Next week, a new production opens on Broadway, directed by Sam Mendes, with Bernadette Peters as Rose - a role originally created for "Broadway belter" Ethel Merman. The lyrics came from Stephen Sondheim, who also coined the phrase "everything's coming up roses" for the show. It has a talking cow, dancing girls and a song called Have an Egg Roll, Mr Goldstone. His "fable" tells the story of gawky, talentless ugly duckling Louise Hovick, who is forced on stage by her mother Rose, and blossoms into star stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. Laurents may have used Gypsy's name for the title, but his musical is dominated by Lee's monstrous mother. How can you resist doing a musical based on a woman like that?" So she pushed him out the window and killed him. "We all got to talking about our first loves, and one girl said, 'My first lover was Gypsy Rose Lee's mother.' That interested me." He remembered another story, relayed by the same girl: "Rose had a big fight with a hotel manager. "Everybody was getting smashed," he said later. What changed Laurents' mind was a girl at a cocktail party. Arthur Laurents wasn't sure - he was, he thought, "too grand for any of that trash". No wonder when Lee published Gypsy: A Memoir in 1957 that Merrick snapped up the musical rights. And six years later, Jacqueline Susann, the pill-popping author of Valley of the Dolls, appeared on stage as ladylike stripper Fudge Farrell in Charles Raddock's comedy Between the Covers. In 1940 Rodgers and Hart wrote a song about her in their musical Pal Joey: Zip! satirises "a broad with a broad, broad mind" who spouts Schopenhauer while she unzips (disregarding the fact that Lee shunned zippers as "common"). Lee had never made it into legitimate theatre, but she had long been an inspiration to Broadway. "Well, I certainly am." She would then whip off her skirt, whisk the curtain in front of her and close with: "Oh boys, I can't take that off. "Do you believe, for one moment, that I'm thinking of sex?" Lee would ask, followed by a dramatic pause. During her "inside out strip", she relayed her interior monologue: "And though my thighs I have revealed/ And just a bit of me remains concealed,/ I'm thinking of the life of Duse,/ Or the last chapter of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire." She would threaten to "take the last thing off", prompting a plant in the audience to scream. When she undid the pins in her dress, she dropped them into a tuba to hear them plink. Why, she doesn't even strip." For the New Yorker, however, Lee was "a must for those who feel better with their eyebrows raised". The theatre's press agent put out a statement declaring, "Strip teasing is pure American art," to which Lee's rival June St Clair complained: "Gypsy's work isn't art.