Mae West: Countess

It is always nice to notice new television personalities who credit MAE WEST with being an inspiration.
• • The Brooklyn bombshell did not do too much work on the small screen — — which was still a new and untried medium to the vaudeville veterans born during the 1890s.
• • To Mae West's way of thinking, TV appearances were merely an episode and not the mainstay of her career.
• • Similarly, to the reality fixtures of the Bravo series "The Real Housewives of New York City," it seems matrimony has been a saucy episode but not the whole enchilada.
• • Naturally, nouns like "housewife," "motherhood," and "matrimony" do not figure in her life. However, Mae did work for a few years in burlesque, a form of live entertainment that is making a comeback in her hometown.
• • The New York Observer dispatched a scribe for The Daily Transom to West 45th's colorful Night Hotel and here's the headline Chris Shott accorded the interview with Luann, a former waitress and fulltime diamond polisher: "Countess Luann de Lesseps Conjures Lascivious Mae West at the Night Hotel."
• • Let's enjoy an excerpt together, shall we?
• • Chris Shott writes: The classy Countess Luann de Lesseps [born on 17 May 1965] is a big fan of the old bump and grind.
• • "I love burlesque!" Ms. de Lesseps confessed to the Daily Transom on Wednesday night, May 27, during intermission at former Roxy and Palladium promoter Lee Chappell's risque weekly Foreign Affairs show in the dimly lit lounge at Vikram Chatwal's Night Hotel on West 45th Street.
• • Sporting a slinky black Michael Kors dress, the 43-year-old co-star of the popular Bravo series "The Real Housewives of New York City" sat legs crossed, slowly sipping a glass of red wine, while onstage the contortionist and onetime Cirque du Soleil aerialist Ekaterina Sknarina performed a steamy striptease and bawdy hostess Lady Rizo belted out an appropriately schizophrenic cover of the 2006 Gnarls Barkley song "Crazy." . . .
• • Vowing to be true to the jewelry box . . . • •
• • In fact, her marriage to the Count Alexandre de Lesseps has been the subject of much speculation in recent weeks, with her rep ultimately confirming rumors of a split.
• • She vowed to cling to her noble title, nevertheless, she told the Daily Transom. "And the jewelry!" she added, laughing.
• • "But I love cabaret and I love this kind of music," Ms. de Lesseps said. "I'm a big fan of Mae West. So this takes me back. I actually just wrote a book called Class with the Countess. And I write about Mae West and I write about how I think that she was such a great woman because she knew how to be a woman. You know, how to flirt. I talk about the art of seduction in my book and I talk about Mae West and I pull out a lot of her quotes, which I love. You know, 'It's better to be looked over than overlooked.' I think it's a lost art. I really do." . . .
— — Excerpt: — —
• • Article: "Countess Luann de Lesseps Conjures Lascivious Mae West at the Night Hotel"
• • Byline: By Chris Shott | The Daily Transom
• • Published in: The New York Observer — — www.observer.com
• • Published on: 28 May 2009
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• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West: O Night

Rex Reed once co-starred with MAE WEST. Here's an excerpt from his column on the rise and fall of Oscar.
• • Rex Reed writes: Call me yesterday’s child, but after the thrill of Doris Day arm in arm with Clark Gable, or Mae West’s carnal gibes at Rock Hudson on a raunchy duet of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” that almost knocked the show off the air in 1958, the sight of Charlie Kaufman and a coven of assorted Desperate Housewives just doesn’t quite make it.
• • I still think Judy Garland should have won for the achievement of a lifetime in A Star Is Born (1954), instead of dreary Grace Kelly. I remain unconvinced that Judy Holliday should have won in 1951 for Born Yesterday over Bette Davis in All About Eve.
• • How can a sane mind explain how The Greatest Show on Earth beat out The Bad and the Beautiful in 1953? Orson Welles never really won anything; neither did Alfred Hitchcock. James Dean changed the face of movie acting forever, but Oscar gave him the middle finger twice — posthumously, too. Kim Stanley, my favorite actress of all time, wasn’t even nominated for The Goddess.
• • Already disheartened, I pretty much stopped covering the Oscars on a regular basis after Titanic swept the awards in 1998, and for no logical reason, a silly, spastic fop named Roberto Benigni beat Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan the following year. When it comes to grousing, I’m just scratching the surface. It all reminds me of what Hunter Thompson once said about the music business: “A dark, plastic hallway where pimps and thieves run free, and good men die like dogs. … There is also a negative side.”
• • The winds of change have now reached gale force, but here we go again. The songs have been a joke since real songwriters stopped writing them. The last great song with any legs written for the screen was “New York, New York” in 1977. It wasn’t even nominated. In the old days you got musical numbers by Kern, Berlin, and the Gershwins. Now you get X-rated rap about pimps. Aware of the negative impact this trash has provoked, the Academy this year is limiting the category to three songs instead of five, and the performance time to one chorus each. No cigar, but it’s a start. . . .
— — Excerpt: — —
• • Article: "Oscar and Me"
• • Byline: Rex Reed
• • Published in: The New York Observer
• • Published on: 17 February 2009
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
• • Critic Rex Reed was born on 2 October 1938 in Fort Worth, Texas to Jimmie M. Reed and Jewell Smith.
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West: The Observer

