Doin' Jail Time: Mae West's Spiritual Recovery

For years now, bad girls have overcome terrible times by reinventing themselves in strange places. Take Mae West, for example.

When the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice got Mae’s play Sex shut down on obscenity charges in 1927, she made no apologies to the “publicity-seeking blue-noses” who claimed to be offended by her performance. Her wriggling on stage, she explained at her trial, “was nothing more than an exercise involving control of my abdominal muscles, which I learned from my father when I was a child.”

The blue-noses weren’t impressed, and they saw to it that Mae was sent to jail for her unlawful wriggling. While serving a ten-day sentence on Welfare Island, Mae contemplated her fate and realized that a stint behind bars offered her the perfect opportunity to take an artistic retreat.

With the forty-one-week run of Sex now at an end, Mae thought about the career moves she would need to make to get to Hollywood. She thought about the 8:2 audience ratio of men to women at Sex and how she might draw more female ticket buyers. And as a result, she created a new character called Diamond Lil and started to write the play that would eventually become the motion picture She Done Him Wrong. The worst thing about being in jail, Mae found, was that the matron wouldn’t let her wear silk underwear.

Diamond Lil was a smash hit in New York, and within a few short years Mae West was indeed Hollywood-bound. She arrived in 1932, age thirty-nine, and was cast in a small role in Night After Night with George Raft, who later reported that in her performance, Mae “stole everything but the cameras.”

I just love this story about Mae West. Nowadays, when people feel a need to reinvent themselves, they go to spas and ashrams and whitewater rafting resorts. Hell, look at me--I reinvented myself at a freakin' villa in the south of France. But Mae West was so tough and cool (she was a Brooklyn girl, after all) that she turned the pokey into a personal retreat. That's class!

Makes me wonder where I'll next reinvent myself, now that I'm a Brooklyn girl myself. The subway? Visiting my girl Nancy? In Prospect Park? Eating a cheeseburger at the Church Avenue diner? Oh hey, I've been called up for grand jury duty on Monday. I see self-reinvention possibilties here--I'll pretend to listen to police testimony about buy-and-bust operations, but all the while I'll be thinkin' 'bout me, me, me. (Or as Mae herself once said, "Too bad everybody just can’t be themselves and be happy about it. I am. Remember that once popular song, ‘I love me, I love me’? Baby, that’s me.”)

A Conversation with Victoria Woodhull

Just after the Civil War ended, an intriguing young woman stepped into American public life. Victoria Woodhull, a 28-year-old Midwestern fortuneteller who earned her money by bringing dead souls into contact with the living, was told by "the powers of the air" in 1866 that she was destined to become the ruler of the world. So Vickie moved to New York City, of course, and within a few short years she was a household word nationwide. Not only did she run for US President in 1871, but she also became the first woman ever to open a Wall Street stock brokerage and the first woman to publish an American newspaper.

Vickie was no conservative. She favored spiritualism, magnetic healing, free love, the women’s suffrage movement, easier divorce laws, legalized prostitution, birth control, labor reform and Marxism. (Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, whose masthead read “Progress! Free Thought! Untrammeled Lives! Breaking the Way for Future Generations,” was the first American newspaper to publish Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto.)

Fame preceded Vickie wherever she went, and people either loved her or hated her. She eventually was jailed on obscenity charges, lost her bid for the Presidency and was shoved back into the faceless crowd as American life steamrolled (I think steamrollers were invented by then) toward the 20th century. You've never heard of Victoria Woodhull, have you? I hadn't myself, until I started to research bad girls and came across her name in the British Public Library.

But Vickie is back here with us today, in a conversation with Bad Girl Blog!

Bad Girl Blog: Hello, Vickie. I just want to get this party started by saying that I'm a big fan of your work. Really, really big. I mean, I worship you. That's not even a joke. For example, when I'm in a bad mood, I ask myself, "What would Victorial Woodhull do?" And the right answer just comes to me, like that! It must be the powers of the air. So anyway, can we talk about sex? I hear you're a huge free lover. Is that true?

Victoria Woodhull*: Yes! I am a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can, to change that love every day if I please! And with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere.

BGB: Wow, Vickie, I love you! You rock! Hey, are you bi-curious, by any chance? Sorry, that's a bit premature. But hell no, I'm not going to interfere with your natural right to love whom you may. I'm totally for it. I mean, I believe I have that natural right, too. The only thing that's keeping me back is my natural shyness. Believe it or not, when it comes to sex, I can get a little shy and (gulp) repressed.

Vickie: Some women seem to glory over the fact that they never had any sexual desire and to think that desire is vulgar.

BGB: Ha ha. You're funny. You're so intense. Did I say vulgar? No, one of my favorite things about me is my ability to feel sexual desire. It's just that sex itself can feel vulgar, if it's bad sex with a bad lover.

Vickie: What! Vulgar! The instinct that creates immortal souls vulgar?

BGB: I love the way you talk. Say more.

