Mae West: Goodness Had Nothing To Do With It
MAE WEST, the actress, author and sex symbol from Brooklyn, New York, dropped out of school after the third grade, but became a Broadway star, and an international movie star. A shrewd investor, she was for a time the highest paid woman in the United States. A workaholic, she portrayed a woman of leisure. She wrote 11 plays, 3 novels, and her memoir, and made famous the lines: “Too much of a good thing can be… wonderful” and “Come up and see me sometime.”
She was born as Mary Jane West in Brooklyn in 1893 — and all her life retained a slight Brooklyn accent. Her family lived for some years in a six-family cold water flat at 137 Conselya Street, off Bushwick Avenue. Mae’s father, John “Battlin’ Jack” West, was a street-smart man who loved to fight, sometimes with boxing gloves, in a ring, with a referee watching over matters, and sometimes with bare fists in a bar. He was also canny and well-organized enough to run, for a time, his own agency of private investigators.
Mae’s mother, Matilda West, was a warm, voluptuous woman, born in Bavaria, who’d once been a corset model and a fashion model. Matilda thought Mary Jane West could do no wrong, and mother and daughter were very close.
Mae had a happy, colorful, unchaperoned childhood — just the kind of childhood you’d think Mae West would have. She was a gifted mimic by the age of 7, sometimes called “Baby Mae,” and her mother encouraged her to perform in church socials, talent shows and amateur shows. Through her father, she met boxers and underworld figures. She had a Sweet 16 Party at a backyard beer garden on the corner of Knickerbocker & DeKalb in Bushwick.
Mae was adventurous and liked to say, “Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.” She tried sex, liked it, and couldn’t see why only the boys got to enjoy it. The family was sharply split about Mae’s interest in a career in show business. Various aunts and Mae’s paternal grandmother were mortified by Mae’s growing “reputation” and urged her to keep her pants on, marry a nice young man and settle down.
But Mae wasn’t interested in that and her mother encouraged her to do whatever she wanted. Since the age of 14, in 1907, Mae had been appearing in vaudeville shows with the Hal Clarendon Stock Company. She had a good time, loved to perform in front of a live audience, but — always observant and practical — she saw how precarious the life was, except for the star.
So she decided to make herself a star.
She did this in two basic ways. The first, and most notorious, was to cultivate a reputation as a girl who talked dirty and liked sex. She’d make her voice husky and say, “When I’m good, I’m very, very good — but when I’m bad, I’m better.”
The other, less appreciated thing which Mae West did to become famous was to write plays, and write shows. As the playwright, she could cast herself in the lead. She often wrote as “Jane Mast,” so it wasn’t clear to the audience that Mae had written the show.
There are parallels in the careers of Mae West and Madonna, 60 years later. Both were young blondes with more ambition and drive than conventional “talent” who played the media and the taboos of society to become rich and famous. Both of them freely explored black culture and gay culture, looking for things they could use. Mae shocked people by dressing in men’s clothes. In a Harlem nightclub, she saw “the Shimmy-Shawobble” and she helped bring “the shimmy” into the white mainstream. Mae West was a master of using the censorious, and the media as a foil to advance her career. She once commented, “I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it.”
She even used the criminal justice system to advance her career. In 1926, she wrote, produced and directed a play, called “Sex,” confident it would make her a lot of money, get her arrested — or both. The “better” newspapers couldn’t even print the play’s name; columnists had to say ‘Mae West, in that certain play…’
She would finish an evening performance of “Sex” and while the other performers went home, Mae would meet up with a new group of actors and, deep into the night, would rehearse her next play, “The Drag,” which was about homosexuality. She used gay actors and encouraged them to improvise and be risque. “The Drag” made headlines — and money — in Connecticut and New Jersey; it was one of Mae’s enduring regrets that she’d never been able to stage it on Broadway. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice got the better of Mae that time.
Critics and religious groups loathed “Sex” — but audiences liked it, and pretty soon the New York Society for the Prevention of Vice insisted that politicians and officers of the law “do something” about this revolting play which encouraged hedonistic sex. In April 1927, police raided the theater where “Sex” was playing and a prosecutor soon charged Mae with “corrupting the morals of youth.”
At the Jefferson Market Courthouse, Mae went before a judge, and playing to the crowd and the newspapermen, tossed off a series of double entendres.
“Are you trying to show contempt for this court?” asked the exasperated judge.
“No, I’m doing my best to hide it,” said Mae.
The judge told her she could pay a fine — or get 10 days in jail. Everyone expected Mae to pay the fine. But she chose the 10 days in jail — a good long-term investment in her career.
Her arrest made headlines; her sassing the judge made headlines; her release from jail made more headlines — and then she gave interviews about her time in jail, pointing out that the warden and his wife had invited sinning Mae to have dinner with them, and describing the silk underwear she wore in jail instead of that awful burlap underwear the other girls had to wear.
And then she went back out and wrote more hedonistic plays. “The Wicked Age,” (1927) “The Pleasure Man,” (1928) “The Constant Sinner” (1931) … she could crank these things out. The press jousted with her and reviewed her plays with their own droll lines. (“Mae West has climbed the ladder of success, wrong by wrong.”)
