Rick DesRochers

Rick DesRochers It’s interesting because I think we think of vaudeville as burlesque variety, theater and vaudeville all being the same thing. So it’s very interesting to see that continuum. And I know you would ask about how that continuum works. So in the late 1890s, let’s say burlesque was actually a form where comedians were parodying other art forms and also people and immigration issues and race and gender and women were actually comedians who did the comic acts and not just the dance part of it. And then as vaudeville or as variety theater sort of moved in a different direction, it sort of kept the sort of third tier kind of, you know, working class audience and sort of moved in that direction. And then vaudeville suddenly became this thing that was becoming respectable. And then Benjamin Franklin, Keith and Edward Albee took viability, made it into what they call the Sunday school circuit. So they cleaned it up to get middle class audiences, especially women and children, to come see these shows. So then there became a schism between what was Variety theater, what was burlesque, and what was vaudeville. And the vaudeville structure was very much so they would start with a what they called a dumb act or a silent act to get people in because they were going to make a lot of noise, getting seated and getting ready. And then they would go to sort of a symbol of maybe a singer or an animal act of something really simple or juggler. In fact, W.C. Fields was one of those jugglers that used to he got his start that way. And then they would build the act, maybe a two person song or a sketch comedy routine between two people. And then it would build as the virtuosity of the performers builds, it would build to the headliner act. And it was at the turn of the century. You’d have people all the way from Sarah Bernhardt doing, you know, Shakespeare monologues. And then, of course, being Sarah Bernhardt, she did Macbeth and Hamlet and played the male roles as opposed to Ophelia. And Wait a minute. And so it it ended with somebody who was either a singer like Louis and Russell or, like I say, Sarah Bernhardt would be the headliner people had come to see, and then it would end there, and then there would be some acts after it, which would be the worst place to be in the lineup, because people are basically leaving after that point, but they still had to have something going on. And the interesting thing I think about vaudeville structure is that it’s continuous. They would do these shows, especially at the turn of the century. It changed a little earlier, but they would do these shows continuously beginning sort of around noon all the way to midnight every day, seven days a week. Some folks would do 12 shows a day. You know, and granted, their acts were like 5 to 10 minutes long at the most. But still, you’re doing 12 of those shows and it’s a continuous cycle. So the main thing was to make sure that audiences could drop in at any time. So whoever was on had to be on and had to be connecting with the audience and what was called putting it over, which I wrote about in the book. The notion of putting an act over meant connecting with your audience and getting them on your side, sort of engaging with them. And so for working class audiences and performers like Mae West, they were in tune with that. And so they had sort of what W.E.B. Dubois called a double consciousness. They would play for their working class women and Mae West case, as well as played a sort of more the upper classes in the male clientele. And that’s where the double entendre comes from, for example. So she knew the women in the audience understood what she was getting at, and she knew the men probably received it in a different way. So she would play both at the same time. And there were many acts that had to do that, especially race acts like Bert Williams, for example. Once again, he had he performed for black audiences and they were all relegated to what they called the gallery gods in the balcony way in the back. And of course, the middle class and more wealthy people were in the orchestra up front. But he would play to both audiences at the same time, telling the same jokes, but in just a slightly coded way so that that black audience would hear something different than the white audience. Or it could be interpreted in many ways. So she wasn’t the only one doing that. And I think that’s really interesting that most acts had to play on that edge of race and gender and economic status, because I would say the majority of performers were from working class, poor backgrounds.

Interviewer That was great. You just answered like ten questions. Oh yeah, that’s perfect. But I actually want to go back to if you just explain what Mae was doing and again and and who. So you explain that. A lot of hundred things in the audience. And it’s just because I want to really make sure we get that.

