Stripping Gypsy: The Life of Gypsy Rose Lee
FOR MUCH of her life Gypsy Rose Lee (born Rose Louise Hovick in 1911) was the most famous striptease artiste in the world. Even now, almost 40 years since her death, she remains a legend.
Gypsy inspired the satirical song Zip in Rodgers and Hart’s classic Pal Joey and most famously her early life served as the basis for Stephen Sondheim and Jules Styne’s musical fable Gypsy, one of the greatest of all Broadway scores. She was played in the subsequent film of this by Natalie Wood.
Like the musical, Stripping Gypsy is dominated by Rose Hovick, Gypsy Rose Lee’s overbearing mother. But whereas the Rose of the Broadway show is a larger-than-life and bullying archetype of the stage mother determined that first one daughter and then the other would become a star, the reality was grimly different.
“Rose’s mental illness, emotional brutality and overt bisexuality were not the stuff of a Fifties musical,” explains Frankel in the preface to the book, surprisingly the first ever biography of the star. Nor had Rose’s more glaring character defects been a part of Gypsy Rose Lee’s autobiography, from which the show had been loosely drawn. Frankly she was a monster, entirely without redeeming qualities.
A native of Seattle Gypsy came from a family of strong women who had little use for men. Her grandmother married young, believing that marriage would give her freedom. She spent much of her life as a travelling saleswoman, marketing hats and lingerie to women in far-flung logging and mining camps.
Rose also married young – she was 15 and used marriage to escape her convent school. Once intent on a stage career of her own she soon diverted her ambitions on to her daughters and created a musical act built around June, Gypsy’s younger sister.
When June defected also by way of an early marriage Rose turned her attention to her eldest daughter who soon became Gypsy Rose Lee. A legend (fostered and burnished by the star in press interviews and self-penned articles) was born.
A stripper who was more tease than strip, Gypsy used her easy wit and sharp intellect to create an act that was stylish and sophisticated and which enabled her to mix with the likes of composer Benjamin Britten, poet WH Auden and novelist Carson McCullers.
Although she enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle, married three times and had a son by her movie director lover Otto Preminger, Gypsy remained true to her working-class roots. She supported unions and campaigned against fascism. By the paranoid Fifties she found herself branded a “Red” and out of work.
Decades before Madonna, Gypsy was a relentless re-inventor and a remorseless self-promoter. After stripping she found success as an actress on stage and in film. She became a television talk show host – though she had a tendency to hog the conversation – and spent her final years in Hollywood. She died from cancer in 1970 aged 59.
Hers is a fascinating story – Cinderella spiced with Left-ish politics, gangsterism, literature and showbusiness – admirably revealed in this endlessly fascinating biography of an extraordinary woman and her 40-year career.
By Noralee Frankel
Oxford University Press, £15.99
