Unabashed Women: The Fascinating Biographies of Bad Girls, Seductresses, Rebels and One-of-a-Kind Women (Celebrating Women) by Marlene Wagman-Geller

About the book

Synopsis:

Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History

A thrilling journey into the badass women whose non-conventional lives left their DNA on history. Discover words of wisdom from the women who found their voices, inspiring you to do the same.

Amazing women with a story to tell. Join Mae West as she shakes up the entertainment industry with her wit and wisdom or create colorful art pieces with Yayoi Kusama that are larger than life itself. These women in history defied the expectations of conventional society to live the lives they chose, regardless of what others thought.

Words of Wisdom. Society may have labeled these fierce femmes as rebels, bad-ass, wild, or uppity. But, these amazing women still dared to be different. With an out-of-the-box perspective, you’ll find inspiration from an array of fabulous females who will give you a lesson in being one-of-a-kind.

Unabashed Women offers you:

Lessons on how to break the glass ceiling
Biographies of trailblazing women from all walks of life
Empowerment through famous females who dared to go against the grain

If you enjoyed badass books like Women in Art, The Book of Gutsy Women, or In the Company of Women, then you’ll love Unabashed Women.

INTRO:

Anyone's Shadow

“What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice/And all things nice/That’s what little girls are made of.” When Mother Goose penned her rhyme, little did she realize the heavy load she had placed on female shoulders: to be nice is daunting. And what of those girls who shirked the role of Ms. Goody Two Shoes? In every age, in every clime, there are those whose DNA does not consist of the Pollyanna gene.

Ever since Eve, the original bad girl, went against God’s directive forbidding eating from the Tree of Good and Evil, wayward women have had a bad rap. The wage of sin was an angel with a flaming sword who ensured eternal banishment from Paradise. Eve’s punishment-as well as all her female descendants-was to give birth in great pain. As penance for his participation in Original Sin, her partner, and his male lineage, had to work by the sweat of their brow. No more free rides thanks to the lady fashioned from Adam’s rib. From this biblical couple, the male-female power structure was born.

Throughout the millennium, the standard of womanhood was to exercise modesty, especially in the sexual arena. The New Testament admonishes, “Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies.” Revered role models remain Madonna (not the Material Girl) and Mother Teresa – hard shoes to fill. In the Medieval era, when the knights rode off to their Crusade, to ensure their wives didn’t play while their hubbies were away, they devised the chastity belt. After all, trust can only go so far.

While brides wear white to signify virginity, a prize surrendered on the wedding night, males are allowed free reign to their libido due to the mindset of “boys will be boys.” The male adage for sexual conquest-a notch on the crotch-is a much-vaunted trophy; a woman, equally liberal with her body, is viewed as a slut. Rebel girls viewed the legs crossed mindset as another way for the patriarchy to clip their wings.

Language is symptomatic of societal mores, and English has a plethora of words to describe women who do not walk the prescribed gauntlet. The most derogatory put-downs for those ladies who do not subscribe to the time-honored double standard for sexual transgressions: whore, cougar, frigid – feel free to add your own – all which have no male equivalent.

Other searing adjectives to describe pushy “broads:” sassy, shrill, spinster, hag, ditzy, bitch, hormonal. And, a newer term to describe a bride who places unreasonable demands on her wedding party: Bridezilla. No one seems to feel the need to use the male equivalent of groomzilla.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on perspective, there has always been bad-ass broads. In Aristophanes’ 411 B. C. play Lysistrata the heroine arranged for wives to withhold sex until their soldier husbands ended the Peloponnesian War. As a further measure, the ladies took over the Acropolis that halted access to money funding the feud between Athens and Sparta. Another feisty fictional femme was the lady whose name manifested her fiery spirit: Scarlett O’Hara from Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind.

Unlike most women in the antebellum South, Scarlett was brash, bratty, and ballsy. She is far more memorable than her arch-rival Melanie Hamilton Wilkes, the embodiment of virtue-the quintessential good girl. Another woman who took gave no f**** was Lisbeth Salander, the tattooed, chain-smoking anti-heroine who favored courtier Goth. The non-shrinking violets go through life with upraised middle finger, with an ever-ready retort.

