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GYPSY ROSE LEE: AN AMERICAN ICON LAID BARE

January 8, 2011

LIVE from the New York Public Library

www.nypl.org/live

how I got the job—I was only fifteen. Of course I was big for my age. I wasn’t exactly

what you’d call a stripling of a girl. I was thirty-eight when I was thirteen! Billy

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Minsky’s on Forty-second Street, a haven for the tired businessman. Those men were

tired of any kind of business but monkey business.

(applause)

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Good evening. Good evening. My name is Paul

Holdengräber, and I’m the Director of LIVE from the New York Public Library. As you

know my motto here is simply to make the lions roar, to make a heavy institution dance

that Karen Abbott, whose book on Gypsy Rose Lee, American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare,

the Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee, which we celebrate together with Gypsy Rose

Lee’s centennial, found this quotation. Now, listen very carefully and try to divine who

may have said this, “May your bare ass always be shining.” (laughter) Well, as you

probably guessed, this is from a telegram Eleanor Roosevelt (laughter) sent to Gypsy

Rose Lee on May 8, 1959. For all of you history buffs, you will find it at the New York

Public Library Billy Rose Theatre Division at Lincoln Center. If you are looking to find it

quickly, Karen Abbott has helped us greatly by telling us that it’s in Box 6, Folder 8, so

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check it out if you are so inclined. I must say I feel rather envious—I have never gotten

such a telegram.

I also like the story of Gypsy Rose Lee under Mayor La Guardia, who railed against so-

called “incorporated filth” and made quips about her need to take off her clothes, to

which Gypsy Rose Lee had a fast retort, as she often did. “Why, Mr. Mayor, you know

I’d never end a sentence with a preposition.” (laughter)

from Stephen Breyer, as I said, to a tribute to the National Lampoon, and in between

everyone from Angela Davis with Toni Morrison, Keith Richards to Zadie Smith to Jay-

Z, and this spring the range is no less daunting. From tonight’s joyously dishabille start—

I must say the green room has never quite felt like the way it felt tonight, and it’s going to

be hard on Tuesday when one of the great scholars of religion, who I much respect,

Karen Armstrong, will come fully clothed.

And then we have at the end of this month a festival on all things and thinkers French

meeting their American counterparts, from a discussion about happiness seen from the

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American shores with Lemony Snicket and Maira Kalman, The State of Surveillance

with Mireille Delmas-Marty and Jeffrey Rosen to What Constitutes an Enemy with Philip

Gourevitch and Ann Stoler. And so many others. That is at the end of this month, so

please check it out. The festival is called Walls and Bridges. It comes from a wonderful

line by Isaac Newton—“we build too many walls and not enough bridges.” And also this

season quickly, and in no particular order, a tribute to Chris Blackwell and Island

Records. A conversation that I will have with Harold Bloom in May during the PEN

World Voices Festival, and Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Prize, also during the PEN World

her new book. There will be a little surprise after our conversation, so that it doesn’t

become too ponderous when I ask her about the relationship between Gypsy Rose Lee

and phenomenology. As always, I’d like to thank our independent bookseller, 192 Books,

for being our provider of books during this season and for the past four years. So thank

you very much, 192 Books. (applause)

I would like also to thank the band for playing on, the Ixion Burlesque, making its debut

at the New York Public Library. (applause) I hope, maybe you should come for Karen

Armstrong—that would be fun. I’m sure she’s never seen the likes of this—with Albert

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Garzon on the piano—I think I made your name sound awfully French. Maybe you are

French, in part. And Mark Kirby on drums, so a big round of applause for them!

(applause) And I would like to thank my producer, always, Meg Stemmler, for bringing

all of this together, and the publicist for Karen Abbott, who I’ve worked on so many

projects with, most recently Jay-Z, Barbara Fillon, so a big round of applause for them.

