Ideas - 'When I'm bad, I'm better' – The revolutionary Mae West

Episode Date: June 10, 2026

Mae West shocked audiences and infuriated censors for more than 70 years. She was pop culture’s original blonde bombshell sex-symbol comedienne provocateur. But she was more than just a corseted sex pot with an affinity for word play. She was a trailblazer, transgressive, funny, smart, sassy, lively, a genius. And she got away with all of it. IDEAS contributor Lynda Shorten explores the legacy of the eccentric Mae West.Guests in this episode:Linda Hutcheon is a professor emerita of English and comparative literature at The University of Toronto.Ramona Curry is an associate professor emerita of English at The University of Illinois.Pamela Wojeck is a professor of film studies at The University of Notre DameScott C. Miller is a make-up artist and retired undertaker

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This is a CBC podcast. This voice I've been hearing in my head, I want you to hear it. When I'm good, I'm very good. But when I'm bad, I'm better. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. found that it's impossible to talk about May West without imitating her. So can you do her?

Well, you start. Oh, I start, okay. Well, when I'm good, I'm very good. But when I'm bad, I'm better. There's never been anyone quite like May West. Her campy performances and wicked double entendres shocked and mocked and entertained her public for more than 70 years. was one of her lines that drove the censors crazy. Haven't you ever met a man that can make you happy?

Sure. Lots of times. Yes, many times. Lots of times. Yes, lots of times. Good enough. Yes. Why was that a problem for the censors? Because she was brilliant at imbuing the most mundane language with sensual and sexual overtones and undertones, and it was partially the way she walked,

the way she looked and the way she sachets. in the way she rolled her eyes and... Too much for the censors. Too much for the censors. She'd inflame male desire, then deflate the men who desired her, and gloried in her power to do both. Aren't you forgetting that you're married?

I'm doing my best. Wow. I know. Risque. Risque. So she was more than willing to... In many of her movies, she played a prostitute or some version of a prostitute.

She was more than happy to claim her sexuality and claim it as a way of asserting power, control, doing what men did to women, only doing them better. A guy what takes his time, I'll go for any time. I'm a fast-moving girl I'd like some slow. Got no use for fancy driving one. I see a young guy arriving in love. But may west find, I'd like to find,

I know again what takes his time. But Mae West was more than just a corseted sex pot with a penchant for wordplay. She was both postmodernist and feminist, avant la Latre. You know, before any of us have even thought about the word or the cultural practice of either feminism or postmodernism, there she was.

And she really did it. She was crescient. I think being transgressive was her modus operandi. Transgressive, funny, smart, sassy, lively, sexy, and genius. Genius, postmodernist, feminist, transgressive. And she got away with all of it. When I'm good, I'm good, I'm because that's my nasal. Okay.

When I'm good, I'm very good. but when I'm bad, I'm better. No. They rest with a cold. Yeah, that's right. Who would qualify no alibi to be the guy what takes his life? So buckle up. This documentary by contributor Linda Shorten is called

When She's Bad, She's Better, the legacy of May West. May West started early. She was born in. 1893 in New York. Her mother, a sometimes corset model, and her father, by some accounts, a mob enforcer. At age seven, she was in amateur shows, by 14 on vaudeville. By 18, she was dancing the shimmy on Broadway. In her 20s, she was writing plays, mainly so that she could star in them. She began in vaudeville as a male impersonator. That is so wonderful. Then she goes on to write a Broadway play called Sex.

And she gives herself a pseudonym, Jane Mast. So she goes from being an impersonator of a male to taking a very phallic name, excuse me, but Mast sort of made me giggle for ten minutes at least. I am Linda Hutchin. I am a retired professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, and I'm in love with parody and irony and satire. Sex was about prostitution. Her next play, The DRAGE, The DRAGE,

was about drag queens and gay subculture, and she wrote it in 1927. The next year, she rewrote the drag, transforming the leading man into an over-sexed heterosexual this time out. She called it Pleasure Man. 1928 was also the year that Wes brought Diamond Lil to Broadway. Lil was to become her signature character, a wise, cracking Scarlet Women of the 1890s, all furs and curves with an insatiable appetite for jewels and men. Yes, that wasn't always rich. No, no, there was a time I didn't know where my next husband was coming from.

So all this is your famous collection, eh? Oh, this is just my summer jewelry. You had to see my winter stuff. I see. You know, it was a toss-up, whether I go in for diamonds or sing in the choir. The choir lost. Then in 1932, May West took her diamond little persona to Hollywood, and renamed her Lady Lou.