Unabashed Women pays homage to the anti-Martha Stewarts, those who do not define themselves by their prowess in the kitchen or the bedroom, those who pried themselves from the shadows. Although they paid a price for their “ballsy” behavior, they, in the words of Mr. Sinatra, had the satisfaction of being able to say, “I did it my way.”

The Mother Goose counterpart for little boys is, “What are little boys made of? Snips and snails and puppy dog tails/That’s what little boys are made of.” The ladies who made leaps into the flames are an amalgam of the sugar and the spice. The most memorable of the Shakespearean heroes were great men with fatal flaws, the latter of which made them relatable, human.

The ladies profiled in Unabashed Women serves as their female counterparts; their prickly personalities may not have made them Ms. Congeniality, something that did not induce guilt. They left their historic imprints because they dared to be different and difficult. In the final analysis, badness is in the eye of the beholder.

The list of feisty females is legion, including the nineteenth century British author Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre, although madly in love with Mr. Rochester, spurns his proposal that she live with him as his mistress in his estate, Thornfield Hall. The protagonist’s response-one that was an eyebrow raiser in its time-responded, “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me. I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you.” As with Ms. Eyre, the unabashed women were no birds.

Although the women who populate Unabashed Women came from different eras and far-flung locales, they are bound by the common thread of refusing to let their light dimmed by another. Martha Gellhorn, the journalist wife of Ernest Hemingway, wrote, “Why should I be a footnote in someone else’s life?” Francoise Gilot, the painter and common-law wife of Pablo Picasso, declared, “I’m not here just because I’ve spent time with Picasso.”

In fairy tales, bliss arrives in the guise of a prince; in literature, Heathcliff’s devotion extends post grave, in film, Ricky Blaine’s devotion to Elsa is the litmus test of adoration. However, songwriters Michael Masser and Linda Creed argue that the greatest commitment must be to oneself, a philosophy shared by those who forage their own paths. The lyrics, immortalized by Whitney Houston, state, “I decided long ago/Never to walk in anyone’s shadow.”

Mae West

Chapter 4 I’m No Angel (1892)

“I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.”

Before Mansfield’s bosom and Monroe’s backside, before Madonna’s bustier and Stone’s uncrossed legs, there was the leader of the pack: bodacious, bawdy, blonde Mae West. Critic George Jean Nathan dubbed her the Statue of Libido.

The master of sexual innuendo came from a working-class neighborhood of Brooklyn, the daughter of an Irish American ex-boxer, John “Battling John” Patrick West, and his French-born wife, Mathilde “Tillie,” a corset and fashion model. West was never jealous of her siblings because of her supreme self-absorption. She often commented, “I don’t like myself. I’m crazy about myself.” Mae West was a Mount Everest of egomania, a trait she regarded as a virtue.

The precursor of Dr. Ruth, at age five, Ms. West found her passion at the Royal Theater where she performed wearing a pink and green satin dress and won first prize in a talent competition. She later recounted, “I ached for it, the spotlight, which was like the strongest man’s arms around me, like an ermine coat.” Formal schooling went by the wayside in favor of vaudeville, and from the ages of 8 to 11, Mae played roles as the moonshiner’s daughter, Little Nell, who stepped through a swinging saloon door in search of her drunk father. In her early teens, Mae performed under the name “Baby Mae” and incorporated burlesque into her act. Frank Wallace, a song-and-dance man, was her co-star; the young entertainers secretly married in Milwaukee in 1911. Realizing she was not cut out for the role of domestic diva, Mae helped her husband find a job with a show that was going on the road for forty weeks, a move calculated to dissolve both her professional and conjugal ties. She kept the marriage under wraps - mink no doubt - until Frank resurfaced in 1941 and demanded a $1,000-a-month alimony. They divorced in 1942. Asked if she would ever tie the knot again, she stated, “Marriage is a fine institution, but I’m not ready for an institution.”