Vickie: Who dares stand up amid Nature, all prolific and beautiful, where pulses are ever bounding with the creative desire, and utter such sacrilege? Vulgar rather must be the mind that can conceive such blasphemy. No sexual passion, say you. Say, rather, a sexual idiot, and confess that your life is a failure.

BGB: Wait. What? All those words pouring out of you got me confused. You're not calling me a failed idiot, right? I mean, you're speaking in generalities now, right? Because I'm totally cool about sex. Sex is beautiful. It's all nakedness and touching, and we're all animals, we all love to be touched. Oh look, there's my cat, Donna, she's naked right now! And she loves to be touched--well, usually, sometimes, not always. Actually, Donna can be a real bitch when she's not in the mood. Oooo, she's stretching now. Isn't she cute? Donna for US President! Yay!!

At this point, an annoyed look crosses Victoria Woodhull's face and she disappears in a puff of mist.

BGB: No, Vickie, don't go! I'm sorry, I got silly. Can't we continue this conversation? Sorry, Donna distracted me, wait, don't go...Vickie?...That's the problem with ghosts--they're incapable of change. I know Vickie would be an animal-rights activist if she were alive today...Vickie, come back...Ms. Woodhull?...

*Vickie's quotes are taken from speeches she made and articles she published while running for President of the United States in 1871.

Idle Gossip or Malicious Slander?

I hate blog post titles that contain a question mark. They're a sure sign of an amateur. But I'm looking for your comments here. Please respond, my lovelies.

D. and I were talking the other day, speculating, as girls do, about a mutual friend's love life, home life, work life and life life as follows:

--Why doesn't B. have a boyfriend?

--She must put men off with that attitude of hers. Plus, remember her last boyfriend? She's probably off men for good reason.

--I wonder what she would think if she could hear us right now. Oh man, would we be in trouble.

--Why? Everybody talks about everybody else. You should hear what she says about you.

Oops. That was me saying the last line above. Idiot. D. then turned the spotlight on me and our friendship with each other.

--What do you mean? What were you and B. saying about me? Do you always talk about me?

I had to think fast to cover over this one and move it in a direction that wouldn't make me look so bad.

--Oh c'mon, D. We've had this conversation before. People always gossip about each other. It's not even about you--it's just human nature to talk about each other. It's some tribal instinct to ensure the survival of the species. Why do you even care what people say about you?

--Because I want to know. Wouldn't you just love to be a fly on the wall and hear what people really say about you when you're not around?

--Oh god no, that would be horrible. I don't want to know. What's the point? I'd just get more self-obsessed than I already am.


So, dear readers, what do you say? Do you want to know what people say about you or don't you? Do friends talk about each other out of love and affection or malice aforethought? Idle gossip or malicious slander?

Eddie

Eddie was my next-door neighbor in the Catskills, a man who really shouldn't be the subject of discussion on My Bad Girl Blog, even though he likes women and thinks the subject sounds interesting. But I really want to write about Eddie because I have a crush on him.

Eddie lived in the Bird House, a little cottage next to mine at the Sunny Oaks camp. He's been spending his summers there for years now and has planted flowering bushes that attract hummingbirds.

Eddie is 102. He knows all about hummingbirds and plant life because he's a horticulturalist with with a master's degree in biology. He took me on a nature walk around Lake Cynthia, a little lake at Sunny Oaks, and he pointed out colt's-foot, which the Indians used to treat bee stings, and vibernum, which the Indians used to dye their feathers a purplish blue, and a fuzzy leaf called something like "shoe flannel" because the Indians put it in their mocassins like a Dr. Scholl's footpad. I can't remember all the names Eddie told me, there were so many.

Eddie saw all kinds of things on our walk that I'd never noticed before. But he couldn't remember the name of one plant, a flower, and it bothered him. He remembers a lot, like leaving Austria in 1912 when he was 8 years old and the boat ride over, where he saw a banana for the first time in his life, and arriving at Ellis Island.

Eddie dropped out of school in the eighth grade because the American kids in Coney Island teased him about his accent. He was a butcher's son so he became a butcher. But when he was 24 years old, Eddie got a land grant from the US government to homestead in Oregon, which is where he studied biology. Eventually he became a park ranger for the Department of the Interior, and while he was working at Mount Hood he met a pretty girl who was camping there with a girlfriend. Eddie and the girl got married three months later and they stayed together for about 50 years, until she died 12 years ago.

Eddie recently had a 40-something girlfriend, but the story is that he finally broke up with her, saying, "What are you doing with a 100-year-old man?" Now another 40-something lady has been knocking at his door lately, and the weekend I met him she cooked Eddie some shrimp scampi for dinner. "I think she's lonely," Eddie told me.

On the day I left Sunny Oaks, I went to the Bird House to hug and kiss Eddie goodbye, and he told me he remembered the name of that flower. It was a tansy. T-A-N-S-Y, which has yellow buttonlike flower heads and aromatic leaves.

More on Home-Made

I forgot to mention, I was in a family-owned grocery store in Wisconsin once, and saw a hand-lettered sign in the deli department advertising "ho-made" sausages and potato salad. Gave a whole new meaning to the phrase.