American Rose_ A Nation Laid Bare_ The Life And Times Of Gypsy Rose Lee Part 6

"Shut up!" she said. "She'll always be a baby. She'll never grow up. Never, do you hear me?" He stood there and took it, using his forearms as a s.h.i.+eld while her nails tore at his skin. Sometimes he disappeared after these episodes, just long enough for Mother and June to miss him. Louise wondered what they would do if one day he didn't come back.

"What fights?" June said, bringing her back to the moment. "She just slugs me. It's always one slug and out. That's no fight."

Louise considered her next words, weighing what they might give and what they might take, and the fact that she couldn't empathize with June without betraying Mother.

"I know how you feel," she said, finally. "About the act, I mean."

"You do?" June said. Her mouth widened, cracking the line of drying blood. "But you don't have to do the act-you never have."

Louise sighed. As if she needed to be reminded she wasn't necessary.

"That's right," she said. "All that sweating, practicing every minute. I've watched you enjoying your broken toes and scratches. Dancing so hard you black out in the wings. No, you do the act because you enjoy all that. I never have and what happens? You don't enjoy the act any more than I do now. Do you? So, we sit here in the same bathroom with the same problem."

The sisters regarded each other for a long, silent moment. This was the first confidence they had ever shared.

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Louise consulted her tea leaves. Peering into the cup, letting all other objects around her recede, a vision appeared that she couldn't unsee. A steel beam, like a willful, deliberate streak of lightning, shot from the back of a truck and aimed straight at someone she knew, a former Newsboy Songster traveling in the next car. It pierced him, sheering his tendons and veins, severing his head from his neck. Three days later, through the vaudeville circuit grapevine, she learned the boy had been in a fatal accident, so similar to her premonition it was as if she'd ch.o.r.eographed the death herself.

She never read tea leaves again.

Instead, Rose adopted the superst.i.tion. Her tea leaves signaled ominous days for the stops in Wichita and Kansas City, but the grouch bag was light and they needed to work. Their bookings were miserable-one theater manager threatened to cancel the act on the ground that they no longer resembled their press photos-but there was, as Louise later put it, "one bright spot"; the blankets on the hotel beds were the nicest she'd ever seen, soft, pure white wool. Rose decided that Louise should make coats out of them. Their trunk was too full, so Rose wrapped them around her body and wore her beaver coat on top. No one in the hotel lobby suspected a thing when they left.

In Omaha, their next stop, Louise made coats for everyone, including her monkey, Gigolo. His had a shawl collar, dolman sleeves, and a tam-o'-shanter to match. On closing night, she put Gigolo to bed in his new outfit. She found him in the morning, lifeless and limp, a mess of gorgeous wool coiled tight around his neck. He died because of her, she realized, and began to cry quietly, so no one could hear. Louise promised G.o.d she would never again take anything that didn't belong to her, even if she felt she deserved it.

Mother soothed Louise, promising to get her a new monkey, but her fights with Gordon escalated. They had been laid off for four weeks and had trouble getting booked anywhere, despite Gordon's connections in Detroit.

"Everything going out, nothing coming in," he said. "We're d.a.m.ned near broke."

"And whose fault is that?" Mother retorted. "The act is as good as it ever was. It's your fault we're not back on the Orpheum Circuit, where we belong. A fine man you are, blaming your failure on a baby-a child."

June found solace with the boys in the act, shooting c.r.a.ps and playing tag, and Louise buried herself in her books. No one knew about her secret hiding place next to the Dixieland Hotel. She spent hours prowling the aisles of the Seven Arts Book Store, where batik scarves looped brightly across the walls and exotic-looking young men talked in low, sure voices about F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce and Carl Van Vechten. She eavesdropped, memorizing fragments of their conversations: "His very lack of pretension is pretentious...having asthma doesn't make a hack writer another Proust." The manager was young, too, and he didn't seem to mind that Louise had browsed for a week without buying anything. She learned that his name was George Davis.

"Have you read Shakespeare's sonnets?" he asked her one day, handing her a cloth-covered book.

