SexyPrime, a blog by Susan Crain Bakos

DAN TAYLOR LOSES A FRIEND--And We Gain More Insight Into The History of the Tuskegee Airmen

 
Photo Credit:  "Bird of Paradise" on Photobucket

 

“I’m saddened to report the news that my friend and fellow airman, Lt. William Wheeler, passed away yesterday of heart failure at Mercy Medical Center in Rockville Centre.

“As many of you know, I took Bill and his dear friend, the late Major Victor Terrelonge, flying in the same type aircraft they first used in primary training to become fighter pilots in WWII…” Dan Taylor, "The Morning Show", WCBS-fm 101.1.

 Read Dan's tribute and see the photos. 

 

Officially, the 332^nd Fighter Group and 447^th Bombardment Group of the U.S. Army Air Corps, the Tuskegee Airmen, as they were popularly known, were the nation’s first black pilots.  They served in the racially segregated military in World War II, won medals, are still receiving honors and earned the collective title, Heroes, by anyone’s definition of the word—though as Dan Taylor points out in a moving remembrance of his late friend William Wheeler, these splendid pilots couldn’t get jobs with U.S. airlines after the war. 

I first heard a part of the Tuskegee story as a little girl, from Daddy, as we were en route to New Orleans to bring his Mammy Lou Lou to live out her final days with us in Illinois.   Before foreign au pairs and nannies, families in New Orleans turned the daily duties of child-rearing over to Mammies, many of whom even wet-nursed the white babies as Mammy Lou Lou did for Daddy and his two brothers.  (Who took care of her own children?  Is that why were they missing from her life in old age?)

Trips to the South always included a learning segment, lessons in cautious behavior that Daddy or Mama thought their irrepressible little girl needed, coupled with the historical back stories attempting to explain the inexplicable, like why I couldn’t drink out of the “colored” drinking fountain and vice versa.  Why the Tuskegee airmen that particular day?  I don’t know.  Most likely, the topic was sparked by a newspaper story. Whatever, Mammy Lou Lou and the Tuskegee airmen—“some of the war’s greatest heroes,” Daddy said— were linked forever in my mind; and it seems a valid link.

I shared that story and Dan’s essay and photos with my veterans’ book group last night.  We decided to read next a book on the pilots and selected from the eight we found online:  Black Knights:  The Story of the Tuskegee Airmen by Lynn Homan and Thomas Reilly (Pelican Press, 2001.)  Any other recommendations? 

R., an African American man who lost a leg in Afghanistan, said, “Dan Taylor’s story of becoming friends with the two old pilots after he took them up in the plane they’d flown is very inspirational to me.   In the aftermath of war, even decades later, there can be good surprises, people reaching across age and race lines to honor those who served.  His respect for those men and their tradition is heartfelt.”

D.T., you are a good man.  I am always appreciating you more,, and on deeper levels, than I would have guessed the first time I heard your sexy voice and sat straight up in bed.

Readers, if you would like to honor the accomplishments of those great American pilots, help introduce young people to aviation or contribute to a scholarship fund, go to the Tuskegee Airmen Inc. website.

 

 

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ASK AUNTIE SUE--Honoring Our Vets and a Thank-You to Anthony Weiner

 

Auntie Sue's legs,  Photo by Trent

 

Auntie Sue is taking a holiday.

This morning I attended a Veteran's Day service (with cake!).  The vets who invited me are part of my reading group, representing veterans from the current wars back to Viet Nam.  They are a great group of people, sadly under-appreciated [I think; they don't complain.] by Americans--ordinary citizens and government officials.  After shopping the sales and enjoying the barbecues, please take a moment to remember those who died for our freedom to enjoy such pursuits--and those who came home from service to limited job opportunities and are struggling financially as well as psychologically and physically--and finally, those who are serving in the line of fire now. 

Without the men and women who volunteer to lay down their lives for us, how free would we be?

In keeping with the Memorial Day theme, Babes (and the men who love us) don't forget the civilians who fought different kinds of battles at home, and sometimes died, for the American ideal of equal rights--like Martin Luther King Jr--and the brave women who led the fight for equal rights.

