“I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it.”
Behold the queen of the double entendre. Is there anyone more American than a self-made legend who used societal puritanical beliefs as a methodology for fame, fortune, and controversy? From her head sprung the likes of Madonna, another brash bottle blonde from meager beginnings, a voracious carnality, and a knack for transforming controversy into notoriety.
Born Mary Jane West in Brooklyn, what becomes immediately clear when reading up on her life and work is an indomitable willpower to succeed and thrive. There is a certain canny intelligence for shock as a never-ending moneymaking device. If any performer ever embodied the lyrics of “I Am What I Am” from La Cage aux Folles in all its defiance and declaration of self, then it would have to be Mae West.
She started performing at a very young age and learned her tricks from female impersonators. Early reviews described her way of singing and dancing as a “grotesquerie.” And, based purely on her work in film, there is a certain truth to that. West’s body is more thick than curvaceous which she swivels around awkwardly as if not only playing at femininity but taking the absolutely piss out of the entire concept of gender.
Her early start in vaudeville gave way to a run as a Broadway auteur of sorts. Much like in her eventual film work, West’s career was a testament to the self of her own creation with co-stars, directors, and other writers seemingly secondary to her artistry. She wrote, directed, starred, and took the heat for a variety of shows like Sex and The Drag. Famously, or infamously, she did jailtime on a morals charge. Newspapers at the time reported that this bad girl had “climbed the ladder of success wrong by wrong.” If that is not a brilliant description of her career and piece of analysis, then I do not know what else is.
She was approaching 40 when Hollywood came courting. Never an ingenue, West was a hard-bitten woman who sauntered onto the screen with an egocentric behavior that was gravitational in its pull. After all, her first scene in film practically wrote her autobiography for her: “Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.”
If the promise of erotic fulfilment filled her body with euphoria, her hip movements, eye rolls, and undulations always spoke louder than naked flesh, then so did cold hard cash. Marilyn Monroe may have sung “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” but it was clear that she wanted emotional connection above all else. Not so with West. She wanted the jewelry. In fact, gaudy diamonds might have caused a greater erotic reaction from her than any amount of muscular, handsome men. And her film career and subsequent nightclub work is filled with handsome, muscular men orbiting around her.
Once again, West writes a better analysis about herself than anyone else ever could: “I wrote the story myself. It’s about a girl who lost her reputation and never missed it.” Even in her film debut she never bothered with playing at innocent. She saw the rest of the actors reciting their dialogue at a slower pace due to limitations of the sound technology in the early 30s and decided to liven up the pace.
She appears at roughly the midway point in Night After Night, and she works a minor miracle as Maudie Triplett. Up until her introduction the film was something of an interminable bore about George Raft’s speakeasy owner taking elocution lessons and romancing a high society girl. Raft was no actor, nor was he much of a star persona, and the film needed someone with personality to make it zip. West’s rat-a-tat-tat delivery of one innuendo and witticism after another provides that zip.
Given West’s star-making (and scene-stealing) turn in Night After Night, Paramount was quick to test her out as a major star. Loosely based on her hit Broadway show Diamond Lil, She Done Him Wrong is all the proof you need that any Mae West vehicle is ultimately a creation from her own mind. A director is nearly immaterial if West’s spicy wit and impenetrable gaze is there. Same goes with co-stars as they are merely pawns for her to launch her playful use of language, to exhibit her sexual prowess.
Her quips here are enough to shake the lax censorship of the era and enforce the building of the Production Code. West works best as a Pre-Code entity capable of swaggering her thick frame and dominating the subservient men revolving around her. The plot of She Done Him Wrong is nearly unnecessary: prostitution, jewelry theft, and the bad girl goes semi-good ending.
This was the lone film of West’s to ever flirt with the Academy Awards by receiving a Best Picture nomination. The large box office saved Paramount from bankruptcy, and for a brief period, allowed her to have nearly complete creative control over her projects. She Done Him Wrong does not add up to much as a film, but the essence of her persona is all right there and just needing a little refinement.
