MARGY Well, come on and let’s see it.
Lt. GREGG You’ll get it, you’ll get it. I don’t mind telling you I had an awful time saving it for you. Why, all the women were fighting for it.
MARCY It better be good.
Lt. GREGG It’s good alright. It’s the best you could get, but you’ve got to be very careful not to bend it.
The “it” that couldn’t be bent was a feather, but the “business” signaled in the stage directions indicated a more anatomical reference.
West brought the Fleet Street Band into the play, and she chose the songs. Some of them were sentimentally familiar, like “Home Sweet Home,” “Bells of the Sea,” I’m Sorry Dear,” and, for her critics on Variety, the “Meditation” from Thais. Music signalled audiences what she was up to, as when she had sailors dance jigs with other sailors or do steamy tangoes with the women of the brothel. The best of the dirty dancing she saved for herself—a new Charleston called “Sweet Man” (words and music by Ray Turk and Maceo Pinkard, 1925) about kisses as “hot” as TNT, gasoline, and nitroglycerine. She did her famous shimmy to “Shake That Thing” (1926), lyrics by Charlie “Papa” Jackson, who worked with the blues singer Ma Rainey.11
All around her, Broadway shows were bringing in black dance and black music as fast as they could. The Ziegfeld Follies hired black dancers to teach showgirls how to move, and in 1927, Ruth Etting danced a “rhinestone shimmy” to Irving Berlin’s new song “Shaking the Blues Away.” Stylish women like Anita Loos and Ellin Mackay Berlin went to a “local dance parlor” to learn how to do the Black Bottom.12
But the rhinestone shimmy and the Black Bottom at the dance parlor were not what Mae West was doing on the stage of Daly’s Theatre.
West told reporters that she first saw the “shimmy shawabble” in 1911 in a club for “spades” on Chicago’s South Side and that she did the dance the same night in her act, although in deference to her father’s discipline she called it a “muscle dance.” Songs identified with black singers were part of her signature, songs like “A Guy What Takes His Time,” “Easy Rider,” and W. C. Handy’s “Memphis Blues.” She meant audiences to know the black sources of her comedy and attitude.
In a waggish mood, Timony and C. W. Morganstern formed the Moral Producing Company, found two new “angels,” and sent Sex to preview in New London, Connecticut. Word about the salacious comedy reached the naval station, and a line of sailors snaked around the block. The manager brought in kitchen chairs and sold standing room. John Cort, who owned Daly’s Theatre, saw the play in Connecticut, paid off the cast of Earl Carroll’s White Cargo, and brought Sex to 63rd Street on April 26, 1926.13
Sex was an amateur effort with echoes of O’Neill’s Anna Christie. “It was all men’s fault—the whole business.” A smart woman, however, could find a comfortable life with a man she could manage.14 But no playwright had ever attacked “respectable women” from the stage. Margy accuses Clara, the “society lady,” of being a whore in disguise. “She’s one of those respectable dames who … is looking for the first chance to cheat without being found out.” And later, “I’ll bet without this beautiful home, without money and without any restrictions, you’d be worse than I have ever been…. The only difference between us is that you could afford to give it away.” Margy goes on, “I’ll remember this night as long as I live. And if I ever get a chance, I’ll get even with you, you dirty charity. I’ll get even.”* Margy’s anger is one of the startling aspects of the play.
Mae West added only one character to Byrne’s original script, Agnes, the young whore who yearns to go straight. Margy gently tells her, “Get a grip on yourself. There’s a chance of rising to the top of every profession.” Underscoring that bit of entrepreneurial advice, Margy argues that a woman can survive alone. “Go it alone, Agnes, there’s more chance of getting ahead.”
