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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Biography of an American Icon,
By CRT "crtriebs, reader" (Vancouver WA USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Queen of Camp: Mae West, Sex and Popular Culture (Paperback)
This book is primarily a thoughtful examination on the myth, and work of Mae West whose public persona won her a place in American folklore, and outraged the morality police of her times. (I recall back in the early 40's when I, a mere lad, was refused admittance to one of her movies because it was unfit for tender eyes). Hamilton, a professor of history at the University of London, has done a remarkable job of attempting to get at the real Mae West. Mae, herself, authored two autobiographies, one in 1959, the other in 1975; and a host of journalists and hangers-on were more than willing to recount what they knew of her life. But the critical point of her life, between 1920 and 1927 when she metamorphosed from a burlesque performer and probably, a prostitute, into a writer, producer, and actress of some stature--remains unknown. As to the untampered biographical data that do exist, Mae West was born in 1893, baptized as Mary Jane. Her father, John West was of Irish extraction, and although details of his occupation, etc. are largely a creation of his daughter's fertile invention. The author writes that he was undoubtedly "a onetime craftsman on the margin of Brooklyn's underworld." Her mother, Matilda (Tillie) Doelger was an emigrant from Wurtemberg, Germany. She pushed her daughter into the theatrical life. Mae made her professional debut at the age of 7, in a theatrical company that specialized in blood and thunder melodrama. Mae's venue was never very high. She continued to be associated with cheap theater that catered to prurience, flaunted sex, crime and scandal. She became, in the author's word, a "tough girl", the bane of reformers such as Jane Addams. Mae was married before her eighteenth birthday to a fellow performer, but after flagrant adulteries, walked out on her marriage as if it never existed. (She was not legally divorced until 1943). Mae quickly found a niche in burlesque, and may have been a stripper; probably a prostitute. In any case, she dropped out of sight around 1920, and did not surface until 1926-1927 when she burst upon the notice of New York theater by two productions that she wrote, and with the help of private funding, produced. The first was a story of a Canadian prostitute that was provocatively titled, Sex. Despite howls from the "better sort", this play became one of the major hits of the 1926 Broadway season. Sex was followed in 1927 by her own written "homosexual comedy-drama" titled The Drag, and in 1928, with Pleasure Man (closed down by the NY police) and finally, Diamond Lil, better known in its cinema version, She Done Him Wrong. Now here is were the biography breaks down. Mae West had no better than a grade-school education. She was a bottom feeder in the vaudeville/burlesque venue, disappearing from the radar between 1920 and 1926. The author never gives us a clue, or tries to explain what she was doing during those years and how suddenly, she became a no mean playwright and theatrical producer. And it is here that we jump into Mae West as the symbol of rampant sexuality which horrified or titillated the American public in the late 1920's and early 1930's, and transformed her into an icon of the liberals and a target of the conservatives. A large part of this book focuses on Mae West's often tedious fight against the forces of "virtue". These included local watch and ward groups, the Hearst newspapers, and municipal laws governing lewd performances. Mae spent much time in court, and served time at Welfare Island. Over a few years, Mae's Broadway and off-Broadway productions no longer attracted customers, as whatever she could do for an encore had to be raunchier than what went on before. So Mae changed venues again, and looked to Hollywood. Although her plays were on the list of properties judged unsuitable for film adaptation by the film companies' self-regulatory body, the MPPDA, or Hays Office, in 1932, Paramount offered her a two-month contract to act in a gangster melodrama. She did wonders with a small role; the first one she played in front of a camera. Rewriting many of her colorless lines, she introduced the one-liner innuendoes that became her trademark: e.g., in response to "Goodness, what beautiful diamonds", she would reply, "Goodness had nothing to do with it dearie." Paramount decided, partly on the basis of West's performance, which drew many plaudits from critics, fans, and most importantly, theater owners, to film Diamond Lil. The Hays Office had come down hard on gangster films, which generated much of Hollywood's profits 1930-31, so the studios turned to another crowd-pleaser, sex. Now the Hays Office had to mount another campaign. After much huffing and puffing, Paramount was allowed to start filming. But the name of the picture was changed; the memories of Diamond Lil still too green. Much of the dialogue had to be changed, but here again, Mae demonstrated how she could evade the direct prohibition of certain lines by substituting nuanced others that retained the original intent. For