And a special thank-you today to Anthony Weiner who stood up for women in a big way.  Kimmie sent me the link to this YouTube video with the comment, "This is awesome."

It is.

 

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WHAT BECOMES A LEGEND MOST?--The Tributes to Elizabeth Taylor

 
Photo Credit:  "Yellow Rose" on Photobucket

 

More infamous than Angelina in her day, Elizabeth Taylor was not consumed by Fame.  It did not chew her up and spit her out.  She prevailed over the love and hate.  More than that, she did not even seem to care about the inconsequential idiots who judged her.  She owned her bad behaviors—and they were numerous—and she was modest about her accomplishments and incredible generosities—and they were numerous too.  If you are not old enough to remember, she was the first celebrity who stood up for those infected with HIV-AIDS and the first to raise money for a cure.  In the name of her good friend the actor Rock Hudson who died of AIDS, she lent her star power to that cause when doing so was likely to end the average star’s viability as a marketable commodity.  That takes guts.  Shockingly, she still sold a lot of her own perfume, especially to middle-aged women who stood on line for her appearances at the cosmetics counters in upscale mall department stores. 

When I was a little girl growing up in the 50s and 60s, I loved paper doll books; and the Elizabeth Taylor paper dolls were my favorite, not merely because of her hourglass figure and the clothes patterned after movie studio designs.  She had something that I was sure Doris Day did not have. As a small child, I somehow intuited from the little knowledge I had—bits of conversations between my mother and my grown sisters, articles in the magazines I only glimpsed at the “beauty parlor”, what hairdressers’ shops were called before Warren Beatty’s star turn in the movie “Shampoo”—that Elizabeth Taylor was not like the other movie stars.  She was truly sexy, a word my mother did not know I knew, a word I couldn’t define though I knew Elizabeth had it.

My niece Elizabeth born when I was five, shared the famous name (also my grandmother’s name), which we reduced to “Liz” or “Lizzie”; and like La Taylor, she didn’t like that much either.  Finally, our girl insisted on Beth.  She was not the “Beth” of Little Women.  Nor did she grow up to be the suburban Beth of soccer Moms.  Again like Taylor, she married eight times.  Now it is clear to me that we should have by-passed the “Elizabeth” altogether and called her E. Jane, “Jane” being her middle name; that would have suited her.  (She died way too soon, at 49, of heart disease; and one of the last things she did before she collapsed was email me, lovingly describing the flowers I'd sent for her birthday.)  One memorable Thanksgiving dinner, at which Beth announced yet another forthcoming marriage, I scandalized the family by saying, “Beth, you don’t have to marry every man you fuck.”  The silence was so profound, I could hear the sodden over-cooked vegetables give up their last feeble crunch.

In later years, Elizabeth Taylor said ruefully that she blamed her eight marriages on her Puritanical parents who taught her that sex belongs in marriage.

She was one of us—and yet she lived in a special celebrity world, more rarified than the one inhabited today by Brangenlina, the closest thing we have to a “Liz and Eddie”, followed by a “Liz and Dick” scandal in modern times.  Taylor stole Debbie Reynolds’ husband Eddie Fisher and famously dumped him for Richard Burton.  (Aren’t we all waiting for the Big Dump that will leave Brad punching Jen’s numbers into his cell phone?)  If you haven’t read the story of the Taylor-Burton love life, you really should. See my review of Furious Love, "Women In Love:  They Live In Passion".  Their story is bold and big and glamorous in a way that such stories cannot be in the age of 24/7 media and over-exposure.  We have heard too many earnest comments about the importance of family combined with tips for keeping the “hot” in their monogamy to believe that Brad and Angelina are really all that glamorous and tempestuous.  Celebrities are not that different from everyone else; and the tabloids have their cellulite photos to prove it.They just look better and have more money.

Elizabeth Taylor has been called “the last of the Hollywood stars.”  She was a legend.  What I love best about her:  She did not give a damn for the opinions of the small-minded idiots who presumed to judge her.

She must have laughed at the internet trolls.  So do I.  I shall continue to do so in her honor.  Elizabeth Taylor knew the secret of life:  People you don't care about can't hurt you.

