Mae West: Yogini

MAE WEST was involved with yoga in 1940, observes this recent article in Columbia Journalism Review. Here is a brief excerpt.

• • The thirties saw the rise of the influence of gossip columnists, many of whom had started their careers just a few years earlier with the tabloids. Walter Winchell and Hedda Hopper were two of the best known of the pack. Gossips wrote six days a week in many cases, so they relied to an inordinate degree on movie stars’ predilections, which began to involve yoga.
• • In 1938, Cole Porter was back in the hospital, a year after his legs were crushed in a riding accident. He was studying yoga, reported Leonard Lyons in The Washington Post, “to attain complete control of his system.” Lyons had previously outed Greta Garbo as a lonely yogini; Maureen O’Sullivan was mentioned by the beauty columnist Ida Jean Kain in one of her “Your Figure, Madame,” columns titled "Yoga Exercises Finding Favor With Women in America."
• • And guess what? Mae West was one of those women, according to Sheilah Graham in her “Hollywood Today” column of January 30, 1940.
• • During the war years, Southern California became the undisputed locus of alternative culture, and Hollywood its epicenter. Yoga was by this time, if not totally American, then a harmless pastime for the citizens of California. During World War II, it was reported that “nerves are unpatriotic,” according to the author and actress Cornelia Otis Skinner, who told a health columnist that she had tried yoga and calisthenics to cure her wartime nervousness. ...
Source: "Fear of Yoga" By Robert Love [C.J.R., November - December 2006]
Source: © 2006 Columbia Journalism Review - - http://www.cjr.org
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
• • Photo: Mae West • • 1938 • •
NYC
Mae West.