Mae days | The New Criterion (original) (raw)

She was, on the one hand, decades ahead of her time, and, on the other, absolutely archaic.

She was, on the one hand, decades ahead of her time, and, on the other, absolutely archaic. As to the former, the revival of Sex (at the Gershwin Hotel) hails West as an anti-censorship crusader. For a relatively minor figure, she was at the center of celebrated cases in almost every medium. In 1939, guesting on Edgar Bergen’s radio show, she told his dummy, Charlie McCarthy, “Come up and play in my woodpile,” and was to all intents permanently banned from the airwaves. As a double entendre, it doesn’t really work and it’s certainly not the dirtiest thing you could say to a young boy entirely made of wood. But, by then, virtually any utterance by West was assumed to be a sexual innuendo, and the less obvious it seemed, the filthier it was assumed to be.

Her first films, Night After Night (1932), She Done Him Wrong (1933), and I’m No Angel (1933), had wider consequences. The last two made so much money and provoked such consternation that they were directly responsible for the restricted Production Code of 1933. That died with the studio system, but it lasted long enough to ensure that, when it finally went, the pendulum would swing long and hard. Today, the ugliness of Hollywood is a wonder to behold: in my experience, for what it’s worth, the average American movie is fouler-mouthed than American life by some degree. But, every time you mention what even Democrats call the “toxic culture,” Hollywood’s “artistic community” indignantly accuses you of wanting to go back to the Code days when married couples could only be shown in twin beds and if the husband wanted even to wander over and chat to his wife in her bunk he had to be careful to keep one leg on the floor. There’s no getting over it, it was ridiculous: you could show a double-bed in a Sears Roebuck catalogue, but not in a Warner Brothers motion picture. The conservative overreaction to Mae West gave Hollywood a grievance it still won’t let us forget.

Mae West and her friends called their operation the Morals Production Company. Which begs the question: what moral ought we to draw from her travails? In some ways, the obscenity trial segments are the least contemporary aspect of the current production of Sex. They may make you pine for the racier days of Jazz Age New York, for shyster mayors and Irish cops and lippy broads, but, as an attempt to position Mae West as a prototype Karen Finley or an experimental piece of elephant dung, it’s woefully unpersuasive. Only The New York Times could seriously think that audiences will “experience a shock of recognition” when the Giuliani of his day declares that Sex should be censored because it’s “calculated to excite in the spectator impure imagination.” The problem with enlisting Sex to the fecal-stained banner of the Brooklyn Museum is that it’s the wrong vehicle for the message. The defining attribute of Mae West is not that she’s against censorship but that, in every respect, she stands for self-reliance. She’s a trouper in the truest sense: She climbed the ladder of success wrong by wrong, as she later said, but, by God, she climbed it herself. She began writing material because the lame lines the pros wrote for her vaudeville skits didn’t work. She became a playwright because the star vehicle she needed never turned up. She became a producer because the Main Stem boys ran scared. If you were to construct the exact negative of today’s bigtime NEA trough-feeders, it would look exactly like Mae West.

Mae West and her friends called their operation the Morals Production Company.

The point is reinforced by the play itself. Sex, the first of West’s plays to make it to the stage, is a crude, raucous, vulgar melo- comedy about Margy LaMont, a Montreal hooker who climbs her way up to a Connecticut mansion. As _The New Criterion_’s resident Quebecker, I confess I’m not entirely persuaded by the idea that Montreal-to-Connecticut represents upward mobility, but let that pass: all Montreal hookers (about 68 percent of the population, I’d estimate) will take a quiet pride in West’s characterization of Margy. For one reason, all the other characters are forgettable cutouts. But that doesn’t matter because West made Margy one of those chippy, brash, tough-as-nails purpose gals whose lines crackle across the footlights. As she tells the snooty socialite Clara, “the only difference between us is that you could afford to give it away.” The only contemporary relevance to all this is its irrelevance: the difference between Margy and Karen Finley is that Karen expects the taxpayer to give it away to her. Indeed, Margy shares with every Mae West character an overwhelming revulsion against dependence. A few years later, when Paramount attempted to change the title of She Done Him Wrong to He Done Her Wrong, West put her foot down, disdaining the clichés of victim drama. A few years further on, the studio tried, unsuccessfully, to get the rights to Mrs. Warren’s Profession for West. It’s hard to imagine Shaw’s lines in that accent, but this time Paramount was on surer ground: evidently someone at the studio had spotted the two as soulmates. There were other “exploitation plays” around in the Twenties, but Sex is distinguished by Margy’s uninterest in salvation. It’s a rowdier, frontline confirmation of the Shavian view—that such creatures are a logical consequence of a society that makes other forms of economic independence all but impossible for women.

For all that, Miss Singer is at pains to keep Mae West at the heart of the production. George Xenos’s set, for example, is an extension of Salvador Dalí’s “Face Of Mae West Which Mae Be Used As An Apartment,” in which West’s eyes are picture frames and her lips are the sofa. In effect, both the play and the trial are being restored to their original tryout venue, inside the star’s head. Yet, oddly enough, the least Westian aspect of the production is the central performance. As Margy, Carolyn Bauemler has the garb and a couple of the mannerisms (the swagger) but she looks nothing like the originator of the role. Though this revival is being mounted by the Hourglass Group, if there’s an hourglass in sight it’s not Miss Bauemler: blonde, young, svelte, she has the same sustaining regal dignity as West but is otherwise closer to Joan Blondell, Una Merkel, Jean Harlow, the young Ginger Rogers, and Lucille Ball, and the other gum-chewing wise-cracking Warner Bros. gold diggers who came after. But that’s OK: all those ballsy blondes are descendants of Mae West, increasingly sleeker and streamlined until they all dwindle down to that faintest of xeroxed composites, Madonna.