"I don't care much about reading plays," she said, making her voice low and deliberate, unfurling each word. "Being in the theater myself I-"

"These are poems," George said evenly.

Louise didn't like poems but she liked George Davis. He had kind eyes and an encouraging smile, and he spoke to her as if they were equals. She bought the book with her lunch money and ran back to the Dixieland Hotel, heading straight for the alcove of desks behind the elevators. She yearned to speak in an important voice about characters and themes, to laugh at jokes understood only by the exceptional few, to become someone who inspired second glances and curious whispers. She wanted to write-but what? About herself, maybe-not who she was now but who she'd become: the rich husband, the money money money, the life she would seize for herself when the moment was right and ripe.

On a piece of hotel stationery, she wrote: PAGE ONEScene OneI enter.

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That night, hours into the hollering, Gordon pulled on his overcoat. "You've told me to get out for the last time, Rose," he said. Louise had never heard his voice so angry or certain. "I'm leaving, and so help me G.o.d, I'm not coming back." He left behind only a photograph of Rose in a leather frame, set on the bureau. Mother secluded herself in her room with her curtains drawn, weeping and wheezing, and the air grew thick with the scent of her asthma powder. Three of the boys slept on the floor so Louise and June could share their bed; no one wanted to disturb Rose. They brought her food that went uneaten. Ten days later, her eyes still swollen and her hair unwashed, she summoned all of them and announced they were going to New York. She put a down payment on a secondhand Studebaker after realizing that train travel consumed much of their profit, and ticket fares, unlike cars, had to be paid for in cash, all at once. "I'm going to start all over again," Louise heard Rose whisper to herself. "Alone with my two babies against the world."

They settled, along with their menagerie, costumes, and props, in the Langwell Hotel on 44th Street and Sixth Avenue. Rose sent the native New Yorkers in the act to stay with their parents so she could save s.p.a.ce and money on the hotel room. The two remaining boys slept on a daybed in the sitting room, and Rose, Louise, and June shared the bedroom. It wasn't clear how much longer the current crop of boys would last, anyway. Meals could no longer be counted on. June was so thin she was nearly translucent, and Louise was hopeful that she might finally lose some weight. Mother gave them pep talks. "We'll just have to tighten our belts, girls," she said. "It's only temporary, until we get going." Neither Louise nor June asked what happened to all of the money that once weighted Mother's grouch bag, and they never learned the truth. They had repaid Grandpa Thompson's numerous loans, bought him a Model T Ford sedan, fixed the roof of the Seattle home, supplemented Big Lady's and Belle's meager savings, bought the dogs an entire wardrobe of wool sweaters and red leather shoes with lace-up legs, and spent untold thousands on costumes and transporting their elaborate collection of props. But still, they should have had plenty left over. "That's interesting," June said eighty years later. "I don't know. We had lean times-very lean times."

By eleven in the morning, Rose had the girls up and dressed and ready to make the rounds. Louise noticed a marked difference in the way the booking agents treated Mother, and she felt humiliated for all three of them. Gordon had sat on the edges of their desks, slapped backs, and handed out cigars. If they made a lowball offer, he laughed and walked out the door. With Mother, they continued to bark on the phone while sifting through sc.r.a.pbooks and piles of faded clippings, and barely glanced at the old, lucrative Orpheum contracts she "accidentally" dropped on the desk. When they made a lowball offer, she shoved the papers back into her briefcase and spoke in a huff. "Why, that's an insult," she said. "Two hundred and twenty-five dollars for eight people! You know our salary and you know how our little act goes over. You've been booking us long enough to-"

"Take it or leave it," was the typical response. "Plenty of acts around will grab it if you don't."

And so they took all of them, at theaters with moldy curtains and rank lobbies and marquees dotted with dead bulbs: one day at the Victoria Theatre in Lansford, Pennsylvania, for $116.67; two days at Central Park Theatre in Chicago for $175; four days in Los Angeles for just $70 total. One of the boys, finally fed up with Rose's antics and the dwindling crowds, decided to quit. "It is understood and agreed upon," Rose scribbled on the back of the contract, "that Henry Elias is remaining here in Los Angeles with his own free will, transportation has been offered him by Rose E. Hovick to New York City. This he has refused." Louise and June stared out at the audience, the seats more empty than full. It gaped back at them, a wide black mouth with so many missing teeth.

