BURLESQUE: The Peeled Grape

At the age of 15, Mae West watched with haughty interest as two Brooklyn street gangs—the Eagle Nesters and the Red Hooks—fought a battle over her charms. Nearly 50 years later, men were still at it. While Mae was touring U.S. nightclubs in 1956 with a troupe of male weight lifters, she was again an interested onlooker (or so she says in her autobiography) as one of her musclemen punched another in the jaw in a quarrel over her beldame favors.*

In the years between, as she tells it in Goodness Had Nothing to Do With It (Prentice-Hall; $3.95), Mae had perfected her inimitable style: the silken walk that suggests the meshing of superbly machined parts, the languid glance, the., lethargic but meaningful gestures, and the tantalizing drawl employed with devastating effect in sybaritic phrases such as “Beulah, peel me a grape,” or “Come up ‘n’ see me sometime.”

To some, Mae West was bawdily suggestive, and her theatrical career has been beset by police raids and moralistic outcries. But to most, Mae’s meanderings were enlivened and redeemed by an intuitive sense of the ridiculous and a cheerful vulgarity. F. Scott Fitzgerald found Mae the only Hollywood actress with “an ironic edge, a comic spark.” British Author Hugh Walpole applauded her mockery of the “fraying morals and manners of a dreary world.”

Finer Instincts. The Brooklyn-born daughter of an Anglo-Irish professional boxer and a Bavarian mother, Mae got onstage early and has seldom been off. As an “innocently brazen” moppet of seven years, she projected exclusively toward “the men and boys.” At eleven, she was being flirtatious with vaudeville hoofers, and at 17, for the first and only time, Mae married. She told the lucky man, a vaudevillian named Frank Wallace, that she was not in love. “It’s just this physical thing,” explained Mae. “You don’t move my finer instincts.” Domestic life proved a bore, and Mae soon sent her husband off on a solo tour.

With the “editorial assistance” of prolific Stephen (High Button Shoes) Longstreet, Mae makes a determined effort at total autobiography. The list of her male conquests seems to stretch to infinity: lawyers, politicians, theatrical agents, Wall Street brokers, film magnates, judges, operatic tenors, Mexican wrestlers, French importers, chorus boys, casual diners in a restaurant. Readers may get the impression that lovers lurk under every bed, in every closet, behind every curtain. Some of them showered Mae with diamonds, emeralds and furs. Others gave more of themselves. Of a fellow named Ted, Mae sighs: “I had experienced other men who performed as ardent lovers, but never for a period of 15 hours.” One suitor whom she discarded, says Mae solemnly, was a virgin when she met him and has lived a life of celibacy ever since.

Matured Men. Away from what she calls “the linen battlefields,” Mae became a vaudeville headliner, a star in Broadway musicals and in her own lubricous dramas —Sex, Diamond Lil, and The Constant Sinner. In a dozen Hollywood films, Mae triumphed on both sides of the Atlantic. During the war, her shape was saluted by R.A.F. pilots, who called their inflatable life jackets “Mae Wests.” U.S. Indians, naturally with the dedicated help of publicity men, made Mae a member of the Lakota tribe as Princess She-Who-Mountains-in-Front.

Now 66, and ensconced in a gold-and-white Hollywood living room surrounded by nude portraits and nude statues of herself, complacent Mae ends her autobiography with a scatter of advice for her sisters. She recommends that they find a man of 40 (by then “he has matured and ripened”) with plenty of money (“in love it buys time, place, intimacy, comfort, and a private corner alone”), who is not too expert (the ideal “is the man a woman can teach something about love he never knew before”). She also tells women how to make themselves more attractive to men. The depressing formula: constant exercise, no fried foods or fats, daily massage with cocoa butter followed by a cold spray, and a visit to the dentist “at least once a year.”

* The one-punch loser: Mickey Hargitay, now the husband of Jayne Mansfield.