EXCERPT:
"Unlike a wisecracking Mae West, whose sexuality was so exaggerated she became a caricature of herself, or Marion Davies, who insisted to the very end that she and William Randolph Hearst were simply good friends, there was nothing coy or ironic about her persona. Others may have called her a tramp and regarded her as a high-priced call girl, but Peggy fit more easily into another mold, that of a full-blown courtesan whose approach to the opposite sex was frankly strategic. The critic George Jean Nathan, who had discerned "a touch of the French eighteenth century about her," was right: had she lived in another time, in another land, she might have taken her place in a long and distinguished line of women for whom being a courtesan represented an honorable and prestigious way of life..."
"As author Cornelia Otis Skinner noted respectfully of the legendary courtesans not of the eighteenth century but of Belle Epoque France, those visions of loveliness wreathed in clouds of ylang-ylang who drifted from the races and the Polo matches to the Opera and Comdie Francaise and onward to late suppers at Maxim's : "The leading coquettes were in an upper echelon not to be spoken of in the same breath as the status of ordinary prostitute. They were celebrities as filmy established as the top starts of theatre. They were the talk of the smart set. Boulevardiers quoted their bon mots... Even the press rated them as important news."
"Unlike a wisecracking Mae West, whose sexuality was so exaggerated she became a caricature of herself, or Marion Davies, who insisted to the very end that she and William Randolph Hearst were simply good friends, there was nothing coy or ironic about her persona. Others may have called her a tramp and regarded her as a high-priced call girl, but Peggy fit more easily into another mold, that of a full-blown courtesan whose approach to the opposite sex was frankly strategic. The critic George Jean Nathan, who had discerned "a touch of the French eighteenth century about her," was right: had she lived in another time, in another land, she might have taken her place in a long and distinguished line of women for whom being a courtesan represented an honorable and prestigious way of life..."
"As author Cornelia Otis Skinner noted respectfully of the legendary courtesans not of the eighteenth century but of Belle Epoque France, those visions of loveliness wreathed in clouds of ylang-ylang who drifted from the races and the Polo matches to the Opera and Comdie Francaise and onward to late suppers at Maxim's : "The leading coquettes were in an upper echelon not to be spoken of in the same breath as the status of ordinary prostitute. They were celebrities as filmy established as the top starts of theatre. They were the talk of the smart set. Boulevardiers quoted their bon mots... Even the press rated them as important news."
C Constance Rosenblum
MAY 2021
Please note that both MAE WEST's man PAUL NOVAK and MARION DAVIES have been featured here at Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot.
PAUL NOVAK – 27 Years as Mae West’s Much Younger Live-In Companion: Protective and Loving Till The Day She Died.
MARION was featured in July 2013
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