Mae West: Megaphone Figures

In 1934, Picture Play, piqued by a New York newcomer’s meteoric rise, pondered this: “Is MAE WEST a Fizzle? A bold discussion of an important question!” This is Part 22 of 29 segments.
• • Is Mae West a Fizzle? • •
• • Mae West: Directors are important megaphone figures • •

• • Dorothy Herzog wrote: But that is Mae West.  
• • Dorothy Herzog wrote: Those she likes, she likes. Those she doesn't — well, she doesn't, that's all.
• • Dorothy Herzog wrote: But a Mae West director, whether he be Lowell Sherman or Wesley Ruggles — and both men are important megaphone figures — cannot be held entirely responsible for a Mae West talking picture.
• • Dorothy Herzog wrote: Not so long as Mae continues to write her own stories for the silver screen.

• • Dorothy Herzog wrote: And there, to me, is the crisis that is currently confronting Mae West — that is, the writing of her own stories.  
• • Mae West: The fall of Ruth Chatterton • • …
• • This will be continued on the next post.
• • Source: Picture Play; issue dated for May 1934.
• • Broadcast on Thursday, 16 February 1950 • •
• • From "Mae West on the Air" [Sandy Hook LP and CD SH 2098]
• • "Little Red Riding Hood" performed by Mae West (from "The Chesterfield Supper Club" program aired on 16 February 1950).
• • "The Chesterfield Supper Club" was broadcast by NBC and sponsored by Chesterfield. The segment was pre-recorded in January (on 23 January 1950) for broadcast on February 16th, 1950 so that NBC could screen the content in advance. Mae sings a duet with Perry and tells her version of "Little Red Riding Hood." It's a very good show. Perry Como, Mitchell Ayres and His Orchestra, The Fontane Sisters, Martin Block (announcer), Mae West: airtime: 28 minutes.
• • Overheard in Hollywood • •
• • W.C. Fields, annoyed that Mae West stopped the camera whenever he turned up drunk on their movie set, retaliated by describing Mae as “a plumber's idea of Cleopatra.”
• • In Her Own Words • •
• • Mae West said: "People seem to read double meanings into every word I speak."
• • Quote, Unquote • •
• • A fan magazine discussed Mae West.
• • “Hollywood High Lights” • •
• • Picture Play wrote: Mae West had been in court all week testifying in the case against the jewel robbers who took away some of her most valued ornaments a year or so ago.  
• • Picture Play wrote: Mae’s lateness to Gary Cooper’s wedding fete was explained by this fact, but it was also surmised that Mae was determined to make a grand entrance, and she did.  
• • Picture Play wrote: Mae was a sensation with the men. But women were slightly more reserved. …
• • Source: Picture Play; issue dated for April 1934
• • The evolution of 2 Mae West plays that keep her memory alive • •
• • A discussion with Mae West playwright LindaAnn LoSchiavo — —
• • http://lideamagazine.com/renaissance-woman-new-york-city-interview-lindaann-loschiavo/
• • The Mae West Blog celebrates its 17th anniversary • • 
• • Thank you for reading, sending questions, and posting comments during these past seventeen years. Not long ago, we entertained 3,497 visitors. And we reached a milestone recently when we completed 4,800 blog posts. Wow! 
• • By the Numbers • •
• • The Mae West Blog was started seventeen years ago in July 2004. You are reading the 4,932nd blog post. Unlike many blogs, which draw upon reprinted content from a newspaper or a magazine and/ or summaries, links, or photos, the mainstay of this blog is its fresh material focused on the life and career of Mae West, herself an American original.

• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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• • Photo: • • Mae West • • with Noah Beery on the set in 1932 • •
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Mae West: Midwest Screening

MAE WEST will be applauded in Hyde Park today at 7 PM.
• • On Thursday 13 January 2010 you will have the opportunity to watch Mae's 66-minute cinema classic "She Done Him Wrong," co-starring a young Cary Grant.
• • "She Done Him Wrong" directed by Lowell Sherman • •
• • "Why don't you come up sometime and see me?" Mae West oozes sex while firing off brazen double-entendres in this racy pre-Code classic — — her first, finest, and most jaw-droppingly salacious vehicle. West plays Lady Lou, a singer at a Gay Nineties saloon, where she performs crowd-pleasing numbers like "Frankie and Johnny" and the suggestive “Where Has My Easy Rider Gone?” while also finding time to seduce an upstanding young temperance-leaguer (Grant) investigating the bar owner for corruption.
• • WHERE: University of Chicago Doc Films, 1212 E. 59th St., Chicago, IL 60615; Tel: 773-702-8575.
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West: Saucy Screen Vixen

MAE WEST, costumed as "Maudie Triplett" in her slinky evening gown from "Night After Night," is the first comedienne featured in a brand new slide show highlighting female achievement in cinema.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
• • Saul Austerlitz writes: For someone telling the story of the American comedy film, one of the most striking subplots is the relative paucity of great female comedians onscreen. Especially when compared with television, which has nurtured the brilliant likes of Lucille Ball, Mary Tyler Moore and Roseanne Barr, the American film has remained mostly inhospitable to female comedians. The ranks of critically and commercially successful comic stars, past and present, have been dominated by men. And yet, with such luminous performers as Mae West, Katharine Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, and Barbara Stanwyck, the American comedy is studded with remarkable women in unforgettable roles. ...
• • Saul Austerlitz describes "She Done Him Wrong" (Lowell Sherman, 1933) like this: "She Done Him Wrong" was batting practice for comedian extraordinaire Mae West (who also wrote the film's script), its script a series of softballs tossed the way of her amorous, amoral Lady Lou, each smacked out of the park with lackadaisical assurance. Cary Grant, unrecognizably young, is the official straight man here, representing the massed forces of overbearing gentility, but truth be told, there are nothing but straight men here. Their lines all serve as setups to West's wise, witty punch lines.
— — Excerpt: — —
• • Byline: Saul Austerlitz
• • Article: Funny Girls: 10 Great Comedies of Our Time — — Culture buff and author Saul Austerlitz outlines his picks for the best female-centric comedies of the last 100 years.
• • Published by: The Women on the Web — — www.wowowow.com/
• • Published on: 7 October 2010
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West: In Palo Alto

In Palo Alto, California, the Stanford Theatre invites you to come up and see MAE WEST.
• • From Saturday January 31st — Monday February 2nd, 2009, movie buffs can enjoy two classics from the pre-Code era: "She Done Him Wrong" [1933] on the same bill with "Gold Diggers of 1933."
• • One original billboard was pretty frisky. "Swinging hips, bedroom eyes, and the throaty growl of an amorous cat — — she just doesn't give a damn!" slavered the hand-colored poster, describing the Lady Lou character.
• • "She Done Him Wrong" will be screened at 6:15 PM and also at 9:20 PM.
• • Mae's break-out screen gem was first released by Paramount Pictures on 9 February 1933.
• • "Gold Diggers" features Dick Powell, Ruby Keeler, Warren Williams, Joan Blondell, and Guy Kibbee. Marian Anderson dubbed Joan Blondell's singing voice. Choreographed by Busby Berkeley, this is extravagant eye-candy indeed.
• • Contact: Stanford Theater — — 221 University Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94301 — — Cross Streets: Between Emerson Street and Ramona Street; Tel: (650) 324-3700.
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West: Selected

