Tuesday, January 31, 2006

2 Ways to Come Up & See Mae


January's chill is merely a MAE away.
• • An exciting press party is in progress in midtown Manhattan that will provide a climax to the month of January Mae West would approve of. Members of the media and the blonde bombshell's friends are celebrating the Mae West episode on "Dead Famous" with outstanding refreshments, live entertainment, and a luxury-lover's giftbag [Retail Value: $125].
• • You, too, can come up and see Mae tonight and on Saturday by tuning in for A&E's Biography Channel series "Dead Famous: Ghostly Encounters." You must come over!
• • • • MEDIA ADVISORY • • • •
• • WHAT: DEAD FAMOUS: GHOSTLY ENCOUNTERS. Each week, hosts Gail Porter, a self-confessed skeptic, and Chris Fleming, a psychic able to detect paranormal events beyond the range of five senses, set off to investigate reported sightings of legendary figures such as Mae West [or James Dean, Lucille Ball, Jim Morrison, or Marilyn Monroe]. Part travelogue, part "X-Files," DEAD FAMOUS: GHOSTLY ENCOUNTERS explores the beloved locales of the world's most famous departed to unveil the real story of their lives... after their deaths.
• • WHEN: Tuesday evening 31 January 2006 [10:00pm ET]; episode repeats Saturday 4 February.
• • WHERE: A&E's Biography Channel [TVPG].
• • WHO: Psychic Chris Fleming, Gail Porter, LindaAnn Loschiavo, Joe Franklin, Ward Morehouse III, psychic Terry Iacuzzo, Conrad Bradford, along with several Mae West fans and friends.
• • WEB: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com
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• • Illustration: Mae West during her stage career

Mae West.

Sunday, January 29, 2006

Mae West: Songbird & Giftbags End January


Singer-composer ERIN JIVIDEN will perform a few covers once associated with MAE WEST as well as a smattering of classic Cole Porter at a chic press party that celebrates the MAE WEST episode being broadcast on The Biography Channel 31 January 2006 [repeated on Saturday 4 February 2006].
• • Formerly a SONY recording artist, the blonde beauty is currently signed to BonGiovi Entertainment Records. This multi-talented musician has released four albums, has written a Broadway musical "The Skye Is Falling" with Ward Morehouse III [wardmorehouseiii.com], and is studying acting with Terry Schreiber.
• • Guests will leave the party with more than memories. The luxury-lover's giftbag [Retail Value: $125] will contain SAMPAR Equalizing Foam Peel (to make wrinkles fade away before your eyes and revitalize your complexion) • • JOICO's unique Hair Protection System (which is known as the K-PAK Collection, a trio that leaves hair looking and feeling salon treated) • • Jane Iredale's new LipKit (which gives you six miniature glosses in her top selling colors and a lip plumper). Special thanks to the wonderful folks at Pierce Mattie Public Relations.
• • All the more reason to come up and see Mae for a hot time in January!

• • • • MEDIA ADVISORY • • • •
• • WHAT: DEAD FAMOUS: GHOSTLY ENCOUNTERS. Each week, hosts Gail Porter, a self-confessed skeptic, and Chris Fleming, a psychic able to detect paranormal events beyond the range of five senses, set off to investigate reported sightings of legendary figures such as Mae West [or James Dean, Lucille Ball, Jim Morrison, or Marilyn Monroe]. Part travelogue, part "X-Files," DEAD FAMOUS: GHOSTLY ENCOUNTERS explores the beloved locales of the world's most famous departed to unveil the real story of their lives... after their deaths.
• • WHEN: Tuesday evening 31 January 2006 [10:00pm ET].
• • WHERE: The Biography Channel [TVPG].
• • WHO: Psychic Chris Fleming, Gail Porter, LindaAnn Loschiavo, Joe Franklin, Ward Morehouse III, Conrad Bradford, along with several Mae West fans and friends.
• • WEB: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com
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• • Photo: Erin Jividen

Mae West.

Monday, January 23, 2006

Mae West on TV: January 31st

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

New York Playwright Invites You to Come Up & See Mae
The Blonde Bombshell Reappears January 31st on A&E's Biography Channel


New York, NY: Come up and see Mae on Tuesday January 31, 2006 in a special hour-long episode broadcast by A&E's Biography Channel [10:00pm ET]. New York dramatist LindaAnn Loschiavo, whose play "Courting Mae West" will be in a theatre later this year, was tapped by the TV crew to co-star in this hour-long presentation and select the locations central to Mae's days.
• • Since "Courting Mae West" is based on true events during the 1920s when the Brooklyn bombshell was arrested and jailed on obscenity charges, Loschiavo focused on East Coast addresses for this TV episode, some of which are spotlighted in her play.

