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It was 1 March 1960 and MAE WEST was a special guest on "The Red Skelton Show" on TV.
• • "The Red Skelton Show" was an American variety show that was a television staple for almost two decades — — from the early 1950s through the early 1970s.
• • You can listen to this on "Mae West — On the Air," a CD that features several of Mae's rare recordings from 1934 — 1960 such as "The Red Skelton Show" — CBS-TV — 1 March 1960.
• • Born in Indiana, Red Skelton [1913 — 1997] was an American comedian who was best known as a top radio and TV star from 1937 to 1971. Skelton's show business career began in his teens as a circus clown and he went on to appearances that spanned from vaudeville, Broadway, films, radio, TV, night clubs, and casinos. During his career as a performer, he also pursued his interests as a serious fine arts painter.
• • Mae West biographer has a new title • •
• • Emily Wortis Leider, who did such a fine job with "Becoming Mae West," has a new actress biography in the pipeline. "Myrna Loy: The Only Good Girl in Hollywood" will be published in September 2011 by the University of California Press [384 pp] this September. We wish Emily Wortis Leider well with her new release.
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
• • Photo: • • Mae West • • 1 March 1960 • •
• • Feed — — http://feeds2.feedburner.com/MaeWest
NYC
Mae West.
MAE WEST was inspired by "The Hairy Ape," a popular play written by Eugene O'Neill. 
• • She certainly saw it once — — and possibly twice — — before it ended its Broadway run at the Plymouth Theatre [236 West 45th Street, NYC] on the 1st of July 1922.
• • July 28th — 29th, 1922 • • • • For the out-of-town try-outs of her new show "The Ginger Box Revue" in Connecticut on July 28 and July 29th, 1922, Mae West had polished her parody of O'Neill's tragic hero.
• • According to biographer Emily Wortis Leider, Mae West burlesqued the character: “Yank was the very sort of brutish caveman type Mae West favored as a foil to play against, onstage and off — — in O’Neill’s hands a somber and powerful archetype, and in hers a comic cartoon rendered with broad strokes.”
• • Backed by a dozen chorines (the Stoker Girls) and a black orchestra, Mae sang, “Eugene O’Neill, You’ve Put a Curse on Broadway” and bellowed “Yank-style” lines including, “She don me doit! Lemme up! I’ll show her who’s an ape.”
• • Rehearse your favorite Mae West lines right on Broadway on Sunday afternoon 16 August 2009, when a guided tour will explore Manhattan's WEST-side during the "Gaudy Girls on The Great White Way: Mae West and Texas Guinan in the Theatre District" walking tour. The annual event — — open to the public — — is timed to salute the Brooklyn bombshell on her birthdate: 17 August 1893.
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
• • Photo: • • Mae West • • 1923 • •
• • Feed — — http://feeds2.feedburner.com/MaeWestNYC
Mae West.
Books about MAE WEST, revivals of her plays, reverberations of her witticisms, impersonations — — the public dialogue about the Brooklyn bombshell still wends its way through the traffic of noisy reviews, bell-ringing blogs, clamorous articles, toots and tweets. Though other twinkles have gone out, her light shines on.
• • Within the vague infinitude that is the West Coast, many admirers are still buttoned to Mae's glory days. And some Californians will boldly let you know they have read the books, seen the movies, cherished the souvenirs, kept one votive candle lit.
• • In the Castro, they are a bit more careful with their cadences — — weighing the texts, deciding which are too reverent, or too lax, or merely too content to wrap the comedienne in a mythic haze.
• • The Bay Area Reporter's critic Robert Julian has much to say, and now it's his voice you will hear.
• • Robert Julian writes: It remains to be seen if the world will seek out yet another Mae West biography, especially after Emily Wortis Leider's definitive Becoming Mae West [NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997 hardcover; Da Capo Press, 2000 paperback]. Emily Leider's work favored social anthropology and intellectual analysis over anecdotal recollection. But author Charlotte Chandler's She Always Knew How relies almost exclusively on anecdotes, supplemented by material from an interview Chandler had with West in 1980.
• • The blessing of Chandler's work is the opportunity to hear the gospel according to Mae, exactly as it was articulated by the star shortly before her death at the age of 87. Some of the Westian gems include statements like, "In my whole life, I've never envied anyone. I was too busy thinking about myself." When confronted with the fact that she was not a good student, West acknowledges, "I'm not very grammatical, because I'm only a third-grade graduate. And I didn't exactly graduate. I sort of retired from it."
• • Mae West opted for a childhood spent on vaudeville stages. After puberty forced a hiatus, West crafted her bawdy adult stage persona and forged a career in the theater via self-penned theatricals that placed her at the center of various sexual shenanigans. Success in Hollywood films began in 1932, when West was almost 40. And there is no disagreement on one point: West's films single-handedly saved Paramount Studios from bankruptcy.
• • Chandler's book contains nothing critical about Mae West. But Leider's biography surfaced the "ungrammatical" star's practice of appropriating words written by others and working them into her plays and screenplays without credit. Chandler gets high marks for readability, propelled by West's own Brooklynese delivery. The most interesting parts of Chandler's biography may be the last decade of West's life, when she returned to the screen in the films Myra Breckinridge (1970) and Sextette (1978).
