BEHIND THE BURLY Q by LESLIE ZEMECKIS : MISTRESS MANIFESTO BOOK REVIEW

Leslie Zemeckis, the author of this book, really did her research. The book includes a long list of "characters", many of the performers who she interviewed in their old age. Blaze Starr, whom we are focusing on this month here at Mistress Manifesto, is just one of them. The book also includes strippers such as Gypsy Rose Lee, who was featured here at Mistress Manifesto in the past, and Sally Rand, known for her elaborate feather fan dances and Lili St. Cyr who was known for her Dance of the Seven Veils. You'll also note some familiar men in this book such as Jack Ruby, who assassinated Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President JFK, and Mike Todd, a husband of actress Elizabeth Taylor. JFK also makes an appearance and Blaze claims a few dates with him.

So let me start with admitting that I personally don't understand the appeal of burlesque and am too modest to have ever considered becoming a stripper myself.  Still, I want to be fair to those who have found their calling - their life's work - as women who have found this profession such as Blaze, who had to find her way out of the poverty of West Virginia coal mining country.

As Zemechis' profiles reveal, back in the day women who had to find some way to earn income as young as fourteen, many who were born into severe poverty, did find their way into burlesque or were solicited to dance. They were young, vital, and bodacious, and becoming what today we call "exotic dancers" was an opportunity.  Some made their fortune, some stayed in the profession for a long while even as they aged, and others became infamous.  

Burlesque evolved into an American art form, with roots in European theater, that intended to be comedic and mocking of legitimate theater and the upper classes.  The intention originally was to find humor in sex and what people were willing to do to have it. (I.e. akin to the French Farce.) So, though today's performances are generally distanced from what might even be thought of as a kind of protest, favoring titillation, the women who entered into burlesque when the average starlet wasn't taking it all off, created acts in which being funny was all part of being successful. (Blaze Starr having smoke seemingly emitting from her nether regions is funny.)

So, beginning in what is the history of burlesque was a popular art form that many people you might not imagine as enjoying it, did go off to fine theaters, where hundreds of people, including single woman and couples, were the audience and sometimes full orchestras played and a variety of entertainers acted. However as the decades went on, as the shows became more focused on the women who stripped, the musicians and comedians who had been part of the show were dispensed, and by the 1960's it was becoming all about porn.

This book focuses on what happened to the starts of burlesque, most who could not then move on into other aspects of entertainment. Some of them started out as chorus girls, some became prostitutes, some retired well regarded. No apologies.

The book is fascinating.  If this month's posts about Blaze Starr stroke your interest, you'll want to read this book!  (And remember that the books are often better than the films made of them!)

Missy

GYPSY ROSE LEE UPDATE - A NEW DOCUMENTARY

DAILY MAIL : STRIPTEASE ARTIST GYPSY LEE - DOCUMENTARY

Our Mistress of the Month for September 2018, news is that Gypsy's only child, son Erik Preminger, is behind a new documentary about his mom.  Go to the article that includes a video!

EXCERPT: The event was hosted at the Hollywood Heritager Museum and after the screening, Preminger, 74, was joined by burlesque start Dita Von Teese, who has cited Gypsy as one of her inspirations, for a Q and A.

Preminger is Gypsy's only child and he was constantly by her side until the age of 17, traveling with her to gigs and helping her change between acts backstage.

MIKE TODD and GYPSY ROSE LEE - BEFORE ELIZABETH TAYLOR?

Gypsy Rose Lee starred on Broadway and rumors were that she and Michael Todd, who would marry actress Elizabeth Taylor, had a thing, and that Gypsy was crazy about him.

Image replaced June 2021

MOTHER FINDS A BODY

My library doesn't have copies of Gypsy Rose Lee's murder fiction, but I checked and this was the second in the series that began with the G-String Murders.

Not shy about using her reputation as a stripper to be an author of noir, I suspect the woman who started out life as Rose Louise Hovick could give contemporary women some strong business advice.  I'm especially interested to know if Mother Rose, the stage mother from hell, was used to base the character of the Mother who finds a body.  Oh, and by the way, one source says that there is a possibility that Mother Rose murdered her room mate at one point.  Or was it a suicide?

