२८ मार्च, २०२३

"She feels that curves are far more appealing than angles, and won’t accept photographs that do not show her a bit more voluptuous and rounded than the slim silhouette the modern woman has succeeded in making popular."

I'm reading something written in The New Yorker in 1928: "Mae West, the Queen of New York/The writer and star of 'Sex' and 'Diamond Lil' is calm, clear, and eager for success," by Thyra Samter Winslow. 

If you do a certain puzzle, which I won't spoil by naming, you too may have clicked on the link to this article from a century ago.
... Mae is courteous, amused, always optimistic, glad to see everyone, dropping fairly good, though somewhat trite, epigrams, peppered with bad grammar and made important because of her drawl and her insinuations. She ends her sentences with “Know what I mean?” or “See?”—sometimes combining the two.... 
She is slow, rhythmic, insinuating. She moves with almost feline intensity, a curious sort of wiggle, inside her corsets of the nineties. Her voice is low, husky, magnetic.... 
Miss West writes her plays on bits of paper, sometimes between the acts of another play. Now she has taken to using a dictaphone. “When all my notes are put together and typed I have a play. See? I put in the real stuff at rehearsal. Know what I mean? I let the actors write a lot of their own lines. I pick them out for types, and then let ’em talk. You can’t tell how lines will go over until you try them out on the stage. You have got to hit an audience hard, keep ’em interested every minute. If the action starts to get dull I lift a scene from another act and put it in. See?"

ADDED: The puzzle was the New Yorker's "Name Drop" yesterday. I like this puzzle. Each weekday there's a set of 6 clues for a famous name. The clues get easier as you go along, and I got Mae West after the second clue: "My silhouette inspired the shape of the bottle for Elsa Schiaparelli’s Shocking perfume, and my lips inspired the shape of a sofa designed by Edward James and Salvador Dalí." 

Last night, I happened to watch a Mae West movie, her first, "Night After Night." It was another one of the Criterion Channel's series of pre-code Paramount movies. She has a secondary role and doesn't even show up until the movie is halfway over, and it looks like this, at the door of George Raft's speakeasy:

The character West plays — Maudie Triplett — was based on the real life personage, Texas Guinan. Here's some documentary footage of Guinan in a speakeasy in 1928:


According to Wikipedia, George Raft wanted Guinan to play the role that went to West, but "but the studio opted for West since she was nine years younger. Raft believed that the part would have launched a major film career for Guinan (then aged 48), which proved to be the case for West instead. (West was reportedly a fan of Guinan and incorporated some of the flamboyant Guinan's ideas into her own acts)."

१६ टिप्पण्या:

Jupiter म्हणाले...

" Mae was one of those people I always felt had a distinctly masculine vibration about her. I have often ventured the opinion that she was a man in drag. [Laughs]”

Raquel Welch

John henry म्हणाले...

Patron Saint of sailors.

Those actually are bouoys

John Henry

gahrie म्हणाले...

Sounds like she was doing improv before improv was a thing.

Saint Croix म्हणाले...

ha ha ha

my review of She Done Him Wrong (1933)

#3962 (C-)

Somebody explain Mae West's career to me. What the hell is wrong with early 20th century America? I mean, take Bette Midler, subtract whatever comic talent she has, subtract whatever singing ability she has, make her shorter and fatter, turn her into a tramp-ho from hell, and you got Mae West. And America's like, "More, more, more." And Cary Grant's like, "I'm second banana. She's got my banana." You can do better, man, I swear.

"Why don't you come up and see me some time?" Cause I'll catch syphilis, you frickin' prostitute.

Normally I love bad girls. I don't know. Mae West gives me the willies. Stay a virgin, Cary. Wait for Ingrid or Grace. I've seen your future, man. Don't let the tarantula woman suck you in. This is like a horror movie.

My Review of I'm No Angel (1933)

#1268 (B+)

I hated my first Mae West movie (She Done Him Wrong), which is also with Cary Grant, but she rocks in this one. She starts off as a bad girl stripper at a state fair in the sticks, and her boyfriend is a pickpocket working the crowd. Oh, she’s low.

