the stripper gypsy rose lee--1/31/25

31 Jan 2025

the stripper gypsy rose lee--1/31/25

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Today's selection--from Gypsy by Gypsy Rose Lee. Gypsy Rose Lee (1911-1970) was a vaudeville dancer and burlesque entertainer who became famous for her striptease act. From the time she was very young, her mother drove both her and her younger sister June into seemingly never-ending performances on the vaudeville circuit in a desperate search for fame and money. Despite her eventual fame, their lives were marked by poverty, arrests, and other hardships:

“Our apartment at the Henry Court in New York was one of the cheaper ones, with no outside windows. There was ventilation of a sort from the windows facing the court, but no daylight. We had to burn electricity all day, and it was very expensive. There was a meter on the wall in the sitting room and it seemed we were always putting quarters in it. We could tell when the quarter was almost used up because the lights would dim for an instant before they went out completely.

“One of the advantages of the apartment was that June could play outside on the street. There were many children living on the block and June made friends with them. The oldest of her friends was twelve, and a rather snively twelve at that. I was fourteen and thought of myself as a bit above the children in the neighborhood. None of them collected stamps the way I did, and they had never heard of the books I read. My vocabulary was better than theirs, too. They didn't like me any better than I liked them. Sometimes when I would be sitting on the brownstone steps in front of our apartment house, they would race by me screaming, ‘Stuck up, stuck up, she's covered with mud and she's stuck up.’

Gypsy Rose Lee in Los Angeles, c. 1937

“‘I am not!’ I'd yell, and taking off after them I'd chase them up the block. I didn't wear boy's clothes or knickers any more, I wore pleated skirts, but I could still run fast in a skirt.

“June said it was my own fault that the kids didn't like me. ‘You snoot them,’ she said. ‘Nobody likes to be snooted and you do it all the time. You even snoot me.’

“‘I don't care if they like me or not,’ I said, which wasn't exactly true; even snively twelve-year-olds are better than no one at all. 'They're gauche, that's what they are. And you're gauche, too, or you wouldn't play with them.’

“June ran screaming into the apartment, ‘Mother, Mother,’ she yelled. ‘Louise just called me a dirty name!’

“I had to show Mother the word gauche in the dictionary before she'd believe me. ‘It isn't a dirty name,’ I said. ‘It means ill bred and that's what June is and you have to admit it.’

“‘'I'll admit nothing of the kind,’ Mother said. ‘She's as well bred as you are. You're both well-brought-up young ladies, and if I hear you call your sister a name like that again, so help me, I'll take every one of your books and burn them.’

“Mother cooked for us in the apartment. There was a dark kitchen back of the sitting room and every time we turned on the kitchen light the cockroaches would scurry across the floor to their hiding places. ‘How [their friend] F. E. would love this kitchen,’ Mother used to say. ‘She'd think it was a gold mine.’

“We hadn't seen F. E. since the attempted robbery months before, but we thought of her a lot. Not just when we saw the cockroaches, but when we saw a building being demolished, or when we passed the Roxy Theatre. ‘What a misdirected life,’ Mother would say on these occasions. ‘Why, with her personality she could have been another Aimee Semple McPherson.’

“There was always enough to eat; Mother saw to that. We ate beans, stew, cabbage, all wholesome food, Mother said, and plenty of it. ‘The Maynards don't eat any better than we do,’ she would add. ‘And we can be thankful that we don't owe a penny to a living soul.’

“Perhaps if we had known anyone with money we might have borrowed it, but most of the acts we knew were as broke as we were. Then when the money bag was flat, the diamonds were in hock and the rent was past due, the telephone would ring and we'd be offered a date in Greenpoint, or three days in Utica. During the frenzy of packing the costumes and telephoning the boys Mother would stop, a grateful smile on her face. ‘God's watching out for us,’ she would say. ‘I knew He wouldn't let a little act like ours lay off.’