"Mabel Normand was a proto-example of what food writer and film scholar Betty Fussell dubs the "sexy clowns": Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard, Mae West, Jean Aurthur, Ginger Rogers, Katharine Hepburn, and Judy Holliday. And Fussell herself is like a lost member of this tribe. In her early eighties, she's dazzling beautiful, and speaks in crescendos and exclamatory noises that are difficult to duplicate in print..."
