The much-spanked Lupe Velez was not the only Latin American actress to come to Hollywood and find herself over somebody’s knee. Nor was she the first: that was the statuesque Mexican beauty Dolores del Rio,
whose magnificent bottom was displayed in all its curvaceous glory in the notorious nude swimming scene in Bird of Paradise (1932).
By then, she had already been spanked, by Victor McLaglen when she played the title role in The Loves of Carmen (1927), as described by the Los Angeles Times:
Carmen playfully kicks Escamillo in the trousers, and that estimable gentleman gallantly repays the compliment by turning her across his knee and administering a good spanking.
The scene is discussed at greater length here. And yes, it is the very same Victor McLaglen who also spanked Lupe Velez in Hot Pepper (1933), not to mention Fifi D’Orsay in On the Level (1930) and Barbara Pepper in Sea Devils (1937).
As for Dolores, when she bared her superb bottom beneath the South Seas (or at least the studio tank at RKO), she was a year away from having it subjected to a second spanking in Flying Down to Rio (1933). The film is now best remembered for launching the great partnership of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, but its simple central story has much more to do with the romance between band leader Roger Bond (Gene Raymond) and Dolores’ character, the Brazilian heiress Belinha de Rezende. He falls for her during a dance at a hotel in Miami, which gets him fired for fraternizing with the guests. So he offers to fly her home to Rio, notwithstanding the complication that she already has a fiancé whom she must marry on arrival for the sake of the family honor.
He fakes engine trouble over the Caribbean and puts down on an island beach where they have to rough it for the night. Whether it should be a night of romance is a key question memorably addressed by their respective inner selves, innovatively (for 1933) superimposed on the picture as ghostly consciences. But her first instinct is to play hard to get, resulting in an argument in which she slaps his face and he…
And that too is pretty magnificent, if brief!
By then, Lupe Velez had received her first incontestable onscreen spanking, so the tiny, fizzing Mexican cabaret performer Armida can’t really be said to be blazing a trail,
though you could argue that she has a trail blazed across her in The Marines are Coming (1934), in which she plays the Latin dancer Rosita:
The film deals with the adventures, both military and amorous, of Marine Lieutenant Billy Traylor (William Haynes). After saving Rosita from bandits, he is posted to San Diego, where she follows him, intent on marriage. She barges into the office of his commander, Colonel Gilroy (Hal Hamilton), eager to discuss the matter, and the Colonel questions her in an effort to discover how far Traylor might have unwisely committed himself. Oh no, she insists, he did nothing dishonorable; it was she who vamped him rather than vice versa.
ROSITA: He take me in his arms like this, ooh, and I like it so much. Then I snuggle close to him like this, ooh, and I like it so much that I give Billy a big, big kiss.
COLONEL: Yes, I understand, yes.
ROSITA: But then he spoil it all. He dump me right on the ground, ploop! And then he shake his finger at me like this. What do you think he say? He say, ‘Rosita, business is business. If you kiss me again, I’ll spank you.’
COLONEL: Then what happened?
ROSITA (giggles): He spank me. And I like it.
The Colonel decides she will have to sort it out for herself without help from the military authorities. Traylor tries to avoid her, but she pursues him to a fifth-floor hotel room and there is a row. He tells her he has no intention of marrying her, and she tries to throw herself out of the window. And with that, history repeats itself twice in rapid succession: he saves her life again, and then…
A second spanking for Rosita – this one onscreen!
Strictly speaking, Dona Drake wasn’t Latin American.
She was Miami-born, with some black heritage, and her real name was Eunice Westmoreland; but for professional purposes she presented herself as Mexican, and used the stage name Rita Rio in her act. You might think that a risky stratagem in view of the evidence so far presented, but Dona only came to regret it when she got her first feature film part, in Aloma of the South Seas (1941).
She plays Nea, described in publicity as ‘a girl-who-gets-spanked’; in other words, she’s a ‘whipping girl’ for the title character, her cousin Aloma (one of a long line of ‘sarong roles’ for Dorothy Lamour). Aloma cannot herself be spanked because she is betrothed to the King, and therefore taboo; so when her aunt, Tarusa (Esther Dale), tells her, ‘Oh, thou shameless heap of perversity, for this blasphemy thou shalt be punished’, it is not she but Nea who is ordered, ‘Bend thee over.’
