Read American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee for Free Online Page B

grime, and it occurred to him that if he heard the shot, he must still be alive. Then he heard something else that confirmed it: the sound of running—furious, swift wing-flapping strides that grew fainter, then barely perceptible, then silent. He raised his head an inch, dared to peek through parted fingers. Second Avenue was as peaceful as he’d ever seen it.
    First thing next morning, Billy made yet another rash decision, one that would shape not only his life but the life of a toddler living on theopposite side of the country, a failure as soon as she could walk. He sat down with his father.
    “Listen, Pop,” he said. “You know that deal you’ve been talking to Abe about, showing movies on the National Theatre roof? Well, I think I’m interested in it after all. I think I’ve just about had it with the newspaper business.”

Chapter Four
    He was just a taker. She was a taker in her way too. They were taking each other, and they loved each other for that.
    – JUNE HAVOC
New York City, Fall 1940
    For five months, the entire length of their World’s Fair show, Gypsy devises ways to be near Mike Todd. She finds herself in the unfamiliar process of falling in love, or at least the facade of it; nothing in her past has taught her the difference. They stroll past the Lagoon of Nations, find privacy in the cloistered corner near the Temple of Religion.They pose for pictures in the photo booth: she behind a cutout of a pregnant woman with voluminous breasts, legs akimbo, scratching at her thigh; he behind a baby clad only in a diaper, one fat fist tucked inside the woman’s shirt and a cigar clamped between his teeth. Besides her mother, he is the only person capable of amusing and angering her at the same time.
    “I am not a stripper,” Gypsy tells him one day between shows. “A stripper is a woman who puts on a sex spectacle. My act is straight comedy.”
    “I don’t care what you call it,” Mike says, waving a cigar, “as long as you zip.”

    Michael Todd. (photo credit 4.1)
    It’s a familiar misconception, and she checks her temper when she corrects him.
    “I never use a zipper,” she explains. “A zipper is cheap and vulgar. And suppose one got stuck? I use ordinary straight pins. I used to toss ’em into the bell of a brass tuba in the band. They would go ping every time I hit the target.” She pauses, adds a punch line; she wants to amuse him too. “But it was too expensive, the guy wanted union wages.”
    After the closing ceremonies they watch workers dismantle the World of Tomorrow, artifact by artifact, returning the future to dust. Mike announces he’s heading back to Chicago, his hometown, to discover what he’ll become next. Gypsy wants to keep seeing him, but also let him miss her. After all, she has a murder mystery to write, her own image to update.
    She’s been in relationships before, with a comic, a socialite, a salesman, and a gangster, but stayed on guard in all of them, as modest with her emotions as she is onstage—in these later years, at least. But Mike is, to Gypsy’s frustration, exactly her type. “I like my men on the monster side,” she confides to a friend, not entirely in jest. “A snarling mouth, an evil eye, broken nose—if he should happen to have thick ears, good! And I like a little muscle, hair on the chest, none on the head. A nervous tic excites me and if with all these things he wore green suits—BANK NIGHT!”
    Certainly part of the attraction is that they come from the same place. He, too, remembers the Great Depression’s long plain brown days, the light pockets and empty stomachs, the desperate things one did to fill them. As a kid he daydreamed about money.When he was nine his tonsils were removed, and he convinced his classmates to pay two cents each to peer down his throat. He hawked newspapers, shined shoes, played the cornet in a boys’ band, worked as a roustabout at a carnival where he rigged the games of chance, and became an expert craps