Lee, Gypsy Rose (1914–1970)

Celebrated American ecdysiast and writer who turned the striptease into an art form, was accepted as a legitimate actress, and whose memoirs of growing up in show business were turned into the musical Gypsy. Born Rose Louise Hovick, but known as Louise Hovick, on February 9, 1914, in Seattle, Washington; died on April 26, 1970, in Los Angeles, California; daughter of John Hovick and Anna Thompson Hovick (known as Rose); sister of June Havoc (b.1916); attended public schools and was tutored when touring with her mother and sister; married Arnold Mizzy (divorced 1938); married Alexander Kirkland (divorced 1944); married Julio de Diego (divorced 1951); children: (with film director Otto Preminger) Erik Lee Preminger.

Brought up in show business from the time of her parents' divorce (1918); at first sang and danced with her younger sister June throughout the Northwest; led a more settled existence during mother's two subsequent but short-lived marriages; auditioned for various vaudeville circuits (early 1920s); won a contract with the Pantages circuit through the West and Midwest, but remained in the chorus line backing up her younger sister June; June eloped with one of the chorus boys (1929); Rose soon built a new act around Louise, but by now vaudeville was dying in the surge of radio and feature films and was being replaced by its bawdier stepchild, burlesque. Mama Rose, undaunted, soon managed to get Louise star billing at a burlesque theater in Toledo, Ohio, where Louise performed her first, modest striptease and adopted the name Gypsy Rose Lee. From this point on, Gypsy took control of her own career, developing a trademark, almost balletic striptease act appreciated in terms of sophistication and entertainment value more than prurience. Gypsy went on to even wider audiences in feature films and on radio, wrote two novels and a play, and published her memoirs, which were turned into Gypsy, one of the most successful Broadway musicals of all time (1959), and later successfully adapted for film and television.

Selected filmography:

(as Louise Hovick) You Can't Have Everything, Ali Baba Goes To Town (1937); Sally Irene and Mary, The Battle of Broadway, My Lucky Star (1938); (as Gypsy Rose Lee) Stage Door Canteen (1943); Belle of the Yukon (1944); Babes in Baghdad (1952); Screaming Mimi, Wind Across The Everglades (1958); The Stripper (1963); The Trouble With Angels (1966).

Selected publications:

two mystery novels, including G-String Murders, which was adapted for the screen as Lady of Burlesque, starring Barbara Stanwyck (1943); a play was also adapted for film as Doll Face (1946); Gypsy (1957, autobiography).

On a summer's evening in 1918, the worthy gentlemen of the West Seattle Knights of Pythias Lodge were treated to some after-dinner entertainment, provided courtesy of their fellow lodgemember Charlie Thompson. Charlie's daughter, Anna Thompson Hovick, who preferred to be known as Madame Rose, played the piano while her two daughters sang and danced. The younger of the girls, two-year-old June (later known as June Havoc ), was obviously the most talented, while the older one, four-yearold Louise, seemed awkward and uncomfortable. Nonetheless, the gentlemen gave the girls a hearty round of applause while their mother beamed proudly.

Havoc, June (1916—)

American actress. Name variations: Baby June. Born Ellen Evangeline Hovick on November 8, 1916, in Seattle, Washington; daughter of John Hovick and Anna Thompson Hovick, known as Rose Hovick; sister of Gypsy Rose Lee (1914–1970); attended public schools and was tutored when touring with her mother and sister; married at 13; married William Spier (a director).

Filmography:

Four Jacks and a Jill (1941); My Sister Eileen (1942); No Time for Love (1943); Casanova in Burlesque (1944); Sweet and Low Down (1944); Brewster's Millions (1945); Gentleman's Agreement (1947); Intrigue (1947); The Iron Curtain (1948); When My Baby Smiles at Me (1948); Chicago Deadline (1949); The Story of Molly X (1949); Mother Didn't Tell Me (1950); Once a Thief (1950); Follow the Sun (1951); Lady Possessed (1952); Three for Jamie Dawn (1956); The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (1977); Can't Stop the Music (1980); Return to Salem's Lot (1987).

June Havoc began performing in vaudeville at the age of eight with her sister Louise, under the guidance of their mother. The act became a popular one on the vaudeville circuit in the West and Midwest until June left the act in 1929. Rose Hovick then built a new one around her older daughter that toured burlesque houses, where Louise, now Gypsy Rose Lee , learned the fine art of the striptease.

