On her release, West told reporters her play was “a work of art,” and even if it wasn’t exactly art, she calculated, “Considering what Sex got me, a few days in the pen ‘n a $500 fine ain’t too bad a deal.” Like Margy LaMont, Mae West had learned “there’s a chance of rising to the top of every profession.”
Years later, in her autobiography Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It, Mae West had different memories of women in prison. The Tombs “was dirty and dismal…. The confused, diseased, feeble-minded women were herded like animals The very young … were mixed with foul and decaying old biddies who knew every vice [The] place was run by … ward heelers, relatives, and small-time vote peddlers who were all busy feeding and stealing at the public’s expense…”23
She went to work on a new play, The Wicked Age. Wilva Davis, a young actress from Minnesota, described rehearsals that had become the signature of the Mae West style.“Strange characters who had put money up kept coming in with Mr. Timony. We got the impression they were big-time gangsters. And that was funny because Mr. Timony prayed a lot. One minute he’d be living it up with these rough characters. A few minutes later he’d be off in the corner some where saying his beads.”24
In The Wicked Age Mae West was Babe Carson, a role like the one she had written for herself in The Ruby Ring and The Hussy but the flapper was always an imperfect fit. When the play opened, The New York World called her “pudgy,” and Variety kept sniping at her burlesque past. But even in a weak play, West was practicing the one-liners that tickled audiences and outraged the press. She was getting good at them.
FLAPPER I was up in the Count’s room alone last night. Did I do wrong?
BABE How do I know? Don’t you remember?
West tried to change the lead actor, but he took the dispute to Actors Equity, and when it ruled in his favor, she closed the play. The Wicked Age opened and closed after nineteen performances.
With undiminished zeal, West went to work on another script about a lady named Diamond Lil who worked the Bowery in the 1890s. Jack Lindner sued over the copyright, charging the play was based on his script Chatham Square.25 Variety always eager to embarrass her in public, noted that Lil was a black prostitute from Chicago who got her name by the diamond implanted in her front tooth. Lindner’s play gave Mae West a setting in the 1890’s, an age of buxom showgirls like Lillian Russell and the hefty damsels of Billy Weston’s “Beef Trust.” Once again she was handling a “drama of the underworld,” and Diamond Lil, black or white, was the role of a lifetime.
Owney Madden, bootlegger and part owner of Harlem’s Cotton Club, was one of the backers; he may even have been one of the “big-time gangsters” Wilva Davis remembered at rehearsals of The Wicked Age. George Raft, once a tango dancer at Texas Guinan’s El Fay Club, was Madden’s driver, sent every night in a bulletproof black Packard to pick up his boss’s “take” in a brown paper bag.
Variety may have considered Broadway the home of art and aesthetics, but the street was everywhere a cross-section of gangster and socialite, a mix of people brought together by Prohibition. Ethel Barrymore played the Palace “between engagements.” The Marx Brothers brought slapstick to Broadway in Cocanuts. Charles MacArthur, “the golden boy of the Algonquin set,” had just written the sleazy Lulu Belle. Black pianist Lucky Roberts listened to a young “ofay” named George Gershwin to see if he was as good at the keyboard as people said. Babe Ruth was the “king” of baseball. Jack Dempsey was king of the prize ring. Tourists and bankers, musicians and performers rubbed shoulders at the Cotton Club. Sex was talked about as loosely as bootleg liquor.
Mae West earned her first good reviews in Diamond Lil. Billboard acknowledged she “does a much better job … than she did with her previous offerings.” The Times agreed: “She is a good actress, is Miss West.” John Colton, author of Shanghai Gesture, congratulated her, and West admitted, “I enjoyed my success with no false humility.”26 In the midst of that success, Mae West began to rewrite The Drag. It may have been unquenchable egotism, the stubborn refusal to let the Broadway establishment and the police shut her down. It may have been her affinity for the subject of gay life. In any event, The Drag was probably the only play Mae West ever seriously rewrote, and when it was finished and retitled The Pleasure Man, it was a stronger, more dramatically astonishing play than anything she would write thereafter.
