As a child, she literally didn’t know how old she was; her mother had a succession of forged birth certificates for her and her sister, depending on what age she needed them to be, depending on whether it was for child labour laws or for getting free train rides for children. Even her grave has the wrong birth year on it. Whether her autobiography, and the subsequent adaptations thereof, portrayed it with complete accuracy or not is doubtful, but still; it is indisputable that she came from a difficult childhood and lived an unconventional adult life.
Her younger sister June was the talented one, it seemed. She was left at home at first while June made films for Hal Roach. Then, the sisters toured the vaudeville circuit. When June eloped, possibly to escape their mother’s control, the act fell apart. Rose Louise began stripping and took the name Gypsy Rose Lee. She became the most famous stripper of all time, as famous for her wit as her body. To the point that the movie made of her mystery novel downplayed her authorship almost entirely, changing the main character’s name. Which is weird, since it is still in point of fact a movie about strippers. But a specific stripper? That’s taboo; you might picture her naked, not as fully-clothed Barbara Stanwyck.
There’s a belief, as it happens, that she didn’t write the book anyway, but this seems to be unsupported by the evidence. She had a lot of help, but there’s documentation showing that she wrote at least large amounts of it herself. We know that she was a smart woman, though we also know she was only sketchily educated. (Better than her sister, but that means “not actually taught to read by stage hands. There’s a reason Mother Rose is the archetype for Stage Mother.) But to this day, Sir Paul McCartney can’t read music, and no one suggests he doesn’t write his own songs. I guess it’s because taking your clothes off is in a different category from writing mystery novels.
H. L. Mencken coined the word “ecdysiast” for Georgia Southern, another striptease artist of the time. It was supposed to be “more dignified.” It’s from ecdysis, Ancient Greek for “to take off,” currently used in entomology to mean molting of exoskeletons. Which, um, okay. It kind of interests me that people were willing to enjoy the art but not willing to use the wide array of terms already extant for it because they weren’t, again, “dignified” enough.
From what I can tell, she had the career she did because she wasn’t equipped to do much. She had a minimal education and not much talent. She acted in a few movies as Louise Hovick, and she wasn’t very good. Honestly, even her performance in The Trouble With Angels is Not Great, and she’s not really called on to do much more than be Gypsy Rose Lee at the girls in front of a disapproving Rosalind Russell. I wonder what she could’ve done with more education. And maybe a better mother.
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