Television: TELEVISION Cut Short

Gypsy Rose Lee, who started her career by getting things off her chest, is back at it again. Only now she does it by quipping instead of stripping on a show taped by KGO-TV in San Francisco. The censors plague her still, but now it is her tongue they worry about. Every time they think it has turned blue they press a button, and what she has actually said comes out “blip.”

“The most deceptive woman I knew,” she reflected, “even used to say ‘ouch’ when someone bumped into her blip [falsies].” Today’s dances reminded her of “some African rite of blip [circumcision].” So far, her lip has been blipped at least 100 times. “It’s beginning to sound like a razor-blade commercial,” she complains happily. Unblipped, she sounds like a mildly bawdy grandmother. To her, the Golden Gate Bridge seems like “a great big glorious G string.” She opined that Ernest Borgnine and Ethel Merman’s wedding reception “lasted longer than the marriage.” To get the kind of money Sinatra and Streisand earn for a performance, “I would have to have three of something.”

Barely six weeks old, the show has already been syndicated to Los Angeles and Chicago, with at least four more cities set to join come fall. But the 51-year-old ex-stripper has no idea how long she will choose to stay. “It might turn out to be like my other love affairs,” she says. “Short.”