Reviewing their picks for "The Top 100+ Funniest Movies of All Time," the Reader's Digest selected a sexy MAE WEST motion picture as number six.
• • Correspondent Stefan Kanfer asked: What's your all-time favorite funny movie? Having trouble picking just one? So did we! So we narrowed the field down to the top 100+ side-splitters of all time. Please stay tuned for the upcoming results.
• • Number 1: THE GOLD RUSH (1925) By common agreement (including Charlie's), this is Chaplin's greatest silent film. Alternating between heads-on slapstick and poetic mime, the famous Little Tramp pans for nuggets in Alaska — — and winds up broke. In a classic scene, he and his customary foil, Big Jim (Mack Swain), get so hungry that Charlie cooks a boot for dinner, carving it like a steak, then delicately twirls the shoelaces around his fork pasta-style. Chaplin's comic techniques were to set the standard for the next 50 years.
• • Number 2: THE FRESHMAN (1925) The third of the great silent film trio (the other two were Chaplin and Keaton), Harold Lloyd did all his own stunts, many of them dangerous, with skill and humor. Here he's a frosh trying to ingratiate himself with fellow students.
• • Number 3: THE GENERAL (1927) Celebrated as the Great Stone Face because he so rarely cracked a smile, Buster Keaton is remembered as an adroit stunt man and knockabout comedian. But he was far more than that, as demonstrated by this extraordinary silent comedy of the Civil War. As a train engineer who recaptures some hijacked rolling stock, Keaton is audacious, poetic and explosively amusing. As the film's director, he scintillates.
• • Number 4: DUCK SOUP (1933) Perhaps the purest film farce ever made. Directed con brio by Leo McCarey, the film offers no love story or subplots, just Harpo, Chico and Groucho Marx at their manic peak. En route to a slam-bang finale they satirize war and the country's leading politicians. (Groucho: "It's too late to [prevent a war]. I just paid a month's rent on the battlefield.")
• • Number 5: DINNER AT EIGHT (1933) The "talkies" grew up with this adaptation of a Broadway hit by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber. Under George Cukor's canny direction John and Lionel Barrymore, sex goddess Jean Harlow, and comedians Marie Dressler and Wallace Beery enliven the sophisticated dialogue, revolving around the lives of financial predators, actors on the rocks, hatcheck girls on the way up and millionaires on the way down, all set against the background of a glittering Manhattan dinner party.
• • Number 6: SHE DONE HIM WRONG (1933) Mae West became something of a joke in later life, but as her films prove, she was one of the best comedy writers in 1930s Hollywood. Here, she plays a Gay Nineties saloon singer in trouble with the law — — impersonated by Cary Grant in an early role. "When a woman goes wrong, the men go right after her." "Why don't you come up and see me sometime?" The great lines are here, and Mae wrote 'em all. Lowell Sherman directed unobtrusively.
• • Also included in the "Top Ten" were: SONS OF THE DESERT (1933) with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy; THE THIN MAN (1934) co-starring William Powell and Myrna Loy as Dashiell Hammett's married sleuths, Nick and Nora Charles — — and their dog Asta; IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT (1934) featuring a cynical newspaperman (Clark Gable) and a pampered heiress (Claudette Colbert) who meet cute on an overcrowded bus headed from Miami to New York; MY MAN GODFREY (1936) a screwball farce starring Carole Lombard as a temperamental heiress who hires a down-at-the-heels bum (William Powell), ably directed by Gregory La Cava.
— — Source: — —
• • Article: The Top 100+ Funniest Movies of All Time
• • Byline: Stefan Kanfer
• • Published in: Reader's Digest — — www.rd.com
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West: Lowell Sherman

Lowell Sherman directed one of the hottest motion pictures that starred MAE WEST.
• • Born in San Francisco, Lowell Sherman [11 October 1885 — 28 December 1934] was an actor and a director. Lowell Sherman's acting career began by being cast largely as a playboy or a villain. Perhaps it's no wonder that he was eager to become a director.
• • His best known motion pictures were She Done Him Wrong [1933] starring Mae West — — and also Morning Glory [1933] with Katharine Hepburn, which helped her snag an Academy Award.
• • His third marriage was to actress Helene Costello younger sister of Dolores Costello.
• • At the age of 49, Lowell Sherman died in Hollywood three days after Christmas 1934 from pneumonia.
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West: TLC on TCM

