After June suffers a nervous breakdown at age 12 from nonstop work, Rose insists she get right back onstage. The Rose depicted here makes the leather-lunged tyrant embodied on stage and screen by Ethel Merman, Rosalind Russell and Patti LuPone look like Carol Brady. Rose, Abbott writes, 'raised her daughters as if they were two grizzled generals preparing for war - with men, with her, with each other.' Most of those doozies somehow involve the world's most monstrous stage mother: Rose Thompson Hovick, of whom Morton Minsky declared, her 'river did not run to the sea.' As children, Lee and her younger sister, actress June Havoc, were known, respectively, as Rose Louise and Baby June (later, Dainty June) on the vaudeville circuit Mother acknowledged only Baby's talent.

Beginning and ending 'American Rose' with Lee's performance at the 1940 World's Fair, Abbott creates a brainy striptease similar to the one her subject may have performed: uncovering doozies in one chapter about Lee's outrageous life, followed in the next by the less salacious (but always captivating) details about how New York City's Minsky brothers, who played a crucial role in Lee's stardom, built their burlesque empire.īy clicking Sign up, you agree to our privacy policy. To illuminate not just Lee but the history of vaudeville, burlesque and New York City in the 1920s and '30s, Abbott has chosen an unconventional structure, hopscotching nonchronologically between 19, the years of Lee's birth and death. Abbott, the author of 'Sin in the Second City,' about a famed whorehouse in early 20th century Chicago, sets out to fill in the blanks and debunk the self-created myths about the 'most private public figure of her time,' though she admits that 'trying to discover Gypsy the person, as opposed to Gypsy the persona, became the sort of detective story herself could have written.' (In addition to the novels 'The G-String Murders' and 'Mother Finds a Body' and her memoir, Lee, who had no formal education, wrote several New Yorker articles and a play, 'The Naked Genius.')

American Rose by Karen Abbott