Jill Watts

Interviewer: Do we know about Mae West’s parents?

Jill Watts: So Mae West is the daughter of John Edwin West and Matilda Delkar. And her parents are working class poor. Her father grew up in the Lower East Side. His father was a rigger. He worked on the whaling vessels after whaling went under. He was basically just a laborer. He grew up in the tough neighborhoods of the Lower East Side. Family was very poor. His his John West mother was Irish immigrant. She came during the potato famine. And so you can see in his early life, he grows up on the scrappy streets of New York City. He’s fighting. He doesn’t have much of an education. Her mother is a German immigrant and she comes from Germany at the age of 12. And again, the family’s very poor. They move into Brooklyn and live in Bushwick, in Brooklyn. And you see the family there like like John was family living in the tenements. Working class, getting kind of any job they can to survive her. Her grandfather was a laborer. Her mother, eventually she grew up, became a seamstress. And so they’re just trying to put things together economically. They they aren’t wealthy in any any form. Although later on, she tries to make it seem as if she comes from a very elite family and traces herself to all kinds of royalty. And it’s not at all. It’s a family that’s very, very poor.

Interviewer: Is there anything else we can say about, like the neighborhood of Bushwick in the late 19th century? Was it all immigrants working class? Like, was there any any other color we can get?

Jill Watts: So in Brooklyn, she grows up in the Bushwick neighborhood, and Bushwick at the time when she’s growing up is kind of in transition. There’s still on the one edge open fields and there’s farmers late into the late 19th century, but it’s becoming rapidly urbanized and built up and the population becomes increasingly denser and denser and denser. So it was also the center of the brewing industry in in and especially for German immigrants. German immigrants are coming and settling in this area like her mother’s family did. And her mother’s family had ties to the brewing industry. And later on, that becomes really important because when brewing becomes illegal, then organized crime takes over. And so that allows the family these connections with a lot of organized crime figures.

Interviewer: Perfect. What do we know about her relationship with her father and with her mother?

Jill Watts: Okay. So so Mae West had a difficult relationship with her father. You can see there’s a lot of tension between the two of them in a lot of ways, where she compares herself to him, He’s he’s kind of a scrappy fighter. He’s he was a bare knuckle prizefighter in the in the era when it was the most violent of sports. He takes her along to the to the boxing matches and even teaches her how to box. But at the same time, he’s impatient. He’s a volatile temper. He’s often gone and she really dislikes him. She doesn’t like his cigars, she doesn’t like his manner. He she doesn’t like the way he treats her mother at all. So they have a very, very difficult relationship. Her mother, on the other hand, she has a very, very close relationship with her mother. And she would say that her mother understood her better than her father did. Her father was always trying to force her to do things. And her mother understood that she had this very independent spirit and the stubbornness. And so she would work with the stubbornness. She would coax me West to do stuff rather than tell me was to do stuff. She bonded with her mother because her mother had a great affinity for American popular art. And I think what’s happening is, as a young German immigrant and she’s learning the language, she her mother goes to the performances and theater and vaudeville, and that exposes her to the language. And so she comes to learn the the the ways of Americans. And she really embraces it. She Mae West, mother love the popular stage and of herself wanted to be a performer. Right. But, you know, she couldn’t she couldn’t make it. She is a German immigrant with a heavy accent. But here she has this beautiful daughter who is really talented and she’s able to do all these impressions and she dances and she sings so she can actualize her dream through through her daughter.

Interviewer: Perfect process. Okay, this is great. Does this all percolate in perfect length? Do you I mean, first of all, what do how do we know all the things that you’re saying right now about these early? How do we know this stuff?

Jill Watts: Okay, So how do we know what we know? So untangling Mae West biography is difficult because in a sense, you have three different entities. You have Mae West, the character that we see on film. You have Mae West, the star who wants to convince you of certain kinds of truths about her background. And then you have a real person there. So a lot of what you can tell about Mae West comes from her biography, but you have to intersect it with public record and for working class people, that can be a challenge because their lives go unrecorded in in public record because they’re not that important. So but you can find in the city directories in the newspapers a lot of this, a lot of this life story can be be discerned, even if it’s not definitely mentioned.

Interviewer: I mean, in terms of her mother, the way she talks about her in interviews or in her book, it feels like she was a really spoiled kid. Is that the impression you got.

