The “Sex” Scandal That Made Mae West

On February 9th, 1927, a Broadway show called Sex played its 339th performance.

Sex was a provocative comedy about prostitution that had scandalized its way into becoming a hit.

It was stuffed with salacious dancing, adult situations, and lewd dialogue.

I've got something for you.

Wait until you see this.

Well, come on and let's see it.

You'll get it.

It better be good.

It's good, all right.

But you've got to be very careful not to bend it.

The show was one of the longest running of the Broadway season and a breakthrough for its star, writer, and producer, Mae West.

You gotta get a grip on yourself.

There's a chance of rising to the top in every profession.

West was in her mid-30s and had been performing for over two decades, but sex had finally made her the talk of the town.

And then on that night in February, 10 months into the show's run, the cops busted in.

11 officers crashed in after the final curtain and escorted West and about 20 other cast members out of the theater, through a crowd of hundreds, and into 10 just-hailed taxicabs.

They were taken to a Hell's Kitchen police station and then down to Nightcourt in Greenwich Village.

The charge is corrupting the morals of youth.

West spent the night in jail right next to the courthouse, which was a zoo with onlookers, journalists, and photographers trying to get a glimpse of the actress who would make front pages across the city for months as sex went on trial.

During the resulting brouhaha, West would be asked what she thought the scandal would do to her career.

I expect this to be the making of me.

She was right, but it wasn't as inevitable as she makes it sound.

In the early 1930s, Mae West's dirty talk and hip-swiveling walk, her quick wit and slow delivery, her sexual bravado and horny zingers, her boldness, her campiness made her one of the biggest movie stars in America.

But before West hit the big screen, she was in the bright lights of Broadway and the flashbulbs of the tabloids when she was prosecuted for staging not one, but two scandalous plays.

In this episode, with the help of play scripts, court documents, and old newspaper clippings, we're going to look at this period.

It's the one in which West honed the persona that would make her last and that all these years later still offers a kind of blueprint on how to survive a scandal and maybe even come out ahead.

So today, on Decodering, how did Mae West become herself?

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May West was born in 1893.

I believe that everyone in life should have a mission.

Making people happy is the height of my ambition.

But 130 years later, she's one of those celebrities you know, even if you don't know that you do, because she's just a part of the cultural firmament.

Come up and sing this song.

In the 1930s, Wes's in-your-face hubba-hubba style and incredible quotability made her an icon.

She showed up in Cole Porter songs in Disney cartoons and became a favorite of drag queens.

Salvador Dolly made a couch based on her lips.

But as the years have passed by, she's stayed current, an evergreen cultural reference who pops up as a laugh line in family-friendly sitcoms.

Why don't you come up and see me sometime?

For cultures

As a gag on Saturday Night Live.

Known for her hugely popular catchphrase, why don't you come upstairs and see me up there sometime?

As a staple on RuPaul's drag race.

When I'm good, I'm good, but when I'm bad, I get a serious venereal disliking.

Even as she's still reaching people through her movies.

I discovered Mae West when I was about...

12 years old.

Minerva Jane is a writer, entertainer, and comedian based in Boise who is the voice of May West in this episode.

I'm from a small town called Emmett, Idaho.

And I

really was never

in the closet about anything about who I was.

And so I didn't have a lot of friends.

And I took to old movies as respite from that.

She was...

unlike any other movie star I'd ever seen.

She just was larger than life.

It was a kind of warmth that came through, but

it wasn't a put-on kind of warmth.

It wasn't like a goody-two shoe.

Well, when I'm good, I'm very good.

But when I'm bad, I'm better.

I felt like watching her was watching someone who was being themselves.

But being herself took Mae West years of work.

West was born in working-class immigrant-thronged Brooklyn back before there were cars or radios, let alone movies.

Her father had been a bare-knuckled street fighter.

Her more genteel, absolutely beloved German immigrant mother had been a one-time corset model.

