The Woman, The Myth, The Legend: Mae West—American Woman

Abstract
Born Mary Jane West in 1893, Mae was a strong, vivacious woman whose career spanned vaudeville, the small stage, The Great White Way and the silver screen. She is known for her over-accentuated figure and use of double entendres. Born the daughter of a prize fighter and immigrant, she grew up in the city of New York. She was doted on, as well as encouraged, by her mother, Tillie. She began performing at the age of four and was soon on stage where she came to life. She rarely attended school; getting her education on the stage instead. She became sexually active at a young age and learned to use her sexuality in her acts. After a number of years on stage and touring with various troupes, Mae began composing her own material. With the help of a writer, she produced a number of plays, many of which never made it to production. She always insisted on having control over her parts and lines, sometimes infuriating directors. Night After Night, her first movie, was her first foray in Hollywood and had her rewriting the entire role from its original version. The writer and director were against it, but Mae convinced studio heads to test both versions. They all agreed that Mae’s revisions were the way to go. While not a starring role, she stole the show as the hatcheck girl says to her, “Goodness, what beautiful diamonds,” Mae responds, “Goodness had nothing to do with it!”
Mae continued making movies with constant oversight from the Hays Office. Asserting control over the lines she could speak, the songs she could sing and the wardrobe she could wear, Mae became expert at developing phrases with double meaning. Even with this pressure to adhere to the new “morality code,” Mae continued to experience success in the movies and made significant sums of money for Paramount.
Throughout her career, the one constant that is seen is Mae’s portrayal of Mae. The characterization she developed was as much Mae as the characters that she wrote about and roles that she played. For all her trials and tribulations, she remained true to who she was—a strong, adaptable, tenacious American woman.

When I’m caught between two evils, I generally like to take the one I’ve never tried! ~Mae West Annotated Bibliography
Bartlett, Thomas. "Mae West: Novelist, Playwright, and Racial Prophet." The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 2, 2001: A20.
This article was a brief interview of Jill Watts, author of Mae West: An Icon in Black and White. Mr. Bartlett, a reporter for higher education’s trade publication, asks some basic questions of the author but directs the focus mainly to Ms. West’s attitudes and roles in regard to race and sexuality.
Curry, Ramona. "Mae West as Censored Commodity: The Case of "Klondike Annie"." Cinema Journal (University of Texas Press on behalf of Society for Cinema & Media Studies) 31, no. 1 (Autumn 1991): 57-84.
An assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the author holds a Ph.D. from Northwestern University in the Department of Radio, Television and Film. This case study focuses on the film Klondike Annie and the results of censorship on its production and final product. It discusses the varied versions it went through as the implementation of the Motion Picture Production Code took place. It also asserts that Mae’s diminishing career and success at at the box office, around the time of Klondike Annie came as a direct result of “internal economic and political circumstances that had determined West’s initial value to Hollywood.”
Curry, Ramona. Too Much of a Good Thing: Mae West as Cultural Icon. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
An assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the author holds a Ph.D. from Northwestern University in the Department of Radio, Television and Film. She has been published in a number of U.S. and international journals and anthologies. She utilizes a variety of periodicals from the 1920s and 1930s, trade publications as well as books, biographies and journal articles. Her review of Mae West as a cultural icon purports that the Mae West image has filled a variety of roles over the years, not only in her own life, but in society and cultures as well.
Hamilton, Marybeth. "When I'm Bad I'm Better": Mae West, Sex, and American Entertainment. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997.
The author holds a Ph.D. in history from Princeton University and teaches American History at Birkbeck College, University of London. She uses numerous sources including archival materials of court cases, clipping files of various movies, plays and celebrities. Periodicals such as The New York Times from the 1920s and 1930s are quoted as well. Various books and articles covering not only Mae West, but current culture and expositions on the entertainment industry are also included. This biography makes speculations about the private Mae West as well as discussing the impact of Mae’s public personality.
Robertson, Pamela. ""The Kinda Comedy That Imitates Me": Mae West's Identification with the Feminist Camp." Cinema Journal (University of Texas Press on behalf of Society for Cinema & Media Studies) 32, no. 2 (Winter 1993): 57-72.
