Mae West: May 1932

It was May 1932 and MAE WEST was hip-deep in negotiations with Paramount Pictures. They came to an agreement, confirmed the Los Angeles Record, and Mae was heading West.
• • On 13 June 1932, reporter Relman Morin gave readers this account:
• • According to Morin: We are about to be favored with visits from two more leading citizens of New York. Ely Culbertson, who talks the best game of contract bridge in the world is one. Mae West, the lady who composes dirty plays right out of her head, is the other. Each has signed a contract to grace the talking screen.
• • Of Ely, there is little left to be said. . . . .
• • Mae West, according to the dispatches, has signed a contract with Paramount to appear in the filmization of Louis Bromfield’s story, Number 35 [sic].
• • Mae has much, aside from her literary talent, to recommend her. She must be about 40 years old, but, to see her, you wouldn’t suspect that she is a day over 39. Mae began her professional career as a blues-warbler many years ago.
• • Her rendition of “Frankie and Johnny” is considered by many to be second in excellence only to Tibbett’s delivery of the “Toreador Song” from Carmen. Mae usually sings “Frankie and Johnny” to an accompaniment of what you might call muscle-dancing. The only parts of her that do not move when she is in the throes of song, are the soles of her feet. She plays the piano with unusual agility.
• • Mae is better known, however, as a playwright than a singer. Her creative works are called “Sex,” “Diamond Lil,” and “Pleasure Man.” Each of these enjoyed a long and happy life in the Capital of American Drama except “Pleasure Man.” It was closed, after a record-breaking week [sic], by the police.
• • It took New York’s Finest much longer to catch up with Miss West than it did for Capt. MacD. Jones to get wise to Aristophanes and his “Lysistrata.”
• • Now, in New York, the brain-children of playwrights are granted much more leniency than in Los Angeles.
• • A great many plays that would have our local crime-crushers on the stage after the first act, have gone on to Olympian heights in New York. So Miss West’s “Pleasure Man” must have been a monumental drama, indeed, to have drawn the fire of the easy-going Gaels of Gotham. It was natural, therefore, that the delectable Mae was eagerly sought out by newspaper reporters, Harvard psychology students, and less successful playcrafters.
• • “How,” they wanted to know, “do you do it? Why the oldest inhabitants of Manhattan can’t remember the last time a play was closed.”
• • Miss West blushed, blew her nose, and answered graciously.
• • “I don’t really write plays,” she says. “I just make them up out of my head.
• • “I have an idea, and I work it out from scene to scene as the players are rehearsing.
• • “You see, most of my characters are, well – – very human – – and I find it helps to have real people before my very eyes.”
• • Of Mae, it has, in all truth, been said that “When the curtain rolls up on one of her plays, you know you’re going to see a show.”
• • Source: The Los Angeles Record — 13 June 1932 [errors and all]
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
________
Source:http://maewest.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Mae West
• • Photo: • • Mae West • • none • •
NYC
Mae West.