Gypsy, June, and the Lawyers: Collaboration as Negotiation
Almost forty years after its premiere, actress June Havoc described Gypsy, the musical based on her childhood with her sister, stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, as “Not a legend, a cockeyed fantasy…Mr. Laurents’s private dream.” During its conception, Havoc was concerned that the musical’s portrayal of her would negatively impact her career and livelihood. She considered Arthur Laurents’s character Baby/Dainty June to be insulting, calling her a “no-talent, whining nothing.” Havoc would have preferred Gypsy depict June as the real-life, Tony-nominated actress and writer that she became. To protect herself, Havoc threatened lawsuits unless specific changes were made to the script and the production. The producers of the show struggled to gain her approval, securing her signature on a release just two weeks before the Broadway opening.
Existing accounts of the making of Gypsy frame Havoc’s actions as interference with the creative process rather than necessary negotiations for writing and staging a Broadway show about actual people. Drawing on a variety of archival sources gathered in New York City and Washington DC, including legal documents, date books, and private letters, this paper reveals the extent of Havoc’s intervention in Gypsy and the strife her demands created between the creative and management/legal teams. These documents reveal the important role producers and lawyers play in the creative process and how, from Havoc’s perspective, legal action was the only recourse available to influence the content of a show being made by men she perceived as indifferent to her own story.