Make 'Em Laugh, page 40
When television came into being by 1948, it became clear that the FCC would have to take jurisdiction of this potentially more explosive broadcast medium. By and large, television simply adopted the moral values of the Hollywood Production Code; sitcoms of the 1950s and 1960s are rife with bedrooms containing two twin beds. When Senator Estes Kefauver chaired a Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency in 1954, the focus became violence on television. As a result, each of the three major broadcast networks set up a Standards and Practices office (although CBS called theirs Program Practices) to review, suggest, and often enforce emendations to submitted material. The work of the internal censor is an arcane art, a mysterious force that derives much of its power from its very mystery. Standards and Practices units referred to themselves as “editors” rather than as censors. Producers could object, compromises could be reached, creative solutions arrived at, but the editors’ objections were not necessarily proscribed in formal, accessible ways; a comedian often didn’t know if he was going to cross a line until he had.
This is what George Carlin was getting at when he came up with his classic “Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television” routine. He wasn’t attacking the censors, really, or even the networks; he was expressing his frustration at the FCC, which never published, or made accessible, a list of objections. This is the great paradox in American censorship: practically every ruling or set of standards fell short of objective truth; each age, time, and community brings along its own subjective standards. Sex was not always the major offender, either. It could just as easily be politics or racism. One decade’s outrageousness becomes the next generation’s collective shrug. Even all “seven words” are no longer necessarily proscribed from network television—piss, tits, and even shit have made substantial progress.
Ne’er the twain shall meet: Separate beds, per Standards and Practices.
Of course, with the advent of cable television, any attempt at broadcast restrictions seems quaint, if not ridiculous. The FCC has pointedly recused itself from interfering with the content of cable networks on the grounds, presumably, that the consumer has paid good money for control of that particular “knob.” It comes back to the idea of access; technology has outpaced our ability to police our content. In December of 2006, Saturday Night Live debuted a digital short featuring a song called “Dick in a Box.” Apparently dick is an honorary eighth word—it was bleeped out sixteen times. Producer Lorne Michaels did the next best thing; he posted the short on YouTube in its unexpurgated entirety. It has become one of the most popular Internet downloads of all time. It also provides a, well, potent metaphor—censors have been trying to put dicks in boxes for nearly a century, but they do tend to pop out anyway.
Here come da judge! Pigmeat Markham’s legendary jurisprudence.
Perhaps more disturbing than the ineffectual attempts to put comedy in a box is the essential double standard in American censorship—that violence is okay, but sex and laughter are not. It seems appropriate to give Lenny Bruce the final summation on the subject:
“Over-emphasis of sex and violence will be a deterrent to your child”—what he sees now, he will do later on. Good logic. Correct. If so, I’d rather my kid see stag movies than King of Kings. I don’t want my kid killing Christ if he comes back. Did you ever see a stag film where it ends with someone killed in the end, or slapped in the mouth? Well, for the kids to watch killing, King of Kings—yes. Shtupping—no.
“GOODNESS HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT”
MAE WEST
It’s hard to be funny when you have to be clean. … On love and sex, I take it out in the open and laugh at it.
—Mae West
When Mae West sashayed down the steps of the Santa Fe Chief in June of 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, she already had a lot of scandal behind her—and what was in front of her was wide open. If that sounds like a Mae West line, it’s because just about any sentence, spun in her inimitable way, sounds like one. It also happens to be the truth. West had never made a motion picture before, she was nearing forty, she was not a conventional sex symbol, and censors and moralists had been wagging their fingers at her since she was a kid. And yet within three years of her arrival in Hollywood, she would become the highest-paid woman in the country.
