After she finished the filming of “Myra Breckenridge” in 1970, Mae West went back to the plays she had written in the 1920s—not to Sex or Diamond Lil, but to The Drag, and The Pleasure Man. At the Masquers Award Dinner in 1974, she sang a song written for the original production of The Pleasure Man and got a standing ovation. In 1975, she rewrote the entire script as a novel and looked for new backing for The Drag, hoping a tour would lead to a film with George Segal.
In spite of considerable evidence of her lifelong affection for the gay plays and for gay actors, some critics have found the plays only cheap exploitation of the subject of homosexuality. Theatre historian Kaier Curtin wrote that West simply “cashed in.” Her “persistent, mercenary attempts to exploit gay transvestites in the 1920’s stirred neither public tolerance nor compassion. It reinforced the stereotyping of gay men as vulgar, sex-obsessed effeminates who wear women’s clothing at drag parties.” Curtin quoted the Morning Telegraph, which had written that The Pleasure Man was “a menace to the theater, its performers and the theater-going public.”42
More recently, Marybeth Hamilton agreed that “the aim of Pleasure Man … was to convey to the audience that these men were … de generates, who, even Off stage, when not performing, adopted the mannerisms of women.” West “specialized in raunchy plays that retailed ‘dirt’ to the Broadway public, and her interest in female impersonators was clearly exploitative.” “She was unquestionably exploiting them”43
Curtin and Hamilton see West as a shark among the pilot fish, but Richard Helfer argues that West’s sympathy for gay characters was “astounding for the times.”44 George Chauncey connects the grand sweep of Mae West’s performances with her early admiration for Bert Savoy.45 And certainly it’s hard not to hear Savoy’s lines behind the lines West wrote for herself on the stage. When asked, “How did you spend the afternoon?” Savoy answered, “Well, Margie and I went to a matinee and I met a lovely fella in the lobby.” “Was he a New York boy?” “No, he was a college boy.” “How could you tell?” “He had a Yale lock in his pocket.” When Mae West read the line, it was tougher. “Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?” She knew gay humor to be as bold as it was clever.46 Her association with gay comedy was noted long ago, when George Davis wrote in Vanity Fair in 1934, “I can pay you no greater tribute, dear lady, than to say that [my love for you] has healed the wound in my heart caused by the death [in 1923] of the one and only Bert Savoy. I love you, Miss West, because YOU are the greatest female impersonator of all time.”47
West’s descriptions of her own motives are unreliable, but they sometimes offer clues to what she was about. When she was writing The Drag, she said, she was moved by “some mysterious, subconscious drive. I was … writing a play that could only make trouble”48 But the subject that preoccupied her in The Drag and in The Pleasure Man was not so much homosexuality [which she understood better than most] as sexual instability and the ways in which sexual identities are transformed.
In Sex, the “society lady” has the making of a prostitute. In The Drag, Rolly Kingsbury throws over his gay lover for a “straight” man. In Diamond Lil, West herself says “some of those big guys, when you get to know them, ain’t worth nothing as lovers.” But sexual instability was most fully developed in The Pleasure Man, where Rodney Terrill, the sexual athlete, the stud who has ravished an innocent girl, is really bisexual. Terrill is derided as a “male milliner.” In a joke her audiences would have understood, he appears onstage like a prima donna with a Japanese valet who lights his cigarettes and sprays the room with an atomizer. The allusion was to Julian Eltinge, the famous female impersonator who played “The Fascinating Widow” and kept a valet alluded to in the press as “a little Jap.” Terrill’s bisexuality is underscored when West compares him with Clara Bow, Eleanor Glyn’s “IT” girl, who possessed “an inner magic, an animal magnetism.”49
Stanley How do you get these women? What’s the attraction?
Terrill It is charm, poise, personality, capital IT, IT—It’s a gift—it can’t be acquired. It is my magnetic attraction—all the women fall for me, I can’t keep them away.
Terrill’s villainy is defined not by his seduction of a young girl but because he is a chameleon. He is not what he seems. Paradise recognizes the duplicity. “I always knew you were a rotter … don’t try to scare me—what I know, I know, and that’s that.” “If you’re a man, thank God, I’m a female impersonator.”
