Oddlet: Gypsy Rose Lee · 1 min read
Aug 28, 2026
The Stripper at the Typewriter
What was the headlining stripper at Minsky's doing at the dinner table with Auden, Britten, and McCullers?
Rose Louise Hovick, professionally Gypsy Rose Lee, was the headliner at Minsky's Republic Theater on Broadway through the 1930s, the first stripper invited into the Ziegfeld Follies, and the woman who turned H.L. Mencken's Greek word for molting into a brand. She could make the removal of a single glove last fifteen minutes. She kept her costumes pinned together with straight pins from a dime-store cushion, which she dropped one by one into the bell of the orchestra tuba.
The pins were a bit. The reading was not.
In 1940 she moved into 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights, a brownstone known as February House. W. H. Auden collected the rent. Carson McCullers was upstairs writing The Member of the Wedding. Benjamin Britten was down the hall composing Paul Bunyan. Paul and Jane Bowles drifted through. Auden enforced a dinner rule against political argument, which is exactly the rule you make when Auden is at your table.
Gypsy brought a cook, a maid, and a typewriter. While Britten orchestrated and McCullers wrestled with her manuscript, Gypsy sat down and wrote a murder mystery set backstage at a strip joint. She called it The G-String Murders. Simon and Schuster published it in 1941. It was the bestselling detective novel of the half-decade.
They tore the house down to build a highway.
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- Wikipedia — Gypsy Rose Lee — Comprehensive biography: real name, dates, parents, June Havoc, Minsky's tenure, marriages, Erik Preminger and Otto Preminger paternity, KGO-TV episode count, ecdysiast/Mencken.
- JSTOR Daily — Who Really Wrote The G-String Murders? — Discusses Simon & Schuster's publication of Lee's editorial correspondence as evidence she authored The G-String Murders; confirms she lived at 7 Middagh Street with Auden, McCullers, Britten, the Bowleses.
- Wikipedia — February House — Documents the 1940-41 Brooklyn Heights artists' commune at 7 Middagh Street organized by editor George Davis, with Lee, Auden, McCullers, Britten, Pears and the Bowleses as residents; named by Anais Nin; demolished for the BQE.
- World Wide Words on 'ecdysiast' — Establishes that Mencken's April 5, 1940 letter coining 'ecdysiast' was actually to Georgia Sothern, not Gypsy, and that Gypsy later called Mencken an 'intellectual slob.'
- Burlesque Hall of Fame — Gypsy's Pincushion — Definitive source for the pin-dropping mechanics: distrusted zippers, pinned the side seam, dropped pins into the tuba bell and snare drum.
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