“I was born on August 17 at 10:30 p.m. on a cool night of a hot month, so I can expect anything.” That is a real Mae West line. Her childhood in Brooklyn (she was born in 1893) was, in many ways, a perfect example of the rough-and-tumble mixture of high-art aspirations and low-art realities of popular entertainment at the beginning of the twentieth century. Mary Jane West’s Bavarian-born mother, Matilda, thought that a stage career filled with singing and dancing lessons would be the way out of a lower-class existence. While such refinements helped Mae get onstage, her heart belonged to her daddy, “Battlin’ Jack” West, a former bare-knuckle featherweight fighter, who, when he wasn’t tending bar or mucking out stables, could be found at the racetrack. One could argue that her future stage persona rendered the rough truth of her father’s world through the elegance of her mother’s pretensions.
Hootchie-cootch: Young Mae in vaudeville; looking her best, on trial in 1927.
Her sentimental education came from her magpie talents at borrowing the most useful aspects of popular culture available to her. She made her stage debut at five, and she had little use for the sentimental blarney performed at the time; as a young girl she sang risqué songs, such as the one about a nice Italian girl who winds up dancing the “hootch-ama-kootch” at Coney Island. As she climbed the ladder of small-time vaudeville, she appropriated African American slang and attitudes and came away with her own idiosyncratic but highly effective way of singing the blues. By the mid-1920s, it was clear to West that she would be the best custodian of her talent, and with a colleague she adapted a third-rate one-act play into a Broadway vehicle specifically crafted for her. She would play Margie LaMont, a prostitute who winds up as the love object of the heir to a family fortune from Montreal. The story alone would have raised eyebrows; audiences were also taken aback by West’s references to daddies, dames, dolls, and dirty rats. This was no lady of the camellias—West didn’t play at the demimonde, she lived it. If her intentions weren’t clear enough in the play, all audiences had to do was read the title of it: Sex.
MAN: I’d like to take you away from all this.
MAE WEST: All this? Oh, I get you. For a long time I was ashamed of the way I lived.
MAN: You mean to say you reformed?
MAE WEST: No, I got over being ashamed.
Sex opened on Broadway in April of 1926, and although some of the press was not amused (the New York Times refused to carry advertising for it), it enjoyed a run into the next year. But in early February 1927, acting mayor Joseph V. “Holy Joe” McKee, vulnerable to the campaigning of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, ordered the police to raid three Broadway shows (another was a serious look at lesbianism called The Captive), and their respective producers and performers were arrested. West, in her dual role as author and star, was charged with “corrupting the morals of youth, or others.” West was particularly vulnerable because she had written a new show, trying out in Connecticut, called The Drag, a garishly realistic look at transvestism in vaudeville.
When the Sex trial began a week after the arrest, Mae West was featured on the front page of every tabloid in town. “I enjoyed the courtroom as just another stage, but not as amusing as Broadway,” she later wrote. Stymied to find any lines or scenes that could be definitively obscene, the assistant D.A. went after West’s performance and contended that her mannerisms, gestures, and personality were obscene. The attempt to prove this was ludicrous. West herself recounted what happened on the stand:
I performed the dance fully clothed, wearing a tight metallic evening gown. …
The prosecutor questioned one of the arresting officers in detail about this dance. The officer blushed and testified.
“Miss West moved her navel up and down and from right to left.”
“Did you actually see her navel?” my lawyer asked him.
“No, but I saw something in her middle that moved from east to west.”
The court room roared.
The final verdict wasn’t quite so amusing: Judge George E. Donnellan declared that even though “New York is the most moral city in the universe, the show would have made a terrible impression upon the youth of our city” and sentenced West to ten days at the Welfare Island Woman’s Workhouse on obscenity charges. Ironically, West’s sentence was shaved off by a day for good behavior, and when the reporters surrounded her on her release, she told them, “A few days in the pen ’n’ a $500 fine ain’t too bad a deal. The publicity alone is worth a million dollars.”
She returned to the stage in another vehicle, Diamond Lil, which placed her comfortably in the Victorian era, where her portrait of a scarlet woman had some aesthetic distance. When Paramount Pictures called for her in 1932, it was less concerned with her checkered past than with what her future could do for their checkbooks. There was a brief window of permissiveness in Depression-era Hollywood, and audiences were curious about these new fallen women, gangsters, and vampires. The film industry was not about to strangle the goose that was laying what few golden eggs could be had; Hollywood was going to get in what few good lays it had left.
