Pamela Wojcik

Interviewer: How did you first get introduced to Mae?

Pamela Wojcik: I saw Mae West movies in the seventies on the local UHF station. You know, they’d have movies at noon and two and four. And in the seventies and sixties, there was this nostalgia for the thirties. So they were often showing Mae West films along with Fred and Ginger or the Marx Brothers. So I saw them in and then there were also Mae West Curios in stores at the time. So I knew her image very well and sayings, you know, you’d see sort of ideas of her circulating. And then in the nineties, when I was writing my dissertation about feminist camp, I circled back to Mae West and then really dug in and saw all the films and read the plays and learned a lot more about her.

Interviewer: Right to the, the, the curious and the sort of nostalgia thing. Is that part of the the sort of power of the sixties? I’m curious about the sort of the resurgence in interest in her image then.

Pamela Wojcik: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of different things that come together. I think pop art. I think the rise of retrospective theaters, particularly in college campuses, created a kind of new interest in Mae West, along with other throw stars and a nostalgia for the thirties, particularly that you see in things like, you know, Bonnie and Clyde, right? A return to the thirties. But Mae West particularly, I think sort of as an icon, emerges very strongly in that period. And in the sixties she becomes very present again. So she has an appearance on Mister Ed in 1964, I think. And then she is honored by a USC fraternity. She’s on the cover of Life magazine in 1968, a two page foldout. She’s on Sgt Pepper, the cover of the album, and she becomes very present again. So then in 1970, she has her Playboy interview. So there’s this real interest in her then, and I think as a signifier of the past, but also as someone very unique and kind of available to a kind of pop camp reading.

Interviewer: The Sgt Pepper cover. It’s it seems sort of that nostalgia thing. Is it is there something camp with that cover as well?

Pamela Wojcik: I think so. I mean, nostalgia and camp aren’t the same thing, but camp, some versions of camp have a kind of historic sizing impulse. So something that comes from an earlier period that is no longer the dominant, no longer kind of read in the same way becomes available to be recoded. And I think Mae West is being recoded in the sixties and seventies. That’s a point when she’s showing up in things like Sex Tet and Myra Breckinridge and kind of being rediscovered. But in a way, as someone who’s not relevant or powerful in the same way that I think she was in the thirties.

Interviewer: I’m just curious in terms of the nostalgia of the sixties, why, why the thirties? Why that era?

Pamela Wojcik: I think there’s a tendency the way nostalgia works generally is sort of to go to the generation or so before you were born. Right. I have a friend who claims that, you know, we all turn to that so that, you know, I’m born in the sixties, so I’m like the fifties, you know, my daughter likes the eighties. I don’t know if that’s true, but I think that part of it is that with TV, you’re getting all of the classic Hollywood kind of regurgitated through TV showings and that the theaters are accessing it. So I think it becomes very present and available in the sixties. But it’s also, I think, a generation looking to its parents artforms in some way.

Interviewer: So going back just for a person who has never heard of Mae West, how would you describe. I haven’t heard her her persona, her character.

Pamela Wojcik: The character is almost always a performer, sometimes in the circus, sometimes kind of saloon culture. Sometimes she plays a movie star. She’s covertly a prostitute. She’s never explicitly a prostitute, but she’s always sort of perceived as different from other women. She, at one point in one of the films, refers to herself as finest woman who ever walk the streets. She’s sexually aggressive, very forward in her attentions to men. She’s supremely self-confident, narcissistic, even absolutely sure of her own sexual appeal. She’s witty. She tosses off one liners at a rapid fire, where you can miss a lot of the jokes as she goes and a lot of double entendre. And she has a kind of swagger. You know, she sort of struts.

Interviewer: Something had written about the turn of the century. The feminists were kind of split into two terms of what they were focusing on the political and sexual freedom. Right. Can you just sort of talk about a little bit? We don’t have any of that.

Pamela Wojcik: Okay. So turn of the century feminists, most of the energy is directed toward equal rights and suffrage. But there is a contingent that’s concerned with things like abortion, birth control, sexual freedom, prostitution, and they’re in conversation with each other. The sort of sexual feminists come to the fore more strongly after the turn of the century, and the new woman becomes a figure of sexual freedom, as well as other kinds of equality. And all of those are sort of in the mix together.

Interviewer: So if you’re a teenage male west, then cash or. Mm hmm. Um, what, uh, what was, what would that mean to it? To us? You know, a working class girl like me who was coming up working in theaters and and that kind of feminist sexual freedom influence.

