“Goodness had nuthin’ t’ do with it, dearie.”
—Mae West, in Night After Night
Visiting Los Angeles time and again, arriving by bus, by air, on the Super Chief to Union Station, and once, in tribute to another, finer vanished way of life, descending at Pasadena to be driven through the pass and along Mulholland Drive to Doheny, the border separating West Hollywood from Beverly Hills. Then down Doheny to Sunset and east to 1416 North Havenhurst to the Colonial House, just a few paces down the hill from the site of Nazimova’s ’20s seraglio, the Garden of Allah.
Purpose: to take it all in, to get it all down—the mystery, the mutability, the enveloping allure of this force field antipodal to New York, and always re-enforcing the idea of it as the birthplace of that reactive and ultimately benighted twentieth-century homosexual hypothesis, Gay Liberation.
New York vis-à-vis Los Angeles. Principal industries:
New York (as in textbooks of the 1940s and ’50s)—clothing manufacture and book publishing.
Los Angeles—aviation and motion pictures.
CASINO/DIAMONDS
From a Hollywood diary:
Brooks Riley, then an editor at Film Comment, set up lunch and aftermath with the great Michael Powell [MP], then doing a sort of Zen roshi turn at Zoetrope, Francis Ford Coppola’s glamorous, state-of-the-art and somewhat pastiche operation run out of the historic M-G-M studios on Formosa, in the geographical center of old Hollywood.
MP an apparition, yes, but of what?
A gay gramps, surely, in this instance and for a season in Golden Years residence among his artistic progeny, to a man queer-accepting, or, as the Mott Street Italians back in New York would have it, umbothered.
An, in every way, less magniloquent, less orotund, but concomitantly gifted Orson Welles, in the guise of a British edition of a great European theater-music-moompix monstre sacré on the level of Renoir, Visconti and, yes, Eisenstein, fresh out of Wardrobe and Hair and stamped with no sell-by date whatsoever; on offer as something like an altogether stable, authentic, needless to remark, accomplished and voluble Quentin Crisp. (A case of getting it all backward, really, like referring to Joan Bennett as the false Hedy Lamarr or saying that Tuesday Weld reminds you of Faye Dunaway or Dunaway reminds you of Sharon Stone, but the image is nonetheless restorative and somehow emblematic of the increasingly vaudevillian politics of queer New York vis-à-vis the more realistic talking-money, ballot-box queer politics of first San Francisco and then, more durably, Los Angeles, bringing it all back in the early ’80s to where it all started in the late ’40s.
Gorgeous pastel print shirt, hibiscus in hair (very Dorothy Lamour), all poised for the hearing confession of a film rhapsode (certified by Brooks Riley for work done at Film Comment).
“You look pretty absolutely gorgeous.”
“Thank you; I feel a bit like Bea Lillie about to rip into ‘Lily of Laguna.’”
Thus made to feel luxuriously at ease, rhapsode launches into strophic ode, detailing the effect on the childhood psyche of seeing Black Narcissus screened at the Polk.
(Note: The parish had warned pointedly against parents allowing children to see the picture, which had been rated Objectionable-in-Part by the Legion of Decency. Thus, although it would never be, like Buñuel’s The Young and the Damned (Los Olvidados) or Henry Cornelius’s I Am a Camera, constitutive of what we called a Mortal Sin Double Feature, it was on its own to be shunned. Yes, there were nuns in it, and yes, purity wins in a beautiful Himalayan setting—famously represented by the Pennines enhanced by the knockout matte work of Alfred Junge. However, like Miss Prism’s verdict on the fall of the rupee, this subcontinental melodrama was reckoned somewhat too sensational. Unbothered, QT walked in bold as brass at four o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon, occasioning neither remonstrance nor a blind bit of notice from the impassive matron busy behind glass at her manicure.)
MP sympathetic to the overstimulating effect of a parochial-school neurotic homosexual boy torn between, on the one hand, strenuous bicycle riding and rough body-contact sport, and, on the other, to roller skating over long distances, through the streets of adjacent neighborhoods—significant among them the burgeoning Indian and Pakistani communities of “Tudor” Jackson Heights about a mile away, around the Jackson and the Colony movie theaters, domiciled there while serving their respective delegations at the then newly created United Nations a half-hour away—through strange streets and into strange schoolyards, strange playgrounds and strange back alleys, and nearer to home given (QT) to aggressive skating and the promotion of rough-and-tumble, limb-body-contact re-creations of the then wildly popular Roller Derby contests.