And so, Mae West made her film debut in the fall of 1932, playing a supporting role in Night After Night. Her entrance was one of the most famous in film history. As the ex-mistress of nightclub owner George Raft, she wafts past a girl at the coat check:
COAT CHECK GIRL: Goodness, what beautiful diamonds.
MAE WEST: Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.
Even more audacious than her screen entrance was her studio entrance; she didn’t much like the script and offered to quit and return her salary until she was given permission to rewrite the part for herself. Variety noted that “Miss West’s dialogue is always unmistakably her own. It is doubtful if anyone else could write it.” As George Raft put it, “She stole everything but the camera.” She was such a success that Paramount optioned Diamond Lil, a property that had been put on a “banned” list two years earlier by the Hays Office, so West was asked first to submit her screenplay to the picture, now called She Done Him Wrong. It came back scrawled with blue pencil marks. It was all part of West’s strategy:
When I knew that the censors were after my films and they had to come and okay everything, I wrote scenes for them to cut! Those scenes were so rough that I’d never have used them. But they worked as a decoy. They cut them and left the stuff I wanted. I had these scenes in there about a man’s fly and all that, and … then they’d say “cut it” and not notice the rest.
Delectable digits: With W.C. Fields in My Little Chickadee (1940); screen debut in Night After Night (1932).
Unlike what led up to the Sex trial, there was little censors could say about West’s appearance or performance. As one critic put it, any chorus girl in any Warner Bros, musical showed much more skin than West. Playing Lady Lou, “one of the finest women who ever walked the streets,” West never lifted anything but her eyebrow. It was her way with a line that made Mae West special—and no censor could put his finger on that. Mae West made an even bigger splash in her second film, prompting a reporter to ask if West thought that there would now be an epidemic of smiling sinners who triumph at the end of movies. “Copy my stuff?” she replied. “Say, they can put all the scarlet women they like on the screen, and all the tenderloin stories. It’s my clowning they can’t copy, and it’s the laughs that make me different.” F. Scott Fitzgerald thought she was “the only Hollywood actress with an ironic edge and a comic spark.” Her 1933 follow-up I’m No Angel made her part of popular culture; her biggest fans were young women, and even little girls were being entered in Mae West look-alike contects sponsored nationwide, each purring her frequently recycled catchphrase “Come up and see me sometime” (introduced in She Done Him Wrong).
JACK CLAYTON: You were wonderful tonight.
WEST: Yeah, I’m always wonderful at night.
JACK CLAYTON: Tonight, you were especially good.
WEST: Well … When I’m good, I’m very good. But, when I’m bad … (winks at Jack) I’m better.
As radio host Joe Franklin put it, “By being blue, she took Paramount out of the red.” Indeed, she had saved the film studio and was on her way to becoming the highest-paid woman in America. She was a pioneer master (mistress?) at manipulating the media; she always had a wisecrack at the ready, and even though in real life she neither drank nor smoked (she was, however, an ardent enthusiast of the enema), West was smart enough to hide such inconsistencies from the public. Even a brief marriage in 1911 was expunged from her collective consciousness. In her unexpurgated state, she even appealed to people who professed to know better. After I’m No Angel was released, a film distributor in Louisiana wrote:
But she drifted: Like flames to a moth; on the radio with Bergen and McCarthy; in color.
Did the best business of the year with this one. Whether they like her or not, they all come out to see her. The church people clamor for clean pictures, but they all come out to see Mae West and stay as far away as they can from the clean ones.
