Mae West

Mae West: The Woman Who Monetised Her Own Scandal

On 19 April 1927 a New York court sentenced her to ten days in jail for corrupting the morals of youth. She could have paid a fine. She took the cell instead, correctly calculating what eight days on Welfare Island would do for ticket sales, and on release told reporters that the play in question was "a work of art." She had written it, produced it, directed it and starred in it. She was thirty-three.

Baby Mae

Mary Jane West was born at home in Brooklyn — Greenpoint or Bushwick, the record is unsettled — on 17 August 1893, delivered by an aunt who worked as a midwife. Her mother, Mathilde Delker, was a Bavarian immigrant and corset and fashion model; her father, John Patrick "Battlin' Jack" West, was a former prizefighter who became a special policeman and founded a private investigation agency. She entertained a crowd at a church social at five, was winning talent contests at seven, and by fourteen was a professional in vaudeville with the Hal Clarendon Stock Company, billed as "Baby Mae." The famous undulating walk was borrowed from the female impersonators Bert Savoy and Julian Eltinge. Broadway came in 1911 with *A La Broadway*, which closed after eight performances but earned her a notice in *The New York Times*.

Sex, and the Consequences

Under the pen name "Jane Mast" she began writing risqué plays. *Sex* (1926) was her own script, her own production and her first Broadway lead. Conservative critics savaged it; audiences bought every seat; police raided the theatre and arrested the cast. The conviction followed, and so did *The Drag* (1927), a play about homosexuality that toured Connecticut and New Jersey but was kept off Broadway by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. *Diamond Lil* (1928), the story of a racy and shrewd woman of the 1890s, ran 323 performances and became the character she would revive for the rest of her life. *The Constant Sinner* (1931) was dismissed as clumsy and closed after 64.

The Woman Who Saved Paramount

In June 1932 Paramount signed her to a two-month contract at $5,000 a week. In *Night After Night* she took a supporting role and rewrote her own dialogue; when a hat-check girl exclaimed at her jewellery, West's revision had her answer, "Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie." Her co-star George Raft reportedly said she stole everything but the cameras. *She Done Him Wrong* (1933) brought Diamond Lil to the screen opposite Cary Grant, was nominated for Best Picture, grossed over $2 million and pulled Paramount back from bankruptcy; the studio named a building after her. *I'm No Angel* (1933) was the most successful film of her career. By 1933 she was among the biggest box-office draws in America; by 1935 she was the highest-paid woman in the United States and the second-highest-paid person of any sex, behind William Randolph Hearst.

The Censor as Collaborator

Strict enforcement of the Production Code began on 1 July 1934 and was aimed squarely at her. She adapted by writing lines so extreme that the censors would spend their objections there and let the merely suggestive survive. "I believe in censorship," she said. "I made a fortune out of it." *Belle of the Nineties* (1934) lost its original title, *It Ain't No Sin*, to the censors; West insisted the studio hire Duke Ellington's orchestra, and their collaboration produced "My Old Flame." *Goin' to Town* (1935) and *Go West, Young Man* (1936) were visibly weakened by cuts. *Klondike Annie* (1936), which attacked religious hypocrisy, drew a private memo from Hearst — whose mistress West had mocked — instructing his editors that it was "a filthy picture" and "DO NOT ACCEPT ANY ADVERTISING OF THIS PICTURE." *Every Day's a Holiday* (1937) ended her Paramount years.

Banned from the Air

On 12 December 1937 she appeared on Edgar Bergen's *Chase and Sanborn Hour*, flirting with the ventriloquist's dummy Charlie McCarthy — "all wood and a yard long" — and adding, "Charles, I remember our last date, and have the splinters to prove it!" A second sketch cast her as Eve in the Garden of Eden. The FCC pronounced the broadcast "vulgar and indecent"; NBC banned West from its stations along with any mention of her name. She did not return to radio until January 1950.

The Long Third Act

*My Little Chickadee* (1940) paired her combatively with W. C. Fields and succeeded anyway. *The Heat's On* (1943), the only film in which she was not permitted to write her own dialogue, failed, and she left the movies citing censorship. She wrote and starred in *Catherine Was Great* (1944); revived *Diamond Lil* in 1949, prompting a *New York Times* reviewer to call her "an American institution — as beloved and indestructible as Donald Duck"; and in the 1950s headlined her own Las Vegas show flanked by bodybuilders, explaining that "men come to see me, but I also give the women something to see: wall to wall men." Her politics were similarly unclassifiable: she defended gay men against police brutality from the 1920s, yet described homosexuality in her 1959 autobiography as a danger to western civilisation, before writing in 1975 that "the world owes male and female homosexuals more understanding than we've given them." She returned to film at seventy-seven for *Myra Breckinridge* (1970), and made *Sextette* (1978) with her lines fed to her through a speaker hidden in her wig.

Why Mae Is Called a Genius

The faculty is authorship, routinely mistaken for glamour. West was a writer who happened to perform: she wrote *Sex*, *The Drag*, *Diamond Lil*, *Catherine Was Great* and most of her own screen dialogue, and from that writing she built a single character she could own outright and rent to studios for fifty years. The specific skill is comic compression — the double entendre as a piece of engineering, a sentence built so that the innocent reading and the obscene one are structurally inseparable and therefore uncuttable. Her handling of the Production Code was strategy of a high order: she planted decoy filth for censors to remove. "I was the first liberated woman, you know," she said. "No guy was going to get the best of me. That's what I wrote all my scripts about."

The honest counter-case is that she wrote one character and played it until she was eighty-five. Her range was deliberately nil; *The Constant Sinner* closed in 64 performances, and the late films were embarrassments propped up by affection for a trademark. UCLA students voted her Woman of the Century in 1970 and the AFI ranked her the fifteenth greatest female screen legend in 1999, but the record does not show critics reaching for the word genius; it reaches for "institution." This is the genius of a joke-writer and a brand strategist, not of a dramatist.

Legacy

She died in Los Angeles on 22 November 1980, three months after a stroke, aged eighty-seven. Allied aircrews had already named their inflatable life jackets after her; Dalí had built a sofa from her lips; a 52-metre sculpture in Munich now carries her name. What she actually left was a template: the female performer who writes her own material, owns her own persona, and treats an attempt to silence her as free advertising.