After reading this biography, you will learn that Mae West was much more than a Hollywood sex symbol, having written stage plays, screenplays, night club acts, and novels.
Mae West was born Mary Jane West on August 17, 1893 (“Mae West”). Her mother was a corset model and her father was a small-time boxer in Brooklyn. West’s mother put her in theatre at a young age and her father taught her weightlifting (Schlissel 3).
West went on the vaudeville circuit at sixteen years old (Schlissel 1), where she married Frank Wallace on April 11, 1911 (Schlissel 3-4). It is on the vaudeville circuits where West began her writing career. She even wrote “…encores to her songs because she was so sure audiences would call her back” (Schlissel 1).
In 1911, after returning to New York and ditching Wallace, West began getting small parts in musical revues (Schlissel 4). Determined to make her big break as a star, West began writing her own material. Her first play was, The Ruby Ring, written in 1921 (Schlissel 5). West became known for her “smart-mouthed quips” and her “flamboyant sexuality” (Schlissel 2). The language she used in her writing developed from speakeasies and her jokes were familiar ones in burlesque shows (Schlissel 8). Her plays also stirred debate over her sexual identity (Schlissel 2).
West’s first prominent play was Sex, premiering in 1926. Sex developed out of West’s decision to make her own version of the film, The Fleet’s In. For Sex, she added a character and changed the ending so that the prostitute was the heroine. In order to produce Sex, she borrowed money from her mother. The play was different from Broadway plays because she wrote about a prostitute having a happy ending (Schlissel 6). Though the play received very negative reviews from critics, audiences ignored them and Sexplayed to full houses. The play did very well financially as well, making $14,000 a week by the end of its first month and $16,000 a week by the end of its second month (Schlissel 10).
Due to its subject matter, Mae West, the cast, the theatre-owner, and the producers of Sex were indicted for producing a play that was “an obscene, indecent, immoral and impure drama” (Schlissel 15). The court said they would drop the charges against Sex if they would close the play, but West and the others refused. They were able to obtain a restraining order against police interference and Sex was able to continue, ending its run a week before its trial (Schlissel 15).
Norman Schloss, West’s attorney, “…compared Sex to A Tale of Two Cities, to Hamlet, and to the Bible. Timony [West’s producer] prayed over his rosary beads, Mae West wore black satin and pretended modest restraint” (Schlissel 15). The trial ended with West and Timony spending ten days in jail and each receiving a fine of $500 (Schlissel 15). West was not at all deterred by her ten-day jail sentence, arriving to the prison in a limousine, where she smiled for photographers and held an armload of white roses. After her release from prison, she donated the $1,000 she received from an interview to the women’s prison in order to establish the Mae West Memorial Library (Schlissel 16).
Though Sex was the play being prosecuted, West’s 1927 play, The Drag, was really the one under attack (Schlissel 14). In the 1920s and 1930s, New York society became fascinated by gay subculture (Schlissel 11). West’s The Drag, also referred to as a homosexual comedy, was meant to be a spectacle, with the play ending in a “drag ball” (Schlissel 12). When the play opened in New Jersey, the police ordered the audience out of the theatre (Schlissel 14). The Society for the Prevention of Vice in New York warned that if The Drag opened, they would “…move to censor all Broadway plays” (Schlissel 14). Despite a successful audience turnout, The Drag received bad reviews from critics.
West’s first good reviews did not come until she wrote Diamond Lil in 1928 (Schlissel 18). However, West was still drawn to The Drag, rewriting it in order to try and get around the censorships that surrounded theatre. One of the ways West did so was by changing the lead character from homosexual to heterosexual. The play that developed from the rewrites of The Drag was The Pleasure Man (Schlissel 18). [See my post, “The Pleasure Man Didn’t Please Everyone,” to learn more]. Out of all of West’s plays, she always returned to The Drag and The Pleasure Man. She revisited them in the 1970s, hoping to turn them into films (Schlissel 2), and in 1975 she turned The Pleasure Man into a novel and looked to take The Drag on tour (Schlissel 25).
In 1931, West tried her hand at one more play, but realized afterwards that if she wanted to make money, she had to turn to Hollywood (Schlissel 24). She received her first movie role when she starred in Paramount’s Night After Night, where she wrote some of her own dialogue and signature one-liners. In 1935, after four years in the film industry, she became the highest paid woman in the United States (Schlissel 24). West’s career was at its most successful from the 1920s through the 1930s (Johnson).
West’s career was not only riddled with controversy surrounding the content of her work, but she was also accused of plagiarism. In Schlissel’s introduction chapter, Schlissel says: “Writers who claimed she had stolen their work often pursued her in the courts, but she defended her claim” (Schlissel 1). West was convinced that even after she “borrowed a script…even the original idea had always been hers” (Schlissel 1-2). Though West’s plays provided many roles for gay actors, and she was clearly accepting of all sexualities, some critics accused her plays of being a “…cheap exploitation of the subject of homosexuality” (Schlissel 25).
West died on November 22, 1980, at the age of 87 (“Mae West”). She was definitely a writer and actress that “…pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in early Hollywood and American society at large” (Johnson).
February 10, 2019
Works Cited
Johnson, Katherine. “Mae West: More Than Meets the Eye.” ScIU, 26 Sept. 2018, blogs.iu.edu/aplaceforfilm/2018/09/26/mae-west-more-than-meets-the-eye/.
“Mae West.” Biography.com, A&E Networks Television, 2 Apr. 2014, www.biography.com/people/mae-west-9528264.
Schlissel, Lillian. Introduction. Three Plays: Sex, The Drag, The Pleasure Man, by Mae West, Routledge, 1997, pp. 1-29.
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