Hoping to inject some new energy into the act, Rose scoured the streets for talent, telling each boy she'd get him onto the Orpheum Circuit-they wouldn't believe the paychecks, the acclaim, the adoration of the audience. "The experience will be so valuable," Rose promised, "and of course the prestige of appearing with Dainty June. You realize, of course, that my baby has headlined all over the country?" A seventeen-year-old boy named Bobby Reed signed on. He "danced like a bubble" and played the saxophone, and he seemed to be auditioning for June alone. Suddenly, Louise noticed, June wasn't running around outside like a savage in between rehearsals. She and Bobby practiced separately in the wings or climbed to the organ loft when they thought no one was watching.

Louise still played "The d.u.c.h.ess," holding herself apart and above, but she found herself drawn to another seventeen-year-old, Stanley Gla.s.s. June considered him a "snoot," but clearly she didn't understand the difference between self-confidence and conceit. True, he was a bit boastful, and did "show-offy" things like changing all of his money into ones and folding a ten over the thick wad of bills-habits Louise told him were "cheap-looking." But he was ambitious and clever and performed his solo beneath a lobster scope, a metal disk that fitted over a spotlight and was rotated via an electric motor. The contraption spliced the light and seemed to slow it down so it looked as if he were dancing underwater-a sure showstopper, and he wasn't afraid to say so.

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Louise, "Bobby Reed," and June. (photo credit 16.2) (photo credit 16.2) "I like being with you," he told Louise one night, while they were sitting together in the stage alley at a theater in Trenton. "You aren't like most of the girls I know, giggling all the time and always talking about themselves. I like serious girls."

The moon bloomed full and bright, and she leaned against the wall so her face dipped into shadow. She was shy, suddenly, and acutely aware of her double chin.

"I have a very serious nature," she said in her most sophisticated voice, the one she'd been practicing since meeting George Davis. "Maybe that's because I read a lot. Do you like to read?"

She'd lost him. He was tap dancing now, listening only to the staccato symphony of his shoes.

"Thus by day my limbs, by night my mind," she recited, "for thee, and for myself no quiet find-that's from Shakespeare's sonnets. Have you ever read them?"

He spun a circle and stopped short, his lithe body outlined against the moon.

"This sure is a dumpy theater, isn't it?" he said. "I never would have joined this crumby act if your mother hadn't told me we were going on the Orpheum Circuit."

"Oh, we'll be going back. It's just that vaudeville is in a slump right now. Mother says that's because of the talking pictures."

He had big plans, he told her: his own professional act, called Stanley Gla.s.s and Company. He'd find a partner, a pretty, dainty girl who could sing and dance. They'd practice right outside the Palace Theatre in New York and catch the eye of the most important agents in town. Would Louise mind humming "Me and My Shadow" so he could show her a few steps? She complied, and he launched into a figure eight and over-the-top, fell into his knee drops, sprang back up, and executed nip-ups and after-beats. He became a blur and she tried to capture each frame of his movement, the right angle of his muscled arms, the perfect arc of his kicks. She felt him land beside her, heaving, soaked through his s.h.i.+rt with sweat. His hand covered hers, and he searched the shadow for her face. "Quickly, like the fluttering of the moth around the electric bulb over the stage door sign, he kissed me," Louise remembered. "My mouth burned from the light touch of his lips." For just a moment she relinquished control. As if on cue Rose appeared, her body silhouetted inside the stage door. Louise broke free and scuttled back in the theatre, catching Rose's look as she pa.s.sed, and all those years of her mother's advice rose like cream in her mind.

She decided she both agreed and disagreed with her mother. A boy couldn't get you pregnant just from a kiss; how silly and naive that sounded, now that she was older. But Mother was right about the power they held as women, about the one currency that never lost its value. She would give it away whenever and to whomever she saw fit, but always-and only-for something in return.

