Transit of Venus

Lewis H. Lapham Lapham’s Quarterly. I used to be Snow White, but I drifted. — Mae West.
On assignment for The Saturday Evening Post in the summer of 1964, I accepted one of Mae West’s invitations “to come up and see me sometime,” and on the stage set that was her house in Malibu I found her in what both Giacomo Casanova and Cecil B. DeMille would have recognized as a “boudoir”—white fur rug, gilded mirrors, satin hangings on the walls; Miss West arranged on the bed wearing a lace negligee, a feather boa, and a pink silk nightgown. She was seventy-one years old, and if she had drifted a long way from the cottage in the forest with the seven dwarves, she had lost nothing of her power to cue the saxophones and stand to attention the members of a cavalry regiment.

She granted me an audience that lasted maybe an hour, which was time enough to count the ways in which she was a contrivance as finely wrought as one of Emily Dickinson’s love lyrics or her own extravagantly blond wig. The curtains had been drawn against the bright, blue California afternoon, but the dim light softened with the scent of roses couldn’t conceal the lines around her eyes and wrists, the wrinkles at her throat, the strain on the corsets that held her figure as rigidly in place as a pagan idol carved in ivory. After ten minutes the imperfections in her appearance were no longer visible. Whether it was art or biology, her letting slip the sleeve of her negligee or the gene sequence encoded in her elbow, so distinct was the sensual inducement that had she directed me to climb the stairway to paradise, I would have gone as willingly as Tristan to Isolde, or Napoleon to Josephine. Read more here