 

 
Photo Credit:  "Violet" by Morgan on Photobucket

 

copyright 2008-2011, www.sexyprime.typepad.com; PARTIAL reposts only permitted with link back to original article on SexyPrime.

 

WHAT'S SEXY NOW?--Why we can't top Marilyn Monroe

America's greatest sex symbol was born in a charity hospital to a single mother who would soon go crazy, never acknowledged by her father.  She dreamed of becoming a star, but more than that, lamented that her mother had never wanted her. 

"I wish she had," she wrote in girlish curvy script.  "I still wish she had."

I happened upon this book on the fourth floor of the Union Square Barnes & Noble: MM-Personal:  From The Private Archive of Marilyn Monroe by Lois Banner and Mark Anderson (Abrams).  I'd read about this illustrated collection, the contents of two gray metal filing cabinets, and frankly I thought:  Oh, no, the detritus of even her life can't be that compelling.

I was wrong. 

Flipping through the pages, I was pulled in by the photos of old handwritten notes, typed business correspondence, letters from fans and her stepchildren when she was married to Arthur Miller--and so much more--with photos tucked around the sides and sometimes splashed across the pages, like a schoolgirl's scrapbook of her life.  The format makes the material so much more inviting than it would have been told in straight text.  I felt like I was discovering secrets.  The mother of a young soldier in Korea wrote to thank MM for entertaining the troops.  An enterprising young man asked if he could promote his business with her photo because "Sex sells--and Marilyn Monroe is sex."

And she pondered the meaning of it all in wistful little notes like the one saying she wanted to be more than a sex symbol, she wanted to be an artist.

"It was all right for a few years," she wrote, "but not now."

Ironically, she was an artist, a gifted comedienne not given her due until after her death--and an artist of sexual theatre, a woman who presented herself in ways to arouse men while making it clear that in sex, the pleasure would be hers too.  We haven't had anything like MM since there was MM.  Partly we remember her for the sad part of her story, an unwanted child who couldn't have the children of her own she desperately wanted or find lasting love.  Most of us can relate to that story in one way or another. 

Largely we remember her because she defined a certain kind of female sexuality, rich, ripe, sensuous, lusty with a touch of wit and sophistication and above all, unapologetic.  Look at her photos and catch one of her old movies, especially "Some Like It Hot", and find yourself asking, Whatever happened to sex in the movies?

Culturally speaking, what is sexy now?

Last year, Michelle Williams in "Blue Valentine" gave the most genuine and believable sexual performance by a woman.  She played an ordinary-bright young woman with goals who got carried away by her lust for a man who would never aspire to anything better than a job that allowed him to have a few beers in the morning.  But the sex was perfect:  real, intense, needy, angry.  Hot. 

Why don't we see (and read) more of that?

American culture panders to the lowest common denominator and is heavily influenced by a loud minority of prudes and other judgmental types, determined to limit everyone's freedom of sexual expression to that which does not threaten them.  So we are reduced to American Sexy:  girls dress like Porn Star Barbie, boys never outgrow fart jokes and leering.  Real life, especially the sex, is too messy for us.

In Marilyn's day, night time talk show guests discussed art and culture, politics and international affairs.  Girls aspired to be women; and boys aspired to be men.  We are more sexually repressed now than they were then.

 copyright 2008-2011, www.sexyprime.typepad.com; PARTIAL reposts only permitted with link back to original article on SexyPrime.

CHEST HAIR, GOLD CHAINS AND AN ARTISTIC MIND: Remembering Bob Guccione

Photo Image:  "Flower Drop" by metalchick on Photobucket

 

 

He was a mass of contradictions--but the most interesting people always are, aren't they?

Bob Guccione, founder of the Penthouse magazine empire, died of throat cancer in Plano, Texas, this week, a long way from London where the empire was born and New York City where it thrived and died.  Artist, art collector, publisher of pornography and Viva, a cutting edge women's magazine and the glossy and beautiful science magazine,Omni, he was best known as the man most often photographed in tight leather pants, open silk shirt, gold chains tangled in copious amounts of chest hair.  The first to show "pink" in a mainstream magazine, he created Penthouse to challenge Hugh Heffner's Playboy with more sexually explicit photographs of girls.  

