There’s a puppetry credit at the end of the Susan and Lloyd Ecker documentary of the life of Sophie Tucker. I assume that refers to the modest special effect where occasionally an image of Sophie moves her limbs and body against the still background. That minor flourish could be the film’s central metaphor. Sophie’s animation sets her apart from the static world around her.
Of course her 60-year career, which extended from vaudeville and radio through films silent and sound to television, through WW II and Korea, was hardly static. But however dynamic or even frenzied the world she still stood apart, her voice and manner and innovations always ahead of her time. The first and last of the red hot mamas made even the fast-moving world around her seem static.
Her brassy bawdy style facilitated the various stardoms from Mae West through Bette Midler (and Lady Gaga). Her rhythms, timing and emotions made her the first of America’s great jazz singers. Her early self-advertisement made her the first star to brand herself. Later her personal outreach to individual audience members, whether townsfolk or soldiers, made her the first to reach beyond the mass appeal of stardom, to recover the individual connection by reading and responding to thousands of fan letters.
In several ways she anticipated much of our modern feminism: her sexual authority and initiative, her celebration of her own unfashionably abundant body, even her apparent ultimate lesbianism. Her influence on the careers she mentored — e.g., West, Judy Garland, Jerry Lewis, Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Paul Anka, etc., etc., etc. — is incalculable.
Sophie Tucker was a large woman with a large career and an even larger heart. She’d make any world seem inert in comparison.
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