The Full Biography
Mae West. Actress. Playwright. The Brooklyn woman who wrote her own lines and made the censors earn their pay.
This is her story.
The image most people still carry is a blonde in white satin, one hand on a hip, a voice that arrived a half-beat after the eyebrow. The line they remember is a smoothing of what she actually said on screen in 1933: “Why don’t you come up sometime and see me?” The still cannot show Mary Jane West of Bushwick, a child already working vaudeville, a woman who wrote the play that sent her to jail, and an eighty-seven-year-old who was still, in her last picture, playing the joke she had invented before talking pictures learned how to blush.
She was born Mary Jane West on August 17, 1893, on Bushwick Avenue in Brooklyn, delivered at home by an aunt who worked as a midwife. Her mother, Mathilde Delker West, had been a corset and fashion model. Her father, John Patrick West, known as Battlin’ Jack, had been a prizefighter and then a special policeman who opened a private-investigation office. There had been an older sister who died in infancy. A younger sister, Mildred, and a brother, John, completed the household.
The first pressure was not Hollywood. It was a stage-struck German mother and an Irish father who understood a crowd, and a child who learned early that a room could be taken if you wrote the line before anyone else did.
She was on amateur nights before she was ten. Hal Clarendon’s stock company put her in children’s parts. By her teens she was already a vaudeville act: singer, dancer, a comic who treated sex as a subject instead of a secret.
On April 11, 1911, she married a fellow performer, Frank Wallace, born Frank Szatkus. She kept the marriage off the program for decades. There were no children. The marriage was a fact she would not let become the plot. The plot was the work.
The door was not a studio gate. It was a play she wrote and starred in, titled, without apology, Sex. It opened in New York in April 1926. She played Margie LaMont, a Montreal prostitute with better timing than the men who hired her.
In February 1927, police raided the production. A Manhattan court convicted her of obscenity. She was given a choice: a fine, or days on Welfare Island. She took the jail. Eight days. She used them. When she came out she was no longer a downtown curiosity. She was a national name who had decided that a morals charge was advertising if you refused to look sorry.
Diamond Lil opened at the Royale on April 9, 1928. She wrote it. She starred in it. The Bowery, 1890s, a woman in diamonds who ran the room and the men in it. The play ran into 1929 and then toured. Hollywood, which had spent the silent years inventing vamps it could not quite let speak, finally wanted the woman who already spoke.
Paramount brought her west in 1932. George Raft’s Night After Night was the first picture. She was not the lead. She stole it anyway, and she wrote the theft. When a hat-check girl told her, “Goodness, what beautiful diamonds,” West answered, on a line she had built, that goodness had nothing to do with it. The memoir she published in 1959 took that sentence for a title.
She Done Him Wrong arrived in 1933, built from Diamond Lil. Cary Grant, still new to pictures, stood opposite her. The invitation upstairs is in that film, and it is not the postcard version. It is a woman setting terms. I’m No Angel, the same year, put Grant with her again and packed the innuendo until the house laughed before the punch.
Those two pictures are still said to have helped keep Paramount solvent in a Depression year. She was credited as a writer because she was one. The Hays Office, and then the Production Code as it tightened after 1934, spent the next decade trying to sand the edges off a woman who had already published the edges as literature.
Belle of the Nineties. Goin’ to Town. Klondike Annie (1936), which she co-wrote and which the censors treated as a public emergency. Go West Young Man. Every Day’s a Holiday. The scripts came back from the Code office thinner each time. She did not become a different woman. She became a woman working inside a smaller room, still writing the best sentences in it.
In 1940 she shared My Little Chickadee with W. C. Fields. Both were authors. Both wanted the last word. The picture is a monument to two comics who could not share a typewriter and still, somehow, made a Western that people quote. Paramount had already tried to keep the franchise going on thinner scripts: Belle of the Nineties (1934), Goin’ to Town (1935), Klondike Annie (1936), which William Randolph Hearst’s papers treated as a public emergency, Go West Young Man (1936), Every Day’s a Holiday (1937). Each time the Production Code office sent the pages back sanded. She kept the walk. She kept the pause. She did not keep the sentences the censors took. The Heat’s On (1943), at Columbia, is the wartime leftover — a backstage picture that is not Diamond Lil and knows it.
I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.Mae West
That is the turn, and it is easy to file as a one-liner. The turn is authorship. Studios hired faces. West hired herself as the writer first and the face second.
When the Code sanded the pictures, she took the character back to the stage: Catherine Was Great at the Shubert on Broadway in 1944, a London Diamond Lil after the war, then the nightclub and Las Vegas circuit of the 1950s. The Sahara put her on a bill with musclemen she used as scenery, a woman in her sixties still selling the walk she had designed in her thirties. Paul Novak, one of those men, became the companion of the last twenty-five years — a household the columns treated as a joke and the apartment treated as a fact. She had already decided that too much of a good thing can be wonderful. She said that, too. She meant the work.
Six things most people never knew
- The birth name is Mary Jane, the street is Bushwick Avenue. An aunt midwifed her at home. The Golden Age face began in Brooklyn, not on a Paramount lawn.