That refinement would come with the follow-up, I’m No Angel. We open with West as Tira, a circus performer who eventually finds work as a lion tamer, doing the laziest gyrations while the men in the audience salivate. Her ironic humor in the situation, nearly making the quotation marks around her performance visible, is crystallized in the way she snidely says “suckers” while walking off the stage. No female star quite elbowed the male gaze this hard before, and no one else would until Jane Fonda’s coitus watch check during Klute.
What lingers is not so much West versus the high society but the quips and her empathy with the outcasts. As her income goes up doing her lion tamer schtick, a perfect symbol for her basic star persona in microcosm, she befriends her servants. A memorable scene involves her doing one of her throaty, strange musical interludes while jiving and shuffling along with her maids, Hattie McDaniel among them. The best of West’s films finds her sympathizing with those that society looks down upon. She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel both feature her being something of a guardian angel to a fallen woman, supportive to jailbirds/criminals, and her Black maid(s).
Eventually she will extend out to coded homosexuals. There is something grandiose about her that does call to mind the delusional grandeur of a drag queen. It was not just her aggressive sexuality, unerring confidence, but a droll humor and sangfroid that feels forged by a life spent getting knocked about. If anything, West’s enduring legacy is carried on by a sympathetic and engaged queer audience who seem to best find her wavelength and ride along with it.
I’m No Angel is possibly the best film of West’s career. It is certainly one that most perfectly encapsulates her unique cinematic legacy. Her hardness and towering self-confidence are all right there, as are her jabs at the sex wars, and playful bon mots that still shock, titillate, and amuse in equal measure.
This would also be the last film of her career to be free from the Production Code and heavy censorship. From here on out, Hollywood tried to muzzle and tame that which could not be held in check. 1934’s Belle of the Nineties suffers from this problem. The story of her showgirl whose success is largely by her own self-promotion genius and laconic style, this should absolutely be read as semi-autobiographical, who winds up in a love triangle of sorts between a boxer and a club owner.
This is our first glimpse of the tamed West as her one-liners seem to have lost their bite and she winds up settling into married life at the end. Many of these plot lines are speedily wrapped up as if West herself was deeply uninterested in them and merely had them as an excuse to feature herself and the Duke Ellington orchestra. Her musical sequences are often bizarre, but her intonations of “My Old Flame” is the bawdy, tacky highlight.
When it comes to the art of acting for the screen, there are two types of performers: actors and personalities. Neither one is inherently better than the other. West was clearly a personality. It does not matter what the character name was, she was essentially playing the same part. A bit like Marlene Dietrich, another detached, worldly, sensual star of the time. But unlike Dietrich, West had no director to help curate and adorn her self-creation with classic cinema.
West worked alone, and often the material’s lackadaisical approach to narrative structure or indifferent directors reflect on this fact. Her comic spark, ironic observations, aggressive sexuality, and empathy for the outsider remained constant. These parts folded in bits of her true life into her cinematic one. Behold, 1935’s Goin’ to Town where West crashes the jet set and tries to become a proper lady.
Her word play is sanded down from multiple readings to just clever surface-level jokes. “I’m a good woman for a bad man” and “I’m an intellectual and you’re opposite” are classics. Her pining for a dull Englishman is absurd, even by the already low standards of the romantic partners in her films. Straight rich white males are objects for her bluntness to scour and knock down to size, mainly as toy boys for her to use and discard. Still, where else are you going to get the chance to see West attempt an aria from Samson and Delilah?
Her impenetrable hardness was at its most glaring in 1936’s Klondike Annie. Her survivor’s toughness folds into the Frisco Doll, a kept woman who kills her sugar daddy then goes on the run, with remarkable ease. A masculine director like Raoul Walsh seems like a nice match for her hard-bitten coarseness. After all, he manages to make West’s extended deception work.
Klondike Annie is a marvel of expediency. No sooner do we meet West’s world-weary dame then she is quickly on the lam on a ship, meeting a missionary, taking her identity in Alaska to avoid jail, and promising salvation in her, uh, unique way. She meets drunkards and dancehall floozies on the level. She does not straight-talk with them, but she emphatically refuses to judge them. West’s live and let live philosophy always murmured in her films, but it rings out loudly here.