Margy follows her own advice, “gets a grip on herself,” gives up Clara’s son, and goes off with her navy lieutenant. She is a good (enough) woman. She makes no apologies; she is neither saved or reborn. There is no spiritual redemption. There is no transformation or renunciation or reformation. The ethical arithmetic is redrawn—the wages of sin are reduced from mortal transgression to misdemeanor. If you “played your cards right,” there is always a chance of “getting away with it.” West’s ribald good humor carried the show which grossed $14, 000 a week at the end of its first month and $16, 000 a week in its second.15
Theatre critics, however, were neither amused nor forgiving. The New York Times considered it a “crude and inept play, cheaply produced and poorly acted.” New York World declared Sex “as bad a play as these inquiring eyes have gazed upon in three seasons.” Variety considered Sex “nasty, infantile, amateurish [with] vicious dialog”
Walter Winchell in the Graphic called it “a vulgar affair,” concluding that the “stench was not the fault of the street cleaning department.” The New York Post called it “Nasty.” The Daily Mirror called Sex “offensive. … [A] monstrosity plucked from Garbage Can to [the] Sewer.” Billboard wrote that the play was “the cheapest most vulgar low show to have dared to open in New York this year. It is a disgrace.” The Evening Post called it “crudely vulgar.” The New Yorker said the play was composed of “street sweepings.” The New York Herald Tribune wrote that the play concerned “a world of ruthless, evil-minded, foul- mouthed crooks, harlots, procurers and other degenerate members of that particular zone of society.” Only the New York Sun found some redeeming qualities—“The play has a frantic vulgarity” but nonetheless “unavoidable jollity.”
The avalanche of condemnation was not as surprising as the fact that so much attention was paid to so flimsy a play by a newcomer. Audiences, for their part, didn’t read the reviews or didn’t care. Behind the dirty jokes and the smartmouth lines, they had discovered a “natural” they could trust. Sex played to full houses, the only play above Broadway to survive the summer and continue through the fall.
As the new season opened, Broadway chose a new form of sexual titillation in two new plays—The Captive and Virgin Man—that explored the theme of homosexuality. The Captive was Arthur Horn- blower’s translation of Edouard Bourdet’s French play about an affair between two women. It starred the glamorous Helen Menken and a newcomer from England, Basil Rathbone. Opening night at the Empire Theatre was attended by Mayor Jimmy Walker, producer Lee Shubert, playwright Anita Loos, and actress Ruth Gordon. The press was not merely respectful; it was fawning in its praise, finding in the play “an aura of pity and terror that comes close to the Greek ideal.” Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times wrote that Basil Rathbone acted “with rare dignity and understanding.” Helen Menken gave interviews suggesting that young college women see the play to learn how to avoid sexual perversion. At the final curtain, the woman who lured a young wife away from her husband was represented only by a small bouquet of violets left on a table. The word “lesbian” was never uttered. With Broadway feeling itself linguistically pure, Mae West went to work on The Drag, street slang for the dress-up celebrations by female impersonators.
The gay subculture fascinated New York society in the 1920s and ′30s. Historian George Chauncey writes that” over the course of the decade, gay men became more visible in almost every setting [Times] Square provided, including its streets, burlesque halls, theatre roof gardens, and nightclubs, as well as the ‘legitimate’ stage.” Langston Hughes recalled “it was fashionable for the intelligentsia and the social leaders of both Harlem and the downtown area to occupy boxes at [drag balls] and look down from above at the queerly assorted throng on the dancing floor.” The Vanderbilts and the Astors came to watch, along with Broadway celebrities popular in the gay world—Beatrice Lillie, Clifton Webb, Jay Brennan, and Tallulah Bankhead. Broadway Brevities in 1932 headlined “Fag Balls Exposed—6, 000 Crowd Huge Hall as Queer Men and Women Dance.”16
The story of The Drag was similar to the story in Sex in that, once again, wealth hides corruption. Rolly Kingsbury is a
judge’s son and a homosexual. He has married an unsuspecting young woman named Claire, thrown over his gay lover, and set his cap to snare a “straight” man. A drag ball at the end of the play offered audiences a gaudy display of cross-dressing, and covered the darker story about Rolly’s murder.
West and Timony collected gay actors from a Greenwich Village club. “Word got out she was casting a play about homosexuals … and those kids really turned it on.” West took a waiter’s pad and scribbled a casting call for the following night at Daly’s Theatre after the final curtain of Sex had come down. From the fifty young men who showed up, West chose twelve principals and a crowd of extras.17 Midnight rehearsals were wildly improvisational as performers were invited to “script” their own dialogue. Scenes were never exactly the same, and the play began to take on alarming dimensions.