So she decides to seduce some rich guy from Dallas. Only the pickpocket boyfriend gets jealous and almost kills the guy. So now Mae West has to run away from the law. So she decides to be a lion tamer and put her head in a lion’s mouth. Which is all the rage in New York, apparently. And she’s whipping those damn lions. Kinda like Catwoman. She definitely has a little Catwoman thing going on in this one. Catwoman in a corset.

And all the upper class men in tuxedos are really into Mae West. And those society ladies don’t like her at all. The fiancé of one of them calls her all sorts of names. You bad girl. So Mae West gets mad and spits on her. Spits on her! Oh she’s a hellcat. And Mae West dumps one rich guy in a tuxedo for an even richer guy, Cary Grant. And she’s in love! For the first time!

And the guys who are running the circus are really unhappy because she’s going to quit being a lion tamer and settle down with Cary Grant and have babies. So they frame her, and the pickpocket ex-boyfriend is waiting in her penthouse apartment for Cary Grant while Mae West is stuck out in Jersey somewhere with a crooked chauffeur who is pretending her limousine is broken.

So Cary Grant is mad because he thinks she’s cheating on him, but she’s not. She’s innocent in this one. Innocent and wrongly accused!

Howard Hawks does this a lot better in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Still, it picks up steam as it goes along, and that third act is a hoot.

n.n म्हणाले...

Guys like gals with curves is Her choice.

traditionalguy म्हणाले...

Mae was a nearly perfect sex symbol. A five foot tall gal with big boobs. Which was Hefner’s secret formula for his Playmates. (But 5 foot 4 in hers work as well.)

n.n म्हणाले...

Girls with curves in a tight little skirt. Boys with angles in a white t-shirt.

"We never go out of style"
- Taylor Swift

Dogma and Pony Show म्हणाले...

Mae West was part of a generation of movie stars whose speaking voices were a major part of their personas and appeal. If you think about the first couple of decades after talking pictures arrived, it seems like almost all of the big movie stars had extremely well-known speaking voices that helped define their images: Mae West, Groucho Marx, Bogart, Cagney, Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, Bette Davis, Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper. Not sure what caused this to change, but far fewer stars of more recent vintage have distinctive voices.

Ficta म्हणाले...

I remember when I learned that Mae West wrote her own movies, I was impressed. I saw a production of "Sex" a few years ago. It has a fairly grim story line, but it should be buoyed up by the non-stop dirty jokes. You could hear how each line was supposed to be delivered (just imaging Mae West delivering it), but the cast (well, presumably it was the director's choice) treated it all as heavy drama so none of the punchlines landed. It was a draggy mess.

gilbar म्हणाले...

no fat shaming there! Of course; people today would think she was skinny

Will Cate म्हणाले...

This is amazing stuff. Reads like it was written yesterday.

rcocean म्हणाले...

Ms.winslow seems to have been an interesting person in her own right. An Arkansas Jew, who lived in Chicago, moved to NYC, and ended up in Hollywood. Late in life, she wrote two bestsellers:

-Think Yourself Thin: The New Mental Outlook to Help You Lose Weight (1951)
-The Winslow Weight Watcher: A Complete Course in Nutrition for Those Who Want to Lose Weight (1953)

Scotty, beam me up... म्हणाले...

Mae was forever immortalized when United States aviators in World War 2 called their yellow inflatable life vests the “Mae West”. Young people today probably have no idea who Mae West the person was but they most likely know that many an aviator from World War 2 on were saved from drowning by their “Mae West” after their aircraft went down over water.

Ann Althouse म्हणाले...

If I can trust the internet she was about 5 feet tall and weighed 116. That would give her a BMI of 22.7, which is squarely in the middle of the normal range. The idea that she was fat is crazy.

She had a very top-heavy figure — maybe 38-25-30. People called it "hourglass" and loved it. Elsa Schiaparelli designed a perfume bottle based on her shape -- and you can buy the perfume on eBay.

effinayright म्हणाले...

My favorite Mae West bon mot:

Tabloid newspaper journalist: "Miss West! Miss West! Do you smoke after sex?"

Mae: "I dunno.....I've never looked."

Saint Croix म्हणाले...

The idea that she was fat is crazy.

ha ha!

Althouse, you're so insensitive to the mentally challenged!

I freely admit though I had an emotional reaction to Mae West in that first movie. ("Ah! Run away!")

Also, my charge of prostitution was over-broad.

And I'm not a doctor and I should not diagnose SDTs across time and space like that.