Gypsy Rose Lee
From Philosopedia
Lee, Gypsy Rose (Rose Lee Hovick) (8 January 1911 - 26 Apr 1970)
Lee, the daughter of Rose Hovick (n�e Rose Evangeline Thompson) and John Olaf Hovick, a Norwegian-American newspaper advertising salesman and reporter at the Seattle Times, was named Rose Louise Hovick when born in Seattle, Washington.
She became an internationally noted ecdysiast called Gypsy Rose Lee and started in showbiz as a four-year-old in vaudeville with her sister, June Havoc.
Author Arthur Laurents (The Advocate, 16 May 1995) has noted that the sisters' mother as well as Gypsy Rose were lesbians, according to June Havoc' own memoirs. He also states that Rose once "had a big fight with a hotel manager because he put too many people in her room. So she pushed him out the window and killed him."
In addition to stripping, Lee wrote, appeared in films, and became a talk show hostess, once saying, "Honey, I go where the dough is."� Also, she once admitted that she was not a great dancer or singer, but audiences disagreed or at least came to see her because of her onstage personality.
Laurents, who wrote Gypsy, a noted Broadway musical, said, "So how can you resist doing a musical based on a woman like that!"� And he did.
E. Haldeman-Julius quoted Lee as saying, "Praying is like a rocking chair � it'll give you something to do, but it won't get you anywhere."�
As for the deity, "God is love, but get it in writing."�
Lee became a star in Minsky's Burlesque, performing for four years and being frequently arrested on a charge of nudity. Her retort, "I wasn't naked. I was completely covered by a blue spotlight!"
Her affairs included relationships with comedian Rags Ragland and Eddy Bruns. In 1937 in Hollywood, she married Arnold "Bob" Mizzy at the insistence of the film studio. At one time in love with Michael Todd, in a 1942 attempt to make him jealous, she married William Alexander Kirkland. They divorced in 1944. While married to Kirkland, she gave birth on December 11, 1944, to a son fathered by Otto Preminger and named Erik Lee - also known as Erik Kirkland, Erik de Diego, and Erik Preminger. Lee was married for a third time in 1948 to Julio de Diego, but they also eventually divorced.
She was known to have smiled that an ecdysiast, another term for a stripteaser, depended upon audiences that had been taught by Puritans to enjoy thinking of sex as something bad. Easily the best-known stripper in the 1930s and on into the 1940s, she utilized large, colorful fans to conceal whether or not she had any clothes on. Who better for a freethinker to entertain than Puritans with feelings of guilt! And her audiences included approving women as well as men. Her son, with Erik Lee, made and narrated a film collage that illustrated his mother's life, Gypsy Rose Lee's Home Movies.� His mother, he found, had been married three times, all disappointments. When he inquired who his own father was, she finally told him when he was twenty-two: film producer Otto Preminger. Previously, she had indignantly responded, "It's none of your business!"
Unchurched, Lee died of cancer and is buried at Inglewood Park Cemetery in Inglewood, California.
(See a YouTube clip)
