American Masters: "Mae West: Dirty Blonde" (Thirteen/WNET, 1515 Productions Limited, American Masters Pictures, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Right now I’m listening to a quite entertaining LP from Columbia, reissued in the late 1960’s from material recorded for the Brunswick label in the mid-1930’s, featuring songs by Ethel Merman (back when her voice still had some resemblance to normal pitches; she was always a big-voiced woman with killer high notes, but this early at least she hit those notes relatively cleanly instead of just screaming in the general direction of pitch as she did later), Lyda Roberti (the Polish-born diva-ette who sang with a very thick accent and died at age 31 of a heart attack after years of heart trouble) and Mae West. I dug this album out of the backlog because last night (Friday, March 15) my husband Charles and I watched a quite good American Masters documentary about Mae West, almost inevitably called Dirty Blonde. It was basically a print-the-legend version of Mae West’s story, though it had some interesting explorations of the various controversies involved in West’s career, both when it was still going on (when she was a lightning rod for censorship) and since (arguments within the feminist community over whether to consider West a pioneer feminist icon or excoriate her, as Marjorie Rosen did in her 1970’s book Popcorn Venus). Mae West is one of my big culture heroines, mainly because she was in total control of her own career; she not only starred in movies but insisted on writing her own scripts. Her contract with Paramount from 1932 to 1937 gave her not only the authority to write her films but a provision that her credit as writer be in letters 75 percent the size of her credit as star. What’s more, she became a movie star when she was either pushing forty or already passed it (her Wikipedia page gives her birthdate as August 17, 1893; as I once wrote in a moviemagg post about one of West’s films, “She would be a Leo!”).

Mae West made her stage debut at age five and never wanted to do anything else with her life. She was born in Brooklyn (and kept the accent all her life instead of working with voice coaches to “normalize” her diction), and there’s a story in this film in which she once got upset when doing a childhood performance because the spotlight was on the other side of the stage from her, so she managed to coax it over to her. Mae West became a star in vaudeville and its raunchier cousin, burlesque. The show emphasized her proletarian origins – her father was a prizefighter named John Patrick West, nicknamed “Battlin’ Jack,” and her mother was corset and fashion model Mathilde Delker – though according to Charlotte Chandler’s book on her she had an attorney uncle, Thomas West, who read all her contracts and advised her on them. In 1926 West was out on the town when she saw a female prostitute wearing a hat with two bird-of-paradise feathers at a time when there was such a demand for such hats the bird they came from had literally been hunted to extinction. Since the woman was in visible want, West found herself wondering why she had spent whatever money she had on food instead of those ultra-expensive feathers, and West started imagining a play based on her experiences. West hired Elwood Elsner, a prestigious director who’d worked with John Barrymore, and she started rehearsing the play before she’d settled on a title. At one point, Elsner complained, “This play reeks of sex, sex, sex!” Mae West heard that and immediately decided to call the play Sex, even though the New York Times then did not allow that word in its pages; the Times ads heralded “Mae West in that certain play.” During the run of Sex the New York Police Department raided the play on protests from women’s religious groups who claimed it was obscene, and West was actually convicted and sentenced to 10 days in jail (though she only served eight). In a 1969 Life magazine interview, West said she was struck by the irony that he was in women’s jail for playing a prostitute, and just about all the other inmates were there for being prostitutes. She also befriended the warden and his wife, and got to have dinners with them. According to her Wikipedia page, West was offered the chance to pay a fine and avoid jail time, but she was a shrewd enough self-publicist to see the possibilities of publicizing the film for which she’d be willing to go to jail. West boasted on her release that there would be enough pent-up demand to see her play that it would run for years, and she was right.

