Musings

At Right - Rose Hovick

Here she is boys/Here she is world…Here’s Rose …

Long before there was a show called Dance Moms, there was Mama Rose. Since she made her first appearance in the brassy, larger-than-life performance of Ethel Merman in 1959’s Gypsy, based on the memoirs of her daughter Gypsy Rose Lee(January 9, 1911 – April 26, 1970), Mama Rose has been a touchstone of musical theater and the most famous “Stage or Dance Mom” in show business, on the stage, in the successful movie musical in 1962 with Rosalind Russell, and, most chillingly, in real life.

At Right - Gypsy Rose Lee

Rose Hovick(August 31, 1898 - 1954) was also the mother of actress June Havoc(November 8, 1912 – March 28, 2010) who was pushed into the spotlight as Baby then Dainty June.

What’s ironic is that, if you ask the man who created her — playwright Arthur Laurents — to talk about Mama Rose, the first thing he does is correct you. It’s Madame Rose, not Mama Rose.

“I’ve never understood that, because she certainly would loathe being called[that],” Laurents says. “And she was … nobody ever thought of her as a mother! Why she’s called ‘Mama Rose,’ I don’t know.”

Whether you call her, Madame Rose or Mama Rose, she’s the stage mother from hell, or is she? In the dazzling score by composer Jule Styne and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, and in Laurents’ script, Rose is a woman boiling over with her own frustrated ambition. And she channels all her energies into turning her daughters into stars — woe be to anyone who gets in her way. She’s horrifying & mesmerizing. But there’s a vulnerability underneath that hard exterior.

At Right - Young “Baby” June

“I can’t think of another part in a musical that’s this complex, this large and this grand,” says New York Times critic Ben Brantley.

How complex, how large, how grand?

“It really is like King Lear with music,” says Bernadette Peters, who played the part in a 2003 revival. “I mean, it’s amazing.”

54 years ago, Arthur Laurents was approached by producer Leland Heyward, who wanted Laurents to adapt the memoirs of burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee into a musical.

As Laurents found out, the real Rose was no delicate flower. She toured the country  with a vaudeville troupe starring her daughters, June — who later became the famous actress June Havoc — and Louise, who became Gypsy Rose Lee.  She literally shoved her way into theaters with her daughters in tow. There was also a contingent of young boys, all of them part of the show.

“She had the two little girls and all the little boys in the newsboy act in one room in a hotel,” Laurents recalls. “The manager came [and] objected, and she pushed him out the window. I didn’t use that, but … I used her pushing him around!”

In one of his biographies of the family he grew up in grandson Erik Lee Preminger alleges that Rose actually shot and killed a guest for making a pass at Gypsy, also alleging the person shot was Rose’s lover. Obviously, with the internet and research, again, more than one story. In some accounts it is a boarding house guest, in others the guest is decidedly a male and a guest at a party.

Rose Hovick died of colon cancer in 1954. Her final words to Gypsy, “Wherever you go I’ll be right there… When you get your own personal kick in the a**, just remember, it’s a present from me to you.”

The musical Gypsy was loosely adapted from Gypsy Rose Lee’s book, but in spite of the title, the musical is really about Rose as seen through the eyes of her children and all those around her. She cannot see herself the way others do. She has decided she wants better for her kids than the way she grew up. Even if it kills them, she will be sure that they get it.

In the beginning she and her children are on tour with boys who’s families are duped by Rose into thinking she will give them an education. When the act falls on hard times she returns to her father’s house for a loan to get the act going again. One of my favorite songs is “Some People” in which she tells him that his kind of life is peachy for some people, some “hum drum” people, but not her, and not her kids. At this point I truly love the character - who doesn’t want something better for their kids? It’s not until the final act that she finally admits it was for herself in “Rose’s Turn”

Gypsy Rose Lee’s story might have been embellishedby Broadway, but it gives a glimpse of Gypsy/Louise as the Ugly Duckling ignored in favor of her younger sister. June was blonde, pretty, talented, and The Star. While Dainty June was getting thousands a week as a vaudeville headliner Louse was ignored, used in the chorus and otherwise pretty much forgotten by her mother and everyone else. Even she wondered if she would ever by any good at anything, even though she was so bright that she educated herself fabulously with nothing more to work with than a little trunk space for books. Everything changed when June ran away to get married at age thirteen (a story told in her own book “Early Havoc”, a good read) at the same time that vaudeville was dying out. It’s here that Mama Rose revealed the depth of her obsession with stardom, trying to make her seemingly plain, talentless, and ungainly daughter a star in a medium that no longer existed. The truly amazing thing is that she succeeded, although not the way she intended.

Survivor Yes, Monster Maybe — and for Actresses, a Dream

Patti LuPone, who won a Tony for her portrayal of Mama Rose in 2008 doesn’t think that Rose was an ogre. ”She had tunnel vision, she was driven, and she loved her kids,” LuPone says. “And she was a survivor. I do not see her as a monster at all — she may have done monstrous things, but that does not make a monster.”

Rose, says critic Ben Brantley, is single-minded, and she takes what she needs. ”She’s a classic American success story — you do what you need to fulfill your objective,” he says. ” And her objective is to get her daughters famous, so she can experience it vicariously. So, sure, if it involves stealing the silverware, or taking the blankets from hotels to make coats, that’s what you do.

Although written in the 50’s, based on the memoirs of a woman who would be otherwise forgotten now, Gypsystill speaks to preoccupations with fame, its brittle tinsel, reality show performers who have no talent and mothers who don’t care and the sense that popularity, not art, is entertainment.

“Rose’s Turn” may be the great moment in American musical theater. Alone onstage, Rose confronts the truth: Her ambition and manipulation have made everyone leave her.

Mama Rose represents what show business is about. She’s why people go into it; it’s that hunger for attention, for adventure, to do more than just “live life in a living room.” That  appeals to audiences. It’s ‘Look at me, watch me, I want to make a difference, I want to be seen. I want to be loved.’ The tragedy is in not knowing when or where to stop.

Buy Gypsy: Memoirs of America’s Most Celebrated Stripper” from Amazon.

Rosalind Russell performing Rose’s Turn. Although many actresses have played the role, Rosalind gave Rose a more vulnerable, desperate quality in my opinion.