(applause)

Now, Karen Abbott asked me to read a letter of one of her favorite letters in the entire

fascinating that I have decided to forswear parties. No, I will never go to another party,

for fear of obscuring the glow of yours. There they sat in that salle à manger, Heywood

Broun and engaging Connie and you on the floor I believe, and deliciously sensual Fanny

Brice, the pure Semitic passion percolating through the comedy conversation, with little

watchdog Billie Rose at her side. There they all sat. Excepting those who like Tallulah

Bankhead were standing at the refectory table, grabbing a second portion of the hot liver,

and those like George Jean Nathan”—I’m making everybody sound French—“were not

standing, were traipsing around the house, rushing into the kitchen and the antechambers,

guzzling beer, listening to George Davis, sliding up and down the elevator, studying the

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Greek frescoes over the mantelpiece, inspecting your well-worn and notably high-brow

library, gossiping about you, chit-chatting about your guests, admiring the African

knickknacks in the shadow of the high semicircular window. But alas and alack! It’s all

over now, the memory of the kiss Beatrice Lillie administered as she passed me in the

hall, the feel of your rounded, taut breasts, the quality of Claire Luce’s personality. The

ubiquitous energy of your faithful secretarial Achates, the realization that some of your

guests had salad and others did not. I’m inarticulate with emotion. I’m saddened at my

own mendacity, because it’s all the bunk that I won’t go to another party as long as I live.

costume is quite significant, let me look, yes, it’s quite significant. (laughter) It is

extremely hard for me to concentrate at this moment—I’m supposed to say something

about it, I think I will turn my eyes downward and read to you a little passage from Karen

Abbott’s book.

“Gypsy Rose Lee continues her political activism, performing a striptease to benefit the

United Committee for the French Relief at the Ritz-Carlton, strolling out onto the stage

clad in a skirt, a few strings of beads, and a bolero. A German banking heir, Paul Felix

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Warburg, scores her red garter for fifty dollars, and Mary Pickford offers four hundred if

she’ll keep the costume on.” (laughter)

Gal Friday, were we not at the New York Public Library—we can’t be auctioning off her

stars tonight—would, if we could, and I would love her to show us how she might, she

would peel off slowly some of those stars, slowly but surely, please give her a cheer.

(applause) Each time she peels off—it’s like getting deep in a text—she peels off yet

another and perhaps yet another, yet another, please one more, maybe two more, layers!

is the headmistress and founder of the New York School of Burlesque, internationally

renowned as a burlesque personality, Jo “Boobs.” She’s rounded her heels on stages from

Coney Island to Las Vegas. She’s the winner of such exotic titles as Bumpbest, and here I

read, I don’t know what I’m reading, the best bump and grinder, the best teacher and

mentor, the biggest cougar in burlesque. She has worked with performers and here I

know what I’m speaking of—Leonard Cohen to Spinal Tap, and has been featured on

television shows from CBS Sunday Morning to Gossip Girl. So Jo “Boobs” Weldon, like

a banana, watch her peel, watch her take it all off, right down to the fruit, ladies and

degentlemen, Jo “Boobs” Weldon!

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[Music plays during Jo “Boobs” Weldon’s performance.]

(applause)

JONNY PORKPIE: Hello. That was Jo Boobs Weldon, the headmistress of the New

York School of Burlesque, with a special tribute to Gypsy Rose Lee, to a song to which

burlesque numbers are rarely performed anymore, for obvious reasons, but then there’s

(applause)

TIGGER!: Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, filthy, dirty scholars, and esteemed

perverts, it is a pleasure to be here as a stripper and librarian myself. (applause) Thank

you! Celebrating Gypsy Rose Lee at the New York Public Library. Strippers and

librarians are both, after all, freedom fighters, so it only makes sense that these worlds

should collide.

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I would like to wish a happy hundredth birthday to Miss Gypsy Rose Lee. (applause)

She could not be here, she had a previous engagement—but she sent her muff. (laughter)

Oh yes, and her gown, and her shoes. So if you just want to come check those out,

generously lent to us from the Burlesque Museum in Las Vegas and Miss Dixie Evans.

