West, Mae 1892-1980

WEST, MAE 1892-1980

Entertainer

Buxom Blonde

More than any other mainstream entertainer, Mae West—with her blonde hair, heavy-lidded eyes, and voluptuous figure—epitomized the liberating force of sexuality—a sexuality that managed to express itself despite the heavy hand of Production Code censors. However, though West is remembered as the heaw-breathing mistress of the double entendre, she is not always recognized for the artistic control she maintained over a career that began when she was five or for acting in stock theater.

Beginnings

By the time she was fifteen West was already starting to rewrite the vaudeville and Broadway revue material in which she appeared. A few years spent in burlesque, where she was billed as "The Baby Vamp," no doubt gave her material for her first play, Sex, which she wrote, produced, and directed on Broadway in 1926. The ten-day jail sentence she received for her conviction on obscenity charges did little to dampen her writing fervor. The very next year she wrote and directed a drama about homosexuals titled Drag, which became a hit in Paterson, New Jersey. Heeding warnings, West chose to keep it off the Broadway stage. Here, as later, she managed to address risqué topics in a manner almost, but never quite, obscene. By this time West was piquing the interest of Hollywood producers; her next play, Diamond Lil (1928), was not only a Broadway hit but succeeded on the road. After writing two more plays, she accepted a Paramount offer to bring her ribald brand of entertainment to the screen.

Cracking the Code

The introduction of the Production Code on 1 July 1934 cast a pall over Hollywood. The self-regulatory code of ethics created by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors in 1930 clearly set out guidelines for what could and could not be seen on screen. Gone were pictures that enlisted the sympathies of the audience to the side of crime or wrongdoing, depictions of illegal drug traffic, miscegenation, and comic or villainous portrayals of ministers. Most problematic for West, though, were the regulations concerning representations of sexuality. The code stipulated that "The sanctity of the institution of marriage and the home shall be upheld. Pictures shall not infer that low forms of sex relationships are the accepted or common thing"; "excessive and lustful kissing, lustful embracing, suggestive postures and gestures" were banned, as was "indecent or undue exposure." Seduction and rape, the code said, were "never the proper subject for comedy." Given that West had built a career on sex comedies, what was she to do?

Come Up and See Me Some Time

Triumph was the answer: by 1935 West was the highest-paid woman in the United States. She used her formidable verbal powers (as well as her great skill at physical comedy) to circumnavigate the rocky shoals of censorship. When she asked a handsome costar "Is that a pistol in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?" or told her maid to "peel me a grape," audiences were vastly entertained—and there was nothing definably obscene about the performance. West was an early avatar of camp: she encouraged moviegoers to laugh a little at her performance, which was both sexy and so exaggerated that it served as a parody of seduction. Throughout the 1930s, West appeared opposite costars including Cary Grant and W. C. Fields in a steady stream of hits: Night After Night (1932); She Done Him Wrong (1933), the basis for her play Diamond Lil; I'm No Angel (1933), for which she also penned the story and screenplay; Belle of the Nineties (1934), also story and screenplay; Klondike Annie (1936), also costory and coscreenwriting credits; Go West Young Man (1936), also screenplay; Every Day's a Holiday (1938), also story and screenplay; and My Little Chickadee (1940), also coscreenwriting credit.

Later Career

Although West may have been down after the failure of her 1943 production The Heat's On, she was not out. Her series of comebacks included her 1954 nightclub act in which the sixty-two-year-old West appeared surrounded by a group of muscle-bound hunks, the publication of her 1959 autobiography Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It, and her successful appearance in the unsuccessful 1970 film Myra Breckenridge, for which she wrote her own dialogue. Her final screen appearance was in Sextette (1978), when she was eighty-five.

Source:

Ephraim Katz, The Film Encyclopedia, revised edition (New York: Harper Perennial, 1994).