It is interesting to note the absurd places where the battle lines of freedom are sometimes drawn: the cost of tea in Boston, a funny-looking house painter from Austria, a busty lusty "belle dame sans merci" named Mae West. Mae West, née Mae West (nobody ever had to invent an interesting bio for her), was the vaudeville comedienne who conquered Broadway in the 1920s, saved Paramount Pictures in the 1930s, and - almost single-handedly - took on the censors of artistic freedom with every movie she made. And to look at her legacy now: almost forgotten beyond nostalgia for a "camp queen," her pictures dated and denuded of their controversial context, remembered in the 1990s primarily as a warning of what Madonna threatens to become. Nevertheless, for a brief period in the 1930s Mae West was the line in the sand drawn between those supporting "decency in America" and those advocating freedom of speech (and profits).
Everything written about Mae West eventually degenerates into a parody of seriousness. Why not? Mae West was a comedienne first and foremost, a satirist of the first order within the range of her interests - which were, first and foremost, sex.
Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.
"Goodness had nothing to do with it," Mae West's self-written introductory line from her motion picture debut, became the title of her 1959 autobiography, "told honestly and the way I lived it, within limits" (West 256). The qualifier is both literal and suggestive - just the way Mae West's approach to writing and acting was. A master of the double-entendre - or, as she would have written it, "mistress" - it was exactly her skill with verbal and physical innuendo that put her in the limelight of publicity and the spotlight of condemnation. She courted both. After she had amassed a few million in movie salaries (she was one of the highest-paid, least-worked stars of the decade), Mae West alternately complained "The censors...