LEST WE FORGET GYPSY ROSE LEE
(January 8, 1911 - April 26, 1970)

SING OUT LOUISE! Without her and her mother, GYPSY, the musical, would never have been born.

She was born Rose Louise Hovick; her birthplace was somewhere on the West Coast. When her famous Mama Rose Hovick divorced her father, she and her younger sister Ellen June (who became June Havoc) began to live with their grandparents in Seattle. Music and dance lessons upstaged a formal education. The sisters made their stage debut at a local Knights of Pythias lodge (their grandfather was a member) and the act was so well-received that their mother was encouraged to arrange bookings in other lodges in the area.

In 1922 they were on the Pantages vaudeville circuit, billed as Baby June and Her Pals. Within two years the act included six boys and various animals and became Dainty June and Her Newsboy Songsters.  Booked onto the prestigious Orpheum circuit  her sister Baby June, a talented dancer known as the "pint-sized Pavlova" was the STAR!  Next to June, Rose Louise looked overweight, but she was good-natured and sang "I'm a hard-boiled Rose," dressed in boys clothes.
      When June eloped with one of the newsboys, Mama Rose restructured the act starring Rose Louise  called Rose Louise and Her Hollywood Blondes.
     By 1929 with the fade out of vaudeville and the emergence of talking pictures, the Hovick company were without funds.  So, always a survivor, Mama booked the troupe into a burlesque house and  the newly named Gypsy Rose Lee performed her first solo strip at the age of fifteen.

Embarrassed by her height, general lack of grace and low self-esteem, she would end her act demurely, wrapping the curtain around herself. (The business with the curtain plus the tossing of a rose attached to a garter into the audience would become her trademark.)
     By 1931 she was a star, headlining at Minsky's burlesque house in New York and in 1936 she had starred in the Ziegfeld Follies.
She used her height to advantage, developing an imposing carriage and her costumes were expensive creations, which could be shed with a minimum of vulgarity.  Bernard Sobel in his A Pictorial History of Burlesque compliments Gypsy (and Ann Corio) for making "undressing a ceremony with a special technique and nomenclature. The number itself was a combination of posing, strutting, dancing and singing punctuated from time to time by thrusts and twists of the abdomen called "bumps" and "grinds."
He goes on: " The various steps were known in succession as the "flash" or entrance, the "parade" or the march across the stage in full costume; the "tease," or increasing removal of wearing apparel while the audience, lusting for bed and body, shouted "Take 'em off. More. More"; and the climactic strip  or denuding down to the G-string, followed by a speedy retreat into the obscuring draperies before the police could move in."

While reveling in her stardom, she never tried to conceal the fact that her education had been haphazard. She had a lively, inquiring mind and while touring the country in her vaudeville days became an avid reader.  The thought of a stripper who could discuss philosophy and literature delighted members of the intelligentsia both here and abroad.  Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart paid homage to this paradox in their classic
musical number "Zip!" in Pal Joey (1940).

Hollywood offered her a contract. Eager though she was to star in pictures, appropriate vehicles were difficult to find. She made five films in two years, none of which were successful.
     She appeared in The Streets of Paris at the New York World's Fair in 1940.  Two years later, she enjoyed her biggest stage success in Star and Garter.
     The publication of her first book, a mystery titled
The G-String Murders in 1941 became a best seller. She also wrote Mother Finds a Body in 1942 and her play
The Naked Genius enjoyed a brief popular run for a month before it was closed by its producer Mike Todd. She was able to sell the film rights to Twentieth Century-Fox while the play was still in rehearsal.

She made few successful films which included Stage Door Canteen and
Belle of the Yukon.  Although the heyday of burlesque was ending, she could still draw huge crowds in burlesque houses and night clubs.

She continued to write articles published in magazines such as The New Yorker and Collier's but her most successful literary effort was the publication of
Gypsy: A Memoir (1957), written with great warmth and humor, about backstage life on both the vaudeville and burlesque circuits.

In Stage Door Canteen

Producers David Merrick and Leland Hayward bought the rights and commissioned Jule Styne, Stephen Sondheim, and Arthur Laurents to do the music, lyrics, and book. The result was Gypsy (1959) one of the best of the 1950s musicals which starred Ethel Merman as Rose Hovick.

June Havoc, her talented sister, was interviewed in the Grill at
The Players several years ago.  When asked about her sister she said,"Gypsy was magnificent. She was such a startling presence. Enormous wit. Brilliant with quick come-backs and very stylish, very elegant, very different, but she did it the hard way.
She was out there stark naked, bumping and grinding along with the rest of the babes in the beginning until she decided she wasn't going to do that.  It was her intelligence and I know how much it cost her.

In 1937 very glamorous

The image she created which was a wonderful, fabulous thing for the rest of the world, wasn't the image she wanted but the image overtook her.  She couldn't crack it, she couldn't get out of it and she couldn't change it.  It was part of her."

Though she retired from burlesque runways in the 1950s, she continued to be active professionally in several cameo screen appearances, guest stars in TV series, and as the hostess of her own syndicated talk show. Her down-to-earth outlook, warmth, and personality won new admirers.  She also had a long history of involvement in liberal causes. Like Picasso,  she supported the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War, a stand that earned her a subpoena from Martin Dies's notorious congressional committee. It was rescinded and she did not have to appear.

The author in a full length portrait

While her sister did not like the way she was portrayed in Gypsy, she was eventually persuaded (and paid) not to oppose it for her sister's sake. The play and subsequent movie deal (which starred Natalie Wood and Rosalind Russell) assured her a steady income.

Her death from lung cancer in 1970 robbed the American entertainment scene of one of its true originals.  While it is easy to dismiss her simply as a successful stripper, she was much more. Like Mae West, she was one of the first women to be able to make people aware that an appreciation of sex and of the human body was both healthful and good.

According to June, visibly moved,  "Cancer. It was pathetic and very horrible, that she should have gone in her fifties like that. And I always thought that was a costly thing. She was so famous and so loved and so funny and so wonderful and so in agony and dying when she shouldn't have."

Gypsy and June in 1964 (NYC)

Samples of her wit and warmth-----

"It's not what you do. It's the way you do it-stripping or writing, or talking..or just breathing. Do it with an air, and never admit you're scared."

"Men aren't attracted to me by my mind.  They're attracted by what I don't mind."

"I used to come home at night full of inspiration, and sit up with a bottle of scotch.  As I wrote, the words seemed wonderful, just too wonderful to be coming from me. Next morning I always found they were terrible and I could never use anything I wrote."

"She's descended from a long line her mother listened to."

"God is love, but get it in writing."


Resources:   Wikipedia, Biography of Gypsy Rose Lee
Sobel, Bernard,  A Pictorial History of Burlesque. 1956
Notable Women in the American Theatre. 1989  William Lindesmith
Unpublished transcript of Interview with June Havoc tape recorded by Mari Lyn Henry