Word of mouth about The Drag was contagious. Variety sent a reporter to Paterson, New Jersey, and readers of the review learned that the play concluded with a drag ball “staged with hippodrome elaborations taking up close to 20 minutes of the third act, without dialogue or dramatic action of any kind. In the playing it is exactly like a revue number, or the floor show of a night club. Some 30 young men take part in this spectacle, half tricked out in women’s clothes and half in tuxedos. Half dozen of the boys in skirts do specialties, and the episode takes on the character of a chorus girl ‘pick-out’ number in a burlesque show.”18
The Drag had no star; it was meant to be spectacle. “One [of the young men] dressed as an oriental dancer, [with] bare legs and wearing only what amounts to a brassiere above the waist, does a muscle dance; another sings after the manner of female impersonators, and all hands are rouged, lip-sticked and liquid-whited to the last degree. During the whole scene a jazz orchestra plays “hot” music in the background.”19 Female impersonators—Clem and the Duchess—took possession of the story and the comedy; the dialogue was insolent and raw. Clem picks up a taxi-driver:
CLEM You better wait, you great, big, beautiful baby.
TAXI-DRIVER I don’t get you guys.
CLEM If you don’t you’re the first taxi driver that didn’t.
TAXI-DRIVER What do you want me to do?
CLEM Ride me around a while, dearie, and then come back for her, if you’re so inclined.
TAXI-DRIVER O. K. with me.
At the drag ball, Clem recounts the meeting:
CLEM So that’s how I met this taxi-driver and he’s been riding me ever since.
As the moment of the grand ball approaches, the “queens” and “queers” talk about their clothes and their conquests.
DUCHESS Oh, my goodness, I’ve got the most gorgeous new drag. Black satin, very tight, with a long train of rhinestones.
CLEM Wait until you see the creation I’m wearing dearie. Virginal white, no back, with oceans of this and oceans of that, trimmed with excitement in front. You know I’m more the flapper type, not so much like a canal boat.
WINNIE Fat! I should say not. I’m the type that men prefer. I can at least go through the navy yard without having the flags drop to half mast.
KATE Listen, dearie—pull in your aerial, you’re full of static. I’m just the type that men crave. The type that burns ‘em up. Why, when I walk up Tenth Avenue, you can smell the meat sizzling in Hell’s Kitchen.
The jazz band was worked into The Drag as it had been in Sex, this time openly scoffing at Helen Menken’s play about lesbians with a song by a gay chorus called “The Woman Who Stole My Gal” and other songs notorious for their special meanings—“How Come You Do Me Like You Do,” and “Goody, Goody, Goody.”
Gay characters “dish the dirt” and flirt. Winnie says, “So glad to have you meet me. Come up some time and I’ll bake you a pan of biscuits.” But there are also darker resonances behind the comedy. Clem tells about a “poor queen” taking heroin and morphine “by the barrels,” about gays beaten by the police, and about the danger and the sadness of life on the streets.
Previews of The Drag set for Stamford, Connecticut, were cancelled when the manager of the theatre thought the subject too risky. Timony got a split week with Minna Daily’s Burlesquers in Bridgeport, and then he put up billboards advertising “A Homosexual Comedy” and “The Male Version of The Captive.” “More Sensational than Rain” The reviews were unrelenting. Variety wrote “This reporter doesn’t believe Mae West wrote it. It has all the earmarks of being the work of a boss hosteler in a livery stable.” West and Timony moved the play from Stamford to Paterson, New Jersey, where “burlesque regulars who traditionally gave ‘nance humor’ a raucous reception” lined up for tickets.20 There were also middle-class audiences who knew that a Mae West play was a “good time.”
If Mae West thought for a moment that the homosexuality of The Drag was not so different from the lesbianism of The Captive, she badly miscalculated the homophobia of the city police and of theatre critics. When the play opened in Bayonne, New Jersey, the police ordered a seated audience out of the theatre. In New York, the Society for the Prevention of Vice warned Jimmy Walker that if The Drag opened, there would be a move to censor all Broadway plays.
On February 9, 1927, with Walker out of the city on holiday, Deputy Police Commissioner Joseph B. McKee ordered the city police to raid The Captive Sex, and Virgin Man. The intention, clearly, was to get Mae West wherever they could catch her. If she weren’t on the stage in The Drag, then the police would close Sex even though the play had been running for almost a year. The anti-vice societies were sending a warning to this burlesque dancer, vaudeville hoofer and upstart actress from Brooklyn, daughter of a corset model and a two-bit boxer, that she was not to expect a career as a Broadway playwright.