We would like to show you some vintage footage of Gypsy because we just love looking

at you, don’t we. Courtesy of her son, Erik Preminger. Now, in what you’re about to see,

Gypsy used her own camera to take this footage. She’s practicing on the rooftop of

Minsky’s Republic in Times Square in 1931. She was then in the process of transforming

Check it out, she’s talking to you, that’s right, that’s right, she’s saying, “oh, no, I

couldn’t do that.” There she is. All for you, it’s all for you, she’s making love to you.

You, you, you are the camera, ladies and gentlemen, Miss Gypsy Rose Lee, there we go,

that was her footage. (applause) As a sidebar, after her arrest, she received six proposals

of marriage, one live bunny, a dozen bouquets of American Beauties—we’re assuming

we mean roses—numerous boxes of candy, forty-four mash notes, a case of ginger ale,

and several fawning telegrams from admirers, which you can check out because they are

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POP: They’re always wild for you, Gypsy.

GYPSY: No, Pop, you tell that to all the strippers.

POP: Nobody draws them in the way you do, real high-class customers, too.

GYPSY: They’re all out there tonight again. The guy with a tie that lights up in the dark,

his friend with a peashooter. What an aim that guy has!

of my burlesque customers or a birdwatcher. It made me so nervous I didn’t know

whether to strip or lay an egg!

JONNY PORKPIE: Coming to the stage next, a legend of television and radio, a man

who is rumored to have interviewed over ten thousand guests in his time on radio and

TV, ranging from Bing Crosby to Yoko Ono. In 2008 he was awarded a Lifetime

Achievement Award by the Theater Museum. Please join me in welcoming to this stage

Joe Franklin!

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(applause)

JOE FRANKLIN: I do go back. I go back to the days when the Dead Sea was only sick.

(laughter) And my first guest ever was Moses. Moses had a headache and I told him to

take two tablets. Now, I don’t do comedy, I just want to say that I guess my participation

here tonight is built around the fact that Gypsy Rose Lee, who was a dear friend of mine,

was inspired as a guest on my TV talk show to want and desire and finally get her own

syndicated TV talk show, which I got for her, I introduced her to the syndicator.

this lady going on the plane right now, very important client of mine, keep her happy,

she’s a very active subsidizer of all my activities, she gets on the plane with her pet dog,

they put the dog in steerage, they fly to Israel, and when they get to Israel, they bring out

the dog. Guess what? The dog is dead! They say, “Oh, my God,” they run into the

cockpit, there’s the captain, “Terrible news, Mrs. Goldberg’s dog dead, we’re all going to

get fired.” “I got an idea.” He said, “About ten minutes into Jerusalem, or in Tel Aviv, is

the veterinarian, maybe, maybe you can match the dog, we’ll keep her happy with happy

talk.” So they say, “We’ll try it!” They take the dog out of the cage, take the dog down to

the veterinarian, and guess what? They are able to match the dog, it’s amazing. So they

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come back fast, take out the dead dog, put in the live dog, bring it out to Mrs. Goldberg.

She says, “This is not my dog!” “Of course that’s your dog.” “It’s not my dog. I’m

bringing my dog to Israel to bury it. My dog is dead!” (laughter)

And when I heard that, I said, “This lady’s gotta have her own TV talk show.” I asked her

what is her latest crusade? She says—she was famous for her campaigns, Gypsy Rose

Lee was. She said, “You know the lady who put missing children’s pictures on milk

cartons? I want to missing transvestites’ pictures on half and half.” (laughter) Well, she

it’s now in its third printing. (applause) That’s because the first two printings were

blurred. I’m only kidding I don’t do jokes, I just want to say what an honor it was to be

invited here tonight, I’m enjoying the show, and may the memory of Gypsy Rose Lee go

on and live for many, many years to come, and God bless you.

(applause)

CHARLIE: Ah, baby, you know I think the world of you.

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GYPSY ROSE LEE: Take your hands off me and stop touring the world.

CHARLIE: But baby I want to marry you.

GYPSY ROSE LEE: I can’t marry you, Charlie.

CHARLIE: Why not?

