American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee [ペーパーバック]

There are so many excellent and thoughtful Amazon reviews of this book that there is little to add. I will just make some comments on the writing and structure - the Eng Lit major stuff. This is a truly first-rate and very disturbing work, very skillfully modulated. It's a horror story of about as psychotic a mother as could be and the devastation she created in her abuse and exploitation of her children. The known murders she committed seem just part of her detachment from anything or anyone outside her anger, viciousness, ambition and just sheer perversion. As a tale of showbiz, poverty and struggle, the tragic triangle of Rose, June and Gypsy is compelling. It's far more, though, the tale of how Gypsy built her invented self and turned her prodigious talent from just getting by to a public persona that was glamorous but fragile; she never escaped the binds of her mother or worked through the fractured relationships with her sister, the child star of the family. The story of her life is complex and enriched by the context of New York post-World War I, vaudeville and burlesque, and the ever-existing links between way out showbiz personalities, crime bosses, and hustlers.

What makes the book work as well as it does is the very fine line Ms Abbott treads in her exposition - stray just a little and it would lose credibility and impact. It doesn't glamorize or trivialize the world of vaudeville. The figures that are usually made larger-than-life or caricatures come across as real - the (in)famous Minsky brothers, Mayor Jimmy Walker, Fanny Brice, Mike Todd, Otto Preminger and many others. The backdrop setting gives body to the struggles, fights, deals and machinations that surrounded mama Rose and makes Gypsy's work and life come alive, to the extent that, as other Amazon reviews note, you really wish at an emotional level that somehow she and June could have had a chance and that the almost inexorable damage, physical as well as mental, could have been ended. The consequences of the damage dominate her later years where the egocentric courage, disguises and ambition become more and more amoral and almost indifferent.

It takes a superior writer to make all this balanced, convincing, vivid and fair in presentation and judgment. Ms Abbott never lets the writing get in the way of the story. It is this that gives the story its resonance. She avoids psychoanalytic guesswork - much of Gypsy and just about all of Rose is beyond understanding. It avoids the sensational, moralistic judgments or efforts to push some very good stories too far. The book has no melodramatic flourishes about a life and society of melodrama. It's very restrained but at the same time empathic - a masterly balancing of tone and content. The narrative technique of moving between her early life, (relative) old age and days of public glory is initially a little disorienting but seems to me to have been a good choice. Gipsy's life is very much a jigsaw of pieces and a linear biography would not have captured the complexity of her many selves. The writing is unobtrusive, with deft sketches and clarity of presentation and pacing. There are some striking phrases that are quite haunting. One I recall talks of how Rose has so much control over Gypsy since she knew too much about the mechanics of her self-creation - "where all the damaged parts were stashed, the lovely lies they invented together to fill in the gaps."

I think this is a book that will stay with me. I found it disturbing and very sad. Poor child - how could she ever have become whole?

A fascinating book about a stage and screen enigma of the past. Gypsy Rose Lee was an early vaudeville, stage and screen star about which little truth has been written ( not even by Gypsy herself.). At last, this book provides a more in depth and factual account of the well-concealed life of a legend. Gypsy Rose (or - Louise) was born into quite a strange family of extremely odd women who managed to quite promptly evict most men from their lives. As a girl, she and her sister (the actress- June Havoc) were taken on the road by their mother and used to satisfy her cravings for attention and publicity. Lingering memories of sexual abuse, extreme physical abuse (by the mother) and constant exposure to a life that no child should have experienced, produced 2 very unique women. Rose became a striper, although considered to be the lesser talent of the 2 sisters, probably to finally gain the attention that her younger sister, the child star, had stolen from her. The other sister, June, was a child star who turned into a movie actress of lesser caliber.

That the 2 girls even survived their upbringing is a miracle, that they survived their mother, is even more of one. With a mother who seems to have committed 3 murders, while in a furious rage, which possessed her throughout her life - the girls had little hope of ever leading a normal life. Rose grew-up obsessed by money,celebrity and fame, June seems to have grown-up angry and jealous of her older sister. Everyone in the family treated each other horribly, but the 2 girls did survive to become stars.

The book can be quite intense at times, life on the road was hardly the life for growing girls. But the descriptions of vaudeville and stage life from the turn of the last century are quite well-described by the author and are extremely interesting. This book should be read as a history of women's rights in the show biz world, a mini-history of vaudeville and a fascinating biography of a legend: Gypsy Rose Lee.

Life was hard for women and children in the early years of the last century and this book offers ample demonstration of that fact. Even for one not interested in June Havoc or Gypsy, the read is quite educational for those wishing to learn more of the beginning years of stage and screen. I recommend this book highly, you will not be able to put it down.

I knew very little about Gypsy Rose Lee before I read this book. I knew she had a talk show in the mid 1960's which I remember seeing, that the musical "Gypsy" was based on her life and that Rosalind Russell played "Mama Rose" and Natalie Wood played "Gypsy". I also knew at one time she had been a stripper because that's what it had in the musical.
I knew Rose Havock (June Havoc's and Gypsy's mom) was a stage mother. I even showed the musical to my sons so they'd realized I wasn't such a horrible mother. But I never knew to what extent "Mama Rose" was a stage mother or how truly twisted she was.
Karen Abbott has written an absolutely fascinating book about the times of burlesque and the depression. She alternates Gypsy's life story with the story of the Minsky brothers, giving details about the economic as well as the moral pulse of society. I found it very difficult to put the book down.
I was stunned at what Gypsy and June went through. What kind of mother names her second daughter the same as the first, already presuming the first, living daughter is a failure? What kind of mother would twist her children's minds by saying the dog died just to get a child to cry on command? And what kind of grandmother would hand her 5 year old grandson a real gun? Rose Havock, that's who. And that's probably one of the nicest things you can say about her.
I was also impressed by the way M's Abbott portrayed the sibling relationship between Gypsy and June. M's Abbott seemed to hit the sibling relationship right on the head between sisters. Her portrayal of Gypsy as an older sister (because she was) is touching but chilling to the bone.
I recommend this book highly to anyone interested in a good biography or anyone interested in thet time period in American history. You won't be able to put it down, it's that good.