Mother Finds a Body Read online

  Mother

  Finds

  a Body

  FEMMES

  FATALES

  Femmes Fatales restores to print the best of women’s writing in

  the classic pulp genres of the mid-twentieth century. From hard-boiled

  noir to taboo lesbian romance, these rediscovered queens of pulp

  offer subversive perspectives on a turbulent era.

  Faith Baldwin

  SKYSCRAPER

  Vera Caspary

  BEDELIA

  LAURA

  Dorothy B. Hughes

  THE BLACKBIRDER

  IN A LONELY PLACE

  Gypsy Rose Lee

  THE G-STRING MURDERS

  MOTHER FINDS A BODY

  Evelyn Piper

  BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING

  Olive Higgins Prouty

  NOW, VOYAGER

  Valerie Taylor

  THE GIRLS IN 3-B

  STRANGER ON LESBOS

  Tereska Torres

  WOMEN’S BARRACKS

  BY CECILE

  Mother

  Finds

  a Body

  GYPSY ROSE LEE

  FOREWORD BY ERIK LEE PREMINGER

  Published by the Feminist Press

  at the City University of New York

  The Graduate Center

  365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406

  New York, NY 10016

  feministpress.org

  First Feminist Press edition

  Foreword copyright © 2012 by Erik Lee Preminger

  Text copyright © 1942 by Gypsy Rose Lee and

  © 1981 by Erik Lee Preminger

  Originally published in 1942 by Simon and Schuster, Inc.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Cover and text design by Drew Stevens

  Cover photo by Michael Maynard

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lee, Gypsy Rose, 1914-1970.

  Mother finds a body / Gypsy Rose Lee.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-55861-802-2

  I. Title.

  PS3523.E3324M68 2012

  813’.52--dc23

  2012004491

  FOREWORD

  My mother’s greatest creation was Gypsy Rose Lee, the persona she first adopted as a stripper at Billy Minsky’s Republic Theater in New York City in the 1930s. While her fame was rooted in her career as a stripper in burlesque, it flowered into legend through her writing: two successful mystery novels, The G-String Murders and Mother Finds a Body; several magazine articles for the New Yorker, American Mercury, Flair, and others; and culminated with her memoir Gypsy, which became the landmark film and Broadway musical through which Gypsy Rose Lee lives on today.

  The progression seems so natural that it must have been easy, but of course it wasn’t. She had no formal education, no informal education either for that matter. She spent her childhood trouping in vaudeville with her sister; they never stayed in one place long enough to attend school. Their mother only hired the occasional tutor when there was an overzealous child welfare inspector lurking backstage. When the inspector left, so did the tutor.

  So how did she learn to write? She began by reading. Books were her escape from dirty dressing rooms and dismal theatrical hotels, her escape from feeling like a failure because her sister could sing and dance but she could do neither, her escape from the loneliness that she experienced because she couldn’t relate to the other children in the act. She didn’t know it at the time, but she was, quite simply, smarter than all of them.

  She read any book she could buy or shoplift, which resulted in an eccentric range of topics and authors: Decameron, The Blind Bow Boy, Painted Veils, Das Capital and Droll Stories to name a few. She read them over and over again. She collected so many books that the bottom fell out of her theatrical trunk. After that, her mother made her give up one book for every one she added. My mother used to say that leaving even a bad book was worse than leaving a good friend.

  Gradually she learned to be more selective. The manager of the Seven Arts bookstore in Detroit, George Davis, became her first teacher. My mother describes him as “young and delicately handsome. He walked softly on the toes of his feet and when he took the books from the shelves he handled them gently. His voice was gentle, too, and his eyes were sympathetic and warm.” Davis suggested she read Shakespeare’s sonnets. The next day, the show’s engagement in Detroit was over, and she left town with the family troupe.

  Skip ahead eight years. Her fortunes had peaked. She had been the toast of New York while at Minsky’s, went on to star in the Ziegfeld Follies with Fanny Brice, and signed a seven-year contract with Twentieth Century Fox. Then her fortunes plummeted. Will H. Hays—Hollywood’s censorship czar—refused to allow the name Gypsy Rose Lee on America’s movie screens. Darryl Zanuck, the head of Fox, fulfilled the minimum terms of her contract by putting her in four mediocre, B-grade pictures using her real name—Louise Hovick—and then let her contract option expire at the end of one year. Throw in a marriage to burnish her image for the studio, followed by a divorce as soon as her option was dropped, and she returned to New York demoralized and broke. Stripping was no longer a possibility since Mayor LaGuardia had closed all the burlesque theaters.

  Re-enter George Davis. During the same eight years, his fortunes, too, had ebbed and flowed. He had written a wildly successful first novel, but squandered the advance for his second novel on a year’s debauch in Paris. He got off the boat with only the clothes on his back, one shoe . . . and the idea to add serious fiction to women’s magazines. He created a job for himself as the fiction editor of Harper’s Bazaar, and introduced to American readers some of the finest writers of the age, among them Carson McCullers, Christopher Isherwood, and Stephen Spender.