Just seeing West’s face in the missionary’s bonnet feels like an act of transgression. Yet there is a certain evenly keeled treatment to her satire of religion. She is here assuming the guise of Sister Annie to help save the mission, and she does with a combination of street smarts and populist sermonizing. Then again, her best-known sideways piece of philosophy is: “when caught between two evils, I generally like to take the one I never tried.”
But be prepared for some questionable, if not downright racist depictions of Asians in the first act of the film. Not only if there a bit of yellowface, but there is some “yellow peril” and the sight of West crooning “I’m an Occidental woman in an Oriental mood for love.” Yet here again is another moment of West engaging in close friendship with one of these social pariahs, this time Soo Yong’s maid who speaks in pidgin English. The kindest thing you can say about it is that older movies like this have their Moments™.
She is a movie star stranded in the country in Go West, Young Man. This is undoubtedly her draggiest performance. West always utilized irony in her work, but here the quotes are bigger and bolder than they have been in prior films. Perhaps because this was based on material she did not originate, she seems mildly bored here and more prone to giving the lascivious eye to her leading man, Randolph Scott. In fact, she seems most obsessed with his ass as she leers at it and smacks it in rhythm while they dance. If the male gaze is the predominant eye of cinema (and it is), then West’s contributions often acted as a jovial, lurid counterpoint.
By 1937, West’s film career was sagging, and she needed a hit. Changing tastes and stricter enforcement of censorship had sanded her heady quips and near-masculine sexuality into a form without a function. Paramount sank an astounding amount of money, for the time, into her next vehicle. Every Day’s a Holiday opens with West’s name launching a firework display. You gotta admire her sheer chutzpah.
Ultimately a box office failure, Every Day’s a Holiday was the final film she made at Paramount, the studio she had saved from bankruptcy just four years earlier. The plot is pure incident with her Peaches O’ Day disguising herself as a French singing sensation (complete with ridiculous accent) to avoid arrest before becoming a suffragette. There is moderate entertainment to be had here, mainly in Charles Winninger mugging away and Louis Armstrong making a cameo towards the end leading a marching band (with West playing drums in full regalia and posing between beats). Aside from that, this is another watered-down outing that leaves West’s brand of humor adrift.
David O. Selznick offered her the part of madam Belle Watling in Gone with the Wind after Tallulah Bankhead turned him down. West also turned him down claiming the part was too small for a star of her stature and demanding to rewrite it to suite her persona. Just imagining either of them in the role is a bit of fun. I cannot picture Clark Gable going ga ga over West, but her voice and eye rolling swagger do seem like a strong fit for the part on paper. I get why Selznick wanted her.
She was one of many stars labeled “box office poison” in an infamous article in The Hollywood Reporter. Fearful studio executives refused to hire her, and it was three years before she would return to the screen. She made 1940’s My Little Chickadee at Universal with W. C. Fields, the only performer in her meager filmography to match her grandiose sense of self and ability to mug for the camera.
The shoot did not go well. Fields was an infamous drunk, they fought over the screenplay (West claims she wrote most of it and Fields contributed only a few scenes despite them getting equal credit), and they generally disliked each other. Yet you would not pick up on that watching the final product. They are a match made in, well, not quite heaven, but certainly not hell.
Their vaudevillian performing styles mesh well together, as do their penchants for smart non sequiturs and a self-involved relationship to the camera. Fields’ manner of speaking means he gets more verbal pyrotechnics in, and many of them are near musical in their cadences and emphases, even as a lot of them are colored by ignorant, prejudicial punchlines. But there is a strange beauty in the moment when he asks her “is it possible for us to be lonesome together?”
Their first few scenes on the train are an enjoyable back-and-forth between two people with a playful, nearly promiscuous ear for language. When he tells her that he never argues with a lady, she purrs out a dry “smart boy.” But it is not long until Fields is playing to the rafters and trying to steal anything that was not nailed down by braying loudly and ‘playing’ drunk. West gets some physical business to play this time. When the train gets held up by an angry tribe, she turns into an Annie Oakley from the wayward side of town. That hardness she displayed in her earlier films has only toughened over time. During that train confrontation, she uses an arrow to clean her nails with an annoyance that could make even late-period Joan Crawford reconsider.
