The Anatomy of Greatness
Great of History profile
A Brooklyn prizefighter's daughter who liked to claim she had no schooling, Mae West wrote her own plays, lines and legend, turned arrests, censors and a jail cell into publicity, made herself the highest-paid entertainer in America on her own terms, and then spent her last forty years guarding the character she had created until it swallowed the woman who made it.
Top traits
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Critical acts
- 1
Writing *Sex* Herself
Her mother told her that "There's only one person in the world who can write the best play for you: 'You!'" She drafted a waterfront prostitute's story "on any scrap of paper around," with Leitzbach uncredited. Louvish finds that it did not start from nothing. In 1924 Timony had obtained a one-act play by J. J.
- 2
Choosing the Workhouse and Making It an Advertisement
The sources disagree on what choice she had. In Chandler, West says the sentence was "$500 or ten days" and that she chose prison: "I was told I could pay the fine and get out of going to jail, but I made up my own mind. I decided it would be more interesting to go to prison."
- 3
Putting Gay Performers on the Stage
She recruited about forty Greenwich Village performers, including two drag-community leaders known as the Duchess and Mother Superior, and let them improvise: "in The Drag, for the first time, gay men played gay men."
- 4
Going to Hollywood on Her Own Terms
She started packing and told Paramount "they could keep their money and even get a refund from me, but I wasn't sticking around like a prisoner." The studio let her rewrite her own part, and she wrote the line "Goodness had nothin' to do with it, dearie."
- 5
Fighting Joseph Breen with Decoys
She said publicly that she would accept cuts and then deliberately broke the Code to give the censors something to remove: "She calculated that censors would focus on these blatantly scandalous components and miss her work's subtleties." She described the method herself: "I'd write some lines I knew they would take out so the others could stay in.
- 6
Reinventing Herself at Sixty-One: The Musclemen Revue
When a young Mr. America came to ask for an autograph, she saw a new act and reversed the usual nightclub show, in which the woman is looked at. Nine musclemen would carry her on stage on a chaise longue, and women could come "to see a bevy of fantastic-looking men without admitting it was why she was there."
Maxims
Write the part yourself, then play it
She had no education and no patron when she wrote Sex, and "You just write yourself the part, and then you play it" became her career. Johnson's whole case for her heroism rests on this: "Mae West was all her own work." See "Writing Sex Herself."
Put a price on yourself before anyone else does
"If you set your own price on yourself as free, you don't deserve to get anything." She told Chandler her interview material "is worth a lot of money, so don't sell it cheap," and when Fox offered $275,000 for Myra, she held out for $350,000 and got it.
Pick the theater before you pick the part
She turned down Ziegfeld because his stage was wrong for her "intimate style," and accepted Wayburn only after inspecting the Fulton.
Give the censor something to cut
"I'd write some lines I knew they would take out so the others could stay in. You had to let them earn their money." She kept two versions of Sex and planted decoys for Breen.
Say it so they can't quote it back
The Pleasure Man jury deadlocked because no one could prove "how it was said." Her line on her method was "It isn't what I say, but how I say it."
Part IThe Story
Where's My Spotlight?
Her father had doubted that a five-year-old should face a paying crowd. "If she gets stage fright, she'll have to wait till she's older." Her mother overruled him. So at Brooklyn's Royal Theatre, with her father and a claque of his boxing friends in the second row, "Baby May" came out in a pink-and-green satin dress with gold spangles, and the spotlight did not follow her.
"I stopped and waited. Nothing. So I stamped my foot and looked up and said, 'Where's my spotlight?'" Some of the audience thought her nerve was part of the act and laughed. Then the light came. "It engulfed me. ... Nothing in my life ever felt better. Nothing."
She sang and danced at once, and the crowd threw so many coins it got "a little dangerous." Her father called up from his seat that the audience would be insulted if she did not pick up the money. "I didn't care. I wasn't picking it up. I pretended I didn't hear him." Two boxers filled their derbies with the coins instead. When her father complained that the coins had ruined the hats, she answered: "Buy them new derbies. And I won first prize." Thirteen years later, when Florenz Ziegfeld threw her a rose, she picked that one up.
The scene contains most of what came later: the need for the light, the refusal to look cheap, a girl overruling her father with her mother's backing, and the habit of having the last word. Mae West was a Brooklyn prizefighter's daughter with a third-grade education. She wrote her own plays, lines and legend. She turned arrests, censors and a jail cell into publicity, and made herself the highest-paid entertainer in America on her own terms. Then she spent her last forty years guarding the character she had created, until it swallowed the woman who made it. Paul Johnson's verdict is the reason she stands among the lives in The Anatomy of Greatness: "No other female star of her time, probably of any time, was so completely her own creation. Just as Garrick was Garrick, so Mae West was all her own work."
