As a child of the 80s, I have never entered a speakeasy, thought about vaudeville, or lived through the Depression. American Rose allowed me to enter into worlds I have never even thought of before. The genius of this book is that these unknown worlds were connected to our own, and I recognized reality stars today in the genesis of Gypsy Rose Lee.Gypsy was, for me, the first reality star. Selling a history and a talent that were not true, Gypsy reinvented herself and became the most famous woman in America. She lived by the idea that to achieve fame you should discover what could make you famous, and then proclaim it already has. Gypsy pretended her way to the top, and I found it fascinating that we have been pretending with our stars ever since.Gypsy, her family, and the Minsky were characters in the truest sense of the word. They all created personas and never deviated from type. What made Abbotts American Rose so unique was that eventually I sympathized with all these cold, self-serving people. I started to like them. I started to root for them. And even now, I am glad I learned about them.

There is perhaps no better introduction to Gypsy Rose Lee than the epigraph to "American Rose," Karen Abbott's new bio graphy: "May your bare ass always be shining." These good wishes, sent to the First Lady of the Striptease by former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in 1959, suggest the magnitude of Lee's celebrity at that time. Through her stage perform ances, books and the musical "Gypsy" (based on her life story), she became not only a legendary show- business figure but part of the American mythos.A New Yorker cartoon reprinted in Lee's autobiography epitomizes her appeal: A pot-bellied, bald man shaving at the bathroom sink glances at his wife, who is speaking to him from behind a shower curtain. She wears an amused expression, her hands gripping the curtain as a covering for her breasts while she sticks one leg out, showing her calf and just a bit of thigh. The caption reads: "Hey, SamGypsy Rose Lee!" Not only did women admire her humor and suggestive style, the nation as a whole celebrated a woman who could make sex into playful entertainment.From the moment she first began performing in burlesque in the early 1930s, Lee was unusually inventive, pinning to her flesh-colored body suits articles of clothing that she could whisk off and throw into the orchestra pit or the audience. She specialized in breakaway dresses with removable panels. She paraded across the stage in prefabricated dresses, bridal gowns, black-net skirts and lacy negligees. What she wore and how she discarded it created the fascination.It soon became clear that Lee was a world-class entertainer who just happened to be working in burlesque. In Broadway revues, and later one-woman shows, she tugged at garters and showed a line of leg bent at the knee, or crossed her silk-stockinged limbs and cocked her head in statuesque poses. She decked herself out in late Victorian garb and did a "bustle dance," mocking the propriety of an earlier age even as she maintained her own brand of decorum. Lee's intelligence was equally recognizable in her unusually witty banter with the audience (and authorities). "I wasn't naked," she once protested after a police raid. "I was completely covered by a blue spotlight." How many other striptease artists could hold down their own radio program, as she briefly did?By the mid-1950s, Gypsy Rose Lee was famous across the country as a performer. But she made herself immortal by writing a book: her sensational 1957 autobiography, "Gypsy." She was so good at embellishing her own story inventing a narrative that had only fitful commerce with the truththat biographers have been kept busy fact-checking her ever since.A revived interest in burlesque culture over the past few years has led to a series of new evaluations. In 2009, Noralee Frankel did her homework in the archives and produced "Stripping Gypsy: The Life of Gypsy Rose Lee," which restored some of the truth about her storyinevitably without the panache that made Lee's own life such a wonderful performance. Even better was Rachel Shteir's "Gypsy: The Art of the Tease" (also 2009), an elegant and insightful study of Lee's self-fashioning that Ms. Abbott relies on heavily.So what does "American Rose" offer that is new? First, invaluable interviews with June Havoc, Gypsy's sister, a tormented observer who could never be sure when Lee was on the level. The author's story of how she got to know Havoc, and her account of the wary transactions between the bio grapher and her interviewee, provide real insight into how icons construct their lives and how biographers go about deconstructing them.But Ms. Abbott has greater ambitions than just enlivening her biography with material from those who knew Lee. Like Lee herself, Ms. Abbott wants to show off her own intelligence and style. That's perhaps a good thing in a biographer dealing with a flamboyant subject. Even so, she tries too hard at times to evoke Lee's inner states. Ms. Abbott's sentences can read as if they came out of a novel, not a biography: "Not a day passes without her retelling, if just to her own ears, the densely woven and tightly knotted story of her own legend, and not a day passes when she doesn't wonder how its final line will read." It is always tempting for bio graphers to employ words that obscure the sad truth that they cannot know about every day of their subjects' lives.Ms. Abbott also denies herself one of the great stodgy pleasures of biography: laying out the chronology of a subject's life in what impatient reviewers might call the plodding approach. Instead, she interrupts the sequence of Lee's life with key scenes from later years and from other lives connected with Lee's. Thus a chapter set in 1912 is followed by one in 1940. Readers of novels would not find this flash forward disconcerting, but in a biographyat least in this onea shifting structure under mines the steady accumulation of detail that makes an account convincing.After five chapters of Ms. Abbott, I started consulting Ms. Shteir's "Gypsy: The Art of the Tease." Its table of contentswith chapters on "Undressing the Family Romance," "The Queen of Striptease," "To Hollywood and Back," "The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual" indicate the kind of analysis short biographies often provide so well. For those unfamiliar with the Lee biblio graphy, which comprises not merely her own memoirs but those of her sister and other family members, Ms. Shteir's is the book to pick up first.Or perhaps second. Despite its flaws and fabrications, Lee's own autobiography is still the best guide to understanding the nature of her success. The story of her first strip actno matter how many of its details are inventedis true to the woman that Rose Louise Hovick became when she changed her name to Gypsy Rose Lee at the Gayety Theater in Toledo, Ohio, in 1931. Her biographers, for all their skepticism, cannot resist relying on Lee's memoir. She always wanted to be taken seriously as a writershe wrote two novels and once shared a house with W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers and Paul Bowlesand her autobiography is certainly a classic of the form.Chapter 26 of "Gypsy: A Memoir" describes her family of starving, bedraggled vaudeville performers arriving at the Gayety Theater only to hear the show's producer telling the stage manager that the lead stripper has been jailed and no one is available to do her scenes. "My daughter does scenes," says Gypsy's mother, who is portrayed in the auto biography as the epitome of the pushy stage parent. Lee writes: "I wanted to hide somewhere. Mother pushed me toward the two men and I wanted the floor to open up and let me drop quietly through it."Up to this point in the autobiography, Rose Louise, fat and untalented, has been overshadowed by her younger sister, June, who as a 3-year-old was already performing as a dancer. The producer asks about Rose Louise: "Does she strip?" As Lee reports: "Mother looked him straight in the eye and said yes." Afterward she assured her daughter that she would have to do no more than drop a shoulder strap at the end of her routine. And, at first, Lee suggests, she didn't.Lee continues: "The full importance of what had happened suddenly hit me." She would soon be a star, playing to ever more enthusiastic crowds, and she decided to behave accordingly, changing her name, seeing to it that the marquee reflected the change, embellish ing her act by breaking from the chorus line and inventing her own moves. It is all, of course, worthy of the movies.Over the years, Lee's bio graphers have diligently undermined parts of this tale. Ms. Abbott notes that June Havoc once did an interview in which she scoffed at her sister's version of her first strip: "She was never an ingenue. . . . And she never just dropped a shoulder strap. Ever." Equally valuable is Ms. Abbott's interview with Gypsy's son, Eric, who told the biographer: "I'm sure it was not an easy year [1931]. . . . There were rough girls, gangsters, prostitution. They had to eat. And she was perhaps forced to do things against her will." The scholarly Ms. Frankel, in "Stripping Gypsy," observes wryly in an endnote: "There is no record in Gypsy Rose Lee's scrapbook that her first strip was done in Toledo."Ms. Shteir, steeped in the history of striptease, provides a shrewd analysis of Gypsy's reminiscence, noting that it "conflates several stories from showbiz mythology": the show must go on, a star is born and my mother made me do it. The signal point, Ms. Shteir notes, is that Lee could not present herself as stripping of her own accord. That would be "too naughty" and "vulgar." Yet, Ms. Shteir observes, Gypsy did not protest her mother's brash maneuvering.Ms. Abbott adds an important piece to this puzzle, uncovering a New York Daily News article (from Sept. 15, 1936) that quotes Gypsy Rose Lee just five years after the events in question and 20 years before she committed the myth to writing. "The shoulder strap led to one thing and another, if you know what I mean," Lee says matter-of-factly, "and that's how I started in the strip business."Here Ms. Abbott is able to pin her subject down and suggest why the autobiography had to replace the facts: "It was beneath her to attach details to that 'one thing and another,' disrespectful to include such memories in her scrapbooks, sacrilege to admit that the singular, legendary Gypsy Rose Lee had begun just like everyone else."