Though Havoc went on to make movies, her Hollywood career never completely clicked. She had more success on the New York stage in Pal Joey (1940) and Mexican Hayride, for which she won a Donaldson Award in 1944. She also wrote and directed I, Said the Fly and the successful Broadway play Marathon 33, starring Julie Harris . June's memoirs were published as Early Havoc (1959) and More Havoc (1980). Residing in Westport, Connecticut, Havoc was active in the causes of the arts and animals.

Mama Rose was determined that at least one of her girls would have the show-business career she had been denied, first by her father and then by her first husband, John Hovick. When she and John were divorced in 1918, Rose prevailed on her father to arrange for appearances for the girls at fraternal lodges and benevolent societies throughout Seattle. Charlie Thompson did not realize what his daughter was up to until it was too late, and Rose was trooping her girls up and down the West Coast looking for a break into show business.

The two girls led an unconventional life, living out of seedy hotel rooms on the fringes of vaudeville and leading a more settled existence during the two occasions their mother remarried. After the second marriage ended, however, the girls lived more or less permanently on the road.

Louise (originally named Rose Louise), writing years later as Gypsy Rose Lee, would describe her mother as "charming, courageous, resourceful, ambitious. She was also, in a feminine way, ruthless." For more than ten years, Louise was forced to the background while Rose concentrated on developing a career for June. "While Louise was the most beautiful child alive, she had no flair for singing and less for dancing," wrote June. "I must have seemed a more likely prospect from the very beginning."

If you wanna grind it, Wait 'til you've refined it.

—The stripper Tessie, from the musical Gypsy

Show business, in the 1920s, meant vaudeville—live variety shows made up of acts by singers, dancers, acrobats, and comedians. Vaudeville had developed from the old minstrel shows of the late 19th century, and it reigned supreme as the most popular form of mass entertainment, with acts booked onto a number of circuits, or "wheels," that covered the entire country. Performers were required to do up to six shows a day, six days a week; to live out of trunks and suitcases; to put up with abusive, sometimes belligerent audiences and theater managers, only to travel through the night by train or bus to start all over again at the next stopover. They were paid in cash, under a bookkeeping system that was riddled with inaccuracies and outright cheating, and could be fired on the spot for questioning or complaining. Unions were unknown, radio was not yet seen as an entertainment form, and motion pictures were still a novelty.

It was in this milieu that Mama Rose brought up her girls with ferocious determination, finally winning them a booking on the Alexander Pantages circuit, one of the country's largest, covering the West and Midwest. Mama Rose built a new act around June, hiring six boys to form "Dainty June and her Newsboy Songsters," with Louise as the seventh newsboy. Louise did her best, but when her two left feet became painfully obvious, her mother threatened to send her home to Seattle to live with relatives. Terrified, Louise promised to try harder and managed to stay with the act. "Dainty June" was a huge success on the circuit, especially when Rose added a barnyard number complete with live animals, and Louise performed as the back end of a cow that pranced around the stage while June sang.

Soon, the act became so popular that it was given a contract with the most prestigious circuit of them all, the Orpheum, at $1,250 a week, playing the best houses in Chicago, Buffalo, Detroit and other top venues. Mama Rose's "grouch bag," a capacious leather sack attached to her belt and suspended between her legs, at one point was stuffed with $25,000 in cash. But Louise continued to languish in June's limelight, even after Rose somehow arranged for her to appear in a skit opposite the most famous vaudeville performer of the day, Fanny Brice . Petrified and with little time to rehearse, Louise blew her lines and was a complete flop, glad to flee back to the anonymity of a cow's hindmost.

By 1929, June was 13 years old and still playing "Baby June." Rose insisted on dressing her in little girls' clothes, even off stage, constantly referred to her as "The Baby," and refused to let her learn a new, more mature act. The last straw came when Rose arranged an audition with Roxy Rothafel, the Steven Spielberg of the vaudeville world and the man who would later conceive and develop Radio City Music Hall. Rothafel quickly recognized June's talent, and just as quickly realized that no future career for June was possible as long as her mother was involved. He offered June a contract on the condition that "Dainty June and her Newsboy Songsters" was abandoned and the development of June's career was turned over to him. Her mother refused, accusing Rothafel of being an evil, selfish man trying to separate a mother from her daughter. Shortly afterward, on New Year's Eve of 1929, after the last performance of the night in Topeka, Kansas, June ran away from the act with one of the Newsboys who, it turned out, she had secretly married some months before. (June would later metamorphose into June Havoc and develop a moderately successful career as a stage and screen actress.) With the act now dead, Rose took Louise home to Seattle.

