Friday, June 17, 2016

Mae West: French Candy Box

MAE WEST, who lived at The Ravenswood for forty years, got three paragraphs in an article about the iconic apartment building.  Let's enjoy every a-Mae-zing word of it together.
• • Mary Mallory wrote:  The Ravenswood gained their most famous resident, curvaceous sex symbol Mae West, in 1932, when Paramount Pictures signed her to a long-term contract. New York resident West requested the studio find her appropriate housing near the lot, per author Charlotte Chandler in her Mae West biography, “She Always Knew How.”
• • Mary Mallory wrote:  The studio furnished her apartment in what author Emily Leider, author of “Becoming Mae West,” describes as “early French candy box.” Decorated in a rococo, over-the-top artificiality, Apartment 611 featured various shades of white and gold accentuating West’s fair complexion, as carefully crafted as any movie set. A canopied and draped bed embossed with the letter “W,” surrounded with pale pink brocade edged with lace, and featuring a quilted, pale pink headboard, dominated her lavish bedroom. Mirrors surrounded the bed and hung over it.
• • Mary Mallory wrote:  Over time, Mae West would add a nude marble statue of her slinky figure by Gladys Bush as well as a Florence Kinzel painting depicting her nude, lying on her back as important decorations in the apartment. In a 1969 interview with Life Magazine, West described her apartment by saying, “Everything has proportion, nothing is jarring. Everything is symphony.”  ...
• • Source: Article: "Hollywood Heights: Ravenswood Apartments Attract the Stylish" written by Mary Mallory for the Los Angeles Daily Mirror; posted in 2014.
• • On Friday, 17 June 1932 • •
• • Mae West would, no doubt, be capable of delivering "curdling melodrama," predicted the publication Hollywood Citizen News in its issue dated Friday, 17 June 1932.
• • On Thursday, 17 June 1982 • •
• • Fergus Cashin's highly suspect biography on Mae West was released in paperback by Virgin Books on Thursday, 17 June 1982.  Before you try to find it, however, read the review by Kirkus, which slams it and explains why. Clearly, the former reporter wished to "cash in."
• • Lacking footnotes and spiked with peculiar points, Cashin's biography makes you wonder what standards a British book publisher has before they accept a manuscript oozing with snark, insinuations, and venom.
• • Fergus Cashin, who worked for the Daily Express, Daily Sketch, and The Sun, died on 4 October 2005 at a hospice in Surrey, aged 81.
• • Overheard in Hollywood • •
• • Mae West, an American stage and movie comedian in the 1930s and 1940s, was the unparalleled mistress of double entendre.
• • In Her Own Words • •
• • Mae West said:  "I think that the most brainless woman in the world can out-smart a man when she has to."
• • Quote, Unquote • •
• • A Los Angeles paper mentioned Mae West.
• • Nita Lelyveld wrote: For nearly 40 years, Sam Fuller has made his home in the Villa Carlotta, a 1920s Hollywood apartment building whose Juliet balconies and wrought-iron grilles conjure the romance of old Italy and Spain.  ... On a roll, Fuller reenacted a scene from a hotel party when Mae West, arms draped across two chairs, eyed him in her sultry, lazy-lidded way, and then dropped a handkerchief for him to pick up.  . . .
• • Source: Article written for The L.A. Times; published on Friday, 30 January 2015
• • The Mae West Blog celebrates its 11th anniversary • •
• • Thank you for reading, sending questions, and posting comments during these past eleven years. The other day we entertained 3,497 visitors. And we reached a milestone recently when we completed 3,400 blog posts. Wow! 
• • By the Numbers • • 
• • The Mae West Blog was started eleven years ago in July 2004. You are reading the 3466th blog post. Unlike many blogs, which draw upon reprinted content from a newspaper or a magazine and/ or summaries, links, or photos, the mainstay of this blog is its fresh material focused on the life and career of Mae West, herself an American original.


• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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• • Photo:
• • Mae West • in 1933

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