Mae West

 From a 1965 issue of TV Guide:

At 72 (give or take a few years) MAE WEST has not ceased to attract males 

BY DWIGHT WHITNEY 

"Come up and see me sometime.. ." --Mae West as Diamond Lil (to the Salvation Army captain in her own 1928 play) 

For more years than a lady likes to count, Mac West—the first, the funniest and, some say, the greatest of all the modern sex symbols — has been issuing the same amusing yet infinitely promising invitation. And for a large part of those years audiences have been enthusiastically succumbing to the forcefulness of a unique and apparently indestructible personality. Mae — if she will forgive the intimacy — has lived 72 years that she admits to. She is still invitin 'em up to see her sometime. And they are accepting with alacrity. She has, as it were, invited producer-director Arthur Lubin up. The result was an appearance with Mister Ed, strictly tongue-in-cheek, which turned out to be one of the unexpected comedy delights of last season. 

This fall Mae was all set to pay a second visit to Mister Ed, but illness forced her to postpone it. If all goes well, she will make it sometime this spring. She has invited the eminent movie director, George Cukor, up. Cukor, for 35 years a specialist in directing women, from Garbo to the current "My Fair Lady," was so enchanted that he hopes to make a movie starring Mae in which she will play a phony clairvoyant. Little matter that he has to wait till her doctor gives the OK. "A woman doesn't become a great big personality like that by accident." Cukor explained recently. "For all the boldness, there is a certain discretion. No real vulgarity but only the wit and twinkle of an amusing mind. Why waste all that?" 

Indeed, Mae invited me up. This was the woman who first set foot on a stage with a Brooklyn stock company in 1897, worked her way through dozens of Little Nell parts into something much more inflammatory, ultimately set fire to vaudeville and the Shuberts to become the slightly singed toast of Broadway in the Twenties; She became a cause celebre in 1927 when she appeared in her own play (the first of many) whose title ("Sex") was considered so wicked that newspaper ads customarily referred to it only as "that certain play." She moved on to Hollywood in 1932, dazzled them with "Diamond Lil" (retitled "She Done Him Wrong"), "I'm No Angel" and others; installed mirrors on the ceiling over her bed; commissioned a white marble statue of herself in the nude; suggested that Dr. Freud, just then coming into vogue in the movie colony, might learn something from her; and generally tickled the town with her honest, non-niggling, direct-to-the-point philosophy of life. "I won't say I invented sex," she said. "I will say in my modest way that I have re-discovered it."

In World War II she had a life jacket named after her. When William Randolph Hearst wrote, "Why doesn't Congress do something about Mae West?" In 1954 she came out of "retirement" to shepherd a passel of loin-clothed musclemen around the night-club circuit, thereby giving the lie to those unimaginative grumblers who said it was time for Miss West to fold up her sequins in favor of knitting. Mae lives on the beach in Santa Monica. Her eight-bedroom house, replete with butler, cook, chauffeur, clerical staff and Cadillac limousine, is early 1930's "modern," the style of architecture which resembled the outside of an icebox. Inside, however, all trace of the workaday world vanishes. I fight my way through a forest of crystal and gilt, antique mirrors and candelabra that might look gaudy at Versailles. 

On the grand piano sits the famous nude statue.  (Sold on Jun 25, 2016 for: $8,125.00) On the walls hang seductive oil portraits of the star in her distinctive full-feathered costumes. In the bar Mae's two pet South American woolly monkeys, "Baby" and "Pretty Boy," pace back and forth, chattering and grinning morosely. I have the distinct feeling that a curtain is going up. Even though Mae, careful craftsman that she is, has been preparing for my visit for several days, there is a wait — naturally. This provides plenty of time to admire the artifacts of her colorful career. There is, for example, the photograph of that good filly, Mae West, which ran 5-furlongs at Belmont in '57; a headline from a 1954 issue of Variety, reading "Mae Breaking Records"; a picture layout on "Venus of 1937"; and a sentimental remembrance from her musclemen—a 3-foot gold trophy inscribed, "To the Queen of Men's Hearts from Your Athletes. We Love You. 1955."

Presently the butler arrives, bows from the waist and announces, "Miss West will see you now." Now I know the curtain is going up. We ascend the circular staircase. On the top landing I am confronted by a large mural full of romping males so archly satyric that they seem almost to parody them-selves. I am ushered into the interview place — the boudoir. I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Everything is gilt on white. The walls are white, the carpet is white, the tufted satin bedspread on the round bed is white, the satin canopy rising majestically to the ceiling is white. Only the TV set is dark-colored. Mae herself is dressed in a peignoir of beige lace, just the thing for casual afternoon wear, with a blonde wig above false eyelashes — a kind of Mount Rushmore of the cosmetician's art. She stands every inch the queen she is, next to two gilt chairs, strategically placed so she'll know exactly where they are. (She cannot see without her glasses.) I admire the lady and the furnishings, in that order. She smiles Westily. makes a stab at the chair, sits, adjusts the drape in her peignoir and gets down to the fascinating business of why she's doing another Mister Ed. "My fans liked the other so well," says Mae, "I was forced to." 

