100 Nasty Women of History

by Hannah Jewell

  Mercedes’ most famous romance, however, was with the glamorous starlet Greta Garbo. Please enjoy this description of Garbo’s legs by Mercedes: ‘They were not tan or the sunburned color which is commonly seen, but the skin had taken on a golden hue and a flock of tiny hairs growing on her legs were golden too. Her legs are classical. She has not the typical Follies girl legs or the American man’s dream of what a woman’s legs should be. They have the shape that can be seen in many Greek statues.’ Statue legs should be the new unachievable beauty craze.

  As Mercedes and Greta’s relationship progressed, Greta got spooked by the increasing publicity about her sexuality. The press said of Greta Garbo, ‘The most talked-about woman in Hollywood is the woman no wife fears.’ Mercedes was possessive, and they split up. She was devastated. But, in the manner of history’s great seducers, she swiftly moved on to Marlene Dietrich, who wore top hats. Mercedes sent her so many flowers that Marlene said, ‘I was walking on flowers, falling on flowers, and sleeping on flowers.’

  As Hollywood became more conservative in the 1930s, things got harder for Mercedes, who could never recreate her successes of the 1920s. She suffered through several deaths in her family, including her beloved sister Rita, the most beautiful woman in New York. Mercedes grew depressed, and fell on hard times.

  To help make ends meet, she wrote an autobiography in 1960 titled Here Lies the Heart which recounted her many exploits in showbiz – including veiled references to her affairs with the stars. Garbo was furious, and she and others thought the memoir was too close to outing her lovers. They cut her out of their lives. When Mercedes died, she had next to her a Bible in which she’d pasted pictures into the cover of Greta, whom she never fully got over. Because you wouldn’t, would you?

  82

  Gladys Bentley

  1907–1960

  One day in 1934, the police came to Midtown Manhattan’s King’s Terrace nightclub to padlock its doors shut. Their aim was to protect the innocent public from the lewd musical offerings of one ‘masculine-garbed, smut-singing entertainer,’ Gladys Bentley. ‘The chief and filthiest offering of the evening,’ said the offended patron who lodged a formal complaint to the police, ‘is a personal tour of the tables by Miss Bentley. At each table she stopped to sing one or more verses of a seemingly endless song in which every word known to vulgar profanity is used.’

  Imagine being the narc who complained to the police about that? It sounds amazing.

  Here’s an example of a Gladys ditty from the scandalous musical revue which the police commissar deemed too ‘vile’ to go on. It’s called, ‘It’s a Helluva Situation Up at Yale’:

  It’s a helluva situation up at Yale.

  It’s a helluva situation up at Yale.

  As a means of recreation,

  They rely on masturbation.

  It’s a helluva situation up at Yale.

  Whether or not there was a helluva situation up at Yale is unclear. However, what is known is that Gladys Bentley, pianist, blues singer, and entertainer, was too much for Midtown to handle. She was a black working-class lesbian from Philadelphia who only wore men’s clothes. Up in Harlem, however, things were different. While plays on Broadway got censored, Harlem hosted drag balls and all-night parties and Gladys’s various inappropriate entertainments. She was a part of the fabric of the neighbourhood, drawing crowds of all races to experience her husky-voiced, innuendo-laden show.

  Gladys Bentley got her start in the 1920s performing as a pianist at parties, then graduated to fancy nightclubs, and eventually toured the country with her one-of-a-kind performances. She’d wear a white tuxedo with her hair greased back, and sang with a group of dancing, effeminate men behind her. One picture shows her in front of six men dressed as sailors, kneeling behind her and captioned the ‘Favorites of the King’. Gladys would rewrite popular songs to be naughty, and get her audience to sing along with them. She was big and butch and could sing jazz and blues standards with a voice that switches between a gravelly tenor, a bird-like falsetto and scatting. She sang the classics, but she also wrote and recorded original songs. She could sing a ballad that would bring a room to tears, or make an audience laugh so hard with her dirty jokes that the police would be left with no choice but to have the whole place shut down.

