American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee [Hardcover]

Karen Abbott (Author)

Book Description

Release date: December 28, 2010

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

With the critically acclaimed Sin in the Second City, bestselling author Karen Abbott “pioneered sizzle history” (USA Today). Now she returns with the gripping and expansive story of America’s coming-of-age—told through the extraordinary life of Gypsy Rose Lee and the world she survived and conquered.

America in the Roaring Twenties. Vaudeville was king. Talking pictures were only a distant flicker. Speakeasies beckoned beyond dimly lit doorways; money flowed fast and free. But then, almost overnight, the Great Depression leveled everything. When the dust settled, Americans were primed for a star who could distract them from grim reality and excite them in new, unexpected ways. Enter Gypsy Rose Lee, a strutting, bawdy, erudite stripper who possessed a preternatural gift for delivering exactly what America needed.

With her superb narrative skills and eye for compelling detail, Karen Abbott brings to vivid life an era of ambition, glamour, struggle, and survival. Using exclusive interviews and never-before-published material, she vividly delves into Gypsy’s world, including her intensely dramatic triangle relationship with her sister, actress June Havoc, and their formidable mother, Rose, a petite but ferocious woman who seduced men and women alike and literally killed to get her daughters on the stage.

American Rose chronicles their story, as well as the story of the four scrappy and savvy showbiz brothers from New York City who would pave the way for Gypsy Rose Lee’s brand of burlesque. Modeling their shows after the glitzy, daring reviews staged in the theaters of Paris, the Minsky brothers relied on grit, determination, and a few tricks that fell just outside the law—and they would shape, and ultimately transform, the landscape of American entertainment.

With a supporting cast of such Jazz- and Depression-era heavyweights as Lucky Luciano, Harry Houdini, FDR, and Fanny Brice, Karen Abbott weaves a rich narrative of a woman who defied all odds to become a legend—and whose sensational tale of tragedy and triumph embodies the American Dream.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A Letter from Author Karen Abbott

My grandmother used to tell me stories about growing up during the Great Depression, and she once related a tale about a cousin who saw Gypsy Rose Lee perform in 1935. “She took a full fifteen minutes to peel off a single glove,” the cousin said, “and she was so damned good at it I would’ve gladly given her fifteen more.” This story got me thinking: who was Gypsy Rose Lee? And how did an awkward girl named Louise Hovick become her? I spent three years researching the answer, research that included connecting with Gypsy’s late sister, the actress June Havoc; I was the last person to interview her.

When I arrived at June’s Connecticut farm I found her lying in bed, her hair done up in pert white pigtails. She was ninety-four years old, give or take, and the legs that once danced on stages across the country were now motionless, two nearly imperceptible bumps tucked beneath crisp white sheets. Her eyes were a bold shade of blue and painfully sensitive to light. She told me the musical Gypsy distorted her childhood so thoroughly it was as if “I didn’t own me anymore.” She realized her sister was “screwing me out in public,” and that, in the end, there was no stopping either Gypsy or Gypsy; the play was both her sister’s monument and her best chance for monumental revisionism.

It took another visit for June to share more personal memories: money was Gypsy’s “god,” and she would do anything to anybody, including June, to make more of it. Gypsy did in fact do things, not only to June but also to herself—“terrible” and “awful” and “shocking” things, things beneath her sister’s formidable intellect and keen wit, things that made June believe, to that day, that love (even love fraught with competition and jealousy) never existed between them at all.

I asked and listened, for as much time as June gave me. I asked until her patience wore thin and her eyes watered with the effort to stay open.

“I hope I didn’t upset you today,” I whispered. “That’s not my intention.”

“I know,” June said. Those startling eyes found their focus, settling on mine. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be more open about some things… I’m still ashamed for her. I wish they hadn’t happened.”

“Would Gypsy wish the same?” I asked.

“She had no shame.”

A pause, and I said, feebly, “You were a good sister to her.”

A hand tunneled out from the sheet. She coiled long, blade-thin fingers around my wrist.

“I was no sister,” June said. “I was a knot in her life. I was nothing.”

She retracted her hand, gave her eyes permission to close. I kissed her cheek and crept out the bedroom door. I was grateful she let me inside—even on the periphery, even briefly¬—and I suspected she was saving her own questions for the day she reunited with the sister she did profess to love, the one she still called Louise.

