Free Gypsy: The Art of the Tease by Rachel Shteir Page A

much to expect anyone to believe that she was reading the classics backstage. “It’s said she discusses Joyce and Santayana at every opportunity—although I am at a loss to know just with whom she discussed these fellows with at Minsky’s,” one feature sniffed.
    In an article in Town and Country titled “She Stoops to Conquer,” Otis Chatfield-Taylor defends his friend as “the Gene 74
    The Queen of Striptease
    Tunney of Burlesque,” after the Jazz Age boxer, friend of George Bernard Shaw, Yale lecturer on Shakespeare, and reader of The Way of All Flesh. He was not Gypsy’s only supporter. Many news-papermen gave Gypsy the benefit of the doubt: she might not have read Remembrances of Things Past cover to cover, but she could talk about it at a party. Sometimes articles described her books as though they were stage props. She displayed copies of e. e. cummings and Joyce in her East Thirty-sixth Street duplex; the New York Post reported that she owned “5,000 volumes.” Life magazine mentioned that Gypsy read Proust and Karl Marx in her dressing room, and another reporter noticed Dreiser’s The Genius, Sherwood Anderson’s Dark Laughter, and Vincent Shee-han’s Personal History as occupying her bookshelves.
    When Gypsy responded to the press’s accusations, she brought up her working-class roots. “They think I’m some kind of freak,”
    she told Collier’s magazine shortly after the Follies of 1936 opened, referring to the American aristocrats who had made her famous and who were now turning on her. Gypsy’s surface insouciance masks her understanding of a radical fact: the wealthy adore and resent being called out by the tough girl and guy personalities whose authentic American-ness they can only steal. The New York World reported that Minsky’s, hoping its former star would come back, “installed earphones for the dowagers” supposedly flocking to the theater. Having succeeded on Broadway, the Queen of Striptease never wanted to go downtown again.
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    The Queen of Striptease
    Slamming the People She Didn’t Grow Up With
    New York in the mid-1930s was full of rage against the American aristocracy, and nowhere more so than in the world of theater.
    The Group Theatre staged plays in which the working-class hero triumphed. Other groups invented new theatrical styles whose intention was to get the audience more involved; agitprop cast cartoon characters and stock settings to direct the audience’s sympathy toward the ordinary man. Living newspapers used headlines to draw attention to the economic and social injustices of the day. The stage was a pulpit on which actors preached social-ism. Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty premiered in 1935 and elicited a standing ovation for its depiction of working people suffering. But Gypsy’s particular brand of beating up on wealthy Americans while flirting influenced the musical theater of this era as much as anyone in the serious theater. Take Harold Rome’s 1937 revue, Pins and Needles, performed by and about the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. I find it difficult to look at Rome’s title without thinking of Gypsy throwing her pins into the audience at the Irving Place. The revue included a skit making fun of a wealthy woman telling strikers, “It’s not cricket to picket,” and a Vassar co-ed “reduced” to working at Macy’s.
    In 1937 Rome was apparently taken enough with Gypsy to
    sell her one song, “For Charity, Sweet Charity,” whose refrain includes the line “I Strip for Charity.” I don’t believe she ever 76
    The Queen of Striptease
    sang it. But the following year Rome’s revue Sing Out the News features a song about an anti–New Dealer “reduced” to eating domestic caviar that sounds like it is right out of Gypsy’s play-book.

When Marc Blitzstein, who considered writing a show for
    Gypsy, describes what he was aiming for in this era, he noted: “I was slamming the smug people and traditions I grew up with.” In