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January 9, 1911– Gypsy Rose Lee
My friends who care about such a thing understand that Gypsy is my favorite musical. I consider it a near perfect piece of theatre. I actually consider Gypsy to be the highest of human accomplishments.
I am well connected in Hollywood and my insiders tell me that Barbra Streisand continues with a plan to produce, direct and star in a new film version of this classic show. Streisand, too old to play the role of Gypsy Rose Lee’s mother by decades, states:
“Age is just a number; some people look old at 45. Some people look younger at my age… I saw CGI of an actor that made him go from 60 to 30, by the way. What they can do now, technically. It should happen, but it just takes forever.”
“Forever” must have meant waiting for Arthur Laurents to die. Laurents, who wrote the script for the original and had held rights to all productions, was not in favor of Streisand playing Mama Rose on film.
It has been filmed before, with Rosalind Russell as an effective, but the softest of Mama Roses. Hardcore Musical Theatre People love to opine on the subject of the casting of any Mama Rose. I admire Streisand’s talent as a director, but I am afraid that at nearly 74 years old, she is a tiny bit long in the tooth for a character that starts the story in her 30s. Streisand might break a hip. Still, Streisand doing that great sung monologue, Rose’s Turn, intrigues.
She was dismissed as “untalented” by her own mother, but Lee remains a source of inspiration 45 years after she took that final curtain call.
Born Rose Louise Hovick in Seattle to a teenage mother right out of a convent, she got an early start in show business, appearing with her little sister June in a vaudeville act when she was just 8 years old. It was apparent that the sister, Baby June, was the true talent of the siblings. From the start of their act, Louise was pushed to the background while June was moved to the center stage and given a special pink spotlight.
The family moved to Hollywood with an act named Dainty June, The Hollywood Baby, & Her Newsboys. Their mother, Rose had an overbearing determination to see her young daughters have successful stage careers and she soon divorced her husband to become the girls’ full-time manager.
In their teenage years, Louise & June had the responsibility of supporting the family. They traveled all over the USA, playing cheap vaudeville theatres, living out of suitcases, & skipping school. When June was 13 years old, she eloped with fellow vaudevillian Bobby Reed. The sister act was finished.
Louise was unable to generate much interest as a solo act. At 17 years old, and stranded in Kansas City without a booking, she was approached by an agent about appearing in a burlesque show when the usual stripper had landed in prison. Despite Mama Rose’s objections, Louise took the gig and was reinvented as Gypsy Rose Lee.
Lee made her NYC debut in 1931, at Minsky’s Famous Republic Theatre, the first burlesque house on Broadway. Comedians Abbott & Costello, Phil Silvers, and Red Buttons were on the same bill, but the strippers were the stars. At height of the Depression, a strip tease artist made more than $2,000 a week. Lee played 12 weeks in a row at The Republic, setting a record for the theatre. She was arrested during one of the many police raids on Minsky’s theatres. This only helped her become even more popular.
Lee didn’t perform the usual bumps and grinds of traditional Burlesque routines. She developed a slow strip which she accompanied with a smart patter song. Her patter was her biggest asset. In those days, women made up half of the typical Burlesque audience, and Lee became famous for her onstage wit and sophistication.
When she turned of 33 years old, Lee decided she wanted have a child. She told her sister June that she wanted to select the father, and he needed to be:
“The toughest, meanest son of a bitch that I can find, somebody who’s ruthless, and my child will rule the world.”
Her choice was the great Hollywood film director Otto Preminger. Lee slept with him just one time. When he was 18 years old, her son Erik demanded to know why she wouldn’t tell him who his father was. Her retort:
“Because it’s none of your business.”
Lee’s autobiography Gypsy: Memoirs Of America’s Most Celebrated Stripper (1957), plus that landmark stage musical and the film based on it, made Rose even more notorious than the daughter. Lee’s book was a bestseller, but she could have sold even more copies had she told the real story about herself & her mother. Rose hounded her daughters for decades, demanding money and credit for their fame.
June, the sister, became June Havoc. She not only starred in the premiere of the great Rodgers & Hart musical Pal Joey (1940), she wrote 2 memoirs that told the story of her long career as an acclaimed actor and stage director. Havoc took her final curtain call in spring 2012.
The musical Gypsy is a horror show wrapped up as a show biz fable. Rose Hovick is the scary monster. The musical & the memoir were, like everything else having to do with that family, highly fictionalized. It turns out that Rose, who wrote the book on how to be a stage-mother, was actually worse in real life. She was an epic bully, enabler, and manipulator, plus she was guilty of at least 2 murders, & possibly a third. And, most dreadful of all, she was probably a lesbian.
The essence of Gypsy is basically true though. Rose’s voracious, inhuman ambition, the early fame of Lee’s little sister who could toe-dance at the age of 2 as “Baby June” on the vaudeville circuit, and the desperation that set in when radio, films and the Depression made vaudeville extinct, those are all fact. June really did elope with one of the act’s chorus boys. It was true that Louise could not sing, dance or act, but she was willing to take her clothes off on stage and smart theater owners recognized that the way she did it was something special.
After one of her many arrests, Lee stated:
“I was completely covered… in a blue spotlight”.
Her talent for publicity made her a household name. The more famous & adored she became, the fewer garments she had to take off.
Through the decades, Lee & her sister continued to fight, then reconciled. Havoc helped Lee get through her final battle with cancer, gone at just 57 years old in 1970. But, when Lee was on her deathbed, she whispered to her son Erik:
“After I go, don’t let June in the house. She’ll rob you blind.”
If she interests you, and she should, I recommend American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare, The Life And Times Of Gypsy Rose Lee (2011) by Karen Abbott. Erik Preminger is in his early 70s. He works as an actor and writer, with a book titled G-String Mother: My Life With Gypsy Rose Lee. He says of his famous mother:
“She was a true-life Auntie Mame, only better.”
The post #BornThisDay: Gypsy Rose Lee appeared first on World of Wonder.
A.J. McLean
