Gypsy Rose Lee (1911–1970)

Before there was Dita Von Tese there was Gypsy Rose Lee, a vaudeville performer turned strip teaser who went on to become a cultural icon with fluctuating media success. According to her son’s introduction, Gypsy Rose Lee was never formerly educated, having spent her whole life travelling for the stage, but had a voracious appetite for reading, individual books becoming her tutors and her windows into different worlds and different lives. Lee is no stranger to the pen, either, and in 1941 show more turns to pulp fiction with her publication of The G-String Murders.

The G-String Murders takes readers behind the scenes of a burlesque theatre, illustrating contentious and complex human relationships between stage performers, which leads to the very real (and welcomed, at times) murders of women with more enemies than back-door Johnnies. Gypsy Rose Lee herself is the protagonist, adding a realistic and identifiable voice to the telling of a series of garish murders, when strip-teasers are found strangled with glittering g-strings in a performance that seems fit for a stage. A classic whodunit, nearly everyone is suspicious, and the animosity between burlesque performers and the police force add a tension to the plot that adds believability to the suggestion that a comic and his dancer girlfriend need to investigate on their own. The scenes backstage and in the dressing rooms are just as grand and engaging as the acts on stage, and the pace runs high and keeps twirling from beginning to end. The G-String Murders will delight fans of mystery, pulp, and cozy-mysteries alike, and would be a real treat for anyone interested in burlesque and strip tease. Strong personalities and an intimate understanding of narrative make this pulp a real winner. show less

review of
Gypsy Rose Lee's Mother Finds a Body
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - June 19, 2018

Gypsy Rose Lee was a famous stripper when I was a kid. I never had much interest in her. I probably knew that there was a musical about her. I didn't know she wrote 2 mysteries. The title of this on the front cover is displayed over a shot of a woman's body wearing high heels, stockings that go halfway up the thigh that're held by straps connected to a bodice. The shot makes it unclear whether she's show more wearing panties. She's laying on her back on a bed. The body that's found is of a man. The image of the cover is exploiting Lee's reputation as a stripper. The foreword is by Lee's son. The 1st paragraph says:

"My mother's greatest creation was Gypsy Rose Lee, the persona she first adopted as a stripper at Billy Minsky's Republic Theater in New York City in the 1930s. While her fame was rooted in her career as a stripper in burlesque, it flowered into legend through her writing: two successful mystery novels, The G-String Murders and Mother Finds a Body; several magazine articles for the New Yorker, American Mercury, Flair, and others; and culminated with her memoir Gypsy, which became the landmark film and Broadway musical through which Gypsy Rose Lee lives on today." - p 5

I think I'm going to put this on my "Working Class Intellectual" bookshelf on Goodreads. There're currently only 21 bks there: 11 of mine (they all belong there so I've accidentally left some off), Joseph Furphy (Tom Collins)'s Such is Life (highly recommended), & work by Cookie Mueller, B Traven. Primo Levi, Michael Gottlieb, The Dirty Poet, etc.. Being included on this bookshelf is a sign of deep respect, it shows that not only do I think that the authors are good writers who're apparently well-read but who're also keenly incisive in ways that show substantial worldly experience. Lee definitely belongs here. Her son tells the reader:

"She read any book she could buy or shoplift, which resulted in an eccentric range of topics and authors: Decameron, The Blind Bow Boy, Das Capital, and Droll Stories to name a few." - p 6

I've read Boccaccio's Decameron. My copy's 617pp long. I've never met anyone else who's read it — although I'm sure there're plenty out there. I've got a copy of Marx's Capital. My copy's 897pp long. I haven't read it yet. If Lee read both of those bks that's enuf to deeply impress me right there. She was censored:

"She had been the toast of New York while at Minsky's, went on to star in the Ziegfeld Follies with Fanny Brice, and signed a seven-year contract with Twentieth Century Fox. Then her fortunes plummeted. Will H. Hays—Hollywood's censorship czar—refused to allow the name Gypsy Rose Lee on America's movie screens." - p 6

This gets mentioned in her novel:

"As far as that goes, we hadn't been married at all. Not if you want to be technical about it. We had a deep-sea captain say the right words, and I wore the ring on the right finger, but since the night of our marriage we hadn't been alone for five minutes.

