Mary Jane West
Her mother was Matilda Delker Doelger (of the Doelger Breweries family) and her father John Patrick West (an Irish prizefighter known as “Battling Jack”).
When Mae was about 7 years old, her parents had her on the stage as “Baby Mae” for the Sunday night programs at the Royal Theatre on Fulton Street in downtown Brooklyn. Mae had taken lessons at “Professor” Watts Dancing School, and it was in his Sunday shows at the Royal that she began her career. She sang and tap danced and won the gold medal first prize.
From the very beginning, Mae knew who she was and just what she wanted out of life. At age 4, Mama and Papa West decided to take little Mae to be photographed. Mae agreed, but insisted on posing with a dog that had captured her fancy. The dog had one black ear and one black eye. Papa scoured the neighborhood, bringing home several likely candidates. One by one, Mae rejected the mutts. The situation grew desperate and Papa began to fume. Threats and pleas, all to no avail. There would be no photo session until the little dog with one black ear and one black eye showed up. Papa finally found the dog.
Mae started winning top prizes for amateur performances around the city. When she was 13, she was playing juvenile leads in a stock company’s productions at the Columbia Theatre. Satisfying her ego even more were the solo performances she did during intermissions. After leaving the stock company, she worked as a strongwoman in a Coney Island acrobatic act. By 1911, she was playing the vaudeville circuit.
Florenz Ziegfeld offered her a spot in his rooftop revue atop the New York Theatre. Mae stopped the show and garnered favorable reviews. From there, she went on as a performer and stage actress as well as a playwright until she finally made her screen debut in Night After Night (’32) as a featured player. She captivated moviegoers’ imaginations with her double en-tendre quips, leering looks and hip-swinging strut.
Mae became a major asset of Paramount, not only starring in but also screen-writing such hits as She Done Him Wrong, I’m No Angel, and Belle of the Nineties. Her last film at Paramount was Every Day’s a Holiday (’38). At Universal, she made My Little Chickadee (’40) co-starring with W. C. Fields.
Throughout the ’40s she was busy on Broadway and on the road with her Catherine Was Great and Diamond Lil. In the ’50s and ’60s she made nightclub and occasional TV appearances just to let folks know she was still around. Her screen return, at 78, in the film Myra Breckenridge, along with film clips from her earlier films, is said by film critics to be the picture’s saving grace. At 86, Mae shimmied out again, somewhat embarrassingly, in her final movie, a gigantic box office flop, Sextette (’79), with her usual entourage of muscle men.
In 1942, the British Royal Air Force had tagged their newly structured life jackets, “Mae Wests.” Much pleased, Mae remarked, “I’ve been in Who’s Who and I know what’s what, but it’s the first time I ever made the dictionary.”
In her later years, Mae loved watching her old movies on TV and said, “Honey, every one of my pictures was a gem … There’ll never be another star like me.” And to this date that is true. Her autobiography is entitled Goodness Had Nothing to Do With It. Mae West died in 1980 from complications following a stroke.
Mae once wrote, “The Brooklyn I was born in, near the end of the 19th century, was still a city of churches, with their great bronze bells walloping calls to the faithful from early dawn, and a city of waterfront dives where the old forest of the spars of sailing ships was rapidly being replaced by funnels and the Sands Street Navy Yard already had a reputation for girl chasers. Gentlemen, and deer, ran wild in Prospect Park…A world of more sunlight and less smoke than now, a world of ringing horse cars, ragtime music, cakewalks and Floradora Sextets, and a sense that the coming century would be the biggest and best…”
At the Cypress Hills Cemetery, along the border between northern Brooklyn and southern Queens, stands a huge white-granite building with stained glass windows and a dramatic columned entryway. This is the Cypress Hills Abbey mausoleum, and inside, off to the right, along aisle EE, movie lovers will discover a whole wall of crypts that bear the name “West.” In the bottom crypt lies the remains of Joe E. West, 1900-1964; above him are John West, 1862-1935; Beverly West, 1898-1982; Matilda West, 1875-1930; and at the very top, Mae West, 1893-1980.
Reportedly, when Mae was first interred in the Abbey, she had been put in the nameless number-three slot. Once her will was read, however, it became quite clear that Mae would not settle for anything less than top billing, and Cypress Hills saw that her wishes were carried out: her final resting place is in number one.
This article was written by Vernon Parker (1923-2004)