By the Numbers
All Her Own Work
375Performances of Sex, the play she wrote herself (Johnson's count)
8 daysServed on Welfare Island after the Sex conviction, 1927
18 daysShooting schedule of She Done Him Wrong, on a $200,000 budget
$2 million+Profit from that film by summer 1933, as Paramount paid off its debts
$399,166Her 1934 income, the highest of any entertainer in America
20,000Jokes in her gag archive: two thousand pages in over forty folders
74Takes of one scene in Sextette, filmed when she was eighty-three
Battling Jack's Daughter
Her father, "Battling Jack," was a street fighter and bouncer whom Mae remembered as "always ready to do physical violence when the urge was on him." She called him "cruel." Watts reads his habit of boxing his small daughter as abuse. The neighbours called the child a "brat" and a "holy terror" who would "smack a boy on the nose as she would a girl."
Her mother treated her "like her precious jewel." Mae grew up "deeply involved with myself," and said so without apology: "I was never jealous of my sister and brother. In my whole life, I've never envied anyone. I was too busy thinking about myself." At a jeweller's window her mother gave her the advice she lived by: "No one can have everything, so you have to try for what you want most. And you have to start early."
She started early. She said she knew at five what she would be. "I always thought I had a long time ahead, but I didn't have a guarantee, so I figured early it was better not to waste any time." She practised her autograph for hours as a child. When the stock-company owner Hal Clarendon offered her a place at about eight, "Before my father could speak for me, I said, 'Yes.'" (Simon Louvish's dating of the company makes her about fourteen.) She was a Leo and believed it fixed her destiny: "I would be strong like a lioness, or even a lion." "I always wanted to be first, never second."
She left school at about twelve ("I sort of retired from it") and treated the stage as her university. "Show business is the most wonderful education you can have." She had "never had much patience for reading, even just a newspaper." When college-educated people began asking for her autograph, she concluded that "Education and intelligence aren't the same thing." She studied the audience as a "character in the show," and learned most from failure: "Plays that fail, those are the ones to see."
Picking the Theater Before the Part
At eighteen, she said, she turned down Ziegfeld, not over the part but over the building: his stage "wasn't right for my intimate style." She took Ned Wayburn's offer for A La Broadway in 1911 only after running to inspect his theater. Louvish files the story under "'hutzpah', to be filed in the 'if only' department": A La Broadway was an independent production, and in 1912 she did appear in a Ziegfeld show, The Winsome Widow, and soon left it. Then she asked Wayburn if she could make "a few changes here and there," was told to wait for rehearsal, and used the short rehearsals to "sneak it in when it counted." The Irish maid became a scene-stealer singing each encore in a different accent. In her first scene she won seven encores.
In vaudeville, Johnson writes, she "soon discovered she could write better jokes and dialogue than what was provided for her, and she gradually took over her show entirely." That was the discovery that made everything else possible. "Being an actress and a writer both—that's the best thing you could be in life because you can be anyone you want to be. You just write yourself the part, and then you play it."
She managed men the same way she managed scripts. She married Frank Wallace in 1911 and kept it secret, partly as a shield: "if I ever had a weak moment again, I couldn't get married because I already was." She got rid of him by finding him a year-long booking far away. "I used my influence to help him get it. ... We never got together again. My choice." With "D," her violent lover of 1916, she "left for my bookings and didn't leave a forwarding address." She left a hit, Sometime, while it was selling out: "I believe you can get stuck in success. It's not as bad as being stuck in failure, but it can lead to being stuck in failure." And in 1916 she fired her own sister from their act. "How do you fire your little sister? ... I did."
Her rule for writing was "Write about what you know, and entertain people, in reverse order." And from the early 1920s she kept a joke archive that grew to two thousand pages in over forty folders, twenty thousand jokes in all, five hundred pages in her own backward-leaning hand. Next to her diamonds, it was her most precious possession.
Writing Sex Herself
By 1925 West was thirty-two, a vaudeville veteran with a Broadway shimmy and no legitimate stage hit. The Shuberts said they were looking for a play for her, and she spent months reading scripts that did not suit her. "I lived in the world of show business, which was a man's world as far as where the power was concentrated." Writing plays "seemed to go with being educated, and school gave me a headache."