"Diamond Lil Still Sparkles," writes New York-based reviewer Sara Vilkomerson, referring to the latest biography of MAE WEST — — which she approaches most patiently, wearing velvet gloves and willing to overlook flaws.
• • • • She Always Knew How: Mae West — A Personal Biography
• • • • By Charlotte Chandler
• • • • Simon & Schuster, 317 pages
• • It’s hard to think of any of today’s shiny and carefully coddled stars who could hold their own when it comes to the utter cool that was Mae West. Seriously! Just try to imagine an Angelina or Scarlett or Reese trying to match the sultry vamp of the tiny and curvy blonde in films like I’m No Angel (1933), She Done Him Wrong (1933), and Go West Young Man (1936), let alone writing their own plays and scripts, and crafting quips like “When I’m good, I’m very good. But when I’m bad, I’m better.” Madonna — who has most definitely studied the Mae West playbook — has pushed the boundaries (and then some) throughout her career, but she never spent 10 days [sic] in jail on obscenity charges (as Ms. West did in 1927, after she wrote, performed, directed [sic], and produced the very popular Broadway play Sex).
• • Mae West set out to rule her world in her own inimitable way, defining all of her own terms. As Charlotte Chandler writes in her new biography, She Always Knew How, “when Mae began her career, doors were opened for women. When she finished her career, doors were open to women.”
• • Charlotte Chandler has written biographies of iconic celebrities before: Ingrid Bergman, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Alfred Hitchcock. In She Always Knew How, she relies mainly on a series of interviews conducted months before the actress’ death, in 1980. From the opening pages, when West shows Ms. Chandler her extensive diamond collection, and immediately offers a few vehement opinions on makeup, spring water and enemas for soft skin, the voice of Mae West jumps off the page, sassy, bossy and clever. In fact, there are moments in the book when one might be forgiven for feeling one’s simply reading some forgotten transcript hidden away for decades in a musty attic.
• • (Ms. Chandler never gets around to explaining why she’s chosen to publish her book now, 29 years after the interviews took place.)
• • Because so much of She Always Knew How is Mae West talking about her favorite subject — herself — it’s hard to know what’s true and what’s the carefully constructed myth West created. (Ms. Chandler did talk to actors and friends who knew the star, but the meat of the book is Mae West herself.) There’s no doubt that Mae West had a brilliant and shrewd mind when it came to branding her own image: There was her private self, which only an inner circle of confidantes were allowed to see, and then there was Mae West, in her form-fitting Edith Head creations and 6-inch platform shoes (the secret to her deliberate walk), purring about how a hard man is good to find.
• • “Do you know what question I’m asked the most? About the mirrors on my bedroom ceiling. I say, ‘I like to see how I’m doin’.’ It’s the truth. It’s very exciting. You should try it,” West tells Charlotte Chandler during one of their conversations. “And the next question I’m most often asked is, am I always the Mae West everybody knows, or am I different when I’m alone? The answer is when I’m alone, I’m the same Mae West. But you’ll have to take my word for it, ’cause when I’m alone there isn’t anyone else here.’”
• • Ms. Chandler wisely organizes the book chronologically, and it’s through Mae West’s voice that we hear about her childhood in Brooklyn; the early marriage she didn’t admit to for many years; her Hollywood ascent; and the love she shared with Paul Novak, her constant companion for 27 years, who took faithful care of her at the end of her life. Along the way we get Mae’s sometimes true and sometimes wild assertions (that she discovered Cary Grant, that she saved Paramount Pictures from bankruptcy).
• • And if Charlotte Chandler neglects to provide supporting facts (or proof to the contrary), who cares? She Always Knew How succeeds in making the reader feel privy to a private conversation — a chance to overhear a singular voice that makes us wish a Mae West were around today.
• • Sara Vilkomerson is a reporter at The New York Observer.
— — Source: — —
• • Book Review by Sara Vilkomerson
• • Published in The New York Observer — — www.observer.com
• • Published on: 13 February 2009
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• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West Defies Cops

"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.
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• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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