Jill Watts: Now that I’m dealing with teenagers? Right. Mae West and her mother, that the tight relationship, I think, comes because her mother lost a baby just before there was a child born two years beforehand and she dies, likely of cholera. And that’s a pretty horrible death for for an infant. And I, I think when Mae West comes along, she becomes this kind of prized treasure that her mother has to protect in every way possible. And I think she divides her from her father. And they’re not on the same page about how to raise her. And I think she creates this kind of bubble around Mae West. There are two children. Subsequently a daughter named Mildred and then a son named John. But she doesn’t meet his mother, doesn’t pay near as much attention to those two. And in fact, according to Mae West, punishes them very harshly, where she’s allowed to kind of get away with almost everything. So I do think I do think in a lot of ways, Mae West mother gave her special treatment, spoiled her. She was the favorite child.

Interviewer: And how do you think that childhood experience shaped the character that she became, the persona she created?

Jill Watts: I think most of what Mae West becomes shaped by her mother and by the antagonistic relationship she built Phelps with her dad. I think that she’s empowered even from an early age. She gets her way and she doesn’t like to be told no. And so as she grows up in a world that’s constantly telling her no, she can’t accept that, you know, and she enters the popular arts, she’s told, no, she can’t do that. But she decides that, you know, she’s not going to obey by the rules. And she didn’t have to be by the rules early on. She was special and treated special. So so I think that a lot of that upbringing and then I think also the father, the relationship with their dad, since it’s so poor, it she just never reconciles that and she sort of Katzmann in a certain category as she views them justifiably as oppressors, but also as people who disempower women purposefully.

Interviewer: How do you think and what kind of talk about some relations with men later, But how do you think this her father affected her relationships with men, her romantic relationships?

Jill Watts: You know, it’s interesting to look at the relationship with her father and ask what kind of impact it has later on with with men, because I think that she had such a such a difficult relationship with him and never was close to him. And you see, men subsequently say they could never get close to her. Even people who admit that they were her lovers talk about how disinterested she was. She really wasn’t involved in lovemaking. And I think that that that could come from her father. But I think there are also other men in her life early on that shape her relationships with men. Later. People have speculated that that Mae West was a victim of child abuse, of child sexual abuse. And there’s a lot of kind of veiled references to it in her life story. And but she does actually admit at one point, just before she quit school at the age of 14 of being abused by a male teacher. And I think the abuse goes just beyond just being abused. I think, you know, it’s sexual abuse. And she quit school right after that. And so I think that her early exposures to men, you know, with this kind of violent, ill tempered father and then kind of being exposed to this kind of sexual abuse in the with with a teacher in the classroom actually state after school. You know, I think that that shapes what she experiences later on with men, the relationships she forges with men later. It’s just she’s unable to, I think, forge a closeness until late in her life. I think later in her life, she was able to find that kind of relationship in that kind of love. Right. So where did.

Interviewer: She talk about that abuse? Do you remember?

Jill Watts: You know, with in looking at her, telling her life story, she tells it different ways at different times. So sometimes a story that sounds one way, for instance, the story in first time where it sounds like, oh, this is my first time, you know, I’ve been experienced. She tells it in another instance when it doesn’t really sound all that pleasant. Actually, it sounds like she’d been violated. So I think that’s the that’s part of Mae West. She’s everything in nothing all at once. She just pivots constantly. And so I think the ability to pivot between extremes is one of the magic parts of her performance. So and I think that’s one of the challenges in telling her life story, though, is in some ways it reads one way, in another way it reads another. And I think she herself probably was conflicted.

Interviewer: That’s a great answer. What so let’s talk generally again about the, you know, the context of the West, and they’re living in Brooklyn in the turn of the century. What kind of entertainment was sort of and you were sort of mentioned earlier, the mother was into popular theater. What kinds of entertainment with the family of the.