Pamela Wojcik: I think with Mae West, you don’t have someone who’s going to be influenced by activists per se, or feminists. I don’t think she’s paying attention to feminists, but I think growing up in Brooklyn, I think she’s growing up in a social milieu where working class women are finding themselves having a lot of freedom, a lot of mobility in the public sphere. They’re engaged in different activities, including work, going to amusements, things like amusement parks, dance halls where they’re able to express themselves freely. They’re getting a little bit of freedom from parental supervision, partly in the tenements, because the apartment is so small that they have to go out to the street to do any kind of courtship. And there’s new kind of sexualized dancing. There’s a lot of flirting at work and a lot of sexual harassment as well. And I think that she’s growing up in a milieu where working class women are experimenting freely, and that has a big influence on her. And her mom has that background as well. And her mom has a lot of influence and gives her a lot of freedom.

Interviewer: Her mom has that background and what.

Pamela Wojcik: Her mom comes up in that kind of tough girl environment where she’s experiencing newfound freedoms, where she’s out and about doing things. She has ideas about how to raise money that give her freedom and particularly sexual freedom. I think I think she encourages a lot of her activities.

Interviewer: Yeah. You know, the tough girls thing. Mm hmm. Is this a stretch where we’re sort of the tough girls paved the way for flappers by sort of mainstreaming this this kind of good time gal thing? Is there a relationship between the two?

Pamela Wojcik: I think tough girls and flappers exist in tandem, but it’s not a causal relationship. I think the tough girls are the working class white ethnic girls who. You are now engaged in sort of different activities in the public sphere. So they’re engaged in work, public amusements, sort of sexual dancing. Flappers, I think, tend to be coded much more middle to upper class. And so their freedoms are happening in convertibles and glamorous gowns and country clubs and nightclubs. Right. But the tough girls, it’s much more of the dance hall. And I think that they’re both part of a movement toward increased sexual freedom for women, but sort of different sides of the coin in terms of class.

Interviewer: Do tough girls sort of along the lines of the way there’s you know, there’s a terrible neighborhood and they kind of colonize it and then they make it safe for the richer people to come. Did tough girls do that for flappers?

Pamela Wojcik: I don’t think tough girls paved the way for flappers. I think they’re happening at about the same time and they’re happening in different spheres. I think that the tough girls are under a different kind of scrutiny by middle class reformers who are finding their behavior appalling. You know, there’s a lot of efforts to police women, police, how they’re dressing, how they’re behaving, what’s happening in the dance halls, what’s happening on the street corners that’s different from the attention to flappers, because the flappers are operating in more rarefied circles, I think.

Interviewer: Right. And May is fully a tough girl. She’s born. Right. She comes up right in that window.

Pamela Wojcik: May is definitely part of the milieu of the tough girls and that she would be very much defined by her class, by her ethnicity, by her accent, and that she’s very much a Brooklyn girl.

Interviewer: Great. So this is a bit of a joke, but I guess not that much, cause she was 17.

Pamela Wojcik: Frank Wallace. Mm hmm.

Interviewer: We’re just introduced into the story.

Pamela Wojcik: Frank Wallace is a song and dance man who may would have met on the vaudeville circuit. They had an act together for some time. Little songs and sketches. They got married. Mae was 17. She lied and said she was 18. This was 1911. Supposedly, they never lived together. May says they never shared a home. They parted company and went their separate ways. The reason for the marriage is probably because Mae was sleeping around, thought she might get pregnant. She better have a husband. They split. They never had contact for decades. And then in the thirties, when Mae started to become famous in Hollywood, someone dug up the marriage certificate and Frank Wallace came forward and tried to get a little bit of money from Mae, but then later said he was pushed into it. So this was her one marriage that she regretted and never married again. And he never had very much of a career beyond his time with Mae.

Interviewer: So the fallout of him coming back, what is it? It’s it’s she’s less appealing character for being single’s, less appealing character for being older.

Pamela Wojcik: I think when he comes back, it’s the surprise that she’s married because that goes against the grain of her sort of determinedly single behavior and attitude and frequent comments about marriage not being something she’s interested in at all. So it works against her image in some way, but I think it also produces a lot of sympathy for her because it’s a moment when someone comes out and is sort of trying to denigrate her and she stands up to it. She initially denies it and then sort of dismisses it, and I don’t think it does terrific harm to her.

Interviewer: All right. So we have this audio of Bay where she’s talking about how she was basically analyzing her audience and sex. And it was all men saying, how do I get the women? And that she created that the diamond little character because it would be more accessible to women. So I guess well for one thing, do that kind of savvy. Is that something that you see throughout her career or is it more when she’s first setting herself up?

