Mae West: German Girl

This is the real MAE WEST — — a woman of passion, highly geared emotions, tense feelings, who has been forced over a period of years to feed those emotions to a box-office, wrote Ruth Biery in 1934. A greedy, wanting-to-be-shocked box-office. Urged gently at first, tempted cleverly, promoted subtly, Mae West has put all the force of her cyclonic nature into bringing the thrills of love and life to others.
• • Journalist Ruth Biery sat down with Mae in Hollywood — — not unlike the way she had sat down with Greta Garbo in the 1920s — — as a sympathetic listener who wrote mainly for movie magazines. "I have really loved only once," Mae has told me, as she has told others. But never before have I heard her say, "They always found a way to break me up with a man before it became too serious. I was not allowed to love, really love. My mother and then Timony — — "
• • Journalist Ruth Biery either was mild enough or persuasive enough to extract Mae's confidences. Or perhaps Mae was ready to confess: "You see, first it was my mother. If she thought I was falling in love, she'd stop it right like that. If I was liking a man too much or she thought a 'crush' was getting serious, she'd find a way. She knew me so well, she could always find a way. She wouldn't let me learn to love really. She wouldn't let me — — and now Timony protects me."
• • When little Mae was growing up, neighbors referred to her as "the German girl."
• • The daughter of Christiana and Jacob Delker, Matilda was born in December 1870 — — perhaps in Wurttemberg, Germany, speculates biographer Jill Watts, noting that Jacob Delker had been working there in a sugar refinery. In January 1889, 18-year-old Matilda Delker wed John West. However, she and her daughter Mae were really the love of each other's lives until Matilda died on 26 January 1930 at age 59. How terrifying it was for Mae during the winter of 1929, watching her mother's illness worsen. After Matilda died, Mae felt, "There wasn't anyone to play to."
• • "Courting Mae West" features interesting scenes dramatizing their relationship.
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Courting Mae West
Mae West
• • Photo: Mae West • • Matilda West • • 1927 • •
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Mae West.

Mae West: Over-Booked

While you may think MAE WEST passed from your life on 22 November 1980, the happy news is that authors are keeping the Empress of Sex very much alive.
• • Remember Charlotte Chandler — — whose second book, The Ultimate Seduction, included conversations with Mae West, Tennessee Williams, Henry Moore, and others? Well, Charlotte Chandler's newest book is She Always Knew How — — Mae West, a Personal Biography [NY: Simon & Schuster]; this hardcover will be released on 10 February 2009.
• • Charlotte Chandler is a member of the board of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and is active in film preservation. She lives in New York City — — and is currently finishing a book on Bette Davis.
• • On the West Coast, former film critic Kevin Thomas — — who enjoyed conversing with Mae for many years — — is busy doing a book about her.
• • On the East Coast, who is a native New Yorker — — as Mae West was — — is at work writing an illustrated book: Mae West's New York.
• • Mae West — — many individuals have said that to know her was to love her.
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Courting Mae West
Mae West
• • Photo: Mae West • • 1932 • •
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Mae West.