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They continued on their tenuous, makes.h.i.+ft circuit, each theater shabbier than the last, one-night stands in Buffalo, Sedalia, North Platte, Toledo, Trenton, and Appleton, Wisconsin. At the Folies Bergere on Atlantic City's boardwalk they were fifth on the bill, below both the Three Ormonde Sisters (tagline: "A Wee Drop of Scotch of the 'Grab Bag Show'"), and Evelyn Nesbit, the former Manhattan ingenue-now, at age forty-three, eight years older than Rose. Even Bingo, Bank Night, and Dish Night had higher billing. They had long layoffs in between when the grouch bag got even lighter, the boys angrier, and June more distant and cagey. Rose, perhaps wis.h.i.+ng for a self-fulfilling prophecy, decided to change the act's name for a gig in Albuquerque, New Mexico: "Dainty June and the Happy Gang Revue" performed at the Kimo Theater.

Rose feigned a positive att.i.tude, insisting that G.o.d was watching over their little act, that He wouldn't "knock vaudeville out from under us." But Louise knew her mother better than anyone; she alone could follow the seismic s.h.i.+ft of her moods, the weather-vane spin of her thoughts. Improbable as it seemed, she was now nearly Mother's age when she'd escaped from the convent so long ago, when Rose first learned the importance of timing: when to latch onto someone and when to let go; when to beg and when to threaten; when to yield and when to take charge; when there was no choice left but to disappear. Louise might not sing or dance as well as June but she had inherited Mother's gifts of timing and tenacity, the ability to walk into a picture just as the shutter clicked and smile until the flash went dim. Rose was falling and Louise would rise to meet her halfway, accept a permanent exchange of innocence for control. It was a matter of both necessity and choice. She wanted to become her mother's equal, her other, willing half, as much as she had to.

Louise tried on her new role slowly, an inch at a time, since this was one costume she could never take off. When they were out in public, she looped her arm through Rose's and whooped and hollered so loudly that June slunk away, mortified, to the other side of the street. Mother loved the attention, and Louise would deliver it to her. When the two girls ran into Gordon by chance in New York City, June jumped into his arms while Louise regarded him, warily, from a distance. "Mother will be so glad to see you," June said, breathing into his neck, forgetting, for the moment, that she was now fifteen years old. "She thinks you're dead." Gordon set her down and stepped away. "I never want to see her again," he said. "Never, do you hear me?" June hid her face in her hands and wept, but Louise was thinking of Mother. She decided that Rose should never know the truth. And if any man ever professed his love for her, she would recognize the words as lies.

When Mother finally lost it, when she did the worst thing she'd ever done in her life-so far, at least-Louise willed herself to understand. These were desperate times, their entire world creeping away from them, and Louise had to wonder how she would have reacted in the same situation, if she were the oldest, the mother, the one ostensibly in charge. An unnamed hotel manager in an unnamed city affronted Rose in an unspecified way. He insulted her daughters, or threatened eviction because their room was overrun with boys, or looked at Rose in a way that dredged up every sore moment with Daddy Jack and Daddy Bub and Murray Gordon and the rest she never cared to name. Louise had to ask herself: if she were Mother under these circ.u.mstances, would she have stood by pa.s.sively and withstood yet another indignity? Or would she have allowed her best instincts to meld with her worst, thinking of her daughters, broken and diminished, while she closed her eyes tightly and pushed that manager out the window?

The why didn't matter after the fact, only that the police accepted Rose's alibi of self-defense, and that the murder was never spoken of again. Louise honored this pact even later, when Rose knew all of her secrets and threatened to remember them out loud.

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And Louise was there for Rose when the end finally came. On December 28, 1928, after performing at the Jayhawk Theatre in Topeka, Kansas, Louise heard her mother scream, a fierce, high-pitched keening that sounded vaguely inhuman. A note rested on the windowsill, and Louise saw her sister's childish scrawl: We were married two weeks ago in North Platte so you can't have it annulled. Please don't try to find me. I can't go on doing the same act all my life. I'd rather die. Bobby loves me...

