All featured products are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, Vanity Fair may earn an affiliate commission.
Born in Brooklyn in 1893, Mae West always knew she was destined for more than life as a staid Victorian housewife. “I was a child of the new century just around the corner,” she writes in her 1959 autobiography, Goodness Had Nothing to Do With It, “and I ran towards it boldly.”
For the entirety of her long life, West would take a sledgehammer to outdated views about what it meant to be a woman. In her plays, movies, and stage shows, she celebrated female sexuality, the male body, and the thrill of “sin” with doses of campy humor and exaggerated glamour. In her autobiography and the new Bette Midler-produced documentary Mae West: Dirty Blonde (premiering on Tuesday, June 16 on PBS), West is revealed as an important cultural agitator—an unashamed “sexual gangster,” in the words of burlesque superstar Dita Von Teese.
“Underneath the blonde wigs and the diamonds and the wisecracks, she had a message and an agenda,” Dirty Blonde codirector Sally Rosenthal said in a statement to Vanity Fair. “She wanted to offer an alternative version of womanhood, in which overt sexual desire wasn’t shameful or dirty but an expression of independence.”
Behind this unwavering independence was a rock-solid belief in herself that would carry West through many a professional and personal rock and roll. “The letter ‘I’ appears very often on these pages,” she writes in Goodness Had Nothing to Do With It. “That is because I have been given the liberty, or have taken it, of telling my own story in my own way—and I like a story that takes its time.”
The Spotlight
A precociously fearless performer, West demanded her due from the time she was a curly-headed child vaudevillian. Scheduled for her first big show at the Royal Theater in Brooklyn, the seven year old’s mother dressed her in a pink and green satin dress with a white lace picture hat. Before she went on to sing “Movin’ Day,” West insisted to the stage manager that she have a spotlight. He said she would—but once on stage, there was none to be found.
“I stepped out on the stage, looked up angrily at the spotlight man in the balcony, stamping my foot,” she writes in her autobiography. “‘Where is my spotlight!’ I stamped it again and the spotlight moved across stage onto me and caught me in the act of demanding my light. The audience saw me and laughed and applauded.”
“Baby Mae” was a hit, and the child was forever hooked on showbiz. “The rest of America could ask for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” she writes. “I’d take the spotlight.”
A Model Prisoner
After years on the vaudeville circuit, West became the toast of Broadway with her original play Sex in 1926. “I became a writer by the accident of needing material and having no place to get it,” West writes in her autobiography. As playwright and star of the titillating piece of theater, she rocketed to fame—and infamy. On April 19, 1927, she was sentenced to 10 days in prison for obscenity and “corrupting the morals of youth.”
Off to jail on Roosevelt Island she went, game except for her rough, prison-issued lady’s undergarments. “I want to wear my silk underwear,” West demanded. The star-struck warden concurred. Now comfortable, West settled in, and was convinced by the besotted warden to greet her adoring fellow inmates. “When I went into a large dormitory, all the women began applauding. ‘Glad to see you!’ ‘Hello, Mae!’ I didn’t care for the use of my first name, but I figured if I could make them a less miserable mob, I was doing some good.”
Diamond Lil Comes to Town
Already a scandalous superstar in New York, cash-strapped Paramount Studios convinced West to finally make her first foray into motion pictures in 1932. “So, this is the place a leaf falls up in some canyon and they tell you it’s winter,” she quipped upon her arrival in Hollywood.
West was decidedly unimpressed. “I saw some of the town, met some of the sodden gilded people,” she writes. “I saw that under the daffy California sun there had hatched out as queer an industry and as odd a collection of self-made men as ever crossed the Rockies…. The studios were giant factories turning out the same length of scented tripe, dressed up with the same rubber stamp features of large cowlike heads, mammary glands, and 10-foot-high closeups of nostrils you could drive a Cadillac into.”
She was equally underwhelmed by her first movie role, in the George Raft vehicle Night After Night. West refused to appear in the movie unless she could rewrite her part, and studio brass finally relented. As she walks into frame for the first time with her trademark wriggle and roll, an attendant exclaims, “Goodness, what beautiful diamonds!”
“Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie,” she replies.
She Wants What She Wants, and She Wants Cary Grant
Unlike most golden age movie stars, West knew her worth. “I enjoyed my success with no false humility, and no coy hiding of my ego under a basket,” she writes in her autobiography.
As her friend Tim Malachosky recounts in Mae West: Dirty Blonde, Paramount head Adolph Zukor discovered this while negotiating her contract. West wanted to write her own scripts, to control costume design—and to get paid. When he asked her how much, she said, “Well, how much do you make?” Zukor told her. “I want a dollar more,” West replied. She got it.
West also got her desired leading man for She Done Him Wrong, the 1933 screen adaptation of her hit play Diamond Lil. “I saw a sensational-looking young man walking along the studio street,” she writes. “He was the best thing I’d seen out there. ‘Who’s that?’ I asked. Kaufman recognized him. ‘Cary Grant,’ he said. ‘He’ll do for my leading man,’ I said. ‘But,’ Kaufman protested, ‘he hasn’t made a picture yet. Only tests.’ ‘Call him over,’ I said. ‘If he can talk, I’ll take him.’”
The Battle of Bulge
In her personal life, West seems to have had a particular penchant for weight-lifting studs decades her junior. In the 1950s, she began mixing business with pleasure, creating a Vegas review of bulging muscle men. “All through the years, night clubs have aimed at something for the men—girl floor shows,” she writes in Goodness Had Nothing to Do With It. “The wives and sweethearts have had to sit bored, while their men applauded female semi-nudity. I was going to give the women something to look at.”
According to West, this troupe of former Mr. Universes and bodybuilding champions began to battle for her affections, much to her barely-contained delight. Two men got into a gun fight over her. But the real battle was between strapping studs Paul Novak and Mickey Hargitay (whose given name was Miklós). In West’s version, Hargitay would not accept her romantic rebuffs. This harassment reached its peak at a press conference, where the overprotective Paul (whom she called “Chuck”) and Hargitay came to blows.
“In a flash, Chuck raised his fist and let him have it, and down went Miklós,” she writes. “It was necessary to summon an ambulance to cart him away for repairs.”
Paul Novak’s loyalty would be rewarded. He would become West’s life partner and true love until her death. Hargitay didn’t do bad for himself either, becoming an actor, husband to sex symbol Jayne Mansfield, and father to Law & Order SVU star Mariska Hargitay.
Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number
According to West, John Barrymore once told her the truth about her cohort: “Actors are people, but not human.” This criticism would often be leveled at West herself, who became an increasingly campy institution as the decades wore on. In 1978, the octogenarian wrote and starred in her last film, Sextette, playing a still sizzling character with many husbands played by actors including Tony Curtis, George Hamilton, and Timothy Dalton.
“She was still wearing her corsets and low-cut dresses, asking 25-year-old men, ‘Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?’” Dirty Blonde codirector Julia Marchesi said in a statement to V.F. “Some might find this depressing, but Mae didn’t care. This was her final act of defiance against social norms.”
As Sextette costar Ringo Starr recounts in Dirty Blonde, West was also still in search of the spotlight. “She invited us to dinner,” he recalls. “She went all the time to this restaurant she knew, but she gets there an hour earlier than you to do the lights. So, she’s got all the lights on her as you walk in the restaurant—and we heard later she does that wherever she goes.”
— “Can We Live?” The Daughter of Civil Rights Activists on the Question That’s Haunted Her for Decades
— Catherine O’Hara, Queen of Schitt’s Creek, Talks Gilda Radner Friendship & More
— Exclusive: Stephen King’s The Stand Comes to Life Again
— Jeffrey Epstein: Seven Remaining Mysteries—And Disturbing Revelations
— Old Hollywood’s Most Scandalous Secrets, as Told by David Niven
— Trevor Noah and The Daily Show Aren’t Just Surviving—They’re Thriving
— From the Archive: Sidney Poitier’s Pointed Message to White America as Race Riots Swept the Nation in the Summer of 1967
Looking for more? Sign up for our daily Hollywood newsletter and never miss a story.
