American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (2010)

A good overview of the life and times of Gypsy Rose Lee, the culture that "created" her and the personal trials and demons that drove her to succeed. This is not a gossipy "tell-all" biography full of lurid information on celebrity affairs, there are a few brief mentions of such behavior as it relates to other aspects of Gypsy's life but it never devolves into tabloid-like sensationalism.

Ms. Abbott has an interesting way of structuring her books - she did something similar in her book Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul - she begins somewhere in the middle of the timeline of the story she wants to tell (in this case about halfway through Gypsy Rose Lee's life when she was at her Burlesque peak but not yet the iconic figure she would become in her lifetime) then time jumps back to the beginning in the next chapter (Gypsy's birth and hard early years) while in the third chapter the author builds up the backstory of the culture that created the opportunity for the subject to flourish (focusing in this case on the early years of the Minsky brothers and the new style of burlesque they helped cultivate). This cycle that goes back and forth and back every third chapter takes a little getting used to at first but it works pretty well for the most part. The structure of the narrative falls apart a little in later chapters. When the separate timelines start to converge - as when Gypsy joins Minsky's roster of performers and the two narrative lines begin to overlap. It gets a little confusing. Some of the Minsky chapters are very dry reading and slow the momentum of the book.

The best and most fascinating part of the book, by far, is the extensive telling of the early life and career of Mother Rose Hovick's two daughters - Baby June and Rose Louise (who would become Gypsy Rose Lee) - as they traveled across the country (like gypsies) performing anywhere and everywhere in their efforts to fulfill the dreams and ambitions of Mother Rose. The author does a great job of describing the atmosphere of the vaudeville circuit and the performers who worked it during those years.

The actual transformation of little Rose Louise into Gypsy Rose Lee is glossed over somewhat - apparently, like many other performers of the era, Gypsy was a master of creating her own myth, so much so that much of what is and isn't true is hard to establish and there are conflicting stories of some events and no information at all of others. The book doesn't provide much in depth information on Gypsy Rose Lee's more famous years other than her lifelong conflicted relationships with her mother and sister. If a reader doesn't already have at least a vague knowledge of who Gypsy Rose Lee was they might be left wondering why she became so famous and celebrated in her lifetime.

I would recommend this book to anyone who wanted to know more about the vaudeville circuits, the child entertainers who performed on those stages, and the culture of burlesque that developed in the early 20th century.

The book is relatively free of any offensive language or explicit descriptions. ( )

My main critiques of the book are that it does flip back in forth from younger ages of the girls to older ages, which can get confusing (as they are called different names as youths and older women). Also, I felt the story tended to focus way more on her sister than Gypsy herself. ( )

Gypsy Rose Lee had one crazy life...it's too bad we're not sure what's fact vs fiction. As I mentioned in my blog post from earlier this week, the book goes back and forth in time - starts in 1940, then 1910s, then back again. That was fine until the last third of the book. People were dead then they were alive and the earlier sections caught up with the later sections so by the end I was just trying to figure out where I was in Gypsy's life. (I'm hoping all of that got fixed before the book was properly published - I was reading an Advanced Copy.) Bottom line: Interesting story. Now I want to know more! ( )

There is perhaps no better introduction to Gypsy Rose Lee than the epigraph to "American Rose," Karen Abbott's new bio graphy: "May your bare ass always be shining." These good wishes, sent to the First Lady of the Striptease by former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in 1959, suggest the magnitude of Lee's celebrity at that time. Through her stage perform ances, books and the musical "Gypsy" (based on her life story), she became not only a legendary show- business figure but part of the American mythos.

A New Yorker cartoon reprinted in Lee's autobiography epitomizes her appeal: A pot-bellied, bald man shaving at the bathroom sink glances at his wife, who is speaking to him from behind a shower curtain. She wears an amused expression, her hands gripping the curtain as a covering for her breasts while she sticks one leg out, showing her calf and just a bit of thigh. The caption reads: "Hey, Sam—Gypsy Rose Lee!" Not only did women admire her humor and suggestive style, the nation as a whole celebrated a woman who could make sex into playful entertainment.

