How surprising is it that the real-life Mama Rose of Gypsy was lesbian? Her grandson Erik Lee Preminger publicly acknowledged it. Rose Hovick’s performer daughters “Gypsy” Rose Lee and June Havoc didn’t admit it as readily. In Lee’s eponymous memoir, which bears minimal resemblance to the Broadway musical, Rose’s sexuality was camouflaged by her marital past; the 1959 musical added “Herbie” (Jack Klugman) as Rose’s fictitious love interest. Gypsy Rose Lee told writer Arthur Laurents that she wished she’d invented Herbie herself.
Lee penned Gypsy as a “monument” to herself and, hopefully once it was musicalized or filmed, a path toward permanent solvency. The glory, not the facts, concerned her. When Laurents asked how she’d gotten the nickname “Gypsy,” she replied, “Oh, honey, I’ve given fourteen or fifteen versions. Yours will be as good as mine.” Like daughter, like mother, for Rose had never let the truth stand between June—the younger and more talented of her daughters—and success. For one of Dainty June’s finales, Rose showcased her in a gown flocked with rhinestones which she claimed in a program note was worth a then-whopping $1,000. Rose had had to be dissuaded from adding that three seamstresses went blind while making the garment.
The musical’s credit read, “Suggested by the memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee.” In the Broadway version, after Louise blossoms into a relatively demure stripper and strikes out on her own, it’s suggested that Mama (never referred to as “Mama Rose”) could open an acting school for kids, to keep occupied. She rejects the idea indignantly. In reality, Rose Hovick wound up running a lesbian boarding house and brothel. This was revealed in June Havoc’s second autobiography, More Havoc, published in 1980, by which time The Topic could finally be broached (her first book, Early Havoc, in 1959, was a sisterly attempt to grab back some of the limelight from Gypsy, whose memoirs had angered June less than the resultant hit musical).
June’s mother had informed her, “Sex is dirty because men are dirty.” As for her lesbian tenants, Rose warned, “Don’t you dare feel superior to those girls. At least they have the good sense to know they can’t get pregnant with spit!”
The 1984 book Gypsy and Me was by Erik Lee Preminger, the out-of-wedlock son of Lee (1914–1970) and director Otto Preminger, whom he strongly resembled and who eventually acknowledged his son. Erik noted that his surrogate father had been a gay man who lived with Gypsy and son during the boy’s formative years. He was more candid about the non-heterosexuals in his background during gay-press interviews in 1993 while publicizing the TV remake of Gypsy that starred Bette Midler.
“Boyd Bennett was there to make sure that I grew up thoughtful and considerate of others. He told me, ‘Your mother is arrogant and grand. But you’re not going to act like the son of a diva if I can help it.’ I couldn’t have learned the lessons I learned if I’d been raised by a straight man.” Among other things, Erik was taught to value women for more than their looks. “I think Red Buttons was [Gypsy’s] only straight friend. Mother would have been happier if I had been gay. She wouldn’t have had as much trouble with me.”
Ironic that although most of the musical’s creators were gay, it had no lesbian or gay content, then or in revivals. In his 2000 memoirs Arthur Laurents recalled that one impetus for Gypsy had been gay or bisexual writer Liz Smith showing up at a party with a girlfriend named Selma Lynch who confessed that her first lover had been Gypsy Rose Lee’s mother. Laurents wondered if Gypsy herself, like many strippers and hookers, was bisexual, possibly lesbian? He added that June Havoc had written about lesbian cocktail parties that Gypsy and Rose gave for their friends, who had to pay admission.
LAURENTS AND OTHERS have described Rose as not just the quintessential stage mother but a “monster” trying to live out her dreams through her daughters.“I was born too soon and started too late,” the fictional Rose asseverates. As played by Ethel Merman, Rosalind Russell, Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly, Bette Midler, Bernadette Peters, and others, Rose is an egomaniacal dynamo. An unusually strong female character for a musical, she is judged more severely by theatre critics and audiences than many similarly domineering male characters in straight plays.
Merman, who originated the role, had long awaited a musical that offered a real dramatic challenge. When Gypsy was published, Ethel read it and told Gypsy Rose Lee at a cocktail party, “I want to do it. I’m going to do it. And I’ll shoot anyone else who gets the part.” After the show became a reality and a smash hit, Lee advised reporters, “I told Ethel to drink lots of milk and stay healthy. She’s going to be my annuity.” Merman, while relishing the starring role of Gypsy’s mother, tried to distance herself from the harsher aspects of Rose’s personality. Herself a domineering mother, she announced, “Rose and me, we got hardly anything in common, ’cept for love of show business.”
In any case, the real Rose Hovick was considerably tougher than the Lee, Laurents, or Merman versions, and the relationships and incidents presented on stage varied markedly from the truth. For instance, the break with rebellious daughter June (born in 1916) wasn’t as final as in Gypsy. Yet the scene after June up and weds a boy named Bobby from their act was more dramatic in real life. Where the fictionalized Rose resigned herself to the loss of her thirteen-year-old daughter and chief breadwinner, the real Rose went straight to the law and demanded of a police lieutenant, “You aren’t going to let him abduct my baby, are you?”
The cop, who spent the day investigating the case, answered, “Marriage isn’t the electric chair.” With the boy present, he assured Mrs. Hovick that her new in-law was of good family and long-range intentions. He ordered, “Shake hands, please.” In Early Havoc, June described what came next. “Mother moved toward Bobby; her eyes glistened. He extended his hand, but just then Mother produced a small automatic.… Ten inches away from Bobby’s chest, she pulled the trigger—once … twice.”
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.”
JUNE REMINISCED THAT “MOTHER” (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.
ANOTHER 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.