The revisions were intended as an end-run around the censors; West changed the lead character from homosexual to heterosexual, making him a “masher,” a “stud,” a seducer of young women. Like Hammerstein’s Showboat, which opened the same year, the scene was the backstage of a vaudeville theatre—the world of acrobats and hoofers, dancers and comics. But she kept the female impersonators and the drag ball at the end of the play. Hammerstein’s gentle lyrics about life upon “the wicked stage” had little to do with Mae West’s play. The singer, for one thing, was not a girl at all but a sister in drag.
The Pleasure Man was staged with a string of dressing rooms cut open to the audience so that dialogue passed quickly between characters and across story lines. Rodney Terrill (“Call me Rod”) is the matinee idol who seduces willing wives and innocent showgirls. A young girl named Mary Ann has become pregnant and pleads with him to remember his promise to marry her. Terrill hardly remembers her name. She has a back-alley abortion, and dies at the end of the play. Her brother, the house electrician, castrates the Pleasure Man, killing him. The word for the deed is never spoken. The avenging brother is led off to prison declaiming that his punishment of the Pleasure Man was more fair than any court might devise.
Most reviewers assumed The Drag and The Pleasure Man were still the same play, but that is not entirely an accurate reading. The crudest jokes were eliminated, and The Pleasure Man was a better comedy built over a more deeply felt melodrama. Rehearsals began when the curtain came down on Diamond Lil, and lasted from eleven-thirty until two or three in the morning. West handed the cast scraps of paper with notes, and actors improvised until they had their scenes. The Pleasure Man was kept close at hand, previewing in September, 1928, at the Bronx Opera House, and then at the Boulevard Theater in Jackson Heights, Queens.
Some reviewers considered The Pleasure Man good theatre, “the second act stands out as a masterpiece, a real slice of stage life.” The Jewish Tribune found the play “much livelier and more amusing theater than many of the more decent and ambitious plays.” The reviewer of the Evening Post, who was not much put out by the female impersonators, wrote that “the main theme of the play is comparatively clean. It is, briefly, that a rake seduces a young girl, attempts seduction of two others, attacks a man’s wife, gets drunk, and is finally murdered in a manner heretofore not suggested on the Broadway stage save in Chee Chee. So far as the plot goes, it is most decent”27 Chee Chee was one of those awful Broadway mistakes, a satire on Gilbert & Sullivan’s Mikado in which the wife of a petty bureaucrat saves him from a fate worse than beheading.
It was not the story of The Pleasure Man, but the jokes that were astonishing. “The huge audience of Queens high life, interspersed with a number of Broadway people too anxious to wait for [The Pleasure Man] to come to town, roared over words and allusions which your correspondent would hesitate to use in conversation with Tammany Hall.’28
1ST BOY I hear you’re studying to be an opera singer.
2ND BOY Oh, yes, and I know so many songs.
1ST BOY You must have a large repertoire.
2ND BOY Must I have that, too?
The play was riddled with allusions to gay encounters:
STAN Have you had your cream-puff this morning?
PARADISE Oh, I always eat early—You know it’s the early bird that catches the worm, dearie.
MRS. RIPLEY Ugh! Such people. I can’t understand them. They’re so queer.
MR. HEATHERLNGTON Yes, my dear—extraordinarily queer. I think queer is the word.
Asked “What kind of act do you do?” Bird of Paradise responds, “Oh, I get down on my knees, an
d sing … Mammy….” The laughter that followed every exchange signaled that Mae West’s jokes, and most burlesque jokes, made audiences accomplices to outlaw allusions.