Pamela Wojcik: I think Mae West is very savvy. I think she’s very savvy about her audience so that when she creates Diamond Lil, she creates it to appeal to women. And she does that partly by setting it in the 1890s, having these glorious costumes, you know, with the sort of corset and the feathers and all of these sort of ornate details which she thinks will attract women. I think as her career goes on, she’s incredibly savvy earlier on in making, in writing sex and in fighting it in court. She knows she’s courting controversy and she does that very deliberately. She knows what it gets. Her. It increases her profile. It gets her more money when she puts on the drag and she knows that it’s going to get her in trouble because she’s hired, you know, whatever, 200 gay men from Greenwich Village and just said go. And that court’s a lot of controversy. But then when she gets to Hollywood, she knows how to play that as well. You know, she’s brought in to be the bad girl and she knows how to work that. And she’s incredibly savvy as her film career diminishes. She turns to radio, she turns to the stage, even coming back to something like Myra Breckinridge and Sex Tat. She keeps working her image and she keeps appealing. She writes health books. She writes an autobiography. I mean, she does a lot of things. She’s a very good businesswoman and she’s always sort of finding the new market. And she understands her market from women. She understands gay men as her market. She understands her appeal as a camp figure for gay men. She says camp is the kind of comedy where they imitate me. So I think she’s incredibly savvy throughout.

Interviewer: And she masters her brand also.

Pamela Wojcik: Very modern. Yeah, she is very modern and she is very conscious of sort of the Mae West character, you know, in a way that isn’t her, you know, But she puts it out there, she markets it, she maintains it. So any time you see sort of the real me in her apartment, for example, you know, she’s lounging on a bed. There’s the mirrored ceiling, you know, always with the sort of growling, purring kind of sexual innuendo. You know, she never stops it. And I think that is the brand that she puts out.

Interviewer: Great, great. And something the 1890s does that just does creating that distance time always enable her to say things that she couldn’t get away with in a present day setting. What is what is made setting it in the past sort of give her that a present day setting wouldn’t.

Pamela Wojcik: I think her use of the 1890s works in a few different ways. One of them is it makes sense of her body because she is curvy, right? She doesn’t look like a sort of thirties figure who’s very lean, even gaunt, so that the corseted figure makes sense of her body. But I think it also it displaces her comedy from the present, which on the one hand lets her get away with things she wouldn’t be able to say in the present. She can say these outrageous things, but because they’re happening in this sort of other place, other time, they don’t seem potentially as threatening. And I think they’re also funnier because they’re coming out of a woman who wouldn’t possibly be speaking like that or acting like that in that milieu.

Interviewer: That’s a great point. Yeah, it’s and she and she said, I think this was in her autobiography, she talks that she first herself was the woman’s ego.

Pamela Wojcik: She talks about herself as the woman’s ego. She says that women would imitate her and fan magazines of the time would describe women doing the walk or kind of trying to talk like Mae West, sometimes wearing corsets. She popularized the corset again in the movie Go West, Young man. Theme tais is it? And it has a young aunjanue who sort of is aspiring to be like Mae and to be sexual. And she imitates her. And then in the same movie, an older woman who’s marked as a spinster also doesn’t she doesn’t more comedically. And I think that that idea of women sort of wanting to identify with her and wanting to imitate her and gain access in some way to some of her sexual power is is a strand that you get in a lot of the fan materials of the time.

Interviewer: And it’s it’s really interesting. And it goes back even further than that, doesn’t it? She talks about seeing women imitating her at intermission.

Pamela Wojcik: Well, she’s very imitate able and I think the women imitate her early on and continue. And then I think, of course, gay men imitate her very strongly and that her the degree to which she can be imitated is a key to her kind of ongoing kind of camp presence in gay male culture. But also I think in feminist camp.

Interviewer: See the being imitated. It’s you can put it on and put on the outfit, you put on the accent. It’s like a costume kind of.

Pamela Wojcik: Yeah. I think that particularly the idea of her that gets sort of boiled down to a walk, a pose, right? People always do this, even though I don’t think she really does that much in the movies. Certain one liners, you know, the sort of come up and see me some time and a kind of way of speaking the kind of growl that Mae West puts on. I think our sort of the condensed version of who people think she is and that that’s what gets imitated.

Interviewer: But this jumping ahead a little bit. But at what point do you think she stops being like a star and becomes this kind of icon, this iconic figure that’s down to the essential elements of the.