Mae West: November 1927

MAE WEST could not have been thrilled during November 1927. The New York Times planted a bitter raspberry with their review of her latest play (published on Saturday the 5th of November 1927). Written by Mae West, age 34, and her long-time collaborator, the production opened on Friday evening 4 November 1927 — — and lasted for merely nineteen performances. Mae West appeared in a bathing suit, a sight which brought out the spite and malice in her longtime detractors. In other words, this project was a turkey that never made it as far as Thanksgiving.
• • "THE WICKED AGE" TAME — —
• • Mae West Wins a Bathing Beauty Contest in Her New Play.
• • Although it is milder than "Sex" and will probably not cause Mr. Banton and the gendarmes to come on the run, Mae West's newest contribution to dramatic art, staged last night at Daly's Sixty-third Street Theatre, will doubtless stand as the low point of the theatrical season of 1927-28.
• • "The Wicked Age" is the name Miss West has given it, and according to its own admission it is a satirical comedy, in which case "Bringing Up Father" is simply mordant and biting irony. [Ouch!]
• • Dragging through the evening until nearly midnight, "The Wicked Age" seemed at its first New York performance incredible cheap and vulgar trash, with only such minor amusement as was to be derived from watching the exhibitionistic antics of Miss West as a faintly redeeming feature.
• • The bathing beauty contest as practiced along the Jersey Coast was the pressing sociological matter upon which the author-actress had her say.
• • This permitted her to introduce a contest scene in the second act in which, a blithe spirit of the younger generation, she captured first honors. The third act, up to 11:35, was devoted to . . .
— — Excerpt: — —
• • Drama Review: "The Wicked Age" Tame
• • Published in: The New York Times
• • Published on: 5 November 1927 — — Saturday
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
• • "Courting Mae West" is based on true events in the life of Mae West during the Prohibition Era. The first scene is set in a Greenwich Village speakeasy during December 1926; the finale is set in Hollywood during December 1932.
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Courting Mae West
Mae West
• • Photo: Mae West • • 1927 • •
NYC
Mae West.

Mae West: "Leading Ladies"

