People Say I'm the Life of the Party Quiz

Answer: Rose Louise Hovick

Rose Louise Hovick was born to a Rose Thompson Hovick and Jack Olaf Hovick. Mama Rose was only nineteen when she gave birth to her daughter, Rose Louise. Jack Olaf Hovick was originally from Norway, before making his home in America and working as a salesman and reporter for the "Seattle Times". Two years later, Mama Rose gave birth to another daughter, June.

Answer: Plug

Rose Thompson Hovick and Jack Olaf Hovick divorced not long after their second daughter was born. This gave Mama Rose the chance to use her two daughters to meet her own needs. She had a vision of Plug being a star on stage but instead turned her attention to Baby June who was more talented and attractive. June was able to dance 'en pointe' when she was two years old and this led to several bookings for stage work. Plug, or Louise as she was also called, did not join the act until she was seven years old.

Answer: Vaudeville

Mama Rose was always in debt, spending the money her daughters earned and often forcing the two girls to steal. They appeared in the Vaudeville productions "Baby June, the Pocket-sized Pavlova" and "Madam Rose's Dancing Daughters". June was the star of the show with Louise often singing in the chorus. Young street urchins were employed to be part of the act, "Baby June and Her Farmboys".

It all came to an end when June became too old to act such a young part and she eventually eloped with one of the male dancers when she was 15 years old.

It was at this time during the late 1920s/early 1930s when stars of Vaudeville such as Al Jolson, Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers, were turning towards a new direction - the talking movie.

Answer: Minsky's

With the departure of Baby June, Mama Rose soon pushed her other daughter Louise into the spotlight. They ended up at Minsky's where Mama Rose introduced "Rose Louise and Her Hollywood Blondes", a slightly risqué song and dance act with Louise in the lead and a group of girls wearing blond wigs as the chorus. It didn't take long for the ever grasping Mama Rose to push her daughter into stripping and it is believed Louise first performed burlesque at the tender age of 17.

Minsky's club first opened in 1912 by four brothers, Abe, Billy, Herbert and Morton. Strict guidelines had to be adhered to, for example, woman were allowed to appear topless in front of an audience but they could not move. Raids were carried out on those clubs breaking the rules. It is believed that when Gypsy Rose Lee was once arrested during one of these raids, she said, ""But officer, I wasn't naked. I was covered by a blue spotlight!"

One such raid at Minsky's in 1925 inspired the 1968 musical comedy, "The Night They Raided Minsky's", which starred Britt Ekland, Elliott Gould and Jason Robards.

Answer: Reading tea leaves

Louise took on the stage name of Gypsy Rose Lee from her love of reading tea leaves. Reading tea leaves, or tasseography as it was formerly known, stems back to Romany gypsies who would travel from town to town telling fortunes. And so it came to be that the name Gypsy was to become immortalised as her stage name, along with Rose and Lee which were both taken from her real name, Rose Louise.

Answer: Mike Todd

Gypsy Rose Lee first married in 1937 to Robert Mizzy who was believed to have been a supplier of dental equipment. The marriage only lasted until 1941.

Her affair with theatre producer, Mike Todd, followed not long after her divorce and she appeared in his 1942 Broadway production, "Star and Garter". Gypsy wrote the play "The Naked Genius" which was produced by Todd in 1943, and starred Joan Blondell who would later become his second wife. Mike Todd became the third husband of Elizabeth Taylor in 1957 but died in an aircraft accident a year later.

Gypsy Rose Lee married Alexander Kirkland on the rebound from Mike Todd but divorced in 1944 when she gave birth to her only child, Erik, after a short affair with film director, Otto Preminger. Her last marriage was to actor and artist Julio De Diego from 1948 to 1955.

Answer: Lady of Burlesque

Barbara Stanwyck played the part of Dixie Daisy, a new attraction at a recently opened burlesque theatre. When two of the other stars were murdered, it was up to Dixie to prove her innocence when she was put in the frame. The film was censored but included the fundamentals of striptease which would not offend cinemagoers of the time.

Barbara Stanwyck started as a chorus girl with the Ziegfield Follies before her acting career took off, starring in films alongside Henry Fonda, William Holden and Gary Cooper.

Her dancing background stood her in good stead when she starred in the "Lady of Burlesque" as she was seen to perform a catchy little song and dance act called "Take it off the E string, play it on the G string". It even included a brief episode of break dancing which was more familiar in the 1970s than the 1940s.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOibSeDyrMo

Answer: Gypsy, A Memoir

Mama Rose often used the quote "Do unto others ... before they do you". There was talk of Mama Rose being involved in murder but this could never be proved. Such was the control she had over her daughters that they eventually resorted to communicating through their solicitors.

The sisters had grown further apart since their teens, but more so after the memoirs were published as June claimed they showed an inaccurate picture of their childhood, and of their mother. June was a successful actress in her own right by taking in the stage name June Havoc and starring alongside Gene Kelly in the 1940 Broadway production of "Pal Joey". She responded to "Gypsy, A Memoir" by publishing her own memoirs in 1959 called "Early Havoc".

Answer: Cynthia Gibb

Both the 1962 and 1993 versions of the film "Gypsy" were loosely based on the memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee. They featured songs written by Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim which included "Everything's Coming Up Roses" and "Let Me Entertain You". In the original film, Natalie Wood starred alongside Rosalind Russell as Mama Rose. The 1993 film had Cynthia Gibb cast as Gypsy alongside Bette Midler as Mama.

Cynthia Gibb was a former model and known for her film and television work. She was also a qualified voice coach. Apart from playing Gypsy Rose Lee, she was best remembered for playing the lead role in the 1989 made for television film "The Karen Carpenter Story".

Answer: Lung cancer

Gypsy Rose Lee once said, "If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing slowly ... very slowly". She had the intelligence to turn what could have been a sleazy act into something which was tasteful and entertaining. She was known for more "tease" than "strip", and this was proved when she would take up to 15 minutes to remove one glove, all the while entertaining her audience with witty repartee.

She stopped stripping when she was in her forties, spending time instead at her new home in Beverly Hills indulging in creative hobbies such as gardening, antique collecting and dog breeding.

She still made the occasional guest appearance on television; one such programme being "What's My Line?" in 1959. In front of a panel of four blindfolded judges, she provocatively removed her gloves finger by finger, much to the amusement of the audience, and then filled her mouth with marbles to disguise her voice. One of the panel guessed her identity and she was heard saying "You fill your mouth full of these, and every day your remove a marble. When you have lost all your marbles you're a stripper".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aROHygwnjE