Review

Praise for American Rose:

"Abbott creates a brainy striptease similar to the one her subject may have performed: uncovering doozies in one chapter about Lee's outrageous life, followed in the next by the less salacious (but always captivating) details about how New York City's Minsky brothers, who played a crucial role in Lee's stardom, built their burlesque empire." —Newsday

"At its core, American Rose is a haunting portrait of a woman 'giving what she has to, keeping all she can,' offering her audiences a sassy, confident self while making sure they would never know the damaged soul who created her." —The Los Angeles Times

"American Rose is the rare biography that captures the imagination and doesn't let go. It would scare the bejeesus out of Gypsy Rose Lee, and it's guaranteed to enthrall readers." —Book Page

"[Abbott's] portrait of the famed stripper is both darker and more inspiring than the famed stripper's version of her life as filtered by Broadway or Hollywood." —Atlanta Journal-Constitution


Praise for Karen Abbott’s Sin in the Second City
 
“A delicious history . . . a lush love letter to the underworld . . . [Abbott] describes the Levee’s characters in such detail that it’s easy to mistake this meticulously researched history for literary fiction.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“[Abbott’s] research enables the kind of vivid description à la fellow journalist Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City that makes what could be a dry historic account an intriguing read.”—The Seattle Times
 
“[A] satisfyingly lurid tale . . . Change the hemlines, add 100 years, and the book could be filed under current affairs.”—USA Today
 
“Assiduously researched . . . Even this book’s minutiae . . . make for good storytelling.”—The New York Times

“A colorful history of old Chicago that reads like a novel.”—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
 
“Lavish . . . an immensely readable book.”—The Wall Street Journal

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1st edition (December 28, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 978140006691
• ISBN-13: 978-1400066919
• ASIN: 1400066913
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1.3 x 9.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (164 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #126,305 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

78 of 84 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Exceptional; the story could not be better told -- disturbing, sad and compelling December 16, 2010

By Peter G. Keen VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

There are so many excellent and thoughtful Amazon reviews of this book that there is little to add. I will just make some comments on the writing and structure - the Eng Lit major stuff. This is a truly first-rate and very disturbing work, very skillfully modulated. It's a horror story of about as psychotic a mother as could be and the devastation she created in her abuse and exploitation of her children. The known murders she committed seem just part of her detachment from anything or anyone outside her anger, viciousness, ambition and just sheer perversion. As a tale of showbiz, poverty and struggle, the tragic triangle of Rose, June and Gypsy is compelling. It's far more, though, the tale of how Gypsy built her invented self and turned her prodigious talent from just getting by to a public persona that was glamorous but fragile; she never escaped the binds of her mother or worked through the fractured relationships with her sister, the child star of the family. The story of her life is complex and enriched by the context of New York post-World War I, vaudeville and burlesque, and the ever-existing links between way out showbiz personalities, crime bosses, and hustlers.

What makes the book work as well as it does is the very fine line Ms Abbott treads in her exposition - stray just a little and it would lose credibility and impact. It doesn't glamorize or trivialize the world of vaudeville. The figures that are usually made larger-than-life or caricatures come across as real - the (in)famous Minsky brothers, Mayor Jimmy Walker, Fanny Brice, Mike Todd, Otto Preminger and many others. The backdrop setting gives body to the struggles, fights, deals and machinations that surrounded mama Rose and makes Gypsy's work and life come alive, to the extent that, as other Amazon reviews note, you really wish at an emotional level that somehow she and June could have had a chance and that the almost inexorable damage, physical as well as mental, could have been ended. The consequences of the damage dominate her later years where the egocentric courage, disguises and ambition become more and more amoral and almost indifferent.

