talktooloose

I've been listening to two versions of the song "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" which comes originally from the Broadway musical, Pal Joey, music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Larry Hart. One is 1950 studio recording featuring the cast of the original 1940 production and the other is Ella Fitzgerald's famous ballad version.

Vera, the main female protagonist of the play, is the equal of the titular character, Joey, in her sexual rapacity and eschewing of romance in favour of pleasure. This makes her quite distinct from other ingenues and certainly marks a distinction between Broadway, where such a figure could happily exist, and Hollywood where the lead girls were good girls.

There were some telling rewrites of the song's lyric when it became a pop song sung by Ella. First of all, some of the overtly sexual references were softened:

Couldn't sleep, wouldn't sleep / Until I could sleep where I shouldn't sleep

became

Couldn't sleep, wouldn't sleep / Till love came and told me I shouldn't sleep

What's more interesting and disturbing is how overt female sexuality had to be turned into female victimhood for mass (i.e., non-New York) consumption.

The original lyric is cheeky. She is making fun of Joey for his stature and manner but also of herself for wanting to fuck him. It ends with delicious double entendre:

Lost my heart, but what of it
My mistake, I agree
He's a laugh, but I love it
Because the laughs on me

Well, apparently this is too brazen and unladylike for Ella to sing, so she recasts herself as a degraded, lovelorn frail:

Lost my heart, but what of it
He is cold I agree
He can laugh, but I love it
Although the laughs on me

To me, preferring women suffering and impotent instead of powerful and confident is a similar cultural perversion to allowing graphic violence in movies but censoring graphic sex.