I spent three years researching American Rose, research that included connecting with Gypsy's sister, the late actress June Havoc (I was the last person to interview her) and Gypsy's son, and also spending countless hours immersed in Gypsy's expansive archives at the New York Public Library. I became obsessed with figuring out the person behind the persona.

I think Gypsy [Rose Lee] would be appalled at today's rawer, more blatant displays of the female form. She was, in her own way, a prude.

Leave the fireworks for those who cast no spark of their own.

The cousin said that Gypsy [Rose Lee] took a full fifteen minutes to peel off a single glove, and that she was so damn good at it he gladly would've given her fifteen more. So this story got me thinking, who was Gypsy Rose Lee? Who could possibly take the simple act of peeling off a glove and make it so riveting that one might be compelled to watch this for a full half-hour? So I began researching, and I came across a series of articles from the year 1940 about Gypsy in Life magazine.

The ideas and practices of Franz Anton Mesmer, an 18th-century Australian healer, had spread to the United States and, by the 1840s, held the country in thrall. Mesmer proposed that everything in the universe, including the human body, was governed by a 'magnetic fluid' that could become imbalanced, causing illness.

When Gypsy was older, after she became Gypsy Rose Lee, I think she was both proud and slightly ashamed of her Seattle roots. She worked very hard to rid her voice of any trace of a local accent, cultivating an affected way of speaking that sounded as if she pinned the ends of her words.

Gypsy [Rose Lee] is as unique as she is timeless. Her story is classic Americana, and the strangest rags-to-riches saga you'll ever read; I like to call it Horatio Alger meets Tim Burton.