"It wasn't only Mother and our guests. Even before they joined us, the studio had sent a publicity man to chaperone until we went through another ceremony that would sound legal to the Hays office. They didn't like the water-taxi business. They didn't like the idea of our captain being willing to disregard the technicalities of a marriage license, and they didn't like me particularly to start with. Making a movie actress out of a burlesque queen was a tougher job than they had anticipated." - p 27

Having thusly found out that she made movies & that she had trouble w/ censorship I've put a few movies that she was in on hold thru my loveable local library. YAY!

Family is an ongoing sore spot in my life. I have some friends whose parents love them & support them & they're pretty well off. I have other friends who didn't know their original parents &/or had parents who neglected them. Usually, they're less well off. My parents are somewhere in between. As far as I can tell, my father cd barely have cared less about me & made a point of being extremely ungenerous. He's dead now & I don't miss him. My mother's still hanging in there & I sometimes wonder whether she'd poison me if I were to eat a meal made by her for me. She's a miser. Lee doesn't depict her mother in a very favorable light & her son claims that Lee's mom sued her over it. I got a great deal of pleasure from seeing the depiction of her mother as unscrupulously manipulative. I've been there.

"Many people have wondered: How much of Mother Finds a Body is true? Ultimately, all of mother's writing was based on her life, so by the time she got to Gypsy she was comfortable with the characters. Ironically, she waited until after her mother died to write it because she wanted to avoid another lawsuit, but she got sued anyway. This time by her sister. Like the earlier suit by her mother, it was settled with money. To call our family mercenary would be an understatement." - p 9

I find Lee to be an excellent writer. There're many writers who have a knack for a turn of phrase w/o being experimental about it all. I'm often an experimental writer & I look for that in others but I can enjoy writing like Lee's & a zillion other pulp writers who were writing for a mass audience but still managing to squeeze in all sorts of things that weren't formulaic. Here're the 1st 2 paragraphs:

"A temperature of one hundred and ten, at night, isn't exactly the climate for asthma or murder, and Mother was suffering from a chronic case of both. She pushed the damp, tight curls off her forehead and tapped her foot impatiently on the trailer doorstep.

""You either bury that body in the woods tonight, or you finish your honeymoon without your mother."" - p 11

This is a threat?! W/ those 2 simple paragraphs the reader is slyly & wittily told that the mother is a drag, that there's a serious situation undealt w/, that the mother is probably making the honeymoon even worse w/ her probably uninvited presence, & that things wd probably improve significantly if the mother wd fulfill her threat & leave.. wch she won't.. b/c that wd be too good to be true & b/c she's THE MOTHER, the selfish, vain, manipulative nuisance. Ok, maybe I'm reading more into that than many readers might.

This is, after all, a mystery, so, while it's very witty, there're moments of drama:

"Then I saw the flames. A second later the entire wood was on fire.

"My first thought from then on was for the safety of the animals. I pushed Biff aside as I dashed for the trailer. I don't even remember screaming that the fire was within a few feet of us all. I do remember grabbing up Bill's family, basket and all. I remember unhooking Rufus Veronica, the monkey, and putting him on my shoulder. Then I scooped up Gee Gee's guinea pig" from "the bureau and shoved him into my pocket. It wasn't until I tripped over Gee Gee that I had sense enough to arouse our guests." pp 19-20

Ok, there's some humor there too: all the freeloaders taking advantage of her honeymoon to have their own vacation are 2nd priority to the menagerie of pets who, after all, weren't captives & hadn't done Gypsy Rose Lee any harm. As for her mother? Well, saving her is something that one might think twice about:

"Sometimes it was worse, Mother loves writing letters. She loves it almost as much as she loves steaming open letters other people have written. Unfortunately, Mother's letters are what people call "poison pen."" - p 23

I suspect that that's an expression that's fallen by the wayside of the road to computer progress. What wd it be now? Trolling?

