On this day in 1980, actress and writer Mae West dies at the age of 88
Matthew Kruk
http://www.hollywoodoutbreak.com/2009/11/22/on-this-day-in-show-biz-mae-west-dies/
On this day in 1980, actress and writer Mae West dies at the age of 88.
West was born in Brooklyn in 1892. She began performing in vaudeville
shows in early childhood and soon graduated to Broadway shows. She began
writing her own material and in 1926 produced her own play, Sex, about a
gigolo. West was arrested and spent 10 days in jail for obscenity.
Undaunted, she continued writing racy plays and battling censors for the
next two years, until she finally scored a Broadway success with her
1928 play, Diamond Lil. West went on to become a Hollywood star and one
of the most highly paid women in the United States. She continued to
taunt censors with the heavily suggestive dialogue she wrote for
herself. Audiences loved her witty wordplay and campy innuendoes. Her
films included She Done Him Wrong (1933), Go West, Young Man (1936), and
My Little Chickadee (1940). After the early 1940s, West's film career
faded, and she returned to the stage with live touring shows and
nightclub acts. In 1959, she published an autobiography. She appeared in
two more films, Myra Breckinridge (1970) and Sextette (1978), before she
died.
Larc
Mae once said that when she died something would come out about her that would
shock the world. There was a lot of speculation at the time about what it could
be, but to my knowledge nothing has ever surfaced that fits. Maybe she was just
creating buzz. She loved doing that.
There has probably never been a film star who devised as much dialog "on the
fly" as Mae did. When the cameras started rolling, even the director often had
no idea what she'd say next. Some of her greatest lines were ad libbed.
Larc
Magnus
>
> There has probably never been a film star who devised as much dialog "on the
> fly" as Mae did. When the cameras started rolling, even the director often had
> no idea what she'd say next. Some of her greatest lines were ad libbed.
And as she was winging her way toward Heaven, she said, with a
trademark roll of the eyes, "Come up and see me sometime."
Loved Mae--a very, very funny lady.
Magnus
Larc
wrote:
"I'm the lady who works at Paramount all day... and Fox all night."
Larc
Bill Schenley
Who Burlesqued Sex, Dies At 87
Photo: http://racehogan.homestead.com/files/Mae_West-1-A.gif
FROM: The New York Times
(November 23rd 1980) ~
Special to the Times
Mae West, the Diamond Lil of filmdom, died at 7:00
this morning at her home in Los Angeles. She was 87
years old.
Her death was confirmed by the Los Angeles County
Police Department, which said she died apparently of
natural causes in the wake of a stroke she suffered
three months ago.
Miss West's body will be shipped back Tuesday to
her birthplace, Brooklyn. She is to be buried in the
same cemetery where her mother, father and brother
are buried, in one of the five crypts she bought when
her mother died in 1930. A younger sister survives
her.
According to Stanley Musgrove, her longtime friend
and former manager, Miss West became ill this
morning. A doctor who was called by Paul Novak,
her companion for the last 26 years, informed him that
Miss West was dying. Although she was
a Presbyterian, Mr. Novak summoned a priest from
a Roman Catholic church a hundred yards away from
their Ravenswood apartment. Immediately after the
priest's blessing, she fell into a peaceful sleep,
according to Mr. Musgrove, and within five minutes
she was dead. Funeral arrangements are being made
by Mr. Novak, who met Miss West when he was
a member of her nightclub act. There will be a private,
invitational funeral service Tuesday morning at Forest
Lawn cemetery in Hollywood Hills.
Miss West's death occurred three weeks after
a three-month hospitalization for a mild stroke that
left her speech impaired. Two days ago,
Mr. Musgrove visited Miss West's apartment, where
Mr. Novak was enthusiastic about her progress,
although she had roundthe-clock nursing care. Her
condition was said to be complicated by the diabetes
from which she had suffered for the last 15 years.
Lighthearted Sex Goddess
Mae West stood as the epitome of playfully vulgar
sex in the United States, portraying the role of
a woman who made men slaver when she crossed
a room in her sinuous walk.
Dressing in skin-tight gowns, bedecking herself
in jewels, maintaining an impeccable blondness
and offering innuendos in a sultry voice, Miss West
posed as a small-town Lothario's dream of sexual
abandonment in Sodom and Gomorrah.