The Mae moves, “the cooch and the shimmy,” borrowed from a black Chicago club, along with suggestive songs and double-entendre wisecracks, were too blatant for vaudeville, and Mae took her five-inch stiletto heels to Broadway. In 1926, she wrote a play whose title epitomized her life and career: Sex. Variety deemed it “the nastiest thing ever disclosed on the New York stage.” The production’s popularity peaked through the auspices of a New York City police raid instigated by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, a nineteenth-century organization dedicated to promoting public morality. The authorities closed her play, and the police arrested Ms. West on a charge of corruption of morals; the judge fined her $500.00 and issued a ten-day jail sentence. Afforded preferential treatment, she wore silk underwear instead of the state-issued ones. The publicity proved pure gold, and she proclaimed, “Censorship made me.” Under her ample cleavage beat a caring heart and in a letter to the governor of California, Mae praised the warden at San Quentin, “I hope your Excellency will feel as I do and let Warden Duffy continue making bad men good, while I continue making good men bad.” The inmates sent her a collective Valentine.

In New Jersey in 1928, Mae came up with her alter ego “Diamond Lil” in which the leading lady reclined in a golden bed perusing the Police Gazette. The show delivered the West witticism directed at a Salvation Army captain Cary Grant, “Come on up” but is remembered as, “Come up and see me sometime.” The star-author took “Diamond Lil” on a national tour and penned her first novel, The Constant Sinner. Denounced by the conservative press, hounded by censors, she put the roar into the 1920s.

After the Wall Street crash extinguished the lights of Broadway, Ms. West, lured by Hollywood, headed in the direction of her name. Not one to be over-awed by the big boy bosses who ran Tinseltown, she boasted, “I’m not a little girl from a little town making good in a big town; I’m a big girl from a big town making good in a little town.”

Although her image suggested she only cared about horizontal positions, she was extremely astute in marketing Mae West. She had carefully honed her act from her expertise in burlesque, black music, and dance and demanded to write her own screenplays. The West persona was chiseled platinum hair, a sin-promising strut, and an elongated delivery of lines, breaking each word into as many syllables as possible, (“fas-cin-a-tin”). In a scene from her 1932 debut film, Night After Night, Ms. Mae, adorned with diamonds, entered a speakeasy. When the hatcheck girl exclaimed, “Goodness, what beautiful diamonds!” the 40-year-old actress purred, “Goodness had nothing to do with them.” The quip led to the title of her autobiography, Goodness Had Nothing to Do With It.

Ms. West selected as her male lead a “sensational looking young man” whom she spotted walking along the street. Smitten, she declared, “If he can talk, I’ll take him.” The unknown actor was Cary Grant with whom she co-starred in a movie in which she fulfilled her lifelong fantasy-to be a lion-tamer. Refusing to use a stunt double in the lion-training scenes, Mae entered the cage replete with boots and whip. In the film, she uttered the famous phrase, “Beulah, peel me a grape,” a line based on her pet grape-peeling monkey. The notorious leading lady earned the highest salary of any Hollywood star: $300,000 per picture-an astronomical price in the midst of the Great Depression- thereby proving her quotation, “The curve is more powerful than the sword.”

The course was set for a succession of highly popular comedies such as She Done Him Wrong, Go West Young Man, and My Little Chickadee, the latter of which W.C. Fields co-starred. A West witticism regarding her screen career was, “I’m the woman who works at Paramount all day and Fox all night.” Mae became a film goddess during the silver screen’s golden era, keeping men securely pinned beneath her double-decker stilettos. Her name became an entry in the Webster’s New International Dictionary when ogling servicemen of World War II christened an inflatable life jacket after the siren. Men were her domain, and the only women she had close relationships with were her mother and sister. The girl from the blue-collar Brooklyn neighborhood was the highest paid woman in the United States.

