If you think you know all about Gypsy Rose Lee because you saw the play “Gypsy” on Broadway, or loved the movie of the same name, come sit next to Karen Abbott.
Her portrait -- “American Rose -- A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee” -- is both darker and more inspiring than the famed stripper’s version of her life as filtered by Broadway or Hollywood. Both whitewashed her damaged but enduring family ties with her formidable stage mother from Hades, Rose Thompson Hovick, who literally killed more than once to get her daughters where she wanted them. and her sister, the equally wounded actress and dancer June Havoc.
Abbott, who has been dubbed the “queen of sizzle history” for the way she brings the ‘20s and ‘30s to juicy, raucous life, filling in those gangsters, politicians and artists who made the margins of those old worlds spin, restores all the real-life Technicolor to this incredible family’s story. (Her first book, “Sin in the Second City,” told the true story of the “world’s most famous brothel.”) Though the former journalist lived in Atlanta for six years and still owns a house in Midtown, Abbott now resides in New York City. She took some time recently to talk about the real Gypsy Rose Lee and why burlesque is back.
Q: How much did you know about Gypsy Rose Lee before you started?
A: I knew nothing. I had not seen the play. I had not read her memoir. I had not seen the movie. My grandmother used to tell me stories about growing up during the Great Depression. She once said that a cousin saw Gypsy Rose Lee perform and she took 15 minutes to peel off a single glove, but she was so damn good at it, he gladly would have given her 15 more. I've always been interested in, for lack of a better phrase, bad women in history, women who on first glance are perceived to be of bad character or questionable virtue or subversive, but actually are just revolutionary. They're ahead of their time and forward-thinking in ways that startled people back then but should be celebrated and appreciated now.
Q: How did you manage to capture the range of her contradictory qualities?
A: She appealed to all people. I like to say if Lady Gaga and Dorothy Parker had a secret love child, it would have been Gypsy Rose Lee. Here's this woman who can make a grand dramatic entrance wearing a full length (evening gown) made entirely of orchids and then the next night she's performing some very naughty tricks with her pet monkey for her burlesque friends in the back of her dressing room. Here's gangsters and politicians and artists and New York literati all praising her. Even Eleanor Roosevelt.
Q: Why do you think burlesque has had a revival?
A: I think it's the spirit of fun, sly, winking, coy, innocence that burlesque brings. Gypsy was a sophisticated self-satirist. She had this sort of contagious delight in the comedy of sex. In this age of hardcore porn and everything in your face, there's something really refreshing about the subtlety and the comedy of performance. Fifty years before Madonna, Gypsy knew how to make performance out of desire – and that whole idea that we want most what we can't have.
Book-signing preview
Karen Abbott. 7 p.m. Jan. 18. $15-$28. Ballroom Book Bash with music by Bernadette Seacrest & Her Provocateurs. Highland Inn's Ballroom Lounge, 644 N. Highland Ave., Atlanta. 404-874-5756. www.thehighlandinn.com. Tickets ($28 includes a signed first-edition copy of the book) may be purchased at www.acappellabooks.com or at A Cappella Books, 484-C Moreland Ave. 404-681-5128.
About the Author
