Mae West: Lil Thrills

Calendar girl MAE WEST was noted in Playbill's long-running feature: "Today In Theatre History: September 7."
• • Theatre chronicler David Gewirtzman writes: 7 September 1949 Mae West stars in a hit revival of her own play, Diamond Lil, for a 182-performance run at the Plymouth Theatre.
• • Last month, the annual Mae West walking tour paused at this popular playhouse on August 16th, and vintage Mae-memorabilia was shown to the group.
• • The Diamond Lil revival enjoyed great success at the venerable Plymouth Theatre [236 West 45th Street]. It opened there on 7 September 1949 — — and had four months of performances on Broadway.
• • In his admiring review of her 1949 reinvigorated Bowery queen romp through her popular "naughty nineties" hit, The New York Times drama critic Brooks Atkinson admitted he was moved to acknowledge what he called — — in an atypically poetic effusion — — ''the sublime fatalism of the entire business,'' and he went on to ask: ''Is she kidding or is she serious?''
• • Knowing Mae, the likely answer is both.
• • Are you a theatre buff? Then you ought to visit Playbill online — — www.playbill.com — — 'cause playgoers are much more fascinating than playboys.
• • 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: Quizzed

Wordplay wizards armed with pointy pencils faced off with MAE WEST this weekend.
• • New Yorkers got clues from Jim Horne, "Wordplay" blogger for The New York Times. In last week's column, Jim Horne teased crossword-addicts with his opening paragraph: “Honorary title bestowed on Bill Clinton, Muhammad Ali, and Mae West” has to be in serious contention for best clue of the year. Even better, the answer is outstanding too. I learn something with every crossword, and this little factoid is amazing. What do I need to do to become so honored? It’s my new personal mission. There is a lot to love in this collaboration by Doug Peterson and Barry C. Silk. ...
• • Jim Horne was referring to what is known as the Premium Crossword [or the Friday Puzzle for 17 July 2009] created by Doug Peterson and Barry C. Silk, a feature available to Times subscribers.
• • In Madison, Wisconsin, a local publication launched a quiz on July 5th, "Hidden in Plain Sight," challenging locals to I.D. local landmarks by their architectural details.
• • One photo showed a place where Mae West hung her hat once or twice in America's Dairyland. The Loraine, 131 W. Washington Avenue, completed as a $1.1 million hotel during 1924, was a chic structure converted 50 years later to a ho-hum state office building, then retro-fitted as a condo dwelling. In its heyday, The Hotel Loraine had been a hotspot whose notable guests included Mae West, Gloria Swanson, Ethel Barrymore, Dwight Eisenhower, Adlai Stevenson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy.
• • We have a quiz: list seven NYC addresses where Mae West lived. You can't? Then come up on August 16th, enjoy the Mae West walking tour, and eyeball a few of these places yourself.
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West: Francine Larrimore

In March 1919 MAE WEST was on Broadway performing in "Sometime" — — exactly ninety years ago — — when she was 26 and more used to appearing in vaudeville than the legit. The "musical comedy of commerce," designed to showcase the talents of laughmeister Ed Wynn, had opened at the Shubert Theatre on Saturday 4 October 1918 (and would have a nice healthy run until June 1919 on West 44th Street).
• • It was Mae's character Mayme Dean who appeared first onstage. But the play's heroine, the actress who got to sing the title tune "Sometime," was 20-year-old Francine Larrimore, who died in the month of March — — on 7 March 1975. The New York Times drama critic enjoyed her rendition, adding that her presentation had "a touch of distinction."
• • Born on 22 August 1898 in France into one of the great acting families of the Yiddish Theater, the Adlers, Francine Larrimore emigrated to America in 1905.
• • By 1910, this beauty made her debut in "Where There’s a Will" at Webber’s Theater in New York. Frequently cast in temperamental "pouty girl" roles, Francine Larrimore worked quite regularly on the Great White Way in a number of musicals and farces. She had training and could put across a song as well as act, dance, and flounce around with elan.
• • Here's how The New York Times reviewer described her voice: "She has, in fact, a wistful, childlike quality, and a haunting vanishing sob in her voice that go straight to one's sympathies. It is she who sings 'Sometime,' and she is almost equally appealing in the second act with 'Baby Doll'."
• • Her Broadway fame lasted from 1917 — 1929, though she was seen onstage in a great many plays for almost 25 years. In 1926, when "Roxie Hart" bowed at the Music Box Theatre in New York City, Francine Larrimore originated the title role of the Cook County murderess who hires lawyer Billy Flynn.
• • After a handful of silent films and much acclaim in mainstage productions, Miss Larrimore was cast in the none too successful motion picture "John Meade’s Woman" [1937].
• • Herman Mishkin [1871 — 1948] held a position with Oscar Hammerstein's Manhattan Opera Company as a photographer-publicist. Since Hammerstein produced "Sometime," Mishkin took this portrait of Francine Larrimore around that time.
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
• • Photo: • • Mae West's songstress co-star • • 1918 • •
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Mae West.