Louise let Mother weep into her shoulder and cry for the baby she had once tried to destroy. "She's only a baby," Rose said, over and over. "She's thirteen, Louise. Thirteen years old! She can't leave me like this." Louise didn't remind her mother of June's true age or stop her when she reached for her coat. It wouldn't be Rose without a dramatic denouement, and Louise would be waiting when she returned.

Two detectives arrived, their flashlights sweeping golden streaks across each corner, beneath the gnarled branches of leafless trees. "She can't have gone far," Rose told them, her voice trailing down the street. "She isn't very bright and won't know what to do." Louise pictured her sister hiding in some slim wedge of s.p.a.ce, willing herself to be smaller than she was.

Mother never stopped talking. "He's been in trouble before," she said. "He's just a tramp traveling around with burlesque companies. That's all he's ever known before-burlesque! My poor baby. Oh, my poor baby! Thank G.o.d there are men like you in the world to help a poor widow."

The officers escorted her to the police station, told her to sit tight. Before long, they returned with Bobby and presented him to Rose. June was nowhere to be found.

"Marriage isn't the electric chair," one officer reasoned. "I would like to see you and Bobby shake hands and be friends."

Bobby took a step toward Rose and extended his hand. She reached inside her coat and pulled out a small automatic pistol. Ten inches from his chest she fired once, twice. The gun jumped in her hand but no bullet discharged. She hadn't unhinged the safety lock. The detective ripped the gun away and locked her inside barrel arms, but she would not be confined. She wrestled free and tackled Bobby, kicking his s.h.i.+ns, pounding his head, scratching at his eyes. The entire night staff approached cautiously, as if closing in on a rabid, feral animal, and then it was over. Rose lay flat on her back, the rhythm of her screams ceding gradually, like a tree swing slowing to a stop after a child jumps off.

When Rose returned, Louise was waiting. She took her mother back into her arms and held her upright. "You're all I have now, Louise," Rose whispered, breathing hot against her neck. "Promise me you'll never leave me. Promise me that, dear." She gripped Louise's arms and pulled back far enough to look at her directly. "Say you'll never leave me! Promise me!"

Louise stared back. They were even, now, shoulder to shoulder, eye to eye.

"No, Mother," she said. "I can't promise that." Rose fell into her arms again, but Louise was already gone-thinking of orange chiffon and ostrich feathers, the sweet refrain of "Me and My Shadow," the spotlight's halo encircling her every spin and stride. She thought of June, lost but free free, and in that moment wanted only to be one step ahead of her.

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Gypsy with Mike Todd and George S. Kaufman. (photo credit 16.3) (photo credit 16.3)

Chapter Seventeen

All I ever wanted was to have one husband and one house and one garden and a lot of children.-ACTRESS JOAN BLONDELL Highland Mills and New York City, 19421943 The slow descent down those steps finally ends, and in the roomful of spectators she becomes Gypsy Rose Lee again. At the makes.h.i.+ft altar, she jokes about feeling like "an Aztec virgin being prepared for sacrifice" and cries as the service concludes. "My Gawd," Georgia Sothern says, patting her back, "what a performance!"

Gypsy doesn't smile when she cuts the cake with a knife the length of a machete, and smiles hugely, falsely, when she and her new husband, Bill Kirkland, pose for a photograph with their mothers that will soon appear in Life Life magazine. Gypsy wrenches away from Rose, as if her mother's skin is painful to the touch, and Rose leans in, resting her chin on Gypsy's shoulder, closing a hand around her daughter's neck. magazine. Gypsy wrenches away from Rose, as if her mother's skin is painful to the touch, and Rose leans in, resting her chin on Gypsy's shoulder, closing a hand around her daughter's neck.

After removing the grapes from her hair, Gypsy dresses in flannel, slathers herself with Vicks VapoRub, and picks up a book, ignoring the champagne and flowers Bill sets by the bed. Ten months later gossip columnist Walter Winch.e.l.l is the first to break the news. The demise of their relations.h.i.+p makes him so disillusioned, Bill Kirkland claims, that he will "stay a bachelor forever." Rose, as always, offers her own unsolicited opinion. "Sorry you are having trouble with Bill," she writes. "It must be your fault."