Pamela Wojcik: I think post Hollywood, when she starts to do the Vegas show in the fifties, you know, she’s basically performing a kind of cartoon version of herself. She’s carried out by, you know, a slew of sort of musclemen, including Mickey Hart, a gay, the father of Mariska Hargitay and Mays lover. At some point. And she comes out and, you know, it’s all kind of over-the-top performance. She’s no longer playing characters. It’s no longer narratives that she’s authoring. She’s just authoring sort of the idea of Mae West. And so she starts to do that, and that’s what gets picked up in the sixties. That’s the cameo that she does in Mister Ed. She’s basically showing up as Mae West. And then I think Myra Breckinridge and sextet are both using that very strongly. I think the difference in that moment is early on, I think we’re seeing Mae playing a character with sexual desire who we can identify with who seems attractive. I think by the time of Sex ten and Myra Breckinridge, we’re supposed to find the idea of her sexuality ridiculous.

Interviewer: Yes. I agree. But in Vegas, there we spoke. Is it the same thing?

Pamela Wojcik: I think in Vegas, it’s a heightened version of the persona. But I think because it’s a live performance and there’s a give and take, there’s less a sense that you’re there just making fun of her. I think there’s a real engagement and love for her. But by the time of Myra Breckinridge and Sex Ted, I’m not sure the love is still there.

Interviewer: Yeah, I think that’s true. So go back to Myra later. But first, let’s just talk about Hollywood and just help us set up her her arrival. Like, what’s going on at the time? Why did they want or what does she bring and what are the risks?

Pamela Wojcik: So when Mae West is invited to Hollywood, it’s on the basis of Diamond Lil in particular. The play is incredibly successful. It’s touring. She’s already very well known. She’s been well known because of the court trial over sex. She has this persona from her plays. She’s invited to Hollywood at a point when the Depression has taken a you know, the hit in Hollywood with attendance is down. The transition to sound has happened, but it’s been bumpy. So we’re just hitting a period where sound is sort of secure and we’re getting new genres that rely much more on talk. So she’s perfect for that. But the problem is they bring her in as this notorious figure, but it’s also the period when the production code is getting under way. So May represents a problem. The Motion Picture Producer and Distributors Association is very wary of Mae West. They’ve already put in the initial production code and they’re scared. They’re scared of what she’ll do. They don’t want Diamond Lil on screen, so they make her sit and she just sits and sits for weeks and weeks. And then they put her in a bit part in the film night after Night with George Raft, and she’s the sensation of the film. So then they realize they’re going to have to use her and they put her in. She done them wrong, which is a slightly revised version of Diamond Lil. And it’s a huge success. People say she saved Paramount Pictures. She didn’t. Exactly. Not singlehandedly, Shirley Temple helped because they were equally important figures at the same time and often compared interestingly. But so she comes in at a point when Hollywood is in crisis and she’s an important iconic figure to sort of shift into a different gear.

Interviewer: Mm hmm. And so at that point, when Hollywood is in crisis. I mean, are they saying to each other, are we going to wrap up the sex and violence.

Pamela Wojcik: When Hollywood is in crisis? They don’t want to ramp up the sex and violence because they’re also under a lot of scrutiny. Prior to this period, individual states would censor films. He’d send your film out, and Kansas wouldn’t like this part. Massachusetts wouldn’t like that part. So the films were being hacked to bits. At the same time, there have been a lot of scandals around film stars, people like Fatty Arbuckle that had made Hollywood seem sinful. So you have these different stages of censorship coming in where Hollywood is trying to censor itself in order to not have the federal government come in and do it. And so they’re cutting down on violence, very particularly at the point when May comes and they’re worried about sex. So there’s a lot of rules going in place about, you know, you can’t celebrate adultery, you can’t have characters having sex outside marriage. And so many steps into that and, of course, pushes all of those buttons. The trick is, but at the point when Mae West shows up, they’re reading the scripts. They’re not scrutinizing the film that’s been made. So the beauty of Mae West is that on the page, the things she says don’t sound that bad. It’s how she says it. And it’s all the growling and the touching herself and the wiggling that she says, and then sort of look them over, stare that she makes, as she says, these lines to men, you know, so that in one film she’ll say you can be had. And on the page that doesn’t sound like much. But when she says it, it’s a complete seduction. So she gets away with a lot in that early period with the production code, because they they just don’t know how to read her scripts.

Interviewer: How was she different than the other actresses at the time? So we’ve got who have we have Garbo, We have Dietrich, Jean Harlow. What’s what was made different from.

