Belle of the nineties - movie star Mae West

Interview, May, 1997 by Emily Wortis Leider

Mae West made sex synonymous with her name, and in the process, provided the censors with a new target. In her new book, Emily Wortis Leider examines West's transformation from Brooklyn baby to American icon. Here's a sneak peek, plus a few words from another taboo-terrorizer, The Lady Bunny

Legendary "beauty" Mae West was actually a little too plump to work the flapper's boyish silhouette favored by her contemporaries, a reality she compensated for by setting many of her vehicles around the turn of the century. This enabled her to streamline her famed figure with heavily-boned corsets and platform shoes, the latter obscured by trains and fishtails adorning her floor-length gowns. Grand, oversized picture-hats and/or elaborate coiffures offset her chubby face (hey, maybe I should start sporting a Mae West look!). Of course the female ideal in the Gay '90s allowed for a bit more cleavage, and in her retro-garb Mae had little difficulty getting the world to buy her as a sassy sex goddess.

"America's Siren" had plenty of other tricks up her bejeweled sleeve. How's this for brilliant? In her later stage shows, she insisted on darkening the teeth of all the other women in order to add sparkle to her own smile (I've got to try that at Wigstock - Do you think RuPaul will go for it?). In her 1975 self-help manual, she recommends a beauty regimen of frequent enemas and indirect lighting. This girl had to know all about creating an alluring image, seeing as how she didn't shoot her first movie until she was almost forty (there's still hope, Lypsinka!).

Her final picture, Sextette (1978) is my fave. After a ten-minute disco buildup, Mae finally fills the screen as Marlo Manners, a fresh, virginal, white-clad bride - at the ripe young age of eighty-five! Her face has been pulled so taut that she can't quite close her mouth over her famous chompers - for that red-hot, octogenarian siren look. And, in one particularly taxing scene, which requires her to walk a few steps, she can't even lift her feet (those pesky platforms), So she improvises a clumsy slide-step. Apparently, not only was the old dear a tad confused about which direction to shuffle in, she also had difficulty remembering her trademark one-liners, so a radio transmitter that whispered little reminders had to be installed - inside her wig! Gee, maybe I should get fitted for one of those.

The following passage from Emily Wortis Leider's Becoming Mae West, to be published next month by Farrat, Straus and Giroux, details West's discipline and her drive for success. With her innate intelligence it didn't take long for this girl on the go to discover one of the founding principles of her popularity: nothing sells quite like sex. THE LADY BUNNY

. . . Mae West turned thirty in 1923, the year before Timony [West's manager and lover] acquired the rights to Following the Fleet. She was too old to be counted a genuine flapper, and too shapely, to boot. Career goals loomed larger in her life than they did in the lives of most flappers, anyhow. Pleasure counted for plenty, but it had to be shoehorned amid long hours devoted to rehearsing, writing, performing, visiting song publishers, and making rounds to the theaters. So long as she maintained this discipline, kept fit, shunned alcohol, saw her mother, kept appointments with the hairdresser, and got her beauty rest, she went after a good time. She saw herself as one who lived to the hilt: gulping rather than sipping life's brew: clandestine trysts, speeding sedans, laughs by the bushel, glamorous furs, days at the races, prizefights, Harlem late nights, bee-stung lips, jazz, and diamonds.

This gulping, thrill-seeking energy is what propels her plays. She began writing for the legitimate stage after years as a vaudeville trouper, and her plays draw directly from that experience. Subtlety finds no place. "In vaudeville you learn to put your stuff across quickly and surely. You've got to hit them in the eye with it. That's the training I brought with me to the legitimate theater." Her earlier work as a child actress in melodrama fostered the same impulse toward a theater of bold strokes, biff-bang action, and sensational, rip-rearing effects. At the opposite extreme from closet drama, which is all writing and no stage action, her plays are long on flash and short on literary finesse. They are not the work of a woman of letters, but rather that of a supreme performer bent on expanding the territory at her command and making money at it, to boot: "My first thought, frankly, is the box office. I'm not interested in art but only in giving the people what they want."

She set out to feed the public taste, not form it. "People want dirt in plays, so I give 'em dirt." in her movies she relied on innuendo and suggestion to convey her sexual message. The plays, from Sex onward, are frankly raunchy. Torrid embraces and sultry kisses abound. When she auditioned a then still-wet-behind-the-ears Nebraskan named Lyle Talbot for a sailor role in Sex, she scared him off by putting her hand on his butt and commanding, "Get close to me!" A nightclub dancer named George Raft refused a part in Sex on the grounds that he wasn't "ready."