- Battlin’ Jack was a prizefighter before he was a detective. The house understood a crowd and a grift. She put both into the dialogue.
- She was married in 1911 and hid it for decades. Frank Wallace. No children. The program listed a single woman because the act required one.
- She chose jail over a fine. Eight days on Welfare Island for Sex. She treated the sentence as a billboard.
- She wrote the pictures people think the studio invented. She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel carry her sentences. The Code spent years trying to unsay them.
- Sailors named a life jacket after her. The inflatable “Mae West” honored the hourglass. She accepted the joke as another credit.
The 1930s pictures are the catalog a Depression house used as weather. She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel are the pair that still get the Sunday slot. Belle of the Nineties kept the Bowery walk after the Code had started sanding. Klondike Annie is the one the Hearst papers tried to treat as an emergency and that she treated as another script. By 1940 the studio rooms had narrowed enough that sharing a Western with Fields looked like a last large joke. It was not the last joke. It was the last time a major lot gave her the run of a picture. The stage, the clubs, and the memoir took the rest of the employment.
Colleagues learned the rules. Grant, who was young enough to be directed by a look, stayed grateful. Fields stayed competitive. Raft, who had known her from the New York rooms, understood that she did not arrive in Hollywood as a discovery. She arrived as a finished product who happened to need a camera.
She did not keep a conventional family on the call sheet. Mildred worked a little under other names. John drifted. Mathilde, who had wanted the stage for the daughter, died in 1930. Jack died in 1935. The public family was the character: diamonds, a chaise, a drawl that made a commandment sound like an offer. She had already decided the act would not include a child or a public husband. Wallace stayed in the legal file and off the program until a court made him expensive. The typewriter stayed on the program. That is the household the stills never showed.
The later years
She did not retire when the Code won the features. Home, for the long Hollywood stretch, was an apartment at the Ravenswood on Rossmore Avenue, decorated as if Diamond Lil had taken a lease: mirrors, white furniture, a bedroom that was a set. She published Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It in 1959 and let the memoir do what the censors would not. Television wanted the cameo — The Red Skelton Hour, a Dean Martin roast, the variety hours that needed a living postcard. Nightclubs wanted the walk. She recorded albums that treated innuendo as a vocal style. Novak kept the door and the calendar. She was, in those decades, a woman who had already become her own statue and still insisted on rehearsing the statue.
In 1970 she played Leticia Van Allen in Myra Breckinridge, a Fox curiosity that used her as a civic object from another decade. She was seventy-seven and still timing a line as if the Royale were waiting. Sextette, released in 1978, was the last picture: a script she had written years before, a cast that included Timothy Dalton and a young Sylvester Stallone, a woman past eighty still insisting that the joke belonged to her. The reviews were not kind. She attended the openings anyway. She had never asked critics for permission to be Mae West. The walk was slower. The pause was intact.
A stroke in August 1980 took the last of the public appearances. She died in Los Angeles on November 22, 1980. She was eighty-seven. Novak was in the household at the end. The funeral in Los Angeles, and then the family tomb at Brooklyn’s Cypress Hills Cemetery, was the kind of goodbye she would have rewritten for a better exit line. The character outlived the woman by design. That had been the job since Sex. Bushwick is the first room. Welfare Island is the hinge. The Ravenswood was the last address. The invitation upstairs is the weather. She had spent the 1960s and 1970s as a living exhibit who still wrote: a London revival of the old play, a record, a talk-show pause that made a host wait. Novak drove. Novak kept the door. The stroke in August 1980 ended the appearances; the three months that followed were a private room in the same city that had once paid her to save a studio. She was eighty-seven when the account closed. The character did not close. That had been the design since 1926. She had already written the memoir, played Leticia, finished Sextette, and kept Novak in the apartment that looked like a set. The censors had spent a decade sanding her pages. Age sanded the walk. Neither got the pause. Brooklyn sent her out. Hollywood paid her. Brooklyn took the body back to Cypress Hills, beside Mathilde and Jack, a Bushwick daughter filed under a name she had made into a trademark. Sailors had already named a life jacket after the hourglass. Drag acts had already taken the walk. The upstairs line had already entered the language. She had written all of that before the censors finished sanding. The typewriter was the career. The walk was only the delivery.
After she was gone
The invitation upstairs is still in the language. Drag acts, comedians, and every blonde who decided to write her own innuendo still pay her a tax whether they know the 1926 playbill or not. She Done Him Wrong still plays as a Pre-Code weather report. The De Havilland generation fought contracts. West fought a different paper: the list of words a woman was not supposed to say, and the list of jobs a woman was not supposed to write.
She came out of Bushwick, took eight days in a jail that made her famous, wrote Diamond Lil into a Paramount fortune, survived a Code that tried to sand her into a souvenir, played Vegas as her own statue, and died in Los Angeles still billed as the woman she had invented. If you only remember the upstairs line, you have the postcard. If you remember Sex, the typewriter, and an eighty-four-year-old finishing Sextette because the part was hers, you have her.
Portrait: Unknown (Los Angeles Times press photo) · Public Domain · via Wikimedia Commons