A boy already somewhat cosseted by the ministrations of the Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart (originally Les Soeurs de la Charité de Couvent de Montréal). Their admirable dedication to and expertise at instruction in English grammar, mathematics, voice and indeed the rudiments of Western music theory did not automatically translate into a taste for such elements of the prescribed reading curriculum as James Russell Lowell’s “The First Snowfall,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” and “A Hymn to Life,” Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Bells” and Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “The Ballad of the Harp Weaver.” He preferred Poe’s Tales, Longfellow’s “Evangeline” and Millay’s “Renascence” and her sonnets, and listening to his mother relate, for all the world as if she’d been there with them, “Vincent’s” party nights in Greenwich Village with Maxwell Bodenheim (Naked on Roller Skates) and Eugene O’Neill—whose Mourning Becomes Electra with Nazimova had been, next to Jeanne Eagels in Rain and Mae West in Diamond Lil, her greatest youthful thrill in the New York theater.
Neither did the strict tuition in the elaborate niceties of English grammar—sentence diagramming growing ever more complicated from fourth grade through eighth, not to mention in the current work—quite seem to match his deep-end immersion in early-’50s film noir dialogue. Meanwhile, over in the music department, neither the stern formalities of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, the intoxicating chromaticism of Wagner, nor the more astringent lyrical beauty of Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” and Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite adequately prepped him for that Saturday matinee performance at the Metropolitan Opera of Richard Strauss’s Salome, sung by Ljuba Welitsch.
As to the nuns, if they ever smelled of anything other than Kirkman’s soap, they did so of the very lightest suspicion of Friendship’s Garden, or as was sometimes darkly whispered by parochial trouble makers, 4711 but never of anything so redolent of mystery as Black Narcissus.
Also QT confessed to the startling histrionic conflict between the Himalayan Anglican nuns of Black Narcissus and such homegrown screen representations of Catholic nuns in action as Ingrid Bergman in The Bells of St. Mary’s and the double dose of Loretta Young and Celeste Holm in Come to the Stable (Henry Koster, 1949), a thing the author had wanted to do for some time in a somewhat different context.
MP most understanding, sympathetic and entirely willing to grant retrospective absolution, especially after hearing the story of the notorious “curse boxes” routinely installed following Young’s winning of the Oscar for her so-wholesome performance in The Farmer’s Daughter (1948), into which offenders in the profanity sweepstakes were required to deposit an offering for “the missions.” Joseph L. Mankiewicz, assigned to a subsequent Loretta Young picture, is reputed to have walked up to the star and said, “Now before we begin work, Miss Young, there is just one thing I need to know: how much is it going to cost me to tell you to go fuck yourself?”
A decade later, QT next admitted, despite imagining himself quite the sophisticated high-school senior, college material, inured to seizures of primitive emotions, when the nun came out of the shadows at the end of Vertigo, he about lost it—he didn’t know for a split second what was hitting him, and the take wasn’t much longer than that, but in it a whole history came back, flooding his brain. Given the similarity of the high tower and the bells and the terror, he then remembered Black Narcissus. He couldn’t help wondering if Hitchcock had not worked the whole picture back from that point? It certainly looked like an hommage.
Powell replied, “I can’t imagine he was remotely aware of any resemblance, or would have seen anything whatever in it. Your reaction of course is interesting, and gratifyingly so to those of us who believe in the storing and study of moving images and cinematic moments along the same lines as the research and study of painterly effects and the paths of literary and musical influences since the Renaissance, but I’m afraid in this instance it was surely entirely personal.”
“Also theological and psychological; movies are a religion, are they not?”
“Oh, certainly, or else I would hardly be here in Hollywood, sitting in the vicinity of all this sunshine with a hibiscus stuck behind my ear, now would I?”
Yet another noteworthy historical Hollywood detail, in and of the moment.
MP had not yet been taken by the proprietors of Zoetrope, putative purveyors of look/see high art, already too accustomed for QT’s taste to the glassed-in limousines through which they saw the dayworld of Los Angeles but darkly, to view the amazing folk-art Hollywood-stars mural on Cahuenga, just south of Hollywood Boulevard, in which Bette Davis and James Dean are pictured side by side. (Alas—destroyed in the Northridge earthquake of 1991; a Polaroid of the work taken at the time of the MP interview remains on Author’s New York living room wall.)
