Mae West: Love Goddess

Released in 1965, the documentary "The Love Goddesses" features fabulous archival footage on MAE WEST — — and one of the movie queens sharing screen credit is attached to August 29th.
• • Using clips from the Hollywood heyday of several bold-faced beauties who graced the silver screen, "The Love Goddesses" shows how the movie industry changed its portrayal of sex and sex appeal from the silent movie era to the present. Scenes are shown from the silent classic "True Heart Susie" starring Lillian Gish, "She Done Him Wrong" starring Mae West (1933), "Love Me Tonight" (1932) starring Jeanette MacDonald (in her pre-Nelson Eddy interval), "A Place in the Sun" (1951) starring Elizabeth Taylor, and many other celluloid sizzlers — — such as the female star of "Casablanca" Ingrid Bergman, who was born on 29 August 1915 and who also died on that date on 29 August 1982.
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West: Gems by Joseff

Once there was a Titania who put the tinsel in Tinseltown, creating the sparkly screen gems worn by MAE WEST in her most memorable motion pictures.
• • According to The Los Angeles Times, Joan Castle Joseff headed Joseff Precision Metal Products, a maker of aircraft and missile parts — — and Joseff-Hollywood, a producer of costume jewelry worn on and off the screen by some of the most notable movie stars.
• • Staffer Dennis McLellan writes: As president of Joseff-Hollywood — — it makes and rents dazzling costume jewelry that has been worn on and off the screen by Hollywood's most illustrious stars — — Joan Castle Joseff was hailed in a 1990 People Magazine story as "the High Priestess of Paste."
• • Mrs. Joseff, who took over running both Burbank, California based businesses after husband Eugene's death in 1948, died on 24 March 2010 of congestive heart failure at Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, said her daughter-in-law, Tina Joseff. She was 97. . . .
• • Staffer Dennis McLellan adds: The company's jewelry has appeared — — and reappeared — — in thousands of films and TV shows over the decades. Those items include an amethyst necklace, bracelet and earring set that Vivien Leigh wore in "Gone With the Wind" and pearl pendant earrings worn by Grace Kelly in "High Society."
• • Mae West, Greta Garbo, Ingrid Bergman, Marlene Dietrich, Myrna Loy, Marilyn Monroe, and Elizabeth Taylor are among the many other stars who wore Joseff's jewelry in films. Many of them also rented pieces to wear at the Oscar ceremonies.
• • "The heyday of our business was in the 1930s and 1940s, when people really dressed up and wore jewelry," Joan Castle Joseff told People Magazine in 1990. "Those days are gone."
• • A fascinating and informative obituary appeared on 4 April 2010 in The Los Angeles Times, from which these brief details have been extracted.
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West: Reading

According to The Phoenix, former kiddie-TV host Gene London is opening his closet — — to reveal his MAE WEST collection.
• • His eye-catching "Movie Star Costume Show" just opened in Reading, Pennsylvania. You can see Mae's classic costumes along with outfits expressly designed for the big screen from now until spring of next year.
• • Quoting directly from The Phoenix here: I talked to Gene London at his Reading, PA climate-controlled studio where he has stored the exquisite movie star costumes he will be sharing with the public on October 2 at the Reading Public Museum. The exhibit will run until May 2010 partnered by Albright College [located at 13th and Bern Streets in Reading, PA 19612]. His knowledge of former movie stars and their costumes ignited memories of their movies that I watched in 1930, 1940, 1950 and on reruns today. ...
• • Featured in a gala "Movie Star Costume Show" are fancy threads worn by Mae West, Ingrid Bergman, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Jean Harlow, Judy Garland, Rita Hayworth, Grace Kelly, John Wayne, Madonna, Marilyn Monroe, and even John Wayne.
— — Excerpt: — —
• • Article: "Time Capsule Gene London's red carpet affair"
• • Published in: The Phoenix [225 Bridge Street, Phoenixville, PA 19460] — — phoenixvillenews.com
• • Published on: 26 September 2009
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• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West: Toronto

