I recently finished reading Karen Abbott’s American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee. It’s one of those historical biographies that includes a healthy dash of something approaching fiction (e.g., Abbott recreates Gypsy’s last thoughts as she’s rushed to the hospital in an ambulance). I enjoyed it—sort of. It’s very well written and it presents a vivid picture of America in the twenties and thirties. But it’s not exactly what you’d call a fair biography of Gypsy Rose Lee.

For those of you who have never heard of her, Gypsy was a stripper in the thirties and forties. But she was a stripper with a difference—she kept a running monologue going as she took her clothes off, spoofing herself, her audience, and even the very idea of stripping. She was also a writer, appearing in venues as sophisticated as The New Yorker, and her autobiography, Gypsy, was the source of the well-known musical.

I remember Gypsy—not well, but well enough to know she was the archetypal example of a “dame.” Smart, funny, pragmatic, and outspoken, she was a helluva broad, and, like a lot of other people, I liked her. In Abbott’s portrait, she’s all of that, but she’s also conniving, selfish, vulgar, and somewhat depraved. Abbott doesn’t really approve of her, and biographers who don’t like their subjects frequently don’t do a particularly good job of portraying them fairly.

I think the real problem, though, lies in Abbott’s source for much of the “intimate” detail about Gypsy—her sister, June Havoc. June was an actress and director, but she never achieved the level of fame that her sister did. Gypsy died in 1970 at the age of 59. June died in 2010 at the age of 95. Unfortunately, it’s the survivors who tell the stories, and much of American Rose has the slightly nasty smell of revenge. It’s June who supplies all the evidence of Gypsy’s depravity, including the rather shaky implication that Gypsy was a murderer. It’s June who claims that Gypsy’s striptease act was degrading, and who regards her sister’s fame as evidence of her corruption. It’s June who claims that she threw a fur coat Gypsy gave her for Christmas into the fireplace because she refused to take anything purchased by stripping (and I found myself thinking, Yeah, sure you did).

Abbott repeatedly damns Gypsy for providing fictional versions of herself, but it apparently doesn’t occur to her that June was equally capable of inventing the version of herself she wanted Abbott to see. Despite an occasional reference to June’s earlier peccadilloes, Abbott calls her a “national treasure” without really questioning her motives in slamming her sister.

There’s a moral here, and this is it. When you die, who’ll be around to tell your story? Will your relatives be kind, or will they take the opportunity to give you a couple of good kicks when you’re down? If ever I needed a reason to make sure my relations with my family are good, American Rose definitely supplies it. However, if you want a more enjoyable portrait of Gypsy, even if it’s a highly sanitized one, I recommend her own version of events in her autobiography rather than her sister’s version that Abbott provides. As they once said in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”