The police raid itself was like a Buster Keaton comedy. The acting mayor sent a limousine for Helen Menken, the star of a highbrow play. And then he sent a Black Maria to pick up Mae West and the entire cast of Sex. Everybody crowded into the van and then tumbled out at the Eighteenth Precinct police station, on West 47th Street in Hell’s Kitchen. At night court, West gathered her ermines and told waiting reporters that unlike Menken’s “lesbian play,” the cast of Sex were all “normal.” After a night in the Jefferson Market Women’s Prison, West arranged bail—$1000 for six principals and $500 each for sixteen others named in the complaint, $14,000 in all.
Though Sex was prosecuted, The Drag was the play under attack. According to George Chauncey, Mae West had “moved the sort of gay act that had become a part of Times Square’s roof garden revues, dramatically expanded it, and transposed it to the legitimate stage.” The play “allowed thirty of its performers to put on a ‘show’ much as they might have at Mother Childs, at a Rockland Palace ball, or in a night-club revue…”21 The trouble was its timing; Broadway was now under scrutiny and threat of censorship.
Helen Menken announced she would have no more to do with The Captive, and the court offered to dismiss all charges against Sex if West and the cast would close the play. They refused. Timony and Morganstern obtained a restraining order against police interference, and Sex went on, with a booming box office, until May 21, a week before the obscenity trial began.
A grand jury indictment found that Mae West, Morganstern, Timony, twenty actors, and theatre-owner John Cort had prepared, advertised and produced “an obscene, indecent, immoral and impure drama,” that the play contributed “to the corruption of the morals of youth,” that the content was “wicked, lewd, scandalous, bawdy, obscene, indecent, infamous, immoral and impure.” The theatre of litigation was about to begin.
On May 28, 1927, Norman Schloss opened the case for the defense, pointing out what must have been obvious, that Sex had already run for 339 performances, that it had been seen by more than 325,000 patrons, including members of the police department and their wives, by judges of the criminal courts, by seven members of the district attorneys’ staffs, and by citizens of the city who showed no moral impairment. A Broadway “play jury” had previewed the show, and the belated prosecution was unreaso
nable.
The prosecutor, District Attorney Joab Banton, argued with passion that the play was obscene and called a series of detectives who became courtroom actors. Sergeant Patrick Keneally of the Mid Town Vice Squad, recited ribald lines from the play, and imitated the walk and the gestures of the “fairies” on stage. James S. Bolan, Deputy Inspector of Police, testified that Mae West had performed a dance that “suggest[ed] an act of sexual intercourse.” He added that the play included a scene in which a young man “goes through with her the business of making love to her by lying on top of her on a couch each embracing the other.” “The language they used does not contain the words ‘sexual intercourse,’ but the purport and tenor of the business and language is to that effect.”
When it came time for his rebuttal, Schloss compared Sex to A Tale of Two Cities, to Hamlet, and to the Bible. Timony prayed over his rosary beads, Mae West wore black satin and pretended modest restraint. Barry O’Neill, the leading man, sweated profusely. Newspaper reporters printed as much as they could of what everyone said and did, and readers around the city enjoyed the fun.
Every single upstanding, middle-class businessman was mentioned in Variety when it published the names and addresses of jury members—the foreman was a coal dealer, and the remaining men included a printer, a publisher, a contractor, an investigator, a hotel manager, real estate agent, chemist, insurance salesman, retailer, cotton goods dealer, and a lithographer. The jury, on public display, took only five and a half hours to reach its guilty verdict. West and Timony were sentenced to ten-day jail terms, and fined $500 each. Morganstern also received a jail sentence, but charges against John Cort were dropped because the court was concerned that other theatre managers might one day find themselves in jeopardy.
West concluded that time in jail was part of the cost of doing business on Broadway. Even Earl Carroll served time in a federal penitentiary when a newspaper reported that showgirls at a private party played in a bathtub filled with champagne (Carroll swore it was gingerale). West had herself driven to prison in a limousine, smiling for photographers, carrying armloads of white roses. She spent eight days on Welfare Island, dined with the warden and his wife, and told reporters she wore her silk underwear all the time she was in prison. On her release, Liberty magazine paid her $1000 for an interview, and she donated the fee to establish a Mae West Memorial Library in the women’s prison. Then she attended a charity luncheon given by the Women’s National Democratic Club and the Penology Delinquency Division of the New York Federation of Women’s Clubs.22 If the suffragettes could be jailed in a good cause, if Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap could stand trial for publishing sections of Ulysses in The Little Review, Mae West could do no less for free speech.
Three Plays by Mae West Page 2
