• • Mae West, the blond, diamond-studded, wisecracking, sashaying vamp from Brooklyn who lit up the stage in the 1920's and the screen in the 30's with a special brand of gender-bending sexuality, still defies categories and refuses to be conscripted into any one ideological army. The salty double-entendres, delivered with the drawling voice and rolling hips, have been recycled by a thousand female impersonators, but she was already there. As early as 1934 she was being called (by a writer in Vanity Fair) "the greatest female impersonator of all time."
• • Her heart, soul, figure and wardrobe belong to the Gay (18)90's, the decade in which she was born and which serves as the backdrop for many of her films; but in her roving eye and assertive sexuality she looks forward to the androgynous role-playing of a later era.
• • Born 100 years ago this week, on August 17, 1893, she might be said to span two decades and two Zeitgeists a century apart: the Gay 90's (hers) and the gay 90's (ours). In honor of the centennial of her birth (she died in 1980), MCA/ Universal is releasing nine of her best-known films on cassette, seven for the first time.
• • The late Parker Tyler, that pioneering and peerlessly witty chronicler of cinema's sexual — — and homosexual — — subtexts, claimed her as the Mother Superior of Drag Queens. Yet there is something straight, sweet and womanly — — even innocent — — about West that escapes camp. Feminists have found her both liberating and awkward: Her frank obsession with men as both lust objects and figures of identification have made her dubious as a "sister," but she's talking only to us when she says life is a man's game and "I just happen to be smart enough to play it their way."
• • Moreover, as the writer and producer of her Broadway shows, and the screenwriter of her films, she was a powerhouse who in 1934 knocked off the highest salary of any Hollywood star. And in blurring the lines between the biological and the culturally constructed woman, she stretches the ways in which we think about and define femininity and what it means to be a woman. As a self-parodying sex symbol, she's not a real siren, a turn-on, but she can brag about liking sex in a way that a more conventionally desirable woman couldn't. As such, she offers a fantasy, an imaginative projection of what a more sexually active and less romantically enslaved woman might be.
• • A transgressive, protean figure who both exposes and resolves the power struggle between male and female, she became a flashpoint for the moralists and guardians of public decency and is most famous now for having provoked the outrage that led to the enforcement of the Production Code, the censorship rules that governed Hollywood movie making until the 1960's. Was it the words in her 1933 films "She Done Him Wrong" and "I'm No Angel," or was it the fact that a woman was saying them, a woman who made bad seem good and refused to honor the dichotomy between virgin and whore. ...
— — — — excerpt — — — —
• • Author: Molly Haskell is the author of "From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies."
• • Source: The New York Times
• • Published: 15 August 1993
• • Byline: Molly Haskell
• • Refresh your Mae West memories 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 7 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 and co-star Cary Grant • • 1933 • •
NYC
Mae West.
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