Jackie "Moms" Mabley
1894-1975
Born as Loretta Mary Aiken in Brevard, North Carolina, Aiken took her stage name, Jackie Mabley, from an early boyfriend, commenting in a 1970s Ebony magazine interview that he had taken so much from her, it was the least she could do to take his name. She later became known as “Moms.”
Her early years were painful. Her father had died when she was 15 and her mother had died a couple years later. By age 14, Loretta had been raped twice and had two children who were given up for adoption. At the encouragement of her grandmother, Loretta ran away to Cleveland and joined a traveling vaudeville act where she sang and entertained.
She came out as a lesbian at the age of twenty-seven, becoming one of the first openly gay comedians. During the 1920s and 1930s she appeared in androgynous clothing (as she did in the film version of The Emperor Jones with Paul Robeson) and recorded several of her early “lesbian stand-up” routines.
Mabley was one of the most successful entertainers of the Chitlin’ Circuit, another name for T.O.B.A., or Theater Owners Booking Association. T.O.B.A., sometimes called the “Tough On Black Asses Circuit”, was the segregated organization for which Mabley performed until the organization dissolved during the Great Depression. Despite Mabley’s popularity, wages for black women in show business were meager. Nonetheless, she persisted for more than sixty years. At the height of her career, she was earning $10,000 a week at Harlem’s Apollo Theater.
In the 1960s, she became known to a wider white audience, playing Carnegie Hall in 1962, and making a number of mainstream TV appearances, particularly her multiple appearances on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” when that CBS show was number one on television in the late 1960s, which introduced her to a whole new audience.
Mabley was billed as “The Funniest Woman in the World.” She tackled topics too edgy for most mainstream comics of the time, including racism. One of her regular themes was a romantic interest in handsome young men rather than old “washedup geezers,” and she got away with it courtesy of her stage persona, where she appeared as a toothless, bedraggled woman in a house dress and floppy hat.