“Extraordinary—are you sure?”
“Yes, and I think I get the rationale. Jimmy is painted in his red jacket from Rebel Without a Cause and Bette in the jodhpurs from Another Man’s Poison.
“Oh, yes, Emlyn [Williams] was in that one. Adored her, of course . . . hilarious stories; mouth like a sailor, apparently, when oiled up. Magnificent actress of course—but that picture was a real stinker as I recall.”
“Pretty bad—but there’s an immortal bit of dialogue in it.”
“Oh, is there really?”
“Yes. ‘You killed Fury—you killed him. There isn’t a man, woman or child I wouldn’t see dead at my feet if it would bring that horse back to life!’”
“And I wanted to talk about The Red Shoes, with Moira Shearer—always more vivid to me than Margot Fonteyn.”
“Oh, much. Came back to Covent Garden, you know, only a few years ago; did the cakewalk number with Freddie Ashton. Lit the place up. We all adored her.”
“I was there then.”
“Where when?”
“At Covent Garden when she did the cakewalk with Ashton.”
“Were you really? Well, then I expect you know.”
Interesting circular exchange, the author said to himself—a real loop. Like being auditioned in form for a proper British conversation; he’d forgotten how to have one, only mused on the fact that Harold Pinter made an entire oeuvre out of them. They’d been used before, in Noël Coward, for example, among so any others (“Very big, China.” “And Japan?” “Very small.”), and in the plays of Terrence Rattigan. It was finally Harold Pinter’s genius to invest them with the raw low-drop of the working class, then work them up into the new middle classes’ mindless defense-against-conversation, torquing them into a kind of nakedly absurdist sublimity.
“But hang on a minute, dear boy, the Covent Garden cakewalk to one side, surely you are improbably young, are you not, to have seen Shearer in her prime?”
“No, I’m actually older than might appear.”
“Oh, are you really? Imagine. Amazing place, California.”
“Truly. Well, look at you; you don’t look a day older . . .”
“Than what?”
“Than whatever age it was you used to be.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely.”
More on the bewitching splendors of The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffman. Then about Mawrdew Czgowchwz, which Brooks had told MP all about, giving him a paperback copy.
“I started writing the thing when I was in college.”
“Back when Shearer was in her prime, do you mean?”
“Well, a bit later than that—but that’s the period it’s set in, exactly.”
“Took you a while to work it up, I expect.”
QT realized he was being—must be being—treated to exquisite dry wit—a compliment, even an honor, in the circumstances. And art, as Stella Adler had insisted for decades, is in the circumstances. So too, of course, is the death of the first boy apprentice in Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes—accidental circumstances—and Michael Powell didn’t look terribly unlike Peter Pears in that role. Fascinatin’, as Mae West would have said, eyes shot upward, toward heaven.
Later with Brooks Riley:
“What are you doing for the rest of the afternoon—the beach, maybe?”
“Exactly—down to Santa Monica to Mae West’s Neutra beach house.”
“And?”
“I’ll probably stand on the beach, looking up at the veranda, and read what I wrote about her when she died. She might get a kick out of it—she liked being read to, you know—Freud particularly.”
THE LATE MAE WEST
“As expression, music behaves mimetically, as gestures respond to stimuli that they imitate by reflex action. In music the rational, constructive principle suppresses the mimetic. The latter must assert itself polemically; espressivo is the protest of expression at the ban placed upon it.
—Theodor W. Adorno, Mahler, A Musical Physiognomy
Late one evening a few years back, in the last decade in which she made her living, the late Mae West, less and less often present ringside in downtown Los Angeles, more and more at home in her sumptuous white suite in the Ravenswood Apartments on Rossmore Avenue in Hollywood, spoke of a visitor she’d been entertaining at her leisure at regular intervals in between reading and revising her memoirs.
“Here I was, sittin’ on my big white couch and who should come to see me, all in evenin’ clothes, but Lou—gone ovuh, y’know, some years ago. ‘Lou,’ I said, ‘you’re lookin’ fine.’ He always got himself lookin’ good to come up and see me when he was livin’, y’ know. He said to me, ‘Mae, I always admired your hands. You have lovely white hands.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, and they go all the way up the arm.’ Yeah, Lou was lookin’ real fine.”
