Mae West: Eternally Edith

Born in the month of October, Edith Head is one of several costumers who whipped up wicked fashions for screen queen MAE WEST.
• • Still traveling the theatre circuit is the one-woman show "A Conversation With Edith Head" written by and starring Susan Claassen, who received her inspiration from a TV bio-pic about Edith Head.
• • The Oscar-winning designing woman Edith Head [28 October 1897 — 24 October 1981] once told an interviewer that "Mae West taught me everything I know about sex, clothes-wise." Claassen, as her alter-ego Head, dishes her dry-witted Hollywood dirt to the audience. The show has played in London's West End, at the Fringe Festival, and elsewhere.
• • Certainly Edith Head would have a lot to talk about since she spent six decades in Tinseltown. Over 40 years were at Paramount Pictures, where Edith Head dressed Mae West, Clara Bow, Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Bette Davis, and others.
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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• • Photo: • • Mae West • • a costume design by Edith Head • •
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Mae West: Neighbors in Lovenests

Marion Davies’s neighbors included MAE WEST, Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, Cary Grant, and J. Paul Getty — — some of whom would walk over for dinner or enjoy a midday swim at her splashy seaside hideaway. A well-paid Paramount Pictures star, Mae had purchased a 22-room beach house in the same enclave, though she was not known for sun-bathing.
• • Actress Marion Davies • •
• • Born (like Mae) in Brooklyn, NY, Marion Davies [3 January 1897 — 22 September 1961] was a motion picture actress who had a long relationship with William Randolph Hearst [1863 — 1951] — — a married newspaper tycoon who tried to destroy Mae's career. Despite his pique over the comedienne's morality, Hearst dallied long in the forbidden zone, unable to curb the longing Mistress Marion aroused.
• • Interestingly, while the Empress of Sex worked hard for everything she acquired and paid her own bills in Hollywood, Marion's sinful 34 years older sugar daddy set her up in jaw-dropping splendor in Southern California.
• • Santa Monica was a celebrity magnet long before Malibu became one, according to an article in The New York Times. Laura M. Holson emphasizes the grandeur Hearst's dewy plaything enjoyed: And Ms. Davies’s mansion was by far the grandest on the beach. In the 1920s, the Santa Monica Land and Water Company sold 30-foot beachfront parcels near the Santa Monica Pier that were acquired mostly by Hollywood’s power brokers as homes and vacation retreats, according to a research study commissioned by the City of Santa Monica.
• • Laura M. Holson adds: Ms. Davies, a talented actress who was ferried by car from Santa Monica to MGM and Warner Brothers, where she worked, never wed the much older Mr. Hearst. He remained married to Millicent Willson Hearst, although his love affair with Ms. Davies lasted three decades. He acquired several adjoining lots for her and consulted Julia Morgan on the project, the architect with whom he collaborated on Hearst Castle.
• • Once completed, the estate was dubbed the Versailles of Hollywood. The pool was 110 -feet long. There were 37 fireplaces and 55 bathrooms. Ms. Davies lived there until 1942 .... — — and you are hereby invited to consult the published piece or imagine this well-feathered lovenest on your own.
— — Excerpt: — —
• • Article: "A Dip Into Hollywood"
• • BY: LAURA M. HOLSON | Santa Monica based journalist
• • Published in: The New York Times — — www.nytimes.com
• • Published on: 28 August 2009
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West: Gregory Ratoff