Rick DesRochers Yeah. Yeah. So W.E.B. Dubois wrote a book, Souls of Black Folks, and in that book he talks about double consciousness, which means he was talking about African-American performers and writers, actually, and like himself. And he said that when you’re talking to an audience of mixed race folks, that you to reach the white audience, you had to perform and sound a certain way so they wouldn’t be anxious about it. And also, they feel like they were getting it and they weren’t being talked down to or they weren’t getting language that they didn’t understand or references they didn’t understand. So the notion was that a performer like Mae West and about I would say about a third of the audience for vaudeville were working class women, which is, you know, sort of a huge amount. So she had to speak to them in a different way. So all the codes that she put in her language that we now interpret as sort of sexual innuendo were really left up to the interpretation of the person who’s receiving it. So if you were a woman, you understood what she was saying in a different way than you were a man, for example. So this double consciousness a lot of performers had to do because if you didn’t or you offended a certain part of the audience, that was it. You’re off. And worse if you offended the producers. The Keith Albie Circuit. These guys have very strict rules that you couldn’t say certain things and you couldn’t be lewd and you were had to play to a middle class audience of women and children and their husbands and fathers. If you offended them, that was it. You were pulled off the bill and your livelihood was gone and then your reputation would be sullied throughout the whole circuit so you couldn’t play anywhere. So people like Mae West had to really negotiate that. And she got in a lot of trouble for it, actually, because the male audience was aroused by what she was saying and the female audience were laughing at her satire of the men that they were sitting next to.

Interviewer You sort of made that distinction between burlesque and vaudeville. But were these were these formats that actors sort of went between? Or once you sort of escalated from burlesque to, you know, like was it sort of a fluid population of actors?

Rick DesRochers Yeah, I think that most folks took what they could get, essentially. So they started in burlesque or Variety Theater because it was, you know, they needed bodies and they needed performers. And, you know, the stakes are pretty low because most of the people in Burlesque and Variety theater, the audiences were mostly working class men who were there just to sort of shout and get drunk and be rowdy, basically. And so, of course, performers didn’t really want to be in that situation. This is not what they do, right. So they wanted to move up through the ranks. But to do that, you had to change your act again, to reach a middle class audience of a very different clientele and women and children and all this. So they literally had to tailor acts. So people like Mae West sort of had to take what worked in burlesque and sort of bring it with her, but also sort of get around the fact that it was pretty raw and raunchy given the fact of where she had come from. But what’s interesting, I think about her is that she never really gave up that sort of burlesque playing to a working class, what was called rough audience. And she was known as a tough girl. Right. She comes from the streets of Greenpoint, New York, and a working class neighborhood of Irish and Polish immigrants. And, you know, this was their humor. They would they would do these saloon acts for good working class men who were just there to have a good time, relax and let off a lot of steam and be very rowdy. So of course, we can’t do that for the same audience. But she tried to negotiate that, but nobody wanted to stay in burlesque. Everybody wanted to move forward.

Interviewer Well, let’s talk a little bit about women at this moment and comedy. You know, I love that article that you found about kind of a sense of humor. Were Well, I guess what my first question is, were were there just as many female comedians as male at this point or. And what was the impression what was the what were the ideas about women and humor at the turn of the century?

Rick DesRochers Yeah. So I think sort of there weren’t a lot of female comedians, really. If there were, it was more kind of, you know, they would do a song and dance and maybe throw in some funny lines about something topical that was happening. But there’s also very few of them because the notion was that women did not have a sense of humor and actually didn’t need to have a sense of humor, because sense of humor was meant to attract women. So men being funny to get women’s attention, basically. And so this was not an issue. So people thought like, well, how are they going to have a sense of humor? They don’t have to develop one. As young women and therefore, where’s the humor even coming from? And the other part of that is that humor. And to this day, I think this is true is often equated with sex. And there’s always this notion of sexual innuendo. And you see this in comedy clubs still, and especially men are still playing this this notion of, you know, telling sex jokes and being raunchy. Right. In order to get cheap laughs, basically. If a woman tried that, especially in 1900, they would think she was basically a prostitute. So and that she had loose morals and was, you know, somehow and this happens in all of Mae West’s performances, she plays a fallen woman who takes other fallen women into her businesses. Usually they’re either brothels or saloons or nightclubs, and she takes them under her wing and says, yes, you’re now labeled a fallen woman because a man has you know, you’ve had sex with a man outside of marriage, maybe more than one. Therefore you’re damaged goods. And now you have to sort of come into my world. But I’ll protect you because I’ll give you a job and a place. And I understand where you’re coming from because I’m the same way. So she would she would sort of take that and turn it around in the act. And what I think is really interesting is, again, the double consciousness of she would say something, but it could be taken in many ways. So she you know, it’s the famous line about her is it’s not what you say or do, it’s how you say and do it that makes it work. And she often gave, you know, her ax to producers and said, this is what I’m going to do. And they were like, oh, great, there’s no offense here. And then the way that she would lean on certain words would make it funny and also probably inappropriate from their point of view. But women definitely were in a place where, yes, you were a wife, you were a mother, you were respectable in your community, and there was no place for having an opinion, never mind telling a joke. And usually jokes are based in some sort of political or social, economic or gender, you know, parody of some sort or satire. So it was assumed that women didn’t even have these ideas going on because, you know, their husbands dealt with all this sort of thing.