I wrote for the Penthouse magazines in the late 80s through the mid 90s, especially for Penthouse Forum under the brilliant editor Jack Heidenry and, as Carolyn Steele, Dear Superlady of Sex, for Penthouse Letters, under Don Myrus, the savviest and smartest of the old school sex magazine editors.  A divorced Soccer Mom from the Midwest, I did not exactly fit into Sex World.  But my fellow writers, including such luminaries as Annie Sprinkle and Veronica Vera, took me under their wing and nurtured me.  Even the late Marco Vassi, the ultimate sexual outlaw, was kind to me.  

Angry, sneering feminists asked me on talk shows and sometimes in person, "How can you write for those magazines?"

They paid very well--and I was also treated very well.  Heidenry, Myrus and Peter Block, editor of Penthouse, were dealing with women as intellectual equals when the heads of some women's service magazines were still treating their women editors and readers with thinly veiled contempt.  I would be surprised to hear (as I never have heard) that any woman was ever sexually harassed in the offices of General Media, the parent company.  It simply was not the vibe of the place.  What I learned from working with that group of people made my career as a sex book author possible.  I owe them all a debt of gratitude for setting me on my path of careful sex science research combined with frank confessional sex writing.  With book number twenty--Daily Sex Bible-- coming out in January, it's been a winning strategy for me.

Occasionally I was invited to a party at The House, the double brownstone mansion on 67th Street in Manhattan.  If the chains and chest hair image made Guccione somewhat embarrassing as a boss, his art collection mitigated that.  I was awestruck by the art.  My first party, Kathy Keeton, his girlfriend, business partner, finally wife, was gorgeous in an emerald green leather mini dress--more beautiful than the Penthouse Pets standing around.  I noticed him looking at her from across the room with real passion and desire, love and devotion in his eyes.  At her side, he put the possessive hand on her back or at her waist, but always with a certain deference, a degree of respect.  They were hot.  Nobody doubted that what they  had together was the real thing.

He asked me if I missed Chicago--because people assume that everyone from Illinois is from Chicago--and I said, "Oh, no, not Chicago, southern Illinois, downstate.  I was born and raised in East St. Louis before it went entirely wrong, moved to Edwardsville, university town and county seat surrounded by cornfields, as a young wife and mother.  The whole of the area is the church of the St. Louis baseball Cardinals."

His eyes lit up, he squeezed my arm and, grinning, said, "It is good to come from somewhere you can define."

Conflicted at leaving the Midwest, I remembered that comment and, in fact, held onto it as comfort.  He signaled a waiter to bring me another glass of champagne and moved on.  There was no glass in his own hand.  He did not drink, smoke or use drugs.

Both he and Kathy suffered long, painful bouts with cancer before they died.  I am sorry they had to endure so much pain.  I hope their last thoughts were each of the other, making eye contact across a crowded room, surrounded by the visible signs of their success when the empire was in power.

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FAREWELL, FARRAH

Photo:  The famous poster

An icon who appealed to women as much as men, Farrah Fawcett lived life on her own terms, sexual and otherwise.  In her late 40s, she posed nude for Playboy magazine and set sales records.  More importantly, she became the leading aging Hollywood beauty refusing to be defined by prejudicial societal concepts of aging.  And she suffered a terribly cruel and ugly illness with incredible courage.

The recent documentary on her battle with anal cancer may save some lives.   According to the American Cancer Society, anal cancer, while rare, is often seen in patients who have HPV (human papilloma virus) infections which are sexually transmitted.   Risk factors include HPV or other STIs, like genital warts, smoking and a family history of anal cancer. 

I am not implying that Farrah’s cancer was related to sexual activity.  She had surgery at the age of one month to remove an intestinal blockage, possibly indicating a predisposition to the cancer.  But I am guessing she knew about the connection between anal cancer and HPV—and that she wanted the information widely disseminated to women so they would practice safer sex, get vaccinated against HPV and follow up on any symptoms immediately.  

TV critic David Zurawik of The Baltimore Sun wrote a moving tribute to her today that concludes:

 

The truth is that she was not a great actress -- let's be honest even at this time of death when truth is usually cast aside for inflated praise. But she was better than Hollywood wanted to let her be -- and she achieved the kind of success she did in The Burning Bed because of her refusal to be pigeon-holed and totally defined only by her good looks. There is integrity in that.