Gregory Ratoff and MAE WEST did not always see eye to eye.
• • Ratoff was related to Mae thanks to his shifty cousin Vladimir Baikoff, who was the actress's brother-in-law and Beverly's second Russian husband.
• • Born in Samara, Russia in April — — on 20 April 1897 — — the 25-year-old actor first sailed to the USA in 1922. A year later Gregory Ratoff wed actress Eugenie Leontovich. He returned to New York in July 1925 on the SS Mauretania with his Russian-Jewish mother, deciding to settle in.
• • As an accent piece, he was harmless. Gregory Ratoff played Tira's New York City lawyer Benny Pinkowitz in "I'm No Angel" [1933]. And many fans remember the amusing scene in which Mae West and Ratoff are discussing the breach-of-promise suit.
• • In early 1943, when "Catherine Was Great" was being hammered out, Mae got a visit from Ratoff. He wanted her to star in a new film for Columbia Pictures to be called "The Heat's On," which he would direct. To arouse Mae's interest further, he hinted that he might also produce her newest extravaganza rushing to Broadway.
• • After many delays and disruptions, "The Heat's On" was released 9 February 1944 to jeers, sneers, and razzberries.
• • For the record, "Catherine Was Great" had its live mainstage premiere on 2 August 1944. The show closed on the Gay White Way on 13 January 1945.
• • Gregory Ratoff's most famous screen role was his portrayal of the producer Max Fabian who feuds with star Margo Channing (Bette Davis) in "All About Eve" [1950].
• • Director, actor, and producer Gregory Ratoff contracted leukemia and died on 14 December 1960 in Switzerland.
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West: Mandolin Dave

Few people made MAE WEST laugh louder than vaudevillian Dave Apollon.
• • Born in Kiev, Russia on 23 February 1897, Dave's heavy "sour cream accent" was so hilarious that Mae West knew exactly how to increase his comic capital when they worked together during 1922 in the ill-fated "Ginger Box Revue" [slated to open at the Greenwich Village Theatre in Sheridan Square].
• • When a shady producer short-changed the cast by not producing the expected costumes and scenery, Mae pushed Dave Apollon onstage to deliver a prologue. Apologizing for the third-rate production the audience was about to see, Apollon muttered under his breath, "Ach! It was better under the czar with the lousy pogroms!"
• • Though Dave Apollon also worked as a mandolin player, it was not his musicianship that brought him the enormous popularity and success he was to achieve in vaudeville. Instead it was his Russian accent. Always on the lookout for entertainers with unique charms, Mae West first noticed his built in assets.
• • In "Goodness Had Nothing To Do With It," Mae described her first encounter with Dave during the Ginger Box Review debacle.
• • Mae West wrote: "At a rehearsal of this show I first met Dave Apollon. He had just arrived in this country, after some hardships, and was in the show. He was a fine mandolin player and Russian dancer. I first saw him dressed in a very tight-fitting green tweed suit that looked as if it had been made for a smaller brother, high button shoes, and a high Hoover collar. He was short but slender, with a round elf's face, and a turned-up nose over a mocking mouth. He had a sour-cream heavy Russian accent, and a very amusing way of expressing himself in a fractured English almost like double-talk. Dave was very funny, I thought, but in the show he just played the mandolin and did a short dance. I couldn't help being amused by him and I would have him come to me so that I could ask him questions just to hear him mangle the language. I would try not to laugh out loud, just inwardly, and somehow everything became funnier that way. When Dave Apollon would start talking it would break me up inside. He'd ask, 'Whut suz funnik I'm saying please to tell me?'"
• • I said to him, "Dave, with your mannerisms, voice, and puzzled expression that seems to struggle to understand what is said, you make me scream with laughter. What would you be able to do to an audience?"
• • "But no thenk you — — I serious minded fella, this mandolin and dancing very serious for me is enough."
• • Mae West persisted and soon had Dave reading lines in a skit about Circe and her lovers. When the show opened in South Norwalk, Connecticut, it was discovered that the scenery was too small for the theater. The producer was about to write a formal apology for the theater manager to read to the opening-night audience, when Mae came up with an idea.
• • "Get Dave Apollon to go out before the curtain, in a spotlight, in his own tight little green street suit, and with that borscht dialect he should really be, funny telling them about the scenery." They captured Dave, fed him hot tea, patted his back, told him he could do it. Finally, Dave did go out on the stage to make the announcement. The more he got tangled up in the English language, the more scared and bewildered he looked, the more the audience howled. He became so screamingly funny the audience doubled up in the seats. They applauded madly, thinking it was all a part of the original show. He came off pop-eyed. "I sweating like a hoss," he said.
• • Dave Apollon died in Las Vegas at age 75 during the month of May: 30 May 1972.
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West: Exaggerating