Her heyday spanned the 1920's and 30's when as
Diamond Lil she devised her own legend in films,
on stage, in nightclubs and on records, not only
performing, but also writing much of her own
material. She continued acting on into the 70's, and
in a career stretching over six decades she became
a millionaire.
''It isn't what I do, but how I do it,'' she said.
''It isn't what I say, but how I say it, and how I look
when I do it and say it.'' Her invariable role
borrowed heavily from the popular conception of
a strumpet of the Gay Nineties. She swathed her
petite, hourglass figure in garish furs and gowns, and
she sashayed on five-inch stiletto heels; she purred
witticisms that evoked both the atmosphere of the
bawdyhouse and the raucous laughter of the
honky-tonk.
Vanity Fair magazine was right in calling Miss West
''the greatest female impersonator of all time.'' It was
a remark passed without malice because the actress,
although flamboyant, was bascially sedate, neither
smoking nor drinking.
Some Memorable Lines
Some of the actress's lines have entered the
American vocabulary. In the mid-30's, her suggestive
invitation to ''come up 'n' see me sometime'' became
the most-repeated phrase of the day. ''Peel me a grape,''
another utterance that hinted at sybaritic sex, was
almost as frequently imitated.
Other memorable Mae West lines included: ''Too
much of a good thing can be wonderful.'' ''I'm not
good and tired, just tired.'' ''When a girl goes bad, men
go right after her.'' ''It's hard to be funny when you
have to be clean.'' ''It's better to be looked over than
overlooked.'' ''Between two evils I always pick the one
I never tried before.'' ''I generally avoid temptation
unless I can't resist it.'' ''The man I don't like doesn't
exist.'' During World War II, Miss West's name was
applied to various pieces of military equipment and
was thus listed in Webster's New International
Dictionary, Second Edition. The Royal Air Force
named its inflatable life jackets ''Mae Wests'' and
United States Army soldiers referred to twin-turreted
combat tanks as ''Mae Wests.''
Made Debut in Brooklyn
Miss West was born in Brooklyn on Aug. 17, 1893,
and by 1900 made her first stage appearance. She
was the first of three children of John Patrick West,
an occasional prizefighter and livery-stable owner,
and Matilda Delker Doelger, who had been a corset
and fashion model. The blond Mae took dancing
lessons and then participated in the first of many
amateur-night performances at the Ro yal Theater
on Fulton Street in Brooklyn. Wearing a pink and
green satin dress with gold spangles, she sang and
danced ''Movin' D ay'' with what she latercalled
''innocent brazenness'' and won first prize.
Within a year, she had worked her way into Hal
Clarendon's stock company, and from the ages
of 8 to 11 played such roles as the moonshiner's
daughter, Little Nell, and the child who stepped
through swinging saloon doors looking for a drunken
father.
Little attention was paid to her schooling;
occasional private tutoring ended when she went
onto the vaudeville circuit at 13. Determined to
become as big a star as Sarah Bernhardt and Nora
Bayes, she teamed onstage with William Hogan, an
actor and family friend.
On the same bill was Frank Wallace,
a song-and-dance man. They worked out what
Miss West later described as a ''very flashy act
- loud opening, chic costumes, patter, comic love
song ('I Love It') and a good get-off.''
The young entertainers were secretly married on
April 11, 1911, in Milwaukee. Miss West then
developed a single act, helped Mr. Wallace find
a job with a show that was going on the road for
40 weeks, and thus informally dissolved both her
professional and conjugal unions.
Show-Stopper in Revue
By September of that year, Miss West was
a show-stopper in her first major theatrical revue,
''A La Broadway and Hello Paris,'' doing a song and
dance titled ''They Are Irish,'' in which she was
backed by an ensemble of 24.
Secretly, during rehearsals, she had written extra
choruses in various dialects for her production
numbers. On opening night, she was called back for
seven encores and stunned the producers by having
a new verse ready for each.
Two months later, Miss West appeared with
Al Jolson in a Shubert show, ''Very Violetta.'' After
these successes, she returned to vaudeville as a star.
When she reached New Haven with her new act, the
Mae West style that had been evolving caused an
interruption in the tour. As a newspaper headline put it:
''Her Wriggles Cost Mae West Her Job. ''Disturbed by
her ''curves in motion,'' the management discharged
Miss West. Disappointed Yale students then rioted and
wrecked the theater.
