Gypsy: The Art of the Tease by Shteir Rachel

Author:Shteir, Rachel [Shteir, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 0300120400
Published: 2012-09-02T20:12:17+00:00

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

bankrolled it, the red, white, and blue café, located at the corner of Clark and Lawrence Streets, featured vaudeville shows, sat 3,700, and employed 190 waitresses, 100 entertainers, 2 dance bands, and 25 bartenders who manned a 400-foot-long balcony bar. Todd served dinners for 75 cents and a champagne cocktail for a quarter, although he banned dice games and “B-girl” hostesses. Gypsy described stripping there as a family event: “I’d be out there doing the number and the kids were swinging back and forth on the railing.”

While Gypsy was pleasing the family crowd, the culture was hardening against striptease. Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s Pal Joey, which opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York, illustrated how sympathy shifted from Gypsy. Written by John O’Hara, the work, originally published as a short story in the New Yorker, became the musical that kept Gypsy in the public eye. But it also showed how Americans were coming to see

striptease as a gimmick. The casting was also a Hovick family affair. June played Gladys Bumps, the corrupt chorus girl. According to June, Rose called on the producer, George Abbott, accompanied by, as the younger daughter wrote, “a les.” Rose wept and complained of hunger, deprivation, and daughterly abandonment.

Besides offering a stage for the Hovick women to play out the roles they had constructed offstage, Pal Joey presented the strip-117

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

tease intellectual as a hoax. Rodgers and Hart give Gypsy’s number to the journalist Melba Snyder, to sing in the number “Zip,” just after Joey, the sleazy emcee, has told his own series of whoppers about his wealthy past. Melba doesn’t take off anything. (No one does in the musical.) Instead, she responds to Joey’s chicanery with a tale about the “funniest” person she has interviewed—

Gypsy Rose Lee, whose striptease is a gimmick. The point of the pissing contest: Striptease is a less vile con than the others occurring onstage right in front of her.

Zip! Walter Lippman wasn’t brilliant today.

Zip! Will Saroyan ever write a great play?

Zip! I was reading Schopenhauer last night.

Zip! And I think that Schopenhauer was right.

I don’t want to see Zorina,

I don’t want to meet Cobina.

Zip! I’m an intellectual.

I don’t like a deep contralto,

Or a man whose voice is alto.

Zip! I’m a heterosexual.

Zip! It took intellect to master my art.

Zip! Who the hell is Margie Hart?

“Can you draw sweet water from a foul well?” Brooks Atkin-

son famously asked about Pal Joey. You could ask the same question about Gypsy. When American Mercury, the magazine founded 118

The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual

by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, named Gypsy “The

Striptease Intellectual” in a feature article, this new moniker evoked a version of that question: was the phrase an oxymoron or did it expose a rags-to-riches truth?

Gypsy either ignored these debates or exploited them. To show support for the troops she wore a net bodysuit spangled with stars, or a Merry Widow with stars sewn in the bra.

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