Mae West: 25 November 1943

Bouquets did not shower MAE WEST after her film "The Heat Is On" was released right before Christmas in December 1943. Trading on The Big Apple's fondness for the Brooklyn bombshell, this ill-fated project had a special New York City premiere on 25 November 1943 — — exactly sixty-five years ago.
• • There were no good reviews. The New York Times sneered, "The heat is definitely off!" And Mae, who did not contribute any material to the screenplay, long regretted getting involved.
• • After the failure of The Heat Is On, Mae West returned to the stage (portraying the Russian empress Catherine the Great) and — — a decade later — — she would create a frisky show that wowed the nightclub circuit.
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
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Mae West: Moral Turpitude

Moral turpitude is back in the news — — but this time MAE WEST had passed the scepter.
• • The New York Times, in an article called "What Moral Turpitude Looks Like" [30 March 2008], was citing a U.S. Customs spokeswoman's objections when she refused to admit "the infamously debauched writer Sebastian Horsley" to this country, citing concerns of "moral turpitude." Apparently, the Englishman celebrated his past arrests in Britain for drug possession and prostitution in his book Dandy in the Underworld [NY: Harper Perennial]. Modeling a custom-made stovepipe, Horsley posed at home for The Times opposite a row of skulls.
• • Of the dramatic black Lincoln-esque headgear, Sebastian Horsley admitted, "It makes me almost pointlessly tall." But the dandy summed it up: "Dandyism, you know, you do it for yourself, but it requires a reaction or it wouldn't exist."
• • No doubt Mae West would have agreed. When writing her plays, she was counting on a certain reaction — — and without it "Sex" would not have gone so far.
• • In April 1926, Mae West opened in "Sex," which Variety described as a "nasty red-light district show." That must have been good for some advance ticket sales.
• • During the 1920s, there was an ongoing debate about what was morally acceptable in the public venue of theater and who was responsible to arbitrate that question. This was hardly a new question in the entertainment world; theater had long been considered a cauldron of unabashed and unacceptable moral turpitude.
• • Here's what some critics said about "Sex" at Daly's 63rd Street Theatre in New York City.
• • The cheapest, most vulgar, low "show" to have dared to open in New York this year — — Billboard
• • "Sex" wins high marks for depravity, dullness — — Herald Tribune
• • "Sex" is a crude drama — — The New York Times
• • "Sex" an offensive play, a monstrosity plucked from the garbage can — — New York Daily Mirror
• • Fumigation needed — — Milwaukee Sentinel
• • A sink of moral turpitude — — Variety
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
• • Photo: • • Mae West • • 1926 • •
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Mae West.

