Seductress (18 page)

Her hold on the twenty-eight-year-old Chopin was partly due to her senior diablerie. A prim salon idol chased down by young lovelies, he looked twice when the literary lioness attended his concert in one of her androgynous costumes. “Is she indeed a woman?” he asked. Afterward she slid a note, “You are adored,” into his score and propositioned him through friends.

In addition to the perfected sex, she understood his music with a developed ear (she played the piano well), buoyed his spirits with her evergreen joie de vivre, and loosened him up with her “Rabelaisian” foolery. And he swooned into her maternal embrace.

Without dropping a stitch professionally, she bathed his fevered brow and nursed him through his physical and creative crises. In 1848, with his health and sexual performance on the wane, he staged a series of jealous tantrums that effectively ended their nine-year relationship.

His jealousy had not been unfounded. In the final lap of their romance she had affairs with two leading socialists. “There are some infidelities,” she temporized, “which do not destroy love.” She went on to achieve a “hale, honored, and triumphant old age”—with all the erotic perks of the senior goddess. Flocks of young men migrated to her Nohant headquarters and hung on her radical pronunciamentos and wise aphorisms. Like Morgan le Fay, she morphed into a “better” fascinator than in her “youth.”

She could be picky. “To preserve my love and esteem,” she said, “a man must hold himself very near perfection.” After working through two prime paramours—a political activist and German pianist—she settled on a handsome engraver thirteen years her junior. Alexandre Manceau sweetened her bed with his “skilled” hands and pampered and adored her for fifteen years. She in turn rejuvenated his life. “I have laughed more,” he said of their time together, “cried more,
lived
more than in all the thirty three preceding them. . . . What a joy!”

Her Wise Blood surged. “Brainwork,” she said, came to her as easily as “to a child,” and between 1857 and 1862 she wrote thirteen novels, two volumes of essays, and three plays. The blood went straight to her loins. Still “not exclusively any man’s,” George left Manceau for a weeklong honeymoon with a hulking painter two years younger than her son. After Manceau’s death she had a final fling with her “Great Big Springtime” before she called it a day and re-created herself as “the Good Lady of Nohant”—grand old Wise Woman and oracle to the young. She died at seventy-two of an intestinal obstruction, a life regenerator to the last. Her final words were “Let green things—[be].”

Although women never cottoned to George Sand (and vice versa), she saw herself as the “Spartacus of women’s slavery.” Today we’ve struck off most of the shackles she had in mind except age anxiety. “To know how to grow old,” she said, “is the masterwork of wisdom.” With age, George rocked out: a juicy, “large-brained,” abundant Silver Fox who reclaimed the divine privilege of eternal youth and allure.

Crowned with supraconfidence, “she spoke,” said one observer, “with the large utterance of the early gods.” That it was really the early goddesses explains her tarnished image. For a century after her death she was called “Chopin’s bloodsucker,” and a “seductive, seditious devil,” who practiced “black magic.” As Sainte-Beuve told her, “Your genius, your devil is to be forever young.”

George Sand’s modern successor is another tribute to the French sweet tooth for cerebral older women. At forty-seven this rotund woman with a frizzled aureole of gray hair watched her comely stepson of sixteen on a Brittany beach through kohled, predatory eyes. At 180 pounds, she looked like a Goddess of Willendorf in her tight black 1920s bathing costume. And goddess-wise she was about to ensnare a consort—in the shape of Our Lady of Words of Power.

Colette, the celebrated French author, was on the brink of a sexual “vintage time.” After squandering her youth under the yoke of adulterous despots, she metamorphosed in midlife into one of the “beautiful, authoritative female demon[s]” of her fiction, a take-no-prisoners siren. This wasn’t a freak mutation. Her whole life had been a long rehearsal.

Her mother and first mentor, herself a siren manqué, raised Colette in a female-dominant, sexually permissive household. Ensuring that her daughter developed a huge sense of self, she idolized her “Jewel of Pure Gold” and allowed her free rein. Colette’s two marriages, though ordeals in feminine subjection, toughened her and honed her seductive edge.

The subsequent years as a stage performer were instructive too. She learned self-presentational savvy as a stage performer, experimented sexually and bisexually, and studied the great courtesans at close range, La Belle Otero in particular. By her late forties, then, when she’d reached the apogee of her literary fame, she was ready to strike.