  George rented a beautiful house in Brooklyn Heights, which he couldn’t afford, so he took in boarders to share the rent. At one time or another, his housemates included the poet W.H. Auden; the composer Benjamin Britten; the writers Carson McCullers, Paul Bowles, and Gypsy Rose Lee, and a trained chimpanzee. Everyone was under thirty-five and touched by genius. Inspired by all this talent, Mother began her first mystery.

  Her writing was interrupted by the dynamic Broadway showman Mike Todd. He wanted my mother to headline a star-studded review at the New York World’s Fair, and she resumed her most lucrative vocation—stripping. A girl’s got to make a living you know. Between shows, she wrote in her dressing room, and eventually The G-String Murders was published on December 7, 1941. It was not an auspicious debut. The publisher took out full-page ads in newspapers around the country, but that day no one got past the front-page story: Pearl Harbor.

  The G-String Murders made the New York Times best-seller list, a rare accomplishment at the time. As soon as it did, its authorship was questioned. How could a stripper write such an entertaining, witty book—a best seller no less? Then Mother and George Davis had a falling out over an antique mantle. Mother took the mantle, so he took credit for her book. At the same time, a rumor circulated that mystery writer Craig Rice was the author, a rumor that survives to this day despite the fact that Rice denied it at the time. Mother was furious and frustrated. How does one disprove a negative? She did it by writing another book.

  She was the central character in The G-String Murders. It was set in a burlesque theater reminiscent of Minsky’s, and the characters were thinly veiled representations of the strippers and com
ics she had worked with. She would also be the central character in her next mystery, Mother Finds a Body, and it would also draw on her own experience. The novel is set in a trailer park during her honeymoon—my mother did honeymoon in a trailer—and is populated with burlesque comics, vaudeville actors, and her own mother, whose behavior in the novel was authentic. This novel was not quite as successful so no one else claimed credit for writing it, but her mother did sue her over the book. What’s fascinating is that she didn’t object to the way she was portrayed; she simply felt she was owed money for acting, so to speak, in the book.

  So you may wonder, what was my grandmother really like? My mother said she was “charming, courageous, resourceful, and ambitious. She was also, in a feminine way, ruthless . . . A jungle mother.” During interviews I conducted for my memoir, My G-String Mother, I was told repeatedly that my grandmother had killed two people: a hotel manager who “fell” out of a window during an argument with her (Arthur Laurents used this as the basis for a scene in the musical Gypsy), and her lesbian lover whom she allegedly shot after the woman made a pass at my mother. This was arranged to look like a suicide.

  I only met my grandmother a few times; the most time I spent with her was when I was five. It was my job to answer the front door of the twenty-eight-room New York City townhouse where my mother and I lived. One day I opened it to a small, plain woman with curly hair. She asked to see my mother.

  “Who shall I say is calling?” I asked. Mother had trained me to be very polite.

  “Tell her it’s her mother,” she answered.

  Now my instructions were very clear. I wasn’t to let anyone into the house who I didn’t know. But this was my mother’s mother, and given the high regard in which I held my own mother . . . Well, I invited her to have a seat in the foyer, and then I ran up the three flights of stairs to my mother’s room and told her who was waiting.

  “Oh, no,” my mother said. She waved her hand as if swatting away a fly. “I can’t be bothered. Tell her I’m busy.” Then, as an afterthought, she asked, “You didn’t let her in the house, did you?”

  “Well, yes,” I admitted.

  “Well for God’s sake, get back downstairs and make sure she hasn’t clipped the Picasso.”

  I ran back downstairs, checked that the Picasso was in place, and politely told her that my mother was “occupied and couldn’t see her.”

  “Oh, that’s all right. I didn’t think she’d see me,” she said sadly. Then her whole demeanor lightened and she said, “You must be Erik. Come, sit and talk with me for awhile.”

  So we had one of those long adult/child chats about school and pets, which ended with her saying, “I bet you like guns.”

  “You bet,” I said. Hopalong Cassidy and The Lone Ranger were the heroes of my childhood, and I played with toy pistols galore.

  She reached into her purse. “I was cleaning out my attic the other day and ran across this. I thought you’d like to have it.”

  She pulled out a real .45 caliber army automatic and handed it to me. It was very heavy, and I could hardly lift it, but I was very excited and couldn’t wait to play with it, so it came as a disappointment when I showed it to my mother who promptly confiscated it.

  Many people have wondered: How much of Mother Finds a Body is true? Ultimately, all of mother’s writing was based on her life, so by the time she got to Gypsy she was comfortable with the characters. Ironically, she waited until after her mother died to write it because she wanted to avoid another lawsuit, but she got sued anyway. This time by her sister. Like the earlier suit by her mother, it was settled with money. To call our family mercenary would be an understatement.

  My mother was fifty-nine years old when she died. She claimed to have no regrets; however, throughout her illness she kept saying that as soon as she was better she was going to write another book. We will never get to read that one, so we’ll have to make do with the three we have, and consider ourselves lucky at that.

