50 Fun Facts About Mae West

In which present-day New York borough was Mae West born in 1893?

Brooklyn was still a city in its own right when she was born and merged into New York only in 1898, so she began life as a Brooklynite rather than a New Yorker.

What was Mae West's real first and middle name?

Mary Jane West, called Mae from childhood, kept her age vague: Hollywood's new screen siren of 1932 was in fact almost 40 when she made her first film.

What had Mae West's father, 'Battlin' Jack' West, been before he became a special policeman?

Prizefighter Jack West boxed only now and then; once he left the ring he kept order for hire and later opened his own private detective agency.

Under what stage name did Mae West perform as a child?

Baby Mae won first prize at a local amateur night singing 'Movin' Day', and she was soon playing child parts with a professional stock company.

In I'm No Angel, what does Mae West tell her maid Beulah to peel for her?

A grape: 'Beulah, peel me a grape', drawled at her maid, became one of the most imitated catchphrases of the 1930s, shorthand for a life of lazy luxury.

Which dance did Mae West perform on Broadway in the 1918 musical Sometime?

The shimmy, all shoulders and torso with barely a step, was her big break: her photograph went on the sheet music of 'Ev'rybody Shimmies Now'.

Under what pen name, built from her own, did Mae West write her early risqué plays?

Jane Mast hid the star in plain sight: the surname takes the first two letters of Mae and the last two of West.

What one-word 1926 Broadway play, written by and starring Mae West, got her arrested?

Sex had been running for most of a year when police raided it; convicted of corrupting the morals of youth, she went to jail and came out a national figure.

Why was Mae West, jailed over her play in 1927, let out two days early?

Good behaviour, of all things, cut her ten days to eight; she served them on New York's Welfare Island, where she is said to have dined with the warden, and the headlines did her career nothing but good.

Which Mae West play about homosexuality never opened on Broadway due to vice campaigners?

The Drag, which ended in an onstage drag ball, packed its tryout houses in Connecticut and New Jersey, but New York's vice society vowed to stop it and West never brought it to Broadway.

Which 1928 Broadway hit by Mae West was filmed as She Done Him Wrong?

Diamond Lil became West's signature role: she toured and revived the play for more than twenty years, taking it to London in the late 1940s and back to Broadway in 1949.

Which studio signed Mae West in June 1932 at $5,000 a week?

Paramount was sliding towards bankruptcy when she arrived, and the takings from her second film, She Done Him Wrong, are credited with helping to keep the studio alive.

Mae West made her film debut in Night After Night (1932), a vehicle for which screen tough guy?

George Raft was the star, but West, allowed to rewrite her handful of scenes, walked off with the picture; in his words she 'stole everything but the cameras'.

What is Mae West's reply to 'Goodness, what beautiful diamonds'?

'Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie' was her own writing: she took the small part in Night After Night only once she could redo her scenes, and later made the retort her memoir's title.

Why was Mae West's stage heroine renamed Lady Lou for She Done Him Wrong?

A censors' ban had kept the play off the screen since 1930, so the studio could film it only under a new title, with the heroine renamed and the stage hit kept out of its advertising.

Which actor did Mae West reportedly cast in She Done Him Wrong, saying 'If he can talk, I'll take him'?

Cary Grant had already played opposite Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus, so 'discovered' is a stretch, but two films as West's leading man in 1933 are what turned him into a star.

Which famous invitation does Mae West actually speak in She Done Him Wrong?

'Why don't you come up sometime and see me?' is what she purrs at an upright young reformer; the snappier wording arrived with her next film, I'm No Angel, and she used it ever after.

Where does Mae West's Lady Lou sing in She Done Him Wrong?

A saloon on New York's Bowery in the Gay Nineties: West wore that era's corseted gowns and plumed hats for the rest of her career, snubbing the boyish fashions of her own day.

What dangerous sideshow act does Mae West's character Tira perform in I'm No Angel (1933)?

Lion taming is Tira's ticket out of the sideshow: to pay a lawyer she agrees to put her head in a lion's mouth, and the stunt carries her to the big time and a string of rich admirers.

By 1935 Mae West was the highest-paid woman in America and the second-highest-paid person, behind whom?

William Randolph Hearst was the only American paid more; within a year the press baron had turned on her, ordering his newspapers to carry no advertising for her film Klondike Annie.

Which bandleader did Mae West insist the studio hire for Belle of the Nineties (1934)?

Duke Ellington and his orchestra got the job over the studio's objections to the cost, and with them she gave the first performance of the future jazz standard 'My Old Flame'.

How did Mae West fight back when Hollywood's Production Code was enforced in 1934?

Wrote decoy scenes to be cut, as she later boasted: her scripts were salted with material too rough ever to use, so that censors who had done their cutting would let the real jokes through.

In Klondike Annie, her 1936 film about religion and hypocrisy, what does Mae West's fugitive pose as?

A missionary: wanted for a killing, her Frisco Doll takes the identity of a mission worker who dies on the boat to Alaska, then rescues the struggling mission with her own mix of sermon and song.

Mae West was banned from NBC radio after flirting with which ventriloquist's dummy in 1937?

Edgar Bergen's Charlie McCarthy got the full treatment on air: she called him 'all wood and a yard long' and said she had the splinters to prove their last date.

Which biblical pair did Mae West and Don Ameche play in a 1937 radio sketch that drew a storm of protest?

Adam and Eve, as written by Arch Oboler, drew a flood of letters: women's clubs denounced the coffee sponsor for letting 'impurity invade the air', and the FCC called the broadcast 'vulgar and indecent'.

