VAUDEVILLE: Saga of Dainty June

"I am not a Vassar girl. I never went to school a day in my life. I was raised, if you wish to call it that, in vaudeville, going from town to town, playing with musicians, acrobats, dancers, even freaks. Some were nice, some tender, some vicious. Many were genuinely bigtime, and you knew it the moment you were with them. Others were simply small-time human beings—petty, meager-minded, whiny, changing from week to week as we traveled from town to town."

So 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 show-business document that might better be titled "How to Make Good in Spite of Mother, Men and Marathons."

"God Is 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." The act packed 'em in across Pantages' corn-fed circuit. "God is watching over our little act," Mother reassured everyone. "He won't knock vaudeville out from under us."

But the act 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.

For 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. The idea, recalls June, was to turn the dancers into animals, make them near-insensate or "squirrely."