Interviewer Great. Yeah. Can you describe the concept of the new woman that was emerging at this moment, how Mae West fits into that?

Rick DesRochers So it sort of goes along with that, this notion that women we’re realizing the suffragette movement is happening just about the same time. That’s really important. But also because or conversely, you have the prohibition movement from the sort of women’s right happening in conflict with that, who really didn’t want women to have the right to vote, essentially, or have a say in politics or the family even. And people like Mae West, who never even was married, never mind. Well, she was married briefly, but, you know, was basically single and had multiple lovers her whole life. She, you know, realized that this was not you know, this was something that I’m sorry.

Interviewer Unless I know. Yeah. Just sort of. How do we define the new woman?

Rick DesRochers Yeah. Oh, yes. So, yeah, the notion is that that the new woman was basically coming into her own saying, Hey, look outside of the home and being a wife and mother, which was the primary goal of the 19th century, it was to make sure you had your home in place and your kids are being raised properly. Outside of that, you didn’t have a function necessarily if you were a respectable middle class woman. But once new technologies come into play and you now have things to clean the house for you, you have vacuum cleaners and you have this new technology, for example, you have more and more time to do things outside of the home. And so a lot of women were like, okay, well, I would like to go and see a show. I would like to go out and, you know, go to a political rally. I would like to see what’s going on there. And then a lot of women were becoming because they started seeing what was going on early 20th century with immigration and race issues and gender issues. They would start responding to that, of course. And, you know, they started agitating for getting the right not only to vote, but just to have a voice in the community. And so that’s where that’s coming from. This notion of the new women is what’s new about it is that she has a place outside of the home. She has a point of view. She has a you know, she has a political agenda. She is also a philanthropist. And one of the most important things is helping out other women who are young or who are poor or who are coming from marginalized circumstances where they need help getting the stigma of that away. So they would literally take them under their wing and and bring them into the fold. And so this is where, in fact they would do union agitation became part of it. As well as, like I say, having democratic voting rights and that sort of thing.

Interviewer Would the would this sort of social rebellion among women be seen on the vaudeville stages of them and sort of translate it into performance?

Rick DesRochers I don’t think directly. I think it was very much they wanted women, especially in vaudeville, especially in the Keith Albee circuit, to be respectable. So they would often be singers and ingenues. And if anything in comedy, it would be more like George Burns and Gracie Allen, or Gracie Allen would be sort of the comic foil, the stupid woman who didn’t understand what was going on, and the George Burns character, the, you know, the husband or father or brother would have to explain to her, you know, these issues. So I don’t think that that was the intention at all. But of course, women having, you know, a sense of humor and a sense of satire and the fact that they understood that they were being oppressed would slide it in with double entendre, especially in music lyrics. And Mae West did a lot of this in songs. You can get away with a lot more than you can when you’re just doing a comic routine because suddenly, you know, you’re listening to pretty music and it’s sort of like, Oh, do I really hear that? And they’re cute little rhymes make it seem less offensive if you were to do any kind of sexual innuendo or even express an opinion or point of view on something, you would really have to to really underplay that. And if a woman word to do that, that would be it. They would take her off the stage. And the idea also and then what happens with the Ziegfeld Follies comes in is they literally take women away from even performing acts of any kind and just make them statues and models that just move around and look pretty in front of male comedians who are in between those acts, telling the jokes and doing the sort of social humor. So no, yeah, women were not were not expected to have any kind of commentary or any kind of thought process was just like pretty voices, pretty ladies, maybe some dancing. But again, not dancing had to be respectable. It had to be, you know, maybe with a male partner. As soon as women started dancing by themselves, there was suddenly this suggestion that it was sexual innuendo because, you know, they were doing this by themselves on their own without anybody leading them, so to speak.