Her mother told her: "There's only one person in the world who can write the best play for you: 'You!'" So she drafted a waterfront prostitute's story "on any scrap of paper around," with Adeline Leitzbach uncredited. She wrote by running the whole thing in her head first: "I'd imagine it all first, then I'd just write it down." When no producer would take it, her mother and Jim Timony financed it themselves. She signed it with a pseudonym, "Jane Mast," and renamed it from The Albatross to Sex. "When I changed the title to Sex, nobody asked me what it was."
Opening night in New London drew a scant house, and she nearly closed it to save her mother's money. "My mother wouldn't hear of it." By the next matinee there was a line of sailors. She kept two versions of the play, "a tamer one for the press and moralists like Sumner and a spicier one for the general public," and played the bland one when the play jury came.
Sex opened at Daly's 63rd Street Theatre on April 26, 1926, and ran, Johnson says, for 375 performances. Most critics at first refused to review it, though Variety later called her "the Babe Ruth of stage prosties." John Sumner of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice called it "moral poison," and the Hearst Daily Mirror "a monstrosity plucked from the garbage can." The play became the base of the persona: a hard-boiled woman who sees through respectable hypocrisy, which Watts reads as West's "mirror which tells the truth." It also brought her under the protection of the gangster Owney Madden, a co-investor who "charged her a protection fee."
— Mae West, to Charlotte ChandlerBeing an actress and a writer both—that's the best thing you could be in life because you can be anyone you want to be. You just write yourself the part, and then you play it.
Ten Days on Welfare Island
In February 1927, under pressure over her drag play The Drag, the acting mayor, Joseph McKee, ordered raids on Sex and two other shows. She never forgave him, and "would always refer to McKee as 'Holy Joe.'" At trial a police sergeant testified that "Miss West moved her navel up and down and from right to left," and the prosecutor argued that her "personality, looks, walk, mannerisms and gestures made the lines and situations suggestive." The jury first voted nine to three to acquit. After the judge told them that one obscene portion made the whole play obscene, they convicted.
The sources disagree on what choice she had. In Chandler, West says the sentence was "$500 or ten days" and that she chose prison: "I decided it would be more interesting to go to prison." Watts and Johnson say the judge imposed both, and the court record Louvish cites agrees: "ten days apiece in the workhouse" and a $500 fine. What she said at the time was a protest, not a choice: "I never expected to be sent to jail." On either account, she treated the sentence as material. As the officer led her away she told reporters, "I expect it will be the making of me."
At intake she was strip-searched and kept naked "for what seemed longer than the required time," while the women guards "took a mighty good look." She sat on the only chair and decided "I put on a pretty good show for 'em." She protested the coarse issue underwear ("This rough stuff will give me a rash. I'm allergic"), and the warden, "known for his generous treatment of 'well-connected' prisoners," let her keep her silk. She dusted his law books and lunched at his home. When the cell door first closed she "felt panic," and controlled it: "I never wanted to surrender control of my emotions."
Most of what she remembered was the other women. One forty-year-old orphan was there for taking a pair of used shoes from a bin, and they were the wrong size. In the venereal ward giggling girls called "Hi, Mae. We love you, Mae!" and the warden told her, "Most of them are going to die." She paid a lawyer for a young mother awaiting trial and "supported the woman's children until their mother was freed." She promised to come back. "I meant it when I said it. But, you know, I never did get back."
She served eight days. Liberty magazine paid her to write up the experience, and she gave the $1,000 advance to build a better prison library. Johnson notes how she "wove her prison term skillfully into her public image," as "a case of Men versus One Woman." She called it "a million dollars' worth of publicity." Fifty years on, she still asked: "What about the girls who were innocent who were there?" The longer cost fell on the industry. Governor Al Smith signed the Wales Padlock Law, which let the state close a theater for a year over one indecent show.
Live and Let Love
In the 1920s the New York police raided gay hangouts and beat cross-dressers. Drag queens performed in speakeasies and at drag balls, not on the legitimate stage. For The Drag, West recruited about forty Greenwich Village performers, including two drag-community leaders known as the Duchess and Mother Superior, and let them improvise; a journalist called the result "spontaneous combustion." "In The Drag, for the first time, gay men played gay men." Broadway producers met to block it from Manhattan, believing it would bring a censor down on all of them.
After her Sex conviction, a second one could mean a harder sentence. She staged The Pleasure Man in 1928 anyway, a backstage play with drag performers about a womanizer castrated by his victim's brother. When police raided it twice, she "put up bail for all of the almost sixty cast members." Then, seeing that a prosecution could send the whole cast to prison, she closed it after two and a half performances. "Only the lawyers would get rich."
The case came to trial in 1930, with West in court every day. The prosecution asked the jury to weigh "innuendos and double meanings," and the jurors deadlocked because "no one could precisely determine what was said and, more important, how it was said." The charges were dismissed. Actors' Equity hailed the result: "Pleasure Man Ends Wales Act Reign of Terror." Watts judges that she was "a little of both" a profiteer and a free-speech fighter, because "If profit was her only goal, The Pleasure Man was not a particularly smart move."
She called the theme of The Drag "live and let love," and always claimed the credit: "I fought for gay rights before it was the thing to do." Watts adds that the tolerance had limits. In 1927 she called homosexuality "a danger to the entire social system of western civilization," while sympathising with "born homosexuals."
In January 1930, her mother died of liver cancer. West forced herself on stage each night, then "would become hysterical afterward in her dressing room"; she cried for days and lost her voice. "One thing I knew. I never wanted to love anyone that way again. And I never did."
Goodness Had Nothing to Do With It
In 1932 Paramount was near bankruptcy, and West, at thirty-nine, was a Broadway name almost unknown to film audiences. The studio brought her west, then left her idle for weeks without a script. When one arrived for Night After Night, she had a small supporting part below George Raft, Constance Cummings and Wynne Gibson. Studio contracts at the time, Johnson notes, kept actors "in gilded slavery under long, exclusive contracts giving them no share in profits."
She started packing and told Paramount "they could keep their money and even get a refund from me, but I wasn't sticking around like a prisoner." The studio let her rewrite her own part. She wrote her entrance. The hatcheck girl gasps, "Goodness! What beautiful diamonds!" and Maudie answers, "Goodness had nothin' to do with it, dearie." She asked the director, Archie Mayo, to have the camera follow her up the stairs "to protect my line. An audience has got to have time to hear the line, absorb it, and then laugh." Mayo wanted a fade-out. It was shot both ways, and his version was used. (Johnson tells a different origin for the line, as a spontaneous remark to an usherette in 1936; West's own account has her writing it in 1932.) She wore her own real diamonds against the studio's fakes, telling only Timony, because fakes gave her a rash.
On the night of the premiere she was still dressing when Timony told her they would be late. She said they were not going. "What if I'd gone to see Night After Night, and I didn't like the way I was? I might have left Hollywood." Nearly fifty years later: "I always intended going to see Night After Night, but I never have." The woman who said she never knew stage fright was afraid of seeing herself enlarged on a screen ("my nostrils so big you could drive a couple of Mack trucks through them"), and she handled the fear by not looking.
The Woman Who Saved Paramount
Her first starring film, She Done Him Wrong, was adapted from her own play Diamond Lil. She picked Cary Grant, whom she called an unknown, after hearing his voice in the alley. "They didn't want him for my second picture, but I insisted." Louvish says the "unknown" part "was not true": Grant had already played the lead opposite Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus. She changed the production method: a week of rehearsal, one take per scene, all scenes in the same costume shot together. Of a later picture she said, "Leo McCarey was good ... but I was really always the director."
The film was shot in eighteen days for $200,000. By the summer of 1933 it had made "over $2 million in profit," and in July the Hays Office noted that Paramount had paid off its debts. "Many, including Adolph Zukor, credited West with rescuing Paramount." She put it more simply: "It's a fact that I saved Paramount Pictures." In 1934 she was "the highest-paid entertainer in America, with an income of $399,166.00," and by 1936 only William Randolph Hearst earned more. Johnson says she won "both freedom and affluence" by "making herself her own boss."
The cost fell on the people around her. Grant, whose career she launched, said she "did her own thing to the detriment of everyone around her." A contract player recalled that the directors "had very little to do with her films." When Ernst Lubitsch came to her dressing room to reprimand her for lateness, Watts says she hit him with a hand mirror; in George Cukor's version it was a "silver-handled hairbrush."
She also took on the mob. In 1932, sitting in her car outside the Ravenswood with Harry Voiler, an underworld acquaintance from Chicago, she was robbed of her jewels and cash at gunpoint, having judged that "the ones I was wearing weren't worth dying for." A mobster confessed and named Voiler as organiser. Unlike most Hollywood victims of the underworld, West took the stand. Shown a photograph of the shirtless, bruised defendant, she replied, "You know, Mr. Clark, that I have never seen anything but this defendant's face," and the courtroom laughed. Outside, a "delegation of menacing Chicago gangsters" arrived, rumours spread that the underworld would throw acid in her face, and the district attorney assigned her two detectives. The defendant was convicted. "It is time someone called their bluff—and it looks like it will have to be me." Watts notes it let her present herself as a "super woman" who was "unafraid of even the most violent criminals." She put the robbery into Belle of the Nineties.