Mae West was terrifying—that’s what it was—and there was nothing else to do about it but to pretend otherwise. Tragedy is to bear the truth; comedy is to pretend otherwise; melodrama, Mae’s forte—and she was the truest musician of the great high comedians—is a tightrope walk between the two.
Her content was much greater than its container: all the while she was pretending to be a camp Delilah, she was enacting (in deeply encoded terms, but in mortal earnest) the Queen of the Night, Chaos in whalebone stays. Mae understood an important truth: all that is necessary for one to become, de facto, a monster, is to allow oneself to be exhibited—in the very sense in which Walter Benjamin, in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” said that the work forfeits its quasi-religious cult value to assume its proper exhibition value—and the thing that becomes crucial is the point of intersection between work and onlooker.
Mae West defined, too, the corollary to the proposition: that the only effective shield for a monster against those brawny, determined and witless cats’ paws (called in story books knights errant) is the cultivation in the cushioned lair of the private view. As she put it, prefiguring by some decades Foucault’s concern with le souci de soi—and sharing with Horace, inter alia, a devotion to the mirrored bedroom ceiling—“I like t’ see how I’m doin’,” adding the footnote, “I invented myself, and I never could put up with sloppy work.”
Hamlet asked the player to hold the mirror up to Nature; Mae decided to hold the mirror up to Mae—figuring the best way to read Nature was to read Nature’s accomplishment, not Nature’s promise—what’s what, not what’s not: the payoff not the pitch. Thus Mae understood perfectly the difference between male and female narcissism. A man is in love with knowing his image in the pool, but has been warned, genetically, of the risk of submersion: knowledge of ecstatic foreclosure; a woman is a little in love with the tactile sensation of total immersion, but can also be wary of the baptismal purpose. Mae said to the maid who entered advising her her bath was ready, “Take it yourself, I’m indisposed.”
Grandfather crossed the Brooklyn Bridge to catch her in vaudeville on Atlantic Avenue. She was a smoldering brunette in those days, a working man’s nostalgic vision of the vanished Lillian Russell. Mother and a sidekick sneaked out of school right under the nose of a Sister of Charity one spring afternoon a couple of decades later to catch her in a matinee of Sex. Father and mother, like everybody else in the Depression, sat through Night After Night, She Done Him Wrong, I’m No Angel, Belle of the Nineties, Goin’ To Town, Klondike Annie and My Little Chickadee, which came out the year I was born. I got a load of her (by then as much a household word as Duz) only on television, trading innuendo with Mr. Ed, the talking horse, and knew right away, as we were to say of much else much later, that she was too much for television—one of those Other Beings from that other, vanished, world, illuminated, like television, from behind, but ever so much bigger. The nature of that being, however, was something else: indeed her entire career is a spectacular chronicle of the ineffable pitched as high concept. Never much of a credentialist but no stranger to hard work, she had the great good sense, finding herself enrolled in the School of Hard Knocks, to audit nearly all the courses, thus avoiding the necessity of, shall we say, putting out for her A’s. She needed no diploma hung on the wall. (“Would’a gotten in the way o’ the mirrors,” she might have said.)
What she brought to film was the full realization of her own personal kinetic potential. It is probably true, as people who knew her said, that no cinematic effect could match the hologrammatic vision of Mae West onstage, lying in her big swan bed in Diamond Lil or sallying forth to meet the masses in Catherine Was Great. (“Oh, Var-vara, hahnd me my traveling case and my peasant disguise.”)
The buzz derived from watching her lope into an empty set-up frame, sniff-scan the room (the darkened auditorium of viewers) like an ocelot in heat, dispense with the information that “Goodness had nuthin’ t’ do with it, dearie!” and then swerve off camera (as if, well, the carte de jour was looking good, but she’d be taking her time over an aperitif). She demonstrated beyond doubt that personal kinesis. Here was Thalia on the move, with a number of similar calls to make in the neighborhood.
So did Mae West become a one-woman National Recovery Administration, uplifting the knackered millions in a fashion and to a degree utterly unprecedented and never again seen—a kind of White Lotus whose far-from-secret society, with its mass membership of ticket buyers coast to coast paying a queen’s ransom in box office tribute to their cosmic heroine, who, co-opting both the energy and even occasionally the scripting of the essential triad of nineteenth-century American mythic impulses—the messianic, the millenarian and the revivalist—promised, in the fantasy of return to a Golden Age (the gilded Gay Nineties), to wrest new treasures from the depths of the earth, enrich the poor, put down the mighty from their seat and exalt the humble and the meek. Mae did more than save Paramount Pictures; she went a long way toward saving the nation from the nasty Bolsheviks of The New Masses.
