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MAE WEST, in animated form, briefly but memorably appears in the Turner Features Animation film "Cats Don't Dance" [1997]. Not marketed very successfully, it breezed through the movie houses on its quiet little paws and perhaps you never heard of it. 
• • Mae West steps into the frame during "Danny's Arrival Song," at a musical interlude. The scene is the legendary Brown Derby Restaurant, which opened in the 1920s.
• • Gossip columnists such as Hedda Hopper would regularly mention certain trendy restaurants and night clubs in their columns when celebrities were seen in hot spots such as Vine Street's Brown Derby, which was steps from the intersection of Hollywood and Vine.
• • It is 1939 when Danny the cat wants to break into show business in Tinseltown. He approaches the Brown Derby restaurant. But instead of entering, he prowls around the perimeter, pussy-footing, and appearing at the windows. First, he is seen at the window of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Then he is seen at the window where Mae West is framed. Mae poses for the cameras and mouths a kiss. A flurry of flashbulbs greets the screen queen — — however, Mae West is not seen again.
• • Several cartoon versions of Golden Age Hollywood stars appear in this film in addition to Mae West and Laurel and Hardy such as: Jimmy Durante, Bette Davis, Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh, Laurel and Hardy, Cary Grant, Joan Crawford, W. C. Fields, and Clark Gable during the red carpet premiere. The cartoon, released in March 1997, won the Best Animated Feature award at the 1997 Annie Awards.
• • Hope in May • •
• • Bob Hope appeared with Mae West on TV on Sunday, 3 May 1959 on Dean Martin's special. The comedian was born in England on 29 May 1903.
• • In Her Own Words • •
• • Mae West wrote this exchange for "My Little Chickadee" [1940].
• • • Wayne Carter: Spring is the time for love.
• • • Flower Belle Lee: What's the matter with the rest of the year?
• • Quote, Unquote • •
• • Canadian columnist Shinan Govani interviewed Montreal's "Eligible Lady Jennifer Campbell," who said that her "Dream Dinner Guest List" would include: Mae West, Chelsea Handler, Graydon Carter, Marilyn Monroe, Rob Lowe, Alexandra Shulman, Karl Lagerfeld, Katie Couric, and Shinan Govani. ...
• • Source: Article: "Shinan’s Worthy 30: Montreal’s most eligible ladies" written by Shinan Govani for The National Post; posted on 28 May 2011
• • By the Numbers • •
• • The Mae West Blog was started seven years ago in July 2004. You are reading the 1945th 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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Mae West• • Photo: • • Mae West • • cartoonized, 1997 • •• • Feed — — http://feeds2.feedburner.com/MaeWest
NYCMae West.
In 1982, she portrayed MAE WEST as a bouncy child. 
• • Born in California on 11 July 1975, Bridgette Andersen embarked upon an acting career in her youth — — not unlike Mae.
• • By her 7th birthday, Bridgette was buzzing and busy. First she was cast in the TV movie "Washington Mistress" [1982]. Later that year, Bridgette Andersen appeared in her most memorable role as the title character in "Savannah Smiles," followed by roles in "Family Ties," "Remington Steele," and as a young Mae West in the TV bio-pic of the actress' life.
• • In 1983, she appeared in a horror flick and a few short-lived sit-coms and was nominated twice for a Young Artist Award.
• • Though she worked steadily throughout the mid-1980s in feature films and on the small screen, by 1987 the 12-year-old was much less in demand.
• • Unlike Mae West, Miss Andersen was not close to her family. As a teen, she became addicted to heroin and that put more distance between her career aspirations and contact with loved ones. Reportedly, she was trying to clean up and get back on track by 1997 when she was employed by Erewhon Health Food Store in Los Angeles, California.
• • In the month of May — — on 18 May 1997 — — her stardusted dreams ended with a fatal overdose of alcohol and drugs. Bridgette Andersen was 21 years old.• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
• • Photo: • • Mae West • • Bridgette Andersen played young Mae • •
• • Feed — — http://feeds2.feedburner.com/MaeWestNYC
Mae West.
