Title: Gypsy: Memoirs of America’s Most Celebrated Stripper Author: Gypsy Lee Rose Publisher: 1999 Publish Date: Frog Ltd Pages: 353 Genres:: Biography,Reviewer: SexHerald Staff

Rating:

Well, read Gypsy: Memoirs of America’s Most Celebrated Stripper, the autobiography of Gypsy Rose Lee, and you will be celebrating America in the 1920’s and 30’s through the eyes, ears and memories of the performer.

Born Rose Louise Hovick, Lee’s autobiography is a well written book highlighted by her tremendous precision to the emotion in which she tells her stories while avoiding being overly emphasized, though she is the main character.

Beginning at the age of 5 in West Seattle, the story takes you to theaters, stages, roads, homes and hotels of Wyoming, Mexico, New York City and beyond. In crowded cars and on trains, it spans Lee’s time as a member of the young family vaudeville act to her start in Burlesque in Kansas City. It ends with her painful departure from the stage to a career in Hollywood.

But if you have a 20’s fetish and are hoping Gypsy will scratch an itch you have for reading about Flappers getting naked and having wild prohibition era sex with pin-striped gangsters…you better look beyond this book or bring the full imagination because Lee, almost as if being icon of the times, writes very modestly.

Almost as if her mother was standing over her.

And it is her mother that is the often the driver of her story. Pushing, pulling and prodding Lee to be a star while dealing with the money, promoters and stage hands, the book celebrates the tenacity and fortitude of her mother as it does with the star herself.

Zipping around the United States as a child, a woman and a performer, Gypsy tells stories that effectively put the reader into the moment. Whether if it is about the death of a guinea pig (“But Sambo, lying on a lettuce leaf, was rigid with death. His mouth was drawn up in a horrible grin, showing his long, sharp teeth, a piece of carrot stuck between them,”) or a story about how some gangster in the audience checking her out, Lee lets you know that the years on the road and on stage have created an effective observe who is able to tell the facts and details of the stories she chooses to tell.

And she obviously chooses the stories she tells. Inscribed to her son Erick “so he’ll stop asking questions,” the book does have some flaws that it is void of risk in its details. The reader is left sure that there are facts she doesn’t want her son to know. Life cannot be as charmed as Lee would lead you to believe!

But in Gypsy…, her memoir acts as more than an autobiography. It is a memory of a time and place before lap dances and silicon. It is a portrait of a time when a g-string and feathers performed side by side with comedians and animals. And in the end, like Gypsy, the reader is sad when they are over.
   Email this review to a friend