Pamela Wojcik: May is different from contemporary actresses in a couple of different ways. One way with a kind of Hepburn, Garbo, Dietrich say, is physically, she’s short and curvy. She’s old. She’s 40 by the time she gets to Hollywood. They’re all these sort of lean, exotic figures. Mae has a heavy Brooklyn accent, right? As opposed to Garbo and Dietrich, who have these European accents. They seem very exotic and foreign. They’re actresses who are primarily in melodrama, women’s pictures. They’re actresses who embody moods where Mae is not a figure of mood. She’s a figure of action and comedy. The other differences from comedians of the time, female comedians are primarily in screwball comedy. So they’re fast talking like me. They’re sharp. They’re sexual. Right? They’re also potentially gold diggers, prostitutes, similar types of characters to me. But they’re in narratives that are primarily about the formation of the couple. And they’re with men who are their equal, right? So that there’s banter, there’s smart, funny lines going back and forth between them. With Mae West, you have a comedian who is the center of attention. The men are not funny. The men don’t sing. There is no equality whatsoever. It is very much driven around Mae West. And so she’s much more like Chaplin, I think, than like other women, because it is that kind of comedian comedy where it’s completely organized around her, focusing on her and her lines, her desires, her interests drive the plot. And that’s the center of it.

Interviewer: Right. That’s that’s interesting You say that that her actual humor is really that different.

Pamela Wojcik: I think that, you know, someone like Jean Harlow can deliver similarly witty, sexually suggestive lines, but the context around them is very different. And I think there’s a way in which when you’re watching a Jean Harlow, the character is more dominant than with Mae West, where Mae West, you’re watching Mae West. And with any star, you’re always watching both. But with Mae West, you know, the incidentals of the particular character matter very little. Right. It’s it’s enjoying her performance, enjoying her humor, watching that swagger that you really want to see.

Interviewer: Oh, so in terms of other movies of the thirties now, she sort of she comes in, she’s kind of cutting against the grain of those movies. Can you give us some examples of what some of those movies are that are sort of just really not what she’s doing, just so we can show that? Right.

Pamela Wojcik: A dominant mode in the period is the fallen woman film. And the fallen woman film is the idea that a woman commits some kind of sexual transgression, right? Adultery or sex outside marriage. And she experiences either sort of a tragic fall. You know, she ends up a prostitute or she ends up dead or she’s successful and she becomes a gold digger. Right. And you have you know, Joan Crawford will be a successful gold digger in something like possessed. But she has to undergo a transformation to learn to actually love the man and be sorry for her behavior. Right. Or something like Babyface with Barbara Stanwyck, where she sets out in a very scheming way to achieve a class rise by sleeping with men. And in that film, there’s a great visual metaphor where as she rises up through the ranks, there’s a skyscraper and you see sort of the windows of the different floors. And she moves up, you know, eventually landing in the penthouse. Right. But in that film, she has to be punished and she has to suffer and repent. Right. And she has to really, truly love him. In the end, the difference with me, she never falls, Right? There’s no moment of sort of crisis. She starts out always already sexual and happy about it. She is something of a gold digger and something of a kept woman. But there’s never a sense that she needs a man, that she couldn’t succeed on her own without him. Right. So in I’m no angel, she rises from being kind of a couch dancer in a circus to then becoming the lion tamer, which has taken as a class rise. And it happens at the same time that she’s dating this guy, Kirk Laurence. Susan Rich, but there’s no sense she needs him, like her own talent will get her where she needs to go. And there’s also no sense that she ever needs to repent or feel sorry. And she is never punished. And I think that’s a big difference for her in terms of the fallen woman.

Interviewer: I think that’s also a big part of what moralists are reacting to with her. It’s not so much the sexuality is the fact that she gets away with it.

Pamela Wojcik: Yeah, the problem with Mae West, with the censors is that she does get away with it. She not only sort of enjoys men, but multiple men within the space of a single movie. She’ll technically be married at the end, or there’ll be a promise of marriage at the end, but it never feels very convincing. It’s sort of a duck smacking out where someone shows up, throws a ring on her, and you’re done. And I think that her enjoyment of sex and her refusal to sort of feel sorry about it or repent her difference from the other women in the film who might judge her and her refusal to be judged in the films I think is really important and a part of what appeals to people, but also is what makes her so tricky for the censors.

Interviewer: Is it because of the nineties where there’s this crazy wedding at the end and she’s wearing the same clothes she was wearing in a previous scene?

