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Mae West was a huge star in the 1930s who basically walked away from full-time show business when censorship made her sexually suggestive brand of humor impossible for the studios to distribute. What did she do to create such controversy? Her movies were suggestive to be sure, but they contained no nudity, no profanity, and very little violence. In fact, you'll find more vulgarity in the first five minutes of the Jenny Jones show than you will in Mae West's entire career. Mae
West made the screen's first booty call.
Religious
leaders condemned Mae West as a negative role model, and forced the
Hollywood studios to curtail her films. They were offended by lines
like; Mae
West was a gifted, multi-talented artist. She not only starred in her
films, she wrote them as well (including the songs which were also sold
as singles). Even though she made less than a dozen films in her entire
career, she saved Paramount Pictures from bankruptcy with her hit movies
of the Thirties. One of the buildings still on the Paramount lot today
is named in her honor.
When
television took hold, Mae West popped up occasionally on variety shows
beginning in 1950 and continuing into the Sixties. Shows like The
Chesterfield Supper Club (originally simulcast on radio and shot
for TV with the cast standing at the microphone), The Red Skelton
Show and The Dean Martin Special.
An
ABC talk show appearance was taped in the mid-Fifties - but the network
was afraid prudish viewers would be shocked by the plain talking actress/writer
who was plugging her 'racy' autobiography. For instance, when the interviewer
asked Miss West why she had mirrors on her bedroom ceiling, she replied,
"I like to see how I'm doing". The show was never aired, that remark
alone was too sexually explicit for TV in the nifty-fifties.
Her
last major television appearance was on the Back Lot, USA Special (April 4, 1976
on CBS) with host Dick Cavett. On the show, the aging Diva (Mae West
was the ORIGINAL Diva) talked about her life and performed a long, elaborately
staged medley of her Thirties' hits - even though the former temptress
was almost 80 years old at the time. The critics were NOT kind, but
that's another story.
Mae
West died November 22, 1980 of natural causes.
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What
uptight people objected to was that Mae West had the nerve to portray
confident women who weren't afraid to use their sexual wiles to get
what they wanted. Her best movies are pastiches of Mae dealing with
men she just met, the men in her past, and the man she's after next.
"Between two evils,
I always pick the one I haven't tried before", "Why don't you come up
and see me sometime" and "Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just
glad to see me?" (now you know where THAT came from). Powerful muckraking
newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst even called on Congress
to do something about the Mae West 'menace'.
The singer/comedienne
was also an incredibly shrewd investor - buying up much of the property
that later became downtown Hollywood. She became one of the wealthiest
women in the world by the 1950's and no longer need to work. She only
dabbled in radio in the Forties, usually making headlines with her brash
(and always hilarious) appearances.
In 1965 Mae
West turned in her most bizarre performance ever. On 
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