There is a discernible element of reaction characteristic of great comedy (Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Molière and Congreve) as opposed to strenuous comedy, comédie larmoyante and farce (Ben Jonson, Beaumarchais, Feydeau, Clyde Fitch). Such conservative reaction is everywhere to be found in Mae West’s antics—often miscalled buffoonery, which is to confuse Thalia with Bacchus, and Mae never played a drunk scene. Great comedy is never sentimental, and the essence of political revolution is sentimentality.
Mae’s reactionary stance was something of a blind: she reincarnated the belle of the Gay Nineties—the essence of curvature—in the age of the flat-chested boy-girl flapper (Louise Brooks, Clara Bow) only to endow her with all the (as-it-were value theory) sexual allure of the black blues woman. In the early part of the century, Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis and Martha Graham had freed women’s movement—inaugurating a rather hieratic style, an example of which can be viewed in the temple dances of the besotted votaries of Ishtar in D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance—while Mae, sister votary of Gilda Grey and Eva Tanguay, shimmied in burlesque like a wild thing. But when, a decade later, nearing thirty-five, she discovered nostalgia, she seemed to regress to something of a cross between a diva of opera’s own Golden Age and Leopard Woman of the Argentine.
Accompanying her movements was the liberal use of the moan—theretofore the exclusive property of black female vocalists, and heard in the ’20s recordings of Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Lucille Bogan, Victoria Spivey and others—introducing thereby the first transposition of black sexual expression into the repertoire of a white American vocalist.
Mae become, as such, far more “transgressive” than Sophie Tucker, Helen Morgan, Ruth Etting et al.—but then Mae’s art, which fathomed its registers and their drift, had a different coded aim—one most clearly and memorably expressed in the superimposition of images in the “Dark Waters” sequence of Belle of the Nineties.
And in life the same license carried over into her long-term association with chauffeur Chalky White—not perhaps a gesture likely to be saluted by contemporary black theorists as a valiant championing of sexual and ethical relativism and the utility of a multicultural perspective, but one nevertheless on record—whatever the motivational mix involved.
Ultimately more philosophical than political (she resisted the emulous), Mae was indeed deeply reflective, intensely spiritual. Parker Tyler’s idea of her—the reconciliation in one body of the gay son and his gaily painted all-forgiving mother—is one not incompatible with the long-sought vision of a conciliation between idealistic and materialist conceptions of reality that has characterized the oblique agony of Western philosophy.
She both sought and afforded more than mere approval. The extra dimension in the West turn is exemplified by the held frame, the rolled eyes, the strut and the few seconds of distracted absorption that follow, elaborated and, in its depiction of affect, agogic.
Mae’s slow-motion involuntariness acts as the counterpoint to her announced program, which is not only voluntary but willful. She talks one line but enacts another, deeper one, hypnotizing her men by suggesting the state of being hypnotized—a Trilby to her own Svengali—or as if the things she is saying are things she’s just thought of. Such discontinuity is evident in all her work, at first disconcerting but eventually comforting in its implicit intention: the indication of the primacy of reflective meditation over the immediate (and relentless) positing of the subject (a.k.a. the capacity to resist paranoia and to exorcise pathic narcissism).
So, when she speaks of “sex truth,” she is sidestepping the question of whether sex and truth are or are not commensurable: what she is declaring in no uncertain terms is that sex truth and other truth are best described as two tenants with time shares in the same atelier: truth works the days, sex truth works the night shift. As experienced by the viewer—and seen correctly as Mae returning the viewer’s gaze—Mae’s commentary (on Mae) is, again, like looking into the mirror and, instead of being convinced, having the image in the mirror take life from the speculation. More than mere approval, the plethoric quality of the Mae West take—the held frame, the rolled eyes, the split second of mystical absorption—soon take on the physical (optical) sensation of simultaneity, and therefore the mental (and spiritual) sensation of eternity, a grace like the contemplation of the Christian saints and of Zen, which prompts further contemplation.
Or, as Mae herself would have put it, “Beulah, peel me a Muscat grape: its aroma, at once mordant and fugitive, assists spiritualization by its evanescence. Yeah.” She called it being in contact with “the Forces” and considered neither the activity nor the aptitude esoteric. In an interview toward the end of her life she avowed, “I’ve usually been able to figure things out for myself; once in a while I get into trouble, and then I ask Grace Moore.”
