Mae West’s beauty tip

Charlotte Chandler: Tinsel Town's other blonde
• • The Californian-born author of several bestsellers about Hollywood, Charlotte Chandler won the show business scoop of last century when she interviewed Mae West before the iconic movie star died. "I never see women interviewers," West snarled. Nevertheless, the blonde bombshell spent six hours primping and preening for their first meeting. Charlotte Chandler was invited to stroke West’s porcelain complexion. "I did so very nervously," she recalls.
• • Mae West’s beauty tip? "Warm baby oil - - applied daily by a man."
• • Mae West told her the secret of perfect skin. Federico Fellini cooked pots of pasta for her and Tony Curtis revealed all about his affair with Marilyn Monroe. Name any Hollywood star and the likelihood is that Charlotte Chandler will have interviewed them - - from the siren of the silent screen, Gloria Swanson, to Pierce Brosnan.
• • Mae West stared in disbelief at the unmarried Chandler’s ringless fingers. "You have no diamonds!" she exclaimed. "You must find a man to buy you some." But later she confided to Chandler that she had bought her own king’s ransom of jewels herself.
• • As the New York-based author listened to the tape - - the interview was chosen for the Penguin anthology of Great Interviews of the Twentieth Century - - she was puzzled by a soft susurration in the background. "It was as if a butterfly was beating its wings, then I realised that it was the sound of Mae’s false eyelashes flapping," says Chandler, whose latest book, Nobody’s Perfect, is a personal biography of the great director Billy Wilder.
• • Chandler is adept at getting big-name interviews, although in the case of Mae West blonde undoubtedly responded unto blonde. For Chandler also has a luxuriant mane of pale golden hair, untouched by peroxide. Photographs of her - - whether she is lunching with Fellini, about whom she wrote an international bestseller, or sharing a joke with Wilder - - always feature her smiling glamorously beneath her crowning glory. Indeed, Groucho Marx used to say of her fabulous follicles: "You’ve got your own beret."
• • She jests that her fine head of hair helped her to persuade stars such as Gloria Swanson, Barbara Stanwyck, Ginger Rogers, Kirk Douglas, James Stewart, Shirley MacLaine, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis (who admitted that he had slept with Marilyn Monroe before she was famous) to be interviewed for the Wilder book. ("Superb name-dropping!" exclaims Chandler.) I suspect it has much more to do with her undoubted skills as an interviewer and writer.
• • Mae West, Henry Fonda, Alfred Hitchcock, Bette Davis, and Tennessee Williams stalked freely to her for her second book, The Ultimate Seduction, about people who are seduced by their creative work.
• • Dressed in a smart navy-blue trouser suit, Chandler is a well-preserved woman of uncertain age - - she politely refuses to tell how old she is. She has a gracious manner and wears her famous hair piled on top of her head. . . .
• • Come up and see Mae online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West

Come Up to See Mae Here!

"Courting Mae West" - a New MAE Play in NYC
"Courting Mae West" is a new play based on true events in the life of Mae West [1926 - 1929].
• • WHERE: C.U.N.Y. Graduate Center (365 Fifth Avenue, NYC 10016)
• • WHEN: Wednesday February 9, 2005 at 8:00 PM
• • INFO: ComeUpSeeMae@aol.com
• • Come up and see Mae online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West

Mae West: Timothy Dalton

MAE WEST co-starred with some handsome leading men such as Timothy Dalton.
• • Timothy Dalton was born in Colwyn Bay, Wales on 21 March 1944. Though Welsh-born, he is of British, Italian, and Irish ancestry. His mother is from the Bronx (New York). He grew up in Manchester, England with a background in show-biz, since both of his grandfathers were vaudevillians. After leaving school, he joined the National Youth Theatre for 3 summers, and studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art for 2 years. He joined the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1966, where he played many leading roles.
• • Timothy Dalton first flew to Hollywood in 1977, to become the leading man of the aging movie queen Mae West [1893-1980] in her last film. In Sextette (1978), with a cast that included Tony Curtis, Ringo Starr, George Hamilton, Walter Pidgeon, and George Raft, Timothy even ended up marrying the cinema legend whose sexual suggestiveness was as amorously artful as it was essentially innocent. He will never ever forget the experience.
• • "I'll never forget meeting her for the first time. We went in to see Mae West in a room where everything was white with gold trim on it. It was quite small, I thought, for somebody as fabulously rich as she was. It was only later that I realized that she owned the entire apartment block, though I doubt that she ever spent a penny on herself in her life; everybody was too busy buying her presents and asking her out.
• • "Then Mae West came in. She was wearing a white suit and a large bouffant hairstyle and these long nails ... there was a great lady. I was very curious, very fascinated by her. Not to put too fine a point on it, we were all wondering, knowing how old she was, if we were going to be able to work with her.
• • "As it happened, she was delightful. I think the most extraordinary thing about knowing Mae West was the realization that she was a brilliant lady. When somebody is that famous, you're never quite sure whether her fame stems largely from the publicity hokum, but she could always come up with a line that was funnier than anybody else's. . . ."
• • "Of course," adds Timothy with a smile that conceals more than reveals, "she was a bit of a flirt. But she tried it only once with me! She had a nice twinkle in her eye, a nice sparkle. Oh, it was definitely an experience I wouldn't have missed for the world."
• • Come up and see Mae online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West

