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 “Step by step I hit the top of the ladder. It was a dangerous climb.
But now I’m a lady, come up and see me sometime.” From Mae West’s closing song
To truly enjoy this film, and understand why the extravagant set design, a little background is in order. It is 1934; Mae has made four pictures for Paramount since detraining in Pasadena in June of ’32, overweight and almost forty. With no one there to greet her in her own words she “reckoned the old Mae West stock had taken a Wall Street cocktail… ”: a reference to the ruinous market crash of 1929. Immediately she set about getting back where she belonged: On Top.
Although once “the toast of Broadway,” Mae’s likes had never been seen by the nation at large—but, when they finally did, what a welcome they gave her! Over the next 24 months, 46 million people laid down their dime and shared happily in her wisecracks and innuendos, so saucily delivered in that unmistakable manner of speech.
Mae was nothing less than a film phenomenon and enjoyed giving the censors a merry chase. Her double entendres were famous, repeated and laughed at from dingy corner saloons to swank dinner parties hosted by Palm Beach society divas. Those who liked her loved her; those who did not feared her power and deliberately set out to destroy the actress and everything she represented.
By the time Goin’ to Town was in pre-production, these unhappy self-appointed social arbiters carried even more firepower. The bat-eared Will Hays, a former Postmaster General of the United States, was Chief Spoilsport. And this “Tsar of all the Rushes” (an annoying little man with an irritating high-pitched voice) had recently introduced an even more severe Production Code for the industry. Mae was now “Target One” and he delighted in tormenting both studio and star. The plan was simple: slash away at the clever wordplay in her scripts until what was left was so lame it would almost certainly ruin her career. After all, without sex where would she be?
Mae enjoyed a good fight; but Paramount, having been saved from selling out to MGM by the enormous profits from her box-office smashes, had its own good reasons for keeping both the actress and her admirers happy. When Goin’ to Town was completed, concerned the much pummeled script might disappoint her public if the film was not properly promoted, the studio went on the offensive. Theaters were instructed to run clips from She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel in the hopes of exploiting the “West mystique” and lather up fan anticipation, despite the fact both films were now forbidden further exhibition by order of this same predatory Hays Office.
Taking no chances in overplaying their hand, the new picture was advertised as a “deliberate” departure for the actress. This was Mae West as social satirist and critic “mocking upper crust arrogance and pretension” and “exposing class superficiality and hypocrisy.” Paramount reasoned (correctly as it turns out, for the film made a decent profit) that if fans did not expect a “modern” Mae to vamp her way through seventy-one minutes of outrageous pranks, double talk, and verbal jousting, all with a heavy sexual overtone, they might watch it with an open mind and the studio would rack up another winner.
The story begins in contemporary time, in a western town deep with the dust of two thousand cattle (likely Texas as there is a lot of cross-border rustling going on). In fact that is what gets Buck Gonzales (played by character actor Fred Kohler), fiancée of wildly popular dance-hall entertainer Cleo Borden (portrayed by Mae West), killed on the eve of their wedding…making her one of the wealthiest women in America, almost overnight.
You see, a geological engineer, Edward Carrington (Paul Cavanaugh in a role originally intended for Cary Grant; but he had a scheduling conflict and had to pass), who was hired by Gonzales only weeks before, now confirms the ranch sits on pockets of oil “worth millions.” Cleo’s infatuation with Carrington is immediate. And we are sympathetic to her feelings; Buck is dead and, after all, he had won her hand in a dice game.
However Carrington, ever the reserved Englishman, is offended by Cleo’s flirtatious antics, such as roping him and shooting his hat off. His work completed, he heads off to South America. The smitten Cleo goes after him, all under the pretext of entering her horse “Cactus,” billed as “the fastest mount in the west,” in the International Sweepstakes. She is also chasing some social cachet, figuring being a “Cattle Queen,” or even “Oil Queen,” just doesn’t cut it if there’s no blue blood when you nick yourself shaving your legs.
The International Club in Buenos Aries is the first big indoor set and Art Deco buffs will be enchanted. The entrance is simply dazzling…and the casino doesn't disappoint either, with its magnificent mirrors, sparkling filigree work and, everywhere, glittering crystal. When we first see Mae in her suite, fittingly in the bedroom, there is a single piece any determined deco enthusiast would leap through the screen for: a magnificent all-white floor radio.
Spurned again by Carrington, Cleo settles for in an arranged marriage to one Fletcher Colton. She gets a Long Island name, and he a wife who can afford his huge gambling debts. It is strictly a monetary agreement; no hanky-panky. So now it’s off to Southampton and Colton Manor where the studio’s art director seem to have had an absolute field day. It looks like most of the stuff was picked up at a “garage sale” at San Simeon, California, where newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst stashed his incredibly eclectic collection of art and objects from around the world. (Hearst’s taste was often reviled!)