After her 1937 scandal, what did NBC radio ban along with Mae West herself?

Mention of her name was barred from the network along with West herself, and she stayed off radio for twelve years, until Perry Como had her on his show in January 1950.

Which comedian co-starred with Mae West in the 1940 Universal western spoof My Little Chickadee?

W. C. Fields and West shared the writing credit and not much else: their relationship on set was famously prickly, and for all the film's success they never worked together again.

Which habit of her screen characters did Mae West avoid in her own life?

Drinking alcohol was out, and smoking too: the woman who played kept women and gangsters' girls lived a sedate private life.

Which empress did Mae West play on Broadway in a 1944 satirical play she wrote herself?

Catherine the Great was said to have had three hundred lovers, which gave West her nightly curtain speech: 'I did the best I could in a couple of hours.'

In her 1950s Las Vegas nightclub act, Mae West sang flanked by what?

Bodybuilders made up her chorus, among them the Mr. Universe Mickey Hargitay, whose romance with Jayne Mansfield set off a headline feud between the two blondes.

With whom did Mae West sing 'Baby, It's Cold Outside' at the 1958 Academy Awards?

Rock Hudson shared the duet with a star who was 64 and had not made a film in fifteen years; the number stopped the show, and her memoir followed a year later.

Which label did US cinema owners pin on Mae West, Greta Garbo and Katharine Hepburn in a 1938 trade ad?

Box office poison was the charge: independent theatre owners complained that such stars drew huge salaries and no crowds, yet West was back in a hit film within two years.

On which 1960s sitcom did Mae West make a guest appearance in 1964?

Mister Ed was typical of her 1960s reinvention: at 70 she played herself opposite a talking horse, and two years later she released a rock-and-roll album, Way Out West.

Why did Mae West at first refuse to let the Beatles put her on a 1967 album cover?

Its 'Lonely Hearts Club' title was the problem: 'What would I be doing in a lonely hearts club?' she asked, and she gave way only after the Beatles wrote to her as admirers.

After a 27-year absence, Mae West returned to the screen in 1970 as Leticia Van Allen in which film?

Myra Breckinridge, from Gore Vidal's novel, gave her top billing over Raquel Welch for what proved a small part, and the film failed with critics and audiences alike before finding a cult following.

Which future TV star made his film debut in 1970 as one of the 'studs' lined up for Mae West's character?

Tom Selleck was an unknown in his mid-twenties when West herself had him cast; his breakthrough as Magnum, P.I. was still a decade away.

Which future James Bond played Mae West's new husband in her final film, Sextette?

Timothy Dalton, cast after West admired him in Wuthering Heights, was barely past thirty; she was over eighty and still playing the irresistible bride, on honeymoon with husband number six.

Which former Beatle appeared in the cast of Sextette?

Ringo Starr joined fellow rock names Alice Cooper and the Who's Keith Moon in the cast; critics savaged the film, which was based on a stage play West herself had written.

Which costume designer worked with Mae West on both She Done Him Wrong (1933) and Sextette (1978)?

Edith Head had got her start in Hollywood a decade before She Done Him Wrong with a portfolio of sketches borrowed from classmates; by Sextette she held a record eight Oscars.

How did Mae West's secret marriage come to light in 1935?

An old document gave her away: the certificate from her Milwaukee wedding at 17 to fellow vaudevillian Frank Wallace. She denied it for two years and admitted it under oath only in 1937.

How does Mae West finish the line 'When I'm good, I'm very good, but when I'm bad…'?

'I'm better' is the pay-off, delivered in I'm No Angel, the 1933 film she wrote for herself, which went on to be the biggest hit of her screen career.

Billy Wilder said he first wanted Mae West to star in which of his films?

Sunset Boulevard's forgotten silent star was no part for West, who turned it down; Gloria Swanson took the role of Norma Desmond instead.

Where did Mae West keep the same home for almost half a century?

A Hollywood apartment at the Ravenswood, done out in white and gold, stayed her home until she died there, though she was a millionaire who owned property across Los Angeles.

Which illness, diagnosed after a fall in August 1980, led to Mae West's death three months later?

A stroke, the first of several that autumn, took her speech; she died at home aged 87 and was taken back east to the family crypt she had bought when her mother died fifty years earlier.

What did Allied aircrews in World War II nickname a 'Mae West'?

An inflatable life jacket, which gave its wearer a suddenly generous chest once blown up; RAF crews coined the name, and it stuck so well that 'Mae West' went into Webster's dictionary.

Which surrealist created the Mae West Lips Sofa in 1938?

Salvador Dalí designed it for the British collector Edward James, and five were made; in a painting he also laid out her whole face as a furnished room.

Which title did UCLA students vote Mae West in 1971?

Woman of the Century was the verdict of a generation that had rediscovered her films in revival; the American Film Institute later placed her among the 25 greatest female screen legends.

Which star was an executive producer of the 2020 PBS documentary Mae West: Dirty Blonde?

Bette Midler backed the film because, she said, West 'believed she was the equal of any man, if not their superior'; a generation earlier Ann Jillian had played West in a 1982 television biopic.

How did Mae West, barely five feet tall, manage to look statuesque on stage and screen?

Towering platform shoes, hidden under floor-length gowns, lifted her by a good five inches, part of a look (platinum wig, tight gown, hand on hip) that she never changed.

What does Mae West say counts more than 'the men in your life'?

The life in your men is what counts, as her circus queen Tira puts it in I'm No Angel, and the line was West's own: she wrote the film as well as starring in it.