Jill Watts: Turn of the century, New York and Brooklyn. They’re filled with opportunities to partake of popular American culture. I mean, it’s everywhere. I mean, New York is a mecca. It is the entertainment mecca of the United States. In 1900, when she’s a child. Coming up, you can go to vaudeville, you can go to burlesque, you can see serious theater. There’s opera, working class. People went to opera in those days. There’s all kinds of varieties of music. There’s all kinds of ethnic theaters, there’s street performers, there’s music in churches. It’s everywhere. So so to not have been exposed to it would have been unusual. And then on top of it, her mother is so invested in the theater and she loves the theater and she loves the major American stars, Lillian Russell, who was the great diva of the American stage, Ethel Barrymore. A little bit later, Eva Tanguay, the very controversial I don’t care, girl. She takes me to see that. I mean, and that’s pretty adult entertainment that she’s exposing her to. There’s also star companies who play the old time melodramas that go. All the way back, you know, before the Civil War. So and then there’s the minstrel shows, which are whites, primarily whites, donning blackface and parodying black music. But there are also African-Americans who are performing in their own minstrel shows and performing their own art, sometimes often in blackface as well, in order to cross over and reach other audiences. But she’s exposed to all these varieties of mass culture.

Interviewer: And because you mentioned the minstrel shows, can you talk a little bit about Bert Williams generally? Just who was he and the level of his fame? And we know that Mae saw him.

Jill Watts: Well, I would we know, according to Mae West, she met Bert Williams, and he was when she met him, he would have been one of the top entertainers in America in his day, even though he was African-American, he had managed to rise up through the entertainment ranks and had actually been on Broadway and eventually in a mixed race cast, which was very unusual. The white female performers weren’t allowed to be on stage with him when he was on stage because of the racial codes of the period of time. But so Britt Williams was probably, I mean, without a doubt, one of the most successful African-American performers. And then amongst American performers, he was recording records and and performing in all kinds of venues. So. So did she see him? It’s not entirely clear she saw him perform, but she claimed that her father was an acquaintance of Bert Williams. And it’s likely so. Bert Williams was himself very invested in boxing, and he was very connected to boxing circles, as was her father. And I think it’s very plausible that through those circles he met him and she talks about him bringing Bert Williams home for to visit one evening. And actually, you know, she did see him because when she I should relate this differently because now when I’m telling you this, I’m remembering.

Interviewer: All right. Yeah, that’s great. So.

Jill Watts: So I’ll start.

Interviewer: To say Bert Williams actually came around.

Jill Watts: Bert Williams actually came to her house. And when he comes to the door, she won’t believe she believes her father has lied to her and said, hey, you know, this is Bert Williams and she doesn’t believe it because he doesn’t look like the man that she’s seen on stage or Bert Williams sheet music where he’s wearing blackface makeup and she won’t believe it. And she runs to her room, she says, crying and slams her door. And Bert Williams comes to the door and sings one of his hit songs. And then she realizes, Oh, wait, this is him. And she comes out. What’s really interesting about that episode, though, is as she reflects on it later, she says what she realizes is, is that the popular culture depiction of Bert Williams is not the man and that she sees the disjuncture between who black people really are and how they’re performed within American popular culture. And I think that was pretty earth shattering for her.

Interviewer: What did she take from her? Williams How did he influence her developing an act.

Jill Watts: Which she takes from Bert Williams, I think is pretty subtle. Bert Williams, when he delivered a lot of his music, delivered it in a kind of a spoken form, and she talks about borrowing that form, speaking her, her songs and her music. But I think it goes even deeper, and I think she borrows from Bert Williams, but I also think she borrows from African-American blues singers and other African-American performers. And that is the idea that you can take popular culture and convey two messages at once with it. This is a practice called signifying in the black community, where you on the surface say one thing, but underneath actually reverse it. And Bert Williams is always doing that with his with his music and his performances. And I think she studied that in him. And then later on, when she’s exposed to blues music as it comes into mass circulation, I think that that’s what provides her the foundation for her comedy and but also for being serious, because on the surface it might be a joke, but underneath it’s a real interrogation. It’s a criticism.

Interviewer: As she’s, you know, she’s a teenager. What is she developing ideas about that she wants to signify? You know, like what is she trying to say? What are the the social commentary that she starts to want to make?

Jill Watts: Because I think with Mae West, what you find is the messages change over time. Okay. I think as a teenager, her mom puts her into a stock company really young and she doesn’t have much room in the stock company to create a performance. And she’s little. But as she grows and she’s exposed to more and more culture, I think as a teenager, the earliest skits you find her doing, she’s taking on these Bowery characters and revising them. So she’s making kind of class commentary, but also commentary on gender. And one of her earliest acts, you see her pair up with a with a with a male partner and. Really flip the act where she’s the powerful one and he’s the weaker one. And so you see that just that early beginning of the the Mae West character that’s not going to be dominated by men.

