"If she had drive and ambition, what's wrong with that?"

That's how June Havoc — dead now at 97 — defended her mother, who was portrayed — unsympathetically, for those not given to excessive sympathy — in the musical "Gypsy." The musical was based on the memoir written by her sister Gypsy Rose Lee. How would you like the world to know the story of your childhood through the eyes of your jealous older sister?

***

But "Gypsy" is such a great musical. It transcends whatever may have been true about the 2 sisters and their mother.  Wouldn't you take great satisfaction to have played a part in the generation of sublime work of art, even if it meant that the real you would forever be submerged under someone else's fictionalized version of you?