In Gypsy [Rose Lee] the musical, her mother, 'Mama Rose', is portrayed as a slightly eccentric, pushy, ambitious stage mother, but that version doesn't come close to the truth.

I came upon a telegram from Eleanor Roosevelt herself to Gypsy Rose Lee that read, 'May your bare ass always be shining'. That was the clincher; I had to write about this woman.

Gypsy [Rose Lee], who was called Louise as a kid, gave her first performances here with her sister [June Hovac], playing for the local Masonic lodge halls. It was a tight-knit community, and the support and success the act enjoyed here enabled them to hit the road and make it in big-time vaudeville.

Female spies typically represented one of two extremes: the seductress who employed her wiles to manipulate men, and the cross-dresser who blended in by impersonating them.

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 real Rose Hovick was seriously mentally disturbed; June Havoc called her a beautiful little ornament that was damaged.

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.