GYPSY's SON ERIC FATHERED By FILM DIRECTOR OTTO PREMINGER

NEW YORK TIMES - 1971 GYPSY's SON ERIK to be ADOPTED by OTTO PREMINGER

EXCERPT:

The story came to light when Mr. Preminger told The Daily Mirror in London of his love affair with Miss Lee, a noted strip tease dancer, actress and author. According to the British paper, Mr. Preminger, who is married and the father of two children, disclosed that his affair with Miss Lee took place in California. On Dec. 11, 1944, he heard that she was in a New York hospital and flew here to be with her. He learned then that she was expecting a baby.

Mr. Preminger said that he offered to help her but she re fused and did not want the child ever to learn who his true father was.

NOTE: Erik also wrote a book, a memoir of life with his mother. Another source tells me that he was about 9 years old before he found out about his birth father.

THE ART OF SHOWING OFF A LITTLE - NOT A LOT

In some photos I've seen of Gypsy, she looks rather thin, especially considering that very thin wasn't quite in until Twiggy, the early 1960's London fashion model who looked pubescent and work a boyish "Pixie Cut" hair style.

THE G-STRING MURDERS by GYPSY ROSE LEE was A BEST SELLER

Noir in a book, Gypsy Rose Lee always did have literary aspirations.

Pose behind a typewriter for publicity photos, this book was a best

seller, based on her notoriety first.  It launched her career as a writer.

LET ME ENTERTAIN YOU

According to the poster of this YouTube video, this is a very tame version of Gypsy Rose Lee's strip routine. Her high brown attitude and voice is interesting to me. At heart she was a literary person. She has a book in her.

GYPSY ROSE LEE - STRIPPER MISTRESS OF WAXY GORDON in the SPEAKEASY ERA

Update : Here's an interesting article from Daily Mail UK about Gypsy's son Erik Preminger's new film about his mother!
DAILY MAIL : STRIPTEASE ARTIST GYPSY - DOCUMENTARY

Rose Louise Hovick - Gypsy Rose Lee

1911-1970

To prepare to write this Mistress of the Month post, besides reading author Karen Abbott's book cover to cover, I watched a few YouTube videos including excerpts from the film in which actress Natalie Wood played Gypsy.  I found a joking and fully clothed Gypsy Rose Lee on an old television show called "What's My Line," which is in black and white and seems extremely dated.

Gypsy projected humor and a certain optimistic joy of living.  It is that attitude that she brought into her burlesque theatre routines.  Her smile was dazzling, but her first set of caps that made her teeth thick, even, and white, was a first perk when early on she was the mistress of a New York mobster named Waxy Gordon, original name Irving Wexler.

Years ago I attended a musical play about Gypsy Rose Lee at a local college theater department.  The play as well as most every mention of Gypsy (and her sister, who became the actress June Hovic) seems to include their mother, Rose, who was the back stage mother from hell, something that perhaps actress Wood had in common with them. 

Why was Rose hell?  Well, I imagine that she was not just driven but a Narcissist and not just a Narcissist but a Malignant Narcissist.  Both of her daughters learned to keep her out of their business eventually. With all the pushy single mothers back in the day getting their pretty and talented daughters to support them, well, maybe this was what it took to survive starvation.  It was the early 1900's when Rose as a single mother of two daughters with no other talent than her pushiness - which likely repelled their fathers - decided her girls were destined for show business.

Petite and blond June, the looker when they were kids, was the one Mama Rose promoted first.  No doubt these two sisters were highly incompatible by their natures and no doubt mom set up a competition between the two but for a while Rose Louise, the darker haired daughter who would become a world renown stripper, was outdistanced by her sister. The one thing both of them had in common was Rose, who as an irrepressible mom had to be dealt with, had to be kept out of their lives as much as possible.

If June went the way of the "good girl," Gypsy, went the way of the "bad girl," at least by reputation. Mom taught her that men should get just the opposite of what other girls, and other strippers, gave, which even then, in acts that generally were tame compared to what strippers do at your local venue, was too much.

Was virginity really expected?

During the Great Depression, according to the author, seven out of ten single men and women were active sexually.  That was risky taking. It was illegal to advertise birth control.  Lovers had to mail order "marriage hygiene" products, tried the rhythm method, or invested in a 14 caret gold button IUD!