But not for long. Within months, Rose was planning a new routine around Louise, this time with six girls. The act hit the road and went through various incarnations, from "The Madame Rose Debutantes" to "Madame Rose's Dancing Daughters" to "Rose Louise and her Hollywood Blondes," the latter after Louise suggested

they all dye their hair. That act was the first time Louise's name was given top billing.

By the early 1930s, however, it was clear to everyone but Mama Rose that vaudeville was dying at the hands of radio and the burgeoning film industry. Quality bookings were becoming harder to find, but Rose refused to close the act down and accepted play dates in houses offering acts from the raunchier stepchild of vaudeville, burlesque. Burlesque shows featured scantily clad women chased around the stage by bawdy comedians spewing seltzer bottles and double-entendres, and something neither Rose nor Louise had seen before—the striptease. Louise's chaste act may have seemed out of place to an audience expecting bare flesh and sexual innuendo, but for the management it was a way to legitimize their shows and keep the censors off their backs. These new venues were to give Louise an opening that would shape her career.

Her chance came in Toledo, Ohio, when the star ecdysiast got into a violent disagreement with a boyfriend, bashed him over the head, and ended up in jail. The management needed a quick replacement, and Rose knew just who that might be. Louise was horrified when her mother volunteered her, but Rose told her all she had to do was sashay back and forth across the stage a few times and drop a shoulder strap. Louise, who had watched the veteran strippers enough times and listened to their banter, knew there was more to it than that. The afternoon before her debut, she watched grimly as a worker put her new professional name up on the marquee—Gypsy Rose Lee. She told an interviewer years later that the Gypsy came from a song she had used in her act for years, "Little Gypsy Sweetheart." She couldn't remember where the Lee came from.

Opening night arrived, and, with Rose stationed in the wings, Gypsy took her place on stage, dressed in a tightly fitted gown made of a sheer, revealing material. "Hold your stomach in, honey," Rose whispered from offstage as the drumroll started, "and your shoulders back!" Many years later, Gypsy remembered it all perfectly:

The spotlight blinded me for an instant, then my nervousness was gone and I began parading back and forth on the stage as I had seen the others strippers do. I lifted the sides of the full net skirt and made it swirl around me…. [T]hen, just as the music came to an end, I dropped the shoulder straps and the lavender net dress fell to the floor. Wrapping the curtain around me, I disappeared into the wings. I stood there for a long moment holding on to the scenery and trying to get my breath.

The applause may have been modest, but Gypsy's career was launched, along with freedom from her mother's control. Over the next year, Lee refined her act by putting more emphasis on the tease than on the strip, and by drawing on her vaudeville background to come up with a running patter of jokes and amusing observations. She developed the habit of seeking out a bald gentleman in the audience and calling out to him "Darling! Sweetheart! Where have you been all my life!," then descending into the audience to plant a kiss on his bald pate. As she removed the pins from the outer layer of her costume, each would be dropped into the tuba in the orchestra pit, followed by appropriate squawks and honks from that venerable instrument. And she always ended her act with a deft removal of the last layer and a quick flash of her lacy undergarments before wrapping herself in the curtain at the side of the stage and blowing a kiss at the blackout. Her costumes, rather than being outrageous or provocative, were elegant and sophisticated, and she let the audience see only enough of what was underneath to keep them interested. "Miss Lee," observed one critic, "never takes off more than she has on." The act began to draw a more discerning audience, who appreciated Gypsy's work almost as an art form. In 1931, she came to New York, opening at the prestigious Republic Theater, and took Broadway by storm.

By the time she was 21, Gypsy was earning $900 a week and playing long runs at some of New York's best theaters. Typical of the patter she developed as she shed various garments was:

When I lower my gown a fraction, …
I'm not thinking of your reaction.
I'm thinking of … The Apples by Cezanne.

Gypsy had a remarkable knack for publicity. When she first opened in New York in 1931, she noticed the powerful New York Mirror columnist, Walter Winchell, in the audience. The next morning, Winchell received a note from her apologizing for her poor performance of the previous evening and promising that if he returned that night, he'd see a better show. Winchell returned to see not Gypsy's usual routine but one she'd written just that afternoon based on Winchell's column of that morning. From then on, Gypsy got at least one mention every week in Winchell's writing. Soon, Variety reported that "Miss Lee has received more free space in two months then the rest of the burlesque business, including everybody in it, usually gets in two years."

