Mae West: Harlem Idyll

MAE WEST wrote a play that starred her feisty and lusty character Babe Gordon, and it was produced on Broadway by the Shubert Organization.
• • However, her popularity was so widespread that the publishers Macauley and Sheridan House also printed a Mae West "novelization" that expanded on the same Harlem-centered material. Macauley printed the book first in 1930 under the title "Babe Gordon." Two decades later, the clever Fourth Avenue (Book Row) publisher Sheridan House held a contest to retitle the book, reprinting it as "The Constant Sinner" in 1949.
• • Mae West gets off to a rousing start on page 1, painting the alcohol and cocaine-fueled life led by her 18-year-old heroine Babe:
• • • • Babe Gordon leaned against the crumbling red brick wall of the Marathon Athletic Club in Harlem, at 135th Street off Fifth Avenue, and pulled at a cigarette. The Saturday night fight crowd picked its way under the glaring arc lamp in front of the main entrance like a slow moving black beetle. Babe scanned the humans with an eye to business. Babe was eighteen and a prize-fighters' tart, picking up her living on their hard-earned winnings. Her acquaintances numbered trollops, murderers, bootleggers, and gambling den keepers. Two well-modeled bare legs were crossed at the ankles; her waist pressed to the wall rose to two voluptuous breasts that almost protruded from the neglible neck of her black dress. Babe waited for Cokey Jenny.
• • • • Cokey Jenny had led Babe to her first drink in an apartment apeakeasy in Harlem, where a colored woman sold corn whiskey to black and white girls and their gentlemen friends, and where coke peddler and sniffer made their "connection" in safety. As Babe watched the mob push into the fight enclosure, she wondered what the hell was keeping Cokey. ... [Chapter 1, The Constant Sinner by Mae West].
• • Walk on the WEST side, starting right on Broadway on Friday evening 17 August 2007, when a guided tour will explore Manhattan's WEST-side during the "Mae West Side Story" walking tour. The event — — open to the public — — is timed to salute Brooklyn's own sexpot on her birthdate. [See the Annual Mae West Gala posting below.]
• • Only 17 more days until Mae's birthday!
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
• • Photo: • • Mae West's novel • • 1949 • •
NYC
Mae West.