Free Gypsy: The Art of the Tease by Rachel Shteir

a dame dancing “The
    Gazooka.” Yet none of these roles ever became identified with Gypsy the way her striptease did. Throughout her career, whatever acts the Queen of Striptease tried, sooner or later in the evening the curtain closed and she came out front and took off her clothes, alone, sing-talking into a microphone. That was what audiences wanted to see.
    Like all signature numbers, “A Stripteaser’s Education” was a blessing and a curse. It condemned Gypsy to a career as an A-List B-List-er, a benchwarmer whom producers and directors could rely on to step into a celebrity role. Besides “A Stripteaser’s Education” and its progeny, Gypsy performed mostly songs the great lyricists and composers had written for other stars. That she was always “singing someone else’s song” lent her an air of comedy or tragedy, depending on the venue and the audience. Like Mae West, if she wanted her own tunes, she had to commission them or write them herself. Her failure to reveal herself made her words sound like impersonations.
    Conceived as a gimmick, “A Stripteaser’s Education” became 71
    The Queen of Striptease
    Gypsy Rose Lee and Bobby Clark. The Shubert Archive
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    The Queen of Striptease
    a sexy joke, swelled into satire, and dissolved into camp where, because of age, much sexuality is forced to go. But the consis-tency of “Education” fails to console since it comes from a Peter Pan hope that neither she nor we will ever grow old.
    When other performers took on “A Stripteaser’s Education,”
    the number became ordinary. Blonde chorus girl and Marx Brothers sidekick Marion Martin performed “A Stripteaser’s Education” after she replaced Gypsy in the Follies in 1937, but no reviewers remarked on it.
    As for Gypsy, no sooner did the Follies open than the press tore her down. “She undressed her way to fame,” a headline read.
    Gypsy responded by distancing herself from striptease. She said it was dead. She rejected the honorific the “number one stripper.” She said that her act “tickled peoples’ funny bones” and that there was “nothing sensuous” about it. “I play my striptease for laughs,” she told a reporter, as if by unsexing herself she could avoid rebuke. Here the impression is that she protests too much.
    By this time Gypsy had developed a sixth sense for stroking the kingmakers. According to Erik, when she first arrived in New York she wrote Walter Winchell a thank-you note for mentioning her in his column after seeing her perform, but also confessed that he made her so nervous she would like him to see the act another night. Winchell obliged. Gypsy transformed her number into a three-dimensional version of his daily column.
    The publicity hound had met his match.
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    In 1936, when the Earl of Gosford, a guest of the Chicago
    “bluebloods” (as the press called wealthy Americans) the Otis Chatfield-Taylors, asked Gypsy out after a show, she made up an excuse about having to get up early the next morning to go to “an ethnological dance lesson.” Gypsy added: “I was pleased with my performance.” She regretted some of the things she had to learn to do for her new role, such as drink cocktails—she lacked the stomach for this—and smoke marijuana. But she never shirked her responsibility to her public.
    Still, her success inspired swift and furious backlash. Even before the Follies opened, Alfred Eisenstadt, who photographed Gypsy for Life magazine on three occasions over the years, captured her leaning into the mirror, putting on her lipstick for a radio interview. Portraying Gypsy getting made up for a venue where no one could see her strip catches her dependence on artifice. But after the Follies opened, critics took umbrage to Gypsy’s claim of being well read. It was one thing for a stripper to put on lipstick where no one could see her and make fun of café society, or to enjoy yachts and dining at chic restaurants. But it was too