example, Lil's line to her leading man, "You can be had" was changed to the iconic, "Come up and see me sometime" She Done Him Wrong (nee Diamond Lil) proved to be a blockbuster. It's return engagements surpassed the all-time record set by Birth of a Nation. It's success created much embarrassment for the Hays Office, and set forward demands for federal censorship. Hays tightened the screws, and Mae's next movie, I'm No Angel was bereft of Mae's creative influence on the text. Indeed, the script was filled with material that would make the movie acceptable to the bluest of the blue noses. But Mae still was able to convey a sense of earthy desires and still delivered one-liners that were suggestive at best, e.g., "Well, when I'm good I'm very good, but when I'm bad I'm better." By late 1933, Mae's popularity was at its peak. She began working on her third starring picture, rumored to be written around New Orleans's old red light district. It's title, It ain't No Sin in this reputed context was a provocation. The Legion of Decency had its origin around this time; many other church groups joined in pledging its members to eschew salacious and criminal films. In a sense, these protest groups reprised similar organizations that in the 1910's and 1920's sought to keep "dirty" plays off Broadway and sanitize other urban amusements. It Ain't No Sin gave they protest groups strong meat, as the preliminary screen play now showed Mae in close physical contact with her leading men. One-liners were evidently not enough for audiences who now demanded rawer meat. Joseph Breen, head of the west coast arm of the Hays Office refused to countenance release of the film as written. Paramount caved in, and did a major rewrite, and changed the name to Belle of the Nineties. This finished film was stripped of all elements that give Mae West her broad and varied appeal. It was confused, colorless, and although the script had been recast to reflect "mainstream" values, it was overwhelmingly unpopular with mainstream audiences. The four films that followed Belle of the Nineties completed the job of sanitizing Mae. She was reduced to a caricature of herself. She tried to inject some of her old ways into the scripts, but was ruthlessly suppressed by the studio, which now marched in lock-step with the Hays Office. Essentially, Mae West as Mae West was in exile. Paramount, which lost money on the 1938 film, Every Day's a Holiday ended its association with her. She made only two more pictures in the next five years. My Little Chickadee (1939) in which she reluctantly co-starred with W.C. Fields, was not a great success at the time, but has become a minor cult movie, principally because of Field's, not Mae's performance. Mae attempted recover with the 1944 theater production of Catharine Was Great, a play, she wrote. Critics expected the old, comic Mae but she played her role as a "solemn historical document". She finally had to introduce some of her trade-mark shticks and one-liners to satisfy the customers who had expected the old Mae. In the 1960's and 70's the pendulum swung from avid censorship of anything sexual in movies to anything goes. With her performance in the 1970 film, Myra Breckenridge, she established herself as the "Queen of Camp" Although most often associated with the homosexual milieu, camp is defined by Hamilton as "a process of cultural recycling, as artifacts reclaimed from popular culture's back annals were invested with iconoclastic new meanings". Aficionados of camp prized the outmoded "relics of popular culture that had become obsolete." This placed Mae in a position to be a iconic camp object. The homosexual component of camp also adhered to Mae. Throughout the 1950's and 1960's, she performed in clubs that depended on the marginal patronage of gay men. Her review included an entourage of weight lifters wearing only skimpy loincloths. The near-naked musclemen brought Mae's camp appeal to the foreground. She was now decidedly "hip". But her revival came at a bad time for the "mainstream" audiences. Now that four-letter words and graphic descriptions were commonplace on stage and screen, Mae's nuanced innuendoes were decidedly tame. And her septuagenarian body, however corseted, made her a laughingstock among younger audiences. One critic said, not unkindly, that Mae was the best of the current female impersonators. Mae West died in late 1980. In the years since her death, she has been enshrined, albeit amorphously, in American pop culture. Her quips and one-liners are still repeated. As an actress, however, she has been all but forgotten. She remains an enigma. Hamilton concludes... Read more ›
4.0 out of 5 stars
When I'm bad...,
By
This review is from: The Queen of Camp: Mae West, Sex and Popular Culture (Paperback)
In this well-researched book Marybeth Hamilton offers a picture of an brave and individual performer/writer and her work. It was surprising to discover that Mae West was all but washed up by the 1940's, her legend seems so dominating in popular culture. I also learnt more than I could ever have imagined about burlesque theatre and life in early 20th Century America.All in all, The Queen of Camp an interesting history of the fascinatin' Ms West and the world she inhabited.
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