Good Vibrations Magazine

Welcome to Fat Sex History month! We’ve had Black History Month and Women’s History Month already this year, and National Masturbation Month is right around the corner — so it’s high time. Besides, I figure everyone deserves at least one historical role model, and that includes those of us who know that more cushion for the pushin’ means a damned good time.

So without further ado, I give you the poster girl for Fat Sex History Month 2001, the legendary Miss Sophie Tucker. Billed as “The Last of the Red-Hot Mamas,” the redoubtable singer, actress, and comedienne was born to an immigrant Russian Jewish family in the early 1880s (the exact date of her birth is uncertain), and began her career as a child, singing for tips while helping wait tables in her family’s restaurant in the theatre district in Hartford, Connecticut. A chunky kid and teenager, she was originally ashamed of her weight, hiding behind the piano when she and her sister would go and perform in amateur-night concerts in Hartford’s Riverside Park. The crowd, on the other hand, loved her, her size, and her wit, and pretty soon the summertime crowds would yell “Give us the fat girl!” and demand that she perform.

She went into showbiz in earnest in 1906, pounding the pavement in New York’s “Tinpan Alley” hoping for a break and making friends with the likes of Irving Berlin. And soon enough she did get a break, shoved on stage in blackface makeup when a vaudeville impresario said she was “too big and too ugly” to go on stage otherwise. But like the trouper she was, Sophie made it work, playing for laughs and soon introducing her signature “hot songs,” suggestive comedy numbers that were just this side of what the censors would allow. It wasn’t too many years before she was out of blackface, recognized for the genius performer she was, and drawing the crowds from coast to coast with songs like “There’s More Music in a Grand Baby Than There Is in a Baby Grand,” “When They Get Too Wild For Anyone Else They’re Perfect For Me,” and one of her signature tunes, “Nobody Loves A Fat Girl, But Oh How A Fat Girl Can Love.”

Although some people claim that Sophie was able to get away with her steamy content because she, as a fat woman, made it come off as funny but never salacious, I think that Sophie could tell a few stories that would put the lie to that theory. Married three times, Sophie never found herself with a shortage of admirers, and had a soft spot for glamorous ne’er-do-wells like gamblers, gangsters, saloon owners, prizefighters, auto racers and, back in the Roaring 20s, even a Chicago alderman named Dorsey Crowe. Stage-door Johnnies were a regular fixture in her hard-working show-biz life, and in her autobiography she writes about one who, during World War I, bought her a pair of dazzling diamond earrings as a token of his affection. She even once received a proposal of marriage from an Arab sheikh who wrote that he was particularly entranced by her “generous proportions.” Not too shabby for a fat girl who was told she was “too big and too ugly” to go on stage!

Not only was Sophie sexy, sought-after, and a fabulous entertainer, she was also incredibly sexually savvy and funny. She paved the way for comediennes like Bette Midler, Joan Rivers, Roseanne, and Margaret Cho. Sex figured prominently in her patter as well as her songs, and Bette Midler still retells some of Sophie’s saltier jokes in her standup acts, like this one:

I was talking to my boyfriend the other day and he said to me, “Soph, when I am 80 years old, I am going to get myself a 20-year-old girl. What do you think of that, Soph?” And I says, “Well, when I am 80 years old, I’m going to get myself a 20-year-old man. And let me tell you something, twenty goes into eighty a hell of a lot more than eighty goes into twenty.”

Sophie was also well aware that even in a time when women were supposed to be proper housewives, a woman who knew what she wanted sexually could definitely get it. She often sang songs about philandering husbands, but she didn’t hesitate to tell their wives that it wasn’t half as hard as they thought to get a little lovin’ on the side, too:

When your red-hot papa’s steam pipe gets cold, your tears won’t heat it up… Love is like home cooking, good and wholesome, but all men like a little mutton on the outside now and then. And if you find your husband is cheating, go out and do the same, old dear! Why, he’s only giving you the chance that you’ve been waiting for for years… go out and make whoopee! Men? You’ll get ‘em by the score. Don’t you worry, honey, that’s what God made sailors for.

Ahead of her time, Sophie summed up her sexual politics pretty distinctly and defiantly. She loved men, no doubt about it, but she expected them to give as good as they got. Once, when asked about her “hot” numbers, she replied:

“My hot songs? They’re educational. They have a message: ‘make him say please and make him say thanks.’ I don’t try at any time to be offensive. The women take the hint, too. After the show they tell me they’re going to make their husbands say ‘please.’ ”

And no doubt about it, they did, especially where Sophie herself was concerned. With a career that spanned vaudeville, radio, talkies, and even television (I’ll bet at least some of you reading this remember Sophie on the Ed Sullivan Show in the early 1960s), Sophie’s life and loves spanned the better part of the 20th century. Sure, she was funny. Sure, people laughed at Sophie when she sang:

I’m the last of the red-hot mamas
They’ve all cooled down but me
Flapper vamps, say, what do they know?
Come get your hot stuff from this volcano!
Way up in Alaska where the natives freeze
An Eskimo left my house in his BVDs
I’m the last of the red-hot mamas
I’m gettin’ hotter all the time!

But many were also intensely aware that under the humorous bravado, red-hot mama Sophie Tucker was telling the gospel truth. Sophie Tucker may have passed away in 1966, but her fat ‘n’ sassy legacy lives on. “Oh how a fat girl can love” indeed!