Interviewer: What can you do? We sort of back up and describe her first real performance.

Jill Watts: Mae West First performance is at a talent show in Brooklyn in her mother’s can. She’s right. There has been kind of nurturing this and encouraging it along. She does impressions for friends and sings and dances a little church social here. So her mother enters in a talent contest and she’s billed as Baby Mae song and dance. And she’s at the in the wings and she won’t go on and she won’t go on. And she’s waiting for the spotlight. So finally, when the spotlight swings, she runs to meet it. And as she talks about, she runs to meet it without any kind of hesitation that she just embraces the spotlight. And that’s what she’s been waiting for. And from then on, in her own, in her own story, that’s where she emerges as performer Grace.

Interviewer: Do you think how do you think Mae and or her mother was seeking fame or was it something else?

Jill Watts: I think with Mae West mother, what she’s seeking is to live her life through her daughter. I think that that’s what she’s doing and that could be fame, but that could also be kind of incorporated into the American mainstream. You know, as an immigrant, that’s a goal for her. Same for her daughter. Yes, I think definitely I think there’s a it’s a complicated it’s a complicated equation. I think going into the popular arts brings enormous fame, but it can bring wealth to a family that’s struggling. And her dad is just a lower level muscle man for gangsters. He’s providing protection for these bad guys. Right. And he’s not making much money. He he, he he’s a working class guy. Her mother, you know, Mae, taken at the beginning sewing, but the possibility to be able to establish yourself and not just get fame, but also to get economic security. I think that’s that’s a that’s a big motivation for me, though. I think I think early on she recognizes all those things. But there’s also power. There’s power that comes with being a performer even early on. I think she realizes that.

Interviewer: Do you think she was overly sexualized at an early age in these performances, or how did that kind of come about, the sexualization of her.

Jill Watts: Life early on? I. I think that her mother encouraged these kind of overly sexualized performances. I think it’s complicated in the era that they lived in. I think putting kids on to do kind of burlesque in adult females were, you know, heavily hypersexual, was regarded as humorous and funny. But I think it also has a certain impact. You can even see Shirley Temple being encouraged to perform in this way in the in the thirties when she’s young. And so I think the same thing occurs with Mae West. It’s a different result, though. Right. So, so so I think it’s part of an act that was not that uncommon for, you know, baby made to do this or other children. But I also think that I think that, again, is something that sells whatever sells, right. Sex sells. Even back at the turn of the century, they knew that sex sells. So when she as she becomes older and realizes what she’s actually doing, I think she buys into that. But I think she sees it as a much more complicated equation than her mother does. It’s not just getting attention and getting fame and getting money and selling an act. The act itself can become revolutionary. And I think she realizes that pretty early on. It’s just I think in the earlier years when she goes from being a teen performer all the way up till the 1920s, she’s trying to find something. She’s trying to find that the right vehicle, right. So that she can emerge as ultimately powerful in the stage. It’s not just finding the right act to be famous and to to make money, but the right act that just fits to do what she wants to do, which is more than just be a performer.

Interviewer: I think it’s to say something.

Jill Watts: Yeah. Is to send a message.

Interviewer: What does that mean? Oh, that’s good. I mean, it’s like in class. Okay.

Jill Watts: Why did Reconstruction end? Yes. So. Yes. So I think her intention is to send a message. I think early on she realizes that she can send a message about gender. But I think as she continues to hone that performance, she realizes it’s a lot more powerful than just sending a message about gender. She can send a message about class. I think also she can send messages about race and politics. If you think about the world that Mae West grew up in, up till 1920, women in America didn’t vote. Women didn’t have the vote. And even after 1920, women didn’t have a lot of economic power. If you had to get a loan, you had to get it through your husband. Right. And so Mae West emerges in this world where she is. Is totally constrained as a working class woman, as as as a as a woman and then as a performer. I mean, performers aren’t highly regarded in that period of time, too, so. So to do what she did to create this kind of volatile character, which eventually emerges in the 1920s, which is interesting because that’s when flappers come out and women get the right to vote. That’s pretty amazing.

Interviewer: Do you think there’s something about theater in this period that was sort of a free place for women? Maybe it helped her show hers with more progressive ideas about gender. Oh.