Interviewer I mean, this might be impossible to answer, but do you have any sense of how Mae West was? Did she just have devised this act because she people were responding to it and she wanted to succeed? Or do you think that she went into it with like I’m, I have an agenda here. Mhm. I don’t know if it’s hard to be a. Could you repeat that again? Yeah. I mean, again, maybe you’re you can’t speculate, but, like, do you think that she went into it thinking, I want to comment on men, women, gender, class, or do you think it just sort of she saw it was she stumbled into it as a successful formula.

Rick DesRochers So I think I think not. I think that Mae West was not intentionally trying to make any kind of commentary. I think she was just reflecting what was going on in her life, what she knew and what she had to deal with, especially with men who are trying to control her. And she grew up in a working class family of immigrants and the father was an alcoholic. And the mother, because of that fact, he couldn’t hold a job. She had to go out and work. And so did me as a kid. And one of the safest places to work was on the stage because, you know, you’re not in the factory, you’re not on an assembly line, you’re not in the triangle waist, shirt, factory, sewing all day long, doing piecework. Right? You’re performing. So at least for a child, especially a lot of children and working class children found themselves on the stage rather than in school, let’s say. And so I think as soon as she did this and she was a very young kid, I think her mother put her on stage when she was like six. And again, it was a very small time community stuff. And by the time she was a teenager, she sort of used to being in front of audiences, but she was still a working class kid who had seen an abusive father and then seen men taking advantage of young working class women, making them into so-called fallen women by either sexually assaulting them or, you know, tricking them, so to speak, into having sex and then abandoning them, promising them marriage or this sort of thing. So Mary West was very much about, okay, I know that’s all fake because I grew up with that and I don’t trust men. I think their agenda is is very much about, Yes, they just want to have sex with young women. They don’t care about them. They don’t care about their opinions. And they certainly don’t want them to be sexually aggressive because that would make the man feel, you know, inferior in bed especially. So what would happen is she would she wanted to talk about that stuff because that’s what she was going through and she thought it was funny. And then I think she knew in the audience there are plenty of women, even middle class, so-called respectable women, that would understand where she was coming from. They just couldn’t talk about it openly. So I think as it progressed, she got more and more sort of pushing the envelope of how far she could go with this sexual innuendo, mostly to make the men in the audience uncomfortable and to have the women be sort of like snickering, going, Yeah, I get it, I get it. I see what you’re saying. And also for her to have control over her act, too, because a lot of times and this is actually still true, producers are very vehement about this is what you look like. You play this kind of role. If you don’t, then we won’t hire you very much. The stereotyping and the casting, the typecasting that we still see today. So Mae West has a very interesting thing, and she was often in the reviews, they would say, is, is she a man or a woman? Now she’s in this third gender that we’re not quite sure what that is, you know, because they couldn’t they couldn’t understand. Like she spoke like a man and she used tough language like a man. And she talked about sex openly, like a man. And for her, this was who she was. So she wasn’t doing anything unique then. She didn’t look like a pretty engineer, you know, she was tough and she was strong and she was built very, you know, very necessarily a large woman, but a strong woman and not a typical ingenue by any means. So she knew she couldn’t play those roles anyway. So she did her own thing.

Interviewer Great. Perfect. Can you. So before obviously, you know, she gets the sexual innuendo, you just talk about her her developing an act as a kid, as an early, you know, like she went on stage at six or seven. Yeah, but like, what? What were those venues? What was you’ve been doing when she was a kid and in her teenage years.

