Mary Jane West (August 17, 1893 – November 22, 1980), known as Mae West, was an American actress, singer, comedian, screenwriter, and playwright. Recognized as a prominent sex symbol of her time, she was known for portraying sexually confident characters and for her use of double entendres, often delivering her lines in a distinctive contralto voice. With a career spanning more than seven decades, she was frequently associated with controversies over censorship and once stated, "I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it." West is listed as one of the top 25 female movie stars of all time in the American Film Institute's survey AFI's 100 Years...100 Stars. For her contribution to the motion picture industry, she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
West began performing in vaudeville and on stage in New York before moving on to film in Los Angeles. By 1933, she was one of the largest box-office draws in the U.S. and, by 1935, she was also the highest paid woman and the second-highest paid person in the U.S. (after William Randolph Hearst). Censorship had increasingly made West's sexually suggestive humor difficult to sustain on screen. She was included in the "Box Office Poison" list published by the Independent Theatre Owners Association in 1938. Among her film credits include Night After Night (1932; her motion picture debut), She Done Him Wrong and I'm No Angel (both 1933), Belle of the Nineties (1934), Go West, Young Man (1936), My Little Chickadee (1940), The Heat's On (1943), and Myra Breckinridge (1970). As her movie career declined, she remained active by writing books and plays, performing in Las Vegas and London, and appearing on radio and television shows. In later years, West also released rock and roll records, including the studio albums Way Out West (1966) and Great Balls of Fire (1972). Her final film role was in the musical comedy Sextette (1978).
In August 1980, West tripped while getting out of bed, which contributed to her death three months later at age 87.
Mary Jane West was born on August 17, 1893, in either the Greenpoint or Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, before the consolidation of New York City. She was delivered at home by her aunt, a midwife.
She was the eldest surviving child of Mathilde Delker (originally "Doelger" and later Americanized to "Delker" or "Dilker") West, a corset and fashion model, and John Patrick "Battlin' Jack" West, a former prizefighter who later worked as a "special policeman" and founded a private investigation agency.
Her mother, known as "Tillie" or "Matilda", was a German immigrant from Bavaria, who arrived in 1886 with her siblings and parents, Christiana (née Brüning) and Jakob Doelger. West's paternal grandmother, Mary Jane (née Copley), was of Irish descent, and her paternal grandfather, John Edwin West, was of English and Scottish ancestry.
Her parents married in Brooklyn on January 18, 1889. According to reports, the groom's parents approved of the union, while the bride's family opposed it. They raised their children in the Protestant faith.
West's eldest sister, Katie, died in infancy. Her surviving siblings were Mildred Katherine "Beverly" West and John Edwin West II (often incorrectly referred to as "Jr."). During her childhood, the family lived in various areas of Woodhaven, Queens and the Williamsburg and Greenpoint neighborhoods of Brooklyn.
West may have first performed publicly at Neir's Social Hall in Woodhaven.
West was five when she first entertained a crowd at a church social, and she began appearing in amateur shows at the age of seven. She frequently won prizes at local talent contests. She began performing professionally in vaudeville in the Hal Clarendon Stock Company in 1907, at the age of 14. As a child performer, West used the stage name "Baby Mae" (the baby may behave like this), and later tried various personas, including a male impersonator.
Early in her career, she sometimes used the alias "Jane Mast". Her distinctive walk was said to have been inspired or influenced by female impersonators Bert Savoy and Julian Eltinge, who were prominent during the Pansy Craze.
West made her first appearance in a Broadway show in 1911, at age 18, in a revue titled A La Broadway staged by her former dancing teacher, Ned Wayburn. The show closed after only eight performances, but West was praised in a New York Times review, which noted that "a girl named Mae West, hitherto unknown, pleased by her grotesquerie and snappy way of singing and dancing". She next appeared in Vera Violetta, which also featured Al Jolson, and in 1912, she played La Petite Daffy, a "baby vamp", in A Winsome Widow.
West continued to build her career in vaudeville, appearing in circuits such as that run by Gus Sun of Ohio. She credited her mother as a constant supporter who believed everything Mae did was "fantastic", though other family members—including an aunt and her paternal grandmother—disapproved of her performing career. In 1918, West gained significant attention in the Shubert Brothers revue Sometime, starring opposite Ed Wynn. Her character, Mayme, danced the shimmy, and her photograph was featured on the sheet music for the popular number "Ev'rybody Shimmies Now".
Eventually, West began writing her own risqué plays using the pen name Jane Mast. Her first starring role on Broadway was in the 1926 play Sex, which she wrote, produced, and directed. Although conservative critics panned the show, ticket sales were strong. The production did not go over well with city officials, who had received complaints from religious groups, and the theater was raided and West arrested along with the cast. She was taken to the Jefferson Market Court House, where she was prosecuted on morals charges, and on April 19, 1927, she was sentenced to 10 days for "corrupting the morals of youth". Though West could have paid a fine and been released, she chose the jail sentence for the publicity it would garner. While incarcerated on Welfare Island, she dined with the warden and his wife and told reporters she had worn her silk panties while serving time, instead of the "burlap" issued to other inmates. She served eight days, with two days off for good behavior, and afterward told reporters that her play was "a work of art". Media attention surrounding the incident enhanced her career, with reporters dubbing her a "bad girl" who "had climbed the ladder of success wrong by wrong".
Her next play, The Drag, dealt with homosexuality and was what West called one of her "comedy-dramas of life". After a series of try-outs in Connecticut and New Jersey, West announced she would open the play in New York. However, The Drag never opened on Broadway, owing to efforts by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice to ban any attempt by West to stage it. West explained, "The city fathers begged me not to bring the show to New York because they were not equipped to handle the commotion it would cause." West was an early supporter of the women's liberation movement, though she said she was not a "burn your bra" type of feminist. Since the 1920s, she also supported gay rights and spoke publicly against police brutality toward gay men. She expressed the then-modern belief that gay men were women's souls in men's bodies, and said that hitting a gay man was akin to hitting a woman.
In her 1959 autobiography, Goodness Had Nothing to Do With It, ghostwritten by Stephen Longstreet, West condemned hypocrisy while also voicing concerns about homosexuality:
I have always hated the two-faced, the smoother-over folk — the people who preach loudly one way of life, and then do something in private that they're against in public. In many ways homosexuality is a danger to the entire social system of western civilization...
This perspective seems at odds with her later statements, such as in her 1975 book Mae West: Sex, Health, and ESP, in which she wrote: