 by LindaAnn Loschiavo
 In the 1920s, the obligatory initial step towards bringing a play to Broadway was a stop at the NYC Police Department. In 1926, before Mae West’s play Sex could be staged at Edward Elsner’s Westside playhouse, Daly’s 63rd Street Theatre, the manuscript had to be approved by a special NYPD Play Jury. (268 plays were produced on Broadway in 1927 and squeezed into 70+ theatres. This kept New York City’s Play Juries very busy; think of how much income City Hall raked in from this lucrative arrangement.) Once approved, the text for Sex was given a license. Only then could a drama or a comedy be taken forward — and was it ever!
Mae West (1893-1980) starred as a prostitute, managing to arouse so much interest that, although it was dismissed by drama critics, Sex became a box office bonanza. In its opening act set in a Montreal brothel, Mae sang Honey, Let Yo’ Drawers Hang Low. In the cabaret scene she sang two Harlem favorites: Sweet Man and Shake that Thing. Muscle-mamboing Mae included a sensual belly dance to the St. Louis Blues.
In April 1926, out-of-town previews began in Stamford, CT. Financial backing was supplied by the Morals Production Company, a group of investors organized by Mae’s lawyer and lover Jim Timony. Backers included her mother, Matilda, and the gangster Owney Madden, Cotton Club owner. On April 26, 1926 Sex opened on Broadway. Mae West was the draw — not the play. and the public poured in. By its third week, it was raking in $10,000 a week. In its seventh week, Sex hit the $16,500 mark.
A steady line of limousines pulled up to Daly’s entrance. The District Attorney became interested and convened a volunteer “Play Jury” that included 1 woman, 1 physician, 2 Brooklynites and 8 Manhattan men; they were asked to review the manuscripts of 4 crowd-pleasing plays once again. In June 1926, this new Play Jury cleared Sex of any suspicion of indecency by a vote of 8 to 4.
NOW, Ask yourself: Why would Sex which passed the scrutiny of the Play Jury TWICE, in March and again in June 1926, be raided by the police after 10 months of enormous attendance and great publicity — on Wednesday February 9th, 1927? There are two reasons:
* * Mayor Jimmy Walker was a great fan of Miss West and did not interfere when he heard that the actress was in the midst of planning to stage The Drag, a play with a homosexual theme that was selecting actors after auditions in gay bars; and
* * Forty-one weeks into a sellout run, Walker happened to be out of town and the acting Hizzoner, "holier-than-thou" Joseph V. McKee, sent in the cops. Mae West spent the night of February 9th in the Jefferson Market Jail. After a trial in the Jefferson Market Courthouse during February and March 1927, Miss West was convicted of “corrupting the morals of youth” and sentenced to 10 days in the Women’s Workhouse on Welfare Island. “I expect it will be the making of me,” she told reporters, and it was: it made her a household name. But The Drag died in Mae’s dreams. Due to fines, an expensive court battle and dreadful jail cells, the politicians made their point: No gays on Broadway.
The play Courting Mae West by Greenwich Village dramatist Linda Ann Loschiavo, set in NYC during 1926-1929 explores Mae West’s legal woes. Using fictional elements, the text is anchored by true events and has three characters based on real people: actress Mae West; Mr. Isidore, a 6th Ave. news seller; & Sara Starr, based on the Village flapper Starr Faithfull, whose death inspired John O’Hara’s novel Butterfield 8 .
The project began as a way to keep the Jefferson Market Courthouse’s history alive in an entertaining way. The New York Law Journal and a dozen other publications have written about it. In January 2005, The Jefferson Market Library devoted a month-long art exhibition to 16 panels depicting scenes from “Courting Mae West” drawn from archival photos from 1927.
The playwright hopes to find investors to help propel Courting Mae West towards Broadway. There will be a free staged reading at 8 PM on Wednesday February 9, 2005 at CUNY Graduate Center. (Details are online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com) Mae West had, Colette noted in 1938, an impudent, solitary presence like Chaplin’s. Truman Capote once wryly described her curves as “the Big Ben of hour-glass figures,” and in the 1920s, when she was starring on Broadway, George Jean Nathan wrote that she was “the Statue of Libido.” Playfully suggesting that she was less notorious than institutional, Salvador Dali painted a portrait of her face in which the features are pieces of furniture.
Mae West stands alone. She wrote her own plays and the dialogue for five Paramount Pictures films; no other actress has ever written her own dialogue. No other actress is as quotable nor are there gas pumps, a bend in a road and a flotation device named for any other actress. You can’t escape Mae West. Admit it. You might as well come up and see Mae in Courting Mae West while you can enjoy it without paying admission.
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