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Entertainment August 23, 2017
Let me see you burlesque!
Before there was Dita Von Teese and Blac Chyna, there was Gypsy Rose. Gypsy Rose Lee gained notoriety because of her very refined strip teases.
She won audiences over with her daring gaze and sexy yet comical performances.
ENTITY shares five facts about the original strip tease entertainer known as Gypsy Rose.
Rose Louise Hovick aka Gypsy Rose was born in Seattle, Washington on January 19, 1911. Her mother created a vaudeville show in which her sisters and eventually she performed. She started to strip tease at the age of 15. She didn’t go on to have a successful movie career, but the play written about her was huge success on Broadway.
By 1931, Gypsy Rose solidified her stage presence. She performed at Minsky’s on the regular. Her performances also won her some notorious friends, like Gangster Waxey Howard, who also paid for her teeth to be fixed. She soon after made her way up into high society.
Her shows became popular because of her strip tease, glamorous costumes and funny monologues. Since Gypsy Rose’s shows were a mix of comedy and sex, men and women were delighted to be attendees. Her act was criticized by her rival June St Clair, who said that Gypsy’s act was nothing but boring.
The Guardian reported St Clair’s statement, “Strip teasing is pure American art. Gypsy’s work isn’t art. She’s fooling the public. Why, she doesn’t even strip.”
The stage moms of today have nothing on Rose Thompson Hovick, otherwise known as Gypsy Rose’s mother. Author Karen Abbott, who is an avid writer about Gypsy’s Rose, says that she came from a dysfunctional family.
“It was so volatile and so erratic. In one note, [Mama] Rose would be telling Gypsy how much she loved her, and please forgive her for the awful past. And in the next note she’d be threatening to blackmail her, for all the dark and secret things she’d done before she became famous,” Abbott shares with NPR.
Abbott continues, “Those girls were abused, in a way. They didn’t have any schooling; they were not brought to doctors or dentists. Their mother pitted them against one other, and taught them to trust no one but her. Especially men — there was a whole theme of distrust of men running through that family.”
Gypsy Rose had said, “I do” three times to men that included Robert Mizzy, Julio De Diego and Alexander Kirkland. Her true love, though, was producer Mike Todd. Of course, they could never marry because he was already very married. CBS News reports that she was deeply saddened that she and Todd could not be together.
Out of the relationship a son was born named Erik Preminger. Preminger speaks of the image he remembers of his mother in the book entitled, “Gypsy and Me.”
“..with a rag around her head, a bikini top and two aprons — one in front to hold the tools and the other in back, as she said, ‘to keep the cops away,” recalls Preminger.
Actress Natalie Wood, one of old Hollywood’s finest actresses, is most recognized for her roles in movies such as “West Side Story” and “Rebel Without a Cause.” She was also noted for her role as Gypsy Rose in the movie “Gypsy.” Ann Jullian, the actress who played Gypsy’s little sister, June Hovick, recalls fond memories of Wood on stage playing Gypsy.
She tells OUT, “I remember standing watching her — remember this is an almost totally black soundstage — and she’s putting her makeup on. I was standing watching her and I felt the presence of someone next to me leaning against a ladder, a man who was watching her too. I said, ‘She’s beautiful, isn’t she?’ He said, ‘Oh yes, she is.'”
Gypsy Rose may have made her fame in stripping, but to many, she was known as a pioneer, and most of all, a classic beauty.
