The mother, Rose Thompson Hovick, was a teenaged bride fresh from a convent school when she married Jack Olaf Hovick. She, her little sister June (later known as June Havoc, 1912?-2010), and her monstrous stage mother, Rose Thompson Hovick, passed into show biz legend when her bestselling 1957 memoir, Gypsy, became a Broadway smash. As Gypsy Rose Lee, she became famous in burlesque as a classy and witty strip tease artist. Gypsy Rose Lee died of lung cancer in Los Angeles in 1970.Seattle-born Rose Louise Hovick had her first brush with fame at age one, winning a healthy baby contest. She had one son, Erik Lee Preminger, with director Otto Preminger, in 1944. To Arnold Mizzy on Augto William Alexander Kirkland in 1942 and to artist Julio de Diego in 1948. Gypsy Rose Lee’s most enduring success was Gypsy: A Memoir, which was made into the popular musical, Gypsy, in 1958. Because of the blacklist, What Makes You Tick? was cancelled in October 1950. In early 1950, she was offered a more permanent gig as host of What Makes You Tick?, a program scheduled to expand from 15 to 30 minutes when she took over later that fall. In the late 1940s, Gypsy Rose Lee’s quick wit was making her a popular guest on radio and television quiz shows. Lee also wrote a play starring Joan Blondell, The Naked Genius, about a burlesque performer. She wrote a less successful follow-up novel in 1942, Mother Finds a Body. At 7 Middagh Street, Gypsy Rose Lee penned a smart, campy novel based on her experiences in burlesque called The G-String Murders, later made into a film titled Lady of Burlesque, starring Barbara Stanwyck. Auden, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, and Chester Kallman. Gypsy Rose Lee was also an accomplished writer who in 1940 moved into an apartment in Brooklyn with a group of literary luminaries including George Davis, an openly gay friend from her burlesque days and fiction editor of Harper’s Bazaar, W.H. She also co-produced and starred in Mike Todd’s Star and Garter in 1952. After Ethel Merman left the show, Gypsy Rose starred in the Broadway production of DuBarry was a Lady. Gypsy Rose debuted on Broadway in 1932 in Hot-Cha as Rose Louise and didn’t adopt the name Gypsy Rose Lee until the 1936 Ziegfeld Follies. A stripper is a woman who puts on a sex spectacle.

Later, Gypsy Rose Lee once told Mike Todd, producer and her lover, “I am not a stripper. Gypsy Rose Lee’s act combined sex and comedy, quickly distinguishing her from the bump-and-grind circuit, where “customers masturbated beneath newspapers in their laps.”. Rose Hovick “harassed and blackmailed both her daughters, demanding money and gifts,” and threatening them with physical violence.”Īlthough Gypsy Rose Lee showed little interest in show business, she developed an act called “Rose Louise and Her Hollywood Blondes, which provided her transition from the dying art of vaudeville into the less reputable business of burlesque. Taken out of school at the age of seven, Gypsy Rose would never complete grade school, much less high school. June later said that from the age of five on, “she never believed anything her mother said.”. The two children were sacrificed to Rose Hovick’s manic, pathological ambitions. She cast Gypsy Rose as the unattractive second fiddle to June, who could dance en pointe from the age f two. Rose Hovick was a monstrous stage mother, as her daughter June later documented. June, known as Hollywood Baby, had caught the eye of Our Gang producer Hal Roach and for a time June had steady work and the three enjoyed a modicum of fame in Los Angeles. Her mother Rose grew up in vaudeville, performing from the time she was twelve, and Rose and her younger sister, now known as June, began performing regularly at the ages of five and three respectively. From that point onward, her older daughter would be known as Rose Louise Hovick. When her sister was born in 1913, her mother gave her second daughter the name Ellen June. Rose Hovick’s first daughter, Ellen June Hovick. Gypsy Rose Lee’s mother, Rose Hovick, married John Hovick married in 1910.

Gpsy rose lee