"MAE WEST Defies Cops" read the cover of the Evening Graphic on 2 October 1928. But the month of March brought even more trouble into her life than the police raid in autumn.
• • Thanks to Mae's arrest on 9 February 1927, the very next month — — March 1927 — — the New York State Legislature passed legislation [Section 1140-a of the Penal Code] banning all depictions of homosexuality on the stage.• • Three years later, when Mae West's "Pleasure Man" trial before Judge Bertini began on 17 March 1930, the District Attorney charged that Mae violated Section 1140-a by writing another gay play and he also charged her with the crime of maintaining a public nuisance — — an insulting charge typically levied at speakeasies and skidrow saloons not playwrights.
• • Lillian Schlissel wrote a fine introduction to her 1997 edition of Mae West's "obscene" plays.• • Book reviewer Rick Whitaker wrote this article for The New York Observer in 1997. This text is Whitaker's — — along with a few of his errors.
• • Mae West Wrote Plays; Pity We Can Only Read Them by Rick Whitaker• • Mae West was thrown into jail in New York on Feb. 9, 1927, for having written and starred in a play called Sex, the content of which a grand jury deemed "wicked, lewd, scandalous, bawdy, obscene, indecent, infamous, immoral, and impure." By the time the case went to trial on May 28th [sic — incorrect date], Sex had been performed on Broadway 339 times and had been seen by about 325,000 people.
• • After spending the night in the Jefferson Market Women's Prison, Miss West provided the $14,000 bail it cost to have herself and her 22 colleagues — — her cast and producer — — released. Three years later, she would spend $60,000 defending The Pleasure Man against similar charges at a time when ticket prices ranged from 50 cents to $1.50 and gross receipts of $5,000 per week were considered pretty terrific. It would still be five years before Miss West would make her film debut in Night After Night, shrewdly upstaging the far more beautiful Constance Cummings with her very first big line. (The coat-check girl says, "Goodness, what beautiful diamonds," to which Miss West replies in thickest Brooklynese, "Goodness had nothing to do with it, my dear.")
• • The jury for the Sex case found Miss West and her producer guilty of obscenity and endangering the morals of youth, and she was sentenced to 10 days in jail and a $500 fine. She arrived on Welfare Island in a limousine, carrying an armload of white roses and smiling for the photographers. Upon her release, she donated $1,000 — — what Liberty magazine had paid for an interview with her — — to found the Mae West Memorial Library in the women's prison. Her career was off to a roaring start, and she was quoted later to say, "Considering what Sex got me, a few days in the pen 'n' a $500 fine ain't too bad a deal." Her troubles with the law over her "works of art" (which her lawyer compared in court to A Tale of Two Cities, Hamlet, and the Bible) were perfectly congruent with her budding theatrical persona as one of the great icons of female hell-raising.
• • The prosecutors in all the cases against Miss West's plays, as is evident from the legal documents printed as an appendix to Three Plays by Mae West, were not concerned so much with the actual events or lewdness in the plays as with the depiction of "fairies" on a public stage. In "Notes for Prosecution Arguments in People v. Mae West et al," a prosecutor notes that "these men were not mere female impersonators, but degenerates, who, even offstage, when not performing, adopted the mannerisms of women." His only mistake was that, in all likelihood, these "degenerate" men were never not performing: They were, in life as in the theater, the great gay characters of 1920s New York — — and Mae West was devoted to them.
• • One of her main influences, as noted by the book's editor, Lillian Schlissel, in a fascinating short introduction, was Bert Savoy, a vaudeville actor who played "cheeky dames named Margie and Maude, gossipy secretaries and beauticians, party girls, and flirts." Offstage, Savoy was just as campy as in the theater. "Stopping in front of Saks Fifth Avenue," Ms. Schlissel writes, "he told friends, 'It's just too much. I don't care if he'" — — presumably meaning an imaginary sugar daddy — — "'is building it for me.… I'll never live in it!' Mae West on stage probably owed more to Bert Savoy than to any woman in the theater before 1920." She was as close as any woman has ever come to being one of the great American queens.