Decoys for Mr. Breen
In 1934 the Catholic Legion of Decency threatened boycotts, and Will Hays appointed Joseph Breen to enforce the Production Code. Watts describes Breen as virulently anti-Semitic and "determined that La West was not going to slip anything past him." He called the story of her next film, It Ain't No Sin, "a vulgar and highly offensive yarn which is quite patently a glorification of prostitution." A Paramount executive stood on her set every day as the film's censor.
She said publicly that she would accept cuts, and then deliberately broke the Code to give the censors something to remove. "She calculated that censors would focus on these blatantly scandalous components and miss her work's subtleties." She described the method herself: "I'd write some lines I knew they would take out so the others could stay in. You had to let them earn their money." When the censors asked what an ambiguous line meant, she scoffed: "I can't tell you because it isn't something you can explain by numbers. You take it or leave it." Watts traces the technique to African-American "signifying." West put it plainly: "It isn't what I do, but how I do it. It isn't what I say, but how I say it."
She also insisted on Duke Ellington in place of the studio orchestra with Black extras ("I persuaded them it wasn't the same thing"). When Paramount missed its two-pictures-a-year deadline in 1936, she declared her contract void and took the train, disguised in a black wig, to meet a rival producer.
The film was released as Belle of the Nineties, and the films still made money, but she lost the long war. Hearst ordered his editors to write "a couple of good editorials regarding the indecency" of Klondike Annie and then "DO NOT mention Mae West in our papers again." After her 1937 Garden of Eden sketch on NBC radio, network executives "agreed to exile Mae West from the airwaves." In 1938 exhibitors named her "box office poison" alongside Dietrich, Garbo, Hepburn and Crawford. Watts states the logic: "Breen manipulated scripts, poor scripts produced poor films, poor films produced poor box office receipts. In turn, the stars shouldered the blame."
She preferred her own version. "Maybe censorship was my best friend. You can't get famous for breaking the rules unless you've got some rules to break."
— Mae West, on the Production CodeI'd write some lines I knew they would take out so the others could stay in. You had to let them earn their money.
Nine Musclemen and a Chaise Longue
Before the decline was complete she made one more shrewd deal. Working with Timony, she wrote into the 1939 contract for My Little Chickadee that she would be paid for future television showings, when "very few people anticipated the future for classic films." W. C. Fields found out too late. Her contract also let her remove Fields if he came to the set drunk, and when he did she ordered him out; Fields called her "a plumber's idea of Cleopatra."
Her one 1943 film, The Heat's On, was "a mistake" made on a verbal pitch, and she admitted it only grudgingly: "I never liked to admit to a mistake, but if I can't deny it, it's tantamount to admitting it." She made "an Old Year's resolution. Never to do a picture on a verbal pitch and always make sure I had an escape clause." By 1954 her film career had been dead for a decade. Jim Timony, her manager, lawyer and lover since 1918, died that April, and "she didn't want to see anyone." She was over sixty in an industry "more and more obsessed with youth."
When a young Mr. America came to ask for an autograph, she saw a new act. She reversed the usual nightclub show, in which the woman is looked at. Nine musclemen would carry her on stage on a chaise longue, and women could come "to see a bevy of fantastic-looking men without admitting it was why she was there." She set strict rules: the men had to eat properly, train, rest, and have no romances on the road, because their offstage behaviour was part of her image. When Mr. Universe Mickey Hargitay began a public affair with Jayne Mansfield, she demoted him, and later called Mansfield "a phoney in all departments" in an anonymous letter to Louella Parsons.
The act played the Sahara in Las Vegas and top clubs through the 1950s. In the troupe she found Chester Ribonsky (Chuck Krauser, later Paul Novak), who stayed with her until she died. The Hargitay affair ended with Krauser flattening him at a Washington press conference. "West used the scandal to her advantage. What could better demonstrate her continued allure than two musclemen fighting over her?"
The same method later won her a $350,000 fee and full control of her dialogue for Myra Breckinridge (1970). When Fox offered $275,000, she held out, and "They gave it to her." She had turned down Elvis Presley's films, a TV series and a Ross Hunter picture over the same point: "no amount of money would've bought my signature on a contract without a clause that gave me control over my character and let me write all my lines."