Miss West changed her act as often as she changed
her costumes. However, the essential ingredients
remained constant: a swaying, sin-promising strut;
a nonchalant and lazy delivery of lines, breaking every
word into as many syllables as possible and accenting
each one (''fas-cin-a-tin' ''); the simultaneous caress of
her undulating hip with one hand and her chiseled blond
hair with the other; and arrogant gestures, one of the best
known of which was the impatient kick with which she
flipped aside the train of her gown.
Playing opposite Ed Wynn in Arthur Hammerstein's
''Sometime,'' with music by Rudolf Friml, Miss West
introduced the shimmy to the Broadway stage in 1918.
In the shimmy, there was hardly any movement of the
feet, but continuous movement of the shoulders, torso
and pelvis. She had seen the dance at black cafes in
Chicago.
After World War I, Miss West developed a nightclub
act, and with Harry Richman as her pianist and
straight man, took it on the road before turning to
playwriting.
85 Attended Her First Play
''I only knew two rules of playwriting,'' Miss West
said. ''Write about what you know, and make it
entertaining. So that's why I wrote it the way I did,
on a subject I was interested in - sex.'' And ''Sex'' was
finally selected as the name of the play, which was
produced by Miss West, her mother and James
Timony, a lawyer who became her manager and
long-time associate.
''Sex'' opened in New London, Conn., before an
audience of 85 people, but by the second performance
the men from the naval base had assured the play's
financial success. When it opened in New York in
April 1926, with Miss West as its star, the play's
notoriety had preceded it, and it played to a full
house despite the refusal of New York newspapers
to carry advertisements for it. They did review it,
however. ''A crude, inept play, cheaply produced and
poorly acted - that, in substance, is 'Sex,' '' The Times
critic said.
Miss West soon thereafter became the target of
a campaign instigated by the Society for the
Suppression of Vice. In the 41st week of
performances of ''Sex,'' Miss West and 20 other
members of the cast were arrested in the theater. After
a jury trial, she was found guilty of a performance that
''tended to corrupt the morals of youth and others''
and was fined $500 and sentenced to 10 days in
prison.
In October 1928, the entire cast of her play
''The Pleasure Man'' was arrested onstage during the
first performance. After a second raid two days later,
the play closed. In court, it was decided that the show
was ''not basically an immoral performance,'' but Miss
West chose not to reopen it.
Mae West and diamonds were almost synonymous
even before the creation of her most memorable
character, Diamond Lil. ''I hadn't started out to collect
diamonds, '' she said, ''but somehow they piled up on
me.'' The onstage Diamond Lil was a singer in a Bowery
saloon of the 1890's - a bad girl with a good heart, who
murdered her girlfriend, wrecked a Salvation Army hall
and sang ''Frankie and Johnny.''
The play opened in Brooklyn in April 1928, and Robert
Garland, drama critic of The New York Evening
Telegram, said that ''it's worth swimming to Brooklyn to
see her descend those dance hall stairs and be present
while she lolls in a golden bed reading The Police
Gazette.'' ''Diamond Lil'' ran for 323 performances in
New York and then went on tour.
First Movie in 1932
In 1932, two years after ''Diamond Lil'' played in
Los Angeles, Miss West was back in Hollywood to
make her first movie - ''Night After Night,'' George
Raft's first starring picture. William LeBaron, the
producer, gave her permission to rewrite her own role.
Miss West described her most notable addition to the
scenario as follows:
''On screen I walked into George Raft's fashionable
clipjoint, and the checkroom girl took one look at all
the diamonds I was wearing and exclaimed,
'Goodness, what beautiful diamonds!'
'' 'Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie,'
I replied.'' Miss West went on to make motion-picture
history with ''She Done Him Wrong,'' the film version
of ''Diamond Lil,'' and ''I'm No Angel,'' both of which
were made in 1933.
For the first time, Miss West selected as the male
lead a ''sensational-looking young man'' whom she
spotted walking along the studio street. ''If he can talk,''
she said, ''I'll take him.''
Having thus chosen an unknown actor named Cary
Grant, she starred him again in ''I'm No Angel.'' The film
was the most profitable picture produced during the
1933 season, according to The Motion Picture Herald,
and contributed to the $339,166.65 that Miss West earned
in 1934.
