Strictly Dynamite: The Sensational Life of Lupe Vélez

Golden (Jayne Mansfield: The Girl Couldn’t Help It) portrays the life of the versatile Mexican-born film and theater actor/dancer/singer Lupe Vélez (1908–44), who began her career in the Mexican vaudeville circuit and then transitioned into Hollywood films. She was often cast as a Latina woman, but sometimes she was hired to play Chinese or Indigenous characters as well. Known for her incendiary personality both on- and off-screen, she was an outlier as a freelance contractor during the age of the studio system, Golden writes. Vélez appeared in 1934’s Strictly Dynamite and in eight Mexican Spitfire films during the 1940s and was the first Latina to headline successive—albeit low-budget—productions, outpacing Dolores del Rio. The author recounts Vélez’s considerable big-name connections: Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., Douglas Fairbanks, and Cecil B. DeMille promoted her, and she dated some stars, such as Gary Cooper, Tom Mix, and Errol Flynn. She married Olympian/actor Johnny Weissmuller in 1939, and they divorced soon after. This book supplies succulent Hollywood chatter from gossip columns, adds to works about Vélez, such as Michelle Vogel’s Lupe Vélez, and disabuses the lurid, fictionalized account of her death by suicide that’s in Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon.