Mae West: Hollywood

As the news crews gather in Los Angeles for the annual Academy Awards affair, what is there to say about MAE WEST?
• • • • In her bestseller "From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies," Molly Haskell discussed the Mae West persona. Haskell wrote: "Unlike other stars, whom we think of in the context of specific films, her image, complete with body language and voice, lifts buoyantly out of celluloid into space like the inflatable life preserver that was named after her in World War II. She's a pneumatic floozy presiding over an army of panting camp followers, a Catherine the Great from Brooklyn, a Salome who adds on the layers instead of shedding them, a Cleopatra whose infinite variety is debatable."
• • • • According to Molly Haskell: For years Mae West tried to promote a film about Catherine the Great, in which she would offer a warmer and more sensual alternative to what she described as Dietrich's "hollow-cheeked doll." Although Mae West finally succeeded in launching an unfunny Broadway play on the subject of the czarina, for most of her career she was in fact playing a bawdy, carnivalesque version of Catherine, surrounded by an "honor guard" of admirers. See her, as the lion-tamer in "I'm No Angel,"entering atop an elephant, wearing a white spangled jumpsuit. Looking at her now, we can't but applaud this middle-aged woman (she was 40 when she made her first film), undisguisedly rotund, flaunting an unliposuctioned, unsiliconed body and demanding her sexual privileges!
• • • • With unshakable confidence, she seems to have hungered for the spotlight from infancy, and when she got a chance to make her song-and-dance debut at the age of 7, she took it and never stopped showing off.... [Excerpt from an essay by Molly Haskell published in August 1993 in The New York Times.] Molly Haskell is the author of "From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies."
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
• • Photo: • • Mae West • • "Belle of the Nineties" 1934 • •
NYC
Mae West.