Mike Todd is still married to Bertha and seems intent on remaining so, but he never stops teasing Gypsy with his letters: "I miss you," he writes, "so don't marry any actors." The situation brings to mind her mother's easy gift for uprooting men, the same way Grandpa Thompson used to weed his garden. Rose's ruthless instinct lives inside Gypsy, to both her occasional frustration and frequent relief, but with Mike its edges are softened, its sting mild. She has no idea how to unweave him from her life, or even if she wants to.

They are together again, on his terms, and he is producing her play, The Naked Genius The Naked Genius, t.i.tled after the way she signs off letters to her editor. It strikes Gypsy that the saga behind The Naked Genius The Naked Genius is more compelling than the play itself, what with its plot that manages to be at once semiautobiographical and contrived-yet another instance of her mining her past to ensure she'll never relive it. A stripper named Gypsy hires a ghostwriter to pen her memoirs, a surprise critical and commercial hit, and she becomes the unlikely toast of New York's literati. She falls in love with her slick, unavailable press agent and, to spite him, decides to marry her wealthy book publisher, who promises to save her from a lowly life in burlesque. is more compelling than the play itself, what with its plot that manages to be at once semiautobiographical and contrived-yet another instance of her mining her past to ensure she'll never relive it. A stripper named Gypsy hires a ghostwriter to pen her memoirs, a surprise critical and commercial hit, and she becomes the unlikely toast of New York's literati. She falls in love with her slick, unavailable press agent and, to spite him, decides to marry her wealthy book publisher, who promises to save her from a lowly life in burlesque.

By now Gypsy is a literary force, a self-fulfilling prophecy she finds both thrilling and ludicrous. Here she is, the author of two novels, The G-String Murders The G-String Murders and and Mother Finds a Body Mother Finds a Body (the latter also based on true events), several (the latter also based on true events), several New Yorker New Yorker articles, and now a Broadway-bound play, her only academic degree a "Doctor of Strip Teasing" issued by the Minsky brothers. After the successful adaptation of articles, and now a Broadway-bound play, her only academic degree a "Doctor of Strip Teasing" issued by the Minsky brothers. After the successful adaptation of The G-String Murders The G-String Murders into the movie into the movie Lady of Burlesque Lady of Burlesque, Hollywood has kept a close eye on her literary efforts. Pulitzer Prizewinning playwright George S. Kaufman signs on to direct the play. Gypsy hopes Mike will give her the lead, but he has someone else in mind: the movie star Joan Blondell.

A marquee name, Gypsy has to admit, and she understands Joan instinctively just as she understands Mike. Their ambitions grow from the same restless place, tick to the same frenzied clock. Joan's parents trouped the vaudeville circuits she remembers all too well, tucking their daughter into a stage trunk instead of a crib, telling her the road was education enough. When vaudeville died she turned not to burlesque but to beauty pageants, winning the 1926 Miss Dallas crown under the stage name Rosebud Blondell. Three years later, back to being Joan, she scored her break in the movie Penny Arcade Penny Arcade and went on to star in twenty-seven films in thirty-six months. She calls herself "the fizz on the soda," a nickname that is as fitting offscreen as on. Stories abound about catfights backstage-cursing, hair pulling, choking, head banging, all of it-and she once bashed a producer with a silver hand mirror. But she has four key things Gypsy lacks: blond ringlets, a large bust, blue eyes that dominate a pet.i.te kitten face, and acting talent. Gypsy soothes herself the best way she knows how, by imagining the size of her royalty checks. and went on to star in twenty-seven films in thirty-six months. She calls herself "the fizz on the soda," a nickname that is as fitting offscreen as on. Stories abound about catfights backstage-cursing, hair pulling, choking, head banging, all of it-and she once bashed a producer with a silver hand mirror. But she has four key things Gypsy lacks: blond ringlets, a large bust, blue eyes that dominate a pet.i.te kitten face, and acting talent. Gypsy soothes herself the best way she knows how, by imagining the size of her royalty checks.