In the strange ethical architecture of the gay plays, Paradise and all the “queers” are the world’s innocents. They do not lie about who they are. Their fantastic gowns and “disguises” confirm their identity. The “straight” world is disguised and the gay world is “straight.” The ethical paradox at the heart of The Pleasure Man was not lost on Mae West’s gay audiences, although it seems to have been lost by most readers.
Closely read, the gay plays hold intimate and tender stories. If you listen to Agnes in Sex, she can break your heart. The sad little whore who wants to go home is certain that virtue can be reclaimed. “If he really loves you it won’t matter to him what you’ve been It’s the kind of a wife you make that counts.” Anna Christie believed the very same thing—“Loving you has made me—clean. It’s the straight goods. Honest!” but Anna Christie found that love could not to be trusted. Like Laura in The Glass Menagerie, Agnes suffers a small “impediment,” her virtue is damaged, and she finds that love does not cure pain. Like the “poor queen” in The Drag who jumps out of the window because “she’s sensitive of what she is,” Agnes dies of shame. Behind Mae West’s rowdy stories are the sad stories. Clem and the Duchess dream of divine entrances and exits, but they remember the “poor queen taking heroine and morphine by the barrels.”
At the heart of The Drag is the story of David Campbell’s love for Rolly Kingsbury, which is told without ridicule or embarrassment. “We loved each other. I worshipped him. We lived together. We were happy … in our own way. No normally married couple were happier than we were.” West never made light of the deep feelings of gay men for each other. If one is not taken in or swept away by the drag scenes, a close reader will find that the gay plays contain the only love stories Mae West would ever write.
Bird of Paradise, the man dressed as a woman, is the ethical center of The Pleasure Man. Paradise plays Portia, the woman dressed as a man, who begs mercy for those who stand before the bar of justice. Paradise asks the audience to pity Mary Ann, dying of an abortion. He cradles her across his knees as she dies, and says, “You poor kid, you had an awful fall. Like happens to all us poor girls.” Paradise plumbs the grief that hides behind jokes about infidelity—“You may be mistaken about your wife—why not give her a chance? None of us are perfect We all make mistakes, you know.” The man in drag is Mae West’s Madonna.
Critics speculate about Mae West’s sexuality. “Was she a lesbian? a nymphomaniac? a transvestite? Did she have … a touch of color in her blood?”50 Perhaps, in her egoist’s fantasy, the gay world offered endless images of herself. Or perhaps the answer lies in the plays themselves, where identity may be framed upon sexuality, but sexuality plays across a multitude of passions. Ramona Curry writes of Mae West as “a multivalent image,” an image of “sometimes contradictory readings.”51 In Mae West, sexual identities are revealed at will. None of the masks she created is the final word.
In 1950 the artist Willem de Kooning painted a series of grotesque and compelling sirens, the faces sometimes abrasive and ugly, sometimes sad and vulnerable. He wrote, “Art never seems to me peaceful or pure. I always seem to be wrapped up in the melodrama of vulgari ty.”52 Finding in women that which was both ferocious and hilarious, de Kooning painted a “quirky” oil sketch on paper and called it MAE WEST. In the melodrama of vulgarity, Mae West changed the way the world saw women, and the way women saw themselves. She changed the way sex was treated on the stage. In de Kooning’s paintings and in Mae West’s plays, in the ferocious and the hilarious mix, art and political
revolution came together.
Notes
1. Lotte Lenya, foreword to The Threepenny Opera, Bertolt Brecht, Grove Press reprint, New York, 1964, p. v.
2. Ibid., p. 105.
3. Jon Tuska, The Films of Mae West, Citadel Press, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1973, p. 22.
4. Marion Spitzer, The Palace, Atheneum, New York, 1969, pp. 50–51.
5. George Eels and Stanley Musgrove, Mae West, A Biography. William Morrow & Company, New York, 1982, pp. 35–36.
6. Tuska, p. 24.
7. Tuska, pp. 30–31. Also Marybeth Hamilton, When I’m Bad, I’m Better: Mae West, Sex and American Entertainment, HarperCollins, New York, 1995, p. 47.
