Mae West: Secret Sisterhood

In "Diamond Lil" MAE WEST refers to her character Lil as "one of the finest women who ever walked the streets." That description also fit Frankie Baker, whose sense of frontier justice in October 1899 had inspired the folktune "Frankie and Johnny."
• • "You say, boy, of Frankie she had dice in one hand and a gun in the other." Frankie Baker of St. Louis, and the sporting circuit, Omaha, Kansas City, Denver, San Francisco, Chicago, shot her man in her twenty-seventh year, having already gained notoriety by her open handedness, good looks, and her proud and racy bearing, wrote John Huston in Frankie and Johnny [NY: Boni, 1930]. Clearly, this was a dame Mae could admire.
• • "[Frankie Baker] was a beautiful, light brown girl, who liked to make money and spend it. She dressed very richly, sat for company in magenta lady's cloth, diamonds as big as hen's eggs in her ears. There was a long razor scar down the side of her face she got in her teens from a girl who was jealous of her. She only weighed about 115 lbs, but she had the eye of one you couldn't monkey with. She was a queen sport."
• • The actress Mae West sang "Frankie and Johnny" from 1928 until the 1970s, when she performed it — — accompanied by a shimmy — — at a California party for The Masquers. She made the folktune her trademark. Why? Possibly because the woman who was Mae West realized that, in Frankie Baker of St. Louis, she met her match, her diamond diva, her secret sharer. The scarlet sisterhood had its queen sport — — and Mae paid her homage till the end.
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
• • Cartoon: • • Mae West as Diamond Lil • • 1928 • •
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Mae West.