Broadway Babylon (13 page)

Rose carried a gun in her car for nighttime traveling protection but knew nothing of guns. The safety catch had locked the action and kept her from becoming a murderess—in which case
Gypsy
might not have been written, or if it had, would probably not have been musicalized (in those pre-
Chicago
days).

“One of the cops grabbed Mother and the gun. She wrested herself free, and then she piled on Bobby—fists, knees, fingernails, and teeth. It took the whole night staff to pull her off.” Mrs. Hovick was detained until Bobby could depart the police station without further harm. When Bobby returned to June he was “battered but undaunted.” The flustered police lieutenant advised June before she and Bobby left by train for their new life together, “Write to your poor mother at once and she will forgive and understand because she loves you so.”

J
UNE REMINISCED THAT
“M
OTHER
” (not “Mama” in her case) had a marvelous vocal range, with “musical” low tones, and speech that could send “chills up your spine with its loveliness.” But “Her fury was like the booming of a cannon. She could be heard halfway down the block.” Rose’s father had kept his daughter from pursuing her own showbiz dream. Though eventually a
rebel, like most girls she was initially compliant. Likewise
her
mother, of whom June wrote:

“She had married Grandpa when she was fifteen.… She hadn’t really wanted to marry Grandpa. She hadn’t wanted to have any children at all, but careers were seldom for women in those days.”

June, who summoned up the courage to strike out on her own personally and professionally, was the first woman in her family for generations, perhaps ever, to attain her goal. She disclosed after establishing herself that “I never went to school a day in my life.” Feminine education was a not a priority during that era, and June’s grandmother suffered for her near illiteracy when her husband asked her to sign a paper and she did, not knowing it was a divorce paper that would sever her 48-year marriage.

Grandpa, whose alter ego in
Gypsy
won’t give Rose eighty-eight cents to pursue her dream when she requests “eighty-eight bucks,” intended to marry a neighbor woman, much to the fury of his ex-wife and daughter Rose. But while driving home one day from a picnic the couple, not yet wed, was hit by a train at an intersection and killed. Who knew the dour “Papa” in
Gypsy
had such a dramatic ending?

Rose typically overdramatized after catching June and her coworker Bobby kissing one day. The youth said he’d thought June was “at least sixteen.” Rose insisted June was thirteen; she kept multiple birth certificates, two of which made her younger daughter out to be twenty-one for when it was useful. Rose slapped Bobby hard, then fired him. In the dressing room, she slapped her daughter twice, then hit her on the back of the neck with her fist. “We had never come to blows before,” wrote June.

When June protested, Rose screamed, “Who do you think you are? You’re nothing. I can’t even get the audience to accept you any more. Out there on the stage, you’re
nothing
. And now you try to break my heart. I’m not hitting you—I’m spanking you!”

When June ordered her out of her dressing room, her mother yelled, “Your dressing room?” Then she struck her daughter with a hand mirror. After it shattered and the stage manager shouted, “Fifteen minutes, first act, Mrs. Hovick,” Rose fell into a chair and sobbed, “What have I ever done to deserve this?” Referring to the shards of mirror on the floor, Rose said, “This is your seven years of bad luck, not mine.”

June Havoc’s professional breakthrough was on Broadway in
Pal Joey
. Despite her blonde beauty and partly because of her aloofness, she failed to become a star in a long string of films during the 1940s. She had her own TV series,
Willy
, but returned to the stage time and again. Her most disappointing comeback was the flop movie
Can’t Stop the Music
(1980) as the mother of Steve Guttenberg’s character, who co-founds a heterosexualized version of
The Village People. (Gays and straights alike hated the disco film, directed by stage star turned TV star Nancy Walker.)

In her second autobiography, June recalled memories she’d never shared with her mother. They included “the uncles,” men Rose had “liked temporarily” who “had put my hand inside their trousers; who cuddled alongside me in bed, rubbing a huge penis against me. Nothing had come of any of this. Just my five-year-old disgust.”