A new exhibition in Canada will feature artwork inspired by MAE WEST.
• • "The Surrealists were the sly, decadent, mocking enemies of everything in modern culture that encouraged simplicity," writes Robert Fulford — — unintentionally (perhaps) conjuring up the Empress of Sex who was a sly, mocking pooh-pooher of everything in American culture that encouraged old-fashioned simplicity for women.
• • Until the end of August 2009, Mae and artistic mayhem are on display at the show "Surreal Things" — — Art Gallery of Ontario [Musée des beaux-arts de l’Ontario], 317 Dundas Street West, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5T 1G4. Toll free: 1-877-225-4246.
• • Fulford's article in Canada's National Post comes billboarded with a large, luscious photograph of the Mae West Lips Sofa. Here's a bite-size portion of his frisky essay.
• • Robert Fulford writes: It's a surprise to glimpse the worried faces of Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck flickering across a wall in the midst of an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario. But Surreal Things (to August 30) is a surprising show. It's an engrossing, revealing essay in what we can call Applied Surrealism, the process by which avant-garde European artists started out as revolutionaries and ended up as fashion designers, advertising artists, and all-purpose idea mongers.
• • An enemy of Surrealism could say that this far-ranging collection of outlandish objects proves that the Surrealists became handmaidens of consumerism by turning art into a comic turn. An admirer, on the other hand, could argue that they simply made themselves useful according to the standards of their (and our) time. Either way, they stretched their influence far beyond the Parisian art world where their ideas were first cobbled together.
• • In Spellbound — — Alfred Hitchcock's 1945 thriller — — Bergman and Peck play a psychiatrist and her amnesia-victim patient. Scenes from that film appear at the AGO because Hitchcock hired Salvador Dalí to design the Peck character's dreams. Dalí of course turned out Dalí-esque nightmares that Bergman decoded, saving her patient and solving a murder.
• • Dalí was the man for that job. He loved to blur the borders of art and show business and loved to play with Freud-inflected images. He emerges as the undoubted star of Surreal Things — — and deserves to, no matter what we think of his art. A large constituency has always restrained its enthusiasm for his painting. Even in his best days, each Dalí picture would begin as a sensation, develop into a curiosity, and then calcify into a bore.
• • His pictures are slick, superficial and forgettable — — less interesting by far than Max Ernst's paintings, less memorable than René Magritte's, less piquant than Man Ray's.
• • Even so, Dalí emerges as a titan in any account of how the Surrealists infiltrated the fashionable imagination. When artists rushed to the marketplace like 21st-century geeks auctioning their great ideas for computer games, Dalí led the pack. In the mid-1920s he was a newly-minted Spanish Surrealist, alive with what looked like inflammatory desires. By the mid-1930s, in New York, he was designing windows for Bonwit Teller, a high-end dress shop on Fifth Avenue. Using Surrealism as a marketing tool, he titled his first window, "She was a Surrealist Woman. She was like a Figure in a Dream."
• • Mae West's Lips • •
• • The most numerous and memorable of the things in Surreal Things are Dalí products, like the loveseat that reproduces Mae West's lips, the telephone with its receiver shaped like a lobster, and a brooch in the shape of a mouth with lips of ruby, teeth of pearls. Dalí illustrates the thesis of Ghislaine Wood, the curator who put the show together for the Victoria and Alberta Museum in London two years ago: The very themes of Surrealism lent themselves to commercialization. (The AGO gift shop gets right into the spirit by offering "Parfums Salvador Dalí.")
• • Ghislaine Wood took the show to Rotterdam and Bilbao with great success and presents it here in a somewhat altered version, with some 40 pieces from the AGO's own collection and several other North American museums, most notably the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., which became, in the 1930s, the first North American museum to take Surrealism seriously.
• • "Surréalisme," coined by Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917 to describe his own writing, was later confiscated by André Breton for his plans to free humanity from the twin curses of capitalism and sexual repression. Ideally, Surrealism would create a culture of unfettered dreams. Humanity, granted this intellectual and spiritual liberation, would build a revolutionary society. . . .
• • Article continues at the National Post site — — and go see the Mae West Lips photo.
— — Excerpt: — —
• • Article: "You’ll want to dilly Dalí"
• • Byline: By Robert Fulford
• • Published in: Canada's National Post — — www.nationalpost.com
• • Published on: 11 May 2009
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• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West: The Observer

