Mae West

Actress

  • Born: August 17, 1893
  • Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York
  • Died: November 22, 1980
  • Place of death: Los Angeles, California

American actor and playwright

A memorable screen presence and wit, West was also a breakthrough playwright in the handling of taboo subjects and a role model as a woman in control of her own sexuality.

Areas of achievement Film, literature, theater and entertainment

Early Life

Because her father was a prizefighter and her mother was a model, Mae West (may wehst) had an early familiarity with show business. Indeed, since she began her stage career as a child, she can hardly be said to have had an early life. By the time she left school at thirteen, she was an established vaudeville performer. While on tour but still under age (giving false information that has led to confusion about her age), she married a dancer named Frank Wallace by implication gay apparently as a way of protecting herself from scandal in the event of pregnancy. She never lived with Wallace who entered into a bigamous marriage with someone else and denied for many years that she was married.

When West made her Broadway debut in À la Broadway in 1911, she was already a seasoned trouper. Alert to her unique style, she retailored her songs for her earthy personality and was an immediate critical and popular success. Dividing her time between vaudeville and Broadway, she had trouble with the police on more than one occasion because of the suggestiveness of her dancing. In 1921, in Sometime, she introduced the shimmy dance to white audiences, creating a particular sensation.

Life’s Work

By 1926, West realized that if she was to achieve star stature, she needed material tailored to her special personality and good-humored view of sex. Since no suitable star vehicle was available, she called on her experience in writing her own vaudeville sketches and fashioned a play by adapting John J. Byrne’sFollowing the Fleet (c. 1926). Even before opening, the show created more than one scandal, first when New York newspapers refused advertising because of the title she chose, Sex (1926), and then when the unprecedented enthusiasm of Yale undergraduates at the tryout in New Haven, Connecticut, and of sailors at the tryout in New London, Connecticut, caused the show to sell out even in previews. In New York, despite the advertising blackout and a plagiarism suit from Byrne, the show ran to packed houses for more than a year until suddenly the New York police decided that it was injurious to the morals of minors. She was convicted on that charge and spent ten days in prison.

The play itself is innocuous by later standards, which it helped to forge. It has no obscene language, nudity, or even suggested sex, all of which later became routine. Sex, which concerns the lives of prostitutes on the Bowery in New York, is a melodrama that presents a realistic view of sexuality with a light touch. The same could be said of all West’s later vehicles.

At about this time, she began a long-term relationship with James Timony, an attorney who worked for West’s mother and who later became West’s business manager. While she was still performing in Sex, she wrote and produced another play that created a scandal on a different front. The Drag (1926), which had to be performed in Paterson, New Jersey to packed houses because of censorship restrictions in New York, was the first substantial, realistic picture of male homosexuality in the theater. It presents a somewhat naïve view of homosexuals as men who want to be women and advocates restraint of this impulse because it disrupts family life, but there is no doubt that the theme was heartfelt on the author’s part and ahead of its time in terms of tolerance.

West wrote and performed with great success in several more plays along the same lines as Sex, including a beauty contest exposé, The Wicked Age (1927), and Diamond Lil (1928), a nostalgic view of the Bowery in the 1890’s. West also wrote but did not appear in another play dealing with male homosexuality, The Pleasure Man (1928). Less provocative than The Drag, this work simply included homosexuality as a fact of backstage life in a melodrama about other relationships. Nevertheless, the police closed the show shortly after its Broadway opening and prosecuted the author for immorality. This time, however, West won the case, striking a blow for artistic freedom. Unfortunately, it was too late for the production to be resumed.

West toured with some of her plays, but the death of her mother and the 1929 stock market crash profoundly disrupted her life, and she wanted a change. She wrote a novel called Babe Gordon (1930; later reprinted as The Constant Sinner), the first popular treatment of the social conditions in black Harlem. She also wrote a novelization of Diamond Lil (1932). Then, after a good Broadway run in a play she adapted from The Constant Sinner (1931), she accepted an offer from Paramount Studios to make films.

Allowed to rewrite her dialogue to fit her persona for her film debut in Night After Night (1932), West became an instant film star. Her next project was an adaptation of Diamond Lil into the legendary film She Done Him Wrong (1933), which featured Cary Grant in his first starring role. This film and its successor I’m No Angel (1933), for which she wrote the whole screenplay, were so successful that she brought Paramount Studios back from the brink of financial ruin. In She Done Him Wrong and Belle of the Nineties (1934; she also wrote the screenplay), she introduced costume drama to the talkies and started a Gay Nineties fashion trend. In the latter film, her insistence on using a black jazz band brought about the first instance of such integrated accompaniment.

At this point in her film career, however, West ran into the sort of trouble with the censors that had hounded her on the stage. The Hayes Office was introduced to monitor the language and plots of films while they were being made. Klondike Annie (1936), Go West, Young Man (1936), Every Day’s a Holiday (1938), and other later pictures that West wrote and starred in were praised at the time for being clean yet amusing; most film historians, however, regard such later films as lacking the free spirit of her early ones. She was also banned from the radio for her supposedly too sensual reading of some innocuous lines in a sketch about Adam and Eve.

Her most memorable film, although not her best as either screenwriter or performer, is certainly My Little Chickadee (1940), costarring W. C. Fields, which she made for Universal. Although she found Fields unreliable because of his drinking and always maintained that he should not have been given a coauthor credit for the screenplay, the incongruous styles of the two meshed in this Western melodramatic spoof, apparently because she understood that giving Fields most of the laughs would mellow his misogyny and because she saw that her eroticism could then effectively be directed away from her costar toward other men in the story.