Your bath is ready, Miss Lou. You take it, I'm indisposed. By now, West was nearly 40, a fact she managed to keep quiet. But she was anything but quiet when it came to setting her terms with the Paramount Studio Head. She wanted control over scripts, costumes, and a dollar more than whatever he made. She got it all. At a time when the average salary for women, if they worked at all, was $11 a week. May West's salary was $5,000 a week,

the equivalent of roughly $15,000 today. She became one of the richest women in America. And then she, 50 years later, she goes back to playing the great role that she incarnated in her whole life, and that was the male's idea of the sexy blonde, right? And then she added wit. She added her verbal wit. and oh my God that changed everything

Maywest famously said it isn't what I do but how I do it it isn't what I say it's how I say it but it was what she said or as the case may be what she's saying I believe that everyone in life should have a mission making people happy is the height of my ambition

and when I get them happy well they stay in that condition I have a sister All my own I got a lot of what I got I can show you if you're feeling blue Add in the eye roll The hand on the hip, the sashet

The diamonds, the feathers And you get this Here is the key The room is 503 It's not so far too far Come up and see me some time Time But sooner you better

I would characterize her image as someone associated with sex and with power, but I also would characterize her more biographically as a very astute businesswoman and a performer who knew how to make the very best of her assets for decades. I'm Ramona Curry, and I'm the author of a book about the cultural impact. act of Mae West called Too Much of a Good Thing, May West as cultural icon. What are her assets, her intelligence, her managing to be quite loud, and managing to find a niche for herself, which was to be an authoritative figure about topics that usually were either swept under the rug, pushed aside, or laughed about with, I would say,

women as the so-called butt of the joke. I think she turned that up. on its head. She said, I am going to tell you what you need to know about sex. And it's for your good and we're going to enjoy it. And I'm going to make money. Ramona Curry identifies three main chapters in the seven decades of May West career, satire in her movies of the 1930s, parody in her years on stage, radio and TV, and self-parody, especially in the two movies made at the end of her career. Her very first film was in 1932, and she was not the star. She got fourth billing, but she stole the show. And that was called Night After Night, where she was a gangster's mall, who was sexually active, acknowledged that she was being considered bad and relished that, and its

benefits. Goodness, a beautiful time. Goodness, has nothing to do with it, there is. The second film, then her first starring vehicle, was based on Diamond Lill. And there, she was a madam. In subsequent films, she's either somebody's mistress or between men and looking for the next. But she is maybe more the autonomous, really as a prostitute. Lady Lou uses her sexuality for wealth, power, and pleasure. And she's never made to pay a price for it.

She's never punished. She's never condemned. I don't think it could have been done at all if it weren't for the comedy. It would have been seen either as treatises on those subjects, but on the wrong side of the morality, you know, asking for sympathy for prostitutes or homosexuality. But by being performed as comedy, drawing this from Freud, that comedy allows a space, a release,

and travesty and transgression, against the culture and the way a gesture can. And clown can perform certain behaviors and be permitted because it's marked as comedy. I wonder what kind of a woman you really are. Too bad, but I can't get about samples. She's the master of the double entendre. Never met an entendre that she couldn't double.

That's a good way to put it. I think so. In a broader sense, I would say she mastered context. She could understand how a word, and this is where Freud was really, helpful, actually, because the whole idea of Freud about jokes, especially verbal jokes, is redirection. So there's some phrase that you say, and you're going along in one way of thinking, and then it gets redirected in an unexpected way. For example, she goes to a mind reader,

and the mind reader says, I see a man in your life. So what do you expect him to say, oh, tell me more, what's he look like? No, what's May West? say, she says, want only one? So again, redirecting from the idea of, you know, having a romance to, you know, challenging romance and wanting just lots of sex. I want to take you back to Freud. You write about his triadic structure of humor. He basically says that there's a joke teller, and in his construction, that joke teller is male. There's a butt of the joke, frequently female. And then there's the audience, again, usually male. And you write about how he talks about marriage,

being the most common target of what he called cynical humor. And then he sums it up in one very bad joke. A wife is like an umbrella. Sooner or later, one takes a cab. Now, why is that supposed to be a joke? Well, what's an umbrella for? It's keeping the rain off. But, you know, if you can't keep the rain off

enough, you've got to give it up and get into a car. You've got to get inside to be protected. So it's a sexual joke because the implication is, okay, you can get some satisfaction keeping sexual demands at bay from a wife, but an umbrella. But if you really need a good sexual round, you're going to have to go elsewhere. You know, it's a good thing he didn't try to make a living and stand up, I have to say, our pal Freud. So, How does West up Enfreude? What does she do to that triadic structure and that terrible joke? Mae West is in her jokes often herself, the narrator, right?

