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COLUMN
SIXTY-EIGHT, FEBRUARY 1, 2002
(Copyright © 2002 Al Aronowitz)
COMPLAINT!
Subject:
MAE WEST
Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 16:26:46 -0600
From: "planet9" <planet9@rocketmail.com>
To: <info@blacklistedjournalist.com>
In
regard to your website concerning Mae West.
She was not nearly 50 years old when she hit Hollywood, she was 38!
Please correct this at once! It
is insulting to the legend!
Ray
~Resign as general manager of the world~ ##
* * *
REG HARTT, AUTHOR OF THE MAE WEST STORY, REPLIES TO THE COMPLAINT
Subject:
"She was nearly fifty."
Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 07:06:48 -0500
From: "reg hartt" <reghartt@hotmail.com>
To: planet9@rocketmail.com
Dear
Pluto (Planet 9),
I
was well aware, when I wrote the piece that set you barking, that Mae West, in
terms of years, was closer to forty than she was to fifty.
What
you, it seems, are unaware of, is that the motion picture camera adds not only
ten pounds but also ten years to the person being photographed.
Movie
heroines tended to be young women in their teens and early twenties. Mae West
was closer to fifty than to twenty.
In
the eyes of an industry prone to exaggeration Mae West was fifty, overweight and
of no possible interest to the motion picture going public. She was a novelty.
The
words were written with an eye towards the deeper truths that lie below the
surface.
The
point, however, was not her body but her mind. She was possessed of a sharp wit,
a natural intelligence and a keen eye.
Had
she been content to conform to Hollywood 'legend"
she would have done her scenes in NIGHT AFTER NIGHT (her first film) without
argument, taken her money and gone back to New York.
And
that would have been the last the movies heard of Mae West.
That
is, if she had been content with the "legend".
For
what is clear, from the many books about her, is that the Mae West of the New
York stage and the Mae West of the movies are two different people.
She
knew she had gone as far as she could on the live stage.
She
also knew that the movies offered her a chance that she had to seize.
That
she did so vigorously seize that moment and trust in her instincts that
Hollywood was wrong and she, a child of the New York streets, was right is to
her credit.
I
have found it rare that legends are not an insult to the truth.
Legends
are for acolytes and fans.
Acolytes
and fans are like back seat drivers in a car.
I
wondered what caused Mae West to have a stroke as she neither drank nor ate to
excess nor did she abuse her body with drugs.
But
what she did do was play the MAE
WEST character on stage and off for nearly all of her life after the death of
her manager, Timothy because that is what her fans demanded of her.
Every
performing artist lives for that moment back at the hotel, away from the fans,
when they can just put their feet up and be human.
Mae
West lived with her fans twenty four hours a day at the end.
That
was a helluva strain. Eventually it proved more than she could bear.
But
that is the price of having fans (short for fanatics) around.
Al
Aronowitz is a man who has always had a keener eye and ear for the truth than
for the legend. That is why he is, as you obviously do not know, Ray, a legend.
It
is also why he deserves to be one.
It
is why Miles Davis quietly paid the bill for his wife's funeral after she died
of cancer and why the late George Harrison gave him part of an album and why
many, many more both famous and unfamous, salute him.
From
the hysteria in your letter you are either very young and thus without
experience or else a man whom life has passed by. I hope it is the former and
not the latter for the former means there is yet a chance for you to get a life.
Charles
Baudelaire, as Mae West was later to do, challenged convention. These are his
words for the fan:
WHICH
ONE IS GENUINE?
"I
once knew a woman named Benedicta, who infused everything with the ideal. When
one looked into her eyes one wanted nobility, glory, beauty, all those qualities
that make us love immortality.
"But
this exquisite woman was too beautiful to live long; she died in fact shortly
after I met her, and it was I who buried her one day when spring was waving his
encensoir even through the cemetery gates. It was I who buried her, well encased
in a coffin made of a wood scented and eternal as the treasure boxes of India.
"And
while my eyes remained fixed on that spot where my jewel lay entombed, I saw all
at once a tiny human being much like the dead woman, doing a bizarre dance,
violent and hysterical, on the loose earth. She howled with laughter as she
spoke: 'This is me! Benedicta, as she is! I'm trash, everyone knows it! And the
punishment for your stupidity and your blind head is this: You'll have to love
what I am!'
"I
went into a rage and said, 'No! No! No! No!' And in order to give strength to my
no, I stomped the earth so fiercely with my foot that my leg sank into the
freshly turned earth up to my knee, and like a wolf caught in a trap, I am now
tied, perhaps for the rest of my life, to the grave of the ideal."
(Translated by Robert Bly).
The
ninth planet, your "nom de guerre" is named after the Greek god of the
dead, Pluto.
Unlike
the perfection of the ideal the real always has a touch of squalor.
In
the past the gods and goddesses of the theatre were able to haunt only the
memory of those who knew them in their time.
In
our time the living are haunted, through the "magic of the movies," by
the dead which is why in France a film showing is called "Une seance du
cinema."
Leave
the dead.
It
is the living who demand our attention and our best.
-Reg Hartt. ##
* * *
AND, ON SECOND THOUGHT. . .
Subject:
Mae West
Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 17:41:01 -0500
From: "Reg Hartt" <reghartt@hotmail.com>
To: <planet9@rocketmail.com>
CC: "al aronowitz" <info@blacklistedjournalist.com>
,"reg hartt" <reghartt@hotmail.com>
Dear
Ray,
The
first Mae West movie I ever saw was a battered 16mm dupe of SHE DONE HIM WRONG.