Jill Watts: You mean in the 1920s or early 19? Early the turn of the century? Yeah. I think the thing about Turn the Century Theater, I think that you have a lot of women’s stars that emerge on the stage and that actually it goes back to the Civil War era, where women are able to forge these careers and become really celebrated American stars. And that gives them a certain power that they wouldn’t normally have in the society and in the culture. Right. So so, yes, yes. I think that stage in that period of time, I have to do that. I’m sorry. So staged in that period of time offers a venue in which women can actually not only get economic security, but also adulation in the American society. There’s really, if you think very few venues for women to emerge as public figures in America at that time, there’s very few venues and the stage is one of them.

Interviewer: You’ve sort of referenced it, but just so we have it, she did not basically get an education. I mean, as far as we know, I mean, which is pretty amazing considering what she then went on to do, but you just sort of reiterate how she went.

Jill Watts: Yeah. So Mae West was had very little education. She. She quit school at the age of 14. Her schooling before that was sporadic because she had gone into this stock company and they toured. And so she she talked about having private tutors. And I’m not so sure how how, how real that was. I think her mother did a lot to try to teach her. And I think it’s interesting because in a lot of ways, she had been learning along with her mother, because her mother was still fairly new to the country and new to the language. So so, yeah, So she she’s not a well educated person, but one of the things Edith had said once was, is that she was completely poorly read, but she was totally articulate despite the fact she had no education at all and she was well informed.

Interviewer: But also she had this fascination with words. Right. Right. Language. Is there anything we can say about that? I mean, it’s kind of unusual for somebody to have much of an education.

Jill Watts: Yeah. I think Mae West fascination with words. I think it comes from a lot to a large degree, her mother, who’s learning the language. And I think as she’s learning the language, she imparts that that curiosity to to me, I think that that that’s not an easy task to come speaking as a child. No English at all. And then, you know, within a few years be able to be fluent So and so I think that that was encouraged in the home. And I also think, though, as a performer, language means a lot. That’s how stage communicates its messages is through language. So people become interested in words and how they sound and how to play with them.

Interviewer: Oh, just a couple influences. If you can just briefly talk about. You mentioned Eva Tanguay, but what was her shtick and how did she influence Mae?

Jill Watts: So Eva Tanguay, if a Tanguay in her era was what Mae West would become, she pushed all the envelopes. She pushed every boundary. She was from Canada, and she came to United States and performed and rose to stardom. So Eva Tanguay comes to the United States from Canada, and she pushes all the boundaries. Hypersexualized performance at a time when even the stage, even the stage women were regarded as totally legitimate. She was beyond what was considered acceptable and acceptable. Theater was, you know, high drama. And even tango took kind of the burlesque and tide of mainstream it in. And it was not just it was in the costumes, which were very revealing. It was in the kind of liberated dancing and the songs which are double entendre songs. And she, you know, she became known as the I Don’t Care girl because of her freeways. And then there was also the celebrity dimension to Eva Tango, which you you kind of believed that she was also who you saw on the stage. So in many ways, she provides a very early format that Mae was can kind of plug herself into.

Interviewer: Perfect. What about Savoy.

Jill Watts: Brit? Savoy. So Burt Savoy was one of the most popular drag performers of the era. He was considered outrageously funny, his character. Was a man starved, desperate for love. He performed in vaudeville, in in incomplete drag. And people just thought he was uproariously funny. And his his tagline was, You must come over some time. And so a lot of people believe that Come up and see me sometime. Has some genesis. Inverts the voice performances so great.

Interviewer: So how did Mae West spend her teenage years, if not in school? Was she doing.

Jill Watts: I don’t even think about it in her teenage years if she’s not in school. I think when she quit school at 14, she spent a lot of it working, trying to, you know, be in theater and be on the road and and put together acts and and make it in the in the entertainment industry, in the show business industry, which is in the turn of the century, which is about that time. It’s it’s itself starting to take off. It’s spreading beyond New York City and other central centers are becoming places where you can see all the popular arts. But she does talk about romances with neighborhood boys and their roller skating and doing those kinds of things. But it’s not very convincing when she talks about it. When you read about in her autobiography, you think it doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun, which when she starts talking about putting her performances together, that’s where she seems like she was investing her energies.

Interviewer: So would she be when she was young? The vaudeville stage? Was that would she be doing it this time?