"Diamond Lil Still Sparkles," writes New York-based reviewer Sara Vilkomerson, referring to the latest biography of MAE WEST — — which she approaches most patiently, wearing velvet gloves and willing to overlook flaws.
• • • • She Always Knew How: Mae West — A Personal Biography
• • • • By Charlotte Chandler
• • • • Simon & Schuster, 317 pages
• • It’s hard to think of any of today’s shiny and carefully coddled stars who could hold their own when it comes to the utter cool that was Mae West. Seriously! Just try to imagine an Angelina or Scarlett or Reese trying to match the sultry vamp of the tiny and curvy blonde in films like I’m No Angel (1933), She Done Him Wrong (1933), and Go West Young Man (1936), let alone writing their own plays and scripts, and crafting quips like “When I’m good, I’m very good. But when I’m bad, I’m better.” Madonna — who has most definitely studied the Mae West playbook — has pushed the boundaries (and then some) throughout her career, but she never spent 10 days [sic] in jail on obscenity charges (as Ms. West did in 1927, after she wrote, performed, directed [sic], and produced the very popular Broadway play Sex).
• • Mae West set out to rule her world in her own inimitable way, defining all of her own terms. As Charlotte Chandler writes in her new biography, She Always Knew How, “when Mae began her career, doors were opened for women. When she finished her career, doors were open to women.”
• • Charlotte Chandler has written biographies of iconic celebrities before: Ingrid Bergman, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Alfred Hitchcock. In She Always Knew How, she relies mainly on a series of interviews conducted months before the actress’ death, in 1980. From the opening pages, when West shows Ms. Chandler her extensive diamond collection, and immediately offers a few vehement opinions on makeup, spring water and enemas for soft skin, the voice of Mae West jumps off the page, sassy, bossy and clever. In fact, there are moments in the book when one might be forgiven for feeling one’s simply reading some forgotten transcript hidden away for decades in a musty attic.
• • (Ms. Chandler never gets around to explaining why she’s chosen to publish her book now, 29 years after the interviews took place.)
• • Because so much of She Always Knew How is Mae West talking about her favorite subject — herself — it’s hard to know what’s true and what’s the carefully constructed myth West created. (Ms. Chandler did talk to actors and friends who knew the star, but the meat of the book is Mae West herself.) There’s no doubt that Mae West had a brilliant and shrewd mind when it came to branding her own image: There was her private self, which only an inner circle of confidantes were allowed to see, and then there was Mae West, in her form-fitting Edith Head creations and 6-inch platform shoes (the secret to her deliberate walk), purring about how a hard man is good to find.
• • “Do you know what question I’m asked the most? About the mirrors on my bedroom ceiling. I say, ‘I like to see how I’m doin’.’ It’s the truth. It’s very exciting. You should try it,” West tells Charlotte Chandler during one of their conversations. “And the next question I’m most often asked is, am I always the Mae West everybody knows, or am I different when I’m alone? The answer is when I’m alone, I’m the same Mae West. But you’ll have to take my word for it, ’cause when I’m alone there isn’t anyone else here.’”
• • Ms. Chandler wisely organizes the book chronologically, and it’s through Mae West’s voice that we hear about her childhood in Brooklyn; the early marriage she didn’t admit to for many years; her Hollywood ascent; and the love she shared with Paul Novak, her constant companion for 27 years, who took faithful care of her at the end of her life. Along the way we get Mae’s sometimes true and sometimes wild assertions (that she discovered Cary Grant, that she saved Paramount Pictures from bankruptcy).
• • And if Charlotte Chandler neglects to provide supporting facts (or proof to the contrary), who cares? She Always Knew How succeeds in making the reader feel privy to a private conversation — a chance to overhear a singular voice that makes us wish a Mae West were around today.
• • Sara Vilkomerson is a reporter at The New York Observer.
— — Source: — —
• • Book Review by Sara Vilkomerson
• • Published in The New York Observer — — www.observer.com
• • Published on: 13 February 2009
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• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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