The year was 1968.
However
bad the print was nothing could diminish the aura of Mae West.
I
then bought superb 16mm prints of MY LITTLE CHICKADEE and I'M NO ANGEL which
remains my favourite among her pictures.
That
same year I read, for the first time, her autobiography.
1970
found me, at the invitation of a friend who returned to Toronto a few days after
I arrived, in Los Angeles in a bordello (not an Italian dessert) just a stone's
throw up the street from THE RAVENSWOOD apartments where Miss West lived.
One
of the fellows in the house thought himself God. He gave me a pill used to knock
out an elephant in a sandwich.
When
I found out what had happened I composed myself by composing a letter to Miss
West in which I wrote that she was a great revolutionary as any artist who goes
to jail, as she had, for their art is a revolutionary.
I
dropped the letter off at the front desk of The Ravenswood. I then found a park
bench where I sat out the drug. It was a very interesting night.
A
month later, on the eve of my return to Toronto, I received a 9"x12"
manila envelope from Miss West which contained an autographed photograph of her
from MYRA BRECKINRIDGE as well as an invitation to come up and see her.
I
dropped off a note explaining why I could not accept her invitation.
When
I arrived back in Toronto I discovered a letter from Miss West saying, "If
you are out this way again, come up and see me."
As
part of my film program at Toronto's Rochdale College (a place as wicked and
wild as anything in Miss West's movies--the piece you read is from my book, THE
NIGHT THEY RAIDED ROCHDALE) I ran all of Miss West's Paramount films many times.
I
would not call myself one of her fans.
I
will say that I am someone who loves her.
That
is quite a bit different.
It
was not until a few years ago when the new books began to come out on her that I
realized the full extent of the compliment she paid me.
Miss
West was terrified of people on drugs. I had written that I was on drugs in the
letter I dropped off.
I
then knew that in the month that had passed since she had received my letter she
had had me checked out by everyone from detectives to her personal psychic.
I
have the great pleasure of having a Tibetan Lama (who accompanied the Dalai Lama
on his journey across Canada) as one of my friends. He claims that, yes, I am
psychic altho I make no claim to be.
Miss
West would be the first to tell you that more is involved in the choice of a
name than we think. You did not just "pull the name out of the air because
you liked the way it sounds."
Yes,
I know saying she was almost fifty would infuriate her.
What
you fail to understand is that that is what people were saying about her when
she arrived in Hollywood.
Everyone
thought she was over the hill except for George Raft (who brought her out mainly
so he could re-kindle the romance).
And
damn near everyone thought her too fat.
Do
I personally think she was too fat? No.
But
the movies have always been hot for women with young boy's bodies.
She
was the opposite of everything Hollywood banked on then and banks on now.
Perhaps
your fury blinded you to the gist of that piece. It contains nothing
The
movies are based on lies. Miss West lied through her teeth in her own book
because she did not want to depress her readers with the truth.
Her
book reads like it was a picnic for her from start to finish.
It
sure as Hades, the place Pluto governs, wasn't.
The
fact of the matter is that Mae West pushed the envelope in both her professional
and private life and she paid a high price for it.
I
push the same envelope. I wrote what I wrote and it stands. And I have been more
than willing to pay the price that goes with standing our ground.
And
if you do not like it, well, to borrow the words of my friend, the late Shamus
Culhane (who animated the "heigh ho" sequence in Disney's SNOW WHITE),
well, you can go perform an impossible sexual act.
Al
Aronowitz was a crime reporter for THE NEW YORK POST when his editor sent him
down to Greenwich Village to write a hatchet piece on some crazy young men who
flashed switchblade knives, smoked pot and spouted poetry.
Instead
Al wrote the first positive piece about William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and
Allen Ginsberg.
When
I did my first show in New York (at the Thalia Theatre) Al introduced it.
He
later took me around the town.
It
was amazing to see one performer after another come up to our table to
acknowledge Al.
He,
as well, is a revolutionary.
And
he, as well, has paid in full the price that goes with being our own person.
I
cannot think of a better person to be the guardian of the universe.
It
took guts on the part of Mae West to stand up to the world she lived in and to
write the first plays about sex, homosexuality and racial integration. She was
the first white woman to kiss a black actor full face on stage.
It
took guts on Al's part to go against the wishes of his editor.
The
day you begin to understand that is the day you begin to really get a life.
Don't,
for Chrissake's, get the impression I am pissed off at you.
You
have put your foot on the right path by admiring a lady whom Salvador Dali
painted as the embodiment of freedom.
It would be awful damned hard for you to go wrong from there.---Reg Hartt. ##
*
* *
AND THEN AGAIN. . .
Subject:
Mae West's age.
Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2001 10:43:22 -0500
From: "reg hartt" <reghartt@hotmail.com>
To: info@blacklistedjournalist.com
www.bigmagic.com/pages/blackj/column27a.html
"She
was nearly 50." change to "She was nearly 40."
It
is a small change and the point is not lost altho it seems to be lost already on
Pluto (Planet9).
He
is certainly right in saying it would have made Mae West furious at first but I
feel she would have realized on further reading she got not a slam but a kiss
from me.
Best wishes for a great year and sincere wishes you are here for a few years more."Reg ##
*
* *
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