According to the publicity story, Esther Dale whacked her for real on the first take, and ‘Miss Drake yelled magnificently.’ So the director called for a pillow to be inserted in ‘the time-honored position’. The camera angle in the finished movie doesn’t allow us to judge whether there’s a pillow there or not, but the whacking is very light-hearted, with Tarusa upset that she can’t spank Aloma herself: ‘Instead I must punish thy poor cousin.’ Nea’s only reaction, far from a magnificent yell, is merely a smile.
But ‘Bend thee over’ becomes a catchphrase in the film, repeated by a cheeky cockatoo, and with each act of defiance from Aloma (who doesn’t want to marry the King), Nea gets it again,
and again…
On the eve of the wedding, Aunt Tarusa says she has it in mind to spank Nea preemptively for the sorrow Aloma will bring to her husband. ‘If you beat me now, Aunt Tarusa,’ replies Nea pertly, ‘I won’t be able to sit down for the wedding feast.’
Aloma also points out that in future she is going to be spanked herself, in person, by her new husband: ‘It will be wonderful.’
Dona wasn’t sure that being spanked was all that wonderful. She told the papers:
‘It was a bit humiliating. Here I’d been in Hollywood a solid year trying to get a chance to make a picture. Finally I got a chance! Talk about taking a bow in pictures; I bent right over!’
Never mind, dear. Stick around for, say, seven years and Hollywood is sure to find a part for you that won’t require any bending at all (ramrod-straight planking will be better), something that will really show off everything you have to offer, to its best possible advantage:
Surely the very best of all the many spanking publicity stills from the golden age of Hollywood!
Several points are starting to emerge here, but we’ll nail them down even more firmly with another example.
Estelita Rodriguez wasn’t even born when Dolores del Rio got her first screen spanking in the role of Carmen, and when making her first movie, Mexicana (1945), she complained that everyone treated her like a kid. Well, she was still a teenager herself, playing Lupita Lopez, a Cuban dancer and teenage groupie admirer of the Mexican singer Pepe (Tito Guizar), who sneaks into his hotel room, and is unceremoniously ejected after receiving the following non-kid treatment:
If in doubt, repeat treatment! In Belle of Old Mexico (1950), she plays Rosita Dominguez, the sister of an old service buddy of Kip Armitage (Robert Rockwell). To honor a promise, he adopts her, not realizing that she’s a teenager on the cusp of maturity. The story administers her a number of embarrassments before she finally wins him from his avaricious and worthless fiancée (Dorothy Patrick), including one that got onto the film poster in cartoon form…
and another that was also ‘tooned’, but regrettably has no available photograph to go with it:
And though she was in her mid-20s by 1952, she still wasn’t too old for a good spanking. Several things show that the studio, Republic, was actively promoting her as a star and had designed The Fabulous Senorita specifically as a vehicle for her: it was the first picture where she was billed by just her first name, Estelita (‘the toast of Pan America’), implying that she now had the recognition factor that went with star status from Karloff to Garbo; while the movie was in development, the setting was switched from Panama to her native Cuba; and the name of her character was… Estelita Rodriguez! This fictional Estelita is a scheming bundle of Latin mischief who thoroughly deserves the customary treatment she receives at the hands of her eventual fiancé, Jerry Taylor (Robert Clarke):
(The story is given in fuller detail here.)
And we could go on. There was Adele Mara, Michigan-born but of Hispanic parentage,
whose Hollywood career brought her, among many other things, the role of Elena del Rio in Twilight on the Rio Grande (1947):
And pushing onward to another Hollywood twilight, meet Rosenda Monteros:
Mexican-born in 1935, she was just coming to prominence as the popularity of spanking scenes was in decline, which may have saved Petra, her character in The Magnificent Seven (1960), from meeting such a fate on screen, even though Rosenda herself had to submit to it from Yul Brynner in the publicity studio:
So far as I know, it was the penultimate Hollywood film to have a studio publicity shoot that included a spanking image, and the last such shoot for a film that had no spanking scene in the final release print. (The very last was for the Stefanie Powers spanking scene in McLintock!; there were also some later publicity shoots for television shows and for some European movies, but the US big screen was done with it from here on.)
So from early silent days right up to the great shift of taste, Mexican and Hispanic actresses came to Hollywood, where they were upended and soundly spanked, in most cases more than once. Is there any significance to that beyond simple coincidence? It is a matter we shall be considering in the next part of this series.
Vanilla Spanking 