That Mae West was no angel

10 April 2012

Does any responsible mother these days still call her child 'Mae'? Not that Mae West can ever really have been a child. When she was just 11 - as she tells it, anyhow - she was already a woman to look at. Boys in Brooklyn used to fight over her. Thus was fixed, early and gratifyingly, the pattern of her lifelong relations with the male sex. All she had to add was a dimension of comedy. The two films that comprise this double NFT bill are among the earliest and best made by a woman who believed sex should always rear its funny head.

She Done Him Wrong, made in 1933, was the cinema title of her famous stage act Diamond Lil. She has an unlikely co-star, Cary Grant, playing the well set-up detective in Salvation Army disguise who falls for Mae's flamboyant courtesan. Rough diamonds are OK as cash customers; but for a vaudeville artiste making the transition to the silver screen, a cop or a 'silk hat' type as an escort and lover was more than just a tribute to her discrimination - it proved the power of her sex appeal to jump class barriers and even subvert the law. 'Are those strictly necessary?' she asks Grant, when he reluctantly has to fit the handcuffs on her, 'You know I wasn't born in them.' Comes the laconic reply, 'A lot of men would have been safer if you had.' Her first appearance in that film is an artful tease, as she rolls up in her open carriage - the time is the 1890s - parasol lofted, drawing glares from ladies and bows from gents. 'A fine woman,' one admirer (male) declares, and draws the ambiguous reply, 'As fine a woman as ever walked the streets.'

In I'm No Angel, made the same year, Mae cries her own wares, parading along the show-tent ramp, displaying her goods, quipping 'Penny for your thoughts' at the gawking males, lifting and lowering her long, near-transparent gown with the provocative query 'Am I makin' myself clear, boys?' before she belts out the song 'They Call Me Sister Honky-Tonk' and sidles off with a sotto voce 'Suckers!'

Reader, I, too, was a sucker, and prevailed upon Christopher Isherwood no less - her neighbour in Santa Monica - to call Mae and ask if she would see me. (Actually, I felt Isherwood wanted rid of me, since he'd just made the discovery that I belonged to the Beaverbrook Press that had given him and Auden such a hard time when they 'defected' to the US before the War.) 'Sure,' said Mae, 'send him up.' She felt my biceps - simply Mae's way of shaking hands, I suppose - sat me down and rated me for class, breeding and gentlemanly deportment. I guess I passed: but all we had was tea.

Mae made it big and was popular in movies until screen censorship in the mid-Thirties done her wrong. She was a displaced Victorian, self-made and self-sustaining, and while her view of sex was healthily post-Freudian, her code of manners was eminently 19th century. She called her film I'm No Angel, but would never have dreamed of entitling it I'm No Lady. She was hardly a 'woman's woman', it's true; but, in her time, very much every man's. Which is why, I suppose, 'Mae' as a name for every mother's new-born darling dropped quickly out of fashion.

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