Although the play was intended to be outrageous, the police did not interfere with The Pleasure Man at the Bronx Opera House.“There was no criticism of or objection to this play during such presentations covering a period of two weeks from any source whatsoever. Public officialdom, the press, the laity, and clerics were as silent as the tomb with respect thereto.” The District Attorney asked that one song be eliminated, which was done, and the play continued in the Bronx for eight performances.”29
But when The Pleasure Man opened at the Biltmore Theatre on Broadway on October I, the play was raided. The police waited until the final curtain. The Evening Sun reported that at least a third of the audience, in response to whispered warnings, “gathered at the stage door alley, passed cigarettes and the latest rumors, and waited to see the actual collision of the actors and the law. This extra act was by far the best of the evening.” The Daily News reported that actors “in fantastic female attire, smothered in powder and with blackened eye lashes, carmine lips and rouged cheeks, were allowed to change into prosaic masculine attire…. Several skirted male actors fainted.” Some were taken in police vans, some in commandeered taxis, and others were led on foot, while several thousand absorbed spectators were jamming the streets near by, held back by a horde of police.” And a few newspapers, apparently in concert with the police, carried the story that Stan Stanley, who played the role of the stage manager, had been arrested in Toms River, New Jersey, on “an odoriferous story told by two sailors.”30
Mae West hired Nathan Burkan, an attorney who specialized in the atrical cases, to obtain a temporary injunction. Equity warned the cast they risked prosecution if the temporary injunction were revoked. “Equity will wash its hands of the matter and consider no appeals,” but the entire cast showed up for the Wednesday matinee. The house was packed, some to see the show and some to see if the play would be raided. In the middle of the matinee, “Lieutenant James Coy raced down the aisle. He called for the houselights to be turned up, and ordered the cast under arrest … the actors gave catcalls, booed and gave the police the raspberry. One of the drag queens delivered a speech about police oppression.”31
The police intended the second raid to be bruising and humiliating. Fifty-four actors, still in stage makeup and dresses, were herded into vans and taken to the West Forty-Seventh Street police station. West appeared after the last curtain of Diamond iil, ready to play the final scene. The police sergeant asked whether she had written the play. “Don’t ya read ya noospapers?” she answered. “Are you going to provide bail for all these people?” “Somepin’ of the sort,” she replied. Then she made her exit, the photographers’ lights flashing and the company applauding.32 By morning, West and Timony had contacted four different bail bond agencies and put up bail for the principals and the cast—fifty-nine people in all.
The Pleasure Man had a Broadway “run” of one-and-a-half performances, hardly time to earn the avalanche of vitriolic reviews it received. Billboard called it an “abomination,” “prostitution of the rankest sort,” “an attempt to capitalize on filth and degeneracy.”33 The Evening Post called the play “such filth as turns ones stomach even to remember.” The Sun said, “No play in our time has had less excuse for such a sickening excess of filth.” Even George Jean Nathan called the play a “Harlem drag, the kind the police peremptorily raid.”34 The homophobia of reviewers was so great that few of them would even mention the “surgical mutilation” of the seducer. Only a female reviewer, Thyra Samter Winslow, in the Jewish Tribune, found the play funny.” I hate to admit this but I must acknowledge my shame—I enjoyed Pleasure Man. [The play] is full of a curious native wit and some rather keen observation”
When the trial of The Pleasure Man was postponed, West took Diamond Lil on tour. Lil played eighteen weeks in Chicago, its hetero- sexuality so explicit that a salacious imitation called “Frankie and Johnnie” was closed by the police. In Detroit the police threatened to close Lil, and a temporary injunction was secured until a court hearing could take place.35 Police raids and court hearings were by then becoming routine.
The Pleasure Man went to trial on March 13, 1930, two years after its opening in New York. The People vs. Mae West et al. charged the principals with “unlawfully advertising, giving, presenting and participating in an obscene, indecent, immoral and impure drama, play, exhibition, show and entertainment” at the Biltmore Theatre. Detectives had taken court stenographers to performances because no script was ever produced. The prosecution argued in court that scenes dealt with “sex, degeneracy and sex perversion,” a misdemeanor according to New York statute. The management of the Biltmore and the Moral Producing Company were indicted. The defendants, it was alleged, “did unlawfully, wickedly and scandalously, for lucre and gain, produce, present and exhibit and display the said exhibition show and entertainment to the sight and view of divers and many people, all to the great offense of public decency.”
The prosecution told the jury that the question was “what took place on stage on October 1st, 1928.” “What was [the] play? On what did it depend for its box office appeal?” The prosecution answered its own question: “It was a deliberate attempt to capitalize on … the speeches, manners and obscene jokes of a large number of male degenerates.” The jokes and the “voguing” by the gay actors constituted the prosecution’s evidence, along with the salacious and censurable allusions.
