Expectant Publisher

Ecdysiast Gypsy Rose Lee last week almost achieved a literary ambition. She all but bought the Police Gazette. ("Everything about it appeals to me. I liked the name, I liked the pink cover, I liked the meat & potatoes Americana it prints.")

But Gypsy intends to satisfy her ambition yet. She wanted the Police Gazette, but she did not want it badly enough to pay $200,000. She was sad at not getting it--the more so because she is sure that a year ago, before the boys filled up the Army camps, she could have bought it for the feed bill. So she has decided to start her own magazine, called after her new show, Star & Garter. ("I wouldn't put a nickel in a show, not 5-c-, but I'd take money from my annuities for a magazine.")

Gypsy is still dazzled by the miracle of type. Her first work (last year), The G-String Murders, was a murder-mystery best-seller (24,000 copies). Her second mystery, Mother Finds a Body, due for fall publication, "rolled right through the typewriter by itself." ("I'd no more think of saying that was a swell performance when I come off the stage--but when I finish a piece of writing, I read it over and I say to myself, 'Say, that's a hell of a hunk of writing!' ")

Now she is finishing a series of articles for The New Yorker about her actress sister June Havoc and her mother, with whom she started trouping when she was six. Even that job did not disillusion her with literature ("People told me that anyone who wrote for The New Yorker got a neurotic stomach. I thought it was a gag. I felt fine when I started. Now, sure enough, my stomach has gone to hell.")

For editorial policies, when she has a magazine of her own, she will rely on the eternal verities that she learned in burlesque. One of them: "You can't sell sex and humor at the same time." Another: "To hell with women."

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