From the Boston “Herald”
29 April 1938:

Clutching, Squealing Crowd Greets Mae West with Mob Scene Here:

Complete with the publicised curves and husky, slurring accents that have made her practically a symbol of what she is pleased to call “the sex personality,” Mae West crashed into Boston yesterday morning through a clutching, squealing crowd of 3000 eager admirers who turned the South station into a mob scene.

Cries of pain mingled with shouts of “There she is!” and “Give us a smile, Mae!” as the mob, in a surging onslaught, trampled on toes and barked shins to get closer to the object of it all. The plump blonde actress, in a trailing satin dress, with make-up thick on her features and a huge bunch of orchids clutched in a heavily jeweled hand, gave them the smile and was taken off to the Ritz-Carlton, where she is staying while appearing in person at the RKO Boston Theater this week…

Mae West, “sex personality,” film star, women’s icon, all-round celebrity, familiar and at the same time utterly mysterious and elusive. Many men had, reputedly, “come up and seen her,” but no one seemed to have quite pinned down the person hidden behind the mask. If there was, indeed, anyone there apart from the magnificent construct that her life on stage and screen had fabricated. By 1938, she had already appeared in eight feature films that had propelled her from the status of a notorious Broadway trouble-maker to that of the movies’ greatest comedienne. Her personal appearance tour continued to cause ructions throughout the U.S. eastern states: In Hartford she was the subject of a dedicated “Mae West Safe Driving Week,” a parade which, upon the star’s appearance, “created one of the wildest and maddest crowd scenes here in several years. Not since Lindbergh came to town has there been such a tumult.” Traffic was disrupted, and the police were overwhelmed by a turnout of over 30,000 fans. From Connecticut Mae moved on to New York, where Loew’s State Theatre opened its doors at 8 a.m., and the jam of backstage “autograph hounds” was so heavy that extra cops were deployed throughout the day.

The fans’ enthusiasm did not diminish. In 1946, after years of war, and the Royal Air Force’s adoption of her name for their buoyant “Mae West” life-preserving jackets, her appearance in her own play, “Come On Up,” continued to awe both public and critics. One breathless columnist, for the Los Angeles Times, had to resort to --- s:

Being invited to “Come up and see me”… Not just sometime…. But after the show at National Monday night… by the lady who originated that seductive phrase… Mae West no less… I did see her… but as through a fog… of human beings… lined up out to E Street and around corner… getting her autograph… door to her dressing room was a bottle-neck… as they neared “the presence”… everyone craned their necks… some of the sailors and GIs got so flustered they dropped their programs… their eyes bugged out… was she real? She was… and a real lady… dashing off her signature with a pleasant smile… lift of her big blue eyes… still with their heavy mascara “window shades”… thick tan make-up on her face… her body unconsciously giving those seductive twists… which have such devastating effect on males… on the stage and off…

In 1951, presenting a regular revival of her greatest stage hit, Diamond Lil, the glittering image knew no limits, as she appeared “encrusted with what is said to be $1,175,000 worth of platinum and diamonds loaned for the performances by Harry Winston Inc., diamond merchant of 7 East 51st St. The jewelery is brought to the theater under guard, Miss West is guarded while wearing it and after the show it is returned to the Winston vaults…” The ornamentation included: “Seven part waist decoration, $500,000; necklace, $100,000; three bracelets, $200,000; 46-carat emerald-cut diamond ring, $300,000; 30-carat oval-cut diamond ring, $75,000…”

To the hordes of pop-eyed journalists, Mae would purr: “Men and jewels are my hobby,” and to the query of one Joe DeBona, of the Connecticut Sunday Herald, in 1952: “If all the men in the world suddenly died, would you want to go on living?” she replied – or was reported to have replied – “No, there would be no sense in it.” Waving in the reporters’ eyes a “22-carat diamond as large as a golfball on one of the fingers of her right hand.”