Beginning on Mondays at 8 PM, TCM will offer a 50-film tribute to Hollywood's leading ladies — — including MAE WEST — — that's meant to promote their new publication.
• • The final scene of the play "Courting Mae West" features Mae West in Hollywood in December 1932, where she is filming the screenplay that was based on "Diamond Lil," her 1928 hit Broadway play set in a Bowery saloon during the Gay Nineties..
• • TCM has also produced a book "Leading Ladies" to commemorate the fifty most compelling actresses of the studio era. Here's their selection on the Brooklyn bombshell herself, penned by TCM's Frank Miller.
• • "Men's all alike — — married or single — — I happen to be smart enough to play it their way." — — Mae West in She Done Him Wrong
• • Frank Miller writes: Mae West played at sex like a man. She used her partners for pleasure and, with most of them, discarded them as soon as she got bored. Though there was usually one leading man who was given exclusive rights to her by the film's conclusion, she was the one doing the giving, with the veiled suggestion that she could always withdraw her approval if things didn't work out. More than any innuendo, more than the tightly corseted gowns she generously overflowed, this was what excited the censors' ire. Not only did she treat sex as an act of pleasure without any undue consequences, but also her attitude exposed the unwritten code by which many men operated, even after they were married. Little wonder she was often credited as the woman who brought stricter censorship to Hollywood. She wasn't — — but as Pauline Kael once said, if she was, the delights she offered on screen more than made for the later depredations of censorship.
• • In the early 1930s, the major Hollywood studios gave lip service to the Production Code, a set of rules for what could and could not be done on screen enforced by Will Hays of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA). Originally, Paramount Pictures was very good about following the Code. They hadn't done much to follow the trend toward gangster films spearheaded by Little Caesar in 1931. But by 1932 the studio was running $21 million in the hole. By that time, there was a new genre challenging the censors, the sex film (also called "women's pictures"), which dealt with women who stray from the straight and narrow and pay for it tearfully by the film's end. Paramount had flirted with the genre with its early Marlene Dietrich films like Morocco (1930) and Blonde Venus (1932), but they mostly let the other studios blaze new sexual trails and reap the box office rewards, at least until Mae West showed up.
• • Mae West had been developing her act since the early days of the 20th century, when she sang bawdy songs in vaudeville, creating a delivery copied from the female impersonators of the day and night-club queen Texas Guinan. She'd scored some huge hits on Broadway, particularly with the controversial Diamond Lil, in which she played a saloon singer on The Bowery in the 1890s who sets out to seduce a Salvation Army officer. Universal Pictures had proposed bringing the play to the screen in 1930, when she toured it to Los Angeles. Hays issued a firm edict, however. The play was off limits, and when Universal suggested hiring West to write something new for them, he talked them out of it. Meanwhile, West fell on hard times when her follow-up play, The Constant Sinner, closed after only eight weeks. The 39-year-old sex star began to wonder if she wasn't over the hill.
• • Then old friend George Raft came to the rescue. There was a juicy part for an older woman playing his ex-girlfriend in Night After Night (1932) at Paramount. The studio wanted to cast Texas Guinan, but he talked them into giving West a chance. She almost turned the role down when she saw how poorly it was written. Instead, however, she got producer Harry Le Baron, another old friend, to agree to let her re-write her lines. Loading the script with comic innuendo, she, in Raft's words, "stole everything but the cameras." Exhibitors were clamoring for another film with Mae West, and Paramount decided to take a chance on bucking the censors.
• • When the studio approached her about making another film, she considered her options, then insisted on adapting Diamond Lil. Rather than buck Will Hays outright, they suggested changing the title and enough details to make it seem like a new story. But when Hays found out, he tried to shut the film down. Studio head Adolph Zukor made his case to Hays' New York board of directors, and won the concession that they could redo the script with a new title and new character names (Diamond Lil became Lady Lou). Other demands made by the Hays Office included making the leading man (Cary Grant) a mission worker with no specific affiliation to the Salvation Army and cutting overt references to prostitution. They also changed the nationality of West's female nemesis from Brazilian to Russian, since there was little market for U.S. films in the Soviet Union.
