negatina

Like her subject, Karen Abbott's biography of Gypsy Rose Lee is a flawed yet compelling work. Abbott presents the strands of Lee's life you would expect: the troubled stage mother whose grip on sanity is tenuous; the tawdry burlesque scene that propelled Lee to stardom; the larger-than-life stage persona that kept Lee from true intimacy in her relationships. Abbott also relishes in the mythological, especially when relating the misbehaviors of Lee’s mother Rose Hovick. Hovick is obviously disturbed: Abbott relates one story where Hovick violently murders a kitten to torture her husband and children. The truly sadistic stories where Abbott connects Hovick to two mysterious homicides are apocryphal, documented only by second-hand sources and grounded more in rumor than evidence. My primary quibble with the book is the thinness of the facts surrounding its most sensational episodes-stories designed to cast Hovick as a villain and to offer motivation for Gypsy’s cruelties and idiosyncrasies. Much like Gypsy’s own approach to her personal history, Abbott tells a good story while winking and flirting with the truth. A lesser problem is the ponderousness of Abbott’s prose. One example is Abbott’s description of Lee’s final moments in her battle with cancer: “ Her body begins working in reverse, exhaling, exhaling, exhaling, giving everything it has, taking nothing in return. With her knowledge but never her permission, it relents at last” (Abbott 341). Abbott’s writing is gimmicky, much like Lee’s own shtick of dropping straight pins into the tuba bell while disrobing Despite the problems, there is much Abbott gets right. Her discussion of the tawdry history of vaudeville during the 20s and 30s is fascinating, and she shows great insight when drawing connections between politics, money, and sexuality during the era’s culture wars. However, Abbott is at her best when discussing Lee’s stage act, whether as a child playing the overweight foil to her beautiful sister or as the masterful diva elevating the striptease to art. In the end, Lee’s story is the quintessential American “rags to riches” tale--how one can rise to greatness though grit and charisma. While the book raises more questions than it answers about Lee’s life, Abbott offers her readers an intelligent discussion on the constructedness of female celebrity and the complicated intersections between love and ambition in Lee’s personal life.

2022-10-26 07:43