Gypsy Rose Lee

Gypsy Rose Lee, born Rose Louise Hovick on January 8, 1911, in Seattle, Washington, was an American burlesque entertainer, actress, author, and playwright who became one of the most recognizable figures in American popular entertainment. She died on April 26, 1970. Known to her family as Louise, she was the daughter of Rose Thompson Hovick and Norwegian-American John Olaf Hovick, a newspaper advertising salesman and reporter at The Seattle Times, who married on May 28, 1910, and divorced on August 20, 1915. Her younger sister, born in 1912, became the actress June Havoc. Their mother later married Judson Brennerman, a traveling salesman, on May 26, 1916, at a Unitarian church in Seattle.

June initially supported the family through vaudeville appearances, billed as the "Tiniest Toe Dancer in the World" from the age of two and a half, and later appeared in short films directed by Hal Roach. Louise was frequently left behind while her mother and sister traveled. June's elopement with dancer Bobby Reed in December 1928, following a performance at the Jayhawk Theatre in Topeka, Kansas, effectively ended the family act. With Louise's singing and dancing talents insufficient to sustain the act on their own, she eventually found her footing in burlesque. An accidental wardrobe malfunction — a shoulder strap giving way and causing her gown to fall — drew an enthusiastic audience response that she subsequently incorporated as a deliberate centerpiece of her performance.

Adopting the stage name Gypsy Rose Lee, she distinguished herself from other burlesque performers through a more casual, wit-driven approach to striptease that emphasized humor and intellectual recitation over the bump-and-grind style common to the genre. She became one of the biggest stars at Minsky's Burlesque, where she performed for four years, and was frequently arrested during raids on the Minsky brothers' shows. During the Great Depression, Lee spoke at union meetings in support of New York laborers, and activist Harry Fisher noted that her talks drew among the largest audiences of any speaker. She approved of H. L. Mencken's coinage of the term "ecdysiast" as a more dignified descriptor for her profession. Her style of intellectual recitation while stripping was parodied in the number "Zip!" in Rodgers and Hart's Pal Joey, a production in which her sister June Havoc appeared opposite Gene Kelly. Lee performed an abbreviated version of her act in the 1943 film Stage Door Canteen.

Her Broadway career spanned from 1932 to 1942 and included appearances in Melody, the Ziegfeld Follies of 1931, Du Barry Was a Lady, and the burlesque revue Star and Garter. The last of these, a 1942 musical revue, was co-produced with film producer Michael Todd, with whom she had an affair. She also appeared in and wrote the book for the comedy The Naked Genius. Billed as Louise Hovick, she made five Hollywood films in 1937 and 1938, but critical reception of her acting was largely negative and she returned to New York.

Lee's literary output was substantial. In 1941 she wrote the mystery thriller The G-String Murders, which was adapted into the 1943 film Lady of Burlesque starring Barbara Stanwyck. While some attributed the novel in part to ghost-writer Craig Rice, others pointed to manuscripts and Lee's own correspondence as evidence that she wrote a significant portion herself, with guidance from Rice and editor George Davis. A breach-of-contract suit filed in December 1942 by Dorothy Wheelock, associate editor of Harper's Bazaar, alleged that Lee had cancelled a collaboration agreement and published the finished work under her own name through Simon & Schuster; the case was settled out of court. Lee's second mystery novel, Mother Finds a Body, was published in 1942. Her 1957 memoir, Gypsy: A Memoir, provided the basis for the 1959 stage musical Gypsy, with music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and a book by Arthur Laurents. The show and its 1962 film adaptation provided Lee with a reliable income stream in her later years.

Lee married three times. Her first marriage, to Arnold "Bob" Mizzy on August 25, 1937, took place at the insistence of Twentieth Century-Fox production head Darryl F. Zanuck; she obtained a divorce in 1941 on grounds of cruelty, though biographer Noralee Frankel suggests the charges were agreed upon to allow an uncontested proceeding. In 1942 she married actor William Alexander Kirkland, and while still married to him she gave birth on December 11, 1944, to a son fathered by film producer Otto Preminger. The child was named Erik Lee and has been known at various times as Erik Kirkland, Erik de Diego, and Erik Lee Preminger. Lee and Kirkland divorced in 1944. Her third marriage, to Julio de Diego in 1948, also ended in divorce. In 1940, Lee purchased a 26-room, seven-bath townhouse with a private courtyard on East 63rd Street in Manhattan. She also rented a ten-room apartment on West End Avenue for her mother, who operated a boardinghouse for women there. Rose Thompson Hovick died of colon cancer in 1954. Following their mother's death, both Lee and Havoc felt free to write about her; June subsequently published her own accounts in Early Havoc and More Havoc.