They both knew gangsters.

The family moved often, and West, who started performing around age six, likely contributed financially.

She is coming out of what can be legitimately described as an underworld of Brooklyn.

Mary Beth Hamilton is the author of When I'm Bad, I'm Better, May West, Sex and American Entertainment.

And she does come out of a pretty low-rent end of vaudeville where, you know, there was not a very clear boundary between the stage and the street.

By the time she was 18, West was performing in cheap theaters around the city.

When she was 17, she went on tour in the Midwest as part of a double act.

West was already sexually active.

Her lasciviousness is not some put-on.

She liked sex and she had it.

But she was still young enough that she could be made to feel ashamed of this.

And so she was pressured into marrying her scene partner.

It would be the first and last time she bowed to sexual propriety.

Pretending the marriage just hadn't happened, West struck out on her own, trying to break into the family-friendly vaudeville big time with a comedic song and dance act, but with limited success.

Just everything about the way she carried herself was so kind of redolent of the world of these kind of low-rank variety theaters.

In her act, West would do dances like the cooch and the shimmy, an African-inflected shoulder and bust shivering move that came out of black nightclubs.

Sometimes she'd perform it sitting down, just her chest shaking, and then at the bits climax, whoops, her shoulder strap would accidentally fall down.

She finished up with the sign-off, it's not what you do, it's how you do it.

Throughout the 1910s, her career did a kind of two-step.

Two steps forward and then two steps back.

Big breaks in vaudeville and on Broadway would be followed by a return to less esteemed venues.

She'd be on a bill with Houdini and a talking dog.

Win over audiences, but offend critics.

Unless Miss West can tone down her stage presence in every way, she just as well might hop right out of vaudeville into burlesque.

In 1923, as vaudeville was losing ground to a new kind of entertainment, the movies, West's career fully hit the skids.

There's a three-year black hole on her resume where her only billings may have been in some really tawdry shows.

Fortunately, tauddry was roaring in.

Prohibition comes in in 1920, makes all drinking and all bars illegal.

Hugh Ryan is the author of The Women's House of Detention and When Brooklyn Was Queer.

Suddenly, nightlife becomes a huge thing, much of it mafia connected, and it also becomes a more small D democratic thing and makes more space for more different kinds of nightlife.

It also starts to make it hot and happening and exotic to go to places that are a little bit wilder.

If you're already going to a place that's illegal, why not go to the place that's exciting?

White New Yorkers began so-called slumming, flooding into places they didn't used to go, including mob-run speakeasies, honky-tonks and jazz clubs in Harlem, and queer bars and drag balls down in Greenwich Village.

Respectable young women started wearing lipstick, eyeliner, stockings, and stopped wearing girdles, flapper styles that had previously been associated with sex workers.

It is really difficult to tell if you go to a speakeasy.

You know, who are the prostitutes and who are the society debutantes.

They look the same.

They dress the same.

They put the same things on their faces.

They dance the same.

And Mae West clocked this.

Her career might have been at a low point, but she was right in the middle of the roaring 20s.

She was dating gangsters and boxers and friends with nightclub owners and MCs.

She was up in Harlem and down in Greenwich Village.

Her mother was running a roadhouse for the bootlegger Oni Madden, who after getting out of Sing Sing ran the cotton club.

She had a front row seat to New York's Changing Mores, which had even reached Broadway, where two hit shows about prostitutes had popped up.

Subjects and performance styles that West was seeped in, but that had been beyond the pale, were becoming more acceptable.

And West was smart and savvy enough to seize the moment.

I became convinced that the great American public was somewhat aware of the existence of a natural state of affairs called neatly sex.

So I wrote a play.

May West had a playwriting philosophy.

It was this.

People want dirt in planes, so I give them dirt.

And if you bought a ticket to C-Sex, which opened in April of 1926, dirt is exactly what you were paying for.