My Little Chickadee may belong more to Fields, it was his home studio, but West more than holds her own. Her best moment is in a classroom filled with schoolboys. Not only does she impart some questionable life advice (“two and two are four, and five will get you ten if you know how to work it”), has this to say about arithmetic, “I was always pretty good at figures myself,” but greets a chalkboard proclamation (“I am a good boy. I am a good man. I am a good girl.”) with a resounding, “what is this, propaganda?”
The film has attained something of a semi-classic standing, largely thanks to the strangeness of watching these two interact, and it deserves it. It is one of the few out-and-out good, if not great, films that she starred in. A box office hit at the time, Universal wanted to capitalize on this and make the two of them pair-up again. West refused, and it would be three years before she would return to the big screen.
1943’s The Heat’s On is the one film of her career I was unable to find anywhere on the internet through either legal streaming means or creative opportunities. By all accounts it is a nadir in her career and one of the only times she did not substantively write (or rewrite) the part to suite her skills. She made the film as a personal favor to friend Gregory Ratoff. It was a commercial and financial failure and sent her off to perform on radio, television, cabaret, Las Vegas, and Broadway.
Nearly all these performances got her in trouble with the censors, as was her wont. A radio sketch where she plays Eve in the Garden of Eden is quite risqué and playful, while another where she makes quite the ribald joke about Edgar Bergen’s marionette Charlie made me snort. Then there was the punchline of “freeing the censor” at the end of The Red Skelton Show that finds the disembodied voice screaming in madness/frustration. At a certain point, Mary Jane West became her creation full-time and the bleeding between the fiction and the reality was complete.
Billy Wilder offered her the part of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, but she refused since he would not allow her creative input on the screenplay. It is impossible to think of anyone but Gloria Swanson in that role, but especially Mae West, yet it is also fascinating to “what if” the scenario in your head for five minutes. By the time that the culture had caught up to where West was in the early 30s, she had been off the screen for nearly thirty years.
When I read Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge knowing that they (somehow) made a movie about it, I kept wondering which of these roles would be the Mae West one. Then Leticia Van Allen popped up and I immediately went, “oh, that one.” Leticia Van Allen is an aggressively camp creation, a vulgar, sex-crazed agent who flips the typical casting couch setup on its head. Much of Myra Breckinridge is written in quotes and with a purposefully vulgar eye towards the detritus of 30s and 40s movies, especially that of starry-eyed hopefuls engaging in the process of mythmaking and egomania. In short, it seemed of a kinship with West’s body of work up to this point in its cheerful vulgarity, nonconforming gender presentation, libertine sexuality, and near maniacal bad taste.
Naturally she would appear in the movie adaptation. The material was practically a summoning spell to bring her out of the cinematic cold. Not to mention that with the advent of television having replayed her films, West was something of a countercultural icon primed to bask in the love of queer and feminist audiences who openly embraced her satirical femininity. Again, on paper Myra Breckinridge seemed like a perfect match between star and vehicle, even if she was a supporting player.
Then you watch the 1970 film, and you wonder just where it all derailed so spectacularly. Not only does it not understand the queerness of the material, or the material in general, but it clearly views it with suspicion, if not outright scorn. The only person involved with the entire production that seems even relatively on its wavelength is, you guessed it, West. (After all, one of her first lines is “Never mind the six feet, let’s discuss the seven inches.”)
I described reading the novel as being akin to John Waters adapting the life of Christine Jorgensen, and that kind of demented, wild energy is what it needed. Not whatever the hell it ended up being, but at least West dusts off her burlesque carnality with some delightfully risqué zingers. Raquel Welch’s figure is not the only shapely thing on screen given West’s epigrams.
It also needed a better leading lady, one who understood the cadences and rhythms of kitsch. Welch was a glamorous movie star, but she was no great talent. Yes, the two of them were famously acrimonious while making this, and Welch still puts down West every chance she gets by insinuating she was a man, and no one would mistake West for an actress of tremendous depth, but she understood camp. Hell, she practically embodied it out throughout her cinematic life.
