Schlock teaser

The somewhat straightlaced theatre-going audiences of 1880s America, eager for performances by European artistes like Jenny Lind and solid, home-grown, classical actors such as Otis Skinner, were hardly prepared for the on-stage vulgarity that the (usually) Russian and Polish immigrant impressarios, with their particular nous for show-biz, were to unleash into the saloons and fleapits across the young nation.

Of the many weird acts that comprised Vaudeville — the bearded ladies, fiddling baboons, human cannonballs and, apparently, ‘comics wearing enormous rubber phalluses’ — none can have been so strange, have kicked against so many pricks, so to speak, than little Louise, the daughter of the echt pushy stage-mother of Vaudeville’s even more raucous baby, Burlesque.

Louise was a plain, puppet-like moppet referred to as Plug, whom Momma Hovick forged, with vulcanic tenacity, into . . . Miss — drum-roll — Gypsy — drum-roll — Rose — drum-roll — Lee. Such was the name by which the teenage breadwinner of this disturbingly functional family (lacking men, but including a jealousy-riven prettier younger sister who became the actress June Havoc) would eventually introduce her couture-clad bumps and grinds.

Gypsy didn’t start off with so felicitous a moniker. For her stripping debut in 1931 at the Republic Theatre in New York she was billed, bafflingly, as Ada Onion from Bermuda. Arrested the next day, she was no doubt ecstatic to find — along with substantial gifts from gentlemen admirers, including ‘one live bunny and a case of ginger ale’— her photograph, wearing ‘a body-suit with flowers over her private parts’ plastered on the cover of the Evening Graphic. Meanwhile Momma Hovick, despite wailing ‘my baby is innocent and pure’ was banned from the theatre by producer Minsky, whose enigmatic reason was that Momma’s ‘river did not run to the sea’.

At a time when Gypsy’s main rivals, Lili St Cyr, Margie Hart and Sally Rand — the three bona fide, or perhaps bona fleshy, strippers, and each one the punch line to the verses of ‘Zip’, the Rodgers and Hart song that sends up ‘Miss Lee’ (though in this book only Rand gets a mention, and barely, to coin a phrase, at that) — were hard at it taking it all off, Gypsy, deceptively demure in an elaborate Charles James ‘breakaway gown’, topped off by a Lily Daché chapeau, didn’t.