gypsy rose lee -- 3/28/25

28 Mar 2025

gypsy rose lee -- 3/28/25

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Today's selection -- from Gypsy by Gypsy Rose Lee. In the mid-twentieth century, the striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee became a sensation in American entertainment:

The Follies ran longer than Eddy thought it would. We opened at the Winter Garden in September and twelve weeks later were still playing to packed houses. The critics agreed that we were a hit, but the follow-up reviews were even better for me. I had been featured in thirty-seven magazine articles, including a picture in the first issue of a new magazine called Life. Walter Winchell had mentioned me forty-one times, Louis Sobel eighteen. Ninety-seven press photos of me had appeared in the New York papers, and seventeen cartoons. I had been elected Queen of Columbia College by the senior students; had starred in the Beaux Arts Ball, where I appeared in a few gold spangles, as the eclipse of the sun; and had been held up and robbed of almost all my jewelry. As Mother said, everything nice that could happen to a girl on her way up had happened to me.

“Not all of my publicity had been complimentary. In fact some of it was most unflattering, but there was a lot of it and, to me, that was what counted. Ed Sullivan, giving me two-thirds of his column wrote: ‘Next to Wallis Simpson ... Gypsy Rose Lee emerged this season as the most successful space grabber of all ... the tall, well upholstered Miss Lee, was graduated from Burlesque to the Follies ... the point of origin is not to be held against her because Jim Barton, Jay C. Flippen, Willie Howard, Bert Lahr and Fannie Brice came out of the Burlesque incubator. It is beside the point that Miss Lee lacks the talent of this distinguished group of alumni ... it is beside the point that Mother Nature did not bequeath her a streamlined chassis to compare with the smoothly contoured torsos of the Follies chorines who parade behind her. Lacking all these things, she compensates for their lack with a divine talent for keeping her name in print, and at the box office that passes for talent. How does Miss Lee operate? I am not privileged to take you behind the scenes with this distinguished strip-tease artist but I can reveal her technique for prodding paragraphs. Not long ago, a Broadway columnist, a contemporary, attended the Follies and sat in row “A” ... to the other performers he was just another customer, in on the cuff ... but Gypsy Rose Lee was more alert ... she sent a note out to him, a shy little missive in which she related that the presence of the great big mans was so thrilling that she couldn't give a performance of artistic integrity. The great big mans was thrilled, too. ... Since then she has been mentioned daily in his columns two and three times.’

“The Daily Worker panned me and burlesque as well. Strip tease, they wrote in an editorial, is a capitalistic cancer, a product of the profit system. Girls who tum away from street walking, they added, took up strip teasing.

“Good or bad, everything went into my scrapbooks. I had five now, and was working on the sixth. I didn't get all the publicity on my own. Joe Flynn, the press agent for the Follies, was a past master at getting space. It was Joe who, a few seasons before, had a girl, wearing nothing but a long blond wig, ride a white horse down Broadway. We were both sorry he had already used the stunt. It would have been perfect for me.

“Minskys' press agent, Mike Goldryer, helped a lot too. He broke the front pages of every paper in the country with his story about the foreign invasion of strip teasers, and how they were taking jobs from the more deserving American girls. ‘Strip teasing,’ he had Minsky say, ‘is pure American art. It is an infant industry, and we must protect our rights.’

“Representative Sam Dickstein, a Democrat, from New York, brought the issue before the House, and that night the newspaper headlines read: ‘Congress Learns of Gypsy's Art’ and ‘Congressional Hearing Halted for Reverie at Mention of Gypsy Rose Lee.’ The stories were accompanied by pictures of me snapping . my garter. Heywood Broun, in his column on the subject, wrote: ‘Gypsy stands in no need of protection. In free and fair competition she can meet all competitors from all alien lands and hold her own ....

