It Takes a Gypsy
I have
to remind myself where I am. I get this feeling every time. It isn’t
appropriate to have this reaction on an Amtrak train. My body won’t listen. I can
feel my heart beat heavy, the hairs on my arms pulled taut. I know it’s coming –
I can feel the weight of her words as they approach the closing lines. The
gravity of conclusions. Stories that change your mind, your knowledge, your
inspiration. Inevitably I will react with a wave of emotions.
I don’t
finish a lot of books.
As I read
the closing pages of Gypsy: a Memoir,
I can’t help but feeling that I’ve fallen just a little bit in love with Gypsy
Rose Lee. I’m not terribly unique in this respect. Her self-written story is
composed in the style which leaves more to be wanted – not a surprising feat
for this burlesque icon, the reigning queen of the scene nationally and abroad
in the early and mid 1900s, who travelled the world while headlining shows,
making movies, making jaws drop and intimates tingle, and pulling in the kind
of money that would rival today’s Hollywood Starlets. Her legend has made her a
forever figure for burlesque aficionados and performers, and I am just another figure
on the list.
It is
clear from chapter to chapter that Gypsy does Gypsy. We find in Gypsy traces of
her ruthless and insufferable, yet undeniably tenacious and indomitable mother,
whose take-no-bull approach to show business provides us with timeless lessons
not only about being a woman on the stage, but about being a woman in general.
Gypsy was a woman who often stood near-nude, but never stood vulnerable; not an
easy feat in the mid 20th century.
Gypsy
avoids the kind of philosophizing and emotional purging that can make readers
lost. She tells her story and lets us attach these extras. In fact, we sometimes
have to wonder if she wrote her words with as straight a face as she would lead
us to imagine. The tale of June’s desertion of the family and the business at age
thirteen, or of her Mother’s continuous, improvised retelling of their life’s history, or of the constant rejection she
faced as an awkward-looking child both on and off the stage – all of this is
told to us factually. However, laced into her terseness is the powerful message
“It was what it was.” Certainly it made her into what she eventually became,
which was, as she says in her closing words, “everything in the world a girl
could ask for…” The fact that this is a quote from her Mother followed by an
ellipsis has to make us wonder, though…
This is
not to say that there are not moments of intense emotional retelling, which is
quite often the definition of a memoir. She makes explicit her feelings of
clumsiness and rejection when her young love for Stanley goes unrequited; of
her intense guilt and sadness after her monkey’s death by strangulation; of her
discomfort during her reunion with her Mother’s runaway husband, Gordon.
There
are moments of omission which actually speak for themselves. After reading this
book, we are left in the dark as to Gypsy’s love life, the birth and upbringing
of her son, Erik, and her battle with lung cancer which eventually took her
life. The message seems to be “Keep out.” I’m sure she had more than enough
speculation and judgment on her personal life.
One
thing seems clear to me by the time I’ve reached the closing pages: Gypsy Rose
Lee was one smart stripper. Her success is self-evident, her appeal undeniable,
her fame ever-lasting. Anyone can and everyone does take off their clothes, but
achieving those accomplishments, my
friends, takes one special hunk of gray matter.
Well,
that’s not to deny that she was a damned good-looking girl.
An
exceptional amount of stigma surrounded Gypsy’s work then, and still attaches
itself to the various forms of sex work today. Is it a crime for a beautiful,
intelligent woman to use what she’s got? Laughably and literally, it can be.
Her
son, Erik, gives us this quote from his mother:
[Looking out on her garden from what
would be her death bed]
“Isn’t that a magnificent rose?
It just proves what I’ve always said: ‘You don’t need to be religious to believe in God, just observant.’”