The Ravenswood
For forty-eight years she lived in the same Hollywood apartment, furnished in white and gold from Paramount's prop department, with mirrors on the bedroom ceiling, the drapes drawn against the sun, and a nude statue of herself on the white piano. She received interviewers in a peignoir in bed, and negotiated there. Around her was a small household of devoted men. Timony had run business, law and investments; Novak ran her body, diet, driving and safety, carrying a licensed gun. "Jim was the brain and Paul is the brawn." She put her money into Los Angeles land and diamonds, not stocks. "The country was on the gold standard. I was on the diamond standard." By the early 1940s she was "one of Hollywood's wealthiest women."
For decades Hollywood believed she owned the building. The story went that a Black friend she had invited was turned away by the desk clerk, and that she phoned the owners and bought the place so it could never happen again. In the 1950s the publicist Dale Olson asked her whether it was true. "And she said, 'It's not altogether true, but there's enough truth in it.' ... 'There's a great deal of truth in it, so you can use it.'" Chandler's fuller account is more practical: she ordered the desk to send her friend straight up, then lent the owners money during a Depression cash crisis. "That saved the Ravenswood." The loan was repaid, and the legend outlived it.
Her record on race shows the same mix of real decency and convenient myth. She brought in Duke Ellington, wrote real parts for Libby Taylor, Louise Beavers and other Black actresses, and in 1968 "demanded that the producer ... use African-American musicians as her accompanists." When her former chauffeur Chalky Wright won the world featherweight title in 1941, it was because she "compelled Morrie Cohen to override the racism against black boxers and arrange the match." But the maid roles "reentrenched racist notions." Her 1930 novel Babe Gordon "freely employs racist epithets and degrading black stereotypes." When the Shuberts would not let a Black actor play her lover in The Constant Sinner, she "capitulated and hired white actor ... George Givot" in blackface. Rehearsing with an all-male Black chorus in 1969, she warned, "They must never touch me—because of the southern senators." She became "an outspoken advocate of civil rights" only in the 1970s, "when it was much safer."
She was generous and controlling at once. She put her sister on a salary, bought her a ranch, pensioned her boxer-chauffeur Gorilla Jones and his mother, paid Eva Tanguay's rent and doctors, and gave her old limousines to nuns. In old age she warned her publicist Stanley Musgrove, "Don't you ever go against anything I say," and listened in on his calls from her bedroom extension. She told him she believed Sybil Brand had put glass in her food. She made Novak, her sister and a butler take polygraph tests over a missing ring. When diabetes was diagnosed in 1964, she never said the word aloud.
Seventy-Four Takes in a Mock Elevator
In 1964 she won an exclusive court right to the name "Diamond Lil," after years of legal action against impersonators. Watts writes that she "had finally achieved total oneness with her stage persona ... It was not without cost." By the late 1960s the only images released were "carefully retouched portraits." She would not be photographed with a younger woman. Tim Malachosky, who ran her fan mail, described her as "totally dedicated to protecting her image like she was the guardian of it, and it didn't even belong to her."
Sextette (filmed 1976–77) was the film she had wanted to make of her 1961 play. Its producers were twenty-two and had never made a film, and the budget grew past $7 million. Edith Head told Musgrove, "You're trying to pass her off as a sex symbol ... You should be ashamed of yourself." West fought the script ("Mae West would never cry over a man. She would just yell, 'Next!'"). The script changed every night, so the director, Ken Hughes, fed her lines through a tiny receiver hidden in her wig. Her eyesight was failing and she could not see the white marks on the floor, so he laid sandbags, then shot her from the waist up while an assistant crawled out of shot to guide her. She did not protest.
One scene, walking down a hall into an elevator, took seventy-four takes. When it was finally done, the crew applauded and packed up, and Novak could not find her. "After a frantic search, Hughes realized that she was waiting patiently in the mock elevator, unaware the scene was wrapped. When they opened the door, West asked, 'You wanna go again?'" The New York Times wrote, "Granny should have her mouth washed out with soap, along with her teeth."
At the end she told Charlotte Chandler, "In my opinion, I lived a selfish life. ... I was dedicated to myself." Her last words to Chandler were a confession: "You know, my diamonds I told you all those men gave me? I wanted you to know—I bought some of them myself." Her sister Beverly, on her payroll for life, "privately ... blamed her sister for her failures," and said of the family crypt, "I've had enough of her while I'm alive ... I don't want to be lying next to her dead." At the funeral Ross Hunter said, "The Mae West character never wanted anybody to feel sorry for her." Watts concludes: "Now, in death, the character had completely overtaken her creator." She had once told a reporter, "All my life ... I've been a put-on."
