Mae West: The Birth of SEX

MAE WEST gave birth to "Sex," her sensational and controversial play [registered with the U.S. Copyright Office from her parents' address in blue-collar Queens], thanks to some unusual mid-wives and odd-fathers.
• • In 1923, one year before James Timony acquired the rights to "Following the Fleet" by John Joseph Byrne, Mae had celebrated her thirtieth birthday. She had briefly returned to variety in 1924 on the touring wheel known as the Interstate Circuit. The month of March found the vaudevillian in heat in Houston, where she had fallen for a handsome Texas-based Variety reporter, Bud Burmeister. By then, Mae had quietly divorced her Italian husband Guido Deiro in the Queens County Courthouse but she was still legally (secretly) wed to danceman Frank Wallace. Either the romance went pretty far or perhaps Mae had a pregnancy scare — — because Burmeister applied for a marriage license.
• • After this hot-blooded escapade (or escape) in the Lone Star State, and after a brief commitment in Detroit at one of Keith's vaudeville emporiums, Mae was back in New York City under her parents' roof. By then Timony had made the acquaintance of a fellow Irishman, John J. Byrne, a 24-year-old thespian living with Mr. and Mrs. Patrick C. Murphy (his married sister and brother-in-law) in East Orange, New Jersey.
• • In Jim Timony's Manhattan office, Mae explained to Byrne she needed a play in the style of Rain, a sin-sational drama that had starred Jeanne Eagels in the role of Sadie Thompson, a beautiful tart who was a wanted woman in San Francisco, and on the run from a Honolulu brothel. After all, Rain — — based on W. Somerset Maugham's short story — — was the Broadway boxoffice smash of the 1922-1923 season. .
• • On the New York stage during the 1920s, whores and brothels were in vogue. David Belasco had scored a success with his racially mixed production of Lulu Belle; Leonore Ulric portrayed the mulatto courtesan. And Mae had been monitoring the meteoric rise of Eugene O'Neill, whose Anna Christie opened in 1921 with Pauline Lord playing the title role of the Swedish farm gal from Minnesota who winds up in New York City — — after escaping from a St. Paul brothel — — and is searching for her alcoholic father, a seaman. Quite aware that O'Neill had helped legitimize a raw realism fueled by life's seamy, seedy side, Mae West was ready to express herself in this idiom.
• • Explaining what she wanted to Byrne, Mae pointed out that Rain's Sadie Thompson was a loose woman who made a living from soldiers. "I told him I had an idea of a girl who made her living from sailors — — and to call the play A Sailor's Delight or True to the Navy, sayings I had previously used in a song," Mae revealed to a reporter.
• • Though Following the Fleet seems to have been written to order by J.J. Byrne and Ted McLean, it did not suit Mae. So she contacted a female playwright of German descent who was often hired to collaborate. The author was living in the Bronx with her widowed mother Mrs. Maximilian Leitzbach and had worked on projects such as adapting a woman's novel Wife in Name Only [1923] for the screen. Soon Mae West, age 32, and Adeline M. Leitzbach, age 38, were revising the script that would become Sex and be staged in April 1926.
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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• • Photo: • • Mae West onstage in Sex • • 1926 • •
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Mae West: Sex Positive

A-MAE-zing thanks go to the San Francisco Weekly who printed an intelligent salute to MAE WEST in their current issue. Drama critic Chloe Veltman paid the Brooklyn bombshell the supreme compliment of laughing at her lines — — and taking her seriously. Here is Veltman's insightful commentary on the revival of "Sex" [now playing at the Aurora Theatre in Berkeley, California through 9 December 2007].

