In 1927, actress Mae West wrote and starred in a play titled SEX. Guess what it was about! The risqué production launched her to stardom on Broadway—and then into a jail cell.
Above: Mae West on a Swan Bed, a 1928 publicity still for her play Diamond Lil. (Image courtesy of The New York Public Library.)
SHOW NOTES
Publicity portrait of Mae West as published in the trade publication, Variety (Christmas, 1914). In her early career, West was a popular vaudeville performer. She enjoyed some degree of national recognition even before her career took off in the 1920s. (Image courtesy of The New York Public Library.)
For decades the Hyperion Theater in New Haven, CT was the place Broadway producers would go to try out new productions. West inadvertently caused a riot at the Hyperion when her performance gave rise to a misunderstanding in the middle of Vera Violeta. (Image Courtesy of Yale University Libraries.)
During the 1920s crusaders, spearheaded by The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, whipped up a moral panic about the alleged sexual deviance of the theater industry. Mae West became a convenient lightning rod for moral indignation in some quarters of the press, including this tabloid cover story. (Image courtesy of The New York Public Library.)
The arrest, trial, and 10-day sentence of Mae West attracted international press attention, including a lot of sympathetic coverage. New York City’s newspaper The Daily Worker published a photograph of West and her fellow cast members at their arraignment.
Mae West rode the tidal wave of publicity surrounding her arrest to become Broadway theater--and then Hollywood--Royalty. In this 1941 plan for a mural, artist John Decker depicts West (far right) in the elite company of silver screen legends such as Bob Hope, Greta Garbo, Shirley Temple, and Humphrey Bogart. (Image courtesy of The Library of Congress.)
Though she became a Hollywood megastar, West never forgot her origins on the New York stage. This undated photo of crowds in Times Square—snapped sometime during the 1940s-50s—shows the marquee for one of West’s post-Hollywood Broadway productions. (Image courtesy of the New York Historical Society.)
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
---Burns, Ric and James Sanders. New York: An Illustrated History. New York: Knopf, 1999.
---Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. New York: Basic Books, 1994.
---Homberger, Eric. The Historical Atlas of New York City: A Visual Celebration of 400 Years of New York City’s History. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998.
---Louvish, Simon. Mae West: It Ain’t No Sin. New York: St. Martin’s Press / Thomas Dunne Books, 2006.
---Wallace, Mike. Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898-1919. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
---Watts, Jill. Mae West: An Icon in Black and White. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
---West, Mae. Three Plays by Mae West. Edited by Lillian Schlissel. New York: Routledge, 1997.
TRANSCRIPT
Mae West never forgot the first time she saw a sex worker. It was in 1924, as she and a few friends were stuck in traffic in New York City. Running behind schedule, West asked her driver to take a shortcut along the waterfront. As the car inched forward, West spotted a woman with a sailor in each arm, strolling near the docks. She had bleached, frizzy hair, with “two big blotches of paint on her face—her lipstick was like she put it on 10 times and never washed it off.” Based on her outfit, West had no inkling of how this lady made her living. It just seemed to West like she mismanaged her money. On the one hand, her stockings were torn, and she wore a black satin gown that looked as if she had slept in it. On the other hand, however, she had an elegant turban wrapped around her head, adorned with a beautiful bird-of-paradise feather, an expensive accessory. “You wonder this dame wouldn’t put half a bird of paradise on her head and the rest of the money into a coat and stockings,” West commented.
“Oh, one of those sailors smuggled it in for her,” a friend of hers speculated. “She gets fifty cents [per trick]. A dollar, two at the most.” That’s when it hit West: the woman was a prostitute, and the sailors were johns. One had rewarded her services with a bird-of-paradise.
West was indignant. She knew that women sold sex, sure, but she had never imagined that a client might pay as little as fifty cents. “I kept thinking, ‘Fifty cents? How many guys would she have to have to pay her rent, buy her food?’” That night, West dreamed of the blonde and woke up thinking about her. It was not long before the actress made up her mind to write a play about a downtrodden sex worker like the one she had seen and play the role herself. By early 1926, she had finished the project. She titled it SEX, with all capital letters, and it launched her to stardom on the Broadway stage. But there was a catch: it also launched her straight into a jail cell.
In the 1930s and ’40s, movie star Mae West became an international sex symbol, the embodiment of unabashed—even brazen—female sexuality. Part of it was how she looked. West was a bombshell by every measure—blond-haired, bosomy, and curvy as they come. Part of it was how she walked. Her gait exuded seductive self-confidence, her eyes straight ahead and her hips and shoulders swaying as if to say, “You like what you see, and I know it.” And part of it was how she talked. Endlessly quotable, she fired off a one-liner faster than a Tommy gun. Her most delicious witticisms tended to be bawdy and often gave expression to her own love of lovemaking. Some are pretty edgy even by today’s standards. This, after all, was the woman who told the world, “A hard man is good to find.” By voicing her desires and exploiting those of others with such easy openness, West flouted expectations about how American women were supposed to behave.
But West had made a career of irresistible misbehavior well before she went to Hollywood. She achieved fame as a sexually provocative playwright and performer at a time when the New York authorities were cracking down on theater they considered obscene. Today, we’ll hear how West courted controversy in vaudeville, scored a hit with SEX, and then went to prison after refusing to shut down the play. This is The Art of Crime, and I’m your host, Gavin Whitehead. Welcome to episode 5 of Crimes of Old New York . . .