— Mae West, to Charlotte ChandlerYou know, my diamonds I told you all those men gave me? I wanted you to know—I bought some of them myself.
Agency Under Constraint
Johnson defines a hero as anyone "widely, persistently over long periods, and enthusiastically regarded as heroic by a reasonable person, or even an unreasonable one." He counts West as one because she was the rare woman who "makes a shrewd assessment of her charms from the start, capitalizes on her strengths, keeps her weaknesses in check, and ends a long, rich life with money in the bank, men on tap and always a few jokes to the good." He borrows Shelley Winters's contrast of West the "boss-heroine" with Marilyn Monroe the "victim-heroine," and concludes that "if she set out to prove that a woman can outdo the men in the grand and grim task of show business, she certainly succeeded."
Her own creed fits his verdict. "I believe in a single standard for men and women." "Economic independence is as important to a woman as to a man, maybe more important." She was proudest that she had done it "not by inheriting it, not by marrying it, and not on my back, but by using my brain and talent." Yet she refused the label: "I never thought of myself as a feminist ... I never identified with groups." Her private list, "Things I'll Never Do," included "Play mother parts, sad parts, dumb parts, or a virtuous wife," and "I pity weak women, good or bad, but I can't like them. A woman should be strong either in her goodness or her badness."
The biographies support the outline but add two qualifications. First, the constraints were real: vice societies, an all-male trial, a Production Code enforced by a man Watts calls virulently anti-Semitic, a press baron who banned her name, and late in life a culture that found an old woman's sexuality "pathetic, not funny," a double standard a scholar later set against George Burns. Second, she also carried the prejudices of her time and profited from them, as the record on race shows. And she lied when it suited her. Watts warns that "West often exaggerated or embellished her personal history." She denied her marriage in public ("I am not married. Not to Frank Wallace"), and Timony may have deliberately never filed the divorce papers. Johnson leaves most of this out.
The private woman remains hard to fix. Johnson, following Louvish, argues that the sexual image was largely a construction: she never used "four-letter words or crude, explicit expressions," never told a dirty story, and "went out very little," because when not onstage, "she was working." Henry Fonda, Bette Davis and Cukor found her quiet and shy; Cukor said, "Mae could be, at times, a prude." Her own account to Chandler, which includes a boast of twenty-two times in one night, points the other way. Asked once whether she was the same Mae West when alone, she answered, "you'll have to take my word for it, 'cause when I'm alone, there isn't anyone else here."
Part IIThe Playbook
Mae West's career is a forty-year case study in owning your product when every institution around you (producers, police, studios, censors, press barons) wanted to own it instead. She won most of those fights with three tools: a pen, a price, and a willingness to walk. She also shows exactly what happens when the founder and the brand become the same thing.
The principles
- 1.Write the part yourself, then play it.
- 2.Pick the theater before you pick the part.
- 3.Put a price on yourself before anyone else does.
- 4.Give the censor something to cut.
- 5.Make your punishment pay.
- 6.Keep the threat of walking away real.
- 7.Leave while you are on top.
- 8.Contract for the future nobody else sees.
- 9.Don't let the character outlive you.
Principle 1
Write the part yourself, then play it
Johnson's whole case for her rests here: "Mae West was all her own work." She rewrote every part she was given, from the Irish maid in 1911 to Night After Night to Leticia in Myra Breckinridge. When no one would give her a play, she wrote Sex. She refused Elvis films and television without a clause that let her "write all my lines."
Tactic: If the scripts on offer don't fit, write your own. And never sign away control of the thing that makes you valuable.
Principle 2
Pick the theater before you pick the part
By her own account she turned down Ziegfeld because his stage was wrong for her "intimate style," and accepted Wayburn only after inspecting his theater. In Hollywood she learned lenses, light and angles ("I don't have a bad side"), and at eighty-four she still told Scavullo, "Shoot me from above, not from the belly button." She insisted the camera follow her up the stairs "to protect my line."
Tactic: Before accepting an opportunity, inspect the conditions: the room, the audience, the format. The right part on the wrong stage still fails.
Principle 3
Put a price on yourself before anyone else does
"If you set your own price on yourself as free, you don't deserve to get anything. If you don't put a high value on yourself, why would you expect anyone else to put a high value on you?" She refused nearly all endorsements and most television: "I've stayed in demand because I never gave 'em too much. I've always left 'em wanting more." She told Chandler her interview material "is worth a lot of money, so don't sell it cheap."