• • The material relating to West's final foray into motion-picture history benefits greatly by quotations from those who participated in the films or witnessed their creation. At the age of 85, West cast herself in Sextette opposite leading man Timothy Dalton, who was 34 at the time. West believed that at 85, she looked just as she looked at 35, and therefore she was — — at least in her eyes — — the perfect object of desire for any man in his 30s.
• • Obsessed with physical perfection, West's last great love was bodybuilder/ chauffeur/ lover/ companion Paul Novak, who spent the last 25 years of the star's life living in her Hollywood apartment. It was originally a lust match — — one that eventually became a quiet love story. Chandler treats her subject with respect, and offers a believable presentation of a movie star whose carefully crafted image made her a proponent for female sexual liberation. The only question that remains unanswered is why Chandler waited almost 30 years from the time of her interview with West to turn the material into a biography. It may be a moot point, but this reviewer would love to know the answer.
— — Source: — —
• • Book Review: "Way of the West"
• • Title: She Always Knew How: Mae West, a Personal Biography by Charlotte Chandler; NY: Simon and Schuster, 2009
• • Byline: Robert Julian | Critic
• • Published in: The Bay Area Reporter Bay [395 Ninth Street, San Francisco CA 94103] — — www.ebar.com
• • Published in: Issue: Vol. 39 / No. 23 / 4 June 2009
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
• • Photo: • • Mae West • • none • •
• • Feed — — http://feeds2.feedburner.com/MaeWestNYC
Mae West.
In 1893, during the summer Mary Jane West was born in Brooklyn, a bellydancer known as Little Egypt created a sensation at the Midway Plaisance of the Chicago World's Fair. ...
• • And so begins Becoming Mae West, a fascinatin' 431-page bio by Emily Wortis Leider that is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year. The Californian poet received rave reviews in The New York Times and elsewhere, bringing her 1997 hardcover [NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux] to many readers' attention.
• • Since then Becoming Mae West has been reprinted twice. It is available in paperback [NY: Da Capo; published 4 April 2000; 480 pages] as well as in a large-print edition in hardcover [Thorndike Press; January 2001; 912 pages].
• • To celebrate the book's tenth anniversary, here is an excerpt from the review printed a decade ago by Library Journal:
• • Emily Wortis Leider (California's Daughter: Gertrude Atherton & Her Times, LJ 11/15/90) traces Mae West's development from child performer to coltish shimmy dancer to the drawling, wise-cracking persona recognized today. The author's focus on West's early career allows her to examine significant changes in American culture as the population became predominantly urban and the new media of film and radio began encroaching on established forms of entertainment. Yet the heart of the story is West — — already a veteran performer with over 30 years' experience when she arrived in Hollywood. But once West honed her persona, she was reluctant to deviate from the successful formula, stifling her arresting creativity and originality. This combined with perennial censorship problems caused the decades-long break in her film career. Recommended for large public libraries and subject collections. ...
• • Reviewer: Marianne Cawley, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore, Maryland
• • Source: Library Journal — — summer 1997
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
• • Photo: • • Mae West • • none • •
NYC
Mae West.
Much admired by both MAE WEST and her mother was the actress Lillian Russell.
• • Millionaire "Diamond Jim" Brady was another devotee.
• • Lillian Russell [born Helen Louise Leonard in Iowa in December 1860] is in our thoughts during the month of June because the influential beauty died at age 61 on 6 June 1922.
• • Referring to the Victorian idol (and ideal example of womanhood) that Russell had become, Emily Wortis Leider writes: "Matilda [West] herself, a soft-spoken native of Bavaria whose stunning hourglass figure reminded people of the ripe and rounded opulence of reigning New York beauty, actress Lillian Russell, had married after a brief stint modeling corsets, a scant seven years after her arrival in America. She had once harbored hopes for a stage career of her own, but her respectable merchant family, kin to proprietors of a New York brewery renowned for its lager, forbade it. They probably had also discouraged her forays into the corset-modeling profession, which she glamorized with a French word, modiste. ..."
• • Leider's book "Becoming Mae West" is a well-researched and engrossing biography.• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
• • Photo: • • Mae West • • none • •
NYC
Mae West.
On 1 May 1997 Interview Magazine saluted MAE WEST. This May-timed issue focused on a new biography that had made a splash – – penned by the California poet Emily Wortis Leider.
• • Here's how Interview Magazine [published in NYC, Mae's hometown] led off the article:
• • Actress Mae West was popular in the 1920s as a vaudeville performer and was well-known for her sexuality. She created a theater show, 'Sex,' that made the most of her sexiness and it appealed to the public because of its raunchiness. She tried to take credit for introducing sex to the public.
• • Mae West made sex synonymous with her name, and in the process, provided the censors with a new target.
• • In her new book, Emily Wortis Leider examines West's transformation from Brooklyn baby to American icon. Here's a sneak peek, plus a few words from another taboo-terrorizer, . . .
• • Source: Interview Magazine | Publication Date: May 1, 1997
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
______Source:http://maewest.blogspot.com/atom.xmlMae West
• • Photo: • • Mae West • • none • •NYC
Mae West.
It was 1 March 1960 and MAE WEST was a special guest on "The Red Skelton Show" on TV.