• • With the publication of these plays, we see some of the sources of her persona, notes for a memorable character. As Ms. Schlissel admits in the introduction, West was not an original writer; nor was she a great one. The plays themselves surely would be much better on stage than they are in print. The third act of The Drag, a vehicle for her openly gay entourage (who were wonderful performers, no doubt), opens with a party where the "girls" are tossing around lines such as "I'm the type that men prefer. I can at least go through the Navy yard without having the flags drop to half-mast." In a good production, these parties would be a lot of fun; unfortunately, in print they seem stiff and wooden.
• • The Drag (1927), subtitled A Homosexual Comedy in Three Acts, is a rather heavy-handed defense of social difference, which was West's main theme. Tragedy, for her, resulted from being pushed out, or kept out, of a class or club to which one feels entitled to belong. In The Drag, Rolly Kingsbury manages to alienate himself from every connection. The crazed man in love with him (West called him "an outcast" in her cast list) kills Rolly in the end; Rolly's father-in-law arranges for the act to be called a suicide.
• • The comedy in the subtitle is provided by the gay guys with their campy lines about cabdrivers and ball gowns, and by the situation of Rolly's loopy wife, who doesn't understand what's wrong with her marriage. ("What's he done?" she's asked. "Why, nothing. That's just it," she replies.)
• • The Pleasure Man is a revision of The Drag. The story is of a modern Don Juan, an actor who seduces one girl after another and who eventually gets punished for his sins: One girl's big brother cuts the actor's dick off. Again, there are homosexuals everywhere, but they are just the spice for what would otherwise be a bland play that "tells a moral story" — — which is how West described it in court.
• • The best of the three plays is the earliest-written in 1926 — — and the only one in which West acted (in the title role), Sex. Mae West played Margy LaMont, an experienced and ambitious prostitute from Montreal ("I'm a jane that craves service"). In Act 1, Margy saves the life of Clara Stanton, a society dame on a naughty fling, who then accuses Margy of robbing her. Margy swears revenge. In Act 2, Margy has followed the fleet down to Trinidad.
• • (The playbill ad for Sex reads, "The story of a bad little girl who was good to the navy!")
• • Jimmy, a rich civilian, falls in love with her: "There was a certain look in your eyes," he says to Margy.
• • "What kind of a certain look?"
• • "I don't know, but I only hope you don't look at any other man that way."
• • "You silly boy," Margy says.
• • Margy goes back to the East Coast with her new boyfriend and discovers that the guy's mother is old Clara Stanton. A cat fight ensues, and this must have been really great theater. Margy says, "I'll bet without this beautiful home, without money, and without any restrictions, you'd be worse than I have ever been.… The only difference between us is that you could afford to give it away."
• • Sex is well written, it's funny — — and it gave West a superb opportunity to develop the type we have seen in her best movies.
• • Telling her about Trinidad, one character says, "Why, down there, you can get a room and a bath, a wife and a bottle of liquor for two dollars." Margy drawls in reply, "It must be bum liquor." The comedy is often a little dark: When Jimmy comes downstairs, in his parents' house, and finds Margy with a lieutenant of the navy she was so good to, he asks, "What is my little sweetheart doing? Entertaining?" And Margy replies, "Not tonight, dear."
• • Mae West was many things-sexual outlaw, wildcat feminist, actress, icon. The publication of these plays proves that she was more complex than her movies suggest. The only thing she did straightforwardly was to insist that her convictions were worth fighting for. And she fought for them.
• • FROM: Book Review: Three Plays by Mae West: 'Sex,' 'The Drag' and 'The Pleasure Man,' edited by Lillian Schlissel. Routledge, 246 pages.
— — Source: — —
• • Mae West Wrote Plays; Pity We Can Only Read Them
• • Book Review by Rick Whitaker | October 26, 1997
• • This article was published in the October 27, 1997, edition of The New York Observer.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
• • Photo: • • Mae West • • 1928 • •
NYC
Mae West.