The woman who appeared on "What's My Line," has in common with actress Marilyn Monroe, the forgiveness of popular culture, the understanding that sometimes when you are a nobody with nothing coming out of nowhere, you do things which are maybe immoral or wrong. A certain aspect of our popular culture figures any kind of work is better than a handout.

To tell the truth, Gypsy got out of stripping not just because she was aging but because the up and coming strippers were going well beyond anything she ever did, making her stripping seem like a comedy act by the 1950's.  Still, she was active as an entertainer from 1928-1969.
Believing that the tease was what her audiences wanted, rather than blatant nudity that shows all, it wasn't until her last strip that she was briefly seen entirely in the nude and then for a fast second before she went behind the curtains.  She kept that ongoing joke of a tease going for years and years.

Gypsy married, divorced, married and had one son, Eric, who, according to some sources, was supposedly the son of film director Otto Preminger, rather than her husband at the time, and divorced.  She married a third time and divorced again.
But for our purposes here, we enter into the reasons beyond a strip act that came to be thought of as tame, for the "bad girl" reputation that Gypsy Rose Lee had back in her early days.

According to author, in the 1930's in New York, there were "animal parties" which were basically sex parties, and gypsy went to them though at heart she was asexual.  It is not said if she simply watched, held her men at arms length, or if she was actually participatory, but her attitudes about sex were very pragmatic. Rose knew it and was indignant that Gypsy had gone this low.


Rose might have objected to her daughter being sexual but Waxy Gordon was not Gypsy's first lover nor did she aim to be married to Mr. Right.  She had lost her virginity to "Ed" a wealthy man connected to Broadway and literary circles that she aspired to.  Then she had a fling with Red who taught her how to Kiss.  Then a Crooked cop.  As she worked her way down to Waxy, who was a short, plump and dangerous man with a diamond bracelet on his own wrist, a man who made his money in speakeasies during Prohibition, she got to know that he knew everyone in the mob from Lucky Luchiano to Arnold Rothstien.  Waxy ran 32,000 speakeasies, illegal nightclubs that served illegal liquor and varied from beautiful locations with the finest of liquors to what amounted to holes in the wall with stuff that could kill off your liver laced with dangerous chemicals.  He brought in 80% of the liquor from Canada and the Bahamas and worked with Irish gangs.  It was rumored that his tactics included murder and even a 6000 foot beer pipeline underground.  Waxy Gordon lived in splendor with a wife and three children, not that he was known to be faithful.  When the average person was earning less than $2000 a year, he was paying about $6000 in personal rent, the children were in expensive private schools and rode horseback.  Waxy is said to have worn underwear bought for $10 a piece under his slick custom suits.  In 1930 he had money to spare from an estimated income of 1.5 million in income, for which he paid $10.76 in taxes.  As a side, the television series Boardwalk Empire has Waxy as a character.

After he set eyes on Gypsy, he sent over four bottles of champagne in a typical act of generosity to those he was interested in and soon they had an implicit agreement that he would open doors for her.  He called her the day ater they met and said she had to go to his dentist to have her teeth straightened.  Mama objected so they didn't go.  But then came the next message from a friend who said Waxy was very hurt and that she had better go.  It was a warning.  The doctor owed Waxy and soon she had new caps that looked like real teeth.  When he asked her to perform at a prison benefit she went.  Rose had bought them a house for $8000 in Queens but it had no furniture.  Waxy started having furniture delivered.  Soon, according to her blond actress sister June, Gypsy became the Pet of the Underworld.  She too was concerned about what was happening to her sister who said "I will never be Louise again.  Call me Gypsy."   Gypsy said, "Nobody is going to be a roadblock for Gypsy Rose Lee."

Gypsy started to think that all men were married and wanted a mere ornament of a woman who would help them live a fantasy life. 

As for Waxy, Gypsy called him "Mr. Gordon and he called her "kid."

Rose decided to like him.  She said, "Give me a true blue gangster anytime."

Nobody was kidding anybody.

While June proved to have no talent or instinct for stripping as an art form and felt ashamed when she tried it,  Rose with the help of Waxy was soon working for the Minsky Brothers, entertainment pioneers if you include stripping.  But now she had to step into Waxy's world which including the shocking parties in which there was smoking and conversation, but mostly sex.  June went to one and soon fled.  How could Rose have allowed it? June was convinced it was because her mother never loved her.

Maybe Rose only loved herself?


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