• • In some ways, Hays' demands actually improved the film. Screenwriter John Bright, who had scored a hit with The Public Enemy (1931), was assigned to collaborate on the screenplay, but he didn't click with West, and her script didn't impress him either. He thought it was a creaky old melodrama filled with cheap jokes and tried to make it more of a straight crime film. West hated his ideas, but had a battle getting the studio to side with her. Then one of Hays' associates suggested that the film might be more palatable if played for comedy. That was the excuse she needed to cut Bright's additions and return many of her laugh lines (eventually she had him replaced by Harvey Thew). When Hays suggested toning down references to Lou's past affairs, West added a maid character (played by Louise Beavers) who knew of her past so the two could discuss it in a series of veiled references.
• • Those references -- and West's ability to make even the most innocent lines sound risque - made the film a hit and made her one of the world's most quoted writers. Early in the film she describes herself as "one of the finest women ever walked the streets." When a young woman complains about losing her virtue, West quips, "When women go wrong, men go after them." One of the play's most controversial lines was part of her come on to the Salvation Army officer, "You can be had," which West repeated at the end when the two hooked up. Hays thought it was too raw, so West replaced the line's second appearance with a comic exchange. Grant chastises her with "You bad girl," to which she coyly replies, "You'll find out." Another line, however, only sounded racy in West's patented delivery — — the line where she tells Grant, "Why don't you come up some time, see me?"
• • She Done Him Wrong was a huge hit. Made for just $200,000, half of which went to West for writing and starring, it returned $2 million domestically on its initial release and another $1 million in international markets. That wasn't enough to pull Paramount out of the hole, but it raised studio morale and their image enough to help them edge back toward profitability. The film made West a household name and boosted the career of co-star Cary Grant, who was just starting in films. He would later claim that he learned most of what he knew about playing comedy from watching West at work.
• • She Done Him Wrong also changed fashions, bringing back the hourglass figure, and encouraged a run of films set in the 1890s. But there was also the inevitable backlash. West's suggestive song "I Like a Man That Takes his Time" was so heavily cut by censors that Paramount called back all release prints to cut the middle stanzas. Other lines were cut by local censors, and the film was banned outright in Java, Latvia, Australia, and Vienna. It also triggered renewed cries for national film censorship that led to the strengthening of the Production Code in 1934. That, in turn, would create even more battles for West and the censors, though they could do nothing to diminish the sexual independence of her characters. Even in the more liberated era of the '70s, West amazed audiences with her sexual forthrightness when she returned to filmmaking after decades off-screen for a small role as a predatory agent in Myra Breckinridge (1970).
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
• • She Done Him Wrong
• • Producer: William LeBaron
• • Director: Lowell Sherman
• • Screenplay: Mae West, Harvey Thew, John Bright
• • Based on the play Diamond Lil — — by Mae West
• • Cinematography: Charles Lang
• • Art Direction: Robert Usher
• • Music: Ralph Rainger
• • Principal Cast: Mae West (Lady Lou), Cary Grant (Capt. Cummings), Owen Moore (Chick Clark), Gilbert Roland (Serge Stanieff), Noah Beery, Sr. (Gus Jordan), Rafaela Ottiano (Russian Rita), Rochelle Hudson (Sally Glynn), Fuzzy Knight (Ragtime Kelly), Louise Beavers (Pearl).
BW — 65m. Closed captioning.
— — Source: — —
• • Byline: by Frank Miller
• • TCM — — www.tcm.com
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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• • Photo: • • Mae West • • 1932 • •
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Mae West: Who Knew