CHARLIE: If it’s fresh, I’ll take it.

TIGGER!: It’s me again. It is my pleasure to introduce to you now my dear friend the

Burlesque Mayor of New York City, the co-winner of the first-ever most innovative

award at the Burlesque Hall of Fame in Las Vegas, which I believe has gone to New

York City every single year, huh? He also, when he wrote and put out his pulp novel, The

Corpse Wore Pasties—yes, you may cheer! (applause)—he became the first burlesque

performer to write and publish a burlesque murder mystery since Gypsy herself. The

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connections, they just keep on bumpin’ and bumpin’! Ladies and gentlemen, Jonny

Porkpie!

JONNY PORKPIE: I should have asked you for “Hail to the Chief,” Albert. Yes, they

call me the Burlesque Mayor of New York City, at least they do when I ask them nicely.

When I’m hosting shows I do a whole shtick about La Guardia, who Paul mentioned

earlier Gypsy had choice words for La Guardia. La Guardia had choice words for

burlesque. He called it “entertainment for morons and perverts.” (applause) And so, dear

don’t seem important when they happen that slip your mind. With me, for instance, as

long as I live I’ll remember seeing that bloated bluish face, the twisted naked body, and

the glitter of a G-string hanging like an earring from the swollen neck. Sometimes even

now I wake up in a cold sweat with the sound of a body squashing on the stage and Dolly

Baxter’s screams in my ears.

The things that are harder to remember are the incidents leading up to the murders. The

raid is a good example. How was I to know it wasn’t just another pinch? Then Dolly

Baxter and Lolita La Verne—they were always fighting anyway, so how could I guess

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that their ordinary hair-pulling, name-calling differences of opinion were leading to

death? I’ll admit I should have known something was up when the Princess Nirvana

opened at the old opera. She must have seen the signs backstage—they were all over the

place: “Full net pants,” “no bumps, no grinds,” “keep your navel covered,” you couldn’t

miss seeing them, but when she did her specialty and took off her last pair of pants I was

definitely going to hand in my notice.

I didn’t, of course, but, well, maybe I’d better start from the beginning. Not when I first

wouldn’t sign it Best regards, nor would he write Herbert or Isadore Moss. “Burlesque is

the poor man’s Follies,” was one of his expressions, but I’m sure he didn’t feel that way

about it. He was convinced that an H. I. Moss production meant not only Clean

Entertainment for the Whole Family but also stood for the very best Broadway could

offer. If he thought Eugene O’Neill could write a good burlesque blackout, then O’Neill

was the man for him. If he couldn’t write anything but Dynamo and Strange Interlude,

Moss would shrug his shoulders and say, “Who wants to know from such corn? Girls!

That’s what the public wants.”

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He might have been right, at that. Of all his theaters the Old Opera was the favorite. It

had survived a good many impressions and the policy was Girls! Girls! Girls! In smaller

print, they advertised “Laffs! Laffs! Laffs!” Next in prominence, Boxing, Thursdays.

Moss emphasized the “clean entertainment” part, too. The night I met him he impressed it

on my mind. That was the night he changed my name from Rose Louise to Gypsy Rose

Lee. “That Louise is too refined for a stripteaser,” he said. “Refinement in burlesque we

must have! But not too much.”

Flo Ziegfeld, with a little Napoleon thrown in as an added attraction. “I will personally

see to it that your name is in lights on Broadway,” he said to me, exactly one half-minute

after I met him. It was my closing night in a comfort station that the defunct owners

playfully called a nightclub. The lights were dim, and a five-piece orchestra pounded out

tune after tune while my new boss outlined my future for me. From the routine he was

giving me, it sounded like I was going into training for the ballet, or at least the

Olympics.