Gypsy
the musical sugar-coated men, show business, the girls’ lives, and, of course, Rose. Missing from the stage version was any reference to the real-life episode of a tenant of Rose’s who was desperately unhappy with her life and prospects. Rose later explained to June: “I said, ‘Why not just check out if you’re that unhappy?’ And there was the gun, and—well, I think she knew what she was doing.” Rose insisted, “I didn’t do a thing. She took the shotgun out of my hand, put the nozzle in her mouth, stepped on the trigger, and pow! I didn’t actually offer the gun, don’t you see? I just had it, that’s all.”

June remembered that “Mother’s mouth hardened in contempt. ‘I’ve never been able to stomach a poor loser.’ ” Mrs. Hovick’s big concern, after burning the young woman’s tell-all diary, was the future of her own older daughter, Gypsy—“with your sister trying so hard to be a Hollywood star, and that fool girl blowing the whole top of her head off.” The studio helped squelch any major publicity.

A
NOTHER HUSHED-UP, MORE LEGENDARY EPISODE
was the one in which Rose Hovick allegedly killed a man.
Gypsy
fleetingly and comically alludes to it in the scene where a landlord invades the rooms of Rose and her troupe. Not only is she guilty of cooking, she’s housing too many people and harboring pets. Rose at first denies all, then abruptly switches tracks and pushes the man into her bedroom where she tears at her clothes, disshevels her hair, then opens the door and claims he tried to attack (rape) her.

“Oh, my babies!” she wails, soon on the verbal attack and warning fellow boarders against those “dangerous middle-aged men!”

In real life, Rose apparently pushed such a man—a hotel manager who’d threatened eviction because she had five boys sleeping in a room rented to one daughter—out a window to his death. Her defense was self-defense and motherhood. Of all the glaring events in Rose Hovick’s colorful, unstoppable life, this was the one most shrouded in mystery and the least explored. Her daughters, otherwise bold and provocative, understandably shied away from this chapter.

Additionally, the real Mama seems to have favored whichever daughter was riding higher at the time. As
Gypsy
the musical shows, Louise got short shrift while her more talented and personable little blonde sister was charming audiences. But it was Gypsy Rose Lee who became more famous via her
thenrisqué specialty, which eventually led to acting and authoring (including a novel). Her autobiography created a rift between the sisters, whom Rose had encouraged to compete with one another.

In
More Havoc
, published after her big sister’s death from cancer, June declared that the musical
Gypsy
“meant more than anything or anyone in the world” to Louise, who believed, “It doesn’t have to be factual, it only has to be big, exciting and—and a smash!”

June demanded, “What about me? It’s all untrue, and it makes me a heavy … a whining kid who grabs and runs.”

Gypsy embraced her sister, offering, “We all know it’s a fable. It’s going to be billed like that—a fable. Please let me have my monument.”

Thus, primarily for legal reasons,
Gypsy
is officially “a musical fable.” A financial settlement was made with Havoc regarding her depiction in the musical. She’d already requested certain changes, so many in fact that the producers were going to rename June “Claire.” In the end, she opted to be included via her own name rather than be left out in the cold. Gypsy’s son, Erik, felt that his Aunt June let it slide “almost as a gift, sister to sister.”

Rose had long since become closer to Louise/Gypsy. Still cantankerous and suspicious, ever the injured party in her own mind, Rose was nonetheless proud of her elder daughter’s determination and success; less so—sometimes throwing it up in her face—of June’s determination and lesser success (besides acting, she wrote two plays and directed). June described her mother’s deathbed scene in 1954, with both daughters at her bedside, the elder one closer and thus nearer to reproach.

“I know you,” Rose accused Louise. “Greedy, selfish! You want me to die. I’m the only one knows all about you … so, die.…” As she moved closer to Louise, Rose’s long suede grouch bag (used for storing money) that she wore strung around her waist was revealed through her nightgown, which burst open. Gypsy warned, “You’ll fall!” and grabbed for her mother.

Rose yelled, “
No!
” interpreting the grab in mercenary terms. “You can’t have anything back! Just because I’m letting go—it’s mine! My house, my jewelry.…” She swayed, and Gypsy took hold of her. It turned into something of a slow-motion wrestling match, with mother pinning daughter down and offering a parting curse: that Louise would never lose the memory of her mother holding her ever so tightly and wishing she could take her “all the way down with me!”