Rehearsals begin in August 1943, at the old Maxine Elliott's Theatre on 39th Street, and at first all of the princ.i.p.als are in good spirits. Joan looks ravis.h.i.+ng if somewhat incongruous, like an amorous kewpie doll. Kaufman has doctored the script-it's less of a collaboration than Gypsy would have liked, but who is she to argue with the master?-and on paper, The Naked Genius The Naked Genius works. works.

But the lines, spoken aloud, seem twice removed from dialogue that might occur in real life; the plot more Dali than Eugene O'Neill. Kaufman sits in the front row, grinning oddly-a nervous muscular reaction, it turns out, rather than an expression of pleasure or approval. Gypsy tries to be positive, praising Joan's ebullient delivery and Kaufman's sure-handed direction, but each rehearsal is worse than the last. It is a slow-motion unraveling that recalls the worst phase of her life, the unspeakable stretch of time before she broke away from Mother, those lost days when she went places and did things that no one a.s.sociates with Gypsy Rose Lee, slippery memories she can't bear to relive....

One morning Gypsy wakes up and decides not to return to the theater.

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Mademoiselle Fifi, another of Billy Minsky's brilliant creations. (photo credit 17.1) (photo credit 17.1)

Chapter Eighteen

When a burlesque producer is asked in court about the morals of his workers, the answer always is, "Some virgins, no professionals."-JOSEPH MITCh.e.l.l New York City, 19251928 It was true that a certain sect of uptown snubbed the Minskys, and that certain detractors gleefully reported that their "bold invasion of Broadway is all over," but as soon as the Hawaiian octet disbanded and the uncharacteristically svelte chorines shuffled away, the brothers turned out the lights on the Park Music Hall and found a rightful home north of 14th Street. Billy Minsky was eager to open as soon as possible; mourning his failures merely got in the way of learning from them. The experiment at Columbus Circle would neither define nor destroy his name.

This latest venture of "les freres Minsky," as the press dubbed the brothers, was called Minsky's Apollo (not to be confused with Minsky," as the press dubbed the brothers, was called Minsky's Apollo (not to be confused with the the Apollo, which had yet to debut). Located in Harlem on 125th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, Minsky's Apollo shared the block with Brecher's Opera House, where f.a.n.n.y Brice and Sophie Tucker often ruled the stage, and another burlesque palace, Hurtig & Seamon's, a venue exclusively serving the Columbia Wheel. Apollo, which had yet to debut). Located in Harlem on 125th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, Minsky's Apollo shared the block with Brecher's Opera House, where f.a.n.n.y Brice and Sophie Tucker often ruled the stage, and another burlesque palace, Hurtig & Seamon's, a venue exclusively serving the Columbia Wheel.

One soup-thick afternoon in August, Billy stood outside surveying his new building, eager to tell his main investor, Joseph Weinstock, about his plans for Minsky's Apollo. Like Billy, Weinstock was a cunning opportunist, once having bid $50 at an auction for a vacant seat on the New York Stock Exchange-and winning it. Several plainclothes officers and uniformed members of the exchange had to guard its doors to prevent Weinstock from entering until a judge finally deemed the price "grossly inadequate." After the debacle on Broadway, Weinstock was taking a risk by backing the Minskys, and Billy wanted to soothe any lingering misgivings.

He felt a tap on his shoulder. This time he wasn't in Lee Shubert's neighborhood, and Billy expected to find one of two people when he turned around: the Columbia Wheel producers, Jules Hurtig or Harry Seamon.

"You won't last four weeks," Hurtig warned.

Billy smiled through a gauzy hoop of cigar smoke and let the old man believe he was right.

