By 1935 she out-earned almost every American
Mae West (1893–1980) turned double entendre into a fortune: by 1933 a top U.S. box-office draw, by 1935 the nation’s highest-paid woman and second-highest-paid person after William Randolph Hearst. Censors chased her; audiences quoted her. A bed-edge fall in August 1980 helped end the run at eighty-seven.
Mary Jane West was born 17 August 1893 in Brooklyn, in either Greenpoint or Bushwick, and delivered at home by an aunt who was a midwife. Mother Mathilde Tillie Delker, a Bavarian-born corset model, and father Battlin’ Jack West, an ex-prizefighter turned private investigator, raised a girl who moved from vaudeville and New York stages to Los Angeles film. Her screen characters radiated sexual confidence, and she wrote much of the dialogue herself in a drawling contralto packed with twin meanings that kept censors busy.
She turned professional at fourteen in 1907 with the Hal Clarendon Stock Company, billed as Baby Mae, and her 1911 Broadway debut in A La Broadway closed after eight nights yet won her a New York Times compliment. Writing under the pen name Jane Mast, she starred in her own 1926 play Sex; police raided the theatre and arrested her with the cast. Diamond Lil in 1928 ran 323 performances, while The Constant Sinner managed only 64. In June 1932 Paramount signed her at $5,000 a week, and She Done Him Wrong (1933), with Cary Grant in an early lead, earned a Best Picture nomination. Studio success then collided with tightening Production Code morality that sanded the edges of the very act that sold tickets. Still, the 1930s made her a national brand: sex-symbol comic, playwright, singer, and screenwriter rolled into one cigarette-holder silhouette. Payday figures from 1935 placed her behind only Hearst among American earners—an astonishing ranking for a performer whose jokes lived one syllable from the censor’s pencil and still filled theatres.
She remained a living punchline and style reference long after the peak studio years. In August 1980 she tripped leaving bed; complications contributed to her death three months later, on 22 November, at eighty-seven. The fortune and the catchphrases outlasted the Code that tried to mute them.
Source: Mae West
