Mae West: Harlem on Broadway

It was the fourteenth of September when MAE WEST was sashaying onstage as the slinky temptress "Babe Gordon" at the Royale Theatre's production of her newest play The Constant Sinner. The play had had its Broadway premiere on 14 September 1931, received mixed reviews, and would last until November.
• • Set in Harlem during the Prohibition Era, the play followed the escapades of a honey-haired prizefighter groupie. Here's a selection from Mae West's novel The Constant Sinner [1930] — — after Bearcat Delaney has attracted Babe's attention by winning a fight.
• • • • Babe walked out with Bill [Larson] and headed for Toni's. She knew then that she was sure to meet the Bearcat.
• • • • With her escort, Bill Larson, she walked to the corner of 135th Street and Fifth Avenue, and then turned to the left, walking through a block of chop suey fronts, dance halls, and speakeasies, where you bought gin for ten cents and where high-strung society nerves dropped in incognito for their shots of morphine and coke, while blood-stained criminals sat drinking and smoking at the tables in resigned security. In this block they were in Coke Village, below the deadline in deep Harlem.
• • • • They came to 134th Street and dropped a short run of steep stairs to Toni's. Toni's was a basement restaurant of red walls stippled with gold and lighted by blue and red bulbs. It was an Italian place and had become popular as a sporting hangout. The food was good. Fighters from the Marathon Club, mangers, and other sporting bloods often dropped in.
• • • • Bill arranged to reserve two tables for the expected party, and Babe and he sat down at one of them to wait. She ordered a gin rickey, while Bill chose rye.
• • • • A couple of drunken white girls sat over empty gin glasses at a table nearby. Babe knew these hustlers. They were guzzlers. They worked the streets till they made enough for a few drinks and then they parked around the Fifth Avenue creep joints, waiting for downtown explorers that needed a "steer" to dope or wanted to be led to a "circus" where women resorted to strange practices to gratify morbid curiosity. There was more money in this racket and it was easier. It took energy to be a leg worker and they were wasted skeletons, bones showing.
• • • • Toni's was crowding up. Musicians and chorus girls from the burlesque houses on 125th Street came in to spend the night and morning over cheap gin and a hunk of chicken.
• • • • The Bearcat appeared in the doorway, with Joe Malone; Harry Flick, another fighter; and three buddies from the express company. They came toward the table where Babe and Bill were eagerly awaiting the party. ...
— — excerpt The Constant Sinner by Mae West — —
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
• • Photo: • • Mae West • • the Harlem cast in Mae's play • • a street in Harlem • •
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Mae West: Well-Rounded

News men had various opinions about MAE WEST, often comparing her to the leading screen queens of her era (and some divas were not as well-rounded as the Brooklyn blonde).
• • Douglas Gilbert, writing in The New York World-Telegram in 1933, thought Mae West symbolized a revolt against the "modern" woman of emancipated ideas and emaciated shape who had dominated the twenties:
• • • • "No argument can dislodge her present position. She has given the gate to those proud beauties who once ruled our screen. The great Garbo [1905 — 1990] today is a trifle passé. 'Legs' Dietrich [1901 — 1992], as she is dubbed in the studios, shakes her slender limbs to apathetic houses. . . . Against Mae's ample bosom figuratively rest the modish aspirations of our girls. Her well-rounded arms encircle a nation's desire for escape from a synthetic life to one of substance and color." . . .
• • According to his grandson, Douglas Gilbert died in late January 1948 [at age 52], "appropriately at the bar in the Gotham Hotel" then located on Fifth Avenue at 55th Street.
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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• • Photo: • • Mae West • • 1933 • •
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Mae West: Toronto