Mae’s effect on formal religion—and particularly on California Orphism—is not to be underrated. Los Angeles was the launching pad not only of the delirium of pictures but also of Aimee Semple McPherson, whose evangelical vaudeville echoes down the ages—in Hollywood each decade is an age—to psychics and channelers all along Melrose Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard.
Mae West was the temple prostitute not of any neo-Babylonian Ishtar but of the Temple of Liberty and Reason—as Mary Magdalen had been the vestal neo-virgin of the Temple of the Body of Christ.
Mae’s mission was the reintegration of the denatured motion-pictured woman. Going better than the vaudeville magicians’ sawing women in half, motion picture directors succeeded in cutting them into pieces—closeups, medium shots—long shots—and even leaving bits of them on the famous cutting-room floor—the conceptual flip side of the casting couch. The brilliant thesis of French feminist Catherine Clément’s L’Opéra, ou La Défait des Femmes has nothing on the mass anxiety and schadenfreude that male audiences experience seeing their mothers and sisters hacked to bits.
Thus, Mae’s rendition of Delilah’s “Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix” in Goin’ To Town reminds us that just as Saint-Saëns was an astringent classicist, so the key to her own aesthetic is reconstitutive vigor, as the signal gesture of her walking whole into the frame, doing her turn and, whole again, walking out is each time an entry into Jerusalem, a passion, a death and a resurrection.
And anybody who doubts this religion’s hold on America is as great as that of Isis, Osiris and Company’s on ancient Egypt—or that the motion picture is the return of that hieroglyphic text that once ran the length of the Nile—isn’t, as Mae might have said, playing the schoolmarm in My Little Chickadee, payin’ attention.
Mae’s originality is of a different type from the originators; its quality is that of the reiterative that denotes a kind of otherness that is perceived not as the result of comparison but as constitutive of selfhood as such—and as in the artistic output generally characteristic of New York/Hollywood, it draws to itself what culture has rejected as derelict and beat up, nurses it and urges it between rounds back into the ring—with the important difference that while it similarly both posits and negates the phantasmagoria of a transcendent landscape, it does so not by salvaging nothing but the transcendence of yearning but, conversely, by pitching and affirming the joy—the kick—of immanent satisfaction.
Hence the chaotic embrasure of her art—and Mae is the self-similarity of chaotics: its waxing-waning inconsistency. Many characters in the first act of The Drag—which, if ever unearthed from the Library of Congress and produced, might well prove as tenable and disturbing as Büchner’s Woyzeck and Wedekind’s Erdgeist—don’t show up in the second; when taxed for explanation, she snapped, “I dunno; maybe they’re busy.”
That said, the ode outright is less interesting than the ode incorporating the palinode (carnival’s requisite inversion), and the livid, murky or glaring light her deviousness casts on the societal arrangements surrounding her cavorts prevents those arrangements from being taken for granted.
She allied herself instinctively with the Surrealists (and was duly memorialized by Dali), according to Walter Benjamin the first whose “profane illuminations liquidated the sclerotic liberal-moralistic humanistic idea of freedom.” But rather than succumbing to the temptation of becoming her own mirage, as the Surrealists did theirs, she became entirely her own reality. She stands, also, with Brecht—proletarian goddess that she was (got up as the Statue of Liberty) and fielded by the proletariat not merely to enshrine its desires but to fulfill them, not to embody its world-view but to promote it, not to embellish circumstances but to alter them. But only up to a point: her association with the notorious red-haired gangster Owney Madden made her only too familiar both with real liquidation and with the real character of the hoodlums Brecht sentimentalized, and she declined after all to accommodate herself to the constructive dictatorial side of revolution.
Meanwhile, although costumed as Lady Liberty, Mae bore a stronger resemblance to Adolph Weinman’s “Civic Fame” (1914) atop New York’s Municipal Building (restored and regilded in the year of her centenary) and for many years reigned supreme as New York’s most renowned (and, after a brief stint in jail on Welfare Island, most notorious) performing woman. And she knew, as they say, both ends of the job—although increasingly she came to feel, despite protestations to the contrary, like Lola Montez (Eliza Gilbert, another girl buried in Brooklyn) and again, like Horace, “odd, worn out by being gawked at, in the street, in the theater . . . tired of providing, with strenuous effort that must look lighter than a breeze on a still pond, what people took to be mere diversion” (W.R. Johnson). Thus her attachment to “The Forces.”
