For a while “American Rose” follows the girls’ upbringing and early stage training. And it introduces Billy Minsky, the vaudeville and burlesque impresario, as another major character. Then it jumps ahead to 1940, with Gypsy falling in love with another impresario, Mike Todd. “I like my men on the monster side,” she once told a friend, in one of her least guarded-sounding statements. “A snarling mouth, an evil eye, broken nose — if he should happen to have thick ears, good! And I like a little muscle, hair on the chest, none on the head. A nervous tic excites me and if with all these other things he wore green suits — bank night!”  It’s typically perplexing of “American Rose” to place this description, and the comment that Todd was “exactly her type,” opposite a photo of the nonbald Todd, who had a very full head of hair indeed. But this book is confusing in much more important ways. It keeps on feinting and switching eras, quite jarringly. It often switches focus, dealing better with the “times” of Gypsy Rose Lee (as mentioned in its subtitle) than with the actual life. It relies on Gypsy’s own 1957 memoir, right down to paraphrasing the way she describes stripping off costumes that were fastened with straight pins, which made a plinking sound each time a pin landed in a nearby tuba. How Gypsy managed these pins without drawing blood is one of too many things left to the imagination.  In tracing the evolution of vaudeville into burlesque, Ms. Abbott has a great trove of material at her disposal. And some of the most memorable figures in her book are the strangest, like the Minsky “Rosebuds,” chorines who could weigh in at up to 170 pounds and were described by one critic as “hulking.” Then there are the Tammany Hall connections, the vice raids, the effects of the Wall Street crash on stripping. (A new and prettier workforce suddenly became available.) Ms. Abbott is at her most writerly when it comes to summoning backstage atmosphere: “Cigarette butts and greasy towels and body makeup sluiced across the floor, gnats swarming half-full glasses of warm beer, a sink clogged with dirty underwear, rhinestones glinting in all directions like pairs of beady eyes.”  But where is Gypsy? Ms. Abbott reserves a full description of her World’s Fair stage act for the book’s finale. She mentions only in passing such details as Gypsy’s television talk show, her interest in “Das Kapital,” her mystery-book writing, art collection, underworld connections, asexuality and/or possible bisexuality. And although she had two incomparably useful interview subjects, Erik Preminger (Gypsy’s only child) and the aged, white-pigtailed June Havoc (who died at 97 this year), Ms. Abbott recycles some of the same primal family struggles that the Broadway show “Gypsy” immortalized. Gypsy’s private pain is often mentioned; her shameless appropriation of events from June’s childhood left behind indelible bitterness. “I was no sister,” June told Ms. Abbott. “I was a knot in her life. I was nothing.”  If “American Rose” does not excel at biographical explanation, it does have a penchant for ornate writing. Some of this befits the gaudiness of the world that Ms. Abbott’s book evokes, but some is just plain overwrought, particularly when it comes to deathbed scenes. As she writes about one figure’s demise: “Quiet crept in, stealthy, taking its time, turning down the volume and unfurling the curtain, lowering it by inches, until the velvet hem teased the floor and the darkness seized his eyes.” If there is such a thing as death by show business, this is what it’s like.  A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee  Illustrated. 422 pages. Random House. $26.  A version of this review appears in print on December 20, 2010, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Life Built On Illusion, More Tease Than Strip. Today's Paper|Subscribe
“American Rose,” a biography of Gypsy Rose Lee, often focuses more on its subject’s times than her life.