At the time of publication of this article, the author was a graduate student at the University of Chicago. This essay won first place in the 1991 SCS student essay competition. She “argues for the role of women as producers and consumers of camp.” She asserts that camp is not only appropriate in discussions for gay men, but for feminist discussions of gender construction, performance and enactment.
Robertson, Pamela. Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.
The author is a lecturer in film studies at the University of Newcastle in Australia. This book goes into detail about the history of camp and how women have always been a part of it—not just gay men. She theorizes that women have always held distinctive roles in camp. She details her study using figures such as Mae West, Madonna, Joan Crawford and Designing Women. She uses a wide variety of resources from biographies, film studies, books and journal articles.
Rothman, Stanley, Stephen Powers, and David Rothman. "Feminism in Films." Culture and Society, 1993: 66-72.
At the time of publication, the Rothman was professor of Government at Smith College as well as Director of the Center for the Study of Social and Political Change. Powers was a doctoral candidate in political science; he authored and co-authored several articles on motion pictures. Rothman was a doctoral candidate as well in the department of English at New York University. He authored and published several pieces as well. Their article focuses on the changing roles that women played in movies from the 1920s to the late 1980s. They specifically review movies and roles that women played in them and how the impact of society and culture have changed the roles written for and played by women.
The American Film Institute's 100 Years....100 Stars. June 16, 1999. http://www.afi.com/100Years/stars.aspx (accessed 12 18, 2010).
The American Film Institute is a national institute that leads the way in screen education and recognizes the excellence in the art of film, television and digital media. AFI is a non-profit educational and cultural organization. AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies is their documented celebration of cinema's centennial.
Watts, Jill. Mae West: An Icon in Black and White. New York City: Oxford University Press, 2001.
At the time of publication, the author was Professor of History and served as the Director of the History Department and Co-Director of the Women's Studies Program at California State University, San Marcos. She has also authored God, Harlem, U.S.A.: The Father Divine Story. This biography contains information from various sources including public records, FBI files, trade publications, periodicals and journal articles as well as other biographies. While providing an accounting of Mae’s life from start to finish, it makes assertions that are not verifiable. The most significant of which is that Mae West may be partly African-American. While there is no proof or outright assertions that this is the truth, the topic is touched on throughout the book, making it an overt pronunciation.
Williams, Linda. "What Does Mae West Have That All Men Want?" Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Autumn 1975: 118-121.
At the time of publication, the author was a graduate student in Comparative Literature at the University of Colorado. She was studying film theory on a Fulbright Scholarship at the Ecóle Pratique des hautes Études in Paris. This essay, written while Mae West was still alive, discusses the sexual freedom and “bravado of the West persona” and how she uses her sexuality to assert her independence. While not the typical “beauty,” Mae holds the power to have men begging at her feet yet does not rely on them to give her what she needs.

It has been said that a person is only as strong as their background. For Mae West, it appears she was built with the strongest of foundations. Born the daughter of a fighter and German immigrant, she grew up in New York City, was doted on by her mother, learned about life on a stage and became one of the most well-known movie stars of our age. She is listed on The American Film Institute’s “100 Years of 100 Stars” as #15 of the Top Female Legends, sharing the listing with Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis and Marilyn Monroe, to name a few. The bulk of her work took place in the 1920s and 1930s, yet today she is still considered to be a cultural icon. Her life’s work shows us that Mae West symbolizes the strength, adaptability and tenacity of the American woman.
The Formative Years
Family Life
Rumors circulated her entire life that her grandfather, John Edwin West, was African-American—a slave that had escaped to freedom by passing for white. Her other three grandparents were undisputedly European born, but records for John West do not appear until after the Civil War in 1866. A seafarer working as a rigger on whaling ships, he made the strongest of impressions on a young Mae, yet he was the one member of her family on which she offered little to no information. In 1852, “he married a twelve-year-old Catholic girl named Mary Jane Copley”, who had fled Ireland during the potato famine. Their second child was born in March of 1866 and grew up to be the outgoing and gregarious Jack West. Born in New York’s Lower East Side, Jack was raised in a community of violence and poverty. He was also confronted with “festering ethnic and racial bigotry.” White Protestant Victorian America is the mold you were expected to fit into. Irish Catholics did not fit that mold, being labeled as a separate, non-white race and being stereotyped as “savage,” “bestial,” and “lazy.” The young Jack fought in his first boxing match at the age of 11. From that point on, he aspired to be a “bare-knuckle prizefighting champion.” He was side-tracked from this pursuit by a young German immigrant—Matilda Decker.
