LEST WE FORGET MAE WEST
(August 17, 1893 - November 22, 1980)

The most famous "Sex Goddess" of the 20th Century made a successful debut as "Baby Mae" in a song and dance act at age seven. She demanded and got her own spotlight at the Royal Theatre, Brooklyn.

At age eight, she joined a theatre stock company to play child parts.  When she became too old to play children, she continued to perform in vaudeville and went on the road with a partner who she secretly married when she was seventeen.

In 1911 after performing at the Columbia Theatre on Broadway, she received offers from Ned Wayburn and Flo Ziegfeld.  She found she was most successful in a smaller theatre where she could work more closely with audiences.  In her autobiography,
Goodness Had Nothing to Do With It, she wrote "The entire effect of my personality depends on audiences being able to see my facial expressions, gestures, slow, lazy, comic mannerisms, to hear me properly."    After starring in Vera Violetta at the Winter Garden Theatre, she teamed up with two male dancers and returned to the vaudeville circuit with star billing and a top agent from the United Booking Office.  She was making $750 a week.  Although nudity was never part of her act, she was developing a sexually seductive wiggle in her routine and adorned herself with elaborate satin and velvet gowns, rhinestones, furs and feathers.   She parodied and glorified conventional sexuality.  "It wasn't what I did, but how I did it. It wasn't what I said, but how I said it and how I looked when I did it and said it. I had evolved into a symbol and didn't even know it."

During her years on the road with vaudeville acts (1912-1916) she became interested in jazz and visited black cafes in Chicago, where she observed blacks dancing the Shimmy.  When she was cast to play the lead, Mamie Dyne, opposite Ed Wynn, in Arthur Hammerstein and Rudolph Friml's Sometime, she introduced her version of the shimmy dance.  The dance amused and titillated audiences and critics, but she soon was in trouble with the Society for the Suppression of Vice in New York City.

She had long taken liberties with lines and lyrics in her performances. Unable to find a role she liked, she wrote her own.  She produced Sex which opened at Daly's Theatre in New York on April 26, 1926. Because of the title, newspapers refused to carry ads, but a poster campaign and word of mouth made the show a success. She played the lead who was a waterfront prostitute. In its forty-first week the play was closed by the aforementioned Society.  While Mayor James Walker was on holiday, his vice mayor decided to crack down on pornography.    In court, unable to establish that the text was obscene, the prosecutor secured a conviction on the basis that West, fully clothed in a tight metallic evening gown, moved her navel in an obscene way when she danced.  She was sentenced to serve 10 days in prison at Welfare Island for "corrupting the morals of youth."

Her second play, The Drag (1926) condemned current views of homosexuality and asked for tolerance and understanding.  Her next play, The Wicked Age (1927) was an expose of bathing beauty contests with their crooked operations and fixed winners. But her greatest success was Diamond Lil (1928) a comic melodrama with a gay nineties theme set in New York's Bowery.  As was her custom, she wrote the leading role for herself and it became the personification of Mae West as she was and wished to be and solidified the type of role she would play when she moved to Hollywood.  She realized that Diamond Lil, descending the stairs of a western dance hall, clad in extravagant turn-of-the-century costumes, lying in a golden bed reading the Police Gazette, spoofing the Salvation Army, love, and marriage and belting out the popular ballad, Frankie and Johnny, was her other self. It was a huge success. But her play Pleasure Man (1928) opened at the Biltmore and was closed by the police.  She went to court and won, but did not reopen the show.

All of her plays, never meant to be "classics" of the theatre, have aged well.  When she revived Diamond Lil 21 years later, critics compared it to American folklore like the minstrel show and burlesque.  In more ways than one, West had wiggled her way into popular culture.
     In 1948 Brooks Atkinson, reviewer for the New York Times, asked what all the 'patrol wagon ruckus' was about twenty years earlier because Mae's burlesque of sex (Diamond Lil) was "about as wicked as a sophomore beer night and smoker." (NY Times)

She decided to accept a $5,000 a-week contract from Paramount Pictures in 1932. Her twelve films included Night After Night in which she had ad-libbed an answer to an admiring remark, "Goodness, what beautiful diamonds," saying "Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearies."
          Then came She Done Him Wrong, I'm No Angel, Belle of the Nineties, Klondike Annie and 
Every Day's A Holiday. Her pictures rescued Paramount from financial problems, made a star of the unknown Cary Grant, and made West the highest paid star in Hollywood.  She teamed up with W. C. Fields to make a mock western, My Little Chickadee, writing the script and leaving room for Fields's improvisations.

Audience response to her was always strong.  Modern audiences know her primarily through her films. Like W. C. Fields and the Marx Brothers, she continues to be  in the iconoclastic tradition of Mack Sennett, Charlie Chaplin, and Buster Keaton, who ridiculed the sweet, the nice, the polite, and the accepted social customs.

"Come up and see me some time."



Resources:  Notable Women in the American Theatre. 1989.  Fran Hassencahl
Mae West. Goodness Had Nothing to Do With It.  1959. Revised in 1970