In the play, West played a down-at-the-heels yet universally desired prostitute named Margie Lamont, who was extremely matter-of-fact about everything.

And she is here when another woman asked her to lay off a John named Sailor Dan.

Sailor Dan from Kansas?

Let me check my book.

Oh, Sailor Dan from Kansas.

Flat feet, asthma, check came back.

Oh, baby.

I'll make you a present of that boy.

He's yours.

But it wasn't just the dialogue that was provocative.

Linda Ann Leshavo is a playwright and poet who runs a May West blog and has written two two plays about West.

People went to see Sex three and four times because May was always going further.

She was always sticking in a new dirty joke, a new bit of innuendo, showing her navel.

Sex made for a wild night out.

It was like going slumming, but on Broadway, the show had a jazz band, sultry dancing, genuine street slang, revealing and shabby costumes, double entendres so matter-of-fact they have been described as single, and of course, sex,

including a scene in which West character Margie straddles a John on a kitchen chair.

She's making contact with him.

You know, she's grinding against him.

This was something that never,

never, never went this far.

The show was so tawdry, they had a plan for dealing with visits from the authorities.

When May had a play on stage, there were two versions, and they would have lookouts in the back of the theater to see who was there.

The dirty script in vaudeville fashion was called the whore script.

The clean script was called the parlor script, and it was a necessary subterfuge because of American obscenity laws and a near-constant background pressure to clean up Broadway.

If cops looked to be in the crowd, the cast would put on the tamer version of the show.

Critics, too, were often shown the parlor script, but even it was too much for them.

Mary Beth Hamilton.

It's absolutely excoriated with reviews that kind of go beyond a normal bad review.

An offensive play, monstrosity plucked from garbage can destined to sewer.

It was also described as having a dark brown quality, and West was referred to as the babe Ruth of stage prosties.

This is not the glamorous Mae West we're used to.

She's kind of slovenly, really.

A couple of them suggest that she's actually kind of getting off on her performance.

But if critics were aghast, audiences were not.

Society folks, city officials, police officers, young women started flocking to sex exactly because it was so inappropriate, so naughty, so bad.

What they were not coming for, particularly, was the story.

But the show does have one.

The play was written by West under the name Jane Mast with the ghostwriter Adeline Leitzbach.

And at its most bare bones, it's as much about class as it is about sex.

The through line involves a society dame who in the first act, out to do a little slumming herself, gets drugged by Margie's pimp and is left for dead.

Margie revives her, only for the woman to try to sell Margie out to the cops.

In the second act, set in Trinidad, where Margie has followed the British fleet, a young rich kid falls for her.

When he takes her home to Connecticut, what do you know?

That society dame turns out to be his mother, who is horrified.

Margie lets her have it.

Say, you've got a knife putting yourself on a pedestal above me.

The things I've done, I had to do for a living.

And I'll bet without this beautiful home, without money, and without any restrictions, you'd be worse than I've ever been.

If you read sex, you realize it's a very angry play.

And that's the real May West, the angry May West.

The humor comes afterwards.

The May West of sex was coming off two decades of having her face pressed to the glass of success.

Years of people telling her she was too vulgar, too unrefined, too much.

She was funny.

She was brash.

She would go there, but she was also pissed off.

And that means she didn't really sound like May West yet.

Our own sense of who she is and who she was is so strongly embedded that I think even if you read the script of sex,

you read it with a May West inflection, you know, that sort of ironic, sort of campy inflection.

I don't think that's how she spoke.

I don't get that impression at all.

The lines don't really lend themselves to that.

West's future movie star persona is so potent, it almost makes her a time traveler.

It's easy to imagine just about any line delivered with her trademark campy gusto, like her kiss-off to the society dame.

The only difference between us is that you could afford to give it away.

But even the lines that lend themselves to that might have sounded sounded different.

They might have been more raw, angrier.

Works in progress.

The only difference between us is that you could afford to give it away.

West was on her way, but she wasn't May West yet.

