MAE I INTEREST YOU...

(Mae with Raquel Welch as a sex-change in the 1970 sick flick MYRA BRECKINRIDGE)


...in a little article I wrote for Interview magazine in '97 on a (then new) book on Mae West? Since this was written, I worked with a crew member on Mae's last film SEXTETTE who confirmed that Mae was actually so stiff on set that she had "wheels on her heels" to ease her "walking". It is also rumored that by the 70's, Mae wore a full face prosthetic mask which had holes for the eyes, mouth and nostrils, so that the unlined skin you were seeing was not actually hers! Revolutionary!

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, 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. 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."

She always seems to have enjoyed making out with actors in front of an audience; turning a lot of people on turned her on. "Mae West herself, not to be outdone by Sadie Thompson, kissed hither and yon with abandoned passion," reports a review of Sex. One scene at the Stanton home has her necking with Jimmy before going up to his bedroom. She helps him take off his collar and tie.

In Sex and The Wicked Age, she flaunted her body, just stopping short of nudity. The New York Mirror's review of Sex comments: "She undresses before the public, and appears to enjoy doing so." In the opening act of Sex, set in a Montreal brothel, according to Zora Neale Hurston, Mae played "Honey Let Yo' Drawers Hang Low" on the piano, a song not named in the script that was lifted whole from black brothels, or "jooks." Her performance, wrote Hurston, "had much more flavor of the turpentine quarters than . . . of the white bawd. I know that piece she played . . . was a very old look composition." In the cabaret scene she sang two Harlem favorites, "Sweet Man" and "Shake That Thing" (a song associated with Ethel Waters), and did a belly dance to the "St. Louis Blues." In the last act, set in the Stantons' posh Westchester mansion, she sits down at the piano and begins to play "Home Sweet Home," but abruptly switches to a blues. "That's more like you, Marge," says her admirer, Lieu, tenant Gregg.

Director Edward Elsner, a veteran of Charles Frohman productions who had directed Maude Adams and the Barrymores, encouraged Mae to make her sexiness the focus of Sex, rather than a mere condiment. In rehearsal, he spoke words to her she would cherish for the rest of her life, and often repeat: "You've got a sex quality, a low sex quality - something I've never seen in anyone before. It even mocks you personally." Elsner named, sanctioned, celebrated, and endowed with trademark status the sensual quality she always knew she had, but had so often been asked to downplay.

Sex appealed to the public appetite for sleaze and sensation. In addition to prostitutes caught in arousing embraces, it includes guns, knockout drinks, a jewelry heist, cops, an offstage suicide, bribery, and the threat of a shootout. Rocky the pimp tries to shake down Mrs. Stanton by blackmailing her. He has murdered someone, has unabashedly lived off women, and now threatens to "plant Margy under the daisies" if she tries to break free of him. She refuses to sew his buttons and threatens, "If I didn't have a certain amount of refinement, I'd kick your teeth all over this floor. Now blow, bum, blow." Better yet, in the last act she pulls a gun on him.

This was surefire stuff. A writer for the theater, Mae West told interviewers, must not only have lived, she needs to make the audience feel fully alive as well: give them kicks, an experience that's the opposite of ho-hum, something sensational like the latest edition of the tabloid Graphic, which shouted to all and sundry the latest spine-tingling doings of murderers, kidnappers, nudes, and sheiks. "People . . . can be dull at home," Mae maintained, "but in the theater they want excitement. They want to feel, not think, know what I mean?"

Tabloids supplemented the lurid details of the latest news-making scandal with huge, attention-grabbing press photos that told the story vividly and quickly, and sold papers. The Mirror's reporting on a party at which Earl Carroll dumped a teenaged chorine into a bathtub of champagne generated a huge jump in circulation - and revenue. A 1926 issue of Life magazine that appeared soon after Sex opened made fun of the tabloid credo: "Blessed are the prurient in heart, for they shall know what the public wants." It featured a cartoon drawing of a newsboy hawking copies of the Evening Grabit, crying "Sextra! Sextra!" Sex was tabloid drama in an era of tabloid supremacy.

The publicity shots for Sex fit perfectly into the tabloid format. Mae West appears on the front page of the New York Evening Graphic (which played at being outraged by such liberties) as a slinkily provocative hussy in a spaghetti-strap slip dress that's falling off one shoulder, caught in an intimate moment with a good-looking, fully clothed man (Lyons Wickland, the actor who played Stanton) who seems to like her as the one on top. The headline reads, IS THE STAGE JAZZING DOWN TO HELL? When Sex toured in Chicago, the ad that boomed it in newspapers warned, "if you cannot stand excitement - see your doctor before visiting Mae West in Sex."

No chances were taken with the publicity for Sex. Placards were placed everywhere. "I sent boys all over town with stickers. If you stopped for a minute when one walked by, why you got a sticker stuck clean across your back, with SEX printed on it." The sticker gag would find its way into Every Day's a Holiday, where Nifty Baily borrows the same technique.

The title Sex had been chosen for its socko shock appeal. Who could forget it? Mae often took credit for having single-handedly brought the word "sex" into the bright light of common American use; before her play, she said, the term was only whispered in hushed tones or medical texts. But in fact, as early as 1913, the article called "Sex O'Clock in America" had been published in Current Opinion. In 1916, a movie called The Sex Lure had appeared, and in 1920 Fred Niblo's film Sex featured a wild party scene in which a drunken businessman dons a tigerskin and crawls on the floor, biting a chorine's ankle. Just at the time when Timony acquired Following the Fleet, attacking suggestive film titles became a high-priority item on the agenda of Will Hays, since 1922 the head of the Motion Picture Producers and Directors Association. Among the titles Hays cited as objectionable were: Manhandled, A Woman of Fire, The Female, The Cafe of Fallen Angels, and The Enemy Sex.

Choosing Sex as a title was part of Mae and Timony's strategy, to stir things up. Even people who couldn't afford the price of a theater ticket would know about Mae West if she created enough of a buzz to get herself photographed and written about in the press. In court following a police raid, and in the headlines, she could star in an offstage spectacle, the theater of hyper-real life. "Let 'era close the show," puffed Timony. "I hope the police do get after it. That'll mean business." . . .