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MAE WEST said: "You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough."
• • This statement could easily describe her handsome co-star Cary Grant, who died in the month of November.• • It’s a kick to see Cary [18 January 1904 — 29 November 1986] opposite Mae West before his own movie star image had solidified. The promise may be there, but Grant is stiff in the role of Captain Cummings. He would not yet become the polished and adroit comic leading man that he turned himself into by the end of the nineteen-thirties. As the uniformed do-gooder, he is baby-faced and no real match for West’s dominating presence.
• • Cary Grant was not yet thirty the first time he starred opposite West, and his age adds another provocative element to West’s gleefully taboo-busting, sexually frank presence. “To be sexual with younger men has been, according to Hollywood, a female sin punishable by death or dishonor,” feminist film critic Kathi Maio writes in her book Popcorn and Sexual Politics. “There have only been rare exceptions. When Mae West encouraged Cary Grant, a much younger man, to come up and see her sometime, she wasn’t interested in baking him a batch of brownies. Mae was sexy, but her blatant bawdiness was never threatening because her come hither looks were played for comedy. And besides, Mae West got to break the rules governing female comportment because Mae West was a law unto herself.”
• • Kathi Maio is mostly right here — — West really does seem to be a law unto herself as she shimmies across the screen and swaps lascivious double entendres, but what Maio neglects to acknowledge is that there were a great number of people who did find West extremely threatening, and that her persona only emerged as the result of cleverness and persistence in the face of censorship.
• • As for Cary Grant's emerging persona, he confessed, "I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be and I finally became that person. Or he became me. Or we met at some point.” In other words, Cary came up sometime — — to see his better self.
• • 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.
Lily Birnbaum once made sensational hats for MAE WEST. 
• • During the 1920s, this talented native New Yorker was head milliner for the Shubert Brothers, and kept busy designing show-stopping creations for their Broadway hits.
• • Born in 1895, Lily was raised amid hatboxes, hatpins, ostrich plumes, osprey feathers, glove boxes, and genteel feminine adornment. After she wed attorney Benjamin A. Javits, she focused on raising a family. Still tethered to the thrills of showbiz, she was one of the founders of the Palm Beach Film Festival. When she was in her sixties, she took up painting and had several exhibitions in Palm Beach and NYC galleries.
• • Following in her footsteps, one of her grandsons was so inspired by her colorful backstage stories that he became a milliner. Lily served for years as his consultant.
• • Lily Birnbaum Javits died at age 91 during the month of August — — on Thursday, 7 August 1986 — — after a series of strokes, at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Palm Beach, Florida.• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
• • Photo: • • Mae West • • 1918 • •
• • Feed — — http://feeds2.feedburner.com/MaeWestNYC
Mae West.
An article that admires actor Cary Grant naturally must mention MAE WEST.
• • The heartthrob was born in the month of January — — on 18 January 1904. Cary Grant died on 29 November 1986.
• • Peter Bogdanovich writes: If there had never been a Cary Grant, someone would have had to invent him, and, in fact, someone did, a fellow named Archie Leach from Bristol, England. Acrobat, tumbler, stilt-walker, tall, dark, and handsome, Archie came over to New York City with a well-known vaudeville kind of stunt show, decided to stay on and try his hand at acting and singing in the theater, got work on Broadway, changed his name, taking “Cary” from his first large role, and “Grant” from the phone book. Did a number of musicals, sang, danced, acted, played in a half-dozen shorts, got picked up by Paramount for a seven-year contract, did leads in over two dozen films before he found his picture persona. But along the way, in a couple of the good movies he did at Paramount, he learned a thing or two.
• • On one of his first, Blonde Venus (1932), the legendary Josef von Sternberg, discoverer-molder-Svengali of Marlene Dietrich, took one look at Grant on his first day of shooting and quietly said, deadpan, “Your hair is parted on the wrong side.” Grant himself told me this story — — we were friends for 25 years — — and I asked him how he had responded. “I parted it on the other side,” Cary said brightly, and somewhat conspiratorially, “and kept it that way for the rest of my career!”