Her next play would get her closer.

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Six months after sex opened, a serious drama about lesbianism called The Captive debuted on Broadway to rave reviews.

A study of a young woman struggling helplessly in the toils of an abnormal, erotic passion.

May West had just scored a big hit by crossing the line.

Upon seeing the success of The Captive, she thought she might do it again, this time with homosexuality.

Male and female impersonators, as they were then known, had been a popular vaudeville staple for years and some of its biggest stars.

But West was looking to bring something a little more underground uptown.

And in fact, she cast much of her new show out of a Greenwich Village drag cabaret.

As Linda Ann Leschavo told me, West had been tipped off about the place by the boxer Jack Dempsey, who she dated.

It was on West 9th Street, a block from the courthouse and jail where West would later spend the night.

And by day, it was just an Italian restaurant.

One night, she went with her manager, scrawled a casting call on a waiter's pad, and the next evening, 50 queer people showed up for auditions at the theater where sex was playing.

She cast much of the show out of this group and started holding highly improvisational rehearsals late at night after she'd finished appearing in sex.

A lot of the dialogue that came out of these improvisations ended up in the play West wrote, but did not appear in.

It's called The Drag.

It's nominally a tragic melodrama about a closeted married man, his miserable miserable wife, and his distraught ex-lover that is surprisingly respectful of gay love.

But the serious stuff was also a kind of Trojan horse, a framework to conceal the show's real draw.

The fun and scandalous stuff, scenes in which queer supporting characters vamp and gossip in heady slang and joke about rough trade and dalliances with cops, musical interludes in which a jazz band performs songs like The Woman Who Stole My Gal, and The Climax, a 20-minute drag performance almost exactly like what was going on downtown.

The show also featured the first iteration of Wes' most famous line.

It might have come from one of the actors, or it's thought to show the influence of the famous female impersonator Bert Savoy, who had turned the innocuous, you must come over, into a suggestive catchphrase.

In the drag, the line in question is delivered by a queer character named Winnie.

So glad to have you meet me.

Come up sometime and I'll bake you a pan of biscuits.

West and her team were nothing if not a bold and provocative bunch.

Their production company was called the Morals Producing Company.

They had named a show sex and would advertise it like this.

Warning.

If you cannot stand excitement, see your doctor before visiting May West in sex.

But if they thought the drag was gonna go over like sex, they were radically underestimating homophobia.

The drag was not only about gay themes and topics.

It featured gay men playing gay men at a time when New York State had just criminalized homosexuality and queer people could not even be part of the actors union.

As the drag began to play out of town in Connecticut and then New Jersey, audiences seemed as titillated and entertained as West thought they would be.

But organizations already aghast at Broadway's wobbly morality ratcheted up the pressure on City Hall.

Meanwhile, Broadway producers and theater owners, in a panic that the drag would bring down all of Broadway, pushed to stop it too.

On February 9th, 1927, Variety reported there had been a special showing of the drag in Manhattan for city officials and doctors it was hoped might endorse the play for its educational value.

That very night, desperate to stop the drag from opening in the city, the law trained its eye on the only May West show playing in its jurisdiction.

10 months into its run, sex finally ran afoul of the law.

And so did two other plays, Linda and LeChavo.

You know, City Hall had to say, we really want to arrest May West, but we can't make it look like we're just coming down on May West.

So let's grab three plays on the same night.

The trial of May West and her co-defendants began in late March of 1927, about six weeks after the initial arrests.

In the interim, the drag had been successfully kept from opening in the city, and sex had eventually closed too.

But with a large downtown courthouse as her stage, West was starring in a new show, one that would prove to be good theater, wildly hyped by the press, with two leading characters of its own.

The first was the prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney James G.

Wallace.

Sex was not intended to paint a moral lesson.

It was intended to sell vileness.

The second was the defense lawyer.

There were actually four of them, some with underworld ties, but for the sake of clarity, we've condensed them into one.