Mae West on Willoughby Street

Loew's Royal Theatre
in Brooklyn, NY
Pearl & Willoughby Streets, Brooklyn, NY [closed/ demolished]

The Royal was the very first Loew's theatre in Brooklyn and one of the circuit's earliest anywhere. It started life around 1901-02 as Watson's Cozy Corner, which included a vaudeville theatre and a downstairs drinking saloon. It rapidly deteriorated into a notorious burlesque house and place for gents to meet hookers.

In 1907, Marcus Loew wanted to expand into Brooklyn and found the Cozy Corner's downtown location ideal for his purposes. He purchased it cheaply, renovated the interior, increased the seating capcity to about 2,000 seats, and re-named it the Royal. Because of the site's bad reputation, Loew feared that "nice people" might stay away, so he first leased the theatre to an Italian opera company for a short season. It opened in October, 1907, as Teatro Italiano Royal, featuring a company of 25 under the management of Antonio Maiori. In those three months, the theatre became regarded as classy and respectable.

In January, 1908, it emerged as Loew's Royal, with so-called "family vaudeville" and movies at a ten-cent admission. In its first year, the Royal earned $60,000 in profits and helped Marcus Loew to expand rapidly in Brooklyn.
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Is this the Royal Theatre where the young Mae West once performed? It probably was since it had presented vaudeville and it opened in 1908.
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According to Emily Wortis Leider in "Becoming Mae West" (Farrar Straus Giroux,1997), "Baby Mae" made her debut at the age of seven (1900) at "The Royal, on Willoughby Street, near Fulton" (p. 32). Leider goes on to describe it: "The theater ... was no great shakes, though large. It seated about seven hundred people. One vaudevillian characterized it as a 'dingy spot,' but Mae upgraded it in her fond recollection to a well-appointed house with two balconies, boxes, and its own twelve-piece orchestra" (pp. 32-33).

Leider's source is John E. Di Meglio, "Vaudeville USA" (Bowling Green Univ Press, 1973), p. 132.

By around 1920, however, Loew's Royal had out-lived its usefulness and was closed forever, eventually to be demolished.
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- - Contributed by Warren G. Harris

Mae West Takes a Back Seat

A Movie Queen & Her Cadillacs

. . . OLD-TIME MOVIE FANS can "come up and see" the 1934 V-12 Cadillac Town Cabriolet once owned by movie queen Mae West. The antique luxury Cadillac will star in the All-Car Shootout Show Sunday at the Long Island Arena, Veterans Memorial Highway, Commack.
Now owned by Joseph Amodei of the Long Island Dream Cars Club, the famous Hollywood car recently had a role in the film, "Batman Forever." Mae West had donated it to a convent in Sacramento, Calif. The vehicle was bought by Amodei in 1993.

The show is open to all makes and models, including trucks and vans. . . .
- - excerpt from an article written by Lynn Petry, Newsday [06-23-1995]
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1934 V-12 Fleetwood Town Cabriolet was owned by Mae West.
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Mae West had a 1938 Cadillac Fleetwood V-16 Limousine. [Model 9033F was purchased new by the actress.]
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Writing about MAE WEST, author Charles A. Johnson revealed this diva-detail:
For the 1949 play season, the Central City Opera House Association had chosen DIAMOND LIL starring Mae West. Miss West was an aging sex goddess whose charm and hourglass figure belonged more to the Gay Nineties that the mid-twentieth century. Nevertheless, she still exuded the magnetism that had attracted men . . .

During her stay in Central City, Miss West boasted to the press, "I brought sex out of the back room. I gave it a shove with personality. I can order a cup of coffee on the stage, and the censors will be on my neck!"