Pamela Wojcik: Ball The nineties has the yes, it’s a sudden marriage and is that where she still has the birds. Yeah yeah. And then the end of she done them wrong. She’s more or less arrested by Cary Grant who turns out to be, you know Hawk the policeman and instead of putting handcuffs on her, he puts a ring on her. And she had said earlier in the film, he’s the kind of man you’d have to marry to get rid of. So the idea that this is going to be a lasting marriage makes no sense. At the same time, she has expressed desire for him, so she’s happy enough to be there.

Interviewer: And he doesn’t express it even as a good thing. He says, I’m going to.

Pamela Wojcik: Be your jailer. Yeah, I’m going to be your jailer. And I think, you know, so that the marriages are never very convincing. You know, in one she marries a guy. I think it’s going to town. She throws dice and says, If I lose, I’ll marry you. If I win, I’ll just take all your stuff. And she ends up marrying him. And then by chance, he gets killed. So she gets all the stuff anyway. And then she marries an earl. And it’s the same thing where it’s sudden at the end and completely unconvincing.

Interviewer: Is that the one where she’s saying that she’s entitled to a step and the guy says, you did consent to the marriage? And she’s you know, he says he did consent, as you know, twice.

Pamela Wojcik: Yes. That’s the one where she says the guy dies and she’s going to potentially inherit his stuff and she doesn’t realize she’s eligible. So this other guy says, well, it says here, if you consent to marry him, you can have his stuff. Did you consent? And she says, yes, twice. Which is shocking.

Interviewer: And that’s the kind of thing that on the page.

Pamela Wojcik: Yeah. It would just seem it wouldn’t make sense on the page, You know, you wouldn’t notice it. But when she says it, you know exactly what she means.

Interviewer: If think of any other lines that on the page look totally innocuous or even kind of nonsensical.

Pamela Wojcik: I think a lot of her lines look innocuous on the page when she says, Come up sometimes see me, it’s an invitation. It doesn’t sound suggestive, but when she says it to Cary Grant on the stairs, it means something. And you know what it means. I think other lines that she says are kind of throwaways that would seem innocuous, but again, become sexual in the way that she says them. So at one point she’s talking to Ace Lamont, who’s hired her in Belle of the nineties, and he says, Oh, so you come from Saint Louis, what part? And she says, All of me. And it’s, you know, it’s a throwaway nonsense line, but it sounds filthy in the way that she says it because she’s drawing attention to all of her industry.

Interviewer: Censors were concerned about how comedies could justify unacceptable material. Are there cheesier examples of this? And in these things, things that she did that she sort of get away with because they were comedies but in a serious movie would be.

Pamela Wojcik: I think, across her career she gets away with things because she treats things comedically. She was called the alarm clock that woke up the cleaner uppers. And I’m no angel. There’s a trial scene. It’s a sort of extended thing where she’s being accused of using a man for his money, and she pulls up a number of witnesses, all of whom she has slept with, all of whom have given her gifts, and she grills each of them. You know, did did I ask you for that gift? No. Do you want it back? Did you ever ask for it back? No. Well, then what are you complaining about? And she just rips through them all. And ultimately, what you’re seeing is a woman admitting to have had multiple lovers, to have accepted financial gifts from all of them, so that a kind of charity girl, if not prostitute, but it’s treated comedically. And you’re rooting for May as she’s sort of ripping each one of them apart because she makes the men seem like they’re trying to get away with something, that they’re trying to weasel back their things, rather than her being the problem for having taken them in the first place.

Interviewer: And she’s also kind of defending her honor in that scene in a way.

Pamela Wojcik: Yes, she does defend her honor in interesting ways because she doesn’t care about a sort of conventional idea of honor. But she has an idea about certain modes of behavior, certain kinds of honesty. She’s willing in some cases, to cheat or steal, but she has her own moral code that she will assert. And it’s it’s about being good to someone. If she likes a man, she doesn’t want to treat him poorly. And her view of poorly doesn’t necessarily mean monogamy. It means being upfront with him, being honest with him. And she maintains that moral code. When Mae West makes Klondike, Annie later in her career, she’s under increased scrutiny from the reformers, from the censors. It’s getting harder and harder to be Mae West. So in that film, she starts out as someone who has accidentally killed a lover. She goes on the run, she’s hiding out, and she meets a reformer. And she’s influenced by the reformer, kind of a missionary figure. And Motion Picture magazine hates this. And they say, you know, if Mae West goes Pollyanna, she’s ruined. Because what we want from Mae West is not for Mae West to be a good girl. We want Mae West to be a bad girl and to make being a bad girl fun. And Mae West reformed is not particularly fun or interesting.