We are going to call prominent people who saw our play.

Why, there were 700 policemen who saw sex in the 11 months it ran.

For just about a week, the two sides faced off in a packed courthouse as West, who had been instructed not to testify, looked on while demurely dressed in cloche hats, fur coats, and black silk.

Also in attendance and hanging on every word were scores of newspapermen filing dispatches about the proceedings to papers across the city and the country.

Dispatches that are where all this dialogue comes from.

I wouldn't object to my child actually going to see it.

It shows that even degraded women have a spark of decency, which if appealed to, may rescue them from their way of life.

The trial had comedy, like during the testimony of the prosecution's star witness.

Police Sergeant Patrick Canale had seen the ribald version of sex three times while taking notes in the dark.

After talking the jury through every salacious moment in the play, he was cheekily cross-examined by the defense.

Miss West moved her navel up and down and from right to left.

Did you actually see her navel?

No, but I saw something in her middle that moved from east to west.

Would you demonstrate?

And then there was more comedy and tension, as when the defense argued that for all of Sex's tawdry moments, it conveyed a larger moral lesson.

Just like Hamlet, A Tale of Two Cities, and the Bible, selections of which were read to the jury.

I read to you from Solomon 7, verses 4 to 7.

The district attorney disagreed with this comparison and instead compared the show to a brothel.

We have cleaned up the red light district of New York.

It's pretty clean town now.

But we got the red lights on the stage.

The climax was simultaneously thrilling and screwball.

Initially, the jury returned with a verdict in West and the co-defendant's favor, but then the judge made a last-minute intervention, issuing explicit instructions that the play was not to be considered as a whole, but on a line-by-line basis.

It is no defense that the play may have taught a moral lesson, because no one can commit an illegal act to accomplish a good one.

Thou shalt not do evil that good may come.

At this point, a producer began counting the rosary, a cast member began to cry, and the lawyers almost got into a fistfight.

You're a cheap, arrogant, insolent dog.

Yeah, okay.

You're a perfect gentleman.

Come outside and I'll take care of you.

The verdict came in soon after.

May West and producers get 10 days as 19 are free.

West and her two co-producers were ordered to pay a $500 fine and sentenced to 10 days in prison, which meant though the trial was over, the frenzy had only begun.

West, who had been sidelined because she wasn't testifying, took center stage again.

She showed up to her sentence in a limo, vowing resilience.

You've got to fight in this world.

You've got to fight to get there and fight to stay there.

On Welfare Island, she dusted books, dined with the warden, and complained about the scratchy wool stockings as the press breathlessly covered it all.

Sex star shines in jail.

Upon leaving the island two days early, she insisted the experience had bothered her not at all.

I was surprised.

I expected it to be a great deal worse.

I got enough material for two or three plays.

Oh, I got plenty.

She's not going to tell City Hall, you crushed me.

Linda Ann Leschavo.

Keep your feisty face in place.

Don't tell people this was the worst experience of my life.

No, that wasn't May.

May is always going to tell you, you know what?

You think you hurt me.

You helped me.

Thank you.

Belinda Ann has a picture from a newspaper archive that tells a slightly different story.

May West

is going through a revolving door in jail and she is crying.

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The legend of Mae West goes that after she went to jail for sex, she was on her way.

I mean, what's a better origin story for a woman who styled herself as a goddess of sex than to have gotten famous for sex, the play?

But the future has a way of making the past look inevitable.

And in the immediate aftermath of sex, it wasn't exactly clear how West should proceed now that she was infamous.

It's not like audiences were lining up to see just anything she did.

The next play she wrote, a kind of sex retread, flopped, playing just over a dozen and a half shows.

But West was nothing if not indefatigable, and so she kept working, writing two plays that opened on Broadway in 1928.

In it, West played the titular Lil, another prostitute who, like sex's Margie Lamont, is street-smart but good-hearted, sexually voracious, and adored by all men, uncowed, unpunished, and startlingly blunt.