Lee gets into the world of comedians, singers, MCs, & stripping:

"Almost swallowing the microphone, Bob Reed sang a verse and a chorus of the number. Then he announced the girls.

"A tall, thin girl with bony knees was announced as Rio Rita. She paraded around the floor in a Spanish shawl. For a finish she let one side of the shawl drop and showed her bare thigh. It had a black-and-blue-mark on it." - p 72

There's much understatement in this. The reader is left to their own conclusions. My conclusion here is that Rio Rita is either shooting drugs or being beaten.

The Mother is obviously manipulative & deceptive but, as w/ the above, it's often by implication:

""You left this in the ladies' room, dear," Joyce said to Mother.

"She showed Mother a carelessly wrapped package. It was the same package I had seen Mother take from the trailer, the package I missed when we were standing beside the grave.

""Oh," Mother said as she reached for it, "it must have dropped from my bag."

Joyce leaned over and smiled sweetly at Mother.

""Could be," she said coyly. "Only I found it in the bottom of the towel hamper."" - p 78

BUSTED! There's plenty of catty humor:

"The sheriff was too busy rewrapping the gun to get the full benefit of Joyce's attitude. The cerise velvet was cut lower than the blue satin. The contrast of heavily powdered chin against the bluish tinge of her neck was hardly attractive. But then, I might've been prejudiced. I really enjoyed the sheriff's unawareness of the private floor show." - p 80

""Will somebody fix me a bromo?" she yelled from the trailer. "So help me, I think they tried to poison me last night."

"Mamie filled a glass with water, picked up another clean one, and went into the trailer. It was going to take more than one Bromo Seltzer to cure Dimples, I thought. She had made enough the night before at a nickel a drink to retire with a hot dog stand. If she was trying to win the crown from Joyce, it looked like she had it in the bag.

"Her voice rose petulantly from the trailer.

""Dammit all, you don't have to look at me like that. So I got a hangover, so what? Just because you got a hollow leg is no sign I have."" - p 116

I doubt that it's a coincidence that Dimples's earning a percentage by getting men at the strip club to buy her drinks is enough to enable her "to retire with a hot dog stand" given that hot dogs are an obvious metaphor for penises. I want a hot dog for my roll, I want it hot I don't want it cold, It must have lots of mustard.. - Butterbeans & Susie

I'm sure that Gypsy had entirely too much experience evading the manipulative lechery of bosses:

""Maybe you like to work here, too," he said, after the surly waiter put two drinks on the table.

"I took a quick look at Cullucio and another at the waiter. No, I certainly didn't want to work at The Happy Hour. I didn't tell him that, though. I knew Biff had something up his sleeve or he wouldn't have acted as agent for Cliff and Mandy. I had seen Biff in action before. When he felt good and ready, he'd tell me his plans. Until then I was expected to follow through if it killed me.

""I'd love it," I said, "but I have a clause in my contract. No doubling. I mean I'm not allowed to hold down two jobs at once," I added hastily as I saw the bewildered expression on his face. "If you're looking for a stripper, though, I know someone who'd fit the bill."" - pp 83-84

Again, I find hidden meaning: "doubling", in porn lingo, means a woman getting fucked by 2 guys at once. That might fit Lee's quick qualifier to resolve any double meaning. I don't know if that expression was in use in 1942 when this was published but I reckon "Miisionary Position" wd've been:

"I told him about Cullucio offering me a job too. Biff said later that it didn't sound like a job for him; it sounded like a position." - p 88

In general, I find Lee hilarious. It's the type of wit that a person develops as a defense mechanism when they've 'been around'. "Blaster" Al Ackerman is another excellent example of this.

