Word: june
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...recalls June Havoc, successful cineminx, Broadwayward girl (Sadie Thompson, Pal Joey), Shakespearean (A Midsummer Night's Dream) and grown-up (41) kid sister of Stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. June, who was worked so hard as a child star that she never learned how to write properly in longhand, took two years to type out the saga of her youth, called it Early Havoc (Simon & Schuster; $3.95). Though some of it covers the same ground Sister traveled in her own autobiographical story, Gypsy,* which appeared in a musical version on Broadway last week (see THEATER), the book is a remarkable...
...Watching." Mother Rose Hovick was a divorcee and frustrated actress who hustled her daughter June to Hollywood at the" age of three, landed her in Our Gang comedies as the hungry-looking waif, got her to weep in the sad scenes by whispering, "Darling, your dog has just been run over." When Dainty June was four, Mother whipped up a vaudeville song-and-dance for her, gave a lesser role to sister Rose Louise (who later became Gypsy Rose), added a chorus of little boys, who often "had very little talent because Mother didn't expect to pay them...
...went down together with vaudeville, pursued by child-welfare officers and cops hunting for the bales of towels Mother filched from hotels. To escape, Baby June eloped when she was 13 with one of the chorus boys, aged 18, outran Mama in a breathless chase to the honeymoon train. Big Sister Gypsy was booked by Mama in a Kansas City burlesque house, soon struck a jackpot at Minsky's in Manhattan and put up Mama in velvety splendor in a flat above the honky-tonks of 42nd Street...
...Dainty June, life without Mother was dismal. An awkward adolescent, she had grown out of her job as a child hoofer. Hungry, she split with her husband, signed on as a marathon dancer near Boston. Just as the stage had been June's nursery, the marathon became her college, and she gives an effective description of one of the weirdest fads of the '20s and '30s. Dredged from the bottom of the Depression, the dancers were "horses" rather than humans, swung on their feet for days, weeks and months-with an eleven-minute break every hour...
...dancers wiped out their rivals by slipping them Mickeys or Ex-Lax. Old-timers advised first-timers to don wet stockings (it gave them blisters); women slugged other women cold. Men and women huddled and sometimes made love while wrapped in blankets. "I never did understand the spectators," says June. "They neglected home, children, work. They were drawn to us by the climate of cruelty in the world. Our degradation was entertainment; sadism was sexy; masochism was talent...