Mae West landed herself in jail for creating “an outrage on public decency” after she wrote, directed and starred in the play Sex (1926). Her performance as an unrepentant sex worker outraged critics but the controversy made her a media sensation. Hoping to capitalise on her scandalous persona, Paramount convinced her to adapt her Broadway breakout Diamond Lil (1928) into a film. When she arrived in Hollywood, West demanded to be paid one dollar more than the studio director. She also wrote her own lines and designed her own costumes. The adaptation, She Done Him Wrong (1933), made the equivalent of US$140 million and earned an Oscar nomination.
Throughout her career, West weaponised her words by writing plots that criticised gender conformity and moral hypocrisy. Using witty double entendres and innuendos that were hard to identify in the written script, she flouted the censorship laws of the Hays Code. Her characters were sexual gangsters: assertive, independent and voracious. They acted on their desires without shame or punishment.
This sexually empowered attitude was even more radical given that West was almost 40 when she made her screen debut; in an industry obsessed with youth, she rejected the expectation to grow old gracefully. She made her final film at 83, the outrageously camp comedy Sextette (1978).
Small statue, huge swagger
“Must I bow my head in shame?” Mae West croons in Belle of the Nineties (1934). She’s playing wise-cracking vaudeville star Ruby Carter, but she could have been talking about herself. Crafted on nightclub stages, West perfected a larger-than-life persona that caricatured femininity and offered a vision of womanhood that celebrated desire as an expression of independence. West wore lavish ensembles of corseted gowns accessorised with oversized hats, ostrich plumes and diamonds. This costume from Belle of the Nineties sums up her showy excess.
As her footprints here suggest, West was tiny. The footprint sketches were used as a pattern for the custom platform shoes that she had studios create to make her look taller. Heavy and cumbersome, the shoes forced West to drag her feet in sweeping semicircles. Rather than slow her down, this hidden choreography became her signature swagger.
What she lacked in stature she made up for with attitude. Forty years after her death, West remains a camp icon and a subversive inspiration for generations of drag queens like Charles Pierce and RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009–) judge Michelle Visage, who both honour West’s extravagant style, sexual freedom and razor-sharp wit.
The Mae West Film that Helped Save Paramount Pictures | American Masters | PBS
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Previously on display
1 October 2023
Australian Centre for the Moving Image
Collection metadata
ACMI Identifier
193593
Curatorial section
Goddess → Weaponising glamour → Mae West