Unhappy with the scripts she was offered and unable to convince anyone to finance a color costume epic of the Russian empress Catherine the Great, she was idle for several years. As a favor to actor-director Gregory Ratoff, she appeared in The Heat’s On in 1943, but this unsatisfactory pastiche convinced her that she needed to return to the stage.

Turned into a play, Catherine Was Great received a lavish Broadway production from celebrated impresario Mike Todd in 1944. Critics found the play too historical and serious, but audiences loved it, and West followed the long Broadway run by taking the show on tour. She then adapted another play as Come on Up (1946) and played to great success in a production of Diamond Lil in London’s West End, first on tour, and then in a revival on Broadway in 1949.

A number of scandals, personal problems, and lawsuits marred her later years. Frank Wallace surfaced and attempted to cash in on her fame, first by asking for separate maintenance, then by billing himself in a nightclub act as “Mae West’s Husband,” and finally by suing for divorce and alimony. She silenced him at last in 1942 in a divorce settlement by paying him an undisclosed amount of money. Her longtime companion James Timony died in 1954, as did Wallace. In 1955, Confidential magazine published a demonstrably untrue exposé. In 1950, 1959, and again in 1964, she was involved in complicated lawsuits in which she tried to defend the name Diamond Lil as a trademark, and two different writing teams accused her of plagiarism in Catherine Was Great.

Finally slowed down somewhat by advancing age and no longer able to carry a full play, West put together a nightclub act with a chorus of musclemen in 1954 and toured with great success, and she began a recording career. Yet there were troubles. Mickey Hargitay (Mr. Universe) and another muscleman in her act, Paul Novak, had a public fight over her when she played the Coconut Grove in 1955. When Hargitay turned his affections to Jayne Mansfield, a film star whose persona suggested West’s sort of available sexuality but without the wit, West established a permanent liaison with Novak that was like the one she had had with Timony.

West made a spectacular television debut at the 1958 Academy Awards, singing “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” (written in 1949, by Frank Loesser) with Rock Hudson, who was then at the height of his film career. Although a Person to Person interview with her on the occasion of the publication of her autobiography Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It (1959) was never shown because of the suggestiveness of some of her comments, she appeared on the television variety shows of Red Skelton and Dean Martin and as a guest star in the situation comedy Mr. Ed.

In 1970, the opportunity arose to return to film when a perfect part for her appeared in the screen adaptation of Gore Vidal’s camp novel of sex change, Myra Breckinridge (1968). Her traditional parodic approach was exactly right for the material, and she was certainly the main reason people went to see the film. Excellent in parts and a succès d’estime for West, Myra Breckinridge was somewhat incoherent in its released form, since director Michael Sarne deleted most of the footage of rival auteur West. Its unauthorized use of clips of old films also caused legal trouble.

Nevertheless, the project convinced West that she still had a film public, and she set about refashioning a play adaptation she had appeared in briefly on tour into the film Sextette (1978). The time lag, however, was fatally damaging, and in the years between these last two films, anything that was left of her screen persona had passed with old age from parody and camp into caricature and grotesquerie. During the years between her two last films, she also wrote a novelization of The Pleasure Man (1975, “with the kind assistance of [her managing assistant] Lawrence Lee”) and the self-help book On Sex, Health and ESP (also 1975), but both are believed to have been ghostwritten.

Although she was still active enough to record radio commercials in 1979, she died in 1980 after a series of strokes.

Significance

Only Jean Harlow rivals West in creating an indelible screen presence in a short career as a film star. Like Harlow’s, West’s screen persona works because she manages to be sexy without taking herself seriously. The combination led to her more than once being compared to a female impersonator and made her popular with women as well as men because the parody removed any chance that she would permanently divert men’s attention. The strong impact of her physical presence is, however, attested by the inflatable life preserver that bears her name.

Although she was most famous as a personality, her enduring mark on theatrical history was made as a writer. By introducing straightforward and unpunished sexual situations, her plays and films defied the taboos of the time. It is particularly interesting that it was a woman who brought the subject of male homosexuality to Broadway. Her work made it possible for later perhaps more technically interesting playwrights to treat sexual themes. She suggested that sex without guilt is possible, even for women and gay men.

Bibliography

Cashin, Fergus. Mae West: A Biography. Westport, Conn.: Arlington House, 1981. This unconvincing exposé maintains that West was a man or was at least somehow biologically deformed.

Eells, George, and Stanley Musgrove. Mae West. New York: William Morrow, 1982. A scholarly biography that corrects some of West’s autobiographical memories, this is the best narrative work on West’s career.

Louvish, Simon. Mae West: It Ain’t No Sin. London: Faber & Faber, 2005. Louvish was the first biographer to have access to West’s personal archives, and he uses these materials and others to create a detailed biography that focuses on her as a writer.

Malachosky, Tim, with James Greene. Mae West. Lancaster, Calif.: Empire, 1993. This lavish picture book of candid photographs was compiled by West’s private secretary.

Tuska, Jon. The Complete Films of Mae West. New York: Carol, 1992. A picture book that also contains full and remarkably accurate commentary on West’s entire career, not only her films.

Ward, Carol M. Mae West: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1989. An annotated bibliography with a full career summary, this is the standard reference work on West.

Watts, Jill. Mae West: An Icon in Black and White. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Well-written and comprehensive biography that assesses West’s impact on American social and cultural history.

West, Mae. Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It: The Autobiography of Mae West. New York: Avon Books, 1970. Although sometimes obviously protective of her reputation, West is candid but not salacious in this chronological review of her career and private life. She is, however, strangely unreflective, and the transitions are often abrupt.

1901-1940: 1934-1938: Production Code Gives Birth to Screwball Comedy.

1971-2000: September 28, 1974: Dalí Museum Opens in Spain.