  A 1931 Harlem guidebook entry for the Clam House, where she performed regularly, called her a ‘pianist and torrid warbler’, noted the club was ‘best after 1am’, but warned the show was ‘not for the innocent young’. The poet Langston Hughes, being a poet, described her with more style, saying how she could play the piano ‘all night long, literally all night, without stopping … from ten in the evening until dawn, with scarcely a break between the notes, sliding from one song to another.’ She was ‘a large, dark, masculine lady, whose feet pounded the floor while her fingers pounded the keyboard …’

  Her show was hers, all hers, and her style unforgettable: Gladys Bentley invented the white tuxedo. In a time when queer women performers could only allude to their sexuality in order to protect themselves, Gladys leaned into it, and built a career upon it. She even married a white woman, whose identity is unknown, in a New Jersey civil ceremony. Gladys was a star who packed houses and was beloved by her audiences no matter how loudly the critics disparaged her and her fellow performers as ‘sexual perverts and double entendre jokes crackers’. She was the soundtrack to the Harlem Renaissance and all the poets and writers and composers who lived through it. Gladys was King.

  The world isn’t guaranteed to grow more open-minded and tolerant with time. When Gladys moved to LA in the 40s and 50s, she found there a much more conservative society than Harlem in the 20s and 30s. One club where she hoped to perform had to get a special permit to allow her to wear trousers. Whether it was a personal shift, or a natural reaction to living through the years of McCarthyism and its attendant anti-gay hysteria, Gladys took to the press to disown her previous life, presenting instead a respectable image of 1950s womanhood, all pearls and flowery dresses.

  She even tried her hand at heterosexual marriage, taking one or possibly two husbands in a row, but kept a picture of her mysterious wife on display in her home, and ended up divorced.

  But even once she had reformed to a life of straight domesticity, Gladys would recollect with fondness her style from a bygone age: ‘tailor-made clothes, top hat and tails, with a cane to match each costume, stiff-bosomed shirt, wing collar tie and matching shoes’. Listen to Gladys’ ‘Worried Blues’ and imagine her whole body tapping out the rhythm at the piano, dressed as splendidly as that.

  83

  Coccinelle

  1931–2006

  Trans men and women get enough shit nowadays, so you can only imagine what it was like in the 1950s. Coccinelle was the stage name of Jacqueline Charlotte Dufresnoy, the French club singer who shot to fame across Europe and the world, and over the course of her life paved the way for the rights of future trans people in France.

  Coccinelle – ‘ladybug’ in French – was not some obscure and unknown show girl, but a bona fide star who hobnobbed with some of the biggest names in showbiz. She was a blonde bombshell who looked like Brigitte Bardot, Marilyn Monroe and the other sex symbols of the era. She was given a flat at the height of her stardom overlooking Sacré-Coeur in Paris, as a gift by an admirer. (Where does one find such admirers? Asking for a friend.)

  The journalist (and future second husband) who profiled her in 1959, Mario A. Costa, described her breathtaking glamour the first time he saw her: ‘Suddenly she appeared, attracting every eye, impeccably dressed, dazzlingly elegant and overwhelming beautiful.’ As all women are, but Coccinelle especially.

  Coccinelle was born in 1935, and had a hard time once she was sent to an all-boys school at age 12, away from all her girlfriends with whom she felt most comfortable. ‘If there is one word which sums up the early years of my existence and stands as their symbol it is that one: loneliness,’ Coccinelle said. After years of bullying and harassment from her teach
ers, she was happy to leave school at 16 to become an apprentice for a celebrity hairdresser in the Champs-Élysées. She was learning under a master, and beloved by most of the fancy customers who came in, but one day, some stupid cow (sorry but she really was) was so offended by Coccinelle, who at the time presented as an effeminate man, that she launched into a tirade of verbal abuse. It didn’t matter to her that Coccinelle was in the middle of bleaching her hair. Why would you be horrible to someone who had your hair in their hands? As I said, a stupid cow (not sorry).