Rick DesRochers Yeah. I think there were sort of more local community sort of things. You might get a few bucks to just go up there, sing a song. And I think mostly when she was a kid, it was just singing funny, cute songs and throwing in, you know, little, you know, malaprop things where they couldn’t quite understand what they were singing. And so, you know, she obviously had a sense of humor already going in plays. And a lot of working class women especially use humor to deflect the pain that they’re going through and to sort of, you know, show that they aren’t being hurt. Right. So I think that she was, you know, as a kid was trying to play off the fact that, all right, I get a lot of attention for being cute and singing these sweet songs and, you know, just go along with the program. So I think that that was sort of the early days. I don’t think there was any sort of consciousness that she was doing anything special or unique beyond that.

Interviewer But was she sort of sexual? It was part of the comedy when she was young that she was. Sexualized kid was that?

Rick DesRochers No, I think that was. No, she wasn’t. I think that when she finally put that persona on, it was intentional and that she was, you know, well into her late teens. And of course, then that was, you know, equivalent of our thirties at this point. So. Yeah.

Interviewer Do you know much about her first performance, like the Spotlight story, where she goes out and sings a song? Do you know anything about that? Okay, Well, I want to you mentioned Bert Williams and raised already, but let’s just talk. I mean, what she did were minstrel shows, something that she would have gone to see.

Rick DesRochers I don’t know about that. But I was actually thinking about that. She performed in Chicago and she would perform in black nightclubs on the South Side with jazz musicians and pianists. And of course, everybody was again, some of these places were quasi brothels, if not actual brothels, but they were speakeasies, certainly. And there was this underground element that black musicians who were playing jazz. And of course, jazz was seen as equally as being salacious and promoting sexual abandon and immoral. Right. And so jazz and what she was doing as a singer were sort of equated, and she was much more comfortable because it was a working class environment of marginalized folks. But they were doing the kind of music that she wanted to do. So early on, she would have been singing sort of a lot of what we would consider sort of the early jazz standards of black musicians. And she would use those songs and then create what they called the cooch dance out of that. And I could talk.

Interviewer About, yeah.

Rick DesRochers I mean, further. But yeah, I don’t think that she went to minstrel shows or I don’t know, I mean, there’s no evidence of it. But she certainly performed with other black performers, especially musicians, and developed a great rapport with them.

Interviewer So but the movement aspect is important here as well. I mean, if you could talk about how she developed her dance style and cooch to shimmy, which I know quite a lot different.

Rick DesRochers But yes, it’s all very Southern. Yeah.

Interviewer Yeah. So how did movement I mean, maybe you could talk about this in the context of comedy. How did her movement play into comedy?

Rick DesRochers So I think, you know, they would they would develop these song and dance routines based off of like Victorian song and dance routines, and she would actually make them her own. And she realized when she moved in a certain way, she got certain reactions. And so there’s a great story where she develops this dance called the Shimmy Shovel, or this is what she calls it, and she claims she got it from these jazz clubs that she worked in. But essentially she’s just gyrating her torso and her hips. But she was unique in the work she did because she was sitting while she was doing it instead of standing, which makes a big difference because it all became very intentional. And also, you know, heaven forbid you might actually get a glimpse of some ankle perhaps. And who knows even more if, you know, she moved in a certain way and this was sort of her salesmanship here was right is to promise the notion of sex but not deliver on it. And this is what early burlesque actually did, too. There was a strippers like we know today. They were very much about the promise of, oh, maybe you’ll see a shoulder, maybe you’ll see ankle or something like this, but you’ll never, ever actually see what’s going on. And that kind of titillation was what they all worked on. So she took that and made it her own. And the more sort of subtle she was about it and the more sort of specific she was about it by sitting in a chair and there couldn’t be any distractions, she would bring the focus to her body essentially where she wanted it. And this is what drove people crazy, especially the producers who were like, This is so obscene. So the same dance that someone would do standing up she did, sitting down to change the whole ball game for her. And I think that she was just using what she saw in clubs and working with musicians especially, and just going with the rhythm of the music that was being played. So you’re moving away from like the 19th century sort of Victorian sort of Tin Pan Alley show tune, right? And you’re moving into jazz music and right away the rhythm and the soul of that music is totally different. And of course, middle class white people were really sort of nervous about that because it was not respectable and it wasn’t what they were used to, and it was associated with low class behavior and low class entertainment.