Her stepson, Bertrand de Jouvenel, was so awed by the author of
Chéri
(the story of an older woman’s seduction of a young man) that he trembled uncontrollably at their first meeting. Now, on the beach in Brittany, he trembled again as Colette sidled over and placed a practiced hand on his wet back. Later she cornered him in a stairwell and deflowered him, beginning an affair that lasted five years. The entire time Bertrand remained totally enrapt by his “voracious, expert, and demanding” “professor of desire.”

At fifty-two Colette scooped up another young literary fan, a handsome bachelor who’d long admired her writing and fantasized about marrying her. Maurice Goudeket, a dark smoothy of thirty-five, dealt in pearls, symbol of the lunar goddess and trope for Cheri’s attachment to the elder Lea. He too was electrified by the Great Author. Seated beside him at dinner, she gave him the full seeress treatment, fixing him with her “all-seeing” midnight blue eyes, then sprawling insolently on the sofa “like a great cat.”

Afterward she surprised him on the Riviera and bore him off. For thirty years he loved her unconditionally and gave her the support and stability she needed to become France’s premier writer. She “saved” him, he said, with her “vitality.”

Colette returned his adoration, married him in 1935, and referred to him as her darling Satan. Their friends called him more graphically Mr. Goodcock. Their sex life was athletic and passionate, and their marriage, a movable feast of intellectual, artistic, and sensuous pleasures. To Colette, the arrangement could not have been more comme il faut; a young man’s passion for an older woman, a doyenne of cerebral dazzle, was utterly “natural.”

No amount of kohl and rouge could make Colette glamorous in old age. She barreled around Paris in Grecian sandals like Hagar the Horrible with a bad perm. But she had something more, the mantle of Circe (down to her sandals)—the “inconceivably old” “goddess of human voice” who transformed herself into a beauty and her captives into tamed beasts. Her persona, though, goes back farther still, to the first sex goddess, the “Knower of All Wisdom” and seducer of all mankind. When she was elected to the Académie Goncourt for her literary achievements at seventy-two, Colette said her greatest pleasure was finding herself in her preordained place, “the only woman surrounded by a tribunal of men.”

Of modern eldersirens, Colette admired Mae West most. This “impudent woman,” she wrote, “alone does not experience the bitterness of the abandoned older woman.” These soul sisters, both smart, sexy divas, threw different senior spells. Mae trafficked in the older deity whose erotic authority and appetite topped out in maturity.

The crone goddess of early myth possessed a “powerful appetite for sex” and copulated with abandon. She roamed the night skies in lascivious disguises and seduced young men through trickery or “sheer charisma.” Her force field was no joke; few could withstand her torrid sexuality and superior sackcraft.

Beneath her self-parodic hypervamp facade, Mae West was the genuine article, the elderbabe with a cortege of pretty boys and allure to burn. “Just kiddin’,” she purred as she cocked her hip and lobbed her pleasure queen zingers: “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful”; “Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?”; “I’ve been on more laps than a napkin”; “Find ’um, fool ’um, and forget ’um.” Through comedy, the oldest contraband in the book, she smuggled the repressed senior sex goddess, with her runaway appeal and appetite, into mainstream American culture.

Mae was nearly forty before she began her Hollywood career as a sexpot, four years older than the age-phobic Marilyn Monroe when she killed herself. But Mae West had been a “sex queen regnant” all her life. She seemed endowed with a rogue genome that “automatically” showed her “what to do.”

“I can’t help it”—she shrugged—“these guys pop up and there it is.” By the time she reached her teens she’d established her lifelong erotic pattern: multiple men with one or more on permanent hold.

Like Colette, she also had an unusual mother-mentor to thank for her siren power. Matilda West was an anomaly in the turn-of-the-century Brooklyn of Mae’s youth. A Bavarian corset model, Matilda held an advanced Continental view of sexuality, encouraging her daughter to play around, avoid marriage, and preserve her self-possession.

Her ideas on child rearing were equally iconoclastic. In defiance of conventional wisdom, she exempted her “favorite” from punishment, denied her nothing, and allowed her to quit school in the third grade for a professional stage career.