Interviewer: There are two ways to read Klondike. Any one is that she’s just she’s trying to be a good girl. And the other is just that she’s making a statement on religious hypocrisy. I’m. Which one do you think it is? I’m sort of inclined to think it’s the person that just goes awry.

Pamela Wojcik: But I think the Mae West is very aware of religious hypocrisy. You know, she doesn’t practice conventional religion because she doesn’t believe it. And in the plays she’s explicit about sort of hypocrisy, about sort of morals being imposed on certain people and not others in terms of class politics. I think she thinks that certain versions of do gooder ism and religion have a kind of rigid moralism and that the kind of moral code that she adheres to is much more humanist. Right? So in the films, if a if a girl has fallen, may will say, that’s okay, you know, you didn’t do anything wrong, it was done to you and I’m going to help you, right. Rather than judge the woman. And she thinks that the the sort of do gooders will judge the woman and not help her.

Interviewer: Well, let’s just I guess quickly just get again, just the idea of her. She shows up, she’s sitting on the bench, didn’t really know what to do with her.

Pamela Wojcik: Okay. So when she gets to Hollywood, because they’re concerned about the risque quality of her play, they don’t know what to do with her. And so they basically have her parked for about six weeks. She’s waiting around and Paramount won’t put her in anything. And so then they stick her and night after night where she’s given a very small part. But she comes in and she completely dominates the film. And everyone is talking about Mae West, and that helps them then decide to go ahead with she done them wrong, which then that becomes such a big sensation that they’re fully committed to her.

Interviewer: Great. You just go through some of the the nicknames for Hollywood era for her. They’re taking a lot of these from from your book, I think The World’s Best Bad Actress, the Empress of Sex, Queen of Curse, First Lady Gangster.

Pamela Wojcik: She’s considered the siren of sex and sensation, the first lady gangster, the Babe Ruth. I can’t remember what the Babe Ruth one is. What is the Babe Ruth?

Interviewer: Babe the feminine Babe Ruth of the screen. Although I also heard the Babe Ruth of stage properties.

Pamela Wojcik: That I don’t.

Interviewer: Know this article.

Pamela Wojcik: But I don’t know. She is called the World’s Best Bad Actress.

Interviewer: The boxers in boxing had a little that she just the fact that she loved boxers and she loved boxing and.

Pamela Wojcik: Mae loves boxing. Her father was a lightweight battling Jack, so that probably has something to do with it, Although she was alienated from her father. I think it’s also it’s still an arena that isn’t super available to women. And I think that May’s sort of entry into that world is another way of marking herself out as different from other women. It’s also a space of masculine spectacle and muscularity, and I think that appeals to her. One of the early fights that’s filmed is the Corbett Fitzsimmons fight, and that shocks people because it attracts all these women to watch this filmed fight. And I think that may that’s part of the appeal that it’s sort of seeing male bodies, but it’s also part of her scrappy Brooklyn upbringing.

Interviewer: Great. She’s very well received by the African-American press. Mm hmm. Interesting. Why is that?

Pamela Wojcik: In a particular instance in The Chicago Defender? Mae West is very well received because at the time, Hazel Scott is in Mae West’s film, and Hazel Scott is a famous piano player and the defender goes and they are all excited. And Hazel Scott treats them as they say, hi hat, and she sits with the white actors and doesn’t talk to the black reporters. Mae talks to them and she’s friendly. And so they say, you know, she was ultimately better to them than Hazel Scott was in general. I think they like Mae West, But the black press also will tend to focus on the African-American performers in her films and read them as sort of what was Hattie McDaniel doing in the film or how did Hazel Scott perform?

Interviewer: So they they like the I mean, the maid portrayal, but that’s generally well received in.

Pamela Wojcik: The Mae portrayal in and of itself isn’t well-received. But as a way to pay attention to someone like Hattie McDaniel, the Black Press is interested so that the Chicago Defender will often read a film and sort of look at the African-American performers and say, We should go see this film because Hattie McDaniel does a really good job. Even though Hattie McDaniel was only on screen for three or 4 minutes.

Interviewer: Yeah. You know the made it’s so interesting she. You know, they’re her friends. They’re her confidence. She’s also she calls one of them eight ball. She calls another one shadow.