* * * On the Streets Where Mae Sashayed * * *

Footage was filmed at several locations familiar to Mae West fans:
* * * 62 West 9th Street [now Stephen Lyle's Village Restaurant], an Italian-French eatery known as Paul & Joe's during the early 1920s, a favorite of heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey who introduced it to Mae;
* * * Jefferson Market on Sixth Avenue at 9th Street, the 19th century courthouse where Mae was on trial several times during 1927-1929 [now a dilapidated library, where worn limestone bits pelt pedestrians];
* * * Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn, where it took the magic wand of Boro President Marty Markowitz to open the creaky pearly gates for the TV cameras;
* * * 57 East 54th Street, Bill's Gay Nineties, where Mae toasted her vaudeville and Broadway buddies; and other locales.
• • When Mae wasn't occupied with a play or a film, some of her favorite activities were organizing a séance, consulting a psychic at Lily Dale Assembly, or penning a book about ESP. Her passion for the paranormal led her to take part in séances organized by Texas Guinan at Manhattan hotels or backstage at the Royale Theatre [242 West 45th Street], before matinee performances of "Diamond Lil" and "The Constant Sinner."
• • On August 17th, 2005, a birthday gala for Mae in a haunted mansion had featured a séance attended by Loschiavo along with those who knew Mae such as TV legend Joe Franklin. The TV crew recreated this séance, led by psychic Chris Fleming, who connected with some of the entities therein, playing peek-a-boo in hand-held light.
• • Before the TV episode airs, a special press party in Manhattan will announce this. Media and press photographers are welcome to attend.
• • Sponsorship opportunities are available.

• • • • MEDIA ADVISORY • • • •
• • WHAT: DEAD FAMOUS: GHOSTLY ENCOUNTERS. Each week, hosts Gail Porter, a self-confessed skeptic, and Chris Fleming, a psychic able to detect paranormal events beyond the range of five senses, set off to investigate reported sightings of legendary figures such as Mae West [or James Dean, Lucille Ball, Jim Morrison, or Marilyn Monroe]. Part travelogue, part "X-Files," DEAD FAMOUS: GHOSTLY ENCOUNTERS explores the beloved locales of the world's most famous departed to unveil the real story of their lives... after their deaths.
• • WHEN: Tuesday evening 31 January 2006 [10:00pm ET].
• • WHERE: The Biography Channel [TVPG].
• • WHO: Psychic Chris Fleming, Gail Porter, LindaAnn Loschiavo, Joe Franklin, Conrad Bradford, along with several Mae West fans and friends.
• • WEB: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com
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• • Photo: Mae West

Mae West.

Sunday, January 22, 2006

Mae in Her Heyday

Australian writer Joel Greenberg discusses the last biography of Mae West in this article, "Mae in motion"
[published 21 Jan 2006]:

• • • • Mae West: It Ain't No Sin • • • •
By Simon Louvish [Faber & Faber, 491pp, 2005]

I ONCE had the opportunity to observe Mae West at close range. At 82, standing beside the 101-year-old Adolph Zukor, founder of Paramount Pictures, she was the main attraction at a 1975 Hollywood studio function marking the end of shooting of a deservedly forgotten film, Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood. Althoughs eemingly well preserved, her physical components - - hair, eyelashes, teeth, bosom - - looked as though they owed more to art than nature, giving her the appearance of a slightly animated waxwork. Yet this was a woman who had created her own legend, who in her heyday was, as she justly claims in her 1959 memoirs, "the most famous and popular motion picture star in the world". And, she might have added, the most notorious, largely responsible for the 1934 tightening of the Motion Picture Production Code that kept American films straitjacketed in hypocrisy and immaturity for the next 30-odd years.