One Film With Fields
Although Miss West and W.C. Fields are frequently
associated in the public mind, they made only one film
together, ''My Little Chickadee'' (1940). Her other films
were ''Belle of the Nineties'' (1934), ''Goin' to Town''
(1935), ''Klondike Annie'' (1936), ''Go West, Young
Man'' (1936), ''Every Day's a Holiday'' (1938) and ''The
Heat's On'' (1943).
In one of her last Broadway appearances, Miss West
dramatized the story of Catherine the Great of Russia,
and surrounded herself with ''an imperial guard'' of
muscular young actors, all over 6 feet tall. ''Catherine
Was Great,'' produced by the late Mike Todd, opened
in New York in 1944, and went on a long national tour
in 1945.
Her autobiography, ''Goodness Had Nothing to Do
With It,'' was published by Prentice-Hall in 1959. In
1967, Joseph Weintraub's illustrated collection, ''The Wit
and Wisdom of Mae West,'' was published by G.P.
Putnam's Sons.
---
Photo: http://www.divasthesite.com/images2/Mae_West.JPG
---
The Sublime Miss West; Mae West, Mae West;
Epitaph For An American Sex Symbol
FROM: The Washington Post
(November 24th 1980) ~
By Kenneth Turan
Seeing Mae West, who died Saturday, was always
like gaining entrance to a small private art collection.
Many sought that particular shrine, but few were Chosen,
and the rules three years ago were very strict. Miss West
would be available between 3 and 4 p.m., no cameras,
no tape recorders, no nonsense. Period.
She lived in the Ravenswood apartment complex,
a vestige of old Hollywood that managed an air of
elegance even though old women with curlers tended
to wander through the lobby.
Her living room was all white with gold trim. Tiny bar
bells sat at the foot of a white grand piano that
supported a nude Mae West statue as well as
a personally autographed "best wishes from an
admirer" photo from Jimmy Carter. A nude painting of
her was on the wall, and other, full-clothed photographs
dotted the room. The whiteness was dizzying.
Paul Novak, the protector, a friendly, bearlike man with
the soft handshake of the very strong, a veteran of Mae
West's muscleman show, and for more than 20 years
her bodyguard and confidant, was the first to enter.
His bulky sportscoat, blue shirt buttoned to the tippy
top and yellow ankle socks clashed fiercely with the
room's decor, but his devotion to Mae West was almost
a physical presence. Novak knew her stories, her lines,
her very history, better than she did herself, and had
a tendency to prompt her when he feared she needed it.
Mae West did not so much enter the room as bounce
in, almost demure in a white pantsuit and matching
platform shoes, on her right hand a 22-carat diamond the
size of a walnut. The woman who liked more men than
Will Rogers, whom George Jean Nathan called "The
Statue of Libido," the world's oldest sex symbol,
arrived.
Her looks were unsettling, a baffling combination of
youth and age. Her face was heavily made up, totally
masking its condition, but the skin on her neck and
hands was extraordinarily smooth, as wrinkle free
as an infant's. "I have my own teeth, all of them, and
they're all good," she said, nimbly running her tongue
over them. "I don't drink and I don't smoke, those things
tear you down. I'm careful what I eat and I only drink
bottled Poland water." Still, if she did not look 85, (what
she was officially claiming at that time) she hardly looked
35 either.
What was most surprising about Mae West was what
a jolly little person she turned out to be, possessed of
a kind of cherry, hang-loose liveliness, oddly reminiscent
of TV's Molly Goldberg, of all people.
"I always have a good time, there's no reason not to
have a good time," she said, suprised that anyone might
think otherwise. "Take crying. A lot of women cry all the
time, but you never see me crying. Come to think of it,
I never have anything to cry about."
One looked in vain, then, for quips from Mae West for
the kind of saucy double-entendre lines like, "It's not the
men in my life, but the life in my men," and, "I used to
be Snow White, but I drifted," that made her the
highest-paid woman in America in 1935, with a two-year,
$300,000 contract. Though she at one point did say
knowingly, "I know what I want to do and I do it," the
good lines no longer seemed to come easily.
One topic, however, gave her no trouble: herself.
Mae West was crazy about Mae West, but in such an
off-handed, easy-going, egotistical way that the total
effect was charming rather than otherwise.