The trial of The Pleasure Man was even more sensational than the trial of Sex. For one thing, the police were better at the parts they played. Lt. James Coy of the Vice Squad wore a snug brown suit with a canary yellow tie and matching handkerchief in his breast pocket. Describing what he had seen, McCoy placed his hands on his hips, looked over his shoulder and said “They behaved in a very effeminate manner.” Defense attorney Nathan Burkan asked if Coy had ever been a chorus boy, and spectators howled with laughter. Irene Kuhn of the Daily News reported that Coy had his own kind of outrageous language. Nothing ever happened, everything “transpired.” The cast was never dressed, they were “attired.” When asked by the defense attorney how he could see such small details Coy replied that the stage was very “illuminous.” Burkan asked if Coy would sing the ballad “The Queen of the Beaches” so the jury could determine whether beaches rhymed with peaches, as the defense claimed, or ditches, as Coy testified.36
Chuck Connors, who appeared in The Drag and toured with Diamond Lil, was asked about lines that had been cut from the play, like one that noted there was “not a dry seat in the house.” The District Attorney asked Connors if gay men wore brassieres, kimonos or “adopted the mannerisms of women” backstage. He was asked to explain the “peculiar significance” of the jokes between the German acrobats, who peered down each other’s baggy trousers. He was asked “Are you married or single? Who do you live with?” Connors, equal to every question, answered that he lived with his mother. Alan Brooks, who played the The Pleasure Man, swore he never understood how he was killed in the play.
After fourteen days of testimony, the jury failed to reach a decision, and the indictments against twenty-four defendants (thirty-four other had already been removed) were dismissed. Defending the play in which she never appeared cost West $60,000. On the day she walked out of the courtroom, she must have felt a thrill something like Babe Ruth’s after hitting sixty home runs in a single season in 1927—“Let’s see some other son of a bitch do that.”
Mae West tried one more Broadway play, The Constant Sinner (1931). It closed after sixty-four performances, and West decided the only money to be made was in Hollywood. In 1932, she blazed across the screen for Paramount in “Night After Night” with her old friend George Raft, who was building a Hollywood career as a Valentino look-alike. She wrote her own dialogue, and her signature one-liners were sharper than ever. By 1935, she was the highest paid woman in the United States, an
d William Randolph Hearst, who tried to keep her name out of his newspapers, was the highest paid man.37 To the hatcheck girl’s admiring “Goodness, what beautiful diamonds,” came the Mae West quip, “Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.”
Sex, The Drag and The Pleasure Man were improvisational scripts, like jazz, spun out of what historian Ann Douglas has called the “nigger keys,” the “slurred notes and split sounds” of outlaw life.38 Sex was a raw practice piece, pitiless in its treatment of whores and police and respectable women who “sin on the side.” But the play was full of energy, and it was funny. The Drag and The Pleasure Man made West the Joan of Arc of gay audiences. “All the chorus boys [in those days] were gay. But the producers never gave speaking parts to homosexuals! So I helped a lot of gay boys along. I gave them parts.”39 The dialogue marked West as an accomplice in forbidden games. The slang, excoriated by the press for its vulgarity, was always accurate. Most important, West was always there to bail out her cast when her scripts got them thrown into jail.
Gay actors were her “sisters” on the road. “They were all crazy about me and my costumes. They were the first ones to imitate me in my presence.”40 She brought the gay cast of The Drag home to meet her mother, Matilda. “They’d do her hair and nails and she’d have a great time. When her mother was dying, Mae brought gay actors to the hospital. “They would always make her laugh.”41 She kept gay actors working—five actors from the cast of The Drag remained in the production of The Pleasure Man, and Chuck Connors, who was in The Pleasure Man, toured with her in Sex. She used gay actors as rehearsal doubles in The Constant Sinner. She gave old timers like Ed Hearn of The Pleasure Man small parts in almost all her Hollywood films, and helped female impersonators like Ray Bourbon, who appeared in Catherine Was Great (1944), throughout his career. Just as boxers came to Mae West when they needed a new match or a new manager or a few bucks, gay actors or Mae West impersonators knew her as a friend.
Three Plays by Mae West Page 3
