In May of 1959, a musical opened on Broadway that became an landmark show.  With “Gypsy”, Styne, Sondheim and Laurents created a terrific play with songs that have become standards and a role actresses fight to play like actors fight to portray King Lear.  The show was loosely based on the memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee which were, according to her sister, pretty loose with the truth already.   What people see on the stage is a compelling, entertaining, occasionally disturbing story of show business and family.  Karen Abbott researched the lives of Miss Lee, her sister, June Havoc and their mother Rose Thompson Hovick for her book, American Rose and showed that the musical barely scratched the surface.

If survivors are worthy subjects of study, then college courses should be dedicated to the Hovick sisters.  Their very identities are a mystery.  They were born in the northwest during the first years of the twentieth century’s second decade but their mother, Rose Thompson Hovick  forged so many birth certificates with different birth dates and names that neither woman could be sure of those details later on in life.  What their mother was sure of was her vision: both of her girls should be on stage, with the youngest in the spotlight.  Pushed, coached and pilfered for by Mama, both girls were professional performers before either of them turned five.

It is not surprising that June and Gypsy had difficult childhood.  Besides the chaos that comes from living on the road, they grew up with the stress of being the family bread-winners, particularly June.  And, even though they were raised by the stage mother from hell, Gypsy and June had limited futures as child performers.  First, despite coaching and her own hard work, the elder girl did not have the talent of her younger sister.  June was a gifted dancer and star of the family act, on and off stage.  Also, the girls went to work during the final years of vaudeville, where groups of entertainers performed live in local theaters.   As films replaced vaudeville, those entertainers either drifted to the coasts in search of work or got out of the business.  Finally, time was not on their side.  Every day the Hovick girls spent on the circuit as child performers was one day less of the time they had as cute little girls.  Eventually they would become adults and want lives of their own.  When they did, the conflicts got worse.

The girls had many things in common.  First and always was their mother, who saw everyone as either someone she could manipulate or an enemy she had to vanquish.  With Mama came a host of secrets and the sisters learned to work together to avoid  the woman, keep her secrets and minimize her attempts at blackmail or murder.  (At least two questionable deaths are tied to Madame Rose, a hotel proprietor when June was about 13 and in 1937 a woman named Ginny Augustin who boarded with Rose.)  Second, they both had great intelligence and drive.  Neither Gypsy nor June had any formal education to speak of but both became well-read, self-educated women as well as acclaimed entertainers, published writers and shrewd business women.  They also had each other, although that wasn’t easy.  Because of their mother’s clear favoritism, the girls were competitors as well as allies and neither could let that contest go: Gypsy, because she had been belittled and shunted aside in favor of her sister and June because her hard work and drive in the theatre were usually overshadowed by Gypsy’s claim to fame as a stripper.  Yet, they could depend on each other.  When June was opening in the musical, “Pal Joey“, she turned to Gypsy to help pull her costumes together and Gypsy dropped everything to help.   Then Gypsy sat in the opening-night audience and cried so hard, she stopped her sister’s show.  In turn, June  threatened the production of Gypsy with litigation white it was still in development until part of the musical was rewritten in her favor. 

Karen Abbott trace the history of the Minksy brothers in this book, those famous burlesque producers that helped make Gypsy Rose Lee a legend, and included interviews with the late June Havoc and Gypsy’s son, Eric Preminger in her research but the book’s ultimate focus is the incredible Gypsy Rose Lee.  In many ways, Gypsy is a harbinger in American entertainment, always reinventing and representing herself and her act.  As a promoter, she eclipses Madonna and Lady Gaga and leaves Jayne Mansfield in the dust.   Other performers incorporate sex into their act to get attention; Gypsy went the other way, using comic timing  and intelligence to turn her strip act into a career where she kept her clothes on.  She and her sister started in one century and hung around long enough to become part of American Theatrical History.  Not bad for two little girls with drive and a cuckoo-for-cocoa-puffs Mama.

I’ve had the pleasure of reading Erik Peminger’s memoir My G-String Mother: At Home and Backstage With Gypsy Rose Lee as well as June Havoc’s Early Havoc and More Havoc .  I recommend them all if you are interested in learning more about these fascinating sisters.