Born to John Edwin West, Jr. and Matilda Delker on August 17, 1893, Mary Jane West, was doted on, indulged, and lavished with praise by her mother. She was Mae’s driving force in life. Tille—as her mother was called—“constructed her daughter as willful, strong, and innately resistant to authority.”
School on a Stage
Mae learned at a young age that performers were quite different than how they appeared on stage. In an incident from childhood, Jack West had invited Bert Williams to their home for dinner. Bert Williams was an African-American performer whose light skin forced him to wear blackface to appear “more black” on stage. The young Mae could not believe that this was the same person that she admired and had seen repeatedly on stage until Williams began singing to her. This incident was a “traumatic awakening to the societal lies regarding race, which eventually resulted in a distrust of the racist image created by white society to ensure superiority, dominance and predictability.” She learned that “appearances were illusions, obscuring other realities that could still be conveyed through language.”
By age four, Mae was imitating famous performers—mostly men. Her mother arranged for her to entertain at a church social. Her performance was successful and Tillie immediately set out to book her daughter at other local events. Despite her father’s protests, Mae’s first appearance on stage was during an amateur contest where she took first place. The promotion of Mae as an actress became a joint effort after that night with Tillie selecting her pieces for performance, costumes and managing bookings and Jack providing moral support in the audience as well as hauling her costumes backstage. She continued to perform in contests, her act consisting of dances, impersonations, and later a selection of double-entendre songs. Writes Jill Watts, “While the sight of a little child performing songs with sexual undertones may have been shocking, Tillie was borrowing from trends popular in variety entertainment of the period.” Mae spent a good portion of her acts impersonating “the bad girl.” By doing so, she came to understand the “process of manipulating the audience’s imagination and simulating desirability.”
She joined a vaudeville troupe at the age of eight. Stock company work was demanding; troupes offered two shows a day, Monday through Saturday, with rehearsals in the morning. She toured with the troupe in the summer. This left little time for formal education. Her education came from the stock company. When she wasn’t performing or rehearsing with the troupe, she was attending other rehearsals to learn more about the craft. She “retired” from the troupe at the age of twelve because she had physically matured and was no longer able to portray children.
The World’s a Stage
In Marybeth Hamilton’s book, “When I’m Bad I’m Better,” she says: “West’s career spanned the twentieth century and unfolded against a backdrop of dramatic change: a revolt against Victorian values, the code of sexual restraint and reticence prized by the nineteenth-century middle class. Spearheading that rebellion were middle-class women, who decked themselves out in lipstick and silk stockings and became ardent patrons of movies, nightclubs and dance halls. In West’s hometown, New York, they forged a new craze for “slumming,” for exploring cultures and styles beyond the respectable pale: the “primitivism” of African-Americans in Harlem, the flamboyance of the city’s gay men, and the aggressive eroticism exhibited by prostitutes, who put sexuality on public display.”
Mae West authored a total of eleven plays, eight of them being produced before she went to Hollywood, where she wrote her own dialogue, if not entire screenplays. Robertson states, “These plays contain themes that will recur in West’s later works—love as a performative technique, men as “suckers,” jewelry as a measure of love’s value, West as friend and counselor to subordinate women, and the conflict between female sexuality and society—but the dialogue contains almost none of the wordplay associated with West.” Her first effort, The Hussy, never made it to production—she was unable to secure backers for it. But in its authoring, it began forming the characters of her future creations. Its lead character, Nona, found satisfaction in relationships with men, but contested their power and authority. “Within this confusing array of attitudes, West challenged women’s subordination by inverting traditional roles. She constructed male characters as weak; many are easily fooled and even a little dim-witted.”
Sex!