Pamela Wojcik: Right. Mae West Maids are one of the trickiest parts of her persona. I think on the one hand, it’s very typical in the thirties for the sort of white woman to have a relationship with the black maid. You see it in Dietrich films, you see it with Betty Davis. It’s very common. Mae West seems to have an incredible camaraderie with her maids. They know her better than anyone. She tells them more about her true feelings than she tells anyone else, and it’s partly a class affiliation. She, on the whole, identifies more and is friendlier with lower class women than with upper class women who she perceives often as enemies. She masks the racial difference by having a sort of gender identification. So she’ll talk to the black maids about men. And, you know, what kind of men do you like? Or she’ll ask them when she’s canoodling with Cary Grant. How am I doing? You know, there’s a kind of playfulness there. At the same time, there is a sort of baseline racism where she will call one of the maids, you know, eight ball and call another one’s shadow or bark orders to them, you know, be able to peel me a grape or when one of the maids is doing her nails, you know, she’ll sort of kicker like, oh, you hurt me, you can’t do that. So there’s never a question of who’s the boss, but there is a friendliness and a playfulness that’s very interesting. So in I’m No Angel, there’s a scene where Mae sings, I found a new way to go to town, and she’s been with the maids who were doing her nails and her hair. She goes to try on a new gown, puts it on, is sort of strutting around the room, begins to sing. Hattie McDaniel and Libby Taylor. Libby Taylor, who was her real life maid as well as played one in the movies. They begin to sing along at Mae’s behest, and then they all kind of dance together out the room so that they become sort of like backup singers for her, you know, sort of foregrounding her and kind of framing her. And there’s ways in which they also highlight her whiteness even more so. So it’s it’s a complicated mix of racism and friendship together.

Interviewer: Highlighting her whiteness. What are those ways.

Pamela Wojcik: Mae West, like a lot of white actresses, is her whiteness is emphasized through lighting, sort of through halo lighting that gives a glow through the white hair that she has. But then also because she’ll surround herself with other actresses who are not necessarily African-American, but slightly darker tone, darker hair, to sort of have her be the most spectacular center of the image. And this is something that is talked about very explicitly as something she did in her stage plays both in the teens and then later when she’s in Vegas, that sort of as kind of the the sort of white beautiful center.

Interviewer: But she also aligned herself with African-American culture. I was interested. I hadn’t read this anywhere else. What you talked about with within in the article, article that Clarence Muse said that she gave him money for an anti-lynching campaign, you know, of other things, like the ways that she supported different.

Pamela Wojcik: She did supposedly give Clarence Muse money for an anti-lynching campaign. I don’t think she was, on the whole, motivated by causes. I don’t think she was an activist. I think she responded personally and that she had personal relationships and personal friendships and she would help in those ways. So when she worked with Louis Armstrong, you know, she made a point of sitting with him when they would have, you know, kind of meals together and be in public places to not have segregated spaces. But I don’t think she, on the whole was out doing kind of race politics.

Interviewer: They modeled herself on female impersonators. I think that’s something she started doing early in her career. Like, in what ways do you see that.

Pamela Wojcik: May had a number of different influences. One of them was Eve Tanguay, who was kind of a burlesque performer, who had this sort of sexually aggressive performance style and was known for her theme song, which was I Don’t Care. Another one was Texas Gwynne, who was another kind of very strong sexual performer. And her big kick line was to call her audience suckers, which is something they explicitly does in I’m No Angel. And then the other one was Burt Savoy, who was a female impersonator. His big line was, You must come over. And the affiliation with Bert Savoy was noticed at the time. So George Davis in Vanity Fair in. The thirties when Mae was emerging and films and you know Mae West, you’ve healed the loss in my heart from the loss of birth Savoy. You are the greatest female impersonator of all time. She incorporated female impersonators into her plays. So in her play, The Pleasure Man, which is about a heterosexual man who kind of uses and abuses women and throws them aside, there’s a whole subplot about the bird of Manly Kent’s Bird of Paradise and his manly kins, who’s a female impersonator. And the stage directions will just say, you know, Bird of Paradise Camps. And he’s supposed to know what to do. And he does things. And she sees an affinity between the female impersonators and gay men and women as mutually oppressed. So the bird of paradise in the pleasure man, when the pleasure man has impregnated an abandoned old woman and then assaulted her bird of paradise, says, If you’re a man, thank God I’m a female impersonator. And then in sex, you know, she’ll sort of talk about the way that her behavior has been determined by the behaviors of men, that because men have oppressed her, she’s fought back. Right. And so I think she sees a kind of affinity. And then also stylistically, she sees an affinity I think she borrows from the female impersonators, she borrows from the drag queens, a kind of witty double entendre. She borrows a sort of heightened performance of femininity from them and sort of sees those connections.