Mae West - Bad Girl, Good Behaviour

rogues gallery online sex drugs and period costume real historical figures behaving very badly the following content is not suitable for anyone aged under 16 or adults who are very easily shocked or offended if this is you turn back now loveable rogues who remain please like share and subscribe and if you could find it in your decadent hearts to support me on patreon I would be overcome with gratitude link is in the description below bad girl good behavior publicity prostitution and prison with Mae West New York February 1927 well I must say that is the dirtiest play I have seen in a very long time an affront to all decent god-fearing people an abomination they should lock them all up and throw away the key it's called excuse my language thanks and it was written by a shameless floozy by the name of Mae West who if we don't stop her right now we'll drag America and possibly the entire world into a rancid pit of vice and filth from which it may never claw itself free it would be bad enough if it were a man peddling this depravity but a woman it goes against everything decent fortunately a Christian jury of 12 upstanding men have quite rightly just sent her to jail and if you ask me it can't be for long enough I suppose I shouldn't be surprised miss West has been performing on the vaudeville circuit since she was 14 you know what those girls are like her father was a prizefighter and private investigator while her mother modeled corsets so make of that what you will May first started acting in the so called cheap theaters of New York City where the plays were usually full of lewdness and violence and more often than not based on some scandal that was in the newspapers at the time well it was for the working-classes after all it was there that she learned that the best way to grab an audience's attention was by shocking them so she behaved in a tough aggressive and some my even say masculine manner I mean really a woman who isn't ladylike is hardly a woman at all in my book this was before they got the vote of course which is where I think everything started to go wrong do you know that when she was performing in Connecticut in 1912 her outrageous behavior on stage attracted a raucous crowd of Yale University students men obviously who used to run down the aisles shouting bula-bula before she started her act but then not students for you this upset so many people that she was fired and it even made the news the headlines red Wiggles cost Mae West her job speaking of dancing and I use the term loosely her first real brush with infamy came six years later in 1918 Mae liked spending her time in jazz clubs if you know what I mean in the company of men no respectable woman would ever associate with and was quite brazen about it too seeing nothing wrong in doing exactly as she pleased I will not conform to the old-fashioned limits they set on a woman's freedom of action she said I see no indecency or perversion in the normal private habits of men and women well what uh turn nonsense it was in these clubs that apart from developing a liking for ungodly fornication music she learned how to perform a dance called the shimmy sha wobble which she brought to the Broadway stage now imagine if you can a more depraved sight than a woman standing perfectly still while shaking her entire body to an accompaniment of obscene jazz music it's like the last days of ancient Rome they should make the shimmy illegal I'm writing a letter West not only encouraged outrage and scandal that positively thrived on it becoming even more famous as she did so it's almost as if she was using the notoriety to publicize herself but obviously a girl like that can't have been so intelligent anyway it must have worked because by 1924 Mae West was a well-known if controversial stage performer but while she was notorious for rewriting and ad-libbing most of her lines make them even more amusing and Oddie she had yet to write a full play by all accounts that changed when she saw a woman who was quite obviously a prostitute touting for business on the New York waterfront she described her as having blond hair / bleached and all frizzy a lot of makeup on and a tight black satin coat that was all wrinkled and soiled runs in her stockings and she had this little turban on and a big beautiful bird-of-paradise West overheard her companions debating how much the woman would probably charge for each sexual encounter deciding it would be somewhere between fifty cents and two dollars she contemplated on just how many men she'd have to service every day just to pay the rent and grew angry not only at how the prostitute was being exploited by society but also at how the harlot was allowing herself to be used by men rather than exploiting them herself as if so West began work on a story about a Canadian trollop who escapes a life of pleasuring sailors to find love with a man who knows about and forgives her sordid past the kind of future she no doubt wished a girl on the docks would one day enjoy and if that wasn't morally reprehensible enough the play also showed police officers as sometimes being corrupt and wealthy members of polite society as being cruel hypocrites more concerned with their reputations than with the lives of others both of which are of course totally untrue naturally no respectable backer would put their money into such a shameful Enterprise nor do they see it fair to host it or cast performing it so over the next year or so West did it all herself obtaining finance from its rumoured local gangsters recruiting a director so desperate for work that he didn't even ask her to make the script less risque finding an off-broadway theatre that hosted experimental productions and hiring a young cast who are actively encouraged to improvise around their roles it was going to be called the albatross but change the title to X just before the opening night now obviously it's not the kind of thing I would ever pay money to go and see but when we saw the poster advertising it as the story of a bad little girl who was good to the Navy I knew I would be so disgusted and outraged that I just had to buy a ticket the poster even had a warning written on it saying if you cannot stand excitement visit your doctor before seeing Mae West in X I'm surprised more people didn't take notice of it and stay away at the opening night was I must say sparsely attended and many people walked out in disgust the reviews were of course appalling we were shown not sex but lust one reviewer wrote stark naked lust another described it as poor balderdash of street sweepings and cabaret sentimentality unexpurgated in tone variety said it was a sink of moral turpitude the Milwaukee Sentinel advised fumigation needed and no less a publication than billboard said it was poorly written poorly acted horribly staged the cheapest most vulgar lows show to have dared to open in