From the moment she first began performing in burlesque in the early 1930s, Lee was unusually inventive, pinning to her flesh-colored body suits articles of clothing that she could whisk off and throw into the orchestra pit or the audience. She specialized in breakaway dresses with removable panels. She paraded across the stage in prefabricated dresses, bridal gowns, black-net skirts and lacy negligees. What she wore and how she discarded it created the fascination.

It soon became clear that Lee was a world-class entertainer who just happened to be working in burlesque. In Broadway revues, and later one-woman shows, she tugged at garters and showed a line of leg bent at the knee, or crossed her silk-stockinged limbs and cocked her head in statuesque poses. She decked herself out in late Victorian garb and did a "bustle dance," mocking the propriety of an earlier age even as she maintained her own brand of decorum. Lee's intelligence was equally recognizable in her unusually witty banter with the audience (and authorities). "I wasn't naked," she once protested after a police raid. "I was completely covered by a blue spotlight." How many other striptease artists could hold down their own radio program, as she briefly did?

By the mid-1950s, Gypsy Rose Lee was famous across the country as a performer. But she made herself immortal by writing a book: her sensational 1957 autobiography, "Gypsy." She was so good at embellishing her own story— inventing a narrative that had only fitful commerce with the truth—that biographers have been kept busy fact-checking her ever since.

A revived interest in burlesque culture over the past few years has led to a series of new evaluations. In 2009, Noralee Frankel did her homework in the archives and produced "Stripping Gypsy: The Life of Gypsy Rose Lee," which restored some of the truth about her story—inevitably without the panache that made Lee's own life such a wonderful performance. Even better was Rachel Shteir's "Gypsy: The Art of the Tease" (also 2009), an elegant and insightful study of Lee's self-fashioning that Ms. Abbott relies on heavily.

So what does "American Rose" offer that is new? First, invaluable interviews with June Havoc, Gypsy's sister, a tormented observer who could never be sure when Lee was on the level. The author's story of how she got to know Havoc, and her account of the wary transactions between the bio grapher and her interviewee, provide real insight into how icons construct their lives and how biographers go about deconstructing them.

But Ms. Abbott has greater ambitions than just enlivening her biography with material from those who knew Lee. Like Lee herself, Ms. Abbott wants to show off her own intelligence and style. That's perhaps a good thing in a biographer dealing with a flamboyant subject. Even so, she tries too hard at times to evoke Lee's inner states. Ms. Abbott's sentences can read as if they came out of a novel, not a biography: "Not a day passes without her retelling, if just to her own ears, the densely woven and tightly knotted story of her own legend, and not a day passes when she doesn't wonder how its final line will read." It is always tempting for bio graphers to employ words that obscure the sad truth that they cannot know about every day of their subjects' lives.

Ms. Abbott also denies herself one of the great stodgy pleasures of biography: laying out the chronology of a subject's life in what impatient reviewers might call the plodding approach. Instead, she interrupts the sequence of Lee's life with key scenes from later years and from other lives connected with Lee's. Thus a chapter set in 1912 is followed by one in 1940. Readers of novels would not find this flash forward disconcerting, but in a biography—at least in this one—a shifting structure under mines the steady accumulation of detail that makes an account convincing.

After five chapters of Ms. Abbott, I started consulting Ms. Shteir's "Gypsy: The Art of the Tease." Its table of contents—with chapters on "Undressing the Family Romance," "The Queen of Striptease," "To Hollywood and Back," "The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual"— indicate the kind of analysis short biographies often provide so well. For those unfamiliar with the Lee biblio graphy, which comprises not merely her own memoirs but those of her sister and other family members, Ms. Shteir's is the book to pick up first.