After acts in Chicago and various other cities, Mae returned to New York. She was inspired to write another play, and using a sketch from another author, she went to work with Adeline Lietzbach again to craft a three-act play that she called The Albatross. Finding financial backing and a production company proved difficult, so with “assistance” from some of New York’s underworld, she and her partner Jim Timony formed the Morals Production Company. Overcoming challenges of finding a cast and a theater, The Albatross was opening in the midst of a series of “sex plays.” In a stroke of inspiration, hours before opening in Waterbury, Connecticut, Mae had the manager replace The Albatross with a new title—SEX. For weeks the production struggled with performance issues, bad reviews and poor attendance. But it was in this production that Mae “established her sensuality and desirability with an image that ran counter to the popular female archetype, the flapper…Now thirty-three, West was full-figured and did not possess the 1920s voguish slim, flat-chested and boyish physique….West chose to exploit rather than downplay the difference.” Just as SEX was becoming a success, Manhattan’s moral watchdogs began taking notice. Using a trick from her burlesque days, Mae had two versions of the play: a tame one for members of the press and the “play jury” or watchdogs and a more risqué one for the general public. In the midst of the successful run, Mae developed her next venture, The Drag. But the moral watchdogs and New York City Police were determined to “clean up” the Great White Way. Mae West, along with 19 others were arrested and charged with “staging an indecent performance, maintaining a public nuisance, and ‘corrupting the morals of youth and others.’” The group was tried and though initially acquitted, after additional instructions from the judge, they were found guilty. Mae was sentenced to ten days in jail. She served nine of those days and was released a day early for ‘good behavior.’
Feminism? Just Mae.
Arguments have ensued that the character Lil in Mae’s play Diamond Lil was an early feminist role model because of her forceful rejection of male domination. The alternate view contends that her focus on satisfaction through men is in line with conventional standards. While the character of Lil is strong, because she plays men’s games by their rules, she does not fit the feminist mold. “Mae West reminds us that all polarities are really constructions of a society that operates to promote and preserve the status quo. By rejecting the divisions between black and white, man and woman, rich and poor, and self and other, she continues to challenge a society that thrives on fixity and certainties.” The article, What Does Mae West Have That All Men Want?, theorizes that “to construe Mae West as a crusading precursor to the women’s liberation movement is to obscure her real contribution to the liberation of women: her ability to expose and ridicule the pathetic feebleness of a masculine desire which cannot choose its object without first considering what the ‘other fellows’ will think.”
Tinsel Town
Upon arriving on the West Coast, she gave journalists some choice comments. One of which put Tinsel Town “on notice:” “I’m not a little girl from a little town making good in a big town. I’m a big girl coming from a big town making good in a little town.” Mae was never received warmly in Hollywood.
Making It Hers
Her first project in Tinsel Town was Night After Night. It took two months after her arrival to get her first glimpse at the script—and the role written for her was one she refused to play. Playing things her way, Mae managed to negotiate oversight of the script and her part, Maudie, in the film. She rewrote her part and ended up receiving a bonus from Paramount for doing so. “In each scene, Maudie bucked gender expectations. Her skintight gowns proudly displayed West’s ample proportions, an aberration from the still popular stick-thin flapper figure. …swaggering through her scenes, West undermined assumptions about delicate femininity with her heavy-handed mannerisms.”
The opening of Night After Night was so successful that Paramount signed Mae to a lucrative contract, “permitting her almost total creative control, allowing her to either write, revise, or select her scripts.” This was against the norm since most actors played parts that had been assigned to them from the studio. She was also guaranteed two films a year, a generous salary and royalties for all scripts that she authored. Jill Watts writes, “At a time when women had little influence in the studios, West amassed a remarkable amount of power.”
Roberston states, “The plots of West’s films could not account for her extraordinary popularity. Because West’s character changed very little from film to film, her personality functioned as an attraction. It is “the Mae West character” that appeals and it operates as an extra-narrative attraction, justifying the melodramatic plots that serve as a mere pretense for the star’s wisecracking personality and hip-rolling swagger.”
Ramona Curry declares, “Rather than earnestly enacting a character role, Mae West always played herself. West signaled her star presence through her frequent direct address to the film audience. Derived from vaudeville and stage traditions, West’s direct verbal and sometimes also visual address made her the primary narrative voice within her films. Not only does each film narrative make West’s character central, but “Mae West” also relates each tale through her ‘trademark’ dialogue and gestural style.”
