Mae West Trivia
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50 free Mae West trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Mae West trivia begins in Brooklyn in 1893 with a prizefighter father and a corset-model mother, moves through vaudeville as Baby Mae and the shimmy, and arrives at the 1926 play she wrote, produced and starred in, whose one-word title got her ten days on Welfare Island in silk underwear. The quiz covers The Drag, Diamond Lil, her pen name and the Paramount contract that took her to Hollywood in 1932, where she stole Night After Night from George Raft with 'Goodness had nothing to do with it'. The film section asks about Lady Lou, the line she really said to Cary Grant, Tira and the lion, the fortune that saved Paramount, Duke Ellington in Belle of the Nineties, Hearst's fury at Klondike Annie, the Production Code, the Charlie McCarthy broadcast that got her banned from NBC, and My Little Chickadee with W. C. Fields. Later questions reach Catherine Was Great, the Vegas bodybuilders, Rock Hudson at the Oscars, Mister Ed, the Sgt. Pepper cover, Myra Breckinridge, Sextette and Ringo Starr, plus her secret 1911 marriage, Paul Novak, the Ravenswood, the WWII life jacket, Dalí's sofa and the AFI ranking. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Mae West and her films, with the supporting sentence attached to each question. Easy questions suit any old-Hollywood fan; the expert tier reaches Guido Deiro, A La Broadway and a 52-metre sculpture in Munich.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which present-day New York borough was Mae West born in 1893?
Brooklyn
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.
Q 02What was Mae West's real first and middle name?
Mary Jane
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.
Q 03What had Mae West's father, 'Battlin' Jack' West, been before he became a special policeman?
Prizefighter
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.
Q 04Under what stage name did Mae West perform as a child?
Baby Mae
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.
Q 05In I'm No Angel, what does Mae West tell her maid Beulah to peel for her?
A grape
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.
Q 06Which dance did Mae West perform on Broadway in the 1918 musical Sometime?
The shimmy
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'.
Q 07Under what pen name, built from her own, did Mae West write her early risqué plays?
Jane Mast
Jane Mast hid the star in plain sight: the surname takes the first two letters of Mae and the last two of West.
Q 08What one-word 1926 Broadway play, written by and starring Mae West, got her arrested?
Sex
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.
Q 09Why was Mae West, jailed over her play in 1927, let out two days early?
Good behaviour
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.
Q 10Which Mae West play about homosexuality never opened on Broadway due to vice campaigners?
The Drag
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.
Q 11Which 1928 Broadway hit by Mae West was filmed as She Done Him Wrong?
Diamond Lil
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.
Q 12Which studio signed Mae West in June 1932 at $5,000 a week?
Paramount
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.
Q 13Mae West made her film debut in Night After Night (1932), a vehicle for which screen tough guy?
George Raft
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'.
Q 21Which bandleader did Mae West insist the studio hire for Belle of the Nineties (1934)?
Duke Ellington
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'.
Q 22How did Mae West fight back when Hollywood's Production Code was enforced in 1934?
Wrote decoy scenes to be cut
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.
Q 23In Klondike Annie, her 1936 film about religion and hypocrisy, what does Mae West's fugitive pose as?
Q 14What is Mae West's reply to 'Goodness, what beautiful diamonds'?
'Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.'
'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.
Q 15Why was Mae West's stage heroine renamed Lady Lou for She Done Him Wrong?
A censors' ban
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.
Q 16Which actor did Mae West reportedly cast in She Done Him Wrong, saying 'If he can talk, I'll take him'?
Cary Grant
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.
Q 17Which famous invitation does Mae West actually speak in She Done Him Wrong?
'Why don't you come up sometime and see me?'
'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.
Q 18Where does Mae West's Lady Lou sing in She Done Him Wrong?
A saloon
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.
Q 19What dangerous sideshow act does Mae West's character Tira perform in I'm No Angel (1933)?
Lion taming
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.
Q 20By 1935 Mae West was the highest-paid woman in America and the second-highest-paid person, behind whom?
William Randolph Hearst
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.
A missionary
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.
Q 24Mae West was banned from NBC radio after flirting with which ventriloquist's dummy in 1937?
Edgar Bergen's Charlie McCarthy
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.
Q 25Which biblical pair did Mae West and Don Ameche play in a 1937 radio sketch that drew a storm of protest?
Adam and Eve
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'.
Q 26After her 1937 scandal, what did NBC radio ban along with Mae West herself?
Mention of her name
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.
Q 27Which comedian co-starred with Mae West in the 1940 Universal western spoof My Little Chickadee?
W. C. Fields
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.
Q 28Which habit of her screen characters did Mae West avoid in her own life?
Drinking alcohol
Drinking alcohol was out, and smoking too: the woman who played kept women and gangsters' girls lived a sedate private life.
Q 29Which empress did Mae West play on Broadway in a 1944 satirical play she wrote herself?
Catherine the Great
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.'
Q 30In her 1950s Las Vegas nightclub act, Mae West sang flanked by what?
Bodybuilders
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.