While Sex was winding down she wrote another play (signing it “Jane Mast,” an obvious pseudonym) called The Drag about Gay men, though the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice managed to keep her from opening it in New York after successful tryouts in Connecticut and New Jersey. In an effort to broaden her appeal and in particular to get more women to come to their shows – at one performance of Sex she’d looked into the audience and noticed it was 80 percent male – she decided to set her next play, Diamond Lil, in the 1890’s. I’ve long suspected one reason Mae West kept gravitating to the 1890’s as a setting for her stories was because that was when women who looked like her – buxom, big-chested and with waists cinched tight by corsets – had been considered the acme of female sexiness before the tall, slender, boyish “flapper” look came into vogue in the 1920’s. Anyway, Diamond Lil was a huge hit and it attracted the attentions of the Hollywood studios, though it wasn’t until 1932 – in the depths of the Depression (which really didn’t start hitting the movie business hard until 1931, but when it did it threatened all but one of the major studios with bankruptcy) – that West finally accepted a contract offer from Paramount. According to this documentary, West asked the studio executive who was negotiating with her, “How much money do you make?” He told her, and she said, “Give me a dollar more than that and I’ll sign.” West’s first film was a rather quirky mashup of gangster film and soap opera called Night After Night (1932), in which she was billed fourth (after George Raft, Constance Cummings and the quite good but largely forgotten Wynne Gibson, and just ahead of the great character comedienne Alison Skipworth), but she demanded the right to write her own dialogue for the scenes in which she would appear. The moment she breezes in to the titular speakeasy “55,” appears at the hat-check desk where the girl at the desk exclaims, “Goodness, what beautiful diamonds” – and West answered back, “Goodness had nothin’ to do with it, honey” – Mae West became a movie star.

Her next film was an adaptation of Diamond Lil, though Paramount had her change the title to She Done Him Wrong and “Lil” became “Lady Lou.” It was shot on a 17-day schedule for a competent but unimaginative hack named Lowell Sherman (who’d begun as an actor and actually delivers a great performance as a drunken has-been director in the 1932 film What Price Hollywood?, the precursor to the multiple versions of A Star Is Born), and for her leading man West picked Cary Grant. The print-the-legend version of how Grant got the part is the one told here; reportedly West looked down a long line of Paramount leading men, spotted Grant and said, “If he can talk, I'll take him!” Grant had actually signed with Paramount a year before and his first film had been This Is the Night (1932), a quite good romantic comedy much along the lines of the movies that would make him a star later on. By the time he co-starred in She Done Him Wrong he’d already worked with major stars – Tallulah Bankhead, Gary Cooper and Charles Laughton in Devil and the Deep; Marlene Dietrich and Herbert Marshall in Josef von Sternberg’s Blonde Venus; and a non-musical version of Madame Butterfly with Sylvia Sidney as Butterfly and Grant as Pinkerton – though Grant’s patented mix of romance and comic exasperation played perfectly with West’s steamroller sex drive and their two films together, She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel (for which Paramount realized what they had in Grant enough they gave him billing along with West on the title card: “Mae West in I’m No Angel with Cary Grant”), are her best.

They’re her best for another reason: both were made during the so-called “pre-Code” era of Hollywood history. Throughout the 1920’s women’s clubs and other busybodies had been denouncing Hollywood as immoral, both for the relative brevity of many of the stars’ marriages and the casual content of the films themselves. In 1930 the movie industry issued a Production Code which the major studios claimed they would enforce against each other to ensure that all movies would be “clean” enough to entertain the entire family. The studios hired Will H. Hays, who’d been Postmaster General under President Warren G. Harding, to be the public face of the cleanup campaign, though the person actually in charge of enforcing the code was a former Jesuit named Joseph Breen. (One critic has pointed out the irony that the studio owners, most of whom were Jewish, hired a bunch of Roman Catholics to advise them on what a mostly Protestant nation would consider “clean” entertainment.) For the first four years, however, the Code was only loosely enforced, and movies took on sexual topics with a refreshing honesty that wouldn’t return to American movies until the 1960’s. Then Mae West came on the screen, and though there were other movies featuring other stars who bore a large amount of the would-be censors’ wrath, she became Public Enemy Number One. The U.S. branch of the Roman Catholic Church organized a pressure group called the Legion of Decency with the clear and openly stated goal of driving “immoral” entertainment in general, and Mae West in particular, off the screen. When the Legion of Decency struck, West had just finished her fourth film, originally entitled It Ain’t No Sin, and it was ready for release – only Joseph Breen’s censors demanded major cuts and the New York state censorship board cut it even further. Among the censor-mandated changes were a scene at the end in which West’s and Roger Pryor’s character would get married – original reviewers rightly guessed this scene had been added only to mollify the censors – as well as a quite obvious cut of one chorus of West’s song “When a St. Louis Woman Comes Down to New Orleans” and a change in the title to the anodyne Belle of the Nineties.

