![]() Was she exploited after that? I don’t think so. It took Gypsy a long time to finally break away and build the creation she named Gypsy Rose Lee. I think her mother convinced Gypsy at a very early age that she couldn’t really trust anyone but her mother. She literally killed to get her daughters on stage. She threatened to blackmail Gypsy for every secret thing she’d done to make it big. ![]() She fed them on $1 a day, while she carried $3,000 in a bag around her waist. In order for Gypsy to have created Gypsy Rose Lee, she had to survive her mother, who turned her and June against each other at a very young age. Do you think Louise was in total control of what she was doing? Or was she in some way exploited too?Ībbott: She was most definitely exploited - first and foremost by her mother. Hinzen: You describe Gypsy Rose Lee, the stripper, as being very much the imaginative creation of Louise Hovick. I met up with June Havoc and talked with Gypsy’s son, and I spent a lot of time at the New York Public Library. Who could make taking off a glove so riveting? So I started researching. He said Gypsy took a full 15 minutes to peel off a single glove and that she was so damn good at it, he gladly would have given her 15 more, which I thought was remarkable. She used to tell me stories about growing up during the Great Depression and once told me about a cousin who went to see Gypsy Rose Lee perform in 1935. ![]() Gypsy would have just turned 100 years old last Saturday, and my grandmother is only a few years younger. Parul Kapur Hinzen: What got you interested in the life of Gypsy Rose Lee? Below is an edited excerpt from our conversation about the Hovick women, around whom “American Rose” turns: the legendary Gypsy Rose Lee (born Louise Hovick), her younger sister June Havoc and their domineering stage mother Rose, who launched them on the vaudeville circuit before they were old enough for kindergarten. By day she wrote her acclaimed first book, “Sin in the Second City,” about two madams who ran a high-class Chicago brothel at the turn of the century.Ībbott’s fascination with bad girls continues. She recalls sitting on her front porch at night and watching hookers ply their trade along Piedmont Avenue in Midtown. I spoke with Abbott by telephone in advance of her upcoming visit to Atlanta, where she lived from 2001 to 2007 and still owns a house. But the world she belonged to, an America losing its Old World mores in the Roaring Twenties and coming unhinged by its first sexual revolution, is a fascinating piece of history to contemplate. How the whole of Gypsy actually fits together seems to remain just beyond the author’s grasp. We come to know all these intriguing and repellent facts about Lee, but Abbott keeps shifting her focus, yanking the story back and forth between her youth and stardom, turning bits of Lee’s glittering personality around like shards of glass in a kaleidoscope. She was a stripper with a razor-sharp brain, a writer who hobnobbed with New York literati but also enjoyed parties where acts of copulation took center stage, a performer who sedated herself with alcohol and was rumored to let her pet monkey play with her privates, yet diligently typed away at a novel backstage in her corset. While she dispels many of the myths that Lee perpetuated about herself, including the false history of being a child star - that was actually her precocious baby sister June, to whom she played second fiddle for years - Abbott is less adept at getting under the skin of the adult Gypsy, a formidable bundle of contradictions. Karen Abbott displays tremendous skill in bringing to life the scrappy milieu of vaudeville - “cheap entertainment for immigrants” - and burlesque through which Gypsy Rose Lee progressed. Tickets are $28 including a signed copy of “American Rose” or $15 without the book. Tuesday, January 18, at the Ballroom Lounge, Highland Inn, 644 North Highland Avenue, Atlanta. Random House, 422 pages.Īuthor appearance: Karen Abbott will celebrate the publication of “American Rose” at the Ballroom Book Bash, featuring jazz singer Bernadette Seacrest & Her Provocateurs, at 7 p.m. “American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare - The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee”īy Karen Abbott.
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