A year later, the clamor from the church people turned loud enough to alter her career permanently. In July of 1934, Hollywood hired Joseph A. Breen to adopt and uphold a new Production Code. This one meant business; there would be no loopholes, no appeals, and certainly no sense of humor. While the new Code was being introduced, West was in production for her fourth Paramount picture, titled It Ain’t No Sin. Breen and his enforcers questioned just what exactly was the “It” of the title, and—sin or no—the picture was retitled Belle of the Nineties. The handwriting was on the wall; such relentless tinkering and objections from the Production Code offices began to wear down Mae West. By end of 1935, the torch of the female box office star had been passed to six-year-old Shirley Temple. One couldn’t ask for a more potent metaphor.
West had a few more cards up her Victorian sleeve. She appeared on the radio with Edgar Bergen and the ventriloquist dummy, Charlie McCarthy. Bantering with the little fellow, she remarked, “Charles, I remember our date and have the splinters to prove it.” This comment, along with a sketch in which she played Eve in the Garden of Eden, drove NBC to distraction; she was banned from radio for the next twelve years. “She could make the phone book sexy,” said Hugh Hefner, who would know. “It was all innuendo. They couldn’t really censor her because it wasn’t the lines, it was the way she read ’em.” The rest of her movies during this period (she only made eight from 1932 to 1940) were pale imitations, and being forced to share screen time with W. C. Fields in My Little Chickadee was more of a chore than an inspiration. As historian Leonard Maltin said, “It’s hard to tell whether the need to sanitize the stories and characters helped kill off Mae West’s popularity or if the novelty wore off.”
Never tamed: With Cary Grant, and as Tira, the Lion tamer in I’m No Angel (1933).
She thought of her persona as a trademark, like Coca-Cola, and resisted any attempt to change or update it. She refused to play Norma Desmond in the film Sunset Boulevard—that would have required transformation. She revived Diamond Lil for the stage and created a Las Vegas muscleman review. Joe Franklin remembers interviewing her during that engagement: “A man comes to the door and says,’ There were twelve musclemen here tonight.’ And she says, ‘Tell one to go home, I’m tired.’” In the 1970s, after a three-decade absence, she made two cinematic embarrassments, Myra Breckenridge and Sextette (which she also wrote), continuing to play the same flirtatious character even though she was now eligible for Social Security. “I met her at the end of her life,” said Joan Rivers, “and she could not sit down at a dinner table unless you had adjusted the lights. She was so artfully conceived, and she was so smart. Mae, to the day she died, was Mae.”
That day was November 22, 1980. Though Mae West herself ultimately became fixed in time, all you have to do is scratch the icon, and her saucy humor drips through:
WEST: You know, it was a toss-up whether I go in for diamonds or sing in the choir. The choir lost.
CARY GRANT: They always seem so cold to me. They have no warmth, no soul. I’m sorry you think more of your diamonds than you do of your soul.
WEST: I’m sorry you think more of my soul than you do of my diamonds. Maybe I ain’t got no soul.
CARY GRANT: Oh, yes, you have, you just keep it hidden under a mask. Haven’t you ever met a man who could make you happy?
WEST: Sure, lots of times.
“IF I HAD NUTS, I’D HAVE DATES”
BURLESQUE
(Stooge enters, all bandaged up, with crutch)
STRAIGHT MAN: What happened to you?
STOOGE: I was living the life of Riley.
STRAIGHT MAN: Then what?
STOOGE: Riley came home.
You’d think if you had an entertainment form that catered to half the population, you’d be doing pretty well—and for a few decades, burlesque did pretty well.
Burlesque had its roots in the all-male, blackface minstrel shows of the nineteenth century, and its comedy was based on poking fun at, or burlesquing, current tastes or politics by having blacked-up comics imitate more established figures or stereotypes. Often the comics would be paired off, in what was called a double-act, which traded on wordplay and double-talk. In the late nineteenth century, a clever producer appropriated the structure of the minstrel show but threw out the male singing and dancing and replaced it with a chorus of beautiful girls. Blackface was out, too, but the corny jokes and double-talk remained; and that’s how, as Stephen Sondheim once wrote in his lyrics to Gypsy, burlesque was born.