Beginning on Mondays at 8 PM, TCM will offer a 50-film tribute to Hollywood's leading ladies — — including MAE WEST — — that's meant to promote their new publication.
• • The final scene of the play "Courting Mae West" features Mae West in Hollywood in December 1932, where she is filming the screenplay that was based on her hit Broadway play.
• • TCM has also produced a book "Leading Ladies" to commemorate the fifty most compelling actresses of the studio era. Here's their selection on the Brooklyn bombshell herself, penned by TCM's Frank Miller.
• • "Men's all alike — — married or single — — I happen to be smart enough to play it their way." — — Mae West in She Done Him Wrong
• • Frank Miller writes: Mae West played at sex like a man. She used her partners for pleasure and, with most of them, discarded them as soon as she got bored. Though there was usually one leading man who was given exclusive rights to her by the film's conclusion, she was the one doing the giving, with the veiled suggestion that she could always withdraw her approval if things didn't work out. More than any innuendo, more than the tightly corseted gowns she generously overflowed, this was what excited the censors' ire. Not only did she treat sex as an act of pleasure without any undue consequences, but also her attitude exposed the unwritten code by which many men operated, even after they were married. Little wonder she was often credited as the woman who brought stricter censorship to Hollywood. She wasn't — — but as Pauline Kael once said, if she was, the delights she offered on screen more than made for the later depredations of censorship.
• • In the early 1930s, the major Hollywood studios gave lip service to the Production Code, a set of rules for what could and could not be done on screen enforced by Will Hays of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA). Originally, Paramount Pictures was very good about following the Code. They hadn't done much to follow the trend toward gangster films spearheaded by Little Caesar in 1931. But by 1932 the studio was running $21 million in the hole. By that time, there was a new genre challenging the censors, the sex film (also called "women's pictures"), which dealt with women who stray from the straight and narrow and pay for it tearfully by the film's end. Paramount had flirted with the genre with its early Marlene Dietrich films like Morocco (1930) and Blonde Venus (1932), but they mostly let the other studios blaze new sexual trails and reap the box office rewards, at least until Mae West showed up.
• • Mae West had been developing her act since the early days of the 20th century, when she sang bawdy songs in vaudeville, creating a delivery copied from the female impersonators of the day and night-club queen Texas Guinan. She'd scored some huge hits on Broadway, particularly with the controversial Diamond Lil, in which she played a saloon singer on The Bowery in the 1890s who sets out to seduce a Salvation Army officer. Universal Pictures had proposed bringing the play to the screen in 1930, when she toured it to Los Angeles. Hays issued a firm edict, however. The play was off limits, and when Universal suggested hiring West to write something new for them, he talked them out of it. Meanwhile, West fell on hard times when her follow-up play, The Constant Sinner, closed after only eight weeks. The 39-year-old sex star began to wonder if she wasn't over the hill.
• • Then old friend George Raft came to the rescue. There was a juicy part for an older woman playing his ex-girlfriend in Night After Night (1932) at Paramount. The studio wanted to cast Texas Guinan, but he talked them into giving West a chance. She almost turned the role down when she saw how poorly it was written. Instead, however, she got producer Harry Le Baron, another old friend, to agree to let her re-write her lines. Loading the script with comic innuendo, she, in Raft's words, "stole everything but the cameras." Exhibitors were clamoring for another film with Mae West, and Paramount decided to take a chance on bucking the censors.
• • When the studio approached her about making another film, she considered her options, then insisted on adapting Diamond Lil. Rather than buck Will Hays outright, they suggested changing the title and enough details to make it seem like a new story. But when Hays found out, he tried to shut the film down. Studio head Adolph Zukor made his case to Hays' New York board of directors, and won the concession that they could redo the script with a new title and new character names (Diamond Lil became Lady Lou). Other demands made by the Hays Office included making the leading man (Cary Grant) a mission worker with no specific affiliation to the Salvation Army and cutting overt references to prostitution. They also changed the nationality of West's female nemesis from Brazilian to Russian, since there was little market for U.S. films in the Soviet Union.
• • In some ways, Hays' demands actually improved the film. Screenwriter John Bright, who had scored a hit with The Public Enemy (1931), was assigned to collaborate on the screenplay, but he didn't click with West, and her script didn't impress him either. He thought it was a creaky old melodrama filled with cheap jokes and tried to make it more of a straight crime film. West hated his ideas, but had a battle getting the studio to side with her. Then one of Hays' associates suggested that the film might be more palatable if played for comedy. That was the excuse she needed to cut Bright's additions and return many of her laugh lines (eventually she had him replaced by Harvey Thew). When Hays suggested toning down references to Lou's past affairs, West added a maid character (played by Louise Beavers) who knew of her past so the two could discuss it in a series of veiled references.
• • Those references -- and West's ability to make even the most innocent lines sound risque - made the film a hit and made her one of the world's most quoted writers. Early in the film she describes herself as "one of the finest women ever walked the streets." When a young woman complains about losing her virtue, West quips, "When women go wrong, men go after them." One of the play's most controversial lines was part of her come on to the Salvation Army officer, "You can be had," which West repeated at the end when the two hooked up. Hays thought it was too raw, so West replaced the line's second appearance with a comic exchange. Grant chastises her with "You bad girl," to which she coyly replies, "You'll find out." Another line, however, only sounded racy in West's patented delivery — — the line where she tells Grant, "Why don't you come up some time, see me?"
• • She Done Him Wrong was a huge hit. Made for just $200,000, half of which went to West for writing and starring, it returned $2 million domestically on its initial release and another $1 million in international markets. That wasn't enough to pull Paramount out of the hole, but it raised studio morale and their image enough to help them edge back toward profitability. The film made West a household name and boosted the career of co-star Cary Grant, who was just starting in films. He would later claim that he learned most of what he knew about playing comedy from watching West at work.
• • She Done Him Wrong also changed fashions, bringing back the hourglass figure, and encouraged a run of films set in the 1890s. But there was also the inevitable backlash. West's suggestive song "I Like a Man That Takes his Time" was so heavily cut by censors that Paramount called back all release prints to cut the middle stanzas. Other lines were cut by local censors, and the film was banned outright in Java, Latvia, Australia, and Vienna. It also triggered renewed cries for national film censorship that led to the strengthening of the Production Code in 1934. That, in turn, would create even more battles for West and the censors, though they could do nothing to diminish the sexual independence of her characters. Even in the more liberated era of the '70s, West amazed audiences with her sexual forthrightness when she returned to filmmaking after decades off-screen for a small role as a predatory agent in Myra Breckinridge (1970).
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
• • She Done Him Wrong
• • Producer: William LeBaron
• • Director: Lowell Sherman
• • Screenplay: Mae West, Harvey Thew, John Bright
• • Based on the play Diamond Lil — — by Mae West
• • Cinematography: Charles Lang
• • Art Direction: Robert Usher
• • Music: Ralph Rainger
• • Principal Cast: Mae West (Lady Lou), Cary Grant (Capt. Cummings), Owen Moore (Chick Clark), Gilbert Roland (Serge Stanieff), Noah Beery, Sr. (Gus Jordan), Rafaela Ottiano (Russian Rita), Rochelle Hudson (Sally Glynn), Fuzzy Knight (Ragtime Kelly), Louise Beavers (Pearl).
BW — 65m. Closed captioning.
— — Source: — —
• • Byline: by Frank Miller
• • TCM — — www.tcm.com
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Courting Mae West
Mae West
• • Photo: Mae West • • 1932 • •
NYC
Mae West.