It takes a superior writer to make all this balanced, convincing, vivid and fair in presentation and judgment. Ms Abbott never lets the writing get in the way of the story. It is this that gives the story its resonance. She avoids psychoanalytic guesswork - much of Gypsy and just about all of Rose is beyond understanding. It avoids the sensational, moralistic judgments or efforts to push some very good stories too far. The book has no melodramatic flourishes about a life and society of melodrama. It's very restrained but at the same time empathic - a masterly balancing of tone and content. The narrative technique of moving between her early life, (relative) old age and days of public glory is initially a little disorienting but seems to me to have been a good choice. Gipsy's life is very much a jigsaw of pieces and a linear biography would not have captured the complexity of her many selves. The writing is unobtrusive, with deft sketches and clarity of presentation and pacing. There are some striking phrases that are quite haunting. One I recall talks of how Rose has so much control over Gypsy since she knew too much about the mechanics of her self-creation - "where all the damaged parts were stashed, the lovely lies they invented together to fill in the gaps."

I think this is a book that will stay with me. I found it disturbing and very sad. Poor child - how could she ever have become whole?

48 of 55 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Fine and Gripping Read! November 10, 2010

By hasselaar VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

A fascinating book about a stage and screen enigma of the past. Gypsy Rose Lee was an early vaudeville, stage and screen star about which little truth has been written ( not even by Gypsy herself.). At last, this book provides a more in depth and factual account of the well-concealed life of a legend. Gypsy Rose (or - Louise) was born into quite a strange family of extremely odd women who managed to quite promptly evict most men from their lives. As a girl, she and her sister (the actress- June Havoc) were taken on the road by their mother and used to satisfy her cravings for attention and publicity. Lingering memories of sexual abuse, extreme physical abuse (by the mother) and constant exposure to a life that no child should have experienced, produced 2 very unique women. Rose became a striper, although considered to be the lesser talent of the 2 sisters, probably to finally gain the attention that her younger sister, the child star, had stolen from her. The other sister, June, was a child star who turned into a movie actress of lesser caliber.

That the 2 girls even survived their upbringing is a miracle, that they survived their mother, is even more of one. With a mother who seems to have committed 3 murders, while in a furious rage, which possessed her throughout her life - the girls had little hope of ever leading a normal life. Rose grew-up obsessed by money,celebrity and fame, June seems to have grown-up angry and jealous of her older sister. Everyone in the family treated each other horribly, but the 2 girls did survive to become stars.

The book can be quite intense at times, life on the road was hardly the life for growing girls. But the descriptions of vaudeville and stage life from the turn of the last century are quite well-described by the author and are extremely interesting. This book should be read as a history of women's rights in the show biz world, a mini-history of vaudeville and a fascinating biography of a legend: Gypsy Rose Lee.

Life was hard for women and children in the early years of the last century and this book offers ample demonstration of that fact. Even for one not interested in June Havoc or Gypsy, the read is quite educational for those wishing to learn more of the beginning years of stage and screen. I recommend this book highly, you will not be able to put it down.

47 of 54 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars not Rosalind Russell and Natalie Wood November 10, 2010

By Patricia R. Andersen VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

I knew very little about Gypsy Rose Lee before I read this book. I knew she had a talk show in the mid 1960's which I remember seeing, that the musical "Gypsy" was based on her life and that Rosalind Russell played "Mama Rose" and Natalie Wood played "Gypsy". I also knew at one time she had been a stripper because that's what it had in the musical.
I knew Rose Havock (June Havoc's and Gypsy's mom) was a stage mother. I even showed the musical to my sons so they'd realized I wasn't such a horrible mother. But I never knew to what extent "Mama Rose" was a stage mother or how truly twisted she was.
Karen Abbott has written an absolutely fascinating book about the times of burlesque and the depression. She alternates Gypsy's life story with the story of the Minsky brothers, giving details about the economic as well as the moral pulse of society. I found it very difficult to put the book down.
I was stunned at what Gypsy and June went through. What kind of mother names her second daughter the same as the first, already presuming the first, living daughter is a failure? What kind of mother would twist her children's minds by saying the dog died just to get a child to cry on command? And what kind of grandmother would hand her 5 year old grandson a real gun? Rose Havock, that's who. And that's probably one of the nicest things you can say about her.
I was also impressed by the way M's Abbott portrayed the sibling relationship between Gypsy and June. M's Abbott seemed to hit the sibling relationship right on the head between sisters. Her portrayal of Gypsy as an older sister (because she was) is touching but chilling to the bone.
I recommend this book highly to anyone interested in a good biography or anyone interested in thet time period in American history. You won't be able to put it down, it's that good.