Jill Watts: I think between 14 and 17 she’s on the local stages. And so it’s not that upper level vaudeville at all. She’s finding local venues to play. It’s not until she hits 17 and she gets in this act, which is she? It was in the Bowery Act in which she kind of flips the characters once she gets into that. Didn’t you see her kind of break into the lower level tiers of vaudeville? So there’s stages hierarchical in that time rate. There’s legitimate stage. We have Shakespeare in the legitimate plays. You have maybe Broadway, which is maybe next in the hierarchy. You have vaudeville, and vaudeville has several levels. It’s like the key circuit is the best circuit, and then there’s second and third tier vaudeville, and then you have burlesque. And she’ll also end up in burlesque as well. And burlesque is not what we think of burlesque. It’s pretty mild compared to when we think about burlesque. It’s pretty much closed, but it’s a lot of hoochie coochie dancing and things like that. So.

Interviewer: So what was the big act that she got into when she was 17? Mike Wallace.

Jill Watts: So Frank Wallace was a not so successful song and dance man. A little bit older than me, kind of rattling around in the burlesque circuit, never really all that all that successful with his acts. And they end up in a show together where they’re partnered off and a little romance kind of commences. I think there’s some dispute about how romantic the romance was. She was pretty young, you know, she was 17 and one of the other players in the troupe takes her aside and says, you know, you like Wallace, but you’re playing around with all these other guys. So safe thing to do is marry Wallace. That way, if you get pregnant, then you can have somebody to blame at all. So, so so when they hit Milwaukee, she marries. WALLACE But then once the tour is over, she dumps him and they kind of go their separate ways, but she forgets to get divorced.

Interviewer: We’ll come back to that if it doesn’t seem like, you know, it’s this marriage of convenience thing, but it doesn’t seem like marriage. And the traditional female life at that point is sort of what she’s looking for. Right. Right. Even at that young age. Right. Right. Can you talk a little about that? Like she has a different plan for her life?

Jill Watts: Yeah. The marriage to Wallace is unusual because she had to have known it would have completely infuriated her mother because to be a married woman would be basically to kind of resign from any kind of career in that period of time. So so I think it’s a marriage of convenience. I think she did it because she was pushed into it. That’s why she immediately jettisons jettisons him when she gets home. And he’s going to be an impediment to her if she wants to be a successful performer on the stage. So she has to get rid of him. No marrying woman can continue. Schoolteachers can’t even continue in their careers. Right. So not even not even a stage performer is going to be able to pull a marriage off like that. So.

Interviewer: And what was you you mentioned the to the hierarchy of theaters. What was her goal? What was she trying to reach? Broadway. What was trying to do?

Jill Watts: Yeah, Early on in the Gulf War, Mae West, I think early on is Broadway. I think that’s where she sees herself and that’s where she wants to be a legitimate theater. Beyond her reach and it’s beyond her style and she knows it. But Broadway, which is really blossoming in the teens, is definitely a goal for a lot of performers in this period of time. And and she wants to pursue that goal. And so a marriage would definitely stop that. Its importance should be seen not only for career choices and stuff like that, but just to be seen publicly as a desirable woman. Right. It’s important that she not be married.

Interviewer: When does she finally get to Broadway?

Jill Watts: So Mae West first arrives on Broadway in September 1911. She’s cast in a play called Black Broadway, where she plays an Irish maid called Maggie O’Hara. And she’s an absolute hit on the Broadway, isn’t. But she steals the show because of some mishaps backstage. She ends up going out earlier and longer and adds choruses to her song called They Might Be Irish, where she sings the song in a variety of different dialects, playing a variety of different characters. She adds nine nine verses to it, and the crowd loves her and she takes down the house with it. Like I said, though, the the play itself is a flop. But Mae West actually it established her as a potential star for Broadway right there at that moment. And so she’s going to go on and she’s got the attention of the Schubert’s who want to take her into the next production.

Interviewer: So I think what happens, though, is that she doesn’t get a million parts on Broadway.

Jill Watts: No, no. But at the at that point, actually, at that point, she was hot property because the Schubert’s recruiter right away in November 1911 to go into Vera Violetta. Right. And Vera Violetta stars Gaby displace the great French Parisian star who has come to America and brought her ego and her outlandish performance as she was famous for the kind of big showgirl hats that you see in Las Vegas. Chorus girl outfits right now. So. So, Gaby, this lace is cast in this, and they do an out-of-town tryout. And so in the out of town tryout, May’s character goes on before the sleaze character comes on. And actually, what she has made is a costume that looks like Gaby display’s costume. And she goes out and she actually does her shtick.