As a consequence, Mae developed into a boundary-smashing original with a stupendous ego. She hogged the limelight with nervy shticks on the vaudeville trail and, inspired by a dream of a bear with a four-inch penis (modest then in her demands), sexually sampled the neighborhood.

Terrified, as seductresses often are, by the prospect of maternity, she protected herself with a sponge attached to a silk string. She looked ill suited for the part. A lean scrapper of just five feet, she was an unremarkable brunette with a slight overbite, square jawline, and strong eyebrows like two virgule slashes.

During her apprenticeship in the theater, though, she restyled herself into a glamour girl. “There’s nobody in my class,” she boasted. “I’m my own original creation.” She blondined her hair, redrew her eyebrows into penciled arcs, and floozied up her wardrobe, undulating on five-inch platforms. From female impersonators she took her hyperfemme mannerisms and whipcrack repartee; from African American dancers, her slo-mo pelvic rolls and the “shimmy shawobble.”

She cruised for trouble and got it. She caused a riot in New Haven for her lascivious cooch dancing. And her plays up-yours’d the establishment. Beneath the hoochie-mama packaging, Mae was a serious cultural saboteuse, an inspired wordsmith whose four plays and eight movies lampooned bourgeois prudery.
Sex,
the story of an unrepentant prostitute, landed her in jail for corrupting minors, and the others (one about a woman with “voracious sexual demands”) generated two raids, a lawsuit, and a tsunami of critical outrage.

While Mae was “inventing censorship” on the stage, her private life was just as transgressive, a reel-to-reel blue movie. During a brief marriage to a fellow vaudevillian, she locked him in his room on tour and accumulated the highest fines in the troupe for forbidden trysts with townies.

Convinced that a “thrill a day kept the chill away,” she flipped the double standard and helped herself to chorus boys, cabbies, boxers, fans, and theater bigwigs. A matinee idol wanted to marry her, and a flashy entertainment lawyer, Jim Timony, who called her “Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, and Duse,” left his practice to manage her career.

Mae handled her next career move, though, alone. With her play
Diamond Lil,
she discovered a way to sneak her flammable subject matter past the censors. Through nostalgia and self-parody, she made her lurid tale of white slave trade, sex, and prostitution palatable to puritanical America. The lewd lowlife seemed quaint in turn-of-the-century New York, and the siren suprema, harmless in the guise of a cartoon hussy with a swan bed and line of comic patter. The play was so wildly successful that Hollywood hired her for the movies.

In 1932, at a superannuated thirty-nine, she made her debut as the sex bomb in
Night After Night.
The macho studio moguls did a double take. This was outside their repertoire—a bossy broad who rewrote her lines and played a smartmouth, triumphant vamp.
She Done Him Wrong,
a diluted version of
Diamond Lil,
made Mae West a superstar, the biggest box-office draw in the country, and a household name.

Ten years and eight films later she was finished. Despite her ingenious cover—the jokes and sentimental scrim—the purity police caught on and sanitized her off the set. By the time Paramount canceled her contract, she’d been neutralized into a pale
Good Housekeeping
version of herself.

But nothing, not all the engines of social repression, could curb Mae’s private life. The studs kept coming, often handpicked at boxing matches, where she’d signal her choice to an accommodating bookie. Rich, famous, and at her sexual and seductive peak, she could “pick and choose.” In her mid-fifties she looked decades younger and took fabulous care of herself: no late nights, alcohol, cigarettes, or sunlight and lots of exercise, health food, and bottled water. So orgasmic she could climax in thirty seconds, she practiced kegels each day with her dumbbell reps and gave men a ride for their money.

On the road in
Catherine the Great
and
Diamond Lil
(two post-Hollywood plays), she feasted on cast members, once with a sexual athlete who climaxed twenty-six times in twenty-four hours. But she liked the sauce of male adoration with her sexual gourmandizing. Besides her ever-faithful lawyer/manager, she collected a ménage of impassioned devotees: black boxer Chalky Wright; her bodyguard; a costar; and one poor cast member who cracked mentally when she refused to marry him.

Mae applied a deliberate system to these conquests. Physically she went for broke—the glamour, hells-apoppin’ sex, and a setting that looked like a temple to Venus of Vegas. The living room was a riot of polar bear hides, nude statuettes, and white satin; the bedroom, a mirrored rococo playpen with a round lace-skirted bed in the center.