mae west +ts...

 “Mae West was once described as “an outrageous female impersonator”; certainly, the persona she evolved on stage and in the cinema must be considered as the ultimate sex satire: splendidly vulgar, ostentatiously overdressed and not so much licentious as laughable. She is one of the great screen comediennes and the object of her mockery is not sex at all, but our attitudes towards it. Her first stage play was called simply Sex and gained her a ten-day jail sentence for its naughtiness. She could be considered the Lenny Bruce of the 30s, daring to talk about the unmentionable.”

/ From The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of The World’s Great Movie Stars (1979) by Ken Wlaschin /

“Mae West was a startlingly beautiful woman with alabaster skin and wide-set sapphire blue eyes framed with long black eyelashes and a trace of eyeshadow. In an interview before her death in 1980, she extended a soft manicured hand with nails frosted a pearly pale pink and seated herself, smoothing the folds of her floor-length pale green peignoir. For a quick moment before she spoke, I wondered if I were faced with a stand-in, a lady some forty years younger than Miss West’s chronological age. Her low-pitched cadence seemed more befitting a Southern-bred woman than a native of Brooklyn. I wondered if she had heard of the wine inspector who had once said, “The 1921 (vintages) were like Mae West, fully developed from the start.””

/ Johna Blinn (possibly laying it on a bit thick) in Celebrity Cookbook (1981). The recipe West provided is “Mae West’s Diet Breakfast and / or Lunch Fruit Compote” /

Died on this day: incomparable high empress of sex Mae West (17 August 1893 – 22 November 1980). I screened West’s notorious final film Sextette (1978) at this month’s Lobotomy Room cinema club. When I was researching it, I came across this tantalizing factoid in the biography Mae West: The Lies, The Legends, The Truth (1989): “during the disco craze, she toyed with an offer to give some of her famous numbers disco treatment but shrewdly decided against doing an album, sensing that the fad had already peaked.” A Mae West disco album? What a missed opportunity!