her struggle to be seen as more than just a strip tease artist and that’s just off the top of my head.

Peeling away the layers of gloss and illusion that Gypsy Rose Lee used as skillfully in life as on stage, a portrait of a damaged and talented woman who could be a cold to her relatives but work herself to the bone for the causes she believed emerges. Did she ever believe the blast furnace of her childhood was worth her too brief fame and notoriety as an adult? Perhaps that is her last illusion.

Unwrapped: Gypsy

~ Wendy-Marie ~ Leave a comment

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.