The Showgirl Must Go on

New York Times

21-02-2025

If names can influence destinies, Gypsy Wood was always meant to be a showgirl. Just as she was about to be born in a hospital in Sydney, Australia, her parents, who were theater people, came across a program for the musical 'Gypsy.' This inspired them to name the baby after its subject, the burlesque performer Gypsy Rose Lee.
'Being very spiritual '70s artists, they were, like, 'It's a sign!' Ms. Wood recounted. That Natalie Wood (no relation) played Gypsy in the movie only added to the sense of planetary alignment.
Ms. Wood grew up to be a dancer and cabaret artist with a wide streak of surrealist humor. She jumped out of dignitaries' birthday cakes, did strip teases and magic shows and appeared on Australian television and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Eventually, she made her way to Las Vegas, where she joined an adult-oriented circus/comedy show hybrid — a 'dirty circus,' if you will — called 'Opium.' She played a nurse aboard a spaceship that transported visitors from Uranus to Las Vegas. Her longtime performing partner, Asher Treleaven, who was also her ex-husband, played the captain.
In the fall of 2023, the cosmos knocked again. Ms. Wood was in bed, recovering from a hangover from her 45th birthday party and moping over the end of a relationship, when someone making a Hollywood movie called 'The Last Showgirl' got in touch.
Through a network of Las Vegas artists, Robert Schwartzman, a producer of the film and the cousin of its director, Gia Coppola, learned about Ms. Wood's house near the Las Vegas Strip and thought it might work as the home of the title character, Shelly Gardner.
As played by Pamela Anderson in a career redefining role, Shelly is a middle-aged dancer whose three-decade job in a Vegas show called 'Le Razzle Dazzle' is about to end. It could be said that Shelly's true home is her backstage dressing room, where she gossips and makes frantic costume changes along with the other showgirls. But much of the film is centered on her domestic life, cooking fish for a date who never shows up, entertaining friends and colleagues, melting down in the bathroom and receiving a rare visit from a resentful daughter.
Ms. Wood said she expected months to pass before anyone stopped by to check out her house for use as a set, but the filmmakers soon came, saw and swooned.
The 1954 ranch house was a veritable museum of Rat Pack era décor, filled with fluffy, sparkly and fruit colored furnishings. The walls were giddy with patterned paper and hung with vintage portraits of busty women. Tiny Chihuahuas ambled around.
Ms. Wood is part of a coterie that haunts estate sales and vintage shops to rescue pieces of Las Vegas that threaten to be buried under the onslaught of themed amusements like the soon-to-be-built Guitar Hotel, and technological wonders like the Sphere arena. To her and many others, these remnants of imperfect times fraught with crime, misogyny and reckless spending now feel as harmless in their gilded excesses as a small, hairless dog.
They are even aspirational.
'When I came to Vegas,' Ms. Wood said, 'I saw a picture of Jayne Mansfield shopping in a supermarket in Las Vegas in a sequined gown, and I was, like, 'That's going be my spirit animal.''
Natalie Ziering, who designed the sets for 'The Last Showgirl,' recalled in a phone conversation that the film's screenwriter, Kate Gersten, was initially put off by all the bling in Ms. Wood's house. 'She saw Shelly's place as more sterile, more IKEA, just more kind of dull. I was, like, 'No, I think this is perfect because she brings her work home. Her work is all she has,'' (Ms. Ziering added that her entire production budget was $95,000.)
Speaking on the phone from Los Angeles, Ms. Coppola said she felt a sense of Kismet when she saw a poster for 'The Red Shoes' hanging in Ms. Wood's living room. The 1948 Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger movie is about how a commitment to one's art can be a two-headed beast, both euphoric and cruel. This is no more true for the celebrated ballerina whom Moira Shearer plays in that film than it is for Shelly dancing in feathers and pasties.
'I definitely felt that that was a movie Shelly would have loved,' Ms. Coppola said.
The production team made few décor changes in the 18-day shoot. A crystal chandelier was hung here, a fluorescent lamp was removed there. A broken pair of porcelain figurines that represented the end of Ms. Wood's marriage was positioned on a bathroom windowsill for a cameo. Paint swatches were left on a kitchen wall where Ms. Wood had been experimenting with colors
'I said, 'Please don't touch that,'' Ms. Coppola recalled about the swatches. 'These are just the kind of little details you couldn't necessarily recreate.'
In January, Ms. Wood offered a reporter a tour of her home. It was early on a Monday afternoon, and she was wearing an emerald green chiffon cocktail dress that complemented her auburn hair. The house looked deceptively small from outside.
'It's three bedrooms, but that's more than a showgirl needs,' she said.
One of those bedrooms — covered in light-blue flocked wallpaper and hung with vintage pinup girl calendar pages — was reserved for artists who were between jobs and needed a place to stay.
A second bedroom was papered in a fuzzy dark-green damask on metallic gold. It had gold-painted furniture and a cherub hanging from a corner of the ceiling.
Ms. Wood's own room was filled with a bed she bought from a security guard at the Treasure Island Resort & Casino, which had a hot pink tufted headboard framed in baroque gilded swirls. She was collecting gold-veined mirror tiles to cover the ceiling and figured she was about halfway done.
By this time, she had papered her kitchen with something 'very Limoncello, very stardust,' as she put it. She spoke of replacing the blond wood kitchen flooring with linoleum. 'It's not terrible,' she said about the boards underfoot. 'It's just too nice.'
She vowed never to paint over the white-and-gold lace-patterned wallpaper in the living room that had been put up by the previous owners. 'It's just a masterpiece of design,' she said.
Ms. Wood opened a closet door and gestured at holes tunneled into the floorboards that she believed had once been used to hide contraband. Ms. Coppola later recalled that she was so enchanted with them she made sure Shelly referred to them in the movie.
Shortly after the film wrapped, Ms. Wood discovered that she, like Shelly, would soon be out of a job. 'Opium,' which was produced by the entertainment company Spiegelworld, closed in December of 2023. But Ms. Wood soon found a place in 'Absinthe,' a raunchy circus performed in a tent outside Caesars Palace that is another Spiegelworld production.
She can also be spotted spinning plates in a scene in 'The Last Showgirl.'