Of all performers of the 1930's, she is generally credited as bringing about censorship. For that, to some she was probably regarded as a heroine but not to others. She was undeniably a liberated woman, flouting convention and at the same time turning the lights on in the bedroom.
She was more like a dancehall queen with her movies looking like filmed vaudeville acts. Vaudeville, in fact, is where she got her starry start. She was not particularly educated but she had an insatiable need for attention and she began performing in early childhood. She was always known to have written her own material and she only had one thing to write about... sex. For all her talk of sex, I found her to always be rather remarkably unsexy.
She was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1893 to a father she could never stand, who was a former prizefighter. He later took about any job he could get including a stint as a private eye. She was a mama's girl through and through and her mother, who wanted to be an actress, thought anything her little girl did was fantastic. By five years old, Mae was appearing in church events (shocking!) and then gave amateur performances around town. By 14 she was a vaudeville performer known as The Baby Vamp. She worked on Broadway and in various revues for several years, often appearing in blackface and cross-dressing. She acquired quite a following.
In 1911, at age 17, she married a fellow vaudeville performer, Frank Wallace, and although they were legally married for 31 years, they only lived together for mere weeks. She would have several long-term relationships in her life but this was her only marriage.
She was encouraged to work more and more by nearly everyone she knew, especially her mother. She loved the attention she got over her risqué side and she decided to capitalize on it by writing her own material. She decided to write a play. In 1926 she wrote, produced, directed and starred in Sex and was promptly arrested and thrown in jail for 10 days. The charge was corrupting the morals of our youths.
Two years later she was a sensation on Broadway in her newest creation, Diamond Lil. It would be the role (and the name) most associated with her live performances but she wrote more plays. The Drag which dealt with gays, never opened because the law and the clergy were upset over the subject matter. Others that did make it on stage, all with some notoriety, were The Wicked Age, Pleasure Man and The Constant Sinner.
She was famous and scandalous in the east and by 1932 the west wanted West. Paramount Pictures came calling and decided she was just what they were looking for. It was true that the studio was into promoting sex in their productions, but it was more fluffy, romantic comedies. That's different from West's sex comedies but they wanted her.
She began her movie career at age 38 with actor George Raft and her final movie was with him as well. He would also pass away two days after she did. I can't imagine that they didn't enjoy a romantic relationship for awhile. Her first film, an unusual one in her catalog, because she wasn't the focal point, is Night After Night (1932). She didn't attempt to rewrite the entire script but she did rework many of her own lines. She is dripping in diamonds as a gangster's moll and it would seem she had a hand in writing this: Goodness, what beautiful diamonds says a hatcheck girl. West says (and you can just hear her) goodness has nothing to do with it, Dearie.
I've always been fascinated with movie casts... who has great chemistry together, who doesn't, teams and other re-pairings and so on. Something fascinating about West is how, except for Raft, most of her costars are hardly the matinee idol types. There are character actors as her male leads, overweight comedy stars, nebbish types... not a he-man among them. I guess plots involving an over-accessorized glamour queen with a nerd are just funny stuff, eh?
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| With Cary Grant... |
When she did get a handsome, matinee idol type, he would be gay (or bi, if you prefer). Real-life boyfriends Cary Grant and Randolph Scott were her two best costars. Scott worked with her in Go West Young Man (1936), actually one of her better scripts, and she worked with Grant twice in 1933... first She Done Him Wrong (a reworking of her Diamond Lil character) and then I'm No Angel. There has never been any question that West liked gay men and they liked her. Grant, however, used to get annoyed when West claimed she discovered him.
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| ... and Randolph Scott |
Paramount was gaga over the money her pictures were bringing in but there was that pesky other issue... West had to be in charge. She was tough and shrewd. Occasionally they wanted her to broaden her talents but she would have none of it. Usually that dynamic works the other way around. Paramount attracted actresses who were control freaks... Jeanette MacDonald, Marlene Dietrich, Claudette Colbert, Paulette Goddard, Veronica Lake, Betty Hutton... but they were all sophomores compared to West. None of them wrote, produced, directed and starred in their own films.
What, of course, these women had over West is that they could act. Occasionally a director, usually in charge of the day-to-day making of a film, would try to coax a richer performance out of her with no payoff. She, in turn, kept her eagle eye on her directors at all times unless she wasn't on camera, which wasn't often. In 1936 she was the highest-paid actress in the country.
Her other films of the 1930's were Belle of the 90's, Goin' to Town, Klondike Annie and Everyday's a Holiday. All were successes because she seemed to tear the top right off the Depression and bring folks some saucy happiness for 80 minutes. Paramount knew she was a goldmine but after censorship arrived, she was shackled. Again, most goldmines would change their ways and make different kinds of films, but not Diamond Lil. After two more films, she would take her act on the road.
West took three years off from movie-making which coincided with her Paramount contract running out. She would not return to her home studio. She made two more films in quick succession... the first of those, at Universal... is her most famous film, My Little Chickadee. It seems to be a TV staple.
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| The studio must have drugged them to get this photo |
It may be a comedy but its behind-the-scenes tales are pure drama and the stuff of Hollywood legend. West and costar W. C. Fields loathed one another and it never changed. She wrote the script and was irritated when Fields wrote some of his own dialogue, mainly in an attempt to muscle his way into more screen time. She obviously ignored the fact that she did the same in her first film. Contractually, he was not to drink, on screen or off, throughout making the film. Whether that actually happened or not, he was bitter and angry, focusing his wrath on her. They traded insults often and he got so mad at one point, and with a third of the film to finish, Fields walked off the picture and never returned. While some of their onscreen bantering hit an occasional high note, it was not a particularly good movie and the plot is no different or better than any of her films. It must have annoyed her that he received more kudos for the film than she does.