• • As Simon Louvish points out in this latest biography, West's career as an important movie star was quite brief (1932-37) and began when she was in her 40s, having been preceded by years of trouping in vaudeville and burlesque and on the legitimate stage.
• • What Louvish fails to mention is that she was half-Jewish and thus part of that extraordinary generation of American entertainers who came to prominence in early 20th-century New York and included Sophie Tucker, Fanny Brice, George Burns, and the Marx Brothers.
• • Born in 1893 and debuting on stage in 1911, West took some time to develop her unique persona, modelled in part on such stars as Eva Tanguay but with an in-your-face sexuality all her own. By the time she'd written and starred in such plays as Sex and Diamond Lil, and served eight days of a 10-day jail sentence for obscenity in 1927, she'd perfected the slow libidinous drawl, sensual slouch and suggestive double-entendre repartee that became her trademarks.
• • The amazing makeover job done on her appearance by Paramount when she entered films in 1932 transformed what Louvish aptly calls "a somewhat dumpy, short and almost nondescript figure" into a platinum-blonde glamour queen, banishing her double chin, downplaying her generous physical proportions and concealing her unlovely legs beneath floor-length gowns.
• • An instant screen hit, West was by 1934 America's highest-paid performer, earning $US399,166 a year, with her films, most of which she also wrote or co-wrote, box office smashes everywhere.
• • Today, like those of her contemporaries Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich, they've achieved a fresh lease of life on DVD, their pictorial beauty stunningly restored.
• • West was more than just a movie star, however. A pioneer women's liberationist, she defiantly asserted their claim to sexual equality with men, proclaiming in her memoirs: "The one departure I have made from the average citizen's way of life has been personal and sexual, and here I have only done openly what comes naturally; I have never felt myself a sinner, or committed what I would call sin." For her, the double standard, not sex, was the real obscenity.
• • Her film vogue more or less over by the 1940s, West dabbled in spiritualism and invested shrewdly in property, furs, and jewels. She also resumed her stage career with a successful revival of Diamond Lil and an idiosyncratic Westian take on Catherine the Great. Following the example of Dietrich, she debuted in Las Vegas in 1954 with a chorus-line of muscle-men, an act she subsequently toured throughout the US.
• • She did appear in two more films before her death at 87 in 1980, the bizarre Myra Breckinridge (1970) and the inept Sextette (1976), but by then she had become grotesque, a campy joke.
• • Louvish has had the advantage of access to a recently opened archive of West memorabilia held at Los Angeles' Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which includes manuscripts of her plays, some previously unknown, and 2000 pages of jokes she assiduously collected for future use (many of her most celebrated quips were not strictly original).
• • While these documents help Louvish flesh out his portrait, they ultimately add little to what we already know. For me, the best Mae West biography remains Maurice Leonard's 1991 Empress of Sex.
• • "Mae in Motion"
• • by: Joel Greenberg
• • © The Australian 21 Jan 2006
- - - From http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/ - - - ________________________________
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• • Photo: Mae West

Mae West.

Saturday, January 21, 2006

No Worse There Is None


The death of 59-year-old Matilda West "was a staggering blow," admitted Mae, who was inconsolable. Born in December 1870 in Bavaria, Matilda died in an apartment at 95 Euclid Avenue, Brooklyn, perhaps being nursed there by relatives. [Matilda and Jack owned a house on 88th Street in Woodhaven, Queens at the time.]
• • On 27 January 1930 Mae West attended the funeral.
• • Gangster Owney Madden waits for her by the door of the sedan, wearing a dark topcoat with a Persian lamb collar.
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• • Photo: 27 January 1930 Mae West, leaving the funeral parlor

Mae West.

Sunday, January 15, 2006

Mae: January 19 Wedding

It all started on 19 January 1889 in Greenpoint, Brooklyn with a wedding belle.
• • Sometime in the late 1880s... Jack was sidetracked from his ambitions [as a boxer] by a young German immigrant, Matilda Delker. Known by her friends as Tillie, she was the daughter of Christina and Jacob Delker, who were married in Germany in 1864. She was born in 1870, probably in Wurttemberg.... She arrived in the United States in 1882....

• • Several factors probably compelled the Delkers to leave Germany.... Anti-Semitism may have driven them out - - Mae had even the most discerning observers convinced that her mother was Jewish - - but by the time the Delkers reached America, they were Lutherans. It is more likely that they were drawn to the United States by economic success enjoyed by relatives....
• • [page 8] Tillie [Mae West's mother] met resistance as she aspired to follow in [Lillian] Russell's footsteps. An acting career for a newly arrived German girl... was a remote dream, especially with parents who forbade the pursuit of such a disreputable profession.... Mae claimed that Tillie secured a position as a "corset and fashion model," a profession accessible to an immigrant seamstress with unsteady English. If true, Tillie pursued this without her parents' consent. It was far from respectable; buyers were known to make sexual advances, and she could not have rejected their demands and kept her job long.
• • Matilda may well not have rejected them... young working-class girls of Tillie's generation, known as "tough girls," commonly rebelled against their parents' standards and experimented with premarital intimacy. In Tillie's adolescent world, crowded tenements and eroded parental supervision allowed young people to experiment with sex. The ritual of working-class dating, in which young male suitors footed the bill for their impoverished dates, often resulted in an exchange: cultural amusements for sex.
• • Ultimately, it would be Tillie who nurtured Mae, shaping her attitudes toward sex, men, and money. Mae recalled her parents battling over her early flirtations with boys. "My father used to want me to come home and all that, but my mother used to say, 'Oh, let her go, she can take care of herself.'" Mae recalled, "I guess she wanted me to learn all that right at the beginning." In many ways, Tillie was not only the motivator for Mae West's libertine ideals but the prototype for her sexually transgressive persona.
• • Tillie's youthful defiance soon met its end with Jack West. Initially, the couple formed a passionate bond.... Mae told an interviewer, "my father had swept her off her feet."
• • ... Jack and Tillie had much in common. Both rebelled against parental expectations, Jack through sports and Tillie through her dreams of a theatrical career. ...
• • On 19 January 1889, in Greenpoint, Battling Jack West and Tillie Delker took their wedding vows before a local minister with Jack's sister Julia West acting as maid of honor.
Source: Jill Watts, Mae West: An Icon in Black and White [NY: Oxford University Press, 2001], pages 4-9.
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• • Photo: 27 April 1927 Mae West, leaving prison in New York, greeted by her mother