Contributing to the lack of elegance are unsightly table bases, heavily ornamented flowers, cupids, nude male statues, mirrors emblazoned with tree branches, and a hodge- podge of other pieces of dubious appeal. The sitting room fireplace is overdone to the point it almost, but not quite, calls your attention away from Cleo as she feeds walnuts to her parrot while verbally sparring with her husband’s viperous aunt. On the plus side, a live monkey is a nice touch.
Fortunately her bedroom is toned down considerably from the rest of the mansion’s motif, and not so bad to look at if you can sleep comfortably amidst a collision of translucent elliptical screens, striped wallpaper, festoons, figurines, and a mad mix of plaster and wood adornments. At a quick glance the relief above the door could represent either the wings of Hermes (a son of Zeus and herald for the Greek gods), or old west-style handlebar moustaches, a reminder of her own somewhat bawdy bloodline.
Two pieces offer redemption: a beautiful white Baby Grand in the music room, and a metal sculpture of a heron just below the bedroom balcony. (The heron is one of three birds most often depicted in Art Deco, the others being the flamingo and pelican. In this scene at dusk, like a foreshadowing of imminent danger, it also closely resembles a baby raptor.)
These sets are either to be viewed as “Deco” in extremis, or a bastardized mixture of rococo and baroque; but they certainly add to the fun as the plot hurries on, sliding nearly into slapstick.
In an effort to impress her sneering Social Register neighbors Cleo decides to put on the opera Samson and Delilah. Accompanied in her grand entrance by muscular half naked African slaves, she sings the role of Delilah (a woman she greatly admires as “one lady barber that made good”).
Watching Mae “in black chiffon with a long shimmering trail…diamond-studded pelvic-and-breast-plates…crowned with a long blonde wig…and a tiara of diamond leaves” singing the mezzo half of her duet in French (while all the while fondling Samson’s lengthy black tresses) is enough to grab the attention of the dead. It is also pure burlesque cheerfully brought back from her high-rolling vaudeville days when she was enjoying a love affair with dancer and future acting star George Raft.
While all this is taking place someone is trying to collect on another of her pasty husband’s IOU’s; a nasty trio of society matrons is planning a most unpleasant surprise for Cleo; her true love, Edward Carrington, has unexpectedly shown up; and, back in Cleo’s bedroom, the nefarious actions of a Russian gigolo results in murder. Here, the quick-thinking assistance of Cleo’s devoted Apache servant, Taho, helps to save the day. (Even in the 1930s, only Miss West or W.C. Fields could have an Apache servant and get away with it!)
The resulting mayhem is a richly wrought spoof of high society, its members and their courtiers. For a little while the mood is more one of the combined comedic insanity of Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, and The Three Stooges…all wrapped into one tremendously entertaining extended sketch. That, to my eye at least, explains why the overly embellished set design works so well. By this time the audience is ready and willing to accept just about anything, even the décor, as long as Mae eventually gets her man.
Michael Orr has written numerous short subject films and documentaries, been a speechwriter and a journalist. He fell in love with movies as a youngster and continues to publish essays about American cinema. A special interest is the late 1920s when “silents, talkies, and radio all violently collide resulting in a cinematic cosmic big bang”—at the heart of novel, Hollywood’s A Scary Place! to be released later this year. He makes his home in Toronto and has one grown daughter. You may contact him at
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Hollywood Popcorn:
Did You Know?
1. Mae was born in New York City on August 17, 1893, to Matilda and John “Battlin’ Jack” West, a former prizefighter. She was actually christened “Mary Jane” after her grandmother. When his career in the ring was finished, her father started a “private police force” which more often than not meant working as occasional muscle for local crime syndicates. He was of English/Irish descent, while mom, “Tillie,” was born in Bavaria and brought to America as a youngster. Eventually Mae had two siblings: Beverley and John.
2. As a child Mae began appearing in vaudeville and burlesque. Eventually she realized her dreams of fame in a series of controversial plays. “Sex,” which she wrote, opened off-Broadway in 1926, and led to her arrest and trial on obscenity charges. This incident put Mae “on the map” as a genuine celebrity. She counted among her friends Texas Guinan, New York’s most famous madam (also known as the “Queen of the speakeasies”) and Mae enjoyed a fast and furious affair with George Raft while she appeared in Diamond Lil (1928). They remained lifelong friends.