Her stock in trade, as the years went by, was to appear forever ageless. Skeptics were given short shrift, as Earl Wilson, of the World Omaha Herald, reported in 1949, under the heading MAE STILL HAS ALL HER TEETH:

Mae West opened her mouth and invited me to look down her throat, an offer which I was too gallant to refuse.
“Look,” she smoldered, “Uh got all muh own teeth. Yuh ask me muh age – Uh’m over 21.”
Miss West, in this gay, confident mood because her show, “Diamond Lil,” is a hit again after 20 years, had overestimated me if she thought I could tell her age by looking at her teeth. When I was a farm boy in Ohio, I might have been able to achieve it…
“Tell me,” I said, facing Miss West there in her dressing room as she waggled about restlessly, “what difference is there between the two productions – between the Mae West now and the Mae West 20 years ago?”
Miss West was wearing one the lowest-cut flamin’ red dresses this side of the South Sea Islands.
“Have you grown any larger?” I asked.
“No,” she said, “they’re the same. Muh measurement is 38 bust, 38 hips and 28 waist.”
“Have you added any new lines to the show?”
“Yeuh. The one about `Goodness, what beautiful diamonds,’ and I say, `Goodness had nothing to do with it.’ That was in the picture, but not in the original show. I got some yells outa that.’”
“Won’t you be getting married?” I asked…
“…Uh’m still lookin’ for the right man,” she said. “Muh trouble is, Uh find so many right ones, it’s hard to decide.”

But to her female fans, Mae West often presented a completely different image, building on the experience of the transgressive plays which had made her name, before the movies beckoned, in the late 1920’s, and her battles with convention and censorship. Presenting herself as an early sex educator, in 1929, she wrote, for The Parade, under the title “Sex in the Theatre”:

I have often been accused both by the press and individuals of deliberately appealing to the salacious and evil-minded. One can readily see how wrong this is, when you consider that I have played to more than ten million people in the United States drawn from all walks of life, from the highest and the most intelligent to the lowest and poorest. Ten million Americans can’t be all salacious and evil-minded. When one can please the masses one must essentially be right.
But what few people realize is that my work has had a deliberate plan and purpose…

It is usually long after the death of pioneers that their work is respected and the truths they stood for recognized. Because of narrow-minded censors and silly taboos the people are unable to learn truths they are starving for. Think of it, thousands of women have asked me the most personal questions about their husbands and love life. In many cases I have been forced to suggest food tonics and the like to help the poor, love-starved wives. They know nothing about sex at all, for the subject is hidden from children, kept out of books and schools and education.

The wonderful medium of theatre, Mae suggested, was ideal to bring those hidden educational truths home to ordinary people, and to cast light on such concealed realities as the lives of prostitutes and the even less known facts of homosexual lives and loves. In three plays, Sex, The Drag and Pleasure Man, written by herself, Mae had attempted to bring these lives to the attention of her eager audiences, only to be met with banning orders, court cases, and, in the case of Sex, an actual spell behind bars. Nevertheless, Mae vowed: “I realized the problem and devoted my career in the theatre to the education of the masses. I shall boldly continue to do so, in spite of criticism, insults and narrow-minded bigots.”

The movie Mae West, however, had to fight a different kind of challenge, both to her material and to the very persona she had built to lure those legions of fans. A hard bed in the cells was no longer threatened, but her capacity to be what the fans now demanded came under growing pressure. Her 1935 film, Belle of the Nineties, became the test case of the newly fortified “Hays Code,” which was deployed to tame Hollywood’s firebrands: the directors, producers, writers and performers who threatened to kick over the traces. Their battle was lost, but the fight was a stubborn one, with unexpected heroes.

Mae West’s career in movies was not in fact a lengthy one, if one counts the seven year period between 1932 and 1939 when the films by which she is remembered were made, most of them for Paramount Pictures. Her last undisputed classic, her great double-act with W.C. Fields, My Little Chickadee, was released in 1940 by Universal. A rarely viewed straggler, The Heat’s On, was made in 1943. Her last two films, the most eccentric comebacks in all of movie history, were committed decades later: The amazing and scandalous adaptation of Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge, released in 1970, and the lesser known Sextette, the last hurrah of the ageless sex goddess, produced in 1979.