  Throughout her life, Coccinelle was never one to stand for disrespect and harassment. To this particular stupid cow (less sorry than ever before) she replied: ‘Madame would certainly be more at home – and attract more attention – in the zoological gardens. Antonio [Coccinelle’s boss] is a hairdresser, not a miracle worker!’ Needless to say, the customer wasn’t pleased. Coccinelle was heartbroken, however, when Antonio fired her, in the spirit of the customer always being right.

  But once again, Coccinelle wasn’t one to be trampled on. Years later, Coccinelle would return to get her revenge, resplendent in her elegant clothes, asking for an appointment with the famous Antonio, who was now suddenly anxious to please her and look after her long, thick blonde hair. After questioning if Antonio recognised her, Coccinelle revealed that she was his former assistant, stunning him completely. ‘He had got rid of me. Now he was waiting on me, ready to obey and anxious to please me,’ she remembered. ‘I had just had a very sweet revenge …’

  A lot had happened in between those two experiences at the hairdressers. Coccinelle first became aware of her true identity while walking around the Strasbourg–Saint-Denis neighbourhood of Paris one day at the age of 18, when she was accosted by five sex workers and brought into the hotel where they worked. There, they did Coccinelle’s hair and make-up – one woman even lent her large fake breasts – and dressed her for the first time in women’s clothing. ‘She’s the prettiest one of us all!’ they declared, and became friends.

  Coccinelle began going about town in the clothes and make-up of her new friends. On one such outing, Coccinelle saw her mother approaching on the street, who didn’t immediately recognise her. She called out to her mother, who stopped and stared for a while before realising it was her child. Then, though, as Coccinelle recalled it, ‘she came up to me and took my head and held it against her breast, comforting me and speaking with infinite gentleness as if she were soothing a little child. “I understand everything now, everything, Jacques my dear … Don’t cry, things will be all right because I’ll always be your mother …”’

  Coccinelle came home and decided to destroy all photos and evidence of Jacques Dufresnoy. ‘Oh, how I hated him, that creature of a sex that was not really mine!’ Coccinelle remembered.

  She worked as a switchboard operator for a while, where a close work friend suggested that she see about auditioning to perform in a cabaret. Coccinelle went to her sex worker friends to help her make her transformation, and wowed the cabaret owner. She was hired right away.

  And so began Coccinelle’s stardom. She performed in famous nightclubs like the Crazy Horse Saloon and Le Carrousel de Paris, and made her film debut in European Nights in 1959, which was rated ‘X’ by the British censor, proving that British people are less fun than the French. She took her act on tour, performed before sold-out crowds night after night, and became BFFs with the legendary Hollywood star Marlene Dietrich.

  She also kept a farm in Normandy, and one day decided to bring her beloved farm animals back to Paris with her to live on her balcony. Her balcony pigs and chickens created quite a stir, but unfortunately, they had to go. The police got involved once animal droppings started landing on the heads of passers-by.

  Despite her fame, and her celebrity friends, and her incredibly glam life, Coccinelle faced constant trouble trying to travel, as her passport stated that she was Jacques Charles Dufresnoy rather than Jacqueline Charlotte, with a picture of her as a man. Frustrating as it was, Coccinelle occasionally took the opportunity to mess with customs agents. She later recalled an instance when some border agents demanded to know why she didn’t dress as a man, to which she replied: ‘Dress as a male? With breasts like this? But that wouldn’t be right. I would become a transvestite!’

  More trouble came when Coccinelle received a draft notice to join the military. She arrived at the military offices in all her splendid glamour, where the officers would not accept that this was indeed the person they had called up for duty. And so she gave them a striptease – annoyed that she was normally paid to do so – and recalled their reaction: ‘That day I found out that officers’ faces always turned purple. Perhaps it was the fashion. Those military men, hardened warriors with years of service, accustomed to danger and the terrible sight of the dying and the dead, behaved like shy schoolboys when they had to deal with a man who had female hormones.’

  They ended up marking her ‘totally unfit for the French army’, which was perfectly fine by her.