She wrote longhand, often in bed, and then dictated to a secretary. Often she put outrageous things in, knowing they’d be censored, but by coming out they’d protect other lines more important to the play.
In 1928, at the height of the Jazz Age, with the world as tolerant as it had ever been — far too tolerant for most conservatives — Mae came out with “Diamond Lil,” a play about a sexy dame of the 1890’s, living her life to the hilt. Diamond Lil was racy — but not too much; it expertly straddled the line between risque humor and obscenity. Mae had a great time with “Diamond Lil” and for the rest of her life, whenever her career was stalled, she’d revive “Diamond Lil” and theatergoers would go to the old warhorse play, chuckle at sexy old Mae West starring in it, and say “This was written in 1928? Boy, she was ahead of her time…”
The only time that Mae’s friends ever saw her thrown by anything was in January of 1930 when her mother died. Then Mae almost went to pieces, and collected herself enough to perform only because she knew that’s what her mother would have wanted. But it was a full three years before she was fully over her mother’s death.
She went out to Hollywood in the early ‘30’s, got permission to rewrite her own dialogue and made her debut in “Night After Night,” a 1932 film that supposedly starred George Raft. Mae stole the show. Raft said ruefully, “She stole everything but the cameras.”
Mae cultivated a reputation as a good-time girl, but she was a very focused woman, never smoked or drank — and had little sympathy for people with a drinking problem. When she made the mock western “My Little Chickadee” co-starring W.C. Fields, she had it written into her contract that she could throw Fields off the set if he ever showed up drunk.
He was a perfect professional for a time, and then one day he did come in drunk, and she threw him off the set. Fields got back at her by describing her as “a plumber’s idea of Cleopatra.”
“Diamond Lil” was the basis for the 1933 movie “She Done Him Wrong” which was criticized by naysayers as too short, simplistic, and dirty-minded but is a rather charming film, and gave a boost to the career of Mae’s young co-star Cary Grant.
Mae was in an office at Paramount Pictures, looking at a book with head shots of different actors, so she could find her co-star for “She Done Him Wrong.” She happened to look out the window, saw Cary Grant for the first time in her life, pointed him out to someone at Paramount and said “If that guy can talk, I’ll take him.” Grant went for a talk with Mae West, thinking he’d have to prove himself. But as soon as he said a gracious “Hello, how are you?” she gave him the part.
Typically, Mae West was not content with having helped Cary Grant; she also told people she had “discovered” Grant, that he’d done nothing before “She Done Him Wrong.” Actually, he’d done six films, and was a rising star. But perhaps Mae didn’t know that. Give her credit; she had good taste in men.
She rented the penthouse suite of the The Ravenswood, a fashionable Art Deco apartment house on North Rossmore Avenue in the Hancock Park section of Los Angeles. When William Jones, one of her sexy African-American boyfriends, began visiting her there, apartment management informed Mae that black people were not welcome at the Ravenswood. So Mae bought the Ravenswood, and changed that rule. She presided over that penthouse suite for the rest of her life.
Mae made films straight through the 1930’s. In one of them, someone tells her: “There are ten guys waiting for you at your apartment.”
Mae says, “Well, I’m a little tired. One of the guys will have to go.”
She had a million of these lines.
“Why do you have mirrors on your bedroom ceiling?” someone asked.
“I like to see how I’m doing,” she replied.
“Goodness, what wonderful diamonds,” someone said.
“Goodness had nothing to do with it.” Mae West said.
Or she’d purr: “I used to be Snow White… but I drifted.”
The line “Why don’t you get out of those wet clothes and into a dry martini?” is often attributed to Robert Benchley but it was written by Mae West, in her 1937 movie “Every Day’s a Holiday.”
The media baron William Randolph Hearst pursued her, and Mae claimed he wanted to marry her. When someone asked her why she didn’t marry Hearst, Mae scoffed that Hearst was always having parties and, “I got no time for parties.”
People asked her why she didn’t get married, and she’d say “Marriage is a great institution — but I’m not ready for an institution.” Instead she had an array of boyfriends, most of them bodybuilders. She asked them to wear only a loincloth, to flex their muscles regularly, and to keep quiet.
Other sexy women made it in show business, but Mae never thought much of any of them. Around 1956, she sued Jayne Mansfield for alienation of affection, after one of Mae’s boyfriends defected to Mansfield. Mae found a tart pleasure in looking down on Marilyn Monroe. When someone asked her, “What do you think of Marilyn?” Mae replied by sashaying over to a mirror, wiggling seductively ’til she was satisfied, then said: “Well, if you like carbon copies.”
She’d bought up a lot of land in Van Nuys, California, and enjoyed reviewing her assets. In her later years, things got pretty strange. She wrote an advice book about sex, self-help and ESP. She still loved to “hold court” but she wasn’t putting on shows so much as entertaining the hangers on — various monkeys, muscle-bound lover boys or wannabe lovers, star struck weirdos, and awkward parasites… Mae West died in 1980, at the age of 87, still insisting she was sexy, and still ready for anything.