Tactic: Set your price high and early, and keep supply scarce. Free exposure teaches the market that you are worth nothing.
Principle 4
Give the censor something to cut
She played a mild Sex for the play jury and a spicier one for paying audiences. She packed scripts with lines like the bellhop who wonders "just how far up you wore your garters" so Breen would cut those and leave the subtler ones. She handled a TV censor by sending an outrageous script first, "so they could use up their energy censoring it." Her deepest defence was ambiguity: a jury could not convict "how it was said."
✂
The Decoy Method
How West managed every gatekeeper she faced.
| Gatekeeper | Her move |
|---|---|
| The Sex play jury | Two versions: "a tamer one for the press and moralists" and "a spicier one for the general public." |
| The Pleasure Man jury | Double meanings so slippery that "no one could precisely determine what was said." |
| Joseph Breen and the Code | Planted "blatantly scandalous" lines for cutting, so the subtler ones survived. |
| A TV censor | Sent an outrageous script first, "so they could use up their energy censoring it." |
Tactic: When a gatekeeper must be seen to cut something, give them something to cut. Protect what matters by surrounding it with what you can afford to lose.
Principle 5
Make your punishment pay
She turned a jail term into a magazine article, a library, and "a million dollars' worth of publicity." Of a plagiarism suit: "you couldn't buy publicity like that." Of a TV interview CBS refused to air: "I think I got more publicity for being canceled." And she did not forget the women she left behind on Welfare Island.
Tactic: When you are attacked in public, ask how the attack can be made to advertise you. Then keep faith with the people who paid more than you did.
Principle 6
Keep the threat of walking away real
She threatened to leave Paramount in 1932, voided her contract in 1936, and held out on Myra until Fox met her price. "I'd learned a little about bargaining from observing my father making a business deal. I knew I had 'em." Her rule for men was the same: "No man ever left me. I was the one who did the leavin'."
Tactic: Your leverage in a negotiation is only as strong as your willingness to leave. Make it credible, by having left before.
Principle 7
Leave while you are on top
She walked out of Sometime while it was selling out because "you can get stuck in success," and said she would end her affair with Hollywood before it ended her: "when the magic wore off, I was gonna be the one who ended the affair." After The Heat's On she added the corollary: "always make sure I had an escape clause."
Her failure is the mirror image. At eighty-three she was waiting in a mock elevator after the seventy-fourth take, asking, "You wanna go again?" The story shows her endurance, and her failure to see when to stop.
Tactic: Plan your exits while you are winning, and write escape clauses into every deal. The hardest exit to make is the one from your own legend.
Principle 8
Contract for the future nobody else sees
In 1939 she had Timony write television residuals into the My Little Chickadee contract, when "very few people anticipated the future for classic films." She put her money into land and diamonds rather than stocks, bought property from the back of her car when she saw it for sale ("She was a very decisive person"), and became one of Hollywood's wealthiest women.
Tactic: In every deal, ask what rights will be valuable in twenty years that nobody is pricing today, and claim them now.
Principle 9
Don't let the character outlive you
The persona was her greatest creation and, in the end, her cage. She won exclusive rights to Diamond Lil, released only retouched portraits, hid her diabetes, refused to be photographed with younger women, and told Musgrove never to go against her. Malachosky said she guarded the image "like she was the guardian of it, and it didn't even belong to her." Her sister did not want to be buried beside her. At her funeral, the character had "completely overtaken her creator."
Tactic: Build the brand, but keep a self outside it, and people who are family rather than payroll. A persona that cannot age will make you defend it until it consumes you.
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Part IIIMaxims
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Write the part yourself, then play it. "You just write yourself the part, and then you play it."
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Put a price on yourself before anyone else does. "If you set your own price on yourself as free, you don't deserve to get anything."
-
Pick the theater before you pick the part. By her own telling, she turned down Ziegfeld over the stage, not the role.
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Give the censor something to cut. "You had to let them earn their money."
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Say it so they can't quote it back. "It isn't what I say, but how I say it."
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Make your punishment pay. Ten days in the workhouse became "a million dollars' worth of publicity."
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Leave while you are on top. "You can get stuck in success."
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Keep an escape clause. Never again "a picture on a verbal pitch."
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Save your energy for the work. "If I ever had to choose between sex and my work, it was always my work I'd choose."
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Don't let the legend replace your family. "How do you fire your little sister? ... I did."
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Buy your own diamonds. "I bought some of them myself."
