Politics: Barking at the Wind Go West, Young Man - Mae West

Continued...

   As the 1920s cracked open a new era of Prohibition and experimentation, followed by a slow decline into Depression, Mae West began a curious transformation of "backwards advancement." She began writing the entire book for the musical revues she starred in, building side acts to support her stage persona. It was a persona that joked ever more explicitly around the issue of sex: "There's only one issue in sex - and I prefer to keep it between a man and a woman." This was fully in step with the "flapper" mentality of young urban females in New York during the Roaring 20s, albeit in stronger terms than most would openly express.

   But, while her themes thickened with the musk of sensuality, West's stage persona stepped backwards in time - to the "Gay '90s." She draped her performances in plotlines and costumery from thirty years earlier. Perhaps it was a practical decision. Certainly the androgynous flapper look was not fitted to Mae's curvaceous silhouette. (The Royal Air Force, noticing her physique also, named their chest-bulky life vest a "Mae West" - to which she responded: "I've been in Who's Who, and I know what's what, but it's the first time I've been in a dictionary.") West herself complained acidly of the flapper ingenues: "Pained faces, sharp shoulders, knobby knees, terrible spaces between their legs. So flat you can't tell which way they're going."

   Artistically, the choice of going back in time served another purpose. West's Gay '90s stage persona provided a convenient distancing effect, cushioning her sharp, satiric sexual barbs. As a popular audience device, the choice certainly worked. Evocation of an earlier time never mollified the censors, though.

   Mae West was certainly not alone in basing her performances around sexual innuendo. On the stage, comedienne-singer Sophie Tucker thrived for decades on "blue" humor. In films, Pola Negri and other "vamps" played with sexual tension as a threat/delight. But West's ambitions were greater than the club circuit and vaudeville bawdyhouses, where word-of-mouth made a career and hard-drinking newspaper reporters did not report the raucous entertainment for fear of Legion of Decency minions closing their watering holes. And there were more substantial differences between West and the film crowd. Movie sirens did not write their own material. Hollywood vamps were criticized, but as a genre, not individually. Pola Negri would play the title whore in Carmen and then a noble (albeit sexy) chambermaid in Hotel Imperial. Moreover, vamps were an exotic creation of Hollywood, not "real" American women - and, as in Negri's case, quite often foreign.

   Mae West was unabashedly homegrown - and vigorously upfront about being the mistress of her own fate. Never was this more so than in her 1926 decision to write, direct, produce and star on Broadway in Sex. (One wonders where Madonna gets her provocative book titles?) The play's moniker alone was designed to provoke controversy. It did. Reviews were good, ticket sales enormous - and the Public Order aroused: Sex was shut down, with Mae West brought to trial on a morals charge.

She refused to be cowed. Challenging the court, West proved that there was nothing indecent about the show's plot or dialogue. However, in a comic scene worthy of the play itself, the star's mannerisms were convicted as "suggestive." The arresting officer claimed that "[she] moved her navel up and down and from right to left." Admitting under cross-examination that Miss West's costume did not allow him to actually see her navel, the officer nevertheless asserted that he had seen "something in her middle that moved from east to west." West was convicted and sentenced to ten days in jail, with two days off for good behavior.

Lesson learned? Not exactly. Mae's next endeavor was to write and produce (but not star in) a realistic drama about homosexual life entitled The Drag. After successfully playing a tryout run in New Jersey - she made a sizeable profit on the two-week run - West was persuaded not to bring the production to New York: "Too many odd important people in town were frightened of the idea of my play as a public exhibit."

Both experiences had an important effect upon Mae West, though: if she wanted to say something of meaning to herself she had to find a way around the censors, official and un-. At the same time, she wanted to provoke the audience. Confident in her own dramatic savvy, in short order West wrote (or adapted), produced and starred in four plays that fit the bill: The Wicked Age, a middling success, Diamond Lil, a smash hit about a bawdy house madam, The Pleasure Man, starring a number of female impersonators and closed down by the police, and The Constant Sinner, adapted from her own published novel (Mae was branching out). Unlike her earlier court experience with Sex, West's trial for The Pleasure Man produced a happy outcome. Then, because Diamond Lil had been such a solid success, West revived the production and took it on tour. It was Diamond Lil that brought Mae West to Hollywood again.