Mae West Goes to Jail
Destined for Show Business
Born in Brooklyn on August 17, 1893, Mae West took her first steps toward a career in show business at an early age. When she was just seven, her mother, Tillie, enrolled her in dance classes. Mae showed such inherent ability as a dancer that her instructor entered her in an amateur contest at Brooklyn’s Royal Theatre. The term “amateur contest” might make it sound like a low-stakes affair, but that was far from the truth. The winner went home with a handy cash prize, and the audiences were brutal when a new act flopped—they booed, heckled, and even pelted greenhorns with eggs if the mood struck them. Child performers were not exempted. Perfectly aware of what could happen if she bombed, West rehearsed a selection of popular songs along with a dance routine, adopting the stage name of Baby Mae. Attired in a green-and-pink satin dress with golden spangles, “Baby Mae epitomized Victorian innocence and sentimentality,” in the words of West biographer Jill Watts. She also epitomized fearlessness, a trait that would stay with her into adulthood as she shed the trappings of cuteness and chastity. When the master of ceremonies introduced her, West later recollected, the spotlight swiveled from the far side of the stage to the center: “When I saw it comin’ for me, I ran to meet it, not a bit scared.” Baby Mae more than proved herself to the tough critics in the house; she came in first place, clinching not just a shiny gold medal but also a cash prize of ten dollars—a veritable jackpot in the eyes of a seven-year-old.
Over the next few years, Mae competed in more talent shows and often took first prize. Soon, her continued success had convinced her mother and father that she could make a living in vaudeville. Before, Mae had led a typical girlhood, playing with dolls and attending public school (though her father Jack, a former pugilist, also taught her how to fight). Now, Mae and her mother pursued her career with unfailing determination, and her attendance at school became sporadic. West later described this stage of her career as “hard days of work and more work, when I practiced dancing and singing until my feet ached and my throat felt as though I had been massaged with a marlin spike.” Apart from singing and dancing, she excelled at mimicry, imitating the mannerisms and voices of acclaimed male performers like dancer George M. Cohan and comedian Eddie Foy.
On September 22, 1911, at the age of eighteen, West made her Broadway debut, landing a spot in a musical revue titled A La Broadway, a garish extravaganza that was billed as “a satirical burlesque on all musical comedies." Throughout the production, individual cast members would take turns singing solos in between larger choral numbers. West was to croon a ballad called “They Are Irish,” in the character of a flip Irish maid named Maggie O’Hara. West made certain that her act would stand out, rewriting and enlarging the ditty without bothering to mention these alterations to her collaborators. On opening night, she belted “They Are Irish” with the heavy brogue she had worked up for the occasion. But instead of stopping where she was supposed to, she sang an additional nine choruses, each in a different dialect and each more risqué than the one that came before. West had taken a big risk with this stunt, and the rewards were enormous. The audience thundered with applause, calling her back to the stage for multiple encores. Considering the success of her first turn on the Great White Way, it must have disappointed West when A La Broadway folded after just eight performances.
Lucky for her, entertainment tycoons Lee and J.J. Shubert were in the audience opening night. Bowled over by her number, they cast her in Vera Violeta, a variety show. It was conceived as a vehicle for the Parisian Gaby Deslys, a music hall megastar and a diva’s diva, peerlessly beautiful and no less tempestuous. She bewitched audiences with her melodious voice, revealing costumes, and over-the-top headdresses, the more feathers the better. So great was Deslys’ internation fame that she negotiated a weekly salary of $4,000 on tour in the U.S., more than $130,000 in today’s currency. She spent her fortune on all manner of luxuries and oddities—emeralds, diamonds, pearls, and pet marmosets. Writer Cecil Beaton opined that she “realized the value of overdoing everything.” West admired Deslys’ glamor, but part of her thought somebody should take this puffed-up peacock down a peg or two.
West herself would do so during the second performance of Vera Violeta. When a new show opened at this point in history, it was common to schedule a trial run outside New York—often in Connecticut or New Jersey—before taking the production to Broadway. Along these lines, the Shubert brothers booked the Hyperion Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut for November 17 and 18. The first performance went off swimmingly, but the problems started early the next morning. Several locals complained to police that Vera Violeta was “vulgar and suggestive.” Law enforcement turned up at the Hyperion and ordered management to shut down the show. The manager persuaded them to keep the revue open, under two conditions. First, the creative team would excise any offensive content. Second, police officers would attend the performance and arrest anyone engaging in indecent behavior. With too little time to make strategic cuts, management eliminated all dialogue, leaving only the musical numbers and drastically shortening the runtime. In this new iteration, Gaby Deslys would go on last.
That night, the audience consisted largely of drunken football fans who had come from a game between Princeton and hometown favorite Yale. Not only were they drunk, but they were also ornery because Yale had lost to Princeton in an upset. Nevertheless, once the show started, everyone had a splendid time, especially when Gaby Deslys made her entrance, sporting one of her trademark, look-at-me headdresses. Enraptured, spectators “clapped, ranted, and practically stood on their seats.” What they did not realize was that they were not clapping for Deslys at all. In actual fact, they were cheering Mae West. Making use of her talents as a mimic, West was imitating the grandiose Deslys. West sang a set of impromptu songs and brought down the house before making her exit. A short time later, the real Deslys glided onstage, fully expecting deafening applause. Instead, spectators looked at one another in bewilderment. Hadn’t Deslys already come on? Furious over the tepid reception, Deslys finished and stormed off to her dressing room.
The show was over. But because of the cuts that management made, it had concluded much earlier than expected. The crowd felt entitled to at least another hour of entertainment. Drunk from the football game and baffled by the mystery of the Deslys doppelganger, they grew angry as the orchestra packed up and left their seats. Audience members called for the manager, demanding an explanation. When one never came, all hell broke loose. Yale students leapt onto the stage and ripped down curtains while others tossed chairs out of the boxes onto the floor. In a desperate attempt to restore order, members of the crew rushed onstage and blasted the rioters with fire hoses. According to one witness, women charged into the fracas, infuriated at having their gowns ruined by the spray. Finally, Hyperion personnel drove the rabblerousers out into the streets, but the rampage continued, with the mob throwing stones, breaking windows, and defacing the Hyperion’s sign. By the time the uprising had finally subsided, the theater had sustained more than $1,000 in property damage. As far as I can gather, nobody was seriously injured in the mayhem.