That unreliable source of information — — the celebrity tell-all — — has showed no signs of bookstore slowdown since Mae West penned her memoirs with the help of a ghostwriter [Stephen Longstreet] fifty years ago in 1958.
• • Many celebrity memoirs over-exaggerate the rotten aspects of a childhood in order to flatter the achievements that follow it. However, Julie Andrews resisted this in Home A Memoir of My Early Years.
• • In her autobiography Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It, Mae West certainly revealed no household poverty nor unhappiness, no past traumas, no "slippery slopes" where she fell down on the upward climb to success, no struggles with alcoholism, no childhood sexual molestations, etc. And it was not a kiss and tell book either.
• • Mae West (who was totally disinclined to air dirty linen) used this as a reason: that her fans wanted to know that Mae West always triumphed, that people did not want to see her as unable to cope or besieged by demons. Her book covered up a lot of unpleasantness.
• • What did Mae West hide in her memoir and her media interviews?
• • She hid the fact that she was sexually molested when young by a relative and also by a teacher. She hid the fact that she had a love affair with a married man when she was 21. She hid the fact that she got lousy reviews for 25 years. She hid the fact that she was fired from several Broadway shows before April 1926 (when she wrote "Sex" and produced it with her mother's savings). She hid the fact that no one would hire her between 1923 — 1925. She hid the fact that she was a bigamist, etc. She hid a lot of warts.
• • In other words, Mae West refused to give herself "a wound."
• • The public prefers stars who have a WOUND: who have had demons to overcome, whose glamorous public image hides dark secrets, etc .
• • While Mae West, who died in 1980, has no fan clubs, and is all but forgotten, Marilyn Monroe [1926 — 1962], who did not write her own plays and scripts, and who struggled with pills and alcohol and depression all her life, who had many marital break-ups, etc., has fan clubs galore and a legion of fans around the globe.
• • Fans love stars who have been WOUNDED.
• • One of the key elements of "Courting Mae West" that Steve Rossi (and other people who knew Mae) commented on is that this play shows Mae West under siege and wounded, and it is quite poignant when you watch Mae struggle and resolve her problems.
• • "Courting Mae West" opens on Saturday night 19 July 2008 at the Algonquin Theatre in New York City. Louis Lopardi directs this 95-minute serious-minded comedy.
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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• • Photo: • • Mae West • • 1897 • •
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Mae West: Walter Winchell

MAE WEST probably counted on the fact that the opening of her 1926 show "Sex" would attract press coverage. And it did. Walter Winchell called it "a vulgar affair ... amateurish in script and cast."
• • A native New Yorker, Walter Winchell [7 April 1897 — 20 February 1972] was a newspaper as well as a radio commentator.
• • While Winchell was at The New York Evening Graphic (whose staff included reporter Ed Sullivan), he invented the gossip column.
• • While still in his teens, natural show-off Winchell was drawn to performing in vaudeville. His career as a journalist began with his fondness for posting gossipy notes about his acting troupe on backstage bulletin boards.
• • During the Prohibition Era, he became a journalist. Walter Winchell, who was a regular at Barney Gallant's Greenwich Village speakeasies and Texas Guinan's midtown clubs, credited his buddies with opening the insider Broadway scene and cafe society to him when he was starting out as a columnist. The gatekeeper of gossip, Texas Guinan claimed that scandals did not officially break unless they broke at her establishments.
• • By the 1930s, he was an intimate friend of ganster Owney Madden, owner of the Cotton Club and a backer of Texas Guinan's nightspots and Mae West's Broadway productions. backers.
• • Always ambitious, Winchell disregarded the media's taboo against exposing the private lives of public figures, permanently altering the shape of journalism and celebrity. He was a top gossip reporter, whose newspaper column and radio show could make or break a celebrity. He became influential for decades in shaping public opinion, notoriously aiding and ruining the careers of many entertainers.
• • In his heyday, Winchell's gossip column ran in more than 2,000 daily papers, written with the same frantic pace as his radio show. Fifty-five million radio listeners tuned in to hear his distinctive rapid-fire delivery of his column during the 1940s — 1950s.
• • In the 1950s, Winchell veered away from his leftist sympathies and supported the right-wing Senator Joseph McCarthy. As Joe McCarthy's Red Scare tactics became more extreme and unbelievable, Winchell lost credibility along with McCarthy. He had a weekly radio broadcast which was simulcast on ABC television until he left in a dispute with ABC executives in 1955. An attempt to revive his commentary program five years later proved to be a disaster and Winchell was canceled after half a dozen broadcasts.
• • He did, however, receive $25,000 an episode to narrate "The Untouchables" on the ABC-TV network for five seasons beginning in 1959.
• • His readership gradually dropped. When his home paper, the New York Daily Mirror, for which he worked for 34 years, closed in 1963, he faded from the public eye. He still holds a fascination and several actors have portrayed him on the big screen and on TV.
• • In 1972, Walter Winchell died of prostate cancer at the age of 74.
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West: Head for Fashion

