American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee by Karen Abbott Read Free Book Online

player before the age of twelve. As a teenager during Prohibition, he partnered with his neighborhood pharmacist to sell illegal alcohol. Michael Todd is his own creation just as Gypsy Rose Lee is hers; he’d said to hell with “Avrom Goldbogen” a long time ago. He understands why she never stops moving, her fear that the past will come galloping forward and override the present.
    The past is already too close, panting against her neck, lurking inside her mailbox.
    “Dear Louise,” Mother wrote recently from Tucson, while on the road with her female lover.
    Well I waited for you to write to me.… and as I told you I only had ten dollars left. We sold our radio for six dollars got a second hand tire and drove as far as we could.… Now for God’s sakes get me some money here as soon as you can.… I had to sleep in the car and I have had darn little to eat in the last three days. No matter how you feel about me or my plans right now I must have help and at once. I would not ask you unless it was absolutely necessary. Love, Mother.
    Gypsy doesn’t quite trust Mike’s endearments—Mother taught her well in the ways of both money and men—but the sound of them still lands soft in her ears, looks lovely typed across the page. “I thought you would like to know that your mind is more beautiful than your body,” reads one missive from Chicago. “Will see you Wednesday. Be good—but only till Wednesday.” It is the last thing she needs right now, to get involved with a married man who already hasone girlfriend on the side, especially since she’s still technically married herself. Matters of the heart are not immune to her pragmatic judgment, and she revels in the irony that most defines her: the great sex symbol is, at her core, asexual. She has to be; one can’t discover the comedy in sex unless observing it from a wide, safe distance. It is smarter to make a living from sex than to incorporate it into her life, but she makes careful exceptions: sex for protection, sex for position, sex for power—sex for any purpose that will further her creation while leaving the girl inside it alone.
    Business with Mike is pragmatic, but not so a romance. She knows she should listen to her instincts and not his sweet, sly promises. Besides, no matter what his letters say, she can’t shake the sense that he is never more absent than when he is by her side.

Chapter Five
    However paradoxical this may seem, a child is at the mother’s disposal. The mother can feel herself the center of attention, for her child’s eyes follow her everywhere. A child cannot run away from her as her own mother once did. A child can be brought up so that it becomes what she wants it to be
    — ALICE MILLER,
THE DRAMA OF THE GIFTED CHILD
Hollywood, California, 1916
    Here they were again, Rose and June, two states away from home, where the Baby’s star could begin its rightful ascent. After her debut at Grandpa Thompson’s Knights of Pythias Lodge, she performed for the Elks and Masons and Shriners and every fraternal organization around Seattle, tumbling across hard linoleum, split-leaping from wall to wall, collecting calluses along the knuckles of her toes. Each time, Rose talked Charlie Thompson into playing the piano and convincing his lodge brothers to attend, although he remained skeptical about the whole enterprise. For these local bookings Louise trouped, too, occasionally scoring bit parts independent of June’s developing vaudeville act. In a stage production of
Blue Bird
she played a frog, while June was a good fairy and Rose a witch. Usually, though, Louise shuffled along in her too-tight striped skirt and labored through “Hard-boiled Rose,” the points of her teeth spiking her bottom lip as she talk-sang.

    Baby June in her toe shoes, age three. (photo credit 5.1)
    Small concerts and benefits clogged their calendar, and at one of the latter Rose gripped June’s forearm and pulled her to the front entrance. “Come quickly,