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The myths of Mae – first lady of Hollywood

Far from being a dumb blonde bombshell Mae West was a highly articulate woman and a feminist to boot, writes Piers Plowright

WHAT is it about Mae West that makes the heart lift?
It’s not just the sexiness, the shoulder-swinging lope, the drawl – like honey poured through broken glass – the one-liners. It’s not even the chutzpah, the cheek, the willingness to take on the men and win. It’s something only the greatest entertainers have and it amounts – for the audience – to ‘liberation’.
I remember going with my father to the Hampstead Everyman Cinema around 1950 to see My Little Chickadee, a piece of Wild West hokum in which Mae as Flower Belle Lee and WC Fields as Cuthbert J Twillie, temporary sheriff of Greasewood City, spar, connive, and compete to take the mask off ‘The Masked Bandit’. It’s not a great film – ‘a classic among bad movies’, critic Pauline Kael called it, but as long as those two are on screen, sheer joy. And Mae West wins on points.
Born Mary Jane West on the August 13 1893 (Mae was to update that by at least 10 years in one of her many rewritings of her own history) in Brooklyn to a one-time part Irish prize-fighter and his fashion conscious German wife, Mae moved through dance-school, vaudeville, comedy theatre and film to become by 1934 the highest paid performer in the USA, earning close to $400,000 a year, over three times as much as Marlene Dietrich.
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Don't waste your finest on relatives

DO you enjoy or endure Christmas? It isn’t only that we’re bullied into spending money we haven’t got.
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