Myra Breckinridge is a cinematic dumpster fire for the ages, but one that is so audaciously bad and fascinating in its misfired creative decisions that it goes beyond star ratings or even the dichotomy of good/bad. It is more akin to Cats or Mac and Me, films so unbelievably terrible that you could argue for their status as totems of unintentional high art by failing so outlandishly that they come around the other side. Anyway, a 70-something West puts it down on a young (and ridiculously hot) Tom Selleck so that he walks out of her office looking like she just fucked his brains into another galaxy, and you must respect her audacity for even dreaming it up.
Speaking of respecting her audacity for dreaming something up, Sextette, her 1978 musical-comedy about West’s starlet achieving world peace or something. The whole thing is so beyond comprehension from the germination of the idea to its final execution that your brain has a hard time registering the ridiculousness on display. Here is a film where a very young and improbably handsome Timothy Dalton (who has aged like the finest of wines, but that’s another discussion entirely) croons “Love Will Keep Us Together” to an 84-year-old Mae West and presents her a diamond bracelet while doing so. I told you, handsome men get her hot, but diamonds get her hotter.
Also, along for the ride are Ringo Starr, Tony Curtis, Alice Cooper, Keith Moon, Dom DeLuise, and George Hamilton as various people orbiting West’s life. Mainly as ex-husbands who are still involved with her life either as a director, costume designer, or a Russian delegate. Much like Myra Breckinridge, Sextette must be seen to be believed, but unlike that film, this one understands its status and value as a kitsch object, and it goes down much smoother.
The entirety of the film is like a totem to West’s persona, a self-penned love letter that does not update or redefine her persona for a more permissive era, but merely seems to present it untethered from any outside context. After all, there is a scene where she tries on a variety of gowns and drawls out a saucy punchline after each, with “I’m the girl that works at Paramount all day, and Fox all night” being the best. Read it aloud and try not to giggle like I did hearing West slowly unfurl it. Yet there is something a little sad about watching a clearly infirm West take tentative steps and deliver her lines in a manner that suggests she has lost some of her ability to pitch them.
There is even a certain circular sweetness to the film as West brought along George Raft for a quick cameo. Essentially playing himself, Raft and West trade some gentle, friendly banter before he quicky leaves the film. This would be the final screen appearance for the two forever binding their cinematic lives in a way.
The major reoccurring joke of the film, beside West being oft married and her current husband running into her past ones is their inability to complete their wedding night rituals. Always one to provide a bon mott that was as shapely as her figure, she describes marriage as being a like a book, “the whole story takes place between the covers.” No wonder gay men, and practically no one else, openly embraced this and turned it into a minor camp classic.
In fact, this final film reminded me of another famous movie star’s curiously inert and a must-see of bad movie curios, Lucille Ball’s Mame. That was also another example of a persona and material that seemed like a perfect match, but it never did quite take off as the star had aged beyond their ability to successfully pull it off. It was treading water on a benchmark that had long since passed. Although, Sextette is a more fun watch as it seems to know and acknowledge that its loopy, campy, and outdated in the same measure as it is a bit of star egomania.
I am not quite sure any other major movie star of her impact has as anemic a body of work as she does. Her legacy and importance are not from her range as an actress, or from a series of classic films, but from her still potent sense of playfulness, sexual domineering, and sayings. She remains essential simply because she was a blueprint that no one else has quite mastered, equaled, bettered, or met. Sure, the likes of Bette Midler and fictional maneaters like Blanche Devereaux are obviously indebted, but they do not quite match the strut of her sardonicism.
West’s appeal is in how she displayed a performative type of femininity that preceded women’s liberation, queer liberation, and more permissive views of sexuality and self-expression. Yes, she was basically a female drag queen by edging her hips swivels with a masculine power and coming out on top throughout her films. Her vulgarity was delivered with brains, and a more than healthy touch of arrogance.
Or, as she said, “brains are an asset to the girl who’s
smart enough to hide them.” There you have it, not only the fulcrum of her body
of work, but the sex wars melted down to their pivot point. Mae West was not
just a celebrity built from scandal, censorship, controversy, and
self-promotion, but a sociological figure that presented a running commentary
on female victimhood, subjugation, purity, and how to upend them.
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