April 19, 1927: Mae West goes to jail, for sex. Well, not for sex. For Sex.
Mary Jane West was born on August 17, 1893 in Brooklyn. She was appearing in amateur stage shows by age 7, under the name Baby Mae, and was in a Broadway show at 18. She began writing plays under the name Jane Mast, and on April 26, 1926, her play Sex premiered at Daly's 63rd Street Theatre.
Mae played Margy LaMont, a prostitute, who gets mixed up with both the police and society swells. The New York Times' reviewer called it a "crude and inept play, cheaply produced and poorly acted." Billboard magazine called it "the cheapest most vulgar low show to have dared to open in New York this year." And those were 2 of the more flattering reviews.
And yet, Sex played to full audiences, and turned out to be the only play on Broadway that season to stay open through the Summer and into the following year. There were 375 performances before the police raided West and her company on February 15, 1927.
They were charged with obscenity, after 325,000 people had watched it, including members of the police department and their wives, judges of the criminal courts, and 7 members of the District Attorney's staff.
On April 19, 1927, at the Jefferson Market Courthouse in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, Mae was convicted, and sentenced to 10 days in a workhouse on Welfare Island (renamed Roosevelt Island in 1973), for "corrupting the morals of youth." She could have avoided the jail term by paying a fine. She certainly had the money. She chose the jail sentence, for the publicity it would garner. She was one of the people who made "The Roaring Twenties" roar.
She dined with the warden and his wife, and was released after 8 days -- for "good behavior." As she later put it, in her aptly-titled 1933 film I'm No Angel, "When I'm good, I'm very, very good. But when I'm bad, I'm better."
Her next play, The Drag, was about homosexuality, and the City's self-appointed moral arbiters prevented it from being staged on Broadway. Her next play after that was Diamond Lil, and it was a smash. "I wrote the story myself," she said. "It's all about a girl who lost her reputation, but never missed it."
Although nearly 40, and thus too old to play an ingénue, she made her film debut in Night After Night. In that film, a hatcheck girl said, "Goodness! What beautiful diamonds!" and Mae said, "Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie."
Again playing Diamond Lil, she starred in She Done Him Wrong in 1933, in which she gave Cary Grant his big break. That film led to her most-quoted line, which everyone seemed to get wrong: "Come up and see me some time." It was, "Why don't you come up sometime and see me?"
She became the biggest box-office draw in the country. The Hays Code getting serious in 1934 didn't seem to stop her: In 1935, despite the Code, and the Great Depression continuing, between her films and wise real-estate investments, she made more money than any person in the country except newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst. As she put it, "Virtue has its own reward, but has no sale at the box office."
And her quotes, often laced with double entendres, never seemed to stop -- to the point where, like Mark Twain, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Mohandas Gandhi and Yogi Berra, she got credited with thing she didn't really say.
Apparently, she never said to a man, "Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?" In a 1944 stage play she wrote, Catherine Was Great, she played the randy Russian Empress Catherine the Great, embraced Gene Barry, playing Lieutenant Bunin, and she said, "Lieutenant, is that your sword, or are you just glad to see me?" But variations on the line go all the way back to the plays of ancient Greece.
But she did say:
* I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it.
* It's better to be looked over than overlooked.
* A hard man is good to find. (A takeoff on "A good man is hard to find.")
* When caught between two evils, I generally pick the one I've never tried before.
* When women go wrong, men go right after them!
* It's not the man in your life that counts. It's the life in your man.
* I only like two kinds of men: Foreign and Domestic.
* Good girls go to heaven. Bad girls go everywhere else.
* I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.
* (Told there were ten men waiting for her at the door) Send one of them home, I'm tired.
* I do all my writing in bed. Everybody knows I do my best work there.
* A dame that knows the ropes isn't likely to get tied up.
* Men are like linoleum floors: Lay 'em right, and you can walk all over 'em for years.
* Don't keep a man guessing too long. He's sure to find the answer somewhere else.
* (Comparing sex to a card game) Good sex is like good bridge: If you don't have a good partner, you'd better have a good hand.
* You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.
* I never said it would be easy. I only said it would be worth it.
* Marriage is a great institution. I'm not ready for an institution.
In fact, she had been married, almost all along. In 1911, still only 17, she married actor Frank Wallace, but they were hardly ever together. They finally got a legal end to their marriage in 1943, by which point Mae's career was already in decline.
In 1914, she had an affair with Italian vaudeville musician Guido Deiro. It has been alleged that she got pregnant, and, on her mother's advice, had an abortion, which left her unable to have children thereafter. Whether this was true or not, it is known that she had no children.
She had a longstanding affair with her manager, James Timony; a brief one with New York gangster Owney Madden, owner of Harlem's famed Cotton Club; and a brief one with William "Gorilla" Jones, a black boxer who was Middleweight Champion of the World for a few months in 1932. From 1930 until her death, Mae lived at the Ravenswood apartment building in the Hancock Park section of Los Angeles. The building's manager refused to let Jones in. Mae responded by buying the building, firing the manager, and letting Jones into her building, among other things.
