And her new movie, Sextette, is so bad it’s good
Opening her mouth so wide that the pink of her gums shows, Mae West taps her teeth with her fingernails. “See that,” she says proudly. “All my own. Not a false one there.” Then, holding out her arms so that her wrists protrude from her jacket, she adds, “I’ve never had any face lifts either. You can tell by my hands and wrists. They can’t operate on your hands. I’ve never had anything done, and I look the way I did when I was 22.” You can’t argue with a lady, and when the lady will be 85 this summer, who would want to? Sixty years ago Mae West looked in the mirror and ordered the clock stopped. So far as she is concerned, it has never dared to start again.
To help maintain the illusion, she lives in a kind of time capsule. Her Hollywood apartment, which she has had since 1932, is still decorated in the style of the ’30s, when she was one of the screen’s highest-paid performers. A vase of fake white calla lilies stands on a white piano across from a white couch that rests against a mirror set in an off-white wall. Two 32-in.-high nude statues of her stand on the piano, a nude painting of her hangs on the wall, and there are photographs of her everywhere. Hers is an egocentricity so forthright and complete as to be pure, like that of a six-month-old baby, happy in the discovery of her body.
Back in the era when she did the decorating, she was a generation ahead of her time. Writing or adapting her own scripts, she made movies such as Go West, Young Man and I’m No Angel that were both sexy and funny, and when she laid down her pen, the formula seemed to be lost. My Little Chickadee, released in 1940, was her last major film. Now, two young producers, who had not even heard of Mae West until a few years ago, have sunk $4 million of inherited money into a film that attempts to prove that Mae is right—that she really does look 22—and that all the mirrors in the world are wrong. The result, Sextette, is one of those movies rarely seen these days, a work so bad, so ferally innocent, that it is good, an instant classic to be treasured by connoisseurs of the genre everywhere. It was released in Los Angeles in March but failed to win an audience. Now, says Co-Producer Robert Sullivan, he is looking for a distributor who will promote it nationwide as “a high-camp movie for everyone.”
Adapted from West’s own script, Sextette has her portraying a movie sex goddess, not unlike the Mae of 40 years ago, who has just married her sixth husband. Sullivan and his partner, Daniel Briggs, originally suggested Cesar Romero, 71, for the part of No. 6. But Mae said he was too old, and she auditioned 1,000 of the handsomest unknowns in Hollywood. She was the one, after all, who spotted young Gary Grant and helped to make him a star in She Done Him Wrong. None of the 1,000 satisfied her, however, and she started looking at the men in newer movies. When she came to the 1971 remake of Wuthering Heights, she took one look at Heathcliff, a British actor named Timothy Dalton, and yelled “Him!” The fact that Dalton was half a century younger than she was of no consequence.
If you accept the premise that a handsome man in his early thirties would be panting to go to bed with an 84-year-old woman, the movie proceeds logically enough. Before the happy pair can crawl between the satin sheets, they encounter (in no particular order) Tony Curtis, Ringo Starr, George Hamilton, Dom DeLuise, George Raft, Alice Cooper, Walter Pidgeon, Mr. Universe, Mr. U.S.A., Mr. America, Mr. California, Mr. Pennsylvania, and a man (Ed Beheler) who looks so much like Jimmy Carter that even Miss Lillian might set him down for a bowl of grits.
The bridal couple also stumble across some unforgettable double entendres from Mae’s old pictures: “When I’m good, I’m very good, but when I’m bad, I’m better,” and the immortal “Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?” There are some new ones too. When her husband turns out to be a British spy, bigger, someone says, than 007, she sighs, “I never got a chance to take his measurements.”
In a story on the making of the Sextette, a Los Angeles magazine suggested that Briggs and Sullivan had done her wrong. But the truth is that in Sextette Mae got just what she wanted. At one point the script called for her to cry. She refused, explaining that “Stars don’t cry,” and the scene was rewritten.
There is, in fact, none of the pathos of the aging star about Mae, none of the desperate anxiety of the character played by Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. Dressed in a white pants suit, her lips painted a bright, girlish peach, she is jollity itself. The famous laugh, which percolates leisurely to the throat, is young and vital still. Mae West is her own best invention, and no one believes in it or enjoys it more than she herself. “All I look for is harmony,” she says. “If I argue, I get nasty, so I don’t have anyone around who argues with me. I also don’t smoke and I don’t drink. I think drinking puts spots on your hands. I always drink bottled water. Water with minerals in it clogs your arteries, and I want to keep my insides clean.”
She takes care of her insides, but the harmony is provided by Paul Novak, the man she has lived with since 1954. A native of Baltimore and a former muscleman in her Las Vegas act, Novak, who claims to be 45 but looks closer to 55, is friend, amanuensis, and bodyguard. Though two of the three huge diamond rings Mae sports are false, one is real, weighing in at 22 carats, and Novak never escorts her without a protective .38. He seems totally devoted to her and nods agreement at whatever she says. “I never argue with her,” he notes, “because she is always right.”
Like many people her age, Mae has a perfect memory for the distant past, but yesterday she can scarcely recall. Asked what she is working on now, she turns blankly to Novak, who tells her that she is working on a film version of her 1927 play, The Drag.
Her errant memory caused a few problems during the shooting of Sextette, and when Mae couldn’t remember her lines, the schedule began to slip. Director Ken Hughes (Cromwell) finally found the solution, and a small radio receiver was placed over her left ear, where it was conveniently hidden by her enormous wig. Hughes would broadcast the lines to her, and she would repeat them word for word. Spiteful gossips are spreading a story that Mae’s radio once picked up the signals from a police helicopter and that, still on cue, she began reporting traffic conditions on the Hollywood Freeway. Not true, declares Dom DeLuise indignantly. What is true, he says, is that she once repeated Hughes’ directions to the cameraman. “But in all fairness,” he adds, “she laughed more than anyone else when she realized what she had done.”
Now she is back in her old routine. She gets up at noon and goes to bed between 1 and 3 a.m. Occasionally she and Novak go out to dinner, and her chauffeur frequently drives them out to her ten-acre ranch in the San Fernando Valley, where her sister Beverly lives and where Mae exercises by walking on an old, half-mile horse track. When she is at home, she faithfully pedals on a stationary bicycle in the kitchen and lifts weights. Along with all the other bric-a-brac in the living room are two 10-lb. dumbbells, “Mae West” engraved on either end.
Can she really lift them? Again Novak answers. “Flex your muscles, dear,” he commands. Mae lifts her arm, and shows a biceps that many men a third her age might envy. “I’ve been doing that,” she says matter-of-factly, “since I was ten.” And, such is her belief in herself, perdurable and everlasting, she will probably still be doing it when she is 110. — Gerald Clarke
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