There was certainly integrity in the way she faced her cancer, sharing all the painful, messy details with the public.  Mamas, watch "Farrah's Story" and get your daughters vaccinated against HPV.

 

 

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MOURNING JOHN UPDIKE

I walked into Madeleine Morrel's office yesterday with a copy of Updike's last novel, The Widows of Eastwick, sticking out of my bag.

"Did you know he died today?"  she asked.  "I just got the CNN blast."

I have been reading John Updike since I was in junior high school.  (I was a precocious child, born into a family of readers, and reading adult novels before I was ten.)  He is one of America's great novelists; and his work will live on.  If you haven't read him, start now with The Witches of Eastwick and then read its sequel, Widows.

 

       

Updike loved women.  He understood them better than most men, including male writers, do.  Witches was considered by some critics to be his statement on the wages of feminism:  The women's movement unleashed this primal sexual power in women and encouraged them to use it in evil ways.

Nonsense!

Updike discovered women's sexual power when he began writing in the 1950s.  He didn't fear it or seek to repress it.  In this last novel, the sexy young witches are old now, but he still gives them the grace of their sexual feelings and desires, perhaps more rooted in memory than present reality, that stir in their brains and pussies.

John Updike was a man who loved women.   

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Bettie Page, An American Icon Who Redefined The Sexual "Normal"

Bettie Page, photo taken by Bunny Yaeger

The incredible Bettie Page died this week at age 85 in a Los Angelos hospital.  Like Marilyn Monroe to whom she was compared, Bettie was an oft-photographed sex symbol.  Both women appeared on covers of Hugh Hefner's fledgling Playboy magazine.  They were the dark and light of sexuality in the 50s--for more reasons than the contrast of brunette and blonde.  Bettie posed for bondage and fetish photos and starred in little films that were quite outrageous by the standards of their day.  She was Sex's Really Bad Girl.  (Marilyn just played a bit naughty on screen.) If you are not familiar with Bettie Page, go to google, type in her name and prepare to be stunned, by her beauty an d how tame these photos and films were that so outraged the as yet unnamed Moral Majority folks.  

Something else that will grab you by the shoulders and make you salute:  The lady never looked ashamed or embarrassed or uncomfortable, whether she was pretending to spank a bound girl on her lap or being led around in a harness and boots with six inch heels.  Bettie was a natural--a natural model, comfortable in her own skin, a free spirit unashamed of her own sexuality.  She was always metaphorically winking at the camera that loved her and confiding, "Girls just wanna' have fun."

I had never heard of Bettie until I started writing for Penthouse Forum in the late 1980s when Jack Heidenry was the editor and the assignments were interesting.  She was a cult figure then; and Jack wanted me to find out what happened to her after she dropped out of sight in the early 60s.  Back in the pre-internet days, such knowledge was difficult to come by.  I narrowed the reports and rumors down to the most credible:  She found God; moved to California; got married.  All true, as it turned out.  There were no photos of an aging Bettie.  So I wondered if her disappearance was motivated by the desire, perhaps subconsciously, to remain Forever Bettie in her public's mind.

My thinking shifted back and forth on that question over the years.  She seems to have answered it when I wasn't looking.  Some of the reports on her death say she told reporters that she wanted no photographs of her as an older person.

Here is Bettie on her career:

"I never thought of the work as shameful.  I thought it was normal. I was not trying to be shocking or to be a pioneer.  I didn't think of myself as liberated; and I didn't think I was doing anything important.  I was just myself.  I don't know any other way to be or any other way to live."

She left when she felt it was time to go and do something else.  And she did leave us a wonderful legacy of photos and films and her irrepressible spirit shining through cheap sets and trashy clothes and (unintentionally) hilarious situations.  Bettie Page was a sexually empowered woman.

Today's cheap holiday thrill:  Do some online research, rent the DVD "The Notorious Bettie Page" starring Getchen Moll.  Get your inner Bettie on--and tie up your man.

 

copyright 2008-2011, www.sexyprime.typepad.com; PARTIAL reposts only permitted with link back to original article on SexyPrime