Gypsy’s face showed no emotion. Rose let her go, and regained her strength. On her feet and stunned into silence, Louise heard their mother swear that this was not the end, that all the rest of their lives, her daughters would know and feel her presence. Rose dared Louise to tell her “classy friends” how funny Rose was, how much less intelligent—but to remember
that when Louise got her own “private kick in the ass,” it would be a “present” from her late but undeparted mother.

Gypsy waited until Rose’s breath came evenly, then left the room. Outside, June held Gypsy’s hands while she insisted to her protesting sister, “Oh, yes, June, [those things] will happen. Just like she promised. She’ll never let me go. Not ever.”

As they prepared to depart, June asked, “Why only you? Why not me?”

Louise replied that June had “failed” Rose by not being exciting enough to reflect their mother’s dream self. The non-stripper, unlike her sister, hadn’t featured in the tabloids, caused sensations, or been arrested. “How many times has she enjoyed a ride in a police car with you?” Louise asked. As the musical made clear, Rose was molded and enthralled by colorful, jazzy vaudeville, not the legitimate stage toward which her younger daughter aspired and left her for.

According to insiders, at the end of her life Gypsy Rose Lee was convinced that she was dying of cancer, prematurely (1914–1970) and long before her younger sister (still alive at this writing), because of her mother’s dying curse.

L
ike most movie stars of his generation, Anthony Perkins (1932–1992) initially set his sights on the stage. It was particularly apt for the only child of Osgood Perkins, a minor movie actor but a stage star despite his mousey, pinched features. Tony made an inauspicious screen debut in a 1953 adaptation of Ruth Gordons
The Actress
, for which he’d been discovered and “mentored” by gay A-list film and former stage director George Cukor.

Perkins, who felt he was too “special” for movie leads—boney, awkward, and shy—then stayed off screen until 1956. Meanwhile he returned to the stage, where in 1954 he got his big break in
Tea and Sympathy
, the Broadway hit in which he replaced John Kerr (who later did the film version with non-relative Deborah Kerr). The then-daring play had homosexual undertones; through much of it Tony’s character’s sexuality is in question and under fire. In the manner of the 1947 film
Gentleman’s Agreement
, ostensibly about anti-Semitism,
Tea
’s ultimate message was, Don’t treat somebody “different” badly, because they might turn out to be “normal.”

After returning to Hollywood and contracting with Paramount, Perkins’s relationship with star Tab Hunter was masked by studio publicists with “double dates” involving female starlets. However, Tony’s real home remained in New York, where he felt freer socially and sexually. Even after becoming a movie star he harbored hopes of being bicoastal and alternating stage and screen work. In 1957 he starred on Broadway to considerable acclaim in
Look
Homeward, Angel
. His next goal was to sing onstage. Director George Roy Hill, later a prominent Hollywood director, was Tony’s choice to guide him in what would be each man’s first and final musical:
Greenwillow
(1960).

It featured a slight plot set in an imaginary village on the banks of the Meander River, with Perkins as young wanderer Gideon Briggs. The slight novel on which it was based had frustrated celebrated composer Frank Loesser, who’d determined to transform it into his own
Brigadoon
. He eventually sought outside help; screenwriter Lesser Samuels coauthored the musical’s book.
Greenwillow
thus earned the nickname the Evil of Two Lessers.

Perkins had a pleasant enough singing voice, but a Broadway musical was a stretch for a teenybopper idol who’d recorded various songs for swooning, uncritical fans. While preparing for his Broadway musical debut, Tony was making
Psycho
, the film which would begin and end his superstardom, forever stereotyping him as a lethal oddball. On the
Psycho
set director Alfred Hitchcock opined to screenwriter Joseph Stefano that Perkins was “excessively shy around women,” and so spared him having to appear in the notorious shower scene with Janet Leigh. The gentlemanly Hitch felt it “just wouldn’t be very nice” to subject Tony to the intimate and brutal scene with a supposedly nude motel guest. A double was hired to hack Marion Crane to death while Norman Bates’s alter ego was taking musical training in Manhattan.