Mae plays hard to get 

To hear Mae tell it, she is not only the busiest septuagenarian glamor girl in town, but the hardest to get. She estimates that she has turned down more movie and TV offers in the last 10 years than most girls get in a lifetime. Why? "Because they are not right for me. They are not Mae West." Having already published her memoirs, "Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It," in 1959, she is currently editing a book on extrasensory perception, rewriting her Mister Ed spot ("Nobody writes for Mae West like Mae West," Arthur Lubin explains), and writing a new novel. The novel is based on her own 1927 play, "The Drag," perhaps the first American play to deal in a non-niggling way with homosexuality. "After the novel comes out," says Mae matter-of-factly, "we'll make a picture of it. It has everything for a great evening's entertainment. Y'know, when I originally wrote it, I was asked not to bring it to New York — uh, it might upset the city." The butler reappears bearing two tall, iced glasses on a silver tray. I cannot imagine what exotic elixir they contain. It turns out to be a cola drink. So there we are, thinking young with Pepsi, and discussing sex. "You're born with it," Mae is saying. She takes a dim view of the "sick sex" which seems to be so prevalent these days. "Not the good healthy normal sex." Mae says. "I inspire that. But really sex hasn't changed. There's just more of it." She pauses to excoriate the topless bathing suit. "That's going too far," she says. "I never had to resort to nudity." Now Mae is in a reminiscent mood. She tells me how tough things were for her in the Twenties, how she had to put humor into her act to gain acceptance; how it was even tougher in the Thirties, after the Hays office cracked down on sex in the movies, forcing her to play even more for comedy, an alarming (by her lights) trend which culminated in 1939, when she was compelled to share top billing with W. C. Fields in "My Little Chickadee." As Mae puts it, "I stepped off my pedestal. Until then I never co-starred with anybody." She recalls with relish the Salvation Army captain in "Diamond Lil," and how she stood on the stairway, wiggled her egrets, and told him, "I like a man in uniformand, honey, that one fits you grand"; and how J. J. Shubert did nip-ups and the only problem was to keep the customers from battering down the box office. She boasts that she has never boiled an egg in her life. Once, however, she did brew a cup of coffee on cook's night out. "I hadda send out for instructions," Mae explains. "They forgot to tell me you had to turn off the heat. I never turn off—the heat." Although she is much too smart to say so, Mae is appalled at the number of strictly egg-boiling females in TV. Asked about glamor in the medium, her look becomes pained, her eyes evasive. How does she dig family situaticn comedy—like The Donna Reed Show? "Donna who?" replies Mae abstractedly. 

As for Liz Taylor... 

According to Mae, movie glamor is in almost as sorry a state. "When they face the real thing, they're afraid," she opines. To her, Harlow was "merely acting sex," Turner was "a schoolgirl" and Monroe—"Well," says Mae grumpily, "they managed to do something with her." As for Liz Taylor, "She's a face." She thinks a minute. "Of course, she has some blood in her veins. But that thing with that fellow — uh, what's his name? — didn't do her any good. Women won't come to see you. Of course, I haven't seen 'Cleopatra.'  I played Cleopatra once." Her voice trails off. I ask her if it's true that she owns half the real estate in San Fernando Valley. Mae denies this. She owns the Ravenswood — the Hollywood apartment building where she lived for so many years — and "some other things." She explains her investment technique: "I'd drive by and see a pretty place. 'Buy that,' I'd say." One of the pretty places was three square blocks in what is now downtown Van Nuys. A few years ago she sold off a piece of it for $1,100,000. Mae is just enthusiastically discussing her plan to do two TV "spectaculars" yearly when the butler arrives to remind her that her agents are waiting downstairs. The timing is perfection. "In a minute," says Mae grandly, then to me: "I must create a certain excitement. Unless it's extra great, I just can't get interested . . .." "Thank you, Miss West," I say weakly. She does not say come back up and see me again sometime. Instead she says: "I'm waiting for pay-TV. I'll bet I'll rate No. 1 on it." I think, how charming! How Mae Westian! How ridiculous! At her age? And yet, on the way out—past the mural with the gold fig leaves, past the butler, past "Baby" and "Pretty Boy" and the statue and the two agents in the parlor—I make an urgent mental note not to take that bet.