In 1893, during the summer Mary Jane West was born in Brooklyn, a bellydancer known as Little Egypt created a sensation at the Midway Plaisance of the Chicago World's Fair. ...
• • And so begins Becoming Mae West, a fascinatin' 431-page bio by Emily Wortis Leider that is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year. The Californian poet received rave reviews in The New York Times and elsewhere, bringing her 1997 hardcover [NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux] to many readers' attention.
• • Since then Becoming Mae West has been reprinted twice. It is available in paperback [NY: Da Capo; published 4 April 2000; 480 pages] as well as in a large-print edition in hardcover [Thorndike Press; January 2001; 912 pages].
• • To celebrate the book's tenth anniversary, here is an excerpt from the review printed a decade ago by Library Journal:
• • Emily Wortis Leider (California's Daughter: Gertrude Atherton & Her Times, LJ 11/15/90) traces Mae West's development from child performer to coltish shimmy dancer to the drawling, wise-cracking persona recognized today. The author's focus on West's early career allows her to examine significant changes in American culture as the population became predominantly urban and the new media of film and radio began encroaching on established forms of entertainment. Yet the heart of the story is West — — already a veteran performer with over 30 years' experience when she arrived in Hollywood. But once West honed her persona, she was reluctant to deviate from the successful formula, stifling her arresting creativity and originality. This combined with perennial censorship problems caused the decades-long break in her film career. Recommended for large public libraries and subject collections. ...
• • Reviewer: Marianne Cawley, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore, Maryland
• • Source: Library Journal — — summer 1997
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
• • Photo: • • Mae West • • none • •
NYC
Mae West.
On 1 May 1997 Interview Magazine saluted MAE WEST. This May-timed issue focused on a new biography that had made a splash – – penned by the California poet Emily Wortis Leider.
• • Here's how Interview Magazine [published in NYC, Mae's hometown] led off the article:
• • Actress Mae West was popular in the 1920s as a vaudeville performer and was well-known for her sexuality. She created a theater show, 'Sex,' that made the most of her sexiness and it appealed to the public because of its raunchiness. She tried to take credit for introducing sex to the public.
• • Mae West made sex synonymous with her name, and in the process, provided the censors with a new target.
• • In her new book, Emily Wortis Leider examines West's transformation from Brooklyn baby to American icon. Here's a sneak peek, plus a few words from another taboo-terrorizer, . . .
• • Source: Interview Magazine | Publication Date: May 1, 1997
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
______Source:http://maewest.blogspot.com/atom.xmlMae West
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Mae West.
Read the words of MAE WEST to fight the winter chill. • • When Lillian Schissel edited "Three Plays by Mae West" [published by Routledge in 1997], this was the first time Sex, The Drag, and The Pleasure Man had been printed in PLAY form. Thought to be lost, the original manuscripts were sleeping at the Library of Congress. After prolonged legal wrangling with the Roger Richman Agency of Los Angeles, who at the time represented the Mae West receivership estate, a deal was finally struck to have the plays published.• • In her introduction, Lillian Schissel argues that West provided one of the first role models for women suggesting they could be independent and achieve success following through on their own ambitions.• • Mae West was, without question, one of the most famous and controversial figures of her era. She was a tough-talking, wise-cracking vaudeville performer who made her way onto the Broadway stage and then into the hearts of the American public with a highly visible Hollywood film career. Rarely, however, do people think of Mae West as a writer even though she wrote eight scripts for the stage and her own dialogue for many of her films.• • In Three Plays By Mae West, Lillian Schlissel brings this underexplored part of West's career to the fore by offering for the first time in book form, three of the plays West wrote in the 1920s -- Sex (1926), The Drag (1927), and Pleasure Man (1928). Schlissel's introduction offers insight to the life and early career of this legendary stage and screen actress.
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Source:http://maewest.blogspot.com/atom.xmlMae West
• • Photo: • • Mae West • • to come • •
NYC
Mae West.