Interviewer Great. So, I mean, if I understand this. So she’s bringing sort of black entertainment traditions onto the largely white vaudeville stage.

Rick DesRochers In a sense.

Interviewer Is that right? Okay. You know, you make an interesting distinction between stage presence and an act. And it was her stage presence, not her act that people objected to. Can you describe that?

Rick DesRochers Yeah, There’s something overtly, I think, less than sexual that there’s a sense that she’s very open and willing to discuss and say anything. And I think she liked to tease. You know, there’s all these stories of her on the road and she had all these affairs with the members of the company and as quite everyone knew about it. And younger women in the company were offended and scared of her and felt that she was a sexual predator. Right. And she would actually enjoy that and push that envelope and tell about her exploits with men all the time to make these folks uncomfortable in the company, to sort of shut them down and also say, yeah, that’s what’s happening. So instead of sort of denying it or trying to hide it or trying to to be ashamed of who she was, she just openly said who she was. And I think that kind of directness really took people by surprise because not only was she a woman, but also she was a person who would say and do anything in front of anyone and not be ashamed for it. She said, this is all what we’re all thinking anyway, and this is what we’re all wanting to be doing. I’m actually doing it. And so for her, you know, she was she was enjoying her life and her time on stage. And so that comes with her on stage. And, you know, it’s what I talk about in my book, the notion of putting something over. Right. This was the key to vaudeville, connecting with that audience. The lights were up. So unlike a traditional stage play, for example, there’s a real connection between audience performer. And if you didn’t make that connection, they wouldn’t respond to you. And so you needed to see and hear and connect with them. And you know, they would do that if she saw somebody in the audience who was uncomfortable, male or female, with what she was doing, she wouldn’t direct her act to that person. So the rest of the audience could look at that person and then we’d all sort of be laughing with her about the uncomfortableness of certain audience members, no matter who they were. And I think that’s the key, is that when an act doesn’t work, people are laughing at you, you know, rather than with you. And they really were on her side in a sense, because she would pick out people in the audience that would look, you know, supercilious or they would be, you know, just sort of arrogant or they would be very uptight and she would put them on the spot. And literally, of course, they had spotlights in these theaters. They would turn the spotlight on these, you know, audience members. And right away they’d be like a deer in the headlights. And the audience would now be on Mae West Side in making fun of that kind of pretension, especially. And again, I remember that the audiences were very segregated. Again, you know, rich folks or at least upper middle class folks were sitting up front. And as it move back, you would have sort of, you know, middle class folks. And then, like I say, you’d have what’s called the gallery gods up in the balcony, which were literally, you know, certain sections of that were for just African-American audience members. They were literally segregated even from the working class. And then, of course, you would have all the working class, you know, folks who would be up there who were coming in after work and blowing off steam and wanting to have a great time and weren’t afraid of interacting. And I think we still have this problem in theater, right, where you have to be polite and we don’t respond and we clap when we’re supposed to. But these audiences wanted to interact with her and she wanted to interact with them. So I think that that’s the key to her success, is connecting with those folks that she knew she grew up with and making fun of the other audience members without insulting them so far that they would walk out, of course, because a lot of people like to be sort of teased. And I want to sort of be in this kind of dangerous place in talking about these things or listening to them, but they don’t want to be caught sort of openly doing it, especially in public, but in the theater that they’re sort of wanting secretly.

Interviewer That’s great. You know, you’ve obviously written about and thought a lot about performers and comedians and is even in the whole scheme of all comedians then to now, is is this idea of melding the person and the persona like she was who she was on stage? Yes. Is this unusual? Is this this way for comedians? Yeah.