But unlike Margie, Lil is no low-class floozy.

She's a diamond-festooned, cartoonishly desirable madam of an 1890s pleasure house.

I got what takes his time.

I'm going for a run of time.

I'm a fast-moving gal.

I'd like some slow.

Gone are the contemporary dresses West wore in sex that did nothing for her, and in are the period glamour puss costumes.

But it wasn't just the costumes that had changed.

Mary Beth Hamilton.

The real difference is her delivery.

Every line was laced with innuendo.

Every word was laced with a sense that there was a double meaning.

And this difference might spring from the other play West was working on, The Pleasure Man, an overhaul of the drag.

For The Pleasure Man, West removed the drag's whole framing story about a gay man and his wife and his former lover, and instead moved the action behind the scenes of a vaudeville show.

But the drag ball remained as did the numerous queer characters and actors who West was working with, collaborating with, hanging out with, and directing as she also developed Diamond Lil.

She's learning from them.

The parallels are too notable.

Whether she knew she was doing it or not, she's imbibing something of a camp style.

West had been adjacent to and marinating marinating in camp for years, but maybe she fully embraced it now because now is when she needed it.

Needed a way to be herself and make fun of herself, a way to wink and to act, a way to send up what she otherwise couldn't live down.

Her notoriety.

By the time she's in Diamond Lil,

she's...

You know, she's not just Mae West the actress.

She's Mae West, the convicted sex offender who went to prison and was on the front pages of the tabloids.

In Diamond Lil, she doesn't shy away from any of this.

She uses it to her advantage.

It's full of double entendres, not just about sex, but about jail.

The audience would cackle when Lil was threatened with time in the clink.

And there's a punchline where she tells a girl pickpocketing watches.

I don't want nothing to do with time.

So I think there's that sort of that awareness of kind of of being in cahoots with the audience, so that everything about the play has a kind of ironic detachment and double meaning.

With Diamond Lil, West embraced the drag of her celebrity and finally looked, moved, and sounded like the May West we remember.

A slow-moving, fast woman with loose morals and tight dresses who doesn't miss a trick even as she's turning them, and though way over the top still has everything under control.

Lil was the character West had been trying to find for years and having found her, she basically never stopped playing her, on stage or off.

Lil even gets the most famous May West line of all.

I always did like a man in a uniform.

That one fits you grand.

Why don't you come up sometimes, see me?

I'm home every evening.

And this new May West, ironic, distance, cool, not angry, bringing everybody along.

She goes over like gangbusters.

Diamond Lil, the play, also features sex scenes, provocative dancing, and a whole subplot about sex trafficking.

But it was a hit with audiences and critics.

She is a good actress, Miss West.

This new widespread popularity probably helped her when she was arrested again, this time for the pleasure man.

Two years later, this case also went to trial.

It was even crazier than the first one, but it ended with a hung jury and then a dismissal, though it cost West a fortune.

By then, the Great Depression was on.

Audiences were flocking to the movies, which were cheap, and the studios needed material.

And so as skeptical as some were of the scandalous Mae West, she was brought out to Hollywood.

Her first supporting role was in the movie Night After Night, for which she rewrote all of her lines and, in the words of one of her co-stars, stole everything but the camera.

The next year, in 1933, when West was 40 years old, but pretending she was younger, she starred in She'd Done Him Wrong, a 66-minute adaptation of Diamond Lil that co-starred Carrie Grant, who West discovered.

Haven't you ever met a man that could make you happy?

Sure,

lots of times.

It was a huge hit for Paramount, nominated for an Academy Award, and it made West a movie star.

And even after everything that had happened to her, that's still the only reason most of us know who she is.

West's history with the authorities and her time in jail always hovered in the background of her fame, mentioned in just about every article about her, and sometimes her dialogue, too.

You once did a play with a very simple title.

You know the one I mean?