  Erik Lee Preminger

  2012

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  1A TEMPERATURE OF ONE HUNDRED AND TEN, AT night, isn’t exactly the climate for asthma or murder, and Mother was suffering from a chronic case of both. She pushed the damp, tight curls off her forehead and tapped her foot impatiently on the trailer doorstep.

  “You either bury that body in the woods tonight, or you finish your honeymoon without your mother.”

  She meant it, too. I could tell from the way she fanned herself with the folded newspaper I’d been saving for my scrapbook. It wasn’t a breeze she was after; a hurricane would be more like it. As the paper waved back and forth I could see the caption: GYPSY ROSE LEE WEDS EX-BURLESQUE COMIC IN WATER TAXI. Below, it read: Biff Brannigan, hit star from Rings on Her Fingers, and bride plan honeymoon in trailer.

  The date line was a week old, August 13, Friday, to make it good. That has been my idea; it sounded romantic. The water taxi was my idea, too. I had romance mixed up with tradition on the last thought, but, as it turned out, it had been romantic. The water taxi was like an overfed gondola. A canvas stretched over the front half of it and wooden seats extended front to back. The captain was one we found in a waterfront saloon, and our best man we picked up on the way to the wharf. The Bible came from and all-night mission that served coffee and doughnuts with religion.

  Even Biff was admitting that it was a wonderful way to get married, when the motor started up and we chugged out to sea. We sat in the back of the boat and I let my hand drag in the cool water. The moon was full and yellow.

  “It’s like a prop, ain’t it?” Biff asked. His voice was low. I think he was awed. “Sort of a Minsky moon. I almost expect the tenor to start singing, ‘I’m in love with the daughter of the man in the moon.’”

  “Yes,” I agreed tremulously. “Then the curtain pulls away and the chorus girls are posing in the sixteen-foot parallels in rhinestone G-strings. The one in the middle holds a flitter star.”

  One of the longshoremen up front was singing. I couldn’t catch all the words, but the song was about a lubber who ought to have his gizzard skewered.

  It had been very romantic. But that was a week ago, before we landed in Ysleta, Texas, and found ourselves a corpse. It wasn’t a very nice corpse, either. It was quite dead and it had a hole in the back of its head that was big enough for a fist.

  “You can’t leave a decayed body hanging around in this hot weather,” she said. “It’s—unhealthy. Asthma or no asthma, I can’t stand the odor.”

  Biff and I had been on friendly terms with corpses before, but even so we didn’t refer to them as casually as Mother did. She thought of our latest one as a pound of hamburger or an opened can of beans; we couldn’t leave them around in the heat, either.

  I had to agree with her about the odor, but I might have pointed out that her newest asthma cure, Life Everlasting, was no bed of heliotrope. As smells go, it ran the corpse a close second.

  Mother stopped to wheeze, and Biff used the lull to get in a few words.

  “But, Evangie,” he said patiently, “when you find a body in your trailer you gotta call the cops. We’ve been able to stand the odor this long; we can put up with it for one more night and first thing in the morning I’ll drive into town and tell the police.”

  Mother’s wheezing ended on a high note. “I’d expect a remark like that from you,” she said
. “You don’t care about my daughter’s welfare. You don’t care about her career. Go ahead and call the police. Let them drag her name through the newspapers. Let them ruin everything she has worked for all her life!” Mother’s voice had reached the hysterical stage and her face was turning red.

  Biff recognized the symptoms and rushed into the trailer for the asthma powder. While he was getting it I led Mother to a camp chair under the lean-to tent. As she sat down I tried to reason with her.

  “But, Mother, someone sooner or later is going to find out about the corpse. One look and they’ll know it’s murder. Then they’ll find out that he’s our best man and . . .”

  “How could they find that out?” Mother asked. Her mouth was a thin white line. Her jaw was set firmly. “After all, the man was a total stranger to you. I can’t vouch for Biff, but I certainly know you never saw him before in your life.”

  “Neither did Biff, and you know it. That isn’t the point. The idea is we can’t touch the body until we notify the police. There’s a law about that.”

  Mother sniffed. “Well, fiddle-faddle such a law. It’s inconsiderate.”

  Biff closed the screen door quietly. He tiptoed over to the table and poured a mound of Mother’s asthma powder into a saucer. He touched a match to it. When the flames died down, a sticky-smelling smoke curled up. Mother put a Turkish towel over her head and buried her face in the volcano. Biff and I listened to her labored breathing until it sounded as though the worst part of the attack was over, then I spoke to him.

  “Were they sleeping?”

  “You mean the dogs, the monkey, the guinea pig, or our guests?” Biff asked. Then he laughed softly. “What a honeymoon! All we need is an olio and we got ourselves a first-class Chautauqua.” After a second he answered my question. “Yep, they were sleeping, all right. As usual, they took up the whole damn trailer.”

  “Well, don’t say it as though it’s my fault. After all, Mandy and Cliff are your friends. If you want to play Joe Host to every comic on the burlesque circuit, don’t blame me when you have no bed to sleep in.”