Mae Questel. Photo courtesy of Leslie Cabarga.

In February 1995, animation historian Jerry Beck curated a Museum of Modern Art tribute to the cartoons of Paramount's Famous Studios. At a party related to the event, Jackson Beck, most famous as the voice of Bluto in many of the Paramount cartoons, was peppered with questions about the vocal history of the east coast animation studio. His response was something like, "There's only one person alive who was there from the beginning and she can't tell you anything." The person Beck was referring to was pioneer voice great Mae Questel (Betty Boop, Olive Oyl, etc.) and he was confirming recent rumors that she had descended into the depths of Alzheimer's disease and could no longer issue accurate reports from animation's past.

An Enchanted Evening
Just four and a half years earlier, at Betty Boop designer Grim Natwick's hundredth birthday soiree, Questel had been in high spirits and had charmed the large crowd with both story and song. While in Los Angeles, she was in discussions with Paramount about a role in its upcoming production, The Butcher's Wife, and she was thrilled to have the opportunity to attend the gathering in Natwick's honor. The banquet hall was filled with animation veterans dating back to the medium's pre-World War I beginnings alongside contemporary talents from such projects as The Simpsons. Nonagenarian Walter Lantz took Natwick's hand and practically danced around the large birthday cake at the front of the ballroom, while at a nearby table, Jerry Beck and I were attempting to extract from Ms. Questel the secrets of the Fleischer and Famous studios.

Questel was a sparkling dinner companion, but I remember the evening more for what she didn't tell us than for what she did. We were endeavoring to learn the extent of the credited directors' involvement in Famous Studios' recording sessions. We repeatedly asked her who had directed the voice actors during the Forties and Fifties. She kept asserting that Dave Fleischer had directed the sessions, even though Fleischer had left the operation during the first half of 1942. Regardless, she was so clear and direct during the remainder of the conversation that we chalked up her mistaken insistence to the vagaries of normal aging. Questel, with her protective husband Jack glowering nearby, chatted happily with fans and signed autographs well into the night and we most assuredly did not recognize in her behavior any ominous indications of imminent decline.

Sadly, Ms. Questel's recent death at the reported age of 89 will leave some questions forever unanswered. Grim Natwick has passed on, as have Walter Lantz and Shamus Culhane, and so many others from animation's early days. Whatever it is that only they knew and no one ever asked, is now permanently lost.

The people who lived the history of the medium we love, are both our best and worst sources of information about its past. They know things that no one else can, from a perspective that is theirs alone. But, like most people, they take a less than academic approach to the details of their own lives and thus, are often wrong when we desperately need them to be right. The following is a brief and loving bio of Ms. Questel. Much of it is culled from her own recollections. Some of it may be wrong and much of it is right but all of it was Mae.