Interviewer: This.

Jill Watts: And it. And the house goes crazy and it brings down the house. And actually, it was the night of the football game. It’s in Connecticut. The football players have a riot. You know, because she’s so awesome, Right? And Gaby does Les has a meltdown because he has totally upstaged her. And actually even Bush before she can come out there, they’re stomping and calling for more and more, more, more that the the theater kind of shuts down. And they the crowd goes crazy. They tear out the seats and they riot in the streets. People get arrested. That’s what hurts her in terms of continuing on Broadway because she upstages this great star and she’s unpredictable in this way. So then she’s kind of consigned to back into the burlesque slash vaudeville circuit. So that’s that impedes this attempt to rice her first attempt.

Interviewer: Great. So, yeah, So she goes back and she travels around. She just called back on the circuit at some point, I think in here she goes to Chicago.

Jill Watts: Right. Right. In 1917.

Interviewer: Yeah. Let’s talk about that. Why? That’s an important moment of her being in Chicago. And specifically related to the shimmy dance.

Jill Watts: Okay. So during World War One, she ends up in Chicago, she leaves New York. Her careers kind of stalled out there. She goes to Chicago, and she’s playing on the smaller Midwestern vaudeville circuits and picking up jobs in clubs and things like that. And it’s a really important time for her in terms of her her development of her performance style in Chicago. What’s happening is the African-American community is growing. The Great Migration from the South begins in 1915, and it and it continues up until 1930. A million and a half African-Americans leave the South. They’re fleeing the racism, the poverty, but they’re all also going to into the cities of the Midwest, in the north, for jobs that are being created by the war industry. And so what they’re bringing with them is all kinds of cultural formations from throughout the south, and they’re sharing them in the nightclubs and in the theaters. And Mae West actually patronized these nightclubs. And as she’s, you know, in and out of Chicago, she patronized some of the most important jazz and blues clubs. And so she observes African-Americans performing jazz music. She listens to the blues songs, and she starts to appropriate those and think, you know, these are would be great for my performance, especially those of the blues. Women. Blues women are really important in this period of time. They’re singing songs not just about the experience of being black in America. They’re about that, but they’re also about being black women in America. About racism. And so Mae West hears this. She also sees the African American dance traditions that are being performed in the nightclubs of Chicago. And so she appropriates these and brings them into her act. And then when she returns to New York in 1919, she comes back a completely different performer before her, before she goes to Chicago. She’s kind of casting about and she’s trained on all these different kinds of performance styles. She’s Parisian and one she’s down and dirty may and another. And when she comes back from Chicago, she comes back with pretty much which you’ll see later on. She’s this blues singing, slow dancing, slow performing, double entendre, but also double messaged person when she returns. And that’s that’s so important because when she comes back to New York, she wants to bring all that that she’s learned in Chicago to the New York stage.

Interviewer: Great. Can you speak specifically about that dance?

Jill Watts: Shimmy dance? Sure. Sure. So in the nightclubs of Chicago, in the teens, the shimmy is is often performed. And it’s performed as a couple starts. Often, but often it’s performed by a single woman. And the thing about the shimmy is the shimmy is kind of it’s a critique of of European dance traditions. Mae West was a coochie dancer and hoochie coochie dance scene is kind of all hips. And and it was not uncommon in burlesque. Shimmy dancing is an interrogation of hoochie coochie. It emanates from the shoulders down and it’s a slower kind of in a way, a faster and slower kind of dance. And so she sees this, and she loves it because she thinks it’s so much more meaningful than the hoochie coochie dance, which is just a dance, right? But she sees something that goes deeper in the shimmy dance. It’s sensual, but it also conveys other messages about suffering and about pleasure, but about pain as well. So she’s determined to bring the shimmy dance into New York and perform it on the stage there.

Interviewer: I think this blues women’s analogy or this connection is really important and maybe you expand on it a little bit, like, what were these blues women saying about what was their sort social commentary that she was picking up on?

Jill Watts: I think if you look at the blues, women of the teens and then the early twenties in the African-American community, it’s it’s so multilayered. I mean, so much of the blues music is about experiencing racism, fleeing the South. The music that people are taking into the clubs. But it’s also about experience, the oppression of of being a woman and being a black woman in society. So there’s multiple voices going on in blues music.