West had stolen the show, but the coup came with consequences. Deslys pitched a fit about getting upstaged, and the Shuberts panicked. They had invested heavily in the production, and it would spell disaster if Deslys quit. Even members of the press were frustrated with West’s antics. The Hyperion fiasco remained a topic of debate for weeks, and many disagreed as to who should bear the blame—the police, the public, or both. Bat a writer for Variety held West at least partly responsible for the chaos: “It is said that May [sic] was right in the middle of that fray, if she did not start it.” Around this time, the same publication announced that West would be leaving the cast of Vera Violeta, owing to a nasty bout of pneumonia. West may have genuinely fallen ill, but it’s also possible that the Shuberts booted her and provided a cover as a professional courtesy. Whatever the case, the Hyperion riot made one thing clear: West was happy to misbehave if it made her the center of attention. It brings to mind a famous line of hers in the 1933 talkie, I’m No Angel, purred with impish self-awareness by West: “When I’m good I’m very good, but when I’m bad I’m better.”
Back to Broadway
It would take seven years for West to make it back to Broadway. In the meantime, she traveled the vaudeville circuits, performing through the northeast and Midwest. While in Chicago, she came across an art form that would lead to her next break. Her visit to the Windy City coincided with the Great Migration, during which hundreds of thousands of Black Americans left the South for northern states, partly to escape violent racial hatred and partly to pursue economic opportunities. Black men and women poured into Chicago, bringing artistic and musical traditions with them. West had always admired Black culture and held progressive views on race by the standards of the early twentieth century. (West indicated later that she identified with Black Americans because she, as a woman, shared a marginalized status with them, among other minorities: “I thought white men had it their own way too long and should stop exploiting women and blacks and gays.”) Hopping around nightclubs in Chicago, West fell in love with three Black art forms that she appropriated for her act: jazz music, blues singing, and finally the shimmy, a dance that scholars trace back to West Africa. One night, West and some friends went to The Elite No. 1, a nightspot in the middle of the Black entertainment district in Chicago’s South Side. There, she watched, mesmerized, as couples did the shimmy. Writing about it later, West provides an apt description of the dance: “They got up from the tables, got out to the dance floor, and stood in one spot with hardly any movement of the feet, just shook their shoulders, torsos, breasts, and pelvises.” The shimmy was sexy but also kind of silly. “For Mae West,” Watts writes, “the shimmy proved irresistible; it was both serious and funny, underscoring and parodying sexuality.” (If you’ve listened to this podcast for a while now and have an absurdly good memory, you might remember that another artist we’ve talked about also loved the shimmy, Otto Dix, the German painter who was implicated in an attempt to assassinate Hitler. If you haven’t already, you should go back and listen to that episode.)
West touched off a shimmy sensation in 1918 when she performed it on Broadway. She did the dance in a show called Sometime, backed by the Shuberts, who apparently decided to give her a second chance. Previously ruled too raunchy for Broadway, the shimmy had never before been seen there. Suddenly, the dance was all over Manhattan, and West was credited with setting the trend. She even appeared with springy curls and a giant black hat on the cover of the sheet music for a song entitled “Everyone Shimmies Now.”
When Sometime closed, West could not find another job on Broadway. She went back to vaudeville, billing herself as “Shimadonna” and “The Girl Who Made the Shimmy a Classic.” She made ends meet, but years went by without another big break. Twice now West had appeared on Broadway and come tantalizingly close to stardom. Now, as a traveling vaudevillian, she frequented the boonies of the entertainment world, and her name often appeared toward the bottom of the bill. Many in her position would have thronw in the towel.
SEX With Mae West
But then, in 1924, West caught sight of her waterfront muse, the sex worker strolling with a couple of sailors. The actress had been casting about for a play that could serve as a vehicle for her Broadway comeback—something bold, something gritty—and it was her belief that an unflinching inquiry into the struggles of a prostitute was just what she needed. By now, West was dating the flamboyant entertainment and real estate attorney, James Timony, who doubled as West’s lover and unofficial manager. A client of Timony’s, John J. Byrne, heard through the grapevine that the aspiring dramatist was at work on a play about a lady of the night. Byrne drafted a sketch titled Following the Fleet, a breezy little play about a sex worker whose clientele mainly consists of sailors. He offered to sell Timony the rights to the script, pitching it as a way of spurring West’s imagination. Impressed by the outline, Timony shelled out $300 and charged the author $100 for acting as his agent.
In December 1925, West fleshed out the skeletal narrative in Byrne’s script. She poured every ounce of herself into the project, scribbling ideas on stationary, envelopes, and tattered paper bags before forwarding them to Timony’s secretaries to be transcribed. West overflowed with characters, dialogue, and scenarios, but she lacked the focus to sit down and synthesize them into a coherent script. Timony took to locking her in a room and refusing to let her out until she made progress. Thanks to Timony’s tough love, West soon drafted a three-act play that combined the genres of comedy and drama, titling it The Albatross and assuming the nom-de-plume, Jane Mast. (“Jane” was her middle name, while “Mast” merged the first two letters of “Mae” and the last two of “West.”)
The Albatross revolves around the meretricious exploits of Margy LaMont, a Montreal prostitute who works for a wicked pimp named Rocky and lives in a dumpy apartment on Caidoux Street, in the heart of the city’s notorious red light district. One day, Margy comes home to find a woman she’s never even met overdosing on drugs. The stranger, it turns out, is a moneyed American called Clara, who is engaged in an activity that was popular among the rich at this time, “slumming.” Basically, you ventured to a rough part of town as if going on safari—to gawk at real, live poor people in their natural habitat. Clara gets more than the cheap thrills she bargained for when Rocky, her tour guide, plies her with enough drugs to incapacitate a giraffe and leaves her for dead. Acting fast, Margy rescues Clara from certain death only for the vacationer to accuse Margy of trying to steal her jewelry when a policeman shows up. Margy swears to exact revenge. When we next see Margy, she has left Montreal for Trinidad, accompanied by a British sailor named Gregg, a regular customer who has fallen in love with her. Margy is in the hopping Café Port au Prince, thrumming with jazz musicians and dancers. She charms the regulars with husky-voiced blues ballads and drool-inducing shimmies. It’s not long before she wins the affections of Jimmy Stanton, a good-natured bachelor and the son of a millionaire. Jimmy makes a mistake that is not uncommon for a guy form his set: he takes Margy for a fabulously wealthy, traveling heiress and proposes marriage. Margy says yes, leaving poor Gregg to pine for her in Trinidad while she follows her fiancé to his family home in Connecticut. Multiple storylines crash into each other in a towering pileup. Plot twist: Jimmy’s mother is Clara, and she threatens to expose Margy as a prostitute. Plot twist: Rocky barges in and threatens to expose Clara as a thrill-seeking drug user. Plot twist: Margy intervenes, prevents catastrophe, comes clean to Jimmy about her past in sex work, decides she’s sick and tired of all these WASP-y rich bitches, and elopes to Australia with Gregg on the last page. Yeah, it’s a lot.
Viewed at a distance, The Albatross might appear daring. It confronts illicit activity that many would prefer to ignore like prostitution. But examined up-close, the script is pretty tame in its discussion of sex. At its raunchiest, it goes no farther than innuendo. Take this exchange between Margy and Gregg. His fleet has just landed in Montreal, and he comes bearing a special surprise for his beloved.
GREGG: Oh, I’ve got something for you. Wait until you see this, wait until you see this.
MARGY: Well, come on.
GREGG: You’ll get it, you’ll get it. I don’t mind telling you I had an awful time saving it for you. Why all the women were fighting for it.
MARGY: It’d better be good.
GREGG: It’s good alright. It’s the best you could get, but you’ve got to be very careful
not to bend it.
Then, he whips it out: his impressively proportioned . . . bird of paradise, a souvenir he purchased while overseas. The giving of Gregg’s gift is amusing, even on the page. It’s also notable for harking back to the dockside sex worker and the feathery recompense she had received from her customer.
What was daring was the way West asked the audience to sympathize with Margy while also applauding her exploitation of men. In a fierce monologue, the heroine declares, “Why ever since I’ve been old enough to know Sex, I’ve looked at men as hunters. They’re filled with Sex. In the past few years, I’ve been chattel to the Sex. All the bad that’s in me has been put there by men. I began to hate every one of them, hated them, used them for what I could get out of them, and then laughed at them.” Far from a victim of rapacious male lust, Margy wields power over the men who take her to bed, manipulating their desires and mocking their cluelessness.
West and Timony fought an uphill battle in staging The Albatross. After several Broadway producers passed on the script, West and Timony were forced to finance much of the production themselves, supported by their acquaintance, C.W. Morgenstern. Broadway directors were just as allergic to The Albatross. Finally, West recruited Edward Elsner, a director without much in the way of talent or name recognition. Career-minded actors did not want a play about hard-boiled hookers and drug-addled WASPs on their résumés, nor could West and Timony offer competitive salaries. So rather than stud the cast with stars, West made do with a gaggle of nobodies. Booking a venue proved no less vexing than every other step in this agonizing process due to a a lack of funding on the part of the company as well as a lack of interest on the part of theater owners. Finally, West and Timony secured Daly’s Sixty-third Street Theatre, a humble playhouse that was willing to take a risk. With cast, crew, and venue lined up, The Albatross went into rehearsal.
On the night of the comedy-drama’s first public performance (a tryout at a theater in Connecticut), West made an attention-grabbing change to the script. During rehearsals, director Edward Elsner told his leading lady, “You have a quality—a strange amusing quality that I have never found in any of the other women. You have a definite sexual quality, gay and unrepressed.” True, Elsner barely knew how to direct a play, but he was onto something. West was unrestrainedly sexy, more so than just about any other mainstream performer. Why not embrace that? Just hours before curtain, West notified management that she was changing the title of the play. That night, the marquis was emblazoned with a three-lettered word that was far more likely to pull crowds than “The Albatross”: SEX. Results were more than encouraging, and West took heart. After so many setbacks, her play seemed destined for success on Broadway.
The New York premiere was set for April 26, 1926. Promotional posters dropped double entendres like “SEX with Mae West!” and trumpeted a “HUGE 100% HIT!” with “More laughs thrills and action than a flappers’ gin party.” Opening night arrived at last, and it did not go off without a hitch. A loud bang rang out from backstage in the middle of a scene, and a sound effect that went with the popping of a cork came several unignorable seconds too late. By all appearances, much of the audience would have had more fun at a flappers’ gin party. White some spectators whooped in approval at the highlights, others walked out midway through. By the beginning of Act III, quite a few seats were conspicuously empty.
In certain respects, early reviews were disappointing. Critics dismissed the writing amateurish at best and appalling at worst. The New Yorker called it, “a poor balderdash of street sweepings and cabaret sentimentality unexpurgated in tone.” Another reviewer considered it “as bad a play as these inquiring eyes have gazed upon in three seasons.”
But writing was one thing, acting quite another. And while the script lacked punch, West was an undeniable knockout as Margy. Playing up her sex appeal, she showed her legs at every opportunity, let her lips linger on those of her co-stars for passionate kisses, and danced a shimmy that exposed her midriff. This crossed a line in the eyes of some critics: “We were shown not sex but lust—stark naked lust,” one critic crowed. Yet others were salivating over what West was cooking. In what has to be one of the most ludicrous lines of dramatic criticism I have ever read (and I’ve read a lot), Variety’s Jack Conway hailed the star as “the Babe Ruth of stage prosties.” He lathers, “Mae’s conception of Margie LaMont [sic] will sentence her to the scarlet sisterhood artistically for life.” Lest that sound like a dubious distinction, Conway closes with a firm endorsement: “Grab a [look-see] and don’t forget to bring along your sweatshirt. You’ll need it.” By "sweatshirt," he means a shirt that absorbs sweat.
This was all kinda gross, no doubt about it, but it was the kind of publicity that boosted ticket sales. In truth, it didn’t matter whether critics were outraged or aroused by SEX—negative and positive reviews alike piqued New Yorkers’ curiosity. They flocked to Daly’s Theatre to feast their eyes on this home-run-hitting Hall-of-Fame “stage prosty.” Together, word of mouth, the hot-and-cold press coverage, and provocative advertising conspired to turn SEX into an unqualified hit. Within weeks of opening, it was generating profit, and its leading lady was the talk of the town.
The Dirt Plays
While West was basking in the warm glow of celebrity, New York’s moral crusaders were gearing up for a holy war. SEX was part of a broader phenomenon, a proliferation of so-called “Dirt Plays” on Broadway. Take The Shanghai Gesture, a 1925 drama by John Colton that tackled taboos like prostitution, miscegenation, and human-trafficking. It’s set in a Chinese brothel run by a madam named Go-Dam. At one point, a Japanese hedonist, Prince Oshima, pays for the company of the white Poppy, an English nymphomaniac of noble birth. Later, Poppy is auctioned off as a slave to a Chinese mariner. As a reviewer reported in Variety, this transaction moved the traumatized Madame God-Dam to recount “her life on the junk [a traditional Chinese vessel] where she had lived chained to the deck, tortured horribly to give her liveliness, and forced to suffer as many as 50 filthy men of all colors in one night.” The critic considered this “one of the most terrific [that is, horrifying] narratives ever heard on the American stage.” The Shanghai Gesture was followed by two more scandalous plays in the 1926-27 season. First, there was The Captive, adapted from a Proust novel about lesbianism, hailed as a deeply affecting drama by open-minded critics but rejected as smut by reactionary playgoers. Then came The Virgin Man, a more banal melodrama about a young Yale graduate who is tortured by temptation as one beautiful woman after another tries to seduce him.
The spate of Dirt Plays preoccupied critics as well as politicians, even causing concern in the halls of Congress. In February 1925, Representative Frederick Dallinger, a Republican of Massachusetts, demanded “an investigation as to what action was being taken by the District Commissioners to prevent the presentation of ‘improper’ plays.”
Leading the fight against Dirt Plays in New York was John Saxton Sumner, a puritanical lawyer who headed the Society for the Suppression of Vice. (As you might remember from a previous episode, the same organization investigated Stanford White at the behest of Harry Thaw.) The theater, Sumner believed, had enormous potential to corrupt the morals of the weak-minded and uneducated, and he made it his mission to stop that happening. Sumner contemplated recommending the appointment of a stage censor but dropped the idea, concerned that it would appear draconian. Instead, he proposed the introduction of a play jury. Empaneled by the district attorney, this body consisted of twelve New Yorkers whose charge it was to attend every play and vote on whether it met the standards of public morality. Plays could go forward as long as four jurors gave their approval. The proposal was accepted.
SEX only barely cleared the play jury. When Sumner went to watch it in April, along with his twelve jurors, he expected the worst. What he and his fellow moral guardians could not have known was that West had been tipped off about their visit. She had prepared two versions of SEX: one for the public, unbuttoned and unzipped, and another for the play jury, comparatively strait-laced. I wasn’t able to find specifics about how the sanitized SEX differed the dirtier rendition, but it’s easy to imagine that West she took measures like cutting kisses and other displays of affection from her stage business. Four votes were needed for the production to continue, and it received four. Disappointed yet determined to wipe Broadway clean of SEX, Sumner registered a complaint with the police, eventually condemning the play as “moral poison.” Much to his dismay, it would take more than a formal grievance to shut it down. For the rest of 1926, West kept right on shaking her hips and raking in money. We’ll hear how the legal tides turned against her after a quick break.
Gay New York
While SEX was still playing to full houses at Daly’s, West turned her mind to her next creative undertaking. This time, she took up another lightning-rod theme: homosexuality.
It’s no accident that West chose to write about gay culture when she did. In his seminal study, Gay New York, historian George Chauncey reveals that gay men achieved unprecedented visibility in New York during the 1920s. Prior to that decade, homosexuals had clustered on the margins of the city—the waterfront, the Bowery, Harlem, and Greenwich Village. As Prohibition took effect, however, the gay community migrated to the cultural center of New York, Times Square. Many found work in theater—then, as now, that industry was known to welcome unconventional sexual identities. Gay men flourished as playwrights, actors, directors, stagehands, and more. Many took lodgings in the area as well.
The sudden concentration of gay men in and around Times Square had everything to do with Prohibition. In New York, many respectable, middle-class establishments relied on the sale of liquor to stay afloat. When selling alcohol was outlawed, many of them went under. Illegal speakeasies and nightclubs cropped up as a result, often housed in the dimly lit basements of brownstones. These businesses made regular payments either to the police, corrupt as ever, or to crime syndicates who provided protection from law enforcement. These measures kept the authorities away from speakeasies and other nightspots. As an unintended side effect, gay men could now congregate in bars with minimal fear of persecution by the police. (That said, raids were not an uncommon occurrence, and when the doors burst open and officers rushed in, partygoers had to be ready to sprint for the rear exit.) Anticipating modern-day gay clubs, gay speakeasies that catered primarily to the LGBT community came into existence. Straight men and women often went to these establishments, curious about gay nightlife.
Hence, the so-called “pansy craze,” a groundswell of gay performance in New York. Drag balls became particularly modish, with female impersonators competing for prizes and achieving notoriety. Bert Savoy, one of the most famous queens of the decade, played a loud-mouthed, love-starved tart and is credited with inventing now-classic phrases like “You don’t know the half of it!” and “You slay me!” Poet Langston Hughes reflected on the pansy craze decades later: “it was fashionable for the intelligentsia and the social leaders of both Harlem and the downtown area to occupy boxes at this hall and look down from above at the queerly assorted throng on the dancing floor.” The largest drag balls drew thousands of spectators, including members of the Vanderbilts, Astors, and other ultra-wealthy and influential families.
West developed a fascination with gay culture as the pansy craze took off. She read up on homosexuality and found herself stimulated by the work of Karl Heinrich Ulrich, a gay German thinker of the nineteenth century. Ulrich saw gay men as an “intermediate sex,” one that mingled masculine and feminine traits. West formed her own opinions about the Gay Question. She decried police violence against gay men, if only because she considered it unchivalrous. Having internalized the teachings of Herr Doktor Ulrich, she once admonished law enforcement, “When you’re hittin’ one of those guys, you’re hittin’ a woman, ’cause a born homosexual is a female in a male body.” At the same time, she declared homosexuality “a danger to the entire social system of western civilization” on the grounds that its normalization would threaten the perpetuation of the human race.
One evening in late 1926, she and Timony checked out a drag show at a Greenwich Village club. Thrilled by the verve of the female impersonators, West stayed after and gave them complimentary passes to a performance of SEX. Those who took her up on the offer received another exciting opportunity: she wanted to cast them in her latest comedy-drama, also written under the pseudonym Jane Mast. West planned to write and direct the play without performing in it.
Her latest effort was titled The Drag. The main character is this gay guy named Rolly, who is married to a straight woman, Clair. Clair is unaware of her husband’s sexual preferences and miserable in her marriage. About two-thirds of the way in, Rolly is shot and killed offstage, and it is not until the finale that the murderer is revealed—another gay man who was spurned by Rolly. Along the way, West explores the nature of homosexuality, staging a debate between a doctor and a judge. The former paints gay men as sufferers in need of compassion and medical treatment while the latter condemns them as a menace to society deserving the harshest punishment.
But all that stuff is beside the point. The plays raison d’etre is what happens when Clair goes away on a trip, leaving Rolly alone at the house. Not unlike a high schooler whose parents are on vacation, Rolly throws a rager he could never get away with under ordinary circumstances—in this case, a drag ball of mammoth proportions. West hired something like forty actors—all gay men—to play the guests. The motley assembly included every species of homosexual known to man, from the slender, effeminate twink to what West characterized as “taxicab and truck-driver types.” The partygoers arrive one by one, each of them as fabulous as they are catty. They bandy quips and talk shit to each other. One queen, Winnie, shouts to another named Hell’s Kitchen Kate, “My but you’re getting thin.” Kate retorts, “I can at least cling to a man without wearing him out. You’re terribly fat.” “Fat!” Winnie explodes, “I should say not! I’m the type that men prefer. I can at least go through the Navy Yard without having the flags drop to half mast.” Kate: “I’m just the type that men crave. The type that burns ’em up. Why when I walk up Tenth Avenue, you can smell the men sizzling in Hell’s Kitchen.” After many zingers and much dance-floor frivolity, the drag ball comes to a buzz-killing end when police raid the house—a nod to the discrimination that gay men endured in real life.
On January 31, 1927, The Drag opened at Poli’s Park, a venue located in Bridgeport, Connecticut. New Yorkers reserved seats and took the train into town, and West later claimed that fans of hers came in from as far as Boston and Philadelphia. Apart from a drunk who had expected a burlesque with wise-cracking strippers and a middle-aged couple who left in disgust, the audience loved it. West declared later, “I never used the word sex, but I had scream’ gay great-lookin’ guys flauntin’ it out all over the place. There were at least a dozen curtain calls after each of the three acts and it took an hour to empty the theater-o-everyone wanted to visit the actors.” The next day, Bridgeport was abuzz about West’s dragtacular murder mystery, and those who had scored tickets to opening night became the envy of the town.
In Trouble With the Law
Yet the chances of a Broadway run became increasingly unlikely. In January 1927, New York’s most zealous moral paladins were calling for the introduction of a censor, a political appointee who would wield broad powers to curtail the production of risqué plays like Sex, The Captive, The Virgin Man, and The Drag. Under mounting pressure, New York mayor Jimmy Walker cautioned Broadway producers that censorship was inevitable unless they cleaned up the theaters.
Broadway executives convened an emergency meeting to discuss the impending crisis. All heaped blame on West for the predicament. She had gone too far with The Drag. It made no difference that the play had not yet been seen in New York. Given audience approval thus far, it was a matter of time before it moved to Broadway. And as much as playgoers were lapping it up, critics were pushing it away in disgust. A writer for Variety excoriated the play as “an inexpressibly brutal and vulgar attempt to capitalize on a dirty matter for profit.” Broadway producer William de Lignemare condemned the comedy-drama as an all-out assault on masculinity itself: “The Drag, I believe, is the worst possible play I have ever heard of contemplating an invasion of New York. That production . . . strikes at the decency of manhood.” They feared that if West brought her latest confection to Broadway, city officials would make good on their threats to appoint a censor, an outcome that all desired to avoid. Banning together, they demanded that Timony pull the plug on The Drag.