8. David Stenn, Clara Bow: Runnin’ Wild, Penguin Books, New York, 1990, p. 79.
9. Ibid., p. 81.
10. Mae West, Goodness Had Nothing to Do With It, Prentice Hall, New York, 1959, p. 61.
11. Sandra Leib, Mother of the Blues: A Study of Ma Rainey, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1981, p. 133.
12. Mary Ellin Barrett, Irving Berlin: A Daughter’s Memoir, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1984, pp. 61, 63.
13. Eels and Musgrove, p. 60.
14. Eugene O’Neill, “Anna Christie,” Act I, scene I, p. 72; in Alvin S. Kaufman & Franklin D. Case, eds. Modern Drama in America, Vol. I, Pocket Books, 1982.
15. Eels and Musgrove, p. 64.
16. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940, Basic Books, New York, 1994, pp. 309–10.
17. Eels and Musgrove, p. 65.
18. Richard Helfer, “Mae West on Stage: Themes and Persona,” City University Ph.D. dissertation, 1990, p. 134.
19. Ibid.
20. Eels and Musgrove, p. 66.
21. Chauncey, p. 313.
22. Eels and Musgrove, pp. 73–74.
23. West, p. 87.
24. Eels and Musgrove, p. 74.
25. Helfer, p. 257.
26. Tuska, p. 40.
27. Helfer, p. 174.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., pp. 172–73.
30. Ibid., p. 176.
31. Eels and Musgrove, p. 87.
32. Ibid., p. 86.
33. Tuska, p. 46.
34. Helfer, pp. 174–75.
35. Tuska, p. 50.
36. Eels and Musgrove, pp. 91–93.
37. June Sochen, Mae West: She Who Laughs, Lasts, Harlan Davidson, Inc., Arlington Heights, Illinois, 1992, p. 81.
38. Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s, Farrar, Straus, New York, 1995, p. 358.
39. West, p. 84.
40. Ibid., pp. 91–92
41. Eels and Musgrove, p. 64.
42. Kaier Curtin, “We Can Always Call Them Bulgarians” The Emergence of Lesbians and Gay Men on the American Stage, Alyson Publications, Boston, 1987, pp. 137–38.
43. Hamilton, pp. 64, 141, 143.
44. Richard Helfer, “The Drag: Mae West and the Gay World,” Journal of American Drama and Theater, 8 (Winter, 1996), 66.
45. Chauncey, p. 312.
46. My special thanks to Eric Concklin for sharing with me a 1923 recording of Bert Savoy on the Vocalion label, and for his help throughout the editing of these plays.
47. George Davis, “The Decline of the West,” Vanity Fair (May, 1934), 46, 82.
48. West, p. 83.
49. Stenn, p. 82.
50. Hamilton, p. 254.
51. Ramona Curry, Too Much of a Good Thing: Mae West as Cultural Icon, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1996, p. 146.
52. Harry F. Gaugh, Willem de Kooning, Abbeville Press, New York, 1983, pp. 42, 48. Also Notes to Exhibit, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995.
* ”Dirty charity“; a woman who plays at being a prostitute. -l.S.
SEX
A Comedy Drama (1926)
THE CAST
MARGY LaMont, a prostitute Captain Carter, an officer
Rocky Waldron, a pimp Condez, host of the Cafe Port au Prince
Manly a thug
Curley, a pimp CLARA STANTON, a wealthy woman
Dawson, an officer of the law JIMMY STANTON, her son
Agnes, a prostitute Red, a prostitute Robert STANTON, her husband
Flossie, a prostitute MARIE, the STANTONs’ French maid
Jones, a client JENKINS, the STANTONs’ butler Policeman
Lieutenant Gregg, an English naval officer First Man, Second Man, Waiter
The action takes place in Montreal’s red light district; a cafe in Trinidad; and in a wealthy home outside New York City. The role of MARGY LaMont was played by Mae West.
Act One. SCENEONE. An “apartment” on Caidoux Street inMontreal.SCENE TWO. The same.
ACT TWO. SCENEONE. Trinidad, the Cafe Port au Prince.SCENE TWO. One week later.
ACT THREE. SCENEONE. The STANTON residence.SCENE TWO. The same, the next day.
The copyright script of Sex is dated July 24, 1926, three months after the play opened at Daly’s 63rd Street Theatre on April 26th. The cover page shows Mae West as author, but the play was originally attributed to Jane Mast, a pseudonym that was a combination of Matilda West’s middle name and the first two letters of Mae West’s given and surnames. The script was hastily typed—it contains a profusion of errors and inaccuracies.
The script offers no description of the set. In several places stage directions have been added where none appear.
ACT ONE
SCENEONE
An “apartment” MARGY shares with the blackmailer ROCKY on Caidoux Street, in Montreal’s notorious red light district Night. The curtain rises in the middle of a conversation between ROCKY and MANLY, with CURLEY off to the side.
Rocky You ought to be lousy with coin. You ain’t depending on any particular lady friend for your jack. What’s the matter, ain’t the police giving you fifty-fifty on the graft you collect?
Manly Aw.
Rocky Don’t try to tell me—
Manly Keep your shirt on—take a tip, old man, and watch your step.
Rocky What the—
Manly Who’s the swell dame you been running around with the last week? Some class to you, picking up a jane at the Ritz—the police have got you spotted.
Rocky What do you know?
Manly The last one you picked up, she’s the kind’ll squeal.
Rocky I’ll take the chance.
Manly Yeah? What’s the lay?
Rocky What’s it to you?
Manly That’s enough.
Rocky Are you trying to shake me down?
Manly I’m giving you a tip straight.
Rocky You’ll not get any of my money.
Manly Your money? (Laughs.)
Rocky Yes mine. And you stop butting into my affairs.
Manly Your affairs? Say you’re none too safe here yourself—get that and get it straight.
Rocky Well, it’ll take more than a low down graft collector like you to tell it to me.
Manly Yeah? Alright. If I can’t collect I’ll send someone in who will.
(Exit MANLY.)
Rocky Can you tie that, Curley?
Curley Let him squawk. He’s looking for a meal.
Rocky Come on, snap into it. Get some duds on and come up to the Ritz with me.
Curley Not tonight, Rocky I’m broke.
Rocky With the British Fleet in the harbor—what’s wrong? Agnes holding out on you—you should worry—Montreal is full of janes glad to supply the bank roll for a pretty kid like you.
Curley I’m kinder used to Agnes, I’d hate to change now.
Rocky Ain’t you the kind-hearted dearie.
Curley Well I got no kick coming, I’ve got it pretty soft, Agnes don’t hold out on me.
(Enter AGNES.)
Rocky Hello, Agnes.
Agnes Oh, there you are Curley, I thought I’d find you here.
Curley Alright dear, I’ll be right with you.
Agnes Where’s MARGY?
Rocky In her room, I guess she’s awa
ke.
(Exit AGNES.)
Curley I‘ll see you later Rocky. (Opens door.) Here comes Dawson.
(Enter DAWSON.)
Dawson (Enters) Hello.
(Enter AGNES.)
Rocky Hello Dawson.
Curley Hello Dawson.
Acnes Hello Dawson.
Curley I’ll be around tomorrow Rocky. Good night.
(Exit CURLEY and AGNES.)
Dawson Business must be good the way you got this dump all dolled up.
Rocky Don’t call this joint a dump.
Dawson I met Manly outside and he said you were a pretty tough customer.
Rocky Yeah?
Dawson If you think you can run this joint without giving [it] up, you’ve got another think coming.
Rocky Look here, Dawson, I’m a pretty good sort of scout, but I don’t like being hounded by a guy like Manly.
Dawson Cut the argument and pay up.
Rocky Pay up? Hey MARGY! MARGY!
MARGY What do you want?
Rocky Come out here. Pay up.
MARGY (Enters) Well, what’s all the noise?
Rocky Dawson wants [his] commission.
MARGY Commission? Is that all he wants? Let him try and get it.
Dawson Now look here—You listen to me.
MARGY Just a minute, I don’t want any unnecessary noise around here. I had a pretty busy night last night and my nerves need quiet. (She lights a cigarette.)
Three Plays by Mae West Page 4