Mae West.

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Mae Impersonator Craig Russell

Forty two years: the life of Mae West impersonator Craig Russell was short and bittersweet.
• • "Craig Russell" was the stage name of Russell Craig Eadie [10 January 1948 - 30 October 1990), a Canadian female impersonator.

• • His impersonations also included Carol Channing, Bette Davis, Barbra Streisand, Tallulah Bankhead, Marlene Dietrich, Bette Midler, Anita Bryant, Peggy Lee, and Judy Garland. While performing, he always spoke and sang in the voices of the celebrities he was impersonating.
• • Born on January 10th in Port Perry, Ontario, Russell Craig Eadie was fascinated by show biz glamour from an early age. When he was 13 and still in high school, he formed the Mae West International Fan Club. By the age of 15, Eadie had moved to Los Angeles to work for Mae West, a pivotal experience in his show business education. He soon returned to Toronto to finish high school but dropped out for good, toiling as an insurance clerk before returning to California in 1967.
• • Eadie moved in with Mae West, becoming her personal secretary for seven months, assisting with her fan mail and honing his impersonations of her. In 1968 Eadie returned to Toronto, moved in with Margaret Gibson, and enrolled in hairdressing school. By day, he worked as a professional hairdresser [1969 - 1971]. By night, he pursued a career onstage.
• • By 1971, he was a regular headliner in Toronto gay clubs and had a burgeoning international following.
• • In 1977, Russell starred in the film Outrageous!, based on a short story written by Gibson about their time as roommates. Two more films followed.
• • Though he publicly identified himself as gay rather than bisexual, Russell wed close friend Lori Jenkins in 1982. They remained married until his death at age 42 from a stroke (related to complications from AIDS) in 1990.
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• • Photo: Craig Russell as Mae West

Mae West.

Friday, January 06, 2006

Mae: Brits and Needles

Bad old boys:
Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty, Stewart Granger, Mae West - some of Hollywood's greatest stars were also its worst advertisement, says Chris Petit

Under discussion in the British newspaper The Guardian: four recent biographies, nicely sliced and dissected by the London critic Chris Petit.

• • . . . . Marlon Brando's ego was more rock star than actor. The Naked Actor offers an insider's portrait of Hollywood. Brando has the last word: "In this town fucking is a technique you develop, like dentistry. You get good at it, you're going to do a lot of fillings."
• • Warren Beatty did an awful lot of fillings. He was initially cast in the same rebel mold as Brando and James Dean when, in reality, he was a prototype yuppie careerist. He cultivated influential mentors, several of them homosexual and smitten. . . .
• • Stewart Granger's mother had an arrangement with an"uncle" that left the boy shamed by his father's emasculation. . . . Granger, a superficial charmer, was arrogant, bigoted and chippy in equal measure. . . .
• • Compared to Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty, or Stewart Granger, Mae West was a paragon of the Protestant work ethic. Few worked harder in Hollywood. Her famous sexual innuendo and throwaway style were the products of much rewriting and rehearsal. She remains a theatrical, and rather Victorian, figure and the film career was limited by censorship battles and studio politics, but, as Simon Louvish's diligent biography shows, she is unique, and heroic in the history of Hollywood for putting her espousal of the pleasure principle into her work.
• • Titles: • •
Marlon Brando: The Naked Actor by George Englund (271pp, Gibson Square Books, £15.99)
Warren Beatty: A Private Man by Suzanne Finstad (587pp, Aurum, £20)
Stewart Granger: The Last of the Swashbucklers by Don Shiach (275pp, Aurum, £18.99)
Mae West: It Ain't No Sin by Simon Louvish (491pp, Faber, £20)
• • Book Reviewer: Chris Petit
• • Condensed from a review in The Guardian • Saturday 31 December 2005
- - http://education.guardian.co.uk - -
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• • Photo: Mae West (born 1893 in Brooklyn, NY)

Mae West.