For the next 25 years, Lee toured with much the same act, earning up to $10,000 a week for her talents. She became a national celebrity and even embarked on a short-lived film career when Darryl Zanuck put her under contract. But the government's film censor, Will Hays, would not allow "that strip woman" to appear on screen under the name Gypsy Rose Lee, and no one had ever heard of Rose Louise Hovick. Besides, Gypsy was well aware of her own limitations, and even she admitted that acting in front of a camera was

one of them. "When I saw my last picture in Hollywood," she told the New York World Telegram in 1938, "I knew it was the end…. I said, 'Gypsy, if that's you, you'd better go fast.' I didn't meet with much resistance from the studios." Nevertheless, Lee would return to Hollywood and appear in seven more films, including Stage Door Canteen, under the name by which everyone knew her. In addition, she wrote two popular murder mysteries (including The G-String Murders with Craig Rice ), a play and, in 1957, published her memoirs, the rights to which she sold to Broadway producer David Merrick. By 1959, the musical Gypsy, starring Ethel Merman as Mama Rose, with a book by Arthur Laurents, music by Stephen Sondheim, and lyrics by Jule Styne, had opened to rave reviews and was on its way to becoming one of the most popular musicals in Broadway history.

Lee was equally adept at keeping her private life out of the public eye. Few people knew of the court suit Mama Rose brought against her two daughters for non-support in 1941 (settled quietly out of court); or, of Gypsy's constant worries about money which kept her touring past the age when even she admitted any self-respecting stripper should quit (her last striptease came in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 1958, when she was 44 years old); or, of her unfulfilling relationships with men. She was married and divorced three times—to a dental-supply manufacturer whom she divorced in 1938, a Broadway matinée idol whom she divorced in 1944 after three months (her son Erik was born in 1945), and a Spanish sculptor-painter to whom she was married for the longest time, six years, before divorcing him in 1951. She told New York Post columnist Sidney Skolsky in 1967, "The first year of marriage, you're exploring everything new together. The second year, you're reliving the first year. The third year, it's just plain normal married life." There were several affairs in between marriages, notably with Broadway impresarios Mike Todd and Billy Rose. By the time her son Erik, who lived and toured with her, was ten years old, Gypsy had largely given up on finding a long-term relationship and devoted her time to seeing Erik into manhood. It wasn't until Erik turned 18 that he discovered he had been born out of wedlock and was not a product of Gypsy's second marriage. Confronted, Gypsy confided to Erik that his father was film director Otto Preminger. Erik, in his own memoirs of growing up with Gypsy, quotes her as telling him that she "picked" Preminger as a suitable father for the child she wanted. "It was after Mike [Todd] left me," she said to him. "I felt so alone that I decided to have something no one would ever be able to take away from me." Erik and Otto Preminger met as father and son in the late 1960s and, in 1971, Preminger publicly acknowledged his paternity and legally adopted Erik.

In the mid-1960s, Lee sold her New York townhouse and moved to Los Angeles, where she purchased a home perched high in Beverly Hills and devoted her time to gardening and to the latest collection of dogs which had been her constant companions since her touring days with Mama Rose. ("Show me someone who doesn't like animals," Lee always said, "and I'll show you a treacherous person.") She appeared very little in public, although she did tour Vietnam for the State Department to entertain American troops and agreed to several guest slots on television chat shows. Erik recalls these years as some of her happiest. But in late 1969, Lee was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. She died of the disease on April 26, 1970. She was 56 years old.

Although her life was relatively short, Gypsy Rose Lee managed to fill those years with successful careers as a performer, a writer, and a single mother. Near the end, as Erik shepherded her past the other patients at the radiation clinic where she went for treatments, she told him quietly, "I've had three wonderful lives, and these poor sons-a-bitches haven't even lived once."

sources:

Havoc, June. Early Havoc. NY: Simon & Schuster, 1959.

Lee, Gypsy Rose. Gypsy: A Memoir. NY: Harper Brothers, 1957.

Preminger, Erik Lee. Gypsy and Me: At Home and on the Road with Gypsy Rose Lee. Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1984.

suggested reading:

Zeidman, Irving. The American Burlesque Show. NY: Hawthorn Books, 1967.

related media:

Gypsy (musical), produced by David Merrick, starring Ethel Merman as Mama Rose, with a book by Arthur Laurents, music by Stephen Sondheim, and lyrics by Jule Styne, opened on Broadway on May 21, 1959.

Gypsy (98 min. film), starring Rosalind Russell, Natalie Wood , and Karl Malden, directed by Mervin LeRoy, Warner Bros., 1962.

"Gypsy," TV-movie starring Tyne Daly , 1994.

Norman Powers , writer-producer, Chelsea Lane Productions, New York, New York