She Was What She Was

By Gerald Clarke

Mae West: 1893-1980

Mae West did not invent sex. She just saw the humor in it, and probably no one before or since has had more fun on what she called the "linen battlefield." "I kid sex," she said. "I take it out into the open and laugh at it. I'm a healthy influence." And, as usual, she was right. Sex goddesses have come and gone and will remain so long as people go to the movies. But only Mae West was able to make a whole career out of the leer and the wink. Her voluptuous figure was as familiar as the Statue of Liberty's. When she died last week at the age of 87, from complications that developed after she suffered a stroke several months ago, America lost a long-enduring symbol of an age when s-e-x was something that could stir laughs as well as libidos.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, the daughter of a boxer turned livery stable owner, she first set foot on a stage when William McKinley was sitting in the White House and when women were ladies, or else not talked about in polite society. She played good-girl roles, like Little Eva in Uncle Tom's Cabin, but soon found that it was just as easy to be bad, and ever so much more profitable at the box office. She was later known as the Baby Vamp. "I never set out to make men a career," she sighed. "It just happened that way."

But once it did, she knew exactly what she was doing. She first appeared on Broadway in 1911, doing ragtime songs in a long-forgotten revue called A la Broadway and Hello, Paris. Deciding that none of the male playwrights quite matched her style, she wrote a play for herself in 1926. It was, of course, titled Sex, and most nice people professed to be outraged. SEX WINS HIGH

MARK FOR DEPRAVITY, DULLNESS, said a New York Herald Tribune headline. The New York City authorities considered the play's contents very carefully. After it had run nearly a year, and after 700 policemen and seven assistant district attornies had viewed it, the show was raided and Mae went to jail for eight days. Every actress should have so much free publicity; before long Mae had another hit in her play Diamond Lil, which ran nine months on Broadway.

Hollywood called in 1932, and Mae headed West, where she remained for the rest of her life. She Done Him Wrong (1933) was her first big picture, and audiences were enchanted by her earthy humor and the total lack of the hypocrisy that was convention in most other films of the time. As an established playwright, she was allowed to write her own dialogue, and thus began the long list of famous Westian one-liners. "Haven't you ever met a man who could make you happy?" Co-Star Cary Grant asks her. "Sure," she replies. "Lots of times." Before they go off together at the end of the picture, Grant says, "You bad girl." Mae replies, or promises: "You'll find out."

By 1936 she was the highest-paid performer in Hollywood, and all at once, everybody seemed to be doing imitations. "I became suddenly a star seen in the third person, even to myself," she said. "It didn't frighten me. I got fun out of being a legend and an institution." During World War II, her name was on every soldier's lips, and inflatable chest life preservers were known as Mae Wests.

On-screen and off, West was probably the most original American aphorist since Benjamin Franklin. "Goodness, what lovely diamonds," says a hatcheck girl who admires her necklace in Night after Night (1932). "Goodness," retorts Mae, "had nothing to do with it, dearie." Other examples of West's wit and wisdom: "She's the kind of girl who climbed the ladder of success, wrong by wrong." "A man in the house is worth two in the street." "It is better to be looked over than overlooked." "There are no good girls gone wrong; there are bad girls found out." "Women are as old as they feel--and men are old when they lose their feelings." "A thrill a day keeps the chill away." And one of her most famous lines: "Any time you got nothing to do -- and lots of time to do it -- come on up."

In her private life Mae was, or pre tended to be, as unrestrained as she was onscreen. She claimed a succession of lovers, and her 1959 autobiography, Good ness Had Nothing to Do with It, some times reads like the telephone book, listing man after man after man. But she was never tied to anyone, and though she married once in her late teens, she lived with her husband only a few months. Said she: "I'm not going to stop being Mae West for any man."

Her narcissism was as all-encompassing as a baby's, and she was her favorite topic of conversation. She would surround herself with admirers (usually musclemen, in her later years), and when the subject shifted to something else, like war or peace, she would hum softly until it returned to the one thing that interested her. The great Garbo came to meet her once. Mae was friendly and polite but not much interested in the sultry Swede; she spent the evening talking about herself and her career. In someone else, such overwhelming egocentricity might have seemed monstrous. In Mae it had its own charm. As she so often said, she was what she was.

Some time in the '30s, time seemed to stop for her. Outside her Hollywood apartment, life whirred by in a blur -- war and armistices, good years and bad. In side, everything remained the same: '30s-style white furniture, piano and rugs. She followed a rigid routine of exercise and health food, and never allowed any discordant thoughts to intrude from the world outside. "I never argue with her because she is always right," said Paul Novak, who had once been a muscleman in her act and, despite a difference of 30 years or so in their ages, remained as her companion.

Mae believed she had stopped aging fifty years ago, and in her old age, she sashayed onto the screen in Myra Breckinridge (1970) and Sextette (1978). Both were memorable disasters, and Mae could not comprehend that anyone would find it odd to see a woman her age being romanced by men half a century younger. "I look the way I did when I was 22," she told an interviewer not long before she died, "and my figure is exactly the same as it was in the '30s." In a way she was right, and most of the world, which knows her only from her early films, will al ways remember her as she remembered herself -- glamorous, sexy and very, very funny.

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