If it seems that undue attention has been given to Mae West's stage career it is because, cinematically, her movies are little more than filmed stage plays. The camerawork in a typical Mae West vehicle is static, the action confined to box sets and theatrical staging. Some of those limitations were the result of technology: the early days of talkies found the camera enslaved by the sound recording process. Other limitations revolved around budget: at least for her first two films, Mae West's movies were shot hurriedly, reflecting Paramount Pictures' financially strapped condition. Finally, though, the major cinematic restriction on Mae West films was the writer-star herself. Mae's orientation was to the stage. Her screenplays were variations on plays and stock situations she had devised for her performing persona.

Be that as it may, what was to become a cliche was still avant-garde in 1932 Hollywood. It was a broke Hollywood that Mae West came to, where the golden goose of the '20s was scrabbling with the other entrepreneurial chickens in America trying to find financing in a country that had banks closing by the gross, entire states unable to meet their payroll, and a Great Depression not yet sunk to its lowest depths. Despite that desperation, Paramount was prepared to offer the successful writer-star of Diamond Lil a salary of $5,000 weekly for ten weeks work as the fourth-billed lead of a George Raft vehicle, Night After Night. West refused: the script was not up to her standards. After much negotiating, during which Paramount conceded that she could write her own lines, she made the picture. When it was finished, George Raft commented wryly: "In this picture Mae West stole everything but the cameras." It was an auspicious, well-received film debut.

It was also not what Paramount was really after from Mae West. Diamond Lil was what they wanted. In 1932 Paramount, which had seen several competing studios sink during the past few years, was on the ailing list as well, designated to join the dead shortly. The strength of Diamond Lil both on Broadway and on a two-year tour proved its popularity with a broad-based, national audience. The problem was how to get Diamond Lil past the censors?

Since 1922, responding to critics from the press, the government and, particularly, church groups, Hollywood had sought to avoid legislated censorship - by creating a homemade censor. The "Production Code" was devised and put under the administration of ex-Postmaster General Will Hays, an evangelical-oriented elder in the Presbyterian Church. Over the next decade the studios alternately adhered to and undermined the Production Code they set for themselves, but Hays' connections with successive Republican White House administrations succeeded in deflecting direct government censorship. The cost, however, was an ever-stricter Production Code. By the year 1930 the Hays office had compiled a list of proscribed books and plays, the Index Expurgatorius, that Hollywood was banned by the Code from producing.

Diamond Lil sat near the top of that list - and not because of alphabetical order. The restriction only increased the play's allure to cash-starved Paramount execs, an effect Mae West would have appreciated had it not kept her from Hollywood for two years longer than necessary. Thus, while Night After Night was the official excuse for Paramount signing-on West, brain sessions began almost immediately to devise a strategy for getting around the ban on filming her hit play.

It was West herself who knew how to handle censorship, beginning with a change of title to She Done Him Wrong. Then:

I wrote scenes for them to cut! These scenes were so rough that I'd never have used them. But they worked as a decoy. ... I had these scenes in there about a man's fly and all that, and the censors would be ... laughing themselves silly. Then they'd say "Cut it" and not notice the rest. When the film came out...and the bluenoses were outraged, they came and said, "Mae, you didn't show us that." But I'd show them the scripts they had okayed themselves!

It was not, of course, as simple as that. Hays and his enforcers were suspicious of "the Mae West project" from the beginning. Adolf Zukor, head of Paramount in Hollywood, basically lied to his bosses in the New York office, the studio's conservative financial control center. Zukor promised that only "suitable material" would be used in the Mae West film. "Negotiating" the script with Hays' representatives took months. Fortunately, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's election gave Paramount a breather. With a Democrat coming into the White House, Hays' Republican connections were leaving office. During the early months of 1933, there was uncertainty as to his usefulness as a protector of Hollywood from government censorship. Taking advantage of this brief window of opportunity, She Done Him Wrong was rushed through production in three weeks. By the time Hays' influence in the new administration was convincingly re-established, the picture was a done deal.

And a moneymaker. Despite outcries of "Immorality!" from Hays, the Catholic Legion of Decency, the Hearst newspaper chain and a horde of others, She Done Him Wrong was so successful that Paramount producers credited Mae West as "a life-saver to the motion picture industry." Of course, with the exception of Hearst (whose hypocrisy in maintaining a wife and a mistress made a mockery of his denigration of West's onscreen behavior), moral critics of She Done Him Wrong rightly noted the thrust of her film - and she gave them the line to use: "There are no withholding taxes on the wages of sin." Despite a tagged-on ³respectable ending² and crudely inserted moral speeches - crudely inserted or parody? - Mae West was playing the same tricks of sexual innuendo that had brought her Broadway fame. The moral critics howled, Paramount still needed financial help, and Mae West gave them both something to fight over: her next film, 1934's I'm No Angel.