• • • • THEATER REVIEW • • • •

• • Sex Sells Itself at the Aurora Theater in Berkeley
• • By Chloe Veltman

• • When she was released from jail for transgressing indecency laws with her 1926 play Sex, Mae West told reporters that her play about a street-smart prostitute's adventures in love was "a work of art." This was a bit of a stretch. West based her slapstick comedy on Following the Fleet, a melodrama by New Jersey author Jack Byrne. Mae West scholar Lillian Schlissel dubs Byrne's creation "a third-rate sex play set in a Montreal brothel" in her introduction to a collection of West's plays. Schlissel's backhanded description of Byrne's work could be applied to Sex as well. The plot, concerning hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold Margy LaMont's journey from the gutter to the stars via a Montreal flophouse, a Trinidad nightclub, and the mansion of a wealthy Connecticut family, is flimsy and farcical.
• • But the true creativity of Sex isn't in the aesthetics of its composition. Like other artists whose works have challenged censorship standards over the years, from D.H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover to Kenneth Tynan's burlesque stage review Oh! Calcutta! to Madonna's photographic book Sex, the genius of West's theatrical effort lies in its notoriety. By the time West, who wrote the role of LaMont for herself and starred in the original production, emerged from her short stay in prison, she was well on her way to fame. Not only that. West's trailblazing portrayal of a prostitute who finds happiness and fortune instead of her moral comeuppance — — which up to that point had been the de facto ending to plays about loose women — — helped to break down contemporary pruderies, paving the way for more diverse characters on the legit Broadway stage. As West later told reporters, "Considering what Sex got me, a few days in the pen 'n' a $500 fine ain't too bad a deal."
• • What makes director Tom Ross' revival of West's comedy at Aurora Theatre so captivating is its sense of fun and its ability to connect what "Sex" meant to Mae West and her audiences with what the play means to us today. This is no small feat when you consider the essential badness of the play. Making a joke of the vaudeville shtick might seem the easiest route for a director. But instead of mocking West's artistic sensibility, Ross and his collaborators embrace every hokey one-liner as if she had written it just last week for The Daily Show, and go at each sentimental musical number like they mean it. The result makes for not only an entertaining night out at the theater, but also a provocative one.
• • Ross' production might appear garish on the surface, but it's subtle within.
Set designer Greg Dunham goes all out for chintz, flinging together an upright piano and a few sparse bits of bric-a-brac furniture in front of a tacky revolving backdrop, depicting an amateurishly painted street corner scene on one side and the inside wall of a parlor on the other. It suggests a hastily put together touring vaudeville show. But there's more to the scenic design than meets the eye. The remarkable similarity between the look of the opening scene, set in a low-class Montreal brothel, and the final scene, set in an upper-class Connecticut home, underscores the main moral point that West makes in her play: that circumstances rather than social position dictate a person's actions, and a society lady is just as capable of committing sin as a prostitute is of being virtuous.
• • The performances similarly balance flamboyance with depth. Aurora's expert cast doesn't shy away from portraying West's vaudeville types in a bravura style. Kristin Stokes plays her sad little prostitute, Agnes, like a Hollywood Golden Era ingénue with her Tweety Pie voice and wide, candid eyes. Steve Irish's British naval officer Lieutenant Gregg is the sort of handsome, beefy hero who would have made women swoon back in the day. The acting may be hammy by modern standards, but without exception, the actions and words come from a place of affection and are delivered with precision and control.