Yet she remained the woman of the people. In She Done Him Wrong, she marries the cop, and in Belle of the Nineties, she marries, against the odds, the prizefighter, having restored her honor by restitution to the rich guy she unwittingly fleeced (and with whom, in a more romantic vein, she would have tied the knot). Even when, at the end of Goin’ To Town, she marrries the Earl of Strattan, it is not as a society dame but as a real broad that she does so, thus implicitly expanding horizons for any number of industrious working girls.
The reversal, like the restitution, is fundamentally Oedipal. Mae had to fix it up for her father, the battling Jack West, just as in life, when she could have had any number of the consuls of New York and later Hollywood, she always kept the company of the gladiator, always threw her lot in with the anonymous pug.
Mae’s comedy cannot be explained as a continuation of the Anglo-American satirical tradition. Americans inherited from the British a great fondness for making fun of other’s weaknesses, as at the Algonquin Round Table. Far more commandingly singular and representative is Mae sitting alone on her big white couch in Hollywood than were the overpublicized cavortings of a whole gang of her artistic inferiors slouched drunk in Manhattan. Immeasurably greater her donation than for example that of the odious Robert Benchley, who so despised her in Sex and whose opinions, like his short and terrible forays into motion pictures, exist merely as splenetive footnotes to others’ careers.
Mae, like the Jews who scrambled and redefined American comedy as shtick, took camp out of the homosexual shadows where it had been tended by such geniuses of the New York Tenderloin Rialto as Julian Eltinge, Bert Errol and Bert Savoy, and Mae’s exact contemporary, the eternal flame of the British pantomime, the great Douglas Byng (1893–1987). She brought Camp into the light of the silver screen, introducing the delicate side of vampirism, sadomasochism, paranoia and necrophilia, while James Whale, Tod Browning, Lon Chaney and Bela Lugosi were scaring audiences to death.
As the glory of Mae’s comedy works through Camp to the transcendence of Camp, so her serious transports move past the edge of dullness to the realm of the Companionate Sublime, entirely rejecting in the process the orderly substantive claims of sociological fiat, technical or formal reason, protocol statements and determinisms of such knights errant as Weber and Durkheim, Russell and Carnap, Weber and Fields.
Philosophically she is like Wittgenstein: the clue, her assumption, rather than her arrogation, of the axiom “I am the case.” Not so much hard to understand as a day’s work to keep track of, busier than the missing characters from The Drag, rejecting the whole of twentieth-century positivism derived from the Enlightenment, especially its social engineering, which she correctly saw as a system of pseudo-ethics that, while claiming to put forth great promises, succeeded only in fielding dire threats.
(Mae did not believe in eugenics either, although she could be existentially severe when sizing up specimens. “That guy’s no good,” snaps Cleo Borden in Goin’ To Town; “his mother shoulda thrown him away and kept the stork!” And as a phenomenon neither repeatable nor divisible without alteration, she would have abhorred cloning, as she did those female impersonators who, not content with simply offering tribute by working encoded references to her philosophy and fair-use employment of her accent and gestures into their routines, crossed the line and tried to reincarnate her character while its originator was still alive and holding forth.)
Both psychologically and aesthetically, she is more like Racine than has heretofore been appreciated, and her strategies employ something very like the Racinian room: all formal negotiation proceeds from and returns to what in French theater is known as the comedienne’s loge. And when she leaves it, it is the world of the boudoir that spills out into the streets—archetypically, the Bowery, characterized by Whitman as the place of all places where popular enthusiasm is felt “bursting forth in those long-kept-up tempests of handclapping: electric force and muscle from perhaps two thousand full-sinewed men.” Not, clearly, the bourgeois room that shuts the street out.
Mae West is not the great comedienne she is by virtue of kidding sex. Lyda Roberti did that just as well, as Mata Machree in Million Dollar Legs, and the vamps Mae vamped—Valeska Suratt, Pola Negri, Theda Bara—and even the great tragediennes Jeanne Eagels (the mercurial “Duse of the Midway”) and Alla Nazimova as often as not got astonished laughs as they did gasps of sympathy. She is great by virtue (and how she would have raised an eyebrow over that particular term) of her uncanny ability to assimilate an entire range of shtick sedimented in the history of late-nineteenth-century Anglo-American show business (with French farce asides) and accreting from the work of her now-forgotten contemporaries, and of not enclosing herself in comedy at the expense of melodrama.