"Finding the stage entrance was easy. We just followed an odor of dishwater, sour floor mops, and slightly spoiled food. The door was between two large garbage cans. It entered into a kitchen. The cook didn't look up as we hurried past him. I was just as pleased. I have seen cooks before, but this one had enough bateria on his apron to wipe out the Japanese army." - pp 98-99

This was written in 1942 during a war called World War II & the Japanese had recently bombed a US miliary base at Pearl Harbor.

"In the main room I noticed that some of the early customers were taking their lives in their hands and eating the Chef's Special, a steak sandwich with limp French fries. On the side, for decorative purposes only, was one leaf of lettuce with a slice of soggy tomato. I couldn't watch the customers eat. Not with that picture of the chef's apron still in my mind." - p 101

Been there, eaten that. More suggestiveness:

"Two tired-looking women stood in the doorway. They both wore enough make-up to face an audience. One of them swung a red patent leather purse, the other sauntered up to the bar. Before she could seat herself, the bartender hurried toward them.

""Gowan, beat it, you bums!" he said loudly.

"The woman with the red purse swore. The words weren't new to me, but she did put a twist on her swearing. If the bartender could do what she suggested, he would have a good vaudeville act." - p 104

A good contortionist vaudeville act, i.e.. For those of you that the above isn't obvious to, the women are prostitutes. It's unlikely that the bartender objected to their profession but he probably strongly objected to the possibility that they might be freelancers.

Mother's feigned innocence wd be funnier if I didn't find fake people so annoying:

""It was hashish, I think, a form of dope," he said wearily. "But you didn't get enough to make . . ."

"Mother thought over the word hashish. I could see her mouth form the pronunciation. Her hands began to tremble and her face turned white, a chalk white.

""You mean I'm a coccon sniffer?" she asked.

"Gee Gee laughed. She should have, because Mother really played the scene well. She was deserving of more than laughter and I told Gee Gee so." - p 163

All in all this was a really fun read. It's republished in this edition by THE FEMINIST PRESS of the City University of New York. I get that. I've known strippers who were feminists. Stripping pays better than many entry-level jobs for women. Nonetheless, having been around the world of strip clubs & peep shows I wdn't really recommend it as a career choice. It's got some built-in degradation factors that just ain't worth the do-re-mi.

If Lee had written more than 2 mysteries she'd stand a good chance of entering my pantheon of great crime fiction writers. I'll definitely read the 1st one if I can find it cheap. I wish she'd written much more. I wonder if there's a compilation of her magazine writing. Feminist Press? show less

Mystery element is pretty feeble but first person narrator is engaging and backstage details a glimpse into a vanished world. Saraband edition has about forty pages of commentary, plus GRL’s correspondence with her editor, which add interesting context to the book.

While living with W. H. Auden, George Davis, Carson McCullers and a mixed bag of other literary types in an old house in Brooklyn, the burlesque crossover star Gypsy Rose Lee threw herself into writing a murder mystery.

The result is great fun: the mystery is satisfactorily complex, the writing capable. However, the real joy comes from two things: the setting, which is the seedy Burlesque theatres of the thirties, and the language, a powerful cocktail of burlesque slang.

Lee drew on her own show more experience for the characters and situations; her tough girls are honestly and sympathetically portrayed, and the love interest was based on her ex-husband (an extraordinary thing for someone to do; I seem to recall that he was a lousy ex-husband, not a beloved, pined-after type).

This is an indispensable account for someone with an interest in burlesque, and a great read. As I went through it, I kept thinking what a shame it was that it was never made into a movie - I kept hearing the voice of Barbara Stanwyck for Gypsy's lines (possibly prompted by her performance as a night club singer in "Ball of Fire"). Imagine my delight when I found that, back in 1943, someone had gratified my desire; I would like to thank whatever time-travelling genius went back and cast Ms. Stanwyck for me. Hayes office interference or not, I'm eagerly looking forward to seeing it! show less