Sex?

That's the one.

That's not so simple.

By the time of that interview, West had long since settled into being an even higher camp version of herself.

Her movie career had in some ways been brief.

After two hit films, the authorities came for her again, this time in the form of the movie's haze code, which neutered and neutralized West's films, and they had all but petered out by the end of the 1930s.

But if West's movie career was truncated, her influence has not been.

By the 1950s, as censorship began loosening its hold, other actors began following in her suggestive footprints, and they haven't stopped since.

It's not just on-screen sex pots that owe something to West.

It's all the celebrities, whether they know it or not, have made like Mae West and lived down a scandal by owning it.

It's not just celebrities.

Minerva Jane learned about West's sex trial as a tween when she was watching and reading everything she could about West.

And that was an important lesson for me.

Not because she got in trouble with the law, but because it didn't matter what other people thought.

If she had a bad reputation, she was going to make the most of it.

That was where it really clicked because I,

you know, being out, very young, being very feminine, and,

you know, I started wearing makeup and growing my hair out when I was 13.

You know,

I

knew

I was going to have a reputation just by being me.

I decided, and it was through Mae West's

incredible story that, you know, it was like, okay,

I'm going to be damned if I do and damned if I don't.

So I'm going to do it.

Mae West died in 1980.

She's probably still not as respected as a trailblazing, no F-giving writer and actress of the 1920s and 30s ought to be.

But she is still with us.

I'll never forget you.

No one ever does.

She even has a quote about dying or really living that you can find on novelty posters and t-shirts and coffee mugs.

Maybe that means it's a little bit corny, especially if you don't know who said it and the life that she lived.

But it's still one of my favorite of hers, which is saying something.

You probably know it.

It goes like this.

You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.

Oh, come on, let me cling on to you like a vine.

Make that low-down music trickle up your spine.

Baby, I can warm you with this love of mine.

I'm no angel.

This is Decodering.

I'm Willa Paskin.

You can find me on Twitter at Willa Paskin.

And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.

This podcast was produced by Willa Paskin.

Decodering is produced by Willa Paskin and Katie Shepard.

Derek John is senior supervising producer of narrative podcasts.

Merit Jacob is our technical director.

Thank you to Benjamin Frisch for this topic and getting this project going.

Thank you also to Emily Wortis-Leiter, Bretton Tyner-Bryan, Barbara Cohen-Straitner, Craig Liu, Tina Barnett, and Arielle Dorlester at the Schubert Archive.

Also, thank you to our voice actors, Minerva Jane, David Deblinger, and Darren Pufal Purdy.

This episode relied heavily on a lot of archival material and innumerable books.

We're going to link to them on our show page, but I want to shout out some of the ones that haven't already been mentioned in this episode.

They include Lillian Schlissel's Introduction to Three Plays by Mae West, Mae West, a Biography by George Eales and Stanley Musgrove, Mae West, An Icon in Black and White by Jill Watts, Becoming Mae West by Emily Wurtis-Leiter, Gay New York by George Chauncey, May West, She Who Laughs Last by June Sochin, Goodness Has Nothing to Do With It by Mae West, and Linda Ann Lashivo's play, Courting Mae West and her blog, which you can find at maywest.blogspot.com.

You also heard part of a few May West songs, including I'm No Angel and I Like a Guy What Takes His Time.

If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our Feed and Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

And even better, tell your friends.

If you're a fan of the show, I'd love for you to sign up for Slate Plus.

Slate Plus members get to listen to Decodering without any ads and they get to hear a special behind-the-scenes episode with me at the end of the season, which means you'll be able to hear that episode next week.

Their support is also crucial to our work.

If you sign up now, you can get the first three months of your membership for only $15.

So please go to slate.com slate.com/slash decoder plus to join Slate Plus today.

That's it for this run of episodes.

We'll be back with two more in early October and then a whole bunch more starting in November.

Until then,

be well.

I'm the winder

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