My G-string Mother: At Home and Backstage with Gypsy Rose Lee

Erik was 12 when Gypsy decided she was through with striptease–‘I’m forty-two years old. Too old to be taking my clothes off in front of strangers.’ Her endless schemes for staying famous and maintaining their extravagant lifestyle–a best-selling writing career, a musical based on her life, a disastrous attempt to turn her home movies into a blockbuster–make for comedic yet poignant reading. My G-String Mother is a stylish, incisive portrait of two lives: an awkward adolescent who was as much confidante, co-conspirator, and companion as son, and the legendary woman who told police at a raid at the famous Minsky’s burlesque house, ‘I wasn’t naked. I was completely covered by a blue spotlight.