The censors’ no-holds-barred attack on Mae West put the people running Paramount in a quandary: they still had a hot star on their hands, but they also had a lot of bothersome busybodies chiming in with their own two cents’ worth on what they could and should do with her. The result was a series of films – Goin’ to Town (1935), Klondike Annie (1936), Go West Young Man (1936) and Every Day’s a Holiday (1937) – that lost money at the box office because they didn’t give West’s audience what they wanted to see from her. West drifted into radio work but also ran afoul of the censors, thanks in large part to an Adam and Eve spoof she did on Edgar Bergen’s radio show, which led to a flood of letters to NBC and an outright ban on West’s further radio appearances. West would get to make two more movies, My Little Chickadee with W. C. Fields for Universal in 1940 (Universal had had a success with fellow Paramount refugee Marlene Dietrich with a Western spoof called Destry Rides Again in 1939 and thought lightning would strike again; it did, sort of, but though Fields and West were supposed to write the script together, according to her 1969 Life interview West wrote the whole thing except for one scene in which Fields fills in for an absent bartender) and The Heat’s On for Columbia in 1943 (oddly not mentioned here; plot-wise it’s a knock-off of the Warner Bros. Busby Berkeley musical Dames and a quite entertaining spoof of censorship even though it suffers from the unwillingness of Columbia’s producers to let West write her own dialogue). Then, locked out of movies and radio, she returned to the live stage, first in a revival of Diamond Lil and then in a Las Vegas stage show in which she filled the stage with musclemen. Among her recruits were Mickey Hargitay (who later married another blonde bombshell, Jayne Mansfield, fathered Mariska Hargitay from Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and sponsored Arnold Schwarzenegger’s immigration to the U.S.) and Chester Rybinski, who under the name “Paul Novak” became West’s life partner for the last 30 years of her life. "I believe I was put on this Earth to take care of Mae West,” Novak once said.

Mae West’s private life was as unconventional as those of her characters; she’d briefly married a fellow vaudevillian named Frank Szatkus, who performed under the name “Frank Wallace,” in Milwaukee in 1911 (and since she’d never divorced him, this sparked controversy when a town clerk in 1935 discovered the marriage record and leaked it publicly, undermining West’s frequent claims that she’d never been married), and later she had an affair with an accordion player named Guido Deiro. She got pregnant by him (they tried a crude form of birth control but it didn’t work), and on the advice of her mother West had an illegal abortion – which was botched and left her unable to bear children again. Mae West got rediscovered in the 1960’s largely as an icon of the sexual revolution in general and the Queer community in particular; she’d always been sympathetic to Queer rights and her over-the-top costumes were often copied by drag queens. This had her full awareness and approval; when she met Walter Plunkett, costume designer for The Heat’s On, she told him, “Make me dresses the female impersonators will want to wear.” West made an ill-advised comeback attempt in the 1970’s with two movies, a supporting role in the film of Gore Vidal’s Trans bestseller Myra Breckenridge and a lead in a film called Sextette, based on a story she’d written in 1959 but filmed 20 years later, in which she and her current husband get together with all of her exes. There’s a clip from Sextette in this documentary in which she’s introduced to a man who’s six feet, seven inches tall, and she says, “Never mind the six feet. Just give me the seven inches” – which, especially coming from a woman in her 70’s whose face looks like her makeup has been applied with a trowel to cover the effects of age, is a) not funny and b) just shows how little Mae West had to say in an era in which all the envelopes she had pushed in the 1930’s had since been totally shredded.

Fortunately, Mae West at least had a comfortable existence; she’d saved her money from her glory years and used it to invest in real estate, mostly in Van Nuys. She’d also never drank or smoked, and she’d avoided the chemical temptations that frequently come with major stardom. Though there’s a certain degree of sadness over how Mae West’s life ended (she finally died November 22, 1980, three months after suffering a stroke), she lived her life on her own terms and had a quite long run, living to be 87. In 1971 the UCLA student body voted West “Woman of the Century” because of her outspoken advocacy of sexual honesty and her denunciation of the censorship that both boosted her career and did so much to destroy it.