ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
April 19
Mae West Brings “Sex” to the City
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On April 19, 1927, Mae West arrived at
Welfare Island prison in a limousine, carrying white roses and wearing silk
underwear. The authorities thought they had punished her—but they actually made
her a feminist icon
A reporter
asked her what she thought was going to happen.
She
turned, paused in exactly the way she had perfected over twenty years in
vaudeville and burlesque, and said: “I expect this will be the making of me.”
She was
right, of course. On April 19, 1927—ninety-nine years ago today—Mae West was
found guilty of obscenity and corrupting the morals of youth for her Broadway
play Sex, sentenced to ten days in a workhouse and fined $500. She refused the
offer to pay the fine and go free immediately. She insisted on serving the
time. She arrived at Welfare Island—the women's prison on what is now Roosevelt
Island in the East River—in a limousine. She was sharply dressed. She was
carrying white roses. She had made certain the press knew precisely where she
was going and when.
She served
eight days. She dined with the warden. She complained, loudly and quotably,
only about the state of the standard-issue prison undergarments, which were not
silk. She was released two days early for good behavior. By every account, she
found the whole thing thoroughly worthwhile.
The Play and the Raid
Sex had
opened on Broadway in April 1926 under the pen name Jane Mast—West had reasons
to be coy about authorship, since she had written, produced, directed, and
starred in the thing, and the content was, by the standards of 1926,
considerably more than theatrical establishments were prepared to defend. The
play told the story of Margy LaMont, a Montreal prostitute navigating the power
dynamics between herself, her pimp, a British naval officer who falls for her,
and an American millionaire whose society wife recognizes Margy as a threat.
The critics were almost unanimously appalled. The New York Times called it "a
crude and inept play, cheaply produced and poorly acted." The public flocked to
it.
By the time the New York Police Department's Municipal Vice Squad raided the theater in February 1927, Sex had run for 375 performances and been seen by 325,000 people. Those 325,000 people included—as the prosecution was forced to acknowledge at trial—members of the police department and their wives, judges of the criminal courts, and seven members of the district attorney's own staff. The audience had been perfectly happy to attend. The authorities had been perfectly happy to let them, for a year, until political pressure from anti-vice organizations made inaction no longer tenable. The hypocrisy was so complete it was almost elegant.
The entire
cast was arrested in the backstage raid, hauled out in black police vans. West
arrived at court the next morning and was asked by the judge whether she was
indeed Mae West. “Don't you read the newspapers?” she replied. The courthouse
filled with hundreds of people hoping for autographs. The trial was the hottest
ticket in New York. When the grand jury indicted her on April 5th, ruling that
Sex 'tended to corrupt the morals of youth and others,' West had already given
the press her verdict on the verdict. She knew exactly what she was doing.
The Other Banned Play
Here is where
the story deepens considerably—and where the Mae West of 1927 reveals herself
as something considerably more than a savvy self-promoter.
While Sex was
running its 375-performance Broadway engagement, West had been writing another
play. She called it The Drag: A Homosexual Comedy in Three Acts. It told the
story of Rolly Kingsbury, a gay man who marries a woman to conceal his identity
and is eventually destroyed by the impossibility of that concealment. The third
act featured a full-scale drag ball, staged with a cast of gay men West had
recruited directly from Greenwich Village clubs and given artistic license to
improvise freely. The play was—in 1927, in America—almost incomprehensibly
ahead of its time.
West was
explicit about her motivation. She had gay friends. She had watched them
navigate a world that demanded their concealment and punished their visibility.
As she put it herself: "Any mention of it was met by ordinary people with a
stare of shocked horror." She wanted to put those people on a stage and make an
audience see them. The Drag ran out-of-town tryouts in New Jersey and
Connecticut to considerable controversy. West had planned to bring it to
Broadway immediately after—and it was precisely the threat of The Drag opening
in New York that crystallized the political will to raid Sex and shut her down.
The resulting
trial didn't just close Sex and prevent The Drag from ever reaching Broadway.
It produced legislation: the Wales Padlock Law of 1927, which prohibited the
portrayal of sexual degeneracy or sex perversion on the New York stage and gave
authorities the power to padlock any theater that violated it. That law
remained on the books and actively enforced for four decades. Queer characters
were effectively erased from American theater—and, when the Production Code
arrived in Hollywood in 1934, from American cinema as well—for a generation.
The trial that made Mae West also buried a community's representation for forty
years.
West would
later donate to the women's prison where she served her sentence, establishing
the Mae West Memorial Library there. She filed the first legal challenge to the
Wales Padlock Law in 1930. She kept fighting, in her way, for the rest of her
career.
“When I’m Bad, I’m Better…”
Modern
Occultist doesn't have to reach far to find the tradition this story belongs
to. The deliberate transmutation of an obstacle into fuel—the refusal to be
diminished by the forces arrayed against you, the mastery of the narrative
frame so complete that your enemies become unwitting collaborators in your
ascent—this is not merely shrewd publicity management. It is a practice as old
as the grimoires, described in the alchemical literature under the operation of
calcination: the burning away of the inessential, the reduction of matter to
its purest ash, from which something new and more powerful is compounded.
West understood this intuitively, in the bones. She had come up through vaudeville and burlesque, two traditions that had long since learned how to survive institutional disapproval by making the disapproval part of the act. The wink at the audience over the censor's shoulder. The double entendre that passes the guardians because they cannot bring themselves to acknowledge what it means. The performance that says, to everyone in the room who is paying attention: we both know what this is. The guardians of public morality were, in West's cosmology, simply a more elaborate version of the straight man in the comedy—necessary, useful, and ultimately working for her.
“When I'm
good I'm very good,” she would say in the 1933 film I'm No Angel, the picture
that made her one of the highest-paid stars in Hollywood. “But when I'm bad,
I'm better.” The line is so perfectly constructed that it doesn't require
analysis. It just requires a witness.
325,000
people had watched Sex before the Vice Squad appeared. The trial added millions
more to the audience. Diamond Lil—the character West developed partly from
observations made of her fellow inmates on Welfare Island—became her signature
role and her path to Hollywood. She arrived in Los Angeles in 1932 at the age
of thirty-nine, already a fully formed phenomenon, trailing the legend of the
prison sentence behind her like a mink. Within two years she was earning
$480,833 annually, making her the second-highest-paid person in the United
States, after William Randolph Hearst. The authorities had sentenced her to ten
days. The ten days had made her a star.
The Show Must Go On
Mae West died
on November 22, 1980, at the age of eighty-seven, in the same West Hollywood
apartment where she had lived for decades, surrounded by white furniture and
mirrors and the accumulated iconography of a persona she had built by hand from
nothing and defended against everything. She had been writing almost until the
end.
The Wales
Padlock Law she had helped precipitate—and then challenged—cast a shadow over
American theatrical and cinematic representation for forty years. The queer
community she had tried, imperfectly and in her own complicated way, to bring
onto the stage in 1927 would wait until the 1960s for the social and legal
changes that began to make visibility possible. The play she sacrificed to the
guardians of public morality—The Drag—has been produced in recent years to
considerable reappraisal, recognized now as what it was: a work of genuine
political courage, written by a straight woman in 1927 from a position of
solidarity that most of her contemporaries could not conceive.
And today, the
woman who arrived at Welfare Island in a limousine and called the whole
experience the making of her deserves a moment of recognition. Not just for the
career she built from the scandal, but for the instinct that told her, even in
the middle of the machinery designed to crush her, that the power she carried
could not be confiscated.
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