In the article, Feminism in Films, the authors note that while women had always appeared in movies alongside men in supporting roles, their activities and interests very different from men. They quote Andrew Bergman from We’re in the Money: Depression America and Its Films, of Mae West’s roles: “She made the female the hunter, not the hunted, an active participant in sex, rather than a passive and ill-starred victim. By asserting her faith in diamonds and baubles, she created the crudest kind of economic independence, but a woman with a safe full of jewelry would have to walk no streets. She could not be manipulated, refused to be solemn about her body and made it clear that she liked her pleasures and liked her freedom. She seemed in complete control of herself and her world.”
Gladys Hall of Motion Picture claimed that if fans got the impression that West was not like her characters “the most glamorous and the most gaudy of woman in the world today will step back into the ranks of ‘just another blonde’” and “if Mae West goes Pollyanish, she is ruined.” Linda Williams puts forth, “But if Mae West manages to triumph, it is because, unlike the men in her films, she doesn’t fool herself about the loyalty or justice of the world she inhabits. It is a tough world, devoid of all warmth—only her ironical good humor gives it luster.”
Censorship
West was a frequent target of theater and film censors not simply due to her sexual explicitness, but also because “censors feared the independence and freedom of Mae West.” William Hays was watchful of Mae as she appeared on Broadway, so he was waiting for her when she reached Hollywood. “By the mid-1930s, the movie morality drive had gained sufficient public legitimacy to persuade Hollywood leaders that they needed to uphold dominant social values—or at least convincingly appear to do so—in order to thrive or even survive.”
Censorship was gaining hold across the country with the “morality movement” taking place. In order to hold Mae to the Moral Production Code, Hays and his staff kept an attentive watch over all of Mae’s scripts, songs and wardrobe. Numerous cuts and revisions came back repeatedly. The Hays Office was in the practice of allowing the release of movies after revisions were made. However, in the case of Mae, they withheld final approval until they had screened the final product.
With all the focus from Hays and other censors, it is interesting to note that as filled with innuendo and double entendres as Mae’s movies were, sex is almost entirely missing. “West never portrayed sex; she signified it. In her films, as in her plays, sex occurred through linguistic play, verbal competitions, and double entendres….Ironically, the woman whom many would celebrate as filmdom’s sexiest star achieved her honors with almost no love scenes.”
The Woman, The Myth, The Legend
“I wrote the story myself. It’s about a girl who lost her reputation and never missed it.”
The key element and constant in all the material available on Mae West is that the “Mae West character” was Mae West. The image she portrayed in public, on stage and on the silver screen was every bit her. “As West had shaped her, the Mae West character was an indomitable, irresistible, all-conquering temptress, a shrewd, resourceful, powerful siren who triumphed in every encounter.” Through failures and successes, trials and tribulations, she emerged as exactly who and what she wanted to be and only let known what she wanted to be known. Her tenacity kept her in business, her strength is what built her character—she was the American woman. Mae’s friend, Edith Head, said of her, “She always knew exactly what it meant to be a woman and how to get what she wanted. I think she died without a regret in the world.”

Too much of a good thing can be wonderful. ~Mae West

Bibliography
Bartlett, Thomas. "Mae West: Novelist, Playwright, and Racial Prophet." The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 2, 2001: A20.
Curry, Ramona. "Mae West as Censored Commodity: The Case of "Klondike Annie"." Cinema Journal (University of Texas Press on behalf of Society for Cinema & Media Studies) 31, no. 1 (Autumn 1991): 57-84.
—. Too Much of a Good Thing: Mae West as Cultural Icon. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Hamilton, Marybeth. "When I'm Bad I'm Better": Mae West, Sex, and American Entertainment. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997.
Robertson, Pamela. ""The Kinda Comedy That Imitates Me": Mae West's Identification with the Feminist Camp." Cinema Journal (University of Texas Press on behalf of Society for Cinema & Media Studies) 32, no. 2 (Winter 1993): 57-72.
—. Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.
Rothman, Stanley, Stephen Powers, and David Rothman. "Feminism in Films." Culture and Society, 1993: 66-72.
The American Film Institute's 100 Years....100 Stars. June 16, 1999. http://www.afi.com/100Years/stars.aspx (accessed 12 18, 2010).
Watts, Jill. Mae West: An Icon in Black and White. New York City: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Williams, Linda. "What Does Mae West Have That All Men Want?" Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Autumn 1975: 118-121.

Notes