He and West refused to comply, but it was now clear they would have to allay any fears about what might happen if The Drag came to Gotham. Taking a page from other controversial artists, West styled The Drag as educational in essence, a window onto the pleasures and pain of gay men in the modern world. On February 8, she invited a small group of city officials and respected physicians to a midnight performance of The Drag at Daly’s.
Alas, The Drag would never make it to Broadway because the powers that be were already arraying themselves against West. On February 9, the district attorney ordered police to raid three Dirt Plays that were sullying Broadway—The Captive, The Virgin Man, and SEX. Everybody knew that targeting SEX was tantamount to a pre-emptive strike against The Drag. As the February 9 performance of SEX came to a close, James S. Bolan of the district attorney’s office entered Daly’s Theatre with ten officers in tow. The police presence did not go unnoticed, and passersby stopped to watch the raid from the sidewalk. Once the play ended, audience members left their seats and joined the ballooning crowd outside. Finally, Bolan made his presence known and announced that West, Timony, Morgenstern, and seventeen cast members were under arrest. He was to escort them from Daly’s to a night court. West told him fine—just give her a minute to change out of costume. As the provocateur well knew, the real show was about to begin.
By now, more than 1,000 spectators had assembled beneath the lights of the Daly’s marquis. When West strutted out, in the company of her comrades, the throng went wild. She smiled, waved, and blew kisses in return. Word had spread among West’s supporters, and by the time she arrived at court, a welcoming party was there to greet her. Inside, she and the rest of the company lined up before a judge, seated beside Acting Mayor Joseph V. McKee. (Mayor Walker was vacationing in Havanna at the time.) In the small hours of February 10, the judge charged the playmakers with staging an indecent performance, maintaining a public nuisance, and “corrupting the morals of the youth and others.” West was informed that charges would be dropped if she agreed to close SEX. Her response went something like, “Hell no.” Before dismissing them, McKee advised the company that if they performed SEX again, police would arrest them. A defiant Timony assured the acting mayor that the cast would be costumed and in places by eight o’clock that night for the scheduled show. And since he perceived the root cause of this drama, Timony declared that he was “seriously considering hiring Madison Square Garden for The Drag.”
That morning, Timony, an experienced entertainment lawyer, arranged for an injunction that prevented authorities from shutting down the show. When the curtain rang up on SEX that night, Margy LaMont sang the blues and danced the shimmy before an auditorium that was packed to the rafters—in trying to protect New Yorkers from SEX, the authorities had only encouraged them to see it.
Ticket sales remained high for the next several weeks, and it was not until early March that public interest died down, as did profits. Several cast members left the production. Finally, by March 19, West decided it was time to call it quits. Eleven months of almost daily performances had left her exhausted. That said, the case against her and her comrades was still pending, and she had every intention of fighting it to the end.
The trial commenced shortly after SEX closed. Indomitable as ever and dressed to kill in her finest furs, West went to court with as much self-assuredness as when she met that spotlight during her first talent show. Prosecutors submitted the script for the consideration of the jury, but they conceded that the immorality of SEX resided not so much in the text as in West’s performance. Prosecutors pointed to her Trinidad shimmy as particularly lewd. Sergeant Patrick Keneally offered key testimony on this point. Don’t even get him started on SEX—he was so repulsed by this irredeemable exercise in sexual depravity he had seen it three times. He described West’s “muscle dance” in horrifyingly frank detail: “Mae West moved her naval up and down and from right to left.” Defense attorney Norman P.S. Schloss roasted Keneally under cross-examination. Could he be certain that he saw West’s naval during the dance in question? Keneally was forced to admit that he could not. But never one to back down, he swore that he had witnessed “something in her middle that moved from east to west.” For the sake of clarity, Schloss retorted, would Keneally care to stand and do the dance himself? Wallace protested: “everyone in the police force is not a dancer.” I’m sorry to say his objection was sustained.
West’s team argued that a duly appointed play jury had greenlighted SEX, and the comedy-drama had run for the better part of a year without issue. Why all the fuss now? And as for the shimmy: a witness testified that dancers were doing it across the country, and nobody was calling the police about them.
When it came time for the jurymen to deliberate, they withdrew and grappled with the evidence for several hours. They returned with a verdict that was unfavorable to West: a nine-to-three vote to acquit the theater troupe. At this point, the judge provided additional, all-or-nothing instructions to the jury: if they deemed a single act of flirtation, kiss on the lips, or shake of the hips obscene, they must consider the entire production obscene and return with a conviction. The defendants lost hope as the jurors filed out to re-evaluate the case. Timony retreated to a corner and muttered prayers, clutching a rosary. Until this juncture, West’s co-star, Barrie O’Neil had struck a sanguine attitude. Now his face fell, and he withdrew into himself. Unflappable as ever, West reassured him, “Don’t worry Barrie. It’ll come out all right.”
If only. The jury came back with a guilty verdict. Barrie O’Neil shook with emotion and bit bit into his handkerchief. Timony and Morgenstern exited the courtroom in sullen near-silence, declining to comment as journalists peppered them with questions. West, by contrast, was willing to talk. She vowed to appeal this case all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary, insisting that SEX was a “work of art.” She added, “You’ve got to fight in this world. You’ve got to fight to get there and fight to stay there.”