Carolyn Bauemler’s performance is enjoyable, though she could certainly afford to slow up a little. But the contrast with Margy’s creator is instructive. Mae West became a twentieth-century sex symbol by remaking herself as a nineteenth-century period piece. As lushly upholstered as Lillian Russell, dripping diamonds, her fleshy curves squeezed into skintight gowns, sashaying across a Broadway stage as if it was a last-chance saloon in the Yukon, she was about as far removed as you could get from prohibition-era notions of sex—the skinny, leggy, slim-hipped, flat-chested flappers who were the Kate Mosses of the day. She was, in every sense, a throwback. She played gals called Diamond Lil and Klondike Annie; she starred in vehicles called Belle of the Nineties; for her forays into song, she steered clear of Rodgers and Hart, Gershwin, Berlin and stuck to oldtime warhorses like “Frankie And Johnny.” The proposition that the sexually liberated Mae West was ahead of her time runs up against the awkward fact that she was so determinedly way behind it. Then as now, if you decline to endorse the envelope-pushing cutting edge, the usual response is that it’s so radical some people are bound not to get it. But West’s entire persona cocks a snook at the fake sophistication of her time and ours. To the pseuds’ suggestion that some people won’t get it, Mae West scoffs: Honey, we’ve always got it.

With Sex, it’s generally agreed that the NYPD were belatedly sent in because the city feared the play West was working on as a sequel—The Drag, as in queen. But, even if in only vague atmospheric ways, homosexuality is often present in West’s work. After Sex was closed down, she started writing Diamond Lil and Pleasure Man. The latter’s concerns are aptly conveyed by Jack Conway’s column in Variety after the tryout at the Bronx Opera House:

It’s the queerest show you’ve ever seen. All of the Queens are in it. . . . The party scene is the payoff. If you see those hussies [he continued, referring to gay actors] being introduced to do their specialties, you’d pass out. . . . The host sang a couple of parodies, one going, “When I go out I look for the moon.” Now I ask you. Another guest very appropriately sang, “Banquets, Parties, and Balls,” and I ask you again.

But you had to be quick to see Pleasure Man. On October 1, 1928, opening night on Broadway, the play was raided by the vice squad and closed down. Mae West moved on to Hollywood and became one of the biggest box-office draws in the world, but she was already pushing forty and saddled with a persona the new Production Code effectively made non grata. By the time the movie business had loosened up sufficiently to let her do her thing, the thing she wanted to do was Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckenridge, God help us.

She came back to Broadway in 1944 with a play she’d written about Catherine the Great.

She came back to Broadway in 1944 with a play she’d written about Catherine the Great. Mike Todd agreed to produce it because he figured Mae West in a nympho comedy couldn’t miss. At the first preview, he discovered, to his horror, that West thought she’d written a serious historical drama, and he was so embarrassed he wired his backers refunding their money on the grounds that he’d taken it under false pretences. It made no difference. Whatever her intentions, the critics took it as, in George Jean Nathan’s words, “a dirty-minded little girl’s essay on the Russian Empress.”

Dirty Blonde (at the New York Theatre Workshop) dwells (though never too gloomily) on the star’s persona as a kind of jail cell, far more confining than that on Welfare Island. It begins the story at Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn, where Mae West was laid to rest in 1980. At her idol’s mausoleum, one West fan—Jo, a full-figured femme and aspiring actress played by Claudia Shear—meets another—Charlie, a film librarian and closet crossdresser played by Kevin Chamberlin. Both find freedom in the gowns and millinery of the 1890s, as Mae once did. As their friendship deepens, West meets West in a Mae/Mae relationship: the star was a magnificent narcissist and the notion of one Mae West making out with another Mae West would greatly appeal to her. After all, as she herself once noted, she liked to play both heroine and hero, the woman who finds her happy ending with herself.

I’m not sure how much else of Dirty Blonde would appeal to her, however. “Mae West was never devastated by a man,” Miss Shear, the star, author and co-conceiver of Dirty Blonde, told The New York Times. “She never looked in a mirror and said, ‘I’m fat.’” True, but, in putting it that way, Miss Shear is doing what Elyse Singer and the gay acolytes and everyone else does: looking for her own reflection in Mae. They’re the same height—five feet—though West seems taller and Miss Shear wider: the latter once weighed over two-hundred pounds, as she told us in her autobiodrama Blown Sideways Through Life (1993). The passivity of that title, versus Mae West climbing her ladder “wrong by wrong,” is striking. But Dirty Blonde is in part a meditation on the vicissitudes of celebrity: though the star is trapped by her persona, the fans are liberated by it.

If that doesn’t seem much of an insight, it’s apparently enough for Miss Shear. The rest of the play is selected highlights from the West oeuvre, with Miss Shear recreating the star engagingly enough and the remaining member of this three-hander, Bob Stillman, taking care of the music. The twin strands of the play show little desire to entwine, save for the fact that Chamberlin’s character got to know West in later life and spent many hours contentedly sitting in her apartment watching her leaf through his souvenir scrapbooks. “She never saw Paris,” says Jo, “but she could have”—one of several lines which Miss Shear seems to have positioned as a forlorn counterweight to the star’s good-humoured quotable quips. The director (and co-conceiver) is James Lapine, who stages the piece with his customary stylized sterility. Even more than in the passionless Passion couple of years back, it seems bizarrely at odds with the subject and with the innocently abandoned approach to acting of his leading lady. You’ll have a good time in the company of Shear’s West, but that very fact seems to embarrass Lapine.