I've been reading this book for 4 days, and I'm only 39% of the way through. I rarely give up on a book, but I'm going to have to do just that. There are too many issues with this book for me to continue.The biggest issue is the structure of the book. One chapter will discuss Gypsy Rose Lee's childhood, being put on the stage from a young age as a bit player in her younger sister's acts. Their mother was overbearing and at times cruel, and saw her children as a way of getting rich. But then the following chapter will jump in time to the 1940s, when Gypsy was an adult. It's really quite difficult to keep track of what's going on in the later chapters, as to why the author is even including these events. I would much preferred a more chronological structure to this book.I also am having a difficult time of caring about Gypsy Rose Lee to begin with. The chapters about her childhood seem to be more about her mother and her sister than about her, and I feel as though the readers are only getting a superficial view of who this woman is. What would have worked a lot better for this book, in my opinion, is a prologue of some kind which tells the reader exactly who Gypsy Rose Lee was and who many of the characters are that the author is going to introduce. I feel as though the author drops us into the middle of a story with very little introduction.

Quite simply- a brilliant, revealing and most important, human portrait of an American Icon. American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee by Karen Abbott is one of those rare biographies that allow the reader to truly BOTH know the subject,but understand her as well. Ms. Abbott not only captures the dramatic life of Ms. Lee (Hovick) but the complex relationships with her overbearing -unstable mother and talented sister- June Havoc (Up in Mabel's Room ect). This is both a biography of a person and a history of a unique time.AN OFFICIAL JAMES MASON COMMUNITY BOOK CLUB MUST READRICK FRIEDMANFOUNDERTHE JAMES MASON COMMUNITY BOOK CLUB

This is a biography about one of the most famous strip teasers in American history. And I don't mean pole dancing, but burlesque. This is a woman who would remove pins from her outfit one by one and throw them in a nearby tuba and show only one body part at a time. It was stripping before it became "stripping." It was stripping when stripping had a measure of class about it. (I know that sounds funny, but seriously.)To read full review, click the link below:http://wwwbookbabe.blogspot.com/2010/...