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“Experience! That’s what you need.” His eyes peering at me through bifocal glasses

closed dreamily. “And clothes! Velvets with feathers, diamonds in your hair.” The red

and blue overhead lights reflected on his bald head as he raised his voice above that of

the singer and the band. When he really interested me was when he really got down to

cases. A pay-or-play contract. Diamonds in my hair was well and good, but at that

moment I was a little hungry. “First you play my circuit, then you play a year in stock,

here in Toledo. If at the end of that time, I, H. I. Moss, feel that you are ready for

Broadway, you play the Old Opera!” He waited for me to gurgle, “Not THE Old Opera,”

performers. But, folks, we’ve come to the part of the evening where we learn a little more

about the book that brought us all here this evening. A conversation, if you will, between

Karen Abbott, author of American Rose, applaud. (applause) and the Director of LIVE

from the New York Public Library, Paul Holdengräber. Please welcome them to this

stage for a conversation.

(applause)

GYPSY ROSE LEE: Oh, boys, I can’t take that off! I’d get cold!

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PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: What a pleasure. I’ve never used that word so effectively.

What a pleasure. You look so beautiful.

KAREN ABBOTT: I feel strangely overdressed.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You know how I feel.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Well, what else would you like me to do? I feel that one

thing we should do, I feel that we should have the presence of this dress with us on the

stage. I don’t know how I’m going to do this, but I want to—can you help me with it?

Because I feel like she should be with us and I just would like the shoes to be—which

one would you like? I think you should take this one. I just feel like—

KAREN ABBOTT: Oh, dear. Almost there.

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PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I can see where you have your hands. Well, while we wait

for Gypsy Rose Lee to come back—

KAREN ABBOTT: I think it would only be polite, since it’s her hundredth birthday.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I just felt that she was too hidden there.

KAREN ABBOTT: Yeah, she was alone.

wouldn’t be having this evening, and Karen Abbott would not have written this book.

KAREN ABBOTT: And, by the way, her face was not usually covered by a muff.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Just imagine. Use your imagination. Now, it has been said

once upon a time that there are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to

function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. And the third is that

moment sometime in the future when your name is spoken for the last time. Now, there is

an issue here with Gypsy Rose Lee, in some way an issue pertaining—

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lining up in the morning just to get in the burlesque shows in the evening, and you know,

they felt this camaraderie with the women, and just equally naked, these people are

equally naked and equally baring themselves. And so that’s what the country started

turning to, which of course upset the puritans, because there was a lot of fun had in the

process.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But some of the puritans probably enjoyed those shows,

no? Yeah.

better than I do at this particular moment what the difference between vaudeville and

burlesque is, that’s my first question, and my second one is more specifically, what

would a burlesque show entail? If I went to a burlesque show, what could I maybe expect

and perhaps what could surprise me? And Gypsy as it were was sometimes just one part

of that show, as I understand it.

KAREN ABBOTT: Vaudeville, the only thing I can really liken it to it’s like the reality

TV of the 1920s, although people back then actually had to work hard at being famous

instead of just getting drunk and punching each other and rolling around on the floor and

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going in hot tubs. But, you know, so people would find a talent, and even if it wasn’t a

talent, these people just invented a talent, and they practiced it and practiced it and

practiced it until they became quite good enough to charge people to see it, and June

spoke a lot about vaudeville, too, but one of my favorites, just to give you a vaudeville

taste, was a man called the Amazing Regurgitator.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Maybe we could check him out a little bit.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Such innocent pleasures, no?

(laughter)

KAREN ABBOTT: Just good fun.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: So what else would a show entail?

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KAREN ABBOTT: A vaudeville show—kiddie acts, of which of course Dainty June

and Her Newsboy Songsters, and, you know, from 1923 to 1927 Dainty June and Her

Newsboy Songsters, headlined by June Havoc, was one of the most popular vaudeville

acts in the country, and they were making like $2,500 per show, which was an

astronomical sum, like 32,000 in today’s dollars, and one of their numbers featured a

dancing cow, and Gypsy always claimed that she was forced to work the back end of the

cow, but June disputed this, and June told me, “Gypsy couldn’t dance that well,”

(laughter) so.

and just continued on in that path.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Now, Some of your critics have worried that you have not

followed a chronological order in this book which so often in biographies particularly one

does follow in order to unveil, unpack as it were, the subject. Why did you choose the

nonchronological narrative?