In between, though Mae West made no new films, she continued to groom her unique image through a non-stop stream of stage appearances. She performed in new plays, razzle-dazzled Las Vegas and all points north, south, east and west, emitting endless interviews and homilies. Mae West on Health and Beauty, Mae West on Sex, Love and Marriage, Mae West on New Year Resolutions, Mae West on Extra Sensory Perception, and ever and anon, Mae West on Men. But these published writings were but the tip of a very large iceberg, or rather a ceaseless lava flow of projects for both stage and screen. Since the 1920’s, Mae West has been known for her authorship of her own plays, and later for three raunchy novels, all versions of her favourite stage hits, as well as her autobiography, defiantly titled Goodness Had Nothing To Do With It. The archives of the Library of Congress in Washington, the formal repository for copyright materials, contain manuscripts for twelve plays attributed to Mae, some with co-writers. Three of her best-known 1920’s plays, Sex, The Drag and Pleasure Man have been published for a new generation. But recently donated archives, still in a process of collation at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, provide a unique insight into the writer Mae’s workshop. Long known for scorning the night-spots, cabarets and clubs where scandal was brewed and decanted, eschewing the Hollywood or Broadway gala premieres apart from her own productions, Mae West had an unguilty secret: She stayed home, and endlessly wrote, learning her craft by a slow painstaking process of trial and error, redrafting and recycling notions and themes. This was not the way she wished to represent herself as a creator, as she recounted to gullible reporters in 1928:

Mae West’s formula for writing a play: “hire a room in a hotel, lock yourself in and go to work for as many hours as you can stand the pace. Then you grab a little sleep, get up and rescuscitate yourself with a few tons of cold water and start all over again. And so on until the play is finished a few days later… That’s the way Mae West wrote “Sex.” That’s the way, in fact, she has written all her plays, including her latest, “Diamond Lil…”

There are lies, damn lies, and publicity… “STAR CREATES PLAYS WITHOUT WRITING A LINE,” headlined the San Francisco Examiner in 1929, recounting yet another Maesian tale of creation through rehearsals alone. What Mae, like many modern playwrights and script-writers, did, was a labour which put her original drafts through many permutations and versions dependant, indeed, on the casting and input of her various actors, much as improvisers like John Cassavettes and Mike Leigh have done in our own time for movies. In movies, however, Mae’s input was different, as we shall see in due course.

I am fortunate, as an author, to have had a first sight of the archive that sheds new light on Mae West the writer, a view which transforms our outlook on Mae West the performer and actress. As a feminist icon, she has attracted attention as a precursor of a very up-to-date woman, determined to preserve her independence of thought and of action, financial power and sexual desire.

“THE TROUBLE WITH MEN IS GETTING RID OF THEM,” an essay about her was headlined as early as 1933, in Movie Mirror, written, alas by the very male Marquis Busby: “`Men?’ repeated Mae West in a puzzled voice, for all the world as if she has never heard of the darned things. `Oh, you mean MEN! I haven’t time for them now. I’m in Hollywood to make a success in pictures, and you can only do one thing at a time.’” Nevertheless, the name of the game was still getting your man, rather than ignoring him, or ignoring him only to inflame his passions. It should come as no surprise that someone born in the last decade of the last but two centuries should still harbour some old fashioned notions. Many things claimed as sui-generis for Mae West, like her adoption of black music and styles, was more a matter of combining existing trends and forgotten modes, some less attractive than others, that have dropped out of our collective memory.

So my brief, in this book, is to give an all-round picture of one of the most unique performers of the 20th century, an American and Feminist icon, no doubt, the movies’ most famous female star, universally recognised not only as a rubber appendage to save air force pilots from a watery grave. She was, like many of her contemporaries, the juggler W.C. Fields, the Four Marx Brothers, Charlie Chaplin, Stan Laurel, Fanny Brice et al, a vaudeville baby, schooled in the five-a-day world of non-stop performances, the rough hustle of the quick change stage, where a fifteen minute slot had to grab the audience before it called for the next act, competing with one-legged unicyclists, trained seals, and giants like Houdini and Eva Tanguay, her role model and precursor. From these hardy roots, in the first decade of the last century, to her remarkable swan songs in the era of flower-power, gay rights and gender bending fantasies, she remained a once only phenomenon. Like her sole comedy equal, W.C. Fields, she carved her own identity out of a patchwork of influences, which then faded into an invisible backdrop, leaving the self-made creation to inhabit its own singular world, to challenge and disrupt, by sheer force of her personality, our easy assumptions about life and art.

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