Rick DesRochers I would say with comedians. So here’s the bottom line in improv comedy. And Tina Fey would talk about this all the time. But in improv comedy, you have to be truthful for it to work. So it has to be something personal to you. You’re not just telling jokes, you’re not just being funny, satirical about something. It has to be something where what you’re commenting on is actually something you believe in, and you actually want to convince somebody else that this is the truth. This is the way things are. And I think we forget that. We think the comedy is just throwing off one liners just to be funny. And I think with Mae West, she had this persona. People were responding to it. And so she could do both. She could she could engage with them as herself. And she built a character. And now, who knows at this point, as she gets older and older, how much that character and her meld. This happened with Groucho Marx, W.C. Fields and many other comedians, male and female. This notion that you sort of became the character and you sort of lived with that character as you got older and Mae West became Mae West as a person offstage and on stage by performing it, being successful at getting a reputation for, you know, this is what we’re going to get when we get her. And she also, of course, a lot of performers are very smart. They know that the tabloids are out there and they want to know about their personal lives. Right. So she would actually get in these scandalous situations with men and producers and get it into the newspaper as if it had been, you know, shot by a journalist and she had been found out, but she had actually manufactured that so that she would bring audience in to see this infamous woman on stage. So she’s very smart at marketing herself, both onstage and offstage.

Interviewer Do you think that becomes a kind of prison, though, to be sort of stuck in that prison?

Rick DesRochers Well, you know, it’s interesting. In preparation for this, I listen to a Dick Cavett interview with her, I think, in the early seventies. I don’t get a sense that I think she enjoyed being Mae West. I think she enjoyed putting people on the spot. I think she enjoyed being her own person. Like I say, she was never in a serious relationship of any kind. And she was very autonomous right up until the day she died in her eighties. She had young men, boyfriends, like literally right up to the very end. And that’s what she wanted. That was the life she chose. So, you know, and she was okay with that. So I think that I.

Interviewer Think that.

Rick DesRochers I don’t think that it was working and she enjoyed it. So I don’t think she felt trapped by it. I think the opposite happened when she moved to Hollywood and they tried to tone her down or change or rein her in. That’s when it didn’t work and that’s what depressed her. And actually, for a while, her career was, you know, you know, just wasn’t going anywhere because they were trying to make her into some sort of, you know, sort of vampy 19th century saloon gal. And that’s just not who she was.

Interviewer Great. Just back to sort of the early stage stuff, you know, this verbal comedy, you know, the one liners. Can you talk about how I mean, that became her signature in movies. But that’s a really a vaudeville has vaudeville origins.

Rick DesRochers Yes, absolutely. And the funny thing about Mae West is she’s never very good. And a two person usually a lot of these acts are two person comedy, actually of the straight person. And then you’d have the comic, you know, the person who would set up the jokes and the person who would sort of, you know, have the one liners, the zingers or the commentary. And there’s, you know, we know all these dual acts all over the place. And she tried to do an act with her sister actually in this vein. And it was disastrous because she was a solo performer, basically. And it’s interesting, in the early and late 19th century, early 20th century, female comedians were called talking women, as if talking in and of itself were somehow radical and a woman never mind telling jokes, but just actually speaking. Right. So male comics weren’t called talking men. You know, they were all comics, Right. So the funny part of that is this sort of schism between a woman who opens her mouth is going to somehow, you know, not have anything to say or it’s going to be ridiculous. But when she started making comments on what was going on with the people right in front of her, this is what scared people. And because the notion of comics, whether they are duos or solos, is that it’s it can be improvised and tailored, especially live in the moment. So you’re able to change your act in that instance. And if you can’t, if as a producer, you can’t control this because it’s happening on stage, and if people are responding to it and spending money to see this and enjoying it, it can’t pull them off the stage. You’re only shooting yourself in the foot. So she would use that improv technique right from the beginning to play off the audience. She had her standard set ups, you know, lines that are become famous about, you know, goodness, what amazing diamonds as well. Goodness had nothing to do with it. Right. She would say those lines, but she would tailor them for the audience she was in front of as a comic. So I would see her more in the vein of someone like a Robin Williams, for example, or Chappelle, where when they do their standup, they do it on their own and they control the material, they control the patter, and it’s it relies on them to sell it.

Interviewer Great. And so we skipped around a little bit here. I guess we should just go back and mention, you know, Bert Williams. But Eva Tanguay as a as an influence. Yeah. Can you just speak to that?