Finally, Mae met some men she did not desire: the censors of the Hays Office-the film industry’s watchdog. They were less than impressed with her song “A Guy What Takes His Time” with its lyric, “I don’t like a big commotion. I’m a demon for slow motion.” Although West’s popularity had rescued Paramount Pictures from bankruptcy, they did not protect her from the hounds of Hays. Unlike her contemporaries, she refused to let the men in suits alter her image. Another hound of public purity was William Randolph Hearst who used his newspaper empire to pillory her in the press, “Isn’t it time Congress did something about Mae West?” (Hypocritically, at the time Hearst was canoodling with his mistress actress Marion Davies at his mega mansion, San Simeon.) Mae’s response to the slings and arrows aimed in her direction, “I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it.” After the sanitization of her pictures that did not dovetail with her artistic vision, West bid farewell-no doubt with a ring-bedecked middle finger - to Hollywood.

With her hefty bank account, West purchased a home, a shrine to herself. A nude marble statue of the diva stood on her grand piano that dominated the living room; on the wall hung a painting of a reclining Mae, in which she had also dispensed with garments. Her bedroom held a plethora of mirrors because she often said, “I like to see how I’m doin’.”

In her later years, journalists who expected to find the aged star taking refuge in yesteryear, a self-pitying Norma Desmond, were in for a surprise. The octogenarian was still preoccupied with all matters horizontal-at age seventy-eight, she claimed that in one marathon session she had sex twenty-six times in a single day. However, her alter-ego “Diamond Lil” was not a portrayal of the private Ms. West. She lived with her bodyguard, Paul Novak, thirty years her junior, who she persuaded to change his name from Chester Rybinski. She took her writing seriously, and despite her image as the symbol of hedonism, she led a private life of rigid discipline. Under the sequined, form-hugging, cleavage-bagging gowns was an artist who orchestrated her moves and movies. Shunning alcohol and tobacco, the five-foot-two star maintained an organic diet that included fresh fruits dusted with almond powder and honey.

After a lengthy absence, West toured for years in Catherine the Great in which she was the only female actress, (a ratio in which she reveled.) As the Tsarina, she surrounded herself with an imperial guard of muscular, six-foot-tall young men. Her twilight years were dedicated to mediums and ESP, and she was a dedicated follower of astrologer Sydney Omarr. Her aged countenance appeared as if she were wearing a wax-colored mask, and her hour-glass figure had expanded. Mae did not care that her slinky gowns showed off her expanding girth, “I never worry about diets. The only carrots that interest me are the number you get in a diamond.” After twenty-four years of retirement, Ms. West left her mirror-lined bedroom to appear in Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckenridge where she had a falling out with fellow diva Raquel Welch. Her last rendezvous with the silver screen was at age eighty-five when she starred in the appropriately titled Sextette. As proof the lady still possessed spunk and a salacious spirit, she delivered the indelible words in her final film: “Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?”

Mae’s immorality rests on her movies that knocked the stale wind out of conservative Hollywood. She also gained goddess stature when Salvador Dali created the Mae West Lips Sofa, one of the twentieth century’s most iconic pieces of furniture. Another Mae milestone was her appearance on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band album cover. When the Beatles had contacted her to ask permission to use her likeness, Mae agreed, but she added the quip, “What would I be doing in a lonely hearts club?” The band placed her next to the image of Lenny Bruce who also pushed the boundary of free speech.

“A real star never stops,” Ms. West said after her release from Good Samaritan Hospital where she spent three months recovering from a stroke and a concussion. And she never did until she passed away in her Hollywood home at age eighty-eight. Novak, her companion of twenty-six years, opted for an open casket because he claimed she still looked young. The ageless star died a cult figure who had shown that carnal pleasure was not synonymous with brimstone. For West, the only sin was hypocrisy. An apt metaphor for the incomparable Ms. West could well have been the title of one of her movies, I’m No Angel.

Author's Bio:

Marlene Wagman-Geller received her B.A. from York University and her teaching credentials from the University of Toronto and San Diego State University. Currently, she teaches high school English in National City, California. Reviews from her books have appeared in The New York Times and the Associated Press. Articles about her books have appeared in dozens of newspapers such as The Denver Post, The Huffington Post, and The San Diego Tribune.

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Marlene Wagman-Geller

Author of Women of Means: Fascinating Biographies of Royals, Heiresses, Eccentrics and Other Poor Little Rich Girls

Mango Books (2019) marlenewagmangeller.com

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