Mae West: Joseph V. McKee

When New York City's Mayor Jimmy Walker went out-of-town briefly, he left Joseph V. McKee in charge — — and his deputy's first act was to have three actresses arrested on 9 February 1927 and the third Broadway headliner was MAE WEST.
• • The raid and arrest in 1927 are dramatized in the play "Courting Mae West."
• • Since the month of November focuses on voting and going to the polls — — here's how we remember "Holy Joe" on 7 November 1933, when he was casting his ballot for himself on Morris Avenue in the borough of the Bronx. Fortunately, Fiorello LaGuardia won the mayoralty instead of this humorless would-be censor who wanted to scrub all the "dirt plays" off Broadway.
• • Bronx-born Roman Catholic Joseph V. McKee, Sr. [8 August 1889 — 28 January 1956] was originally a teacher at DeWitt Clinton High School and a lecturer in Latin and Greek at Fordham University. Eventually, he became a politically active Democrat.
• • Joseph McKee married Cornelia Kraft on 27 November 1918.
• • He served as a New York State Assemblyman for the 7th Assembly District (Bronx County) from 1918 — 1923, and was a Municipal Judge from 1924 — 1926. In 1926, he was tapped to serve as President of the New York City Board of Aldermen with James J. Walker as Mayor.
• • Joseph McKee was appointed Acting Mayor of New York City after the resignation of Mayor Walker on 1 September 1932.
• • On 31 October 1933, Samuel Seabury, chairman of the Fusion campaign committee, declared in an address from radio station WFAB that the voters had already determined to get rid of both Mayor O'Brien and Joseph V. McKee. Seabury called Mr. McKee the representative of a "sinister group" of Tammany leaders.
• • Though Mae West was not living in The Big Apple during November 1933, she was certainly relieved to hear that the man who made her spend the night in Jefferson Market Jail was finally ousted from City Hall.
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Courting Mae West
Mae West
• • Photo: Mae West's censor • • 1933 • •
NYC
Mae West.

Mae West: Lesbian Influence

MAE WEST, best known for her friendships with homosexuals and drag queens, also had gay women in her circle.
• • New Jersey native Marion Morgan [born on 4 January 1881] — — in the spotlight as a young dancer and then as a 34-year-old choreographer — — relocated to the West Coast. In 1930, she moved into the Hollywood Hills house owned by her lover, film director Dorothy Arzner. They lived openly together for over 40 years until Marion's death in 1971.
• • Morphing into a screenwriter, the very versatile and attractive Marion Morgan worked on the script for "Goin' to Town" [1935] and "Klondike Annie" [1936].
• • This career move was quite a change. Audiences and critics had known her because of the Marion Morgan Dancers, formed in 1915, which was originally comprised of six young women who had studied with Marion Morgan in California. The troupe specialized in ballets adapted from classical legends, such as 'Helen of Troy,' and usually danced in togas and bare feet.
• • In this photo, Arnold Genthe captures Marion Morgan as she glides across the stage, wearing a flowing costume and carrying a drum head.
• • Marion Morgan lived to be 90 years old. She died in the month of November — — on 10 November 1971 — — in Los Angeles, California.
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Courting Mae West
Mae West
• • Photo: Mae West • • screenwriter Marion Morgan • •
NYC
Mae West.