Interviewer: And how would Mae what would she take from that to say, Oh, that I can. That’s partly what does she see in it for herself?

Jill Watts: Well, I think blues music, it carries that double meanings. And I think she’s already kind of been exposed to that through Bert Williams. But now she sees women performing it and and investing it with certain what we would call proto feminist messages. Right. And so I think it has that kind of meaning for her. I think that Mae West resonates with the black experience, I think even as a as a young person. You know, why is that? As a working class woman, poor in New York City, she resonates with other marginalized people. There were always rumors about Mae West possibly being black that her grandfather had passed. When you look into the records, there’s nothing that confirms that. But what you do see is that she creates this character in a lot of ways because it appropriates so much from black culture. It’s a character that’s attempting to pass either for black or for white, depending upon how you look at it. The thing that makes Mae West different is that other white performers are appropriating black performance tradition, too. There are other white shimmy dancers that come up, but she strives to authentic to be was strives to genuinely reproduce the dance, not just the physical part of the dance, but the meaning of the dance. And she’s also always crediting her sources. She doesn’t pretend like she invented this or that. She saw it from some other white source. Over and over again, she underscores the fact that she’s borrowing, appropriating and stealing from black culture when other performers are pretending at the in that era like they had generated this all out of their own imaginations.

Interviewer: Right. And what was the response to that dance when she starts doing it on the stage? The shimmy dance. Was it considered sort of outlandish?

Jill Watts: And so in October 1918, she returns to New York and she. It’s cast in Hammerstein sometime, which is a really good part and with an excellent producer. Oscar Hammerstein is, you know, the top and in the part, she attempts to introduce the shimmy. So she attempts to perform the shimmy, but it’s declared to raw from the New York State for the New York stage. And so her ability to kind of hang on as a Broadway performer again, she’s kind of sabotaged herself like she did earlier. She sabotages this performance by performing the shimmy. And subsequently, whenever she gets another role, she attempts to introduce the shimmy again. But again, it’s too raw. It’s too it’s too it’s too poignant.

Interviewer: Not too poignant because it’s a black dance. What was so offensive about it?

Jill Watts: Well, that’s a good question, because if you look at Ziegfeld Follies, Ziegfeld Follies are filled with women, basically. I mean, there’s skimpily clad and they’re doing all kinds of suggestive dancing. And even there’s a little hoochie coochie here, there. But it’s a good question. Why is the shimmy considered so volatile? Other white female performers perform it and get away with it and in Broadway and in vaudeville. But she does it. And I think it’s because she attempts to replicate it so closely to black culture. I think that her attempts to make it genuine, make it more volatile than than the other performers. So I think that’s what’s going on with her.

Interviewer: She’s not making fun of it.

Jill Watts: Right? No, I don’t think seriously.

Interviewer: And that’s what’s it’s interesting.

Jill Watts: Yeah. I think that now, that’s an interesting point, because the shimmy itself is making fun of European dance traditions. And for African-Americans, when they see people doing the shimmy dance, especially couples doing the shimmy dance scene, Amanda Shimmy is incredibly hysterical. Right. And so in some ways, you’re supposed to laugh at the shimmy, right? But Mae West wanted you to laugh, but she wanted to also understand it was it was serious stuff. It was a serious dance. It was seriously sensual.

Interviewer: So and it’s not just her, but the dancing. She develops a way of moving and just walking. Mm hmm. That’s very unique. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Jill Watts: Yeah. I the the walk. I think she perfects during the 1920s. I think that the walk comes from the shimmy because she becomes a shimmy dancer. If you look at the walk, it radiates from the shoulders downward. The other thing about the walk, though, is it’s enhanced because her attempts to make herself look bigger. So she wears these impossibly high heels and eventually she’ll have shoes constructed where there’s these platform shoes. And if you see them, there’s a real shoe on top of the platform. But she wears these long gowns so that you can’t see that she’s wearing these lifts so she can be much taller. So I think the walk is a combination of over time, the shimmy, then making yourself taller and then later on in the toes. When she plays Diamond Low, the corseted very tightly corseted costumes which don’t allow her to to move very quickly. It’s really interesting because if you look at Mae West, say in 1911, she’s this tap dancer, high kicks, you know, quick cookie coochie all the way into the twenties. Then all of a sudden it becomes slower and more languid and more relaxed.