Miss West made sure her arrival in Central City was noticed. She demanded that two white Cadillac limousines be placed at her disposal courtesy of the Association. She gave a birthday party for herself and invited only men, including Colorado’s governor. (He attended.) [Reportedly,] Mae put mirrors on the ceiling of Penrose #3 where she was staying during the festival.
- - from "Opera in the Rockies: A History of the Central City Opera House Association" by Charles A. Johnson
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Ah, yes, once upon a time MAE WEST flirted with the idea of acquiring a Bohman & Schwartz Duesenberg Town Car in silver, with an open chauffeur, and with a "Pierce Silver Arrow" aero look. Though that Duesenberg had been designed for Mae West,she never bought it. Instead, the Town Car went to the heiress of the "Mars" candy bar fortune.
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Reported in the New York Daily News by Mitchell Fink: As a young actor trying to make it in Hollywood, Jerry Orbach (Law & Order, Dirty Dancing, F/X) was Mae West's chauffeur.

Mae West: 1930 Interview

Mae West [1893 - 1980] Met the Press in 1930

(Article was originally written and published in 1930.)

Mae West was born in Brooklyn, New York on August 17, 1900, according to her life insurance policy and the record on the police blotter at Blackwell's Island. Several acquaintances claim to have known her for seven or eight years before that date.
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She has a younger brother and a younger sister. Her father was a prize fighter. Later he was a bouncer at Fox's Folly Theater.
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Besides English, Mae West can speak German, French, and Jewish.
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She always wears a pendant in the shape of a champagne bottle.
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She uses a floral perfume in the morning. In the evening she changes to a heavy Oriental perfume.
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As a kid she was dressed in Little Lord Fauntleroy clothing.
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Her favorite dish is kippered herring.
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In vaudeville she also worked in an acrobatic act. She can lift a 500-pound weight. She can support three men each weighing 150 pounds.
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Years ago she played the Palace in "Songs, Dances and Witty Sayings." She is the originator of the shimmy. Discarded it before Gilda Gray and Bee Palmer took up the sway.
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All her leading men have been six footers. She prefers the "he-man" type.
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Doesn't smoke. The cigarettes she smokes on the stage are denicotinized.
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Her conversation bubbles with slang. Mae West will often invent certain phrases and expressions all her own. Also will render an original pronunciation of a word. When talking she covers a world of territory by continually saying: "Know what I mean."
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Her ears are really beautiful.
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Her first big role was with Ed Wynn in Some-time. Later she appeared in Ziegfeld and Shubert revues. In one of these she was Cleopatra and shimmied in a number called "Shakespeare's Garden of Love."
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She has the same mannerisms offstage as on. When acting, however, her voice is three times lower than usual.
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In writing a play she needs only an idea. After making a few rough notes, she calls a rehearsal. A script is not essential. She writes the dialogue and works out the situations during rehearsals to fit the cast she has hired. Will often ask the actors if they like a certain line. If they don't she will change it. Reading a part, she believes, makes an actor self-conscious. Before she wrote plays for herself she learned her roles by having them read to her.
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She likes everything massive. Her furniture, bed, even her car is larger than the average. The swan bed used in Diamond Lil was taken from her home. Formerly it belonged to Diamond Jim Brady.
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She has never tried to reduce.
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Seldom reads. When a public event like the Ruth Snyder case interests her, she has it read to her. When she does read, it is an ancient history book.
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Is of the opinion that Sex will become a classic. That in time it will be revived like Ghosts or Hamlet.
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She sleeps in a black lace nightgown. Lying flat on her back with her right arm over her eyes.
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Some day she hopes to own a leopard for a pet.
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Her ambition is to write a Pulitzer Prize Play.
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She receives at least four proposals of marriage a week. And from some of the town's best blue blood.
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When dressing she first puts on her shoes and stockings. Then combs her hair and puts on her hat. Then she puts on her dress. All her dresses are made to order with special slits to enable her to do this. They are all cut very low about the neck.
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She kisses on the stage with all the fervor that she does off. During an intense love scene in the play her pulse will jump twenty-eight beats.
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Her pet aversion is a man who wears white socks.
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She has a colored maid who is a dead ringer for her. She will hand-color her own photograph to show a visitor the likeness.
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She believes virtue always triumphs over vice.
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(Author unknown. This article was originally written and published in 1930.)

Mae West & boxer Max Baer

Mae West: Max Baer Bet
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. . . One day during the 1930s, boxer Max Baer called Mae West from the street outside her apartment in Los Angeles. West invited him to come up and see her sometime - - sometime soon. Sure enough, the couple ended up in bed. When they had finished, Baer rose and went to the window. Then, pulling up the shade, he began to wave - standing, still completely naked - to someone down in the street.
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It was Baer's agent - who had just lost a $500 bet that Baer could bed West on the spot.
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[This was one of West's favorite stories. Among her classic lines? "I used to be Snow White, but I drifted," "I've been on more laps than a table napkin," and "I feel like a million tonight - but one at a time, please."]
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[Trivia: Famed designer Edith Head once put paid torumors about West's sexuality. "No hermaphrodite," she explained, "could have bosoms . . . like two large melons."]
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