She wasn't just a burlesque dancer. Gypsy Rose Lee turned stripping into intellectual performance art, delivering wisecracks and literary references while removing her gloves with the timing of a vaudeville comedian. Audiences forgot they were watching a striptease because she made them laugh first and blush second. Born Rose Louise Hovick in Seattle on January 8, 1911, she was pushed onto the stage by her mother, one of the most notorious stage mothers in American entertainment history. Her younger sister, June Havoc, was the original star; when June ran away from the act, Rose Louise took over. She evolved from a mediocre child performer into the headliner at Minsky's Burlesque in New York, where her act was less about skin than about the sophisticated comedy surrounding it. Her stage name, Gypsy Rose Lee, became synonymous with burlesque's golden age. She talked to the audience as she performed, mocking their expectations, commenting on politics, dropping references to Proust and Schopenhauer. She made the audience complicit: they were not watching a woman undress, they were participating in a performance about the absurdity of watching a woman undress. She published a mystery novel, The G-String Murders, in 1941, which became a bestseller. A second novel followed. She wrote for The New Yorker. She hosted a television talk show. She was friends with writers, artists, and intellectuals who found her more interesting than most of the people they published with. Her memoir, Gypsy, became the basis for the 1959 Broadway musical of the same name, with Ethel Merman originating the role of her domineering mother. The musical is still performed regularly. She performed until the mid-1960s and spent her final years painting and collecting art. She died on April 26, 1970, at 59, of lung cancer. She had been one of the highest-paid entertainers in America and had turned the lowest form of theater into something critics couldn't dismiss.