3. It was Raft who was responsible for bringing her to Hollywood to work with him in the film Night After Night in 1932. It was West’s first feature and her unforgettable performance brought her to the abrupt attention of the entire nation. About his old flame’s accomplishment, Raft accurately offered up the following: “She stole everything but the cameras.” The next three films were Mae’s alone: She Done Him Wrong (based on her hit Broadway play Diamond Lil and I’m No Angel (both in 1933) and Belle of the Nineties the following year. All were smash hits.
4. When she arrived in Los Angeles, Paramount Studios had arranged for Apartment 611 at the Ravenswood, “a handsome Art Deco block on a leafy boulevard in the smartest part of Hollywood.” She soon made it her sanctum. Forty-eight years later, on November 22, 1980, after a series of strokes, Mae West died in her infamous bedroom with its mirrored ceiling, a decorating preference she shared with celebrated silent screen star, the “It” girl, Clara Bow. (She also owned a beach house in Santa Monica and a small ranch.) Within two days George Raft joined her. One can only imagine the conversation between the world’s most famous “wannabe gangster,” and the world’s most famous “sex personality” (Mae’s own words to describe herself), when they met up once more with the long-departed Guinan at her new establishment for a drink and a chat.
5. Mae was married once on April 11, 1911, at age seventeen, to fellow stage actor Frank Wallace with whom she had been touring. It was a secret ceremony; and they never lived together as man and wife. His career eventually failed and he granted her a divorce in 1943 in exchange for a generous settlement.
6. By the end of 1935 Mae West was America’s most highly paid woman with an income of over $480,000 (a gargantuan sum at the time). Although Goin’ to Town returned above average box office, this film did not do as well as her previous pictures.
7. Foolishly, she had so bought into her carefully nurtured self-image that she turned down the lead in Sunset Boulevard: a caustic behind-the-scenes look at the Hollywood studio system as revealed by the decline of a 1920s acting legend whose career collapsed after the coming of sound. Ironically, it was real life “silent movie box-office queen” Gloria Swanson who then grabbed at the chance, a decision she never regretted. This 1950 Billy Wilder film is now considered a timeless masterpiece. It also reminded the world that Swanson, who had pretty much voluntarily retired by 1934, was still very much alive and kicking.
8. In 1971, Mae was honored with the University of California, Los Angeles, “Woman of the Century” award. She deserved it.
Mae West loved men: a lot of them. Rumors about her sex life raised eyebrows even well into her old age. While in her seventies a young British journalist, interviewing her at the Ravenswood, was being given a tour. He was bold enough to gesture at the ceiling mirror. She looked at him, sashayed over to the bed, sat, gave a little shrug, and said: “Every once in a while I just like to look up and see how I’m doin’.”
That was Mae; never at a loss for words…or a man. After quitting films in 1943, she toured with a nightclub act in which she was surrounded by musclemen. It lasted for several years, making her yet another fortune.
Mickey Hargitay (Mr. Universe, 1956) was appearing with Mae at the Latin Quarter in the mid-1950s when Jayne Mansfield first laid eyes on him. Almost immediately these two young cast members “plunged into a headline making affair.” The publicity did not hurt Mae’s show, only her pride. Even she could not pretend to compete with a 20-year-old beauty being touted as the next Marilyn Monroe.
While performing in Mississippi with her own nightclub act in 1967, Jayne Mansfield died in a car crash, age 34. Coincidentally, another muscleman, Arnold Schwarzenegger, played her husband (Hargitay) in a made-for-television biopic, The Jayne Mansfield Story which aired in 1980, just a few years before the future governor of California starred in The Terminator.
Long before his Magnum P.I. fame, Tom Selleck, then 25, played one of Mae West’s studs in Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge. Released in 1970, this was Mae’s first film in nearly thirty years. She made one more picture based on a play she had written in her Broadway days about a woman who has six husbands. It was called Sextette and co-starred future James Bond actor, Timothy Dalton. She was eighty-four.
Famous for her wit, on stage and in film, Mae delighted in the use of language.
Some of Mae’s most remembered quips are:
Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.
I feel like a million tonight. But one at a time.
I’m a good woman—for a bad man.
So many men; so little time.
Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly.
I’ve been in more laps than a napkin.
He who hesitates is a damn fool.
She’s the kind of girl who climbed the ladder of success—wrong by wrong.
I generally avoid temptation, unless I can’t resist it.
Whenever I’m caught between two evils I take the one I’ve never tried.
I always say keep a diary and some day it’ll keep you.
When I’m good, I’m good. When I’m bad, I’m very good.
It’s not the men in my life; it’s the life in my men.
I used to be Snow White…but I drifted.
It’s better to be looked over than over-looked.
I only like two kinds of men: domestic and foreign.
Give a man a free hand and he’ll run it all over you.
Good girls go to heaven; bad girls go everywhere else.
I’m the finest woman to walk the street.
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