Or perhaps second. Despite its flaws and fabrications, Lee's own autobiography is still the best guide to understanding the nature of her success. The story of her first strip act—no matter how many of its details are invented—is true to the woman that Rose Louise Hovick became when she changed her name to Gypsy Rose Lee at the Gayety Theater in Toledo, Ohio, in 1931. Her biographers, for all their skepticism, cannot resist relying on Lee's memoir. She always wanted to be taken seriously as a writer—she wrote two novels and once shared a house with W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers and Paul Bowles—and her autobiography is certainly a classic of the form.

Chapter 26 of "Gypsy: A Memoir" describes her family of starving, bedraggled vaudeville performers arriving at the Gayety Theater only to hear the show's producer telling the stage manager that the lead stripper has been jailed and no one is available to do her scenes. "My daughter does scenes," says Gypsy's mother, who is portrayed in the auto biography as the epitome of the pushy stage parent. Lee writes: "I wanted to hide somewhere. Mother pushed me toward the two men and I wanted the floor to open up and let me drop quietly through it."

Up to this point in the autobiography, Rose Louise, fat and untalented, has been overshadowed by her younger sister, June, who as a 3-year-old was already performing as a dancer. The producer asks about Rose Louise: "Does she strip?" As Lee reports: "Mother looked him straight in the eye and said yes." Afterward she assured her daughter that she would have to do no more than drop a shoulder strap at the end of her routine. And, at first, Lee suggests, she didn't.

Lee continues: "The full importance of what had happened suddenly hit me." She would soon be a star, playing to ever more enthusiastic crowds, and she decided to behave accordingly, changing her name, seeing to it that the marquee reflected the change, embellish ing her act by breaking from the chorus line and inventing her own moves. It is all, of course, worthy of the movies.

Over the years, Lee's bio graphers have diligently undermined parts of this tale. Ms. Abbott notes that June Havoc once did an interview in which she scoffed at her sister's version of her first strip: "She was never an ingenue. . . . And she never just dropped a shoulder strap. Ever." Equally valuable is Ms. Abbott's interview with Gypsy's son, Eric, who told the biographer: "I'm sure it was not an easy year [1931]. . . . There were rough girls, gangsters, prostitution. They had to eat. And she was perhaps forced to do things against her will." The scholarly Ms. Frankel, in "Stripping Gypsy," observes wryly in an endnote: "There is no record in Gypsy Rose Lee's scrapbook that her first strip was done in Toledo."

Ms. Shteir, steeped in the history of striptease, provides a shrewd analysis of Gypsy's reminiscence, noting that it "conflates several stories from showbiz mythology": the show must go on, a star is born and my mother made me do it. The signal point, Ms. Shteir notes, is that Lee could not present herself as stripping of her own accord. That would be "too naughty" and "vulgar." Yet, Ms. Shteir observes, Gypsy did not protest her mother's brash maneuvering.

Ms. Abbott adds an important piece to this puzzle, uncovering a New York Daily News article (from Sept. 15, 1936) that quotes Gypsy Rose Lee just five years after the events in question and 20 years before she committed the myth to writing. "The shoulder strap led to one thing and another, if you know what I mean," Lee says matter-of-factly, "and that's how I started in the strip business."

Here Ms. Abbott is able to pin her subject down and suggest why the autobiography had to replace the facts: "It was beneath her to attach details to that 'one thing and another,' disrespectful to include such memories in her scrapbooks, sacrilege to admit that the singular, legendary Gypsy Rose Lee had begun just like everyone else." ( )

As comprehensive a book about this subject - the real story behind the musical Gypsy - as we're likely to get, given the subject's propensity to make up stories about herself, the lack of written documentation, and now the death of all the active players. I was truly impressed with Abbott's attempt to dig out everything and it was fortunate that Gypsy's sister was still alive and willing to give interviews. I thought the story was fascinating, both as a character study and and as a cultural study. For anyone who likes biography, 20th century American history, or theater history, this is a worthwhile read. ( )