Mae West: Sex in August

Hot: August in New York City — — especially over on the westside when MAE WEST was starring in "Sex" as the unapologetic prostitute Margy LaMont. By the summer of 1926, the show had been booked in Daly's West 63rd Street Theatre for a couple of months but the boxoffice was still sizzling. Onstage Mae was shimmying. All this in the days before air-conditioning, too.
• • As with most writers or actors, Mae West did not want to be ignored.
• • Even before "Sex" officially opened in Manhattan during April 1926, it attracted strong reactions. Mostly, it received a black eye in print.
• • It was "feeble and disjointed," The New York Times critic said.
• • It was a "disgrace," The New Yorker announced.
• • Walter Winchell called it "a vulgar affair ... amateurish in script and cast."
• • The Daily Mirror, a William Randolph Hearst paper, was less mellow. This was, it said, "a monstrosity plucked from the garbage can, destined for the sewer."
• • Theatre critics had a different perspective on scarlet women back in '26.
• • Mae West's play looked at the social mores of the time, she claimed, but John Q. Public was not so sure. The first attempt to close "Sex" failed; the police department convened a play jury but the officials barely missed getting the required three-fourths vote of a citizens' panel.
• • Moreover, celebrities and certain authors [for example, Robert Benchley and Zora Neale Hurston] had favorable things to say about "Sex." Some newspapers carried second reviews, reversing their first opinion.
• • After making a profit on the show, West was fined $500 and sentenced to 10 days in jail. "This will be the making of me," she predicted.
• • That prediction, however, would take a while. Five years later, and nearing her 40th birthday, Mae West finally made her presence felt in the motion picture world. She often wrote her own lines, oozing sexual references. She died in 1980 at 87, having outlived the era she mocked.
• • David Thompson wrote of Mae West: "The real conclusion of her work is that sex is an idea, an obsession for the human being, and one of the most reliable distractions from the equally potent idea that life is tragic."
• • Stage-manage your weekend and make some time for Mae West 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 4 more days until Mae's birthday!
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
• • Photo: • • Mae West • • Daly's Theatre (briefly renamed Coburn) in 1928 • •
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Mae West.

Mae West: March 1940

Here's an excerpt from a movie review published by The New York Times in March 1940 discussing MAE WEST's latest screen effort which had opened in Manhattan at the Roxy on Seventh Avenue.
• • W. C. Fields and Mae West Are Seen in 'My Little Chickadee' at the Roxy . . .
• • Noel Coward once had a line about two empty paper bags belaboring each other, but we never thought we should one day be scoundrel enough to remember it in connection with a picture harboring W. C. Fields and Mae West.
• • "My Little Chickadee," at the Roxy, in which the two comic soloists are trying to sing a duet, is an effort greatly strained. With the best will in the world, it just isn't funny --not even when the great William Claude ogles Miss West and roguishly invites her to come up and see him some time; not even when La West, commenting on her escape from the "Masked Bandit," explains "It was a tight spot, but I managed to wiggle out of it."
• • And those are the film's high-water marks.
• • The low water mark is more clearly defined, for the film is at low tide most of the time in the quality of its humor, in the broad treatment its players and directors have given it, in the caliber of the audience it seems intended to please and in the generally bad odor it exudes.
• • Miss West's humor, like Miss West herself, appears to be growing broader with the years and begins to turn upon the lady: it's one thing to burlesque sex and quite another to be burlesqued by it.
• • Mr. Fields, largely the innocent victim of some one else's bad taste, inevitably is tempted to juggle a few mud pies himself. It puts a heavy strain on an old admiration to endure the old boy's keyhole-peeping and door-champing at Flower Belle's boudoir, to see him become just another member of the adulant entourage Miss West thoughtfully creates for all her pictures.
• • The story this time is of Flower Belle Lee (guess who) and of Cuthbert J. Twillie, who are united in the bonds of matrimony-in-name-only because Flower Belle needs a consort for legal reasons and because Cuthbert has. . . well, never mind what . . . .
• • excerpt from:
• • Film Review
• • Written By FRANK S. NUGENT
• • published: 16 March 1940 in The New York Times
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
• • Illustration: • • Mae West • • 1940 • •
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Mae West.