• • This approach is most obviously encapsulated in Delia MacDougall's portrayal of LaMont. MacDougall unapologetically channels West's persona throughout: Her performance is as much an homage to the American stage and screen's greatest sexual liberator as it is a portrait of an irresistible blonde hussy. MacDougall has all of West's legendary mannerisms down, from her loaded vocal purr and Jell-O swagger to her trademark "teapot" posture, with one arm crooked at the elbow, hand on hip, and the other swinging in the air freely. Yet the performance never feels like a caricature. Whether repelling the attentions of unwanted suitors, seducing millionaires, dispensing sensible advice to homesick young hookers, or resuscitating drugged society dames, MacDougall brings a range to her actions and reactions that goes beyond the clichés that have become associated with West's screen persona over the years.
• • Sex is a good-time show.
• • We can't help but laugh at the jokes. We even find ourselves won over each time the actors break into sweet old songs against musical director Billy Philadelphia's piano accompaniment about such lavender-tinged subjects as sailors' sweethearts, belles of the sea, and paradise waiting for people in their dreams. But even the most entertaining of scenes, such as when two male actors in full drag confront MacDougall about the whereabouts of their philandering boyfriends, hint at something more serious. The presence of the cross-dressers isn't simply another way of celebrating West's achievements: As the creator of the gay plays The Drag and The Pleasure Man, she was responsible for breaking taboos surrounding the depiction of homosexuals onstage. Just as the inclusion of newly written scenes at the beginning and end of the production narrate the story behind the play and provide some context for its legacy, the cross-dressing element also makes West's seemingly anachronistic exercise in theatrical titillation resonate sharply with our own times.
• • If the likes of Kiki & Herb can sell out Carnegie Hall and the Geary Theater today, it's partly thanks to West's groundbreaking efforts some 80 years ago. Yet as far as we've come on the sexual enlightenment front, Aurora's revival of Sex throws the recent resurgence of anti-smut campaigns and censorship laws into sharp relief. Sex was revolutionary when it first appeared because it used comedy to cut sin down to size, reducing it, as Schlissel points out, "from mortal transgression to misdemeanor." If only those who waste so much of the public's time and money trying to stamp out the word "fuck" from the radio and prevent the tiniest exposure of pop stars' nipples on TV had inherited West's sense of humor.
• • Then again, there's nothing like a bit of notoriety to draw attention to a cause and get a budding starlet noticed. Mae West truly knew what she was talking about when she famously said, "When I'm good I'm very good — — but when I'm bad I'm better."
— — Source: — —
• • San Francisco Weekly [Village Voice Media] — — http://www.sfweekly.com/
• • Byline: Chloe Veltman
• • Published on: 21 November 2007
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
• • Mae West was born on 17 August 1893 in Brooklyn, NY.
• • Mae West died on 22 November 1980 in Los Angeles, CA.
• • The Empress of Sex lives forever in our hearts.
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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• • Photo: • • Mae West • • 1926 • •
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Mae West: SEX-cellent Sex

