Rose's Turn: Mother of 'Gypsy' To Get a Biography Rose Thompson Hovick, whose offspring included Gypsy Rose Lee, the burlesque queen, and June Havoc, the actress, is remembered as the ultimate stage mother thanks to the 1959 Broadway musical "Gypsy." Now she's getting a full-fledged biography of her own. "Mama Rose: Gypsy Rose Lee's Indomitable Stage Mother," by Carolyn Quinn, will be published next year by the University Press of Mississippi. Fictionalized accounts and spicy memoirs by others have portrayed Hovick, who was born in 1892 and died of cancer in 1954, as a schemer determined to catapult her daughters to fame by any means. "I was always aware there were various versions of this woman's story and they didn't always add up," Ms. Quinn, a photographer and independent scholar, said in an interview Friday. June Havoc's first book was dark and negative and Gypsy's was light and funny -you wouldn't know they were in the same family, describing the same events. Working on the biography since 2008, Ms. Quinn has relied heavily on newspaper articles, interviews with friends and family members, and hundreds of letters written by Hovick herself. She promises to draw a more complicated picture than the meddlesome Mama portrayed on stage and screen by Rosalind Russell, Ethel Merman, Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly, and Patti LuPone. The latter three won Tony Awards in the role. "She was so independent, she did anything she wanted, she worked completely against convention," Ms. Quinn explained. I found a whole different story in the archives. She was very unhappy she was estranged from her children. "Gypsy" features music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and a book by Arthur Laurents based on Gypsy Rose Lee's memoir. While Ms. Quinn described it as one of her favorite musicals, "I felt the portrayal in the Broadway show was not really fair to the facts of the situation. They made it more conflicted and melodramatic than it was.