During WWII she gathered more fame in an unusual but pleasing manner to her when U.S. Army and Navy pilots and crewmen named their inflatable life vests after two of West's most obvious assets.
At Columbia she made the last film she would make for 27 years, The Heat Is On (1943) which, again, is much like every film she ever made but just a tad worse. West had a memorable scene here and there but thing had gotten kind of stale by now and she knew it. How long can anyone sustain a career on one-liners?
Well, she was certainly going to do her best. Her mission now was to polish her fame and keep it alive. She would do it with recordings and stage shows which, of course, would concentrate on her singing. I have not specifically mentioned that she sang in her movies. It was more like talking and songs were often interrupted for a bawdy comment. Frankly, her singing didn't indicate any more of a talent than her acting did.
Audiences would come to see her in Las Vegas or supper clubs more for her iconic status than anything so to pique public interest, she included something she knew a little about... musclemen. There was always a muscleman around. Actress Mariska Hargitay's father, Mickey, was once in West's employ.
Some of her buddies took on extra duties like working around her spacious apartment in the Ravenswood on North Rossmore, near Beverly Hills... things like opening her mail or her door, cooking, cleaning, chauffeuring, bodyguard and all other duties, as required. She moved into Ravenswood in the 1930's and she died there. One day the management would not let her new hunky, black boyfriend in the building so West bought it. There were many upcoming years when one rarely heard about her, but then there would come some little teaser such as West doing some squats while hanging on to some hunk's biceps.
She took her show to London, did a little television, including a 1958 stint on the Oscars in which she and a highly-amused Rock Hudson sang Baby, It's Cold Outside. It was fun.
There was always talk of her being a man in real life. It probably in part stemmed from the old days when she performed as a cross-dresser but gathered steam over the years as she looked more and more like she had a night off from Madame Tussaud's. Not a lot of people knew or remembered that Paramount costumer, Edith Head, said that she had dressed West for years, seen her in various stages of undress, and could confirm she was all woman.
Certainly West's likeness was captured in a few comics' cross-dressing routines. They were so good at being Mae that she and two of them could have been on TV's To Tell the Truth and no one would have guessed which one was the real Mae. Her persona was so recognized and fun to imitate that in later years Bette Midler, Dolly Parton and others would claim a part of Mae.
It's been said she turned down the Gloria Swanson role in 1950's Sunset Blvd. and the Barbara Stanwyck role in Elvis Presley's 1964 Roustabout. What must be some press agent's messed up dream is that Federico Fellini offered her roles in Juliet of the Spirits (1965) and Satyricon (1969). That could have brought an end to Italian movies.
She should have turned down her two final films. Both were beyond horrible and either could have shown up on a list of the worst movies ever made. They did get her back before new audiences and aid in firing up that fame again and unlike what would have been required in the films she turned down, she didn't have to act.
I hardly know what to say about the plot of Myra Breckinridge (1970). It dealt with a sex change where another non-actor, critic Rex Reed, turned into Raquel Welch, not much of an actress herself in those days. What was actor-director, John Huston doing in this pitiful excuse for a movie? He must have needed money for upkeep at his Irish castle. West was top-billed but her role was little more than a cameo with her doing her usual S&M and
witty little one-liners. The two leading ladies were so highly combustible that their antics reached news coverage around the world.
Sextette (1978) is so bad that every copy should be burned. If you haven't seen it... don't. I have no question this is the best advice I've ever offered you. Not convinced? Here's the plot... a former movie sex symbol (guess who?) on the day of her sixth wedding is asked to intervene in a dispute between two nations. Sound good? Plausible? Fun? Well, Vincent Canby in his New York Times review said it all when he crowed it is a terrifying reminder of how a virtually disembodied ego can survive total physical decay and loss of common sense. (The story was broadened from an old play West wrote.)
There was no way that West could carry a film on her own in 1978 so they rounded up an odd collection of actors to help with the lunacy... future James Bond, Timothy Dalton, as husband #6, along with Tony Curtis, Dom DeLuise, Ringo Starr, George Hamilton, Alice Cooper, Keith Moon, Regis Philbin and the aforementioned George Raft. Apparently, Steve McQueen, Jane Fonda and Jimmy Stewart were busy... or hiding.
Of course, Sextette rings hollow from start to finish... artificial, contrived and embarrassing. Watching and hearing an 85-year old woman do no more than fire off sexual innuendos is just a bit discomforting.
I've probably never been so ruthless with a film since starting this blog but it's so deserving. I suppose it's too late to ask my favorite studio for my money back.
Two years later, in 1980, she died from complications from strokes at her beloved Ravenswood. It's likely a muscleman or two were in attendance.
I never felt there was anything real about her... not in her films nor in interviews. It was always a performance. I have recognized her iconic status. She was daring in her day. For men, she was just pure S-E-X and women, probably appalled at first, came to admire her irreverent cockiness. A tour-de-force behind the scenes, she had no discernible talent as a performer other than a knack for being flashy and risqué. In her 12 movies, she never seemed to connect with anyone emotionally. I thought in scenes with others she appeared as though she was in a trance and furthermore that someone was offstage feeding her lines.
Her legend, her place in Hollywood history, has more to do with fame. Why learn to be a better actress and singer when doing a lot less still brings the dizzy heights of fame? She remains more famous than others in her day who had far more talent. Diamond Lil, who always craved attention, would be pleased.
It's better to be looked over than overlooked.
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