Mae West, the Surprisingly Literary Star of Stage & Screen
By Francis Booth | On July 17, 2024 | Updated July 21, 2024 | Comments (0)
The notorious stage and screen actress and playwright Mae West of “come up and see me some time” fame, was surprisingly literary minded. West was famous as an actress, but it’s far less known that she wrote all her own stage and screen roles, creating the wickedly witty vamp character she became identified with.
Despite her bad girl reputation, despite having been sentenced to ten days in prison for obscenity in her 1926 play Sex, and despite the equally provocative title of her 1927 play The Drag: A Homosexual Play in Three Acts, Mae West wasn’t as much a modern woman as she seemed. Of her 1928 play Diamond Lil West said:
“People have said that I must be bad myself because I played bad parts so well. They fail to credit me with intelligence and love for my art … Particularly now, with such things as ‘companionate marriage’ ideas floating around, is Diamond Lil timely. I don’t believe in it. I think it is nothing more than contracted prostitution. Marriage, love, and home should be kept sacred … I believe in the single standard for men and women.”
A self-created persona
In an interview in the July 4, 1928 issue of Variety, West emphasized her unique ability to maintain multiple current love affairs, if only in a fictional setting. People tend to forget that practically all the quotes for which she became (in) are all from fictional works that she wrote for her self-created persona to play.
“Diamond Lil has all my stuff in it … I only go into a play where I can be myself and strut my stuff. I know how I want to walk and talk, show off my figure and looks. I can bring one man after another into a play to revolve around me and no one else can. I have five men in love with me in ‘Diamond Lil’ and most authors can’t keep up one love interest,” said the star of the season’s $17,000 weekly freak riot at the Royale, New York.
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Mae in 1936
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An early example of her many wisecracks seeming to contradict the quote above comes from the play Sex, where the prostitute Margy is talking about a friend. “She had a guy she thought she was in love with and thought she needed and then she got wise. Now she’s married to an old guy, and she’s got a mansion up near Boston and a limousine and diamonds and everything she wants.”
West was famous for her limousine; another quote is, “If you’re trig and trim and straight and wiry you’ll travel in a slam-bang sports roadster, but if you’re curved and soft and elegant and grand, you’ll travel in a limousine.”
West’s “blonde bombshell” persona was just that: a front for a first-class stage and screen playwright, seriously underestimated as a writer, then and now.
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A revival of Mae West’s play, Sex, originally staged in 1926
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Provocative, prosecuted plays
She had two plays in production in New York in 1928: Diamond Lil and Pleasure Man, which was prosecuted for a performance at the Biltmore Theater on October 1, 1928, for “unlawfully advertising, giving, presenting and participating in an obscene, indecent, immoral and impure drama, play, exhibition, show and entertainment.”
The prosecution claimed that the play dealt with “sex, degeneracy, and sex perversion” arguing that West and her collaborators “did unlawfully, wickedly and scandalously, for lucre and gain, produce, present and exhibit and display the said exhibition show and entertainment to the site and view of divers and many people, all to the great offense of public decency.”
The 1928 prosecution was especially incensed by the presence of openly gay actors and “the speeches, manners and obscene jokes of a large number of male degenerates.”
West’s empathy with and encouragement of gay actors made her an early icon of the gay scene. Much later West said, “They were all crazy about me and my costumes. They were the first ones to imitate me in my presence.”
West even brought the gay actors from The Drag home to meet her mother. “They’d do her hair and nails and she’d have a great time.”
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Mae in 1940
65 Witty, Bawdy Mae West Quotes
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The power of provocation
At the time of the apotheosis of the flat-chested, bobbed-haired, flat-heeled flapper, West was the anti-flapper personified, famous as much for her bust and figure-accentuating dresses as for her wisecracks – “I look pretty buxom and blonde, don’t I? Well, believe me, I’m the kind gentlemen prefer.”
West is referring to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos, which had been published in 1925 to great acclaim. But despite her love for her gay friends, West blamed gay designers for the flat-chested flapper look she so disapproved of. “God gave women their curves – effeminate dressmakers took them away by designing garments which could be worn only by women shaped like scarecrows.”
It’s important to remember just how outrageous the association with gay men, who could be jailed for homosexual activities, was considered in 1928, the year Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness was banned in England.
Mae West was presumably not surprised and probably not upset by the publicity her plays gained from being prosecuted – she was clearly courting prosecution and controversy with her outrageous titles.
Being “Banned in Boston” could be lucrative; being banned in New York was probably even better in terms of revenue for a book, film or play. In naming her works so provocatively, West was only taking to the limit a piece of advice on finding a title for a film given by silent movie actress Agnes Smith in the April 1928 issue of the movie magazine Photoplay.
“Maybe it is an Art; maybe it is a superstition. Anyway, whatever it is, motion picture magnates piously believe that by observing the following rules in the main title, almost any picture will lure the public to the box-office:
1 All box-office titles should hint at a sex situation, a sex struggle, or a sex indiscretion.
2 The word “love” in a title is guaranteed to make men, women, and children part with their quarters. Next in importance to the word “love” are such luscious words as passion, heart, kisses, woman, scandal, devil, marriage, flesh, and sin.”
More about Mae West
- Mae West biography
- Mae West: Dirty Blonde (American Masters, PBS)
- IMDB
- The Best of Mae West (film clip compilation)
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Contributed by Francis Booth, the author of several books on twentieth-century culture: Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde; Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth-Century Literary Eroticism; Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938; High Collars & Monocles: 1920s Novels by British Female Couples; and A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell a Lie: The Fiction of Vera Caspary.
Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and Young Adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England.
Images in this article courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
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