A new exhibition in Canada will feature artwork inspired by MAE WEST.
• • "The Surrealists were the sly, decadent, mocking enemies of everything in modern culture that encouraged simplicity," writes Robert Fulford — — unintentionally (perhaps) conjuring up the Empress of Sex who was a sly, mocking pooh-pooher of everything in American culture that encouraged old-fashioned simplicity for women.
• • Until the end of August 2009, Mae and artistic mayhem are on display at the show "Surreal Things" — — Art Gallery of Ontario [Musée des beaux-arts de l’Ontario], 317 Dundas Street West, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5T 1G4. Toll free: 1-877-225-4246.
• • Fulford's article in Canada's National Post comes billboarded with a large, luscious photograph of the Mae West Lips Sofa. Here's a bite-size portion of his frisky essay.
• • Robert Fulford writes: It's a surprise to glimpse the worried faces of Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck flickering across a wall in the midst of an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario. But Surreal Things (to August 30) is a surprising show. It's an engrossing, revealing essay in what we can call Applied Surrealism, the process by which avant-garde European artists started out as revolutionaries and ended up as fashion designers, advertising artists, and all-purpose idea mongers.
• • An enemy of Surrealism could say that this far-ranging collection of outlandish objects proves that the Surrealists became handmaidens of consumerism by turning art into a comic turn. An admirer, on the other hand, could argue that they simply made themselves useful according to the standards of their (and our) time. Either way, they stretched their influence far beyond the Parisian art world where their ideas were first cobbled together.
• • In Spellbound — — Alfred Hitchcock's 1945 thriller — — Bergman and Peck play a psychiatrist and her amnesia-victim patient. Scenes from that film appear at the AGO because Hitchcock hired Salvador Dalí to design the Peck character's dreams. Dalí of course turned out Dalí-esque nightmares that Bergman decoded, saving her patient and solving a murder.
• • Dalí was the man for that job. He loved to blur the borders of art and show business and loved to play with Freud-inflected images. He emerges as the undoubted star of Surreal Things — — and deserves to, no matter what we think of his art. A large constituency has always restrained its enthusiasm for his painting. Even in his best days, each Dalí picture would begin as a sensation, develop into a curiosity, and then calcify into a bore.
• • His pictures are slick, superficial and forgettable — — less interesting by far than Max Ernst's paintings, less memorable than René Magritte's, less piquant than Man Ray's.
• • Even so, Dalí emerges as a titan in any account of how the Surrealists infiltrated the fashionable imagination. When artists rushed to the marketplace like 21st-century geeks auctioning their great ideas for computer games, Dalí led the pack. In the mid-1920s he was a newly-minted Spanish Surrealist, alive with what looked like inflammatory desires. By the mid-1930s, in New York, he was designing windows for Bonwit Teller, a high-end dress shop on Fifth Avenue. Using Surrealism as a marketing tool, he titled his first window, "She was a Surrealist Woman. She was like a Figure in a Dream."
• • Mae West's Lips • •
• • The most numerous and memorable of the things in Surreal Things are Dalí products, like the loveseat that reproduces Mae West's lips, the telephone with its receiver shaped like a lobster, and a brooch in the shape of a mouth with lips of ruby, teeth of pearls. Dalí illustrates the thesis of Ghislaine Wood, the curator who put the show together for the Victoria and Alberta Museum in London two years ago: The very themes of Surrealism lent themselves to commercialization. (The AGO gift shop gets right into the spirit by offering "Parfums Salvador Dalí.")
• • Ghislaine Wood took the show to Rotterdam and Bilbao with great success and presents it here in a somewhat altered version, with some 40 pieces from the AGO's own collection and several other North American museums, most notably the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., which became, in the 1930s, the first North American museum to take Surrealism seriously.
• • "Surréalisme," coined by Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917 to describe his own writing, was later confiscated by André Breton for his plans to free humanity from the twin curses of capitalism and sexual repression. Ideally, Surrealism would create a culture of unfettered dreams. Humanity, granted this intellectual and spiritual liberation, would build a revolutionary society. . . .
• • Article continues at the National Post site — — and go see the Mae West Lips photo.
— — Excerpt: — —
• • Article: "You’ll want to dilly Dalí"
• • Byline: By Robert Fulford
• • Published in: Canada's National Post — — www.nationalpost.com
• • Published on: 11 May 2009
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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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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• • Photo: • • Mae West's novel • • 1949 • •
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