For it is also essential for an understanding of her art to remember her early appearance as Little Willy in the definitive Victorian melodrama, East Lynne: as she lay there center stage listening to a Brooklyn audience racked with sobbing at the immortal words “Dead—and never called me mother!” she learned the essential lesson of communicative pathos.
As stipulated, Mae West’s aim was to disarm—to neutralize aggression. The voir-dire delay tactic in She Done Him Wrong (“Why don’t-cha come up some time . . . see me”) bespeaks an ability shared to the same degree by only one other comic genius I know of: Jack Benny, as in the immortal, “Your money or your life.” “I’m thinking . . . I’m thinking!” Both adhere to the summation in Schelling’s “Answer to Armed Robbery” from The Strategy of Conflict. “And making myself irrational is the best way to reduce the risk that this man will kill us all.”
But she did not only disarm archetypal male phallic aggression. As important, perhaps more so, she refused, as Carl Jung would have put it (in that selfsame era in which the spurious aura of his now extinct phronesis back-lit, or shadowed, every public stance), to be devoured by her archetype, Entertainment, as those other daring and dazzlingly famous proponents of heavy-give, Jeanne Eagels, Jean Harlow, Mae’s adoring Paramount colleague Marlene Dietrich and, finally, the apocalyptic Marilyn Monroe, were by theirs. Mae, doubtless instructed by her Guardians, frankly and fearlessly sidled right up to her archetype and said, “Hello, dearie, how are ya?” And that was the happy turning of that terribly dangerous corner.
As surely as do Aristophanes, Molière and Oscar Wilde, Mae West belongs in the Western canon. Her name alone would demand it, did not the magniloquent benevolence and attested prodigal generosity of her art and her life make her beyond dispute the finest American comedic metabolist who ever walked the streets.
Thus, progressing through the orders of 1930s Depression-relief comedy, from the angelic (Jean Arthur) and archangelic (Irene Dunne) through the seraphic (Gracie Allen) we come to the highest, most urgent messengers: Dominations, Powers and Thrones: W.C. Fields, Jack Benny and Mae West. Mae, being of a speculative turn of mind, might well agree with Spinoza that, considered from the point of view of the order of Nature, it is equally possible that a certain man exists or does not exist—she would think of it, say, in terms of a muscle-man casting call—but considered from the point of view of the order of art, the existence of Mae West, as ordained by Mary Jane West, would not be up for questioning.
Even so, her oeuvre, though polysemous, never sends out mixed messages. What it does—to amend somewhat further Adorno’s comments on Mahler—is sabotage the established language of comedy-melodrama with dialect, encoding a cryptogram composed of warning signs (“Men Thinking of Working”) of the progress that hasn’t yet begun and the regression that cannot really mistake itself for origins. It too repels a synthesis; its manner resists fusion, implacably opposing the illusory reconciliation of antagonistic elements—a consequence never of inadequacy, but of the embodiment of a content that refuses to be dissolved in form.
Mae’s strut, as Adorno said of Mahler’s symphonic movements, creates energized wakes that are “streams on which is borne whatever is caught in them, yet without its particularity being entirely absorbed.” Likewise they hasten “to succor an ego-enfeebled humanity incapable of autonomy or synthesis”.
Affects are archaic discharge syndromes which replace voluntary action. And what defines tragedy, comedy and melodrama are the gradations in the registers of the voracity of the three drives, sex, aggression and death.
Tragedy:aggression::comedy:sex::melodrama:death.
There is perhaps a point to be made regarding Mae West in relation to Parker Tyler’s theoretical proposition of the drag queen as the reconciliation in one body of the gay son and his gaily painted all-forgiving mother, a reconciliation not incompatible with the long-sought vision of a conciliation between idealistic and materialist conceptions of reality that has characterized the oblique agony of Western philosophy.
Thus in writing about her, one is tempted to forgo contexts and simply elaborate, in imitation of her art. (Taking a leaf from Bakhtin, the fellow celebrant of carnival, we are sparing in our study with “the superfluous ballast of citations and references—for the qualified reader they are unnecessary, and for the unqualified unnecessary.”) As assiduous in covering her tracks as she was in blazing the trail, Mae would have wanted it that way.