• • Another big thing was gleaned from his successful experience on two pictures playing the love interest to Mae West. In both She Done Him Wrong (1932) and I’m No Angel (1933), Cary is the object of Mae’s affections and desires. She pursues him, rather than the other way around. Indeed, she makes one of the screen’s most famous (and most misquoted) invitations to Grant in their first scene together: “Why don’t cha come up sometime, an’ see me?” Cary’s a minister [sic], says he hasn’t the time. She responds, “Say, what’re you tryin’ to do, insult me?!” What Cary took home was that it’s better to be wanted than to want, and once he established himself as a star in 1937, it never was otherwise. . . .
— — Excerpt: — —
• • Article (with errors): "My Favorite Star"
• • By: Peter Bogdanovich
• • Published in The New York Observer — — www.observer.com
• • Published on: 25 November 2008
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
________
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Mae West
• • Photo: • • Mae West • • 1932 • •
NYC
Mae West.
MAE WEST looked at Lorenzo Tucker and saw a leading man. 
• • Born in Philadelphia on 27 June 1907, the light-skinned black actor was known in the 1920s as "the colored Valentino." Tucker claimed that the olive-skinned Italian hearthrob was, in reality, darker complected than he was.
• • Tall, broad-shouldered, and dashing, Lorenzo was tapped by Mae to play the role of the pimp Money Johnson in her controversial Broadway play "The Constant Sinner." The Shuberts refused to permit this, therefore, the Greek-American thespian George Givot played the role in blackface.
• • But Mae West wasn't through. She then cast Lorenzo Tucker in a few minor parts in the production. For example, he played a non-speaking Spaniard and walked across the stage in one scene. When a woman asks the Babe Gordon [Mae West] character who is that hunk, Babe responds, "Oh, he's Spanish — — he's my Spanish fly!"
• • This photo was taken when Lorenzo Tucker was 20 years old.
• • The actor died in August — — on 19 August 1986.• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
________
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Mae West
• • Photo: • • Mae West • • Lorenzo Tucker • •
NYC
Mae West.
Come up sometime. . . I'll tell your fortune! Ah, you can be had. 
• • It’s a kick to see January birthday boy Cary Grant [18 January 1904 — 29 November 1986] opposite MAE WEST before his own movie star image had solidified. The promise may be there, but Grant is stiff in the role of Captain Cummings. He would not yet become the polished and adroit comic leading man that he turned himself into by the end of the nineteen-thirties. As the uniformed do-gooder, he is baby-faced and no real match for West’s dominating presence.
• • Cary Grant was not yet thirty the first time he starred opposite West, and his age adds another provocative element to West’s gleefully taboo-busting, sexually frank presence. “To be sexual with younger men has been, according to Hollywood, a female sin punishable by death or dishonor,” feminist film critic Kathi Maio writes in her book Popcorn and Sexual Politics. “There have only been rare exceptions. When Mae West encouraged Cary Grant, a much younger man, to come up and see her sometime, she wasn’t interested in baking him a batch of brownies. Mae was sexy, but her blatant bawdiness was never threatening because her come hither looks were played for comedy. And besides, Mae West got to break the rules governing female comportment because Mae West was a law unto herself.”
• • Kathi Maio is mostly right here — — West really does seem to be a law unto herself as she shimmies across the screen and swaps lascivious double entendres, but what Maio neglects to acknowledge is that there were a great number of people who did find West extremely threatening, and that her persona only emerged as the result of cleverness and persistence in the face of censorship.
• • As for Cary Grant's emerging persona, he confessed, "I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be and I finally became that person. Or he became me. Or we met at some point.” In other words, Cary came up sometime — — to see his better self.
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
________
Source:http://maewest.blogspot.com/atom.xml
Mae West
• • Photo: • • Mae West • • Cary Grant • • 1932 • •
NYC
Mae West.
