Stealing Everything but the Cameras

Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?

Mae West’s signature line was not put on film until 1978, when she was in her eighties, in the forgettable Sextette, long after she had been driven from the public eye by the Hollywood Production Code, the FCC, and by her own reluctance to admit the passing of time. West’s career spans 70 years of American popular entertainment, from vaudeville and the New York stage, to films and radio. During that time she shaped a unique persona, combining pre-feminist sensibility, drag queen camp, a quick wit, and a social audacity that still inspires both admiration and emulation.

Mary Jane West was born in Brooklyn in 1893, to a German immigrant mother and an Irish father who was a boxer. Her stage-struck mother pushed Mae into vaudeville at the age of three where she got an early education in American popular taste amidst the jugglers, singers, comics, and freak acts that peopled the nation’s vaudeville and burlesque houses. While achieving success on the vaudeville circuit as a singer, dancer, and actress (she also “performed a muscle dance in a sitting position”), she realized there were no roles for strong, independent women, especially women who reveled in their own sexuality and the power it gave them over men. So, to further her career and provide a platform for her unorthodox ideas, she became a playwright and producer.

Her first play, “Sex”, opened in New York in 1926. While West was regarded by reviewers as an arresting stage presence, the play was lambasted: “a monstrosity plucked from the garbage can” (New York Mirror), “Crude” (New York Times), and “‘Sex’ wins high marks for depravity” (New York Herald Tribune). Of course, these headlines, along with the provocative title, insured sold out performances. The play was an angry examination of the plight of a bitter working class prostitute, played by West herself. The wisecracking persona was not yet there, but the attitude toward men is evident: “Ever since I was old enough to know about sex, I’ve looked at men as hunters…I hated them, used them for what I could get out of them, and then laughed at them.” Her next play, “The Drag,” labeled a “homosexual comedy-drama,” was a plea for tolerance of homosexuality as a disease, not a crime. This was too much for the guardians of morality—she was arrested while the play was in out of town previews, prosecuted for indecency related to “Sex” and spent a well-publicized week in the pokey. But, while West’s work continued to express her anger at the social treatment of sexual misfits (strong women and gays), “The Drag” added a new dimension to her developing persona—the outrageous humor of the transgender camp.
Mae was now a national celebrity, but too hot for Hollywood until her breakthrough 1928 stage smash “Diamond Lil’,” about a gay ‘90s saloon singer, in which the well known West persona finally emerged—the wisecracking, purring, double entendre-ing, independent woman, formidably corsetted, decked out in extravagant jewelry, campy, man eating and enormously funny. She transformed her anger and impulse for social reform into a comic assault on social mores, following the advice of her admirer George Bernard Shaw: “if you tell people the truth, make them laugh or they’ll kill you.” The outrageous persona sugar-coated West’s progressive ideas in a way that made them acceptable entertainment.

Hollywood could no longer resist and in 1932, at the age of 40, she signed with Paramount. Her first film role was supporting George Raft in Night After Night. West threatened to walk out when she read the mundane script and managed to convince the Paramount brass to let her rewrite her own lines. The result was a refreshing vibrancy in language and characterization. “She stole everything but the cameras,” claimed Raft. One of Mae’s most famous quips, later the title of her autobiography, came when her jewel-bedecked character arrived at a restaurant. “Goodness, what beautiful diamonds,” exclaims the hat-check girl. “Goodness,” says West, “had nothing to do with it.”

The first film starring West, an adaptation of “Diamond Lil’” entitled She Done Him Wrong, broke box office records and saved Paramount. West was on a roll, eventually becoming one of the highest paid stars in Hollywood. Sailors even named their inflatable life jackets in honor of her endearing proportions. But the guardians were mobilizing again. The Production Code, which defined acceptable film content, was developed by the film industry to stave off political action after Hollywood scandals of the late ‘20s. Now, the Code was toughened to combat this new driving force that snubbed its nose at conventional morality and made a mockery out of expectations of how “good girls” should behave.
West and Paramount came under a relentless attack by the Hearst papers as a “menace to the sacred institution of the American family” because of her attitudes about relationships between the sexes. (Hearst incidentally owned a rival film studio.) Paramount worked hard to clean up West’s act: They rewrote her lines and lyrics, eliminated subplots, tagged on happy endings, changed a character’s occupation or race. However, West continued to frustrate the censors with her ability to make a reading of even the telephone book sound like an invitation to “come up and see me sometime.” But the attacks by Hearst and the watering down of her scripts began to take a toll. By 1936 her audiences, made up largely of young women who had admired her audacity, were on the wane. When her 1937 release Every Day’s a Holiday was drubbed at the box office by Disney’s animated Snow White, West quipped that the cartoon would have done better with her in the titled role. “I used to be Snow White,” she explained, “but I drifted.”
Just as her popularity with film audiences was waning, a dust-up with the Federal Communication Commission knocked West off radio. During a 1937 appearance on the popular Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy show, West bantered with the puppet that even though he was “all wood and a yard long” and gave splintery kisses, he could come “play in her woodpile.” Although this raised eyebrows, the wrath of the faithful was truly aroused over a Garden of Eden sketch in which West played a bored Eve, who deplored the “dismal dump” she and Adam had been given. To liven things up, she tempted the snake to pick a forbidden fruit, which she served to Adam as applesauce. Suddenly, a loud clap of thunder was heard as West announced, “That was the first kiss!”

The idea of Eve as a strong willed woman who brought about the fall of man because she was sexually bored caused an uproar and prompted the Chairman of the FCC to write that the sketch was “offensive to the great mass of right thinking, clean minded American citizens.” Fearing boycotts and legal actions, networks banned West from further appearances. Undaunted, she returned to the stage, successfully touring “Diamond Lil’” on two continents, but her most productive years were behind her.

She subsequently made other films including My Little Chickadee, with W.C. Fields, Myra Breckenridge and Sextette, and never abandoned her youthful sexual persona, refusing good roles that portrayed her as older—even turning down Billy Wilder’s offer to star as Norma Desmond, the aging actress in the classic Sunset Boulevard. Because of her unwillingness to change her sexual persona as she grew older, she became, sadly, a satire of herself in later appearances on TV and the stage, eventually being laughed at instead of with. She died in 1980.
West achieved enormous popularity by confounding conventional morality, by being outrageous and getting away with it, by doing and saying those things ordinary people wished they had the moxie to say and do. She was the social misfit who created her own personal style and flaunted it, making her, at first, a heroine for the young women who flocked to her films and, later, of the gay community which became increasingly her most devoted audience.

West’s role model as an icon of the outcast was developed into the play “Dirty Blond,” which enjoyed a critically-acclaimed run on Broadway last year and will be presented this month at Stageworks in Kinderhook. A romantic comedy with music, the play is about two New York misfits who learn to accept themselves through their mutual obsession with West. The play interweaves two story lines: one, the banal lives and unlikely courtship of the two avid fans following their chance meeting at Mae’s grave site; and the other tracing the evolution of Mae West’s willful career from young vaudevillian upstart and overnight wisecracking sexy film star to the lonely isolation of her later years.

—Bob Miller

Dirty Blond will be performed from July 3 through July 28 at North Pointe Cultural Arts Center in Kinderhook, NY, five times weekly: Wednesday through Thursday at 7:30pm; Friday and Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 2pm. Preview performance ticket prices are $14, July 3 through 7. Regular ticket prices are $20 Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays and $25 on Fridays and Saturdays with special rates for groups, students, and seniors. Tickets may be charged by phone at (518) 822-9667 or by e-mail at contact@stageworkstheater.org.