The judge gave the company a real dressing-down when it came time for sentencing. He pronounced the play “obscene, immoral, and indecent” and declared his intention to repair the damaged reputation of New York, “the most moral city in the universe.” He reserved special censure for West, who, to his mind, “seemed to go to extremes to make the play as obscene and immoral as possible.” He imposed a fine of $500 on both her and Timony and sentenced those two, along with prodcer C.W. Morgenstern, to ten days in jail. West would serve her time in prison on Welfare Island while Timony and Morgenstern languished in the Tombs, a men's penitentiary. The rest of the company was free to go. Thoroughly unfazed, West assumed what a reporter for Variety called “the hard-boiled manner she played in the play, [and] did not wink an eyelid when the sentence was pronounced.” Asked about the sentence by a journalist, West predicted, “I expect it will be the making of me.” And she sounded positively cheerful when she urged a reporter, “Give my regards to Broadway!”
Mae West Goes to the Jail
We know quite a bit about West’s stint in prison because it was covered extensively in the media. By contrast, journalists hardly printed a word about Timony and Morgenstern. After West’s release, Liberty magazine paid her a walloping $1,000 to write an exclusive article about her time on Welfare Island. She took the deal, and the piece published in August 1927, under the title, “Ten Days and Five Hundred Dollars: The Experiences of a Broadway Star in Jail.”
After West’s sentencing, policemen escorted her to a waiting room, where she made conversation with the official in charge, a Black woman West characterized as poised and intelligent. “During my half-hour wait,” she related, “I talked to [the official], asking her various questions about Welfare Island. I like to know something about a place I intend to visit.”
West’s first stop was the city jail, where she spent the night in a tiny cell, furnished with nothing but an iron cot. Much to her delight, however, she discovered that she was as much a celebrity in jail as at elsewhere. The inmates recognized her and even hollered lines from SEX when they saw her, letting her know they had seen the show.
Many accounts have West rolling up to Welfare Island in a limousine, dressed as if she were going to a red carpet event. Much as I would like that to have been the case, it simply wasn’t. After a night at the city jail, she was loaded with several other prisoners into a black paddy wagon and driven to the penitentiary, the vehicle lowered from street level onto Welfare Island underneath by means of a large elevator. West stepped out and sixed up the premises, calling it a “marvellous, gorgeous stone structure most attractively decorated with big sheet-iron doors and plenty of bar-work. The doors opened and I made my grand entrance.”
Unfortunately, her reception was anything but grand. First, a matron relieved the star of her pocketbook and valuables. Then, “I was met by the second matron, who said, ‘Strip!’ I said, ‘What? I thought this was a respectable place.’” Smiling, the correction officer persisted, “I am sorry, Miss West, but I will have to divest you of your civilian attire.” West undressed and was given a raggedy blue-and-white checked uniform, a pair of equally hideous shoes, and a set of cotton stockings and underwear. “Can’t I even keep my silk stockings?” West protested. She sure couldn’t, so she drew herself up and handed them over. “I’m going to be a woman and show them,” she thought to herself. “I’m going to make believe I am acting before an audience and forget that I am doing ten days in the hoosegow.” (First time I ever saw that word for the slammer, by the way, and I was delighted to add it to my vocabulary.)
Despite an unpleasant introduction to Welfare Island, West received star treatment for the rest of her stay. When a matron led her through a packed cell block, inmates applauded and shouted salutations, “Hello, Mae!” and “Glad to see you!” Among her most ardent admirers was the warden, Harry O. Schleth, who had a reputation for favoring “well-connected” prisoners. Thanks to his intervention, West enjoyed the privilege of her own private room in the administration wing. He even invited her to lunch at his living quarters, a treat reserved for notables, and had new stockings procured for the actress when she complained about the ones that she was issued. Schleth later defended West’s preferential treatment by claiming that he had done what was needed to protect her from the “hardened offenders” on the island.
During the daytime, West took care of “light housekeeping,” work assigned by the prison, which included making beds, sweeping floors, and dusting bookshelves in the cramped, understocked library. When impresarios learned of West’s chores, they came up with acts that would capitalize on them. According ot the Daily News, “A night club wants her to mop up the floor in prison costume for a few weeks at a fat salary . . . But Miss West . . . told the warden she is writing a new play in the intervals between dusting and making beds—'a play that will do people some good and keep them out of jail—though I still don’t admit there was any harm in “Sex.”’”
West was released on good behavior after serving just eight of her ten days. Reporters snapped pictures as she took her leave of the hoosegow. One photograph shows her shaking hands with the warden, a big grin on his face.
Apart from generating publicity, West’s incarceration opened her eyes to the oppression and exploitation of New York’s most vulnerable women, many of them Black and working-class. She made the acquaintance of professional shoplifters, drug addicts, prostitutes, and venereal disease sufferers. She formed friendships with several and even contacted her attorneys about representing one of them, a single mother with young children who was facing a charge of petty larceny. After her release, West is believed to have provided financial assistance to this woman and her family. She also took steps to improve the lives of prisoners. Remember that $1,000 that Liberty magazine paid her? Well, she donated that money to the penitentiary so it could expand its library, later renamed the Mae West Memorial Library.
The controversy whirling around SEX, The Drag, The Captive, and other Dirt Plays led to increased censorship of New York theater. A few days after SEX closed in March 1927, the New York state senate passed the Wales Padlock Act, sponsored by State Senator B. Roger Wales. This piece of legislation forbade “immoral drama,” clamping down on plays about sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular. Under this law, the district attorney was required to prosecute the cast and crew of productions that were deemed indecent, and theaters that programmed obscene entertainments would be shuttered for a full year. The Wales Padlock Act caused headaches for quite a few artists. Mae West also faced prosecution, but by now it won’t surprise you that she wasn’t complaining. “I believe in censorship,” she asserted. “After all, I made a fortune out of it.”