A half-century before Madonna, Gypsy [Rose Lee] understood how to make performance out of desire, how to exploit the very human and eternal instinct to always want most what we'll never have.

Gypsy [Rose Lee], who was called Louise as a kid, gave her first performances here with her sister [June Hovac], playing for the local Masonic lodge halls. It was a tight-knit community, and the support and success the act enjoyed here enabled them to hit the road and make it in big-time vaudeville.

The real Rose Hovick was seriously mentally disturbed June Havoc called her a beautiful little ornament that was damaged.

In Gypsy [Rose Lee] the musical, her mother, 'Mama Rose', is portrayed as a slightly eccentric, pushy, ambitious stage mother, but that version doesn't come close to the truth.

I greatly admired Gypsy [Rose Lee] for being able to rise above her circumstances I was terrified of her I thought she was generous I thought she was brilliant I thought she was cruel.

Gypsy [Rose Lee] is as unique as she is timeless. Her story is classic Americana, and the strangest rags-to-riches saga you'll ever read I like to call it Horatio Alger meets Tim Burton.

I came upon a telegram from Eleanor Roosevelt herself to Gypsy Rose Lee that read, 'May your bare ass always be shining'. That was the clincher I had to write about this woman.

Her sister [June Havoc] said the musical portrayed who Gypsy [Rose Lee] wanted to be before the burlesque thing happened she wanted to be this beautiful, romantic person with dreams. So Gypsy told the story of her life as she wished she'd lived it: embellishing, softening the edges, eliminating certain things altogether.

Gypsy [Rose Lee ] was a masterful storyteller, and her memoir and by extension, the musical weren't only Gypsy's monument they were also her chance for monumental revisionism.

Leave the fireworks for those who cast no spark of their own.

Gypsy [Rose Lee] wasn't a linear person, and she didn't live life in a linear fashion. She was relentlessly self-inventing, and moved backward as often as she moved forward.

An amusing city, Chicago, any way you look at it. I'm afraid we are in for the time of our lives.

I think Gypsy [Rose Lee] would be appalled at today's rawer, more blatant displays of the female form. She was, in her own way, a prude.

I felt differently about her [Gypsy Rose Lee] during every phase of the research and writing process. Often, I felt incredibly sorry for her she had an extremely difficult childhood and a complicated 'to say the least' relationship with her family, her mother especially.

The ideas and practices of Franz Anton Mesmer, an 18th-century Australian healer, had spread to the United States and, by the 1840s, held the country in thrall. Mesmer proposed that everything in the universe, including the human body, was governed by a 'magnetic fluid' that could become imbalanced, causing illness.