New York this year and the disgrace to all those connected to it so imagine my surprise when once these reviews began to appear crowds started flocking to the theater to see what all the fuss was about there were lines of people stretching all the way along 63rd Street I simply don't know what was wrong with them anyone would think they found sex and scandal appealing by the beginning of this year three hundred and twenty five thousand of them had seen this Sodom and Gomorrah a play which was being touted as a Jazz Age phenomenon the Catholic Church the Society for the suppression of Vice and noted millionaire newspaper owner William Randolph Hearst were all publicly clamoring for it to be shut down Hearst by the way is vehemently against immorality on the public stage and I consider rumors that he is currently enjoying an illicit affair with the actress Marion Davis to be just that otherwise he'd be the most unconscionable hypocrite to make matters worse West had opened yet another play while sex was still being performed entitled drag it was even more shocking if that's possible in that it featured unabashed homosexuality and the recreation of a drag queens ball while at the same time mocking those who condemned the lifestyle as immoral you know I could almost feel the bowels of Hell opening up beneath me thank the Lord then for acting New York Mayor Joseph v McKee sometimes known as holy Joe for his god-fearing morality he took advantage of the actual mayor of New York Jimmy Walker who had much looser morals going on holiday to Havana to order the ex along with several other theater performances he considered to be obscene be raided by the police as they waited outside to arrest up anybody would think that miss West was looking forward to all the controversy as if she knew that at the frankly over-the-hill age of 33 her mala laksa toot may one day make her a star shameful it said that after her performance she naturally played the lead role of prostitute Margie Lamont miss West retired to her dressing room to prepare for her big moment of being led away by the police variety I believe said that West played a fallen woman so convincingly that she could fool a traveling salesman's convention but I don't know what that means dressed in her best furs she was led through the gawping crowds and along with her entire cast bundled into the back of waiting taxis to be ferried to a police station in Hell's Kitchen once there she was charged with unlawfully preparing advertising giving presenting and participating in an obscene immoral and impure drama play exhibition show and entertainment I would have added moral genocide to the list myself it found guilty she could have faced a year in jail but was told that all charges would be dropped if she closed the play west however refused and positively demanded that she be tried before a jury then she bailed out not only herself at a cost of one thousand dollars but also her entire cast before preparing her day in court I asked myself what possible good could come from the luring press attention the trial would create West would be on the front page of every newspaper in the country with her shame laid bare for all the world to see I can only hope that at her trial she will feel the full weight of the law pressing down on top of her New York April 1927 I have to say that that was one of the dirtiest trials I have seen in a very long time miss West of course was being charged with performing in a play which was obscene immoral and impure the course however were told that there was no nudity or obscene language in the play so it was the task of vice squad detective sergeant Patrick keneley to prove to the jury just how filthy it actually was in his lilting Irish brogue sergeant keneley described certain scenes from the play including one in which Miss West engages in a particularly lascivious dance in this episode the prostitute dances before the sailors of the fleet and the officers in a way that causes ensign Jones the same character who had solicited margie l'amour to commit an act of prostitution with him to say you'd make a bulldog break its chain the set dance having been performed by the defendant Mae West by moving her buttocks and other parts of her body in a way as to suggest an act of sexual intercourse when asked to demonstrate by the defense Miss West's movement to the court a visibly distressed sergeant Connolly declined the prosecution excused this decision by reminding the jury that everyone in the police force is not a dancer the defense's reply of nor an actor alluding to his delivery of the plot was met with much laughter from the assembled audience which I found most infuriating sergeant Connolly was asked if he'd glimpsed Miss West's navel during this wanton display can be replied that he had not but had seen something in her medal that moved from east to west which got even more laughter I nearly exploded with fury all the while miss West sat casually rouging her lips as if this was all part of the show she have no shame when she was finally found guilty and sentenced to 10 days at a woman's work house she simply smiled and sashayed across the courtroom I heard her say give my regards to Broadway to reporters who were posturing around the proceedings like jackals I'd like to see how brazen she is in ten days time I don't believe it she's been released two days early I heard that she told a reporter it was the first time I ever got anything for good behavior what's worse her performance in the courtroom and the damning descriptions of her morally corrupting play have made her even more famous than before prison warden Henry schleff said that she even dined with him and his wife and that she was a woman of wonderful character West went on to say that she spent her entire time in jail wearing silk underwear and then donated her entire $1,000 interview fee to establish a Mae West Memorial Library for female prisoners they say she's now considering working on another play entitled diamond lil about a wealthy harlot who is the mistress of a gang boss now I have no doubt that this will be roundly ignored I mean who wants to watch a play about bawdy sex and organized crime and I hope that any aspirations the woman may have for one day furthering her career in Hollywood will come to naught you take it from me if Mae West becomes a global icon and the highest-paid woman in America I'll eat my Bible my Play kittens take tea with Grandma is opening next week I think you'll find that that's what the public wants you you

Channel: Rogues Gallery Online

Views: 109,849

Rating: 4.8728814 out of 5

Keywords: Rogues Gallery, Rogues Gallery Online, history documentary, history, hollywood history, mae west, Mae West, who is mae west, who was mae west, is mae west still alive, movie history

Id: Im4iWt7Ltfg

Length: 15min 4sec (904 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 28 2020