MAE WEST influenced Hollywood's wardrobe wiz Edith Head [born 28 October 1897 – – died 24 October 1981], whose impressive screen career earned her 34 Academy Awards nominations. "Mae taught me all I know about sex," quipped the gown guru, "clothes-wise." Head won an Oscar eight times – – all for helping MAE WEST and others don their gay apparel for memorable scenes in big-budget movies.
• • How many fans knew what Mae's costumes looked like in COLOR?
• • As costume designer at Paramount Pictures, Edith Head took on a side chore: the custodian of a score of costumes that had been sentimentally preserved because they contributed to movie history.
• • In November 1960, an article in The New York Times discussed the final appearance of these glamourous gowns. "I'm only managing to hold them together with emergency sewing now. This will be about their last time out," said Edith Head. The collection, referred to as a "million dollar" affair, included Mae West's emerald green, jewel-encrusted come-up-and-see-me-sometime gown from "She Done Him Wrong," Texas Guinan and Clara Bow outfits, and Ginger Rogers's mink dress from "Lady in the Dark." . . . [excerpt, N.Y. Times 29 November 1960]
• • Co-starring Cary Grant as a Salvation Army Officer, "She Done Him Wrong" was the only Mae West film that was considered for an Academy Award. Nominated for "Best Picture" in 1933, it lost out to the winner: "Cavalcade." [The trophy-winning motion picture dramatized a cavalcade of English life from New Year's Eve 1899 until 1933 seen through the eyes of well-to-do Londoners Jane and Robert Marryot.] For her portrayal of the wealthy Mrs. Marryot, actress Diana Wynyard received a "Best Actress" nomination but did not go home with the statuette.
• • The Oscar – – that should have gone to Mae West – – was awarded that year to Claudette Colbert, another headliner dressed from time to time by Edith Head. Colbert may have won over the Academy but she never captured the admiration of Ms. Head, who barely concealed her dislike.
• • In contrast, this designing woman had enormous affection for Mae West and other glamour girls such as Barbara Stanwyck and Grace Kelly.
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
• • Photo: • • Mae West's friend • • designing woman Edith Head • •
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Mae West.

Mae West: Dave Apollon

Few people made MAE WEST laugh louder than Dave Apollon.
• • Born in Kiev, Russia on 23 February 1897, Dave's heavy "sour cream accent" was so hilarious that Mae West knew exactly how to increase his comic capital when they worked together during 1922 in the ill-fated "Ginger Box Revue" [slated to open at the Greenwich Village Theatre in Sheridan Square].
• • When a shady producer short-changed the cast by not producing the expected costumes and scenery, Mae pushed Dave Apollon onstage to deliver a prologue. Apologizing for the third-rate production the audience was about to see, Apollon muttered under his breath, "Ach! It was better under the czar with the lousy pogroms!"
• • Dave Apollon also worked as a mandolin player.
• • The vaudevillian died in Las Vegas at age 75 during the month of May: 30 May 1972.
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
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