"I don't like myself, I'm crazy about myself," she said
with a big chuckle. "A person would have to be crazy
about themselves to do what I've done and keep doing
it. As long as I can remember, I was concentrating on
myself. Even when I was a kid I used to write my name
big and visualize it in lights. I worried that 'Mae' looked
like 'Mac.' I worried about that.
"My bedroom," she went on, chuckling again, "has
mirrors on the ceiling, I think that's why I don't change,
I'm always thinking about myself. It's all those years of
having to look at myself and see what I'm going to do."
Her career in vaudeville, theater and film went back
practically to the turn of the century, encompassing
everyone from W.C. Fields -- "He was like a baby," to
Farrah Fawcett, who appeared with her in "Myra
Breckinridge."
Much clearer and saucier were her memories of Cary
Grant, whom she hand-picked in 1933 to be her co-star
in "She Done Him Wrong."
"I was in an office and I saw him passing outside the
window, just going along, and I said, 'This is the
best-lookin' guy in Hollywood. If he can talk, I'll take
him,'" she said, grinning at her impudence. "I can still see
those guys snapping their fingers, saying, 'That's . . . that's
. . . . ' They couldn't even remember his name."
"Oh, fan mail, oh, my God," she said in mock
exasperation, obviously enormously pleased. "Those
young kids, they're crazy about me, they write and say,
'My grandmother was crazy about you.' Three or four
generations I got. When I'm out in my car these kids pull
up, they look over, they wave and they scream."
If that enthusiasm, that jocular good humor, made
talking to Mae West not as spooky as it might have been,
if age did sit lightly on her, it was there nevertheless.
At times, she seemed to wind down into silence, to drift in
and out, and she could not remember things like the names
of films she'd seen recently. But where the distant past
was concerned, the events of her childhood, they came
unbidden to her lips with a wonderful clarity.
She remembered fighting for the spotlight on stage when
she was no more than 6 or 7, she remembered all the
words to songs she sang, like "Marie, She Makea the
Hooch-Mi-Kooch Down at Coney Isle" -- and sang
them to prove it -- but most of all, she remembered Mama.
"Oh, I loved my mother," she said, smiling. "She
always dressed me up with my hair all curled and short
with big satin bows. She'd always buy good wide ribbon,
the kind that made good bows. I'd go with her and pick
out what I wanted, pink and blue. And then I'd look at
myself in the mirrors. I'd spend maybe five minutes at each
mirror, and that's a long time. And I wouldn't carry
a bundle unless it was a tiny little bag. 'I can't carry that
big bundle,' I'd say, and she'd say, 'It's not heavy,' but I'd
answer, 'But it doesn't look good.'" Another smile.
The link between Mae West then and Mae West of the
later years was a simple one: an almost obsessive
concern with work. "I'm always doing something, I'm
always building, building, building," she said at one point,
adding later, "I'm always thinking what to do. I can't
afford to sit back and enjoy what I've done, I have to
keep doing, keep being keyed up about what I'm going to
do next."
So Mae West never stopped being Mae West,
basically because she couldn't stop, because just being
Herself was a full-time occupation that became inseparable
from her very life. And let us not forget, after all, that being
Mae West was very good for Mae West. The lady
herself had never forgotten.
"I've got everything, fame, beauty, what I could wish
for," she said, puzzled when asked if there was anything
missing in her life. "Gee," she added, smiling after a little
thought, "that sounds very hoggish of me. Well, I hope
I keep it all."
---
Photos: http://www.mutoworld.com/OtherArt/MW5.jpg
http://hollywoodimagesusa.com/Mae_West.jpg
http://www.officiallylucy.com/images/Mae%20West.jpg
http://www.famous-autographs.it/Grafica/Mae_West/Mae_West_grande.jpg
http://www.newthalianplayers.org/files/1944ComedyCanteen/06_WCFieldsA...
(w/W.C. Fields)
Mae West in art:
http://library.thinkquest.org/J002045F/Mae_West.jpg
http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4498/482/1600/Mae_West_art_Sex.jpeg
http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/swann/stagestruck/images/00773r.jpg
http://www.alvarezwaxmodels.com/Images/Wax%20Images/mae-west.jpg
http://www.sentertainer.com/BalloonArtist/Poptraits/Mae_West_under_gl...
Matthew Kruk
news:hedgic$rdu$1...@news.eternal-september.org...
> Mae West, Stage And Movie Star
> Who Burlesqued Sex, Dies At 87
Thanks Bill!