Early Havoc

She could dance on her toes when she was eighteen months old (and by heaven she had to!).

June Havoc is the famous younger sister of Gypsy Rose Lee, and the daughter of Mrs. Rose Hovick, whose life story was fancifully portrayed by Ethel Merman in the 1959 smash-hit Broadway musical Gypsy.

In Early Havoc, June tells quite another story, the inside story of a ruthless, conscienceless, ambition-driven woman who stripped her own daughters of their childhood. Early Havoc is a book that gets beneath the glitter of “show biz,”, and reveals the savage reality, as only the real autobiography of a trouper can.

“A remarkable show-business document that might be titled ‘How to Make Good in Spite of Mother, Men and Marathons!’—TIME

“Tensely dramatic…these are the years in which a child and a girl were beaten, pounded and shaped into womanhood.”—New York Herald Tribune