Rick DesRochers Yeah. So either Tanguay was a French-Canadian immigrant and she was known for sort of a different kind of performer, but in the style of Mae West, she and this is self-admitted. She said, I’m not attractive, I’m not a good dancer, I’m not a good singer. I just love to get up here and just blasted out. And she called herself the cyclonic, you know, performer. This notion that she was like a hurricane on stage and just, you know, one of her signature songs is.

Interviewer Forget the Town.

Rick DesRochers Yes. I don’t care what people think. I’m doing this anyway. You know, that was very bold for a woman to do, especially on stage, but she really didn’t care. But I think her act was more crazy comic, like eccentric, they would call it, right. She seemed like she was out of control, like a whirling dervish up there just sort of dancing and shouting, almost these song lyrics with no sense of tone or rhythm or anything like this. And people hate that. But it was a very different kind of act. And I think part of it was just her audacity. And she was also aware of these amazing costumes that because she grew up poor in French Canada, right? So she would often have to make her own costumes. And so she got used to doing that. And even when she was making 20 $500 a week, I know in 1910 or whatever it was, she made her own costumes and one of the costumes she made were out of pennies, essentially a whole dress out of pennies that had been glued together. For example, she had another one, which was just giant flowers coming out of her, you know, out of her neckline, in which she looked like a giant tulip. So and she made these costumes to be funny and also as part of her sort of crazy persona, so very different from Mae West in that way. But the audacity of getting up there and, quote unquote, having no talents really in the traditional sense, actually, that was her skill and that’s what people responded to. And I think Mae West, too. I mean, she’s not like this sort of Broadway singer by any means. And she’s certainly not an actor in the traditional sense. But the personality and that sort of force of personality is what makes her act work. So they have that in common. And there were a lot of women, especially the ones that were considered traditionally attractive in the sense of the ingenue again and of the actresses like Lillian Russell, for example, if you were stuck in this sort of or stereotyped in this, you know, your body type was not the standard, you know, Ziegfeld girl, basically all-American girl, it was called. Right. You fell into this category of being a sort of, you know, like a monstrous figure almost on stage, like this large woman who is not necessarily traditionally pretty, who’s, you know, has these wild movements and has this sort of like husky voice in a singing these songs with no sort of tune or rhythm necessarily, this kind of frightened people, you know what I mean? Like, but it was also sort of like what’s happening here? It was also like, you’re watching it. Like, is this really happening?

Interviewer You use the word freak in your book was maybe, Yeah.

Rick DesRochers Well, that’s not I didn’t say that. The the reviewer actually George Jean Nathan who is this, you know, legit Broadway reviewer for whatever reason, loved to go slumming and go to vaudeville and say, well, why are people watching this stuff? It’s so disgusting. So of course, he was ah, you know, he was interested in it. And, you know, for the moment only it was like, this is something going on here. But he was the one that called her a freak performer. And this comes from the notion of the 19th century of the P.T. Barnum freak show essentially taking. We still have them here in Coney Island, for example, the notion of if you, again, weren’t traditionally attractive as a male or a female, you know, if you had anything that was out of the ordinary, you were considered freakish for that so-called defect, whether it’s physical, vocal or the way you danced or moved or whatever. So the notion is this woman’s a freak because she doesn’t fit into the mold of the new girl on stage, even though she’s the same age and she’s coming from that same world. You know, she would be labeled freak or even better, crazy and crazy, of course, for people and men who are, you know, successful, they’re called eccentric because this makes it seem somehow, you know, more, you know, like it’s just an eccentricity. They’re just weird, right? Because they’re rich. Or successful or, you know, whatever. For women, they would be considered crazy because if you didn’t fit the mold and pattern of a housewife or a mother, you were a freak. You were something wrong with you. And so therefore, if you opened your mouth and said something, especially something funny, you are crazy because no respectable woman would even go there.

Interviewer Great. You mentioned the term slumming, and I think that’s an important point. And we can take a sip of water. Oh, yeah, Yeah. But, you know, if we can just sort of say because that’s something that happened throughout my career, even, you know, when she gets, you know, putting on plays. Yeah. What is what is slumming? What was that concept?