KAREN ABBOTT: I wanted to structure the book like a striptease, and part of that was

revealing a little bit of this side, and pulling it back a little bit, revealing a little bit more

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and pulling back a little bit until all was revealed, and Gypsy was just too complicated—

she wasn’t a linear person. She’s somebody who—you know, at the end of her life she

said, “I’ve had three wonderful lives and these poor sons of bitches haven’t lived once,”

you know, this is after she was diagnosed with cancer and was looking at the other

patients in the room. But she wasn’t a linear person, and she was quite a complicated

jigsaw puzzle, and I thought it would do her a great disservice to just tell this narrative in

a linear way and just beginning, middle, end.

myths she created. You know, she—in the memoir and in the musical she sort of presents

herself as a plucky, happy-go-lucky girl who was just a fluke success and a little bit

hustled along by her mother, but Gypsy was a very driving, ambitious person and had

been since she was a kid, and June said that when she was a girl in the vaudeville circuit,

all Gypsy did was scribble one word in her notebook, it was the word “money” over and

over again. And then of course Rose Hovick calls her on it thirty years later and says,

“you made money your goal and your god and that’s all you ever cared about,” but she

was a very—once she created the persona of Gypsy Rose Lee.

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PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But she created more than a persona, more than a mask, as

it were. She created a whole mythology, and do you think—she created so many of them.

Do you think she ended up believing them?

KAREN ABBOTT: I think when she was living in that persona she fully believed in it.

She couldn’t not. I think if she stopped to think about the difference between who she

was and who this persona was. She was a very troubled, sad woman in many ways, and if

she stopped to think about—

KAREN ABBOTT: She wasn’t very—Erik, when I talked to her son. He was kind

enough to talk to me, he said that she was not a very introspective person. And I think if

she stopped to really look into herself too long it would have overwhelmed her and she

wouldn’t have been able to be this persona that she created.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: So do you think that the mythmaking is a way of fleeing

reality and trying to create a form of momentary happiness in believing one is someone

else?

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KAREN ABBOTT: I do and June and even—I talked with June about this too and she

said that Gypsy the musical was Gypsy’s chance at monumental revisionism. It was not

only her monument; it was her chance at monumental revisionism. And this is the person

she always wanted to be, this beautiful romantic idealist person with dreams, and it’s not

who she was. And she said that, you know, that Gypsy would try to do these serious

literary endeavors and she would like to go somewhere and talk about that, and yet when

she got onstage, people just wanted her to take her glove off for a half an hour.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Would she be published do you think today in the New

Yorker?

KAREN ABBOTT: I think the novelty of being who she was would get her published

anywhere. But she had—she was a very smart lady and a very, you know, as I said,

ambitious lady, and she was going to do whatever she had to do to get published. She was

desperate.

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PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Was she a good writer?

KAREN ABBOTT: She was a good storyteller, she’s a masterful storyteller, and that’s

seen all through her memoir and just through her persona, just even oral storytelling.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Who saw through the persona? Were there people who saw

through it and saw that maybe some of the literary ambitions were not quite backed up

enough by—

time to time. Maybe I’ll use it when I introduce Karen Armstrong.

KAREN ABBOTT: I think that’s appropriate.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: A famous work of booboisie, yes. Because in some way

she had aspirations that she never fulfilled, both as a writer, she tried to act in some ways

and sometimes didn’t do as well as she had hoped. Do you think this was a source of

extraordinary disappointment to her?

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KAREN ABBOTT: I do, I do. I think when she went back to her dressing room after

somebody just wanted to leer and watch her peel off her gloves, and she wanted to have a

sort of higher discourse on her book or her movie career, she would go back there and

cry.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Was there a higher discourse to have, though? Was there a

higher discourse to have on her work? Or was it just an aspiration that she was hoping to

reach but her work doesn’t quite warrant that serious investigation?

KAREN ABBOTT: Benjamin Britten and Carson McCullers.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: What about Carson McCullers?