I'm No Angel outdid She Done Him Wrong at the box office and in the moral critics' response. Even as she became the fifth-highest box office draw for the year (with only one film to the other stars' three to five each), Mae West was blamed by Hays for the imposition of a new, more stringent Production Code that would plague Hollywood until the mid-1960s.

It did not deter Mae West, though. Still plugging for the financially distraught Paramount, she came out with Belle of the Nineties (originally titled It Ain't No Sin). After three passes through the censor's office, the Hays Office wrote that it "remained an oily blend of sex, crime and Mae West." How the screenplay finally passed the censors remains something of mystery. Perhaps Mae just wore them down. It's hard to fight lines like "It pays to be good - but it don't pay much." More likely, there really was not much to complain about in the script per se - but, as Variety drolly concluded: "Mae couldn't sing a lullaby without making it sexy."

It was a good run while it lasted. In three films Mae West established a screen reputation, saved a studio and played the shock troop attacking the battle lines of censorship. Her next films were never to be as successful, financially or artistically. With Mae West receiving the brunt of criticism, even inviting it, others in Hollywood could take the ball and run with it along the sidelines. She had shown the world how to laugh at sex but, as talking films became increasingly sophisticated technically, more versatile stars and writers made her approach to the material seem old hat.

West's talent for provocative satire - and, equally important, audience attraction - did not desert her entirely. In Goin' To Town (1935) she was able to skirt the provisions of the Hays Code as a cattle-rustler's widow scheming her way into a society marriage. A year later, in the title role of Klondike Annie (1936), West tweaked the noses of the moral critics by having her character impersonate a Salvation Army-type sister.

By My Little Chickadee (1939-40), though, Mae West was no longer contracted to Paramount. It was not a good period for independent writer-stars: nothing personal, but her box office was too low, the censorship fights too rough and, this being the "studio system" heyday, independent productions were few and far between. My Little Chickadee was notable for teaming West with fellow iconoclast W. C. Fields. Both wrote their own dialogues - which, as film critic Pauline Kael noted, made for

an awkward movie with intermittent flashes of dialogue: [Mae West] enraged the respectable women of America by turning sin into a joke ("I used to be Snow White but I drifted").

What legacy, if any, does Mae West leave to the American cinema? Certainly she was no First Lady of Liberation. Audiences rediscovering her films via television in the late 50s and early 60s - the age of auteur-ization - hailed West as a camp icon, not a film comedienne on a par with the Marx Brothers and Fields. Critics still did not know how to categorize Mae's satirical approach to the inherently contradictory nature of American sexual and social mores. Both as writer and performer Mae West focussed on sex, played the role of "sex queen," but she never actually was sexy. At least not by the time she made her screen debut. Forty years old when She Done Him Wrong hit the screen, West had frozen her performing persona a decade earlier into a tightly corseted, eccentrically costumed, rigidly coifed, Gay Nineties bawd who might discuss sex, certainly hinted at it, definitely suggested desiring it with every gesture - but never looked as if she wanted to physically have it. Foreplay was her metier, not climax.

In the history of American cinema, Mae West is a role model with no imitators. Though men loved her put-downs and innuendoes - "It's not the men in my life that count, it's the life in my men" - few desired her. Despite the Morality Police outcries, Mae West was "safe," "one of the guys" who men could joke about sex with without the pressure of having to perform. Women liked her for the same reason: Mae said out loud what they were thinking - and, though she got the laughs, she was also the one who got the censure.

But, then, censure and laughs both added up to the same thing: attention. Mae West was a performer first and foremost. Although her last film was the 1970 bomb Myra Breckenridge, it brought her back into the public eye enough to get an invite to the Academy Awards. It was not her first appearance. She made her television debut performing "Baby It's Cold Outside" at the 1959 awards ceremony. There, writing the dialogue as usual, Mae West successfully pulled off the trick of putting these words in Rock Hudson's mouth for a national audience:

"You're very penetrating, Miss West."

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