How many knew that Harvey Francis Thew worked on a famous screenplay with MAE WEST?
• • Born in Missouri on 4 July 1883, writer Harvey F. Thew collaborated with Mae West, and screenwriter John Bright, and Lowell Sherman in 1932 on the film version of the bombshell's best-known stage play "Diamond Lil." For Paramount Pictures, Mae turned it into a script with the aid of Harvey Thew.
• • The studio released "She Done Him Wrong" on 9 February 1933. What a Valentine!
• • A screenwriter since 1916, Harvey Thew actually spent most of his movie career at Warner Brothers Pictures. One of his in-laws was John Barrymore (which did not hurt his career at all).
• • His career highlights — — "She Done Him Wrong," "Sinner's Holiday," "The Public Enemy."
• • At the age of 63, Harvey F. Thew died in Los Angeles on 6 November 1946.
• • 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: The Biographer Wore Black

In August 2001, one of the best MAE WEST biographies was released: Mae West: An Icon in Black and White — — by Jill Watts [NY: Oxford University Press].
• • In November 2001, The London Independent printed a review by critic Julie Wheelwright.
The title of her review is "The sex goddess who understood spin" and here are her comments.
• • • • Julie Wheelwright wrote:
• • BY THE 1930s, Mae West had established her reputation as a sexual liberator and camp vaudeville actress who had conquered Hollywood to star alongside WC Fields, Cary Grant, and Lowell Sherman. But her camping was not confined to the screen. Her black maid Bea Jackson (who doubled as an actress) would conduct visitors into a room emptied of furniture, except for a bed with a mirror emblazoned with the words "Mae West - SEX - Diamond Lil". After a few suspenseful moments, West would appear with one hand on her hip and sway past the visitor to recline on her silken bedspread. Male guests were invited to make themselves comfortable next to her.
• • From the earliest days, when Mae West cut her teeth on the vaudeville circuit in New York's roughest theatres, she understood the rudiments of spin. The new century's saucy sex goddess was born into a working-class Brooklyn family in 1893, in a neighbourhood where her father "Battling Jack" West was a well-known boxer and showman. Her sister remembered that "even as a little girl, Mae's character songs were risque." Through her twenties, Mae West became adept at reinterpreting other artists' acts for a more mainstream audience, and made her name by pushing the envelope of respectability.
• • This new biography argues that West became an icon not only because she plugged into the period's sexual zeitgeist, but because she offered a new interpretation of race. Jill Watts suggests that West's paternal grandfather may have been an African-American, and this could account for the "preoccupation with blackness that eventually dominated her work".
• • Her early novel Babe Gordon (originally entitled Black and White) shockingly featured a white woman who falls in love with an African-American "Apollo"; this stunningly beautiful couple become a magnet for Harlem celebrities. The novel drew on West's experience of downtown dancefloors during the 1920s, when white couples from Manhattan would seek out the exotic experience of shimmying alongside African-Americans. Watts suggests that the novel functioned as a "very personal statement" for West who, a few months before she began writing it, had told a journalist that she was planning an autobiography.
• • West's plays The Drag and SEX also blurred the boundaries between art and reality. The characters discussed transvestism, homosexuality and prostitution, in lines often delivered by West's gay friends. The 10 days she served at the Jefferson Market Women's Prison [sic] after being prosecuted for obscenity in 1927, proved a mine of stories. Watts writes that the experience "returned her to reality, reminding her of the destructiveness of poverty, discrimination, and sexual exploitation of women". The public responded, and although The Drag was forced to close on the grounds of decency, SEX proved extremely popular and ran for several more weeks.
• • Diamond Lil — — her best-known play, and later a Hollywood film — — was also inspired by an authentic New York character. A front-desk manager at a local hotel began reminiscing about his younger days as a police officer in the Bowery district, and about the area's most famous female con artist. The play represented the culmination of the years in which West had crafted her performance. "Lil was a composite of almost all the trends present in the previous 50 years of American popular entertainment — — a pastiche of a Bowery girl, Lillian Russell, George M Cohan, Eva Tanguay, a drag queen, Bert Williams, a shimmy dancer, and a blues singer".
• • Mae West is a fascinating character for contemporary audiences, particularly because her performance was so deeply ironic and sexually playful. But Watts often subjects her to an over-rigorous analysis that takes away from, rather than adds to, an understanding of her life. She regards West's memories of boxing in the ring with her father as tantamount to "abuse", while a family trip to the Coney Island circus becomes "the struggle between animalistic brutality and human intellect".
• • Jill Watt's Mae West may be only for the cogniscenti.
• • Source: Independent Newspapers UK Limited — — www.independent.co.uk
• • Book Reviewer: Julie Wheelwright
• • Published on: 8 November 2001
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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