吉普赛·罗斯·李

Gypsy Rose Lee (born Rose Louise Hovick, January 8, 1911 – April 26, 1970) was an American burlesque entertainer, stripper, actress, author, playwright and vedette, famous for her striptease act. Her 1957 memoir, Gypsy: A Memoir, was adapted into the 1959 stage musical Gypsy.

Early life

Rose Louise Hovick was born in Seattle, Washington, on January 8, 1911; however, she always gave January 9 as her date of birth. She was known as Louise to her family. Her sister, actress June Havoc, was born in 1912. Their mother, Rose Thompson Hovick, forged various birth certificates for each of her daughters—older when needed to evade varying state child labor laws, and younger for reduced or free train fares. The girls were unsure until later in life what their years of birth were.

Their mother had married Norwegian-American John Olaf Hovick, a newspaper-advertising salesman and a reporter at The Seattle Times. They married on May 28, 1910, in Seattle. They divorced on August 20, 1915. Rose Thompson married her second husband, Judson Brennerman, a traveling salesman, on May 26, 1916, at a Unitarian church in Seattle, with the Rev. J. D. A. Powers officiating.

After Hovick and Brennerman divorced, June supported the family by appearing in vaudeville, being billed "Tiniest Toe Dancer in the World" when she was only 2+1⁄2. Rose and June went to Hollywood for two years where June appeared in short films directed by Hal Roach. Louise was left behind while June and her mother were on the road. She had an elementary education, unlike June who was taught to read by stagehands. Much to her mother's displeasure, June eloped with Bobby Reed, a dancer in their act, in December 1928, after a performance in Topeka, Kansas, at the Jayhawk Theatre and went on to pursue a brief career in marathon dancing, a more profitable vocation than tap dancing.

Career

Louise's singing and dancing talents were insufficient to sustain the act without June. Eventually, it became apparent Louise could make money in burlesque, which earned her legendary status as an elegant and witty striptease artist. Initially, her act was propelled forward when a shoulder strap on one of her gowns gave way, causing her dress to fall to her feet despite her efforts to cover herself; encouraged by the audience's response, she went on to make the trick the focus of her performance.

Her innovations were an almost casual stripping style compared to bump & grind styles of most burlesque strippers (she emphasized the "tease" in "striptease"), and she brought a sharp sense of humor into her act as well. She became as famous for her onstage wit as for her stripping style, and—changing her stage name to Gypsy Rose Lee—she became one of the biggest stars of Minsky's Burlesque, where she performed for four years. She was frequently arrested in raids on the Minsky brothers' shows. During the Great Depression, Lee spoke at various union meetings in support of New York laborers. According to activist Harry Fisher, her talks were among those that attracted the largest audiences.

In 1937 and 1938, billed as Louise Hovick, she made five films in Hollywood. But her acting was generally panned, so she returned to New York City where she had an affair with film producer Michael Todd and co-produced and appeared in his 1942 musical revue, Star and Garter. Lee viewed herself as a "high-class" stripper, and she approved of H. L. Mencken's term "ecdysiast", which he coined as a more "dignified" way of referring to the profession. Her style of intellectual recitation while stripping was spoofed in the number "Zip!" in Rodgers and Hart's Pal Joey, a musical in which June Havoc had appeared on Broadway, opposite Gene Kelly. Lee performed an abbreviated version of her act (intellectual recitation and all) in the 1943 film Stage Door Canteen.

In 1941, Lee wrote a mystery thriller called The G-String Murders, which was made into the sanitized 1943 film, Lady of Burlesque, starring Barbara Stanwyck. While some assert this was in fact ghost-written by Craig Rice, there are some who claim there is more than sufficient written evidence in the form of manuscripts and Lee's own correspondence to prove that she wrote a large part of the novel herself under the guidance of Rice and others, including her editor George Davis, a friend and mentor.

Lee's second murder mystery, Mother Finds a Body, was published in 1942. In December 1942, preliminary papers alleging breach of contract were filed in the Supreme Court against Lee by Dorothy Wheelock, associate editor of Harper's Bazaar magazine, alleging that in August 1940 she and Lee entered into what Wheelock described as "an oral agreement to collaborate on a joint venture involving the conception, construction, development, writing and exploitation of a literary work with a burlesque background." Wheelock alleged that, though the agreement held that half of the income from the book would go to her and the other half to Lee, Lee cancelled the collaboration in November of 1940 (when Wheelock had already found a publisher for their project) and had the finished work published by Simon & Schuster under her own name. Lee claimed, contrariwise, that a "sample book" which Wheelock had written based on Lee's notes was too dissimilar to the published book for her actions to have constituted a breach of contract. The case was settled out of court.

Political activism

Like well-known artists such as Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway, Gypsy Rose Lee was a supporter of the Popular Front movement in the Spanish Civil War and raised money for charity to alleviate the suffering of Spanish children during the conflict. "She became politically active and supported Spanish Loyalists during Spain's Civil War. She also became a fixture at Communist United Front meetings, and was investigated by the House Committee on un-American activities."