West, Mae

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WEST, Mae

Born 17 August 1893, Brooklyn, New York; died 22 November 1980, Los Angeles, California

Daughter of John and Mathilda Doegler West; married once (annulled)

Mae West's description of her childhood (in the early chapters of her autobiography, Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It, 1959) illustrates the qualities that were to become her caricature: she learned early that "two and two are four, and five will get you ten if you know how to work it." She began her performing career at age seven. When, as a young actress and singer, she was criticized for "wriggling" on stage during performances, she realized it was the "force of an extraordinary sex-personality that made quite harmless lines and mannerisms seem suggestive." Her one marriage was annulled; she had no children.

West was producer, author, and star of SEX (1927). At first, the title scared away both booking agents and theatergoers. Ultimately, however, the play was a success, firmly casting the stylistic idiom in which West, actress, author, and woman, would be known: the tough, street-smart, unashamedly sexual "dame"—no man's fool—whose unrelenting self-promotion is exceeded only by her vanity.

West believed The Drag (1928), in which she did not appear, was a serious approach to a modern social problem, but her sensitivity to the issue of homosexuality is relative to her time. She writes that the homosexual's "abnormal tendencies (have) brought disaster to his family, friends, and himself"—and her message is that "an understanding of the problems of all homosexuals by society could avert such social tragedies."

SEX and The Drag ran simultaneously—SEX in New York City (for 41 weeks, before, thanks to efforts by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, West was arrested and jailed for a short time) and The Drag in Paterson, New Jersey. The district attorney in New York had The Drag closed and the entire cast arrested after only two performances.

Diamond Lil (1932) was written specifically to attract the female audience her earlier plays had failed to draw. Later filmed (as She Done Him Wrong, 1933) and even turned into a novel (1932), it features perhaps the most famous West character in a "grand Bowery folk play." One critic wrote an appropriately picturesque summation: "It's worth swimming to Brooklyn to see her descend those dance hall stairs, to be present while she lolls in a golden bed reading the Police Gazette, murders her girlfriend, wrecks the Salvation Army, and sings as much of 'Frankie and Johnny' as the mean old law allows."

The novel follows the footsteps and idiom of Diamond Lil. The narrative is liberally dosed with slang and hickish diction; women are "skirts," policemen are "dicks," and are all vividly drawn. It is lively and reasonably well written, given the genre.

In The Constant Sinner (originally titled Babe Gordon, 1930), a novel, the siren Babe "starts low and ends up high"—reversing everything mothers tell their daughters about the fate of bad girls. Babe is celebrated by the author, in part, for knowing her own mind and keeping the control of her body up to no one but herself. Again, West deals with subjects (such as interracial sex) socially unmentionable in the U.S. of the 1930s; yet she does it all within the confines of her public's expectations of the West caricature.

Pleasure Man (1975), West's novelization of The Drag, is about a bisexual Broadway headliner, Rodney Terrill, "whose wild sex-affairs with women," West declares, "led to unexpected but well-deserved difficulties." Again, street talk prevails, but in the novel the prose is often laced with attempts at more eloquent diction—mixed usage with mixed results.

Beginning in 1932, West appeared in many films. She wrote (or cowrote—as with her plays and novels, her collaborative debts are often unclear) at least six of these. Films such as She Done Him Wrong, I'm No Angel (1933), and My Little Chickadee (1939)—the last of which was written with her costar, W. C. Fields—are considered comedy classics.

Her novel, stage, and film personae are one and the same, often a mirror of West herself: the woman who will not conform, in her words, to the "old-fashioned limits" men have "set on a woman's freedom of action." Unfortunately, West's sex-personality became legitimate for the American public only as she became more and more a caricature of herself. Her public self was laundered into a distant cousin, twice-removed, from West the woman, thereby making her frank yet refreshing sexuality laughable and comic, but legitimate.

An extension of American pulp literature, West's fiction receives little attention. She is well known, however, as the queen of the reverse sexist one-liners: Hatcheck Girl: "Goodness, what lovely diamonds!" West: "Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie." Her contributions to American culture are immeasurable, yet—perhaps because her outrageous persona commands so much attention—her written work is virtually unrecognized. She was not only the performer but the author of plays and films in which she appeared, and she deserves to be acknowledged as a creative and successful comic playwright.

Other Works:

The Wit and Wisdom of Mae West (edited by J. Weintraub, 1967). Three Plays by Mae West (1997).

Bibliography:

Baxt, G., The Mae West Murder Case (1993). Blubaugh, A., "Mae West and the Effects of the Camp Sensibility on the Sex Goddess" (thesis, 1997). Chipman, D., Cool Women (1998). Cole, W. and L. Phillips, eds., Sex: Even More Fun YouCan Have without Laughing (1990, published in Britain as The Humour of Sex: From Aristotle to Mae West and Beyond, 1990, 1995). Curry, R., Power and Allure: The Mediation of Sexual Difference in the Star Image of Mae West (1990). Curry, R., Too Much of a Good Thing: Mae West as Cultural Icon (1996). Hamilton, M., When I'm Bad, I'm Better: Mae West, Sex, and American Entertainment (1995). Ivanov, A. J., "Sexual Parody in American Comedic Film and Literature: 1925-1948" (dissertation, 1994). Janik, V. K., ed., Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook (1998). Leider, E. W., Becoming Mae West (1997). Leonard, M., Mae West: Empress of Sex (1991). Malachosky, T., Mae West (collectors edition, 1993). Robertson, P., Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp From Mae West to Madonna (1996). Sochen, J., Mae West: She Who Laughs, Lasts (1992). Tuska, J., The Complete Films of Mae West (1992).