In 1950, director Billy Wilder offered her the part of aging actress Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. She turned it down, leading to a career revival for Gloria Swanson. Mae didn't need the part: She had a successful Las Vegas revue. She was offered a part in the 1964 Elvis Presley movie Roustabout. She turned that down, too, and it went to Barbara Stanwyck. (She wouldn't have played Elvis' love interest, as much as she might have liked that. That part went to Joan Freeman. She would have played their common boss at a carnival. From Elvis' perspective, it was just as well: A mama's boy, he had a problem with older women.)
Many actresses -- either intentionally, or prodded to do so by their film studios -- would try to match Mae West for overt appeal to sex. But as Mae herself said, "The only gal who came near to me in the sex appeal department was pretty little Marilyn Monroe. All the others had were big boobs." Marilyn had starred in the 1953 film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. This led Mae to say, "Gentlemen may prefer blondes, but who says blondes prefer gentlemen?"
In 1967, The Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein, asked her for permission to use a photograph of her for the cover of their album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. She refused, asking, "What would I be doing in a Lonely Hearts' Club?" The bandmembers wrote her a personal letter, declaring themselves great fans of her. Flattery got them where they needed to go, and she changed her mind.
In 1970, after 27 years away from films, she was cast in the film version of Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge. But while the Hays Code had been struck down, and the times would seem to have changed in favor of the kind of dialogue she would prefer, the film had a lot of problems, and she didn't help with her diva behavior, not getting along with the film's star, Raquel Welch. The film bombed. So did her last film, Sextette, based on a play she wrote, premiering in 1978. At 84, she was still "playing Mae West."
She died on November 22, 1980, from the effects of a stroke and an ensuing fall 3 months earlier. Although she had been close to her family, she had survived them all, and was survived only by her lover of 25 years, Paul Novak, who had been one of the young "muscle men" in her Vegas stage act.
In 1982, Ann Jillian starred in the ABC TV-movie Mae West. The public's memory of Mae was still strong enough that it was the 3rd-most-watched TV show of that week.
Daly's 63rd Street Theatre, where Sex was staged in 1926 and '27, was at 22 East 63rd Street, between 5th and Madison Avenues. It was torn down in 1957, and a rather ordinary-looking apartment building is on the site today.
The Jefferson Market Courthouse, built in 1877 at 425 Avenue of the Americas (6th Avenue) at West 10th Street, was converted into the Jefferson Market Library in 1967, and is still open as such. I hope Mae knew about that: She probably would have appreciated it.
*
April 19, 1927 was a Tuesday. These baseball games were played that day:
* The New York Yankees lost to the Boston Red Sox, 6-3 at Yankee Stadium. Hal Wiltse outpitched Bob Shawkey, the 1st great pitcher obtained by Yankee owner Jacob Ruppert. Shawkey was pretty much done, and this would be his last season.
Babe Ruth went 0-for-4, but Lou Gehrig went 2-for-4 with an RBI. It was the Yankees' 1st loss of the season, after starting with 6 wins. Gehrig would finish the season with 47 home runs. Ruth would finish with 60.
* It wasn't a good day for New York's National League teams, either. The New York Giants were swept in a doubleheader by the Boston Braves, 9-5 and 5-4 at Braves Field in Boston. Over the 2 games, Rogers Hornsby went 4-for-7 with a walk and an RBI, Bill Terry went 4-for-8 with 3 RBIs, and 18-year-old rookie Mel Ott appeared as a pinch-hitter in each game, without reaching base either time. He was still 3 months away from the 1st of his 511 career home runs.
* The Brooklyn Robins (as the Dodgers were known while Wilbert Robinson managed them from 1914 to 1931) lost to the Philadelphia Phillies, 4-0 at Baker Bowl in Philadelphia. Jack Scott pitched a 4-hit shutout. So, on the day, New York's teams in what would later be named Major League Baseball went 0-4.
* The Detroit Tigers beat the Cleveland Indians, 8-5 at League Park in Cleveland.
* The Philadelphia Athletics beat the Washington Senators, 3-1 at Griffith Stadium in Washington. Playing out the strings of their great careers, former Tigers star Ty Cobb went 0-for-3 with a walk for the A's, and former Red Sox and Indians star Tris Speaker went 0-for-4 for the Senators. The next season, Speaker would join Cobb on the A's, and it would be the last season and players for each of them.
* The St. Louis Cardinals beat the Cincinnati Reds, 9-1 at Redland Field (later renamed Crosley Field) in Cincinnati.
* The St. Louis Browns beat the Chicago White Sox, 7-5 at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis.
* And the Chicago Cubs and the Pittsburgh Pirates were rained out at Wrigley Field in Chicago. It took until September 25 to make the game up as part of a doubleheader, which was necessary, as the Pirates had yet to clinch the National League Pennant. The Pirates swept, 2-1 and 6-1, but still didn't clinch until October 1.
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