KAREN ABBOTT: What about Carson McCullers?

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Certainly I was sort of sleepy reading that passage at that

moment, and it really woke me up. What happens with Carson McCullers? Did they?

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KAREN ABBOTT: Well, they were rumored. Carson had a huge crush on Gypsy, I’ll

put it that way. She had a huge crush.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Put it in other ways, too.

KAREN ABBOTT: I forgot where we are!

underwear that sagged at the knees and she was very casual with Carson, and she would

fetch her homemade strudel that she’d made from apples in the backyard and feed it to

Carson and Carson would have her bottle of whiskey next to her and they’d lay on the

bed and commiserate together, and when it got too late, Carson would just stay over, and

they would, you know— Who knows what happened?

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: They would.

KAREN ABBOTT: They would.

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(laughter)

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And during that time W. H. Auden was downstairs.

KAREN ABBOTT: Oh, yes, probably listening in on the whole thing.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Yes, because you mentioned it a little bit and how did he

people would come by and it became a big party atmosphere, which Gypsy excelled at, of

course.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: What did the archives at the Library bring you that other

books have not yet—did not find? I mean, what did you find, what new materials did the

archives warrant you that other biographies of Gypsy Rose Lee left out?

KAREN ABBOTT: There was one letter from Gypsy—just to stay on the subject of her

writing career for a second.

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of the life of Duse and the last chapter of The Last Puritan. None of these men are

obscene, they leave me apathetic, I prefer the more aesthetic, things like dramas by

Racine and Gone with the Wind, and when I display my charms in all their dazzling

splendor and prove to you conclusively I am of the female gender, I am really thinking of

Elsie de Wolfe and the bric-a-brac I saw, and that lovely letter I received from George

Bernard Shaw. I have a townhouse on the East River because it’s so fashionable, to look

at Welfare Island, coal barges, and garbage scows. I have a chinchilla, a Newport villa”—

and then she unfastens her cape and swings it out in front of her like a matador. “And

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And I think in many ways upon your reading this it proves

a good reason why we’re here at the Library celebrating her, because she was a very fine

stylist, and very witty.

KAREN ABBOTT: And she wrote a lot of that herself, she wrote a lot of her own

routines and her skits.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Do you think that the humor was used as a tool, a defense

mechanism, something that kept her at a distance from others?

LIVEGypsyRoseLee_1.8TranscriptQUERIES

KAREN ABBOTT: I think so, and she—that’s what she tapped into early on, the idea of

marrying comedy and sex. And you know fifty years before Madonna, she learned how to

transform performance into desire, and that human instinct that we’re always going to

want most what we never have, and she reasoned that “if I first laugh at myself, nobody

else is going to laugh at me,” and she—I think how she really sort of became comfortable

in her own skin, so to speak.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: They are rather big, I must say. You say in the book that

she was the most private public figure of her time.

KAREN ABBOTT: Life magazine said that of her.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And let’s imagine for a moment as we come to a close of

this little chat you and I have had. If she—Karen, if she were here tonight, what in fact

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would you, do you think, ask her? Pretend for a moment, just a moment of a suspension

of disbelief, that I am Gypsy Rose Lee. Darling, what would you ask me?

KAREN ABBOTT: That’s a good question. I would ask you, I think, if she ended up

liking herself. And I know that’s very serious, but it’s something I really wondered.

Throughout he writing of the book, my opinion of her changed so many times. I was

afraid of her, she scared the crap out of me sometimes. I admired her, I thought she was

brilliant, I thought she was cruel, I thought she had an enormous heart, I went all over the

KAREN ABBOTT: I think she would say, “Oh, darling, I’m all of those things. Just

spell my name right.”

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Thank you very, very much.

(applause)

KAREN ABBOTT: Thank you guys so much for coming. Thanks everybody for

coming!

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PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And we now have—

KAREN ABBOTT: A little surprise.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: A little surprise for you.

KAREN ABBOTT: There is a project that Jo “Boobs” and Burlesque Hall of Fame are