Mae West was a larger-than-life character who came roaring out of the Cultural Revolution of the 1920s. Prohibition had put an end to inhibition. It brought us organized crime, flappers, talking films, the Jazz Age, the Machine Age, exuberant optimism, and prosperity right up until it all of a sudden didn’t.
A Closer Look at Mae West
In the 1930s, the Great Depression deepened
Millions of Regular Americans like you and me, no jobs, no prospects, reduced to standing on bread lines and eating at soup kitchens, beaten-down clothes and faces, gaunt, hangdog, with sunken eyes. Add to that the rise of Adolph Hitler and Uncle Joe Stalin, FDR’s fireside chats and the New Deal.
No one played it as close to the edge and over the top than Mae West
Mae started in amateur show business when she was 4 or 7, or maybe something else. As she worked her way through vaudeville and nightclub acts, she gained enough experience to write, produce, direct, and star in her own stage play, Sex. It was 1926.
The entire cast was arrested and charged with corrupting the morals of the city’s youth
Mae was sentenced to 10 days in jail for onstage lewdness. Eight days later and after a couple of friendly dinners with the sheriff and his wife, West was released two days early for good behavior, possibly the last time she was accused of that.
“I speak two languages. Body and English.” -Mae West
West wrote somewhere between many and all of her clever lines herself
The phrases she used had a straightforward meaning that was innocent enough. It was her clever wordplay that turned it into something sexual.
“Men are like linoleum floors. Lay ‘em right and you can walk all over them for years.”
She was the queen of wisecracking one-liners
“Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.”
“I’ll try anything once, twice if I like it, three times to make sure.”
She provoked moral indignation and wrath among the righteous
“When I’m good, I’m very good. When I’m bad, I’m better.”
“Good sex is like good bridge. If you don’t have a good partner, you’d better have a good hand.”
“A hard man is good to find.”
Mind you, while she was looking and sounding like that, American women looked like this
1933’s She Done Him Wrong is known for two things
West chose Cary Grant for the lead after saying, “If he can talk, I’ll take him.” She did and one of the things she told him was “Why don’t you come up some time and see me?” We learned another version the same way we learned “Play it again, Sam.”.
My Little Chickadee
Mae wrote the screenplay for this 1940 film that costarred W.C. Fields as con artist Cuthbert J. Twilley. Mae played a gold-digger who went by Miss Flower Belle Lee. Miss Lee was run out of town when the judge asked if she was trying to show contempt for this court and she said, “No – I’m doing my best to hide it.” Some say it’s a classic now, but back then both stars hated it and refused to work with each other ever again.
In 1950, Billy Wilder offered Mae West the lead role in his film Sunset Boulevard
She turned it down. So did Mary Pickford. Silent film star Gloria Swanson took the role of silent film star Norma Desmond and won the Oscar for Best Actress.
For most of the 1950s, Mae aged her way through a nightclub act
West surrounded herself with a gaggle of paid-to-endlessly-adore-her musclemen dressed in Tarzanwear.
Chester Rybinsky’s stage name was Paul Novak
Mae picked him out of the chorus line of her Las Vegas I’m-still-a-seductress act. Chester moved right in and lived with her for the next 26 years. Gossipers claimed she was secretly married to him. Novak was 30 years younger than West.
Mae explained it this way:
“A man in the house is worth two in the street.”
The Swinging Sixties
Mae tried to become relevant by hiring a band and recording Beatles songs. People who are deep into such things say West’s version of Day Tripper is a classic. As YouTube poster @sylvanm4216 described it, “Probably the most convincing Beatles cover ever recorded by a singer born during Grover Cleveland’s presidency.”
In 1970, Mae appeared in Myra Breckinridge
She played the role of Leticia, the aging queen of the casting couch for young men. Describing her character, Mae said,
“She’s the kind of girl who climbed the ladder of success – wrong by wrong.”
Mind you this was 37 years after her last film. Here’s an exchange that will give you a sense of the dialogue:
Leticia Van Allen: “How tall are you without your horse?”
Aspiring Male Star: “Well, ma’am, I’m six feet seven inches.”
Leticia Van Allen: “Well, never mind about the six feet — let’s talk about the seven inches.”
Wouldn’t this be a great place for a rim shot?
The film was nearly-unanimously ridiculed
In spite of (because of?) the millions of dollars the studio lost, it became a hit with the camp crowd and dragsters. Travalanche called it a tin-foil-gilded freak show. The Famous People says “She became an instant success with the first scene, in which a hat-check girl exclaims to her, ‘Goodness, what beautiful diamonds.’ West, using her nearly sneering but fully wisecracking, throaty, and growling tone, said,
”Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.’
At 85, Mae made her final film, Sextette
She played the leading lady who marries a man 60 years younger. She wore a hidden earpiece because she couldn’t remember her lines and needed someone to feed them to her. The film was a disaster.
Bonus
This from a 1940 BBC radio broadcast: “This life-saving waistcoat can be inflated in a few moments by the wearer, and for some obscure reason is known technically as a “‘Mae West.'”
No one knows where the news reader had been keeping himself
West’s large breasts were so famous to Royal Air Force fliers in World War Two that they gave the name “Mae Wests” to their inflatable life jackets. As fliers who had been shot down bobbed in the English Channel waiting to be rescued, the two inflated sacs on the front of the life jacket gave the appearance of large breasts. Hence, Mae Wests.
“I place a lot of faith in figures – especially my own.”
Mae West’s hourglass measurements are recorded as 38-24-38 or 35-24-35 or 38-25-30 or 36-26-36 and maybe more, but you get the point.
Bonus
Salvador Dali had a thing for Mae West. Not only did he model his surrealistic sofa after her lips.
Dali also turned West’s face into an apartment.