Robert Hurwitt, the San Francisco Chronicle Theater Critic, went up to see Mae at the Aurora Theatre in Berkeley, California. Let's hear how it feels to devote one entire night to excellent "Sex" — — and Mae West.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
• • Polite Applause for 'Sex'
• • By Robert Hurwitt, Chronicle Theater Critic

• • Mae West wasn't the first to discover that sex sells, but she was the first to put it on a Broadway marquee. As she was being hauled off to jail with her cast, she told a reporter she thought it would be the making of her. It was. Within a few years of the 1926 opening of "Sex," which ran for almost a year before it was busted, she was in Hollywood and one of America's best-known and highest-paid stars.
• • Not bad for a former child entertainer from a rough part of Brooklyn — — daughter of a boxer and a corsetmaker — — who had pretty much worn out her welcome in vaudeville by her early 30s. And not too shabby for the Aurora Theatre, which looks as if it's having a great time having "Sex" for what may be a local premiere (the script was long believed lost until rediscovered and published about 10 years ago). With the invaluable Delia MacDougall playing an irresistible vamp on the West persona,

"Sex" is an entertaining romp on the naughtier edge of the Jazz Age.

• • The script holds up surprisingly well given that it isn't very good. West, who'd just started writing plays (she'd written her own vaudeville material and would later write most of her screenplays), bought a fallen-woman-meets-sad-end melodrama by Jack Byrne called "Following the Fleet" and rewrote it (under the name Jane Mast). She stuffed its second act with songs for herself, which made the hackneyed plot even more awkward. But she also infused it with her brand of bawdy wit and street slang, turned its moralism on its head and gave its now savvy hooker, Margy LaMont, a happy ending on her own terms.
• • Aurora Artistic Director Tom Ross and his crew have pared the script well and reduced its large cast to eight, with everyone but MacDougall playing many parts (in playful quick changes of Cassandra Carpenter's eye-catching flapper costumes). They've added material, ranging from context-setting reviews and narrative to some immortal West quips. More important, Ross and sure-fingered accompanist-music director Billy Philadelphia have spread the songs — — witty period numbers and Philadelphia originals — — throughout the show.
• • The cast handles the singing with varying degrees of success (Kristin Stokes, Craig Jessup, Robert Brewer and MacDougall sell their numbers well), aided by Jayne Zaban's engaging Charleston-and-shimmy choreography. The characters are sketched in aptly broad strokes, from Danny Wolohan's sinisterly cocky, vicious Rocky, Margy's pimp, to Stokes' piteously girlie hooker Agnes, Steve Irish's suburbanite businessman and worldly, steadfast English seaman, and Jessup's various cops and johns.
• • Margy is the center of the show, with MacDougall delivering Mae West's lines in the familiar Brooklyn drawl as she faces down not only cops, johns and the dangerous Rocky but also the wealthy socialite Clara Stanton (a hilarious portrait of guilty self-righteousness by Maureen McVerry). Clara, on a slumming expedition into Montreal's red-light district, ends up drugged (by Rocky) in Margy's bed, then blames Margy, who'd rescued her, to avoid a scandal.
• • The story (and Greg Dunham's clever revolving Deco set) follows Margy (and the fleet) to Trinidad, where a rich kid named Jimmy (Brewer) falls for her, proposes and takes her home to Connecticut to meet his parents. Mom, no surprise (to us), turns out to be Clara. Margy gets some revenge, exposes hypocrisy and gets her man as well.
• • No, the transvestite hookers weren't in West's script. They're director Tom Ross' tribute to West's next play, "The Drag," which she was about to open as Broadway's first showcase of gay drag entertainers when "Sex" was busted — — which was probably one reason for the timing of the police raid. Another was the censors' horror at the large numbers of women flocking to "Sex" to revel in a strong, sexually up-front woman making her own way in a world of controlling men and moralistic hypocrites. That element isn't dated at all. So it's nice to report that, even in its 80s, "Sex" is still a pleasure.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
• • Source: San Francisco Chronicle — — http://www.sfchronicle.com/
• • Byline: Robert Hurwitt, Chronicle Theater Critic
• • Published on: 13 November 2007
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
• • Mae West was born on 17 August 1893 in Brooklyn, NY.
• • Mae West died on 20 November 1980 in Los Angeles, CA.
• • The Empress of Sex lives forever in our hearts.
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
• • Photo: • • Mae West • • none • •
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Mae West: Sex or Albatross

The Bay Area Reporter expressed their appreciation for MAE WEST, and applauded the revival of her play "Sex," now onstage at the Aurora Theatre in Berkeley, California.
• • Alas, no one told the paper's Arts Desk that Mae West, writing as Jane Mast, originally titled her daring manuscipt "The Albatross" in 1926 [i.e., 81 years ago]. Well, news in New York can take awhile to reach the other coast. "Following the Fleet" was the play that Jim Timony purchased for Mae and her collaborator to revise. The ladies thoroughly reworked J. J. Byrne's maritime narrative to put a full-frontal focus on the femme. Leave it to the Brooklyn bombshell to whitewash the plot of seamen and emphasize the semen in the story of Margie LaMont in Montreal.
• • Anyway, let's hear from the Castro district's news man and theatre maven Richard Dodds, who wrote this article (below):
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
• • Margie of the red-light district;
• • Mae West's 'Sex' appeals at the Aurora Theatre