Josephine Baker in her "girdle of bananas" outfit, first seen in the Folies Bergère show La Folie du Jour in 1926–27

“Other strip teasers, spurred on by their press agents, helped fill my scrapbooks. June St. Clair, for instance, complained to the Associated Press that I was a fraud. ‘Gypsy's work isn't art,’ she was quoted as saying. ‘She's fooling the public. Why, she doesn't even strip!’

“Margie Hart managed to be heard. ‘Unlike Gypsy Rose Lee,’ she wrote Ed Sullivan ( who evidently appreciated a shy missive himself, when it was sent to him), ‘I do not read Tennyson, and Einstein's theory of relativity leaves me cold .... I owe whatever success I enjoy to reading the Police Gazette and Broadway columns, but I find pictures easier to understand ....’

“‘She would,’ I replied in print, via the United Press.

“Mike Goldryer hit the front pages again with a scheme to have the Minskys present me with a degree, ‘Doctor of Strip Teasing.’ Six professors from New York University were cajoled into taking part in the ceremony, which was to be held after the show one night at the Oriental, Minskys' new theatre. Ten strip teasers, wearing transparent gowns and caps, were to be awarded lesser degrees. Bernard Sobel, author of Burleycue, and keeper of the burlesque archives, was master of ceremonies. After ten minutes of speeches, the proceedings were interrupted by a raucous voice from the balcony, demanding that they bring on the dames. The six professors squirmed uneasily on their chairs, and Reginald Marsh, the artist, went up to the lectern. ‘The strip tease,’ he said, ‘is classical, it is eternal, it is—’

“‘Get the hell off!’ another voice from the balcony yelled. Mr. Marsh obliged, and, as the pop bottles began rolling down the aisles, the graduating class tripped on stage, but I refused to budge.

“‘It was to be a dignified ceremony,’ I insisted, holding my ground in the wings. ‘This is a clambake and I'll have no part of it.’ Wrapping myself in my mink, I stalked out through the stage door.

“The next day I was embarrassed to learn that Gertrude Lawrence, with a true show-must-go-on attitude had accepted in absentia. She gave it to me reluctantly, a few days later. ‘ I should like to have taken it back to England,’ she said. ‘They thought me such a success.’

“All these stories helped, but the jewel robbery was what I called the coup de grace. The police never did catch the hold-up men, and for months, when anyone else was robbed, mine was the name that grabbed the headlines. The value of my jewelry grew with each new robbery, and I became so used to the upped value that when my insurance check arrived from Lloyd's of London I felt as though I'd been cheated. The insurance money went to pay the mortgage on the country house. As Mother said, I no longer needed diamonds. The jewelry had served its purpose. Besides, I had begun to notice that glitter didn't necessarily mean chic.

“When my publicity quieted down I made a few weII-timed entrances into the Stork Club, or was seen dancing in a Charles James gown at the Mayfair or lunching in a Schiaparelli at the Colony. .

“Joe Flynn saw to it that Adele Moon, my maid, was offered a job, which she promptly refused, at sixty dollars a week to do a strip tease in a Harlem theatre. (After fifteen years with Fanny Brice, Adele was wise to publicity stunts.) Julie Bryan, my understudy in the Follies (less experienced than the maid), went to work as featured strip teaser for the Minskys. I made a screen test for Darryl Zanuck and took up ballet for one day while the photographers took pictures to prove it.

“The city, during all this, had broken out in a rash of Gypsy Rose Lees. Uptown there was a sepia Gypsy Rose Lee. Downtown there was burlesque's Gypsy Rose Lee, billed as younger and prettier. The Young Communist League advertised one of their entertainers as ‘Our Very Own Gypsy Rose Lee.’ A female impersonator, wearing a brassiere filled with birdseed to give it a lifelike movement, billed himself as the Brazilian Gypsy Rose Lee. Hubert's Museum, on Forty-second Street, featured a ‘Gypsy Rose Flea.’

“The old Mae West jokes were dragged out and dusted off and attributed to me. There were rumors about that I was illegitimate, a dope fiend, a Lesbian. It was all very gratifying and I did my best to keep the ball rolling.”