'Come up and see me'
The actress and writer Mae West challenged, and broke, boundaries of censorship on stage and on film with her comedies and musicals.
The actress and writer Mae West challenged, and broke, boundaries of censorship on stage and on film with her comedies and musicals. A star of vaudeville and on Broadway, at the height of her fame in the 1930s she was the highest-earning star in Hollywood and an icon of female sexuality. She wrote all of her hit stage shows and most of her movies. Her one-liners and double entendres still hit the mark 100 years after she first delivered them.
As was the case with that other female pioneer of American humour, Lucille Ball, West’s comic persona and the real person who played it became impossible to separate, not least because West wanted it that way. She never gave an interview or spoke in public without cracking wise. Journalists who sat down with West, especially the male ones, thought they were sparring with her; her impeccable, impenetrable character act left them in the dust.
Her frank and open discussion of sex, and how much fun it could be, was genuinely groundbreaking. One drama critic called her ‘the Statue of Libido’. In February 1926, New York police stopped a performance of her play Sex, in which she starred as a prostitute, and she, the cast and producers were arrested; she was convicted of “corrupting morals” and spent 10 days in the workhouse. The play had been a huge hit. “When one can please the masses,” she wrote in 1929, “one must essentially be right.”
Aged 40, in 1943, rich and happy, she went into semi-retirement, and died, aged 87, in 1980.
This is an excerpt from A Woman's World, my new book in collaboration with Dan Jones (History, Etc). Get a copy today to support my work. Thank you so much!