• • If Mae West had not changed the title of her play to "Sex" at the last minute, would we be talking about "Follow the Fleet" today? Maybe, because whatever the title, it was a racy affair for Broadway in 1926, and the legend that West became would warrant revisiting her early efforts at establishing that legacy. But let's face it, Sex, as a title, is about as succinct, specific, and eye-catching as you can get — — whether it's 1926 or 2007.
• • "We're having so much fun here talking about Sex workshops and Sex rehearsals, and getting a choreographer for Sex, " said Aurora Theatre's Artistic Director Tom Ross. "I'm telling people I'm preoccupied with Sex right now."
• • That preoccupation, to continue the word-play, will climax on November 6th [2007] when Sex opens at the Aurora, the small Berkeley theater that usually has a more serious bent. "This is an entertainment," Tom Ross said of his production. "I don't have to preach about the apocalypse in every play we do here."
• • Mae West wrote Sex under the pen name Jane Mast, and the role of Margie LaMont gave the 32-year-old performer her first starring role on Broadway. Margie is a prostitute working in Montreal's red-light district with a steady clientele and a tough attitude. Ready to break from her unscrupulous pimp, she takes the advice of a British naval officer to "follow the fleet," and she sets up business in Trinidad, where she meets a young blueblood from the States unaware of her background. He proposes marriage, then takes Margie to the family estate to meet his high-society folks — where many, many complications ensue.
• • The critics dismissed Sex when it opened on Broadway, but audiences came anyway for a chance to safely go slumming. It had already run for nearly a year when New York City officials shut it down [on 9 February 1927]. West herself spent eight days in prison for "public obscenity," and her plans to follow-up Sex with The Drag, a play about transvestites, were scuttled. Nevertheless, the publicity was priceless, and she wrote and starred in several more Broadway plays, including Diamond Lil, which became She Done Him Wrong and turned her into a major Hollywood star in 1933.
• • Sex, the play, was largely forgotten. And then it was lost. It turned up again in the late 1990s, and the Hourglass Group offered its first New York production in more than 70 years. Ross recalls reading the reviews, getting excited about presenting it locally, and then letting the notion drift away.
• • It was rekindled about a year ago when he talked to Aurora colleague Monica Stufft about her in-progress UC Berkeley thesis on showgirls of the 1920s. "I looked at the play again," Ross said, "and I thought, 'This is really fun, but it's really creaky.' So we decided to put a little workshop together to see how it sounded. One of the brilliant things that happened was, Delia MacDougall was here auditioning for something else, and I gave her a copy of the script. I didn't know then that she was a big Mae West fan."
• • MacDougall is one the Bay Area's busier and more versatile actresses, having worked at most of the major theaters, and helped found Word for Word and Campo Santo. Before Sex, she was playing Goneril in King Lear at Cal Shakes, and after Sex, she's headed to Marin Theatre Company for a role in said Said, a play about torture and terrorism. Playing Margie LaMont sounds like a lark for MacDougall, but it is more than that.
• • "I was looking forward to doing A Christmas Carol at ACT again this year, which is a really fun show to do, and it's a really great paycheck," MacDougall said. "But then Tom handed me this script, and I felt like I only have so many years left to play this part. And it's sort of a love letter to my mother. She would have gotten a really big kick out it."
• • Growing up in Mountain View, a familiar mother-daughter outing was to a nearby revival moviehouse where a Mae West movie was one of the special treats. "I had a lot of brothers, and early on I was aware of the differences between the sexes, the unfairness that was happening in my own household," MacDougall said. "And then I saw this Mae West person, this creature, and I had never seen another woman with that kind of power. I didn't even know what sex was, but I knew she was holding onto something really powerful."

• • • • Mae West moves • • • •

• • When Sex opened on Broadway [at Daly's 63rd Street Theatre], the full-blown Mae West persona had not yet emerged. And so MacDougall is treading the line between playing a real character while giving it a Mae West spin. "I don't intend to do an impersonation, but I'm considering it an homage to Mae West," she said. "I don't quite have her build, but I'll do what I can physically because I just love the way she moves. I am still trying to figure out what a shimmy looks like."
• • In the original script, West had written in the opportunity to shimmy and sing a few tunes during her character's visit to a nightclub in Trinidad. "The play is an odd duck," Ross said, "in that it's a three-act play and the middle act is basically this big musical show. So I thought, why not do it as a mash-up, taking straight theater actors and mixing them up with musical-theater actors."
• • Ross has turned the three acts into two, and in addition to using the songs that are cited in the original script, he brought onboard pianist-composer Billy Philadelphia to create several new songs. "He's written an opening number that sets up the world of the show," Ross explained. "It's called 'Under the Red Light,' and it's about the hard life of a prostitute in Montreal."
• • The play was originally billed as a "comedy drama," and there are moments when West, as the playwright, raises social and sexual issues that were definitely bold for their times. Ross said he is trying to preserve the seriousness of those moments, while at other times acknowledging the plot contrivances and melodramatic twists. "We need to be winking at the audience at times," the director said.
• • The original Broadway cast of Sex used 17 actors, but Ross is making do with just six. "That's part of the fun, too," he said. "Everyone except Delia plays multiple roles, so we'll have quick changes that should be fun for the audience. It is for us. We're having a good time, and as long as we're having a good time, I think we'll end up with a good show."
• • Sex will run Nov. 2nd — Dec. 9th, 2007 at the Aurora Theatre. Tel: (510) 843-4822.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
— — Source: — —
• • Publication: Bay Area Reporter
• • Byline: Richard Dodds
• • Published on: 1 November 2007
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
• • Photo: • • Mae West • • 1926 Program • •
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Mae West.