  Coccinelle fought another kind of battle in her advocacy for the rights of trans people. She started a foundation called ‘Devenir Femme’ – to become a woman – which supported those seeking surgery, and helped establish another organisation to research sex and gender. When she married French journalist Francis Bonnet it was the first known marriage of a trans person in France, and so set a legal precedent for others to be married in future. It was a legal marriage carried out by the French Roman Catholic Church, who only said she had to be re-baptised as Jacqueline. She was given away by her father, and the wedding made front-page news.

  She also underwent not the first, but certainly the most publicised sex reassignment surgery of her generation, travelling to Casablanca for the operation. ‘Dr Burou rectified the mistake nature had made and I became a real woman, on the inside as well as the outside,’ she recalled. ‘After the operation, the doctor just said, “Bonjour, Mademoiselle,” and I knew it had been a success.’

  With the power of her celebrity and status as a beloved national icon, Coccinelle was recognised as a woman by the French state following her surgery. From her position as a national icon, she was able to campaign for trans rights. She was bold and fearless and didn’t let people get away with bullshit. She took the privilege she had as a painfully hot woman – who happened to look like the blondest, most ‘classically’ European beautiful icons of her day – and used it for good. And so must we all use our privilege as incredibly hot people for good.

  84

  Umm Kulthum

  1898/1904–1975

  Umm Kulthum was a legendary Egyptian mega-diva from the 1950s and 60s, who you can’t properly understand without listening to some of her music first. Go. Listen. Search for a live performance like ‘Enta Omri’ on YouTube. Yes, her performances are about an hour of continuous, uninterrupted music, so you don’t have to listen to the whole thing before continuing reading, since after all, you have that appointment you need to get to pretty soon.

  What you’ll hear in any live recording, though, is the sheer JOY of the crowd. The whistling and screaming and people just occasionally losing it and shouting out to God. There is a word in Arabic – tarab – which can be summed up by this reaction to Umm Kalthum’s music, of ecstasy and trance and, I dunno, the classical Arabic musical equivalent of that feeling when the beat drops.

  Another thing you’ll notice is the, like, ten minutes of music that pass before she even starts singing. Things need to be set up just right, you know? You’ll get her voice only when she’s ready, when the orchestra is ready, when that guy in front has shut up. If you are a true diva, you will know exactly when to begin, and until then bless your audience with the very sight of you, with your big 1960s hair and your giant sparkling earrings and your silk scarf dangling from your hand for a bit of extra flair.

  Umm Kulthum was born in either 1898 or 1904, and as we know, it would be rude to ask which. Her father was an imam who taught her to sing and how to recite the Qur’an, a skill
which is credited as lending her great clarity of pronunciation of the formal Arabic in her music. From the age of 12, Umm Kulthum toured with her family ensemble, dressed as a boy at first in order to avoid the objections of haters. Her incredible singing ability led to her getting noticed by prominent Egyptian classical musicians. She moved to Cairo in the 1920s, met the city’s most important composers, and shot to fame. While many elite musicians performed for small private audiences, Umm Kulthum was the people’s singer, giving public performances and then monthly radio performances that would bring Cairo to a standstill.

  For a mega-diva, Umm Kulthum was also incredibly private. She had grown up in humble circumstances, and stayed humble throughout her life, as we all must remember to do once we are rich and famous. She was an Egyptian nationalist and supporter of the country’s first president, Gamal abdel Nasser – though it is the popular belief that more Egyptians turned out for her funeral in 1975 than his in 1970. Sorry Gamal! Umm Kulthum’s songs still sell millions of records every year and she can be heard on the radio across the Arab world, spreading tarab long after her death.

  85

  Josephine Baker

  1906–1975

  Where do I even start with Josephine Baker?

  She lived a life so full, so paradoxical, and so complicated that it’s almost unfathomable. Her story encompasses so many decades, so many tensions, and so many struggles of the 20th century that her life can be read as a sort of history textbook. If that sounds boring, I promise it isn’t.

  Here’s the short version: Josephine was a rather scandalous American showgirl from St Louis, Missouri, who took Paris by storm in the 1920s and 30s. She spied for the French Resistance in World War II, and became a French national hero for her war service. She was an activist for civil rights in the US, and hoped to prove that racial harmony was possible by adopting children from all over the world to be raised together in her chateau in the French countryside.