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When time permitted, Billy explored the local streets, strolling past Harlem Hospital and the twenty-cent-shave corner barbershops, the thrift stores and cheap Chinese restaurants, the pet shop where a monkey had escaped and killed a flock of canaries. There was serious talk, finally, of a triborough bridge that would link together Queens, the Bronx, and Manhattan. Clearly it would take years to open-some things even New York couldn't hurry along-but he expected it to boost patronage at Minsky's Apollo when that day finally came. He'd picked a bustling block in a diverse neighborhood-Jewish between 110th and 125th Streets and black further north, with Jungle Alley along 133rd Street between Lenox and Seventh Avenues. The area boasted the densest concentration of nightclubs and cabarets in New York, luring the sort of people who shaped the city's ethos and manipulated its mood, the very folks whose business Billy courted and whose accolades he craved.

If the rules had been rewritten at the end of the Great War, they were now abandoned altogether. Mores were discarded and manners dismissed at every level of society. New York's cultural arbiters no longer hailed from the Social Register or the Four Hundred; nightlife had turned fluid and democratic. Closed circles cracked open and made room. "There's no such thing as a set anymore," Carl Van Vechten wrote in his novel Parties Parties. "Everybody goes everywhere."

They went to side streets around Jungle Alley to buy cocaine and marijuana, ten joints for a dollar, and to bas.e.m.e.nt speakeasies where a silent man granted entry by yanking a long chain attached to the door. Down a steep flight of stairs elite uptowners and Greenwich Village bohemians and blacks crowded together at wood tables and sipped bootleg liquor with street names like "smoke" and "lightning." They climbed upstairs to rent parties, where jazz musicians and piano "professors" raised money to help friends pay their landlords; marveled at the Clam House's lesbian headliner, a 250-pound crooner clad in a top hat and tuxedo; and were charmed by A'Lelia Walker, Harlem's foremost hostess and heiress, the daughter of the first black female self-made millionaire. They ran into an infamous character called "Money," a hunchback who served as an unofficial tour guide for white interlopers. The final stop, invariably, was a dive run by Sewing Machine Bertha, who showed p.o.r.nographic films as a preview to an after-hours live s.e.x show featuring actors of all races.

Whites also went to clubs meant for them and them alone, Connie's Inn and Small's Paradise and the Cotton Club, the last the most exclusive destination of all. There the gangster Owney Madden sold his personal brand of beer, Madden's No. 1, and denied blacks entry unless they were light enough to pa.s.s. He hired Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway and produced every kind of black show that whites might want to see: the smiling black, the shuffling black, the blackface black, and a mandatory jungle number where a line of chorus girls, no darker than "high yellow," s.h.i.+mmied until their costumes slipped off.

Billy knew Minsky's Apollo would have to distinguish itself in order to siphon customers from the more established clubs; the Minsky name was still unproven in this part of town. Hurtig & Seamon's did a few things right, catering to the neighborhood with a mixed-race production called Super Black and White Sensation Super Black and White Sensation featuring "70 People: 35 Whites and 35 Blacks," and an all-colored company, Lucky Sambo. At Minsky's Apollo, black performers and customers would be just as welcome as whites, and he'd encourage them to interact and play off each other, just as they did at the National Winter Garden. featuring "70 People: 35 Whites and 35 Blacks," and an all-colored company, Lucky Sambo. At Minsky's Apollo, black performers and customers would be just as welcome as whites, and he'd encourage them to interact and play off each other, just as they did at the National Winter Garden.

The brothers placed ads for chorines, coochers, comedians. One comic, a young man named Joey Faye, had some of the freshest sketches Billy had seen in a very long time.

"You got any more material?" Billy asked.

"I got a lot of material," Faye said, "but it's all stolen-most of it, anyway."

"Stolen?" Billy asked, smiling.

"From the First Little Show First Little Show, from the Second Little Show Second Little Show, George White's Scandals Scandals, Ziegfeld's Follies Follies, the Palace Theatre, the Greenwich Village Follies Follies-all the shows around."

"Well, let me see some of the stuff," Billy prodded, and the comedian obliged.

"Can you put one of these on for Friday?" Billy asked. "For every sketch you put on, I'll give you twenty-five extra bucks in addition to your salary."

"Won't you get sued? After all, it's not our material."