And I see her as narrating the joke and as making fun of men usually, right? And performing them to some extent for women or anybody else who wants to make fun of men. sometimes upper-class women or stuffy kind of men. But an example, I recall from going to town, there's a kind of jigolo figure who's pretty unscrupulous. And he says, Let me tell you, I am an aristocrat and a backbone of my family. To which May West answers.

Well, your family ought to see a chiropractor. So they're not all sexual by any means. They just are putting down men who are acting pompous and arrogant. So the joke telling in that way is not, as I say, just about I'm sexually active and what are you going to do about it? It's I can see through you and I'm not putting up with it and just pricking their balloons. They're ballooned up egos. Oh, yeah. I think she definitely uses irony as a weapon.

Linda Hutchin. She uses the irony in order to get at the men in particular. and there's no more vicious weapon than humor. Humor deflates better than anything else, and irony is an amazing form of barbed humor. Irony is even better if the butt doesn't get it. We're intellectual opposites. What do you mean?

Well, I'm intellectual and your opposite. Satire often uses parody. That's what's complex about it. Satire is an art form that tries to mock usually a social practice, for lack of a better word. with the aim of bettering it to make it. It has a really not redemptive so much as a desire to change. So satire always has that social betterment angle to it.

And how do you see that at work in what Mae West did? What was she trying to better? I think she was trying to change how men saw women. And that was a bite of her wit. She wanted, I think, to satirize how men treated women, how men saw women as the objects of their sexual interest, not of their women's own sexual interest. And increasingly over time, I think,

she came to parody and satirize the fact that things maybe hadn't changed as much as people thought they had. In her widely celebrated work, Linda Hutchin argues that satire, irony, and especially parody all take a text, a saying, a statement, anything, and place it in a new context. to shake up the foundations of that original text, a characteristic of postmodernism. In the case of May West, the text that she's shaking up is the cliche of the sexy blonde.

She embodies the sexy blonde. She incarnates it quite literally. So you could argue that she's totally complicit. She's playing into that. And then she opens her mouth. Or she moves in a certain way that allows her to just show who has the power. And she's the empowered one. And that is, I think, the really radical thing that she does. Do you mind if I get personal? Go right ahead. I don't mind if you got familiar. You pay particular attention to wordplay and irony.

And you talk about wordplay subverting the authority of language. What do you mean by that? Well, I think you were the one who had the line of there was never an entendre. She couldn't double. That's absolutely true. I mean, anybody who can play with language is taking language being the means of power of any authority. If you can take that means of power and subvert it

as post-colonial writers, as feminist writers, as gay writers, as writers have been doing for centuries, as comics have done, right? I mean, that's how a lot of comedy exists in terms of puns and playfulness like that. If you can subvert language, you have the means to subvert the power structures. Are you trying to show content for this court? No, I'm doing my best to hide it. I wonder where my easy rider's gone. I wonder why my easy ride

if he was here it when the race If not first he'd get a place Camp is another jockey trailing anyone. I'm losing all. That's why I'm doing. Camp is another means of subverting power structures. In her groundbreaking 1964 essay Notes on Camp,

writer Susan Sontag says Camp was adopted by the LGBTQ plus community, especially gay men, as a means to, quote, neutralize moral outrage. Camp, she said, is defined by frivolity, excess, and artifice. May West had her own definition.

It's the kind of comedy where they imitate me. You say that May West is granted this distinction of self-ironizing camp, that she is the one in control. She's totally in control. And I think there's something quite campy about her, the way that Susan Zonag talks about gay culture and campy. It reminded me very much there's a feminist theorist, called Judith Butler, who talks about how we perform gender.

We act as if that being of a man or that being of a woman is actually an internal reality or something that's simply true about us, a fact about us. Actually, it's a phenomenon that's being produced all the time and reproduced all the time. So to say gender is performative is to say that nobody really is a gender from the start. I know it's controversial, but that's my claim. And I remember reading that and thinking May West, May West, because she performs gender and then exaggerates it in much the same way that, I mean, Butler talks a lot about drag queens.

But May West, I mean, that's one of the reasons why she became a model for a lot of drag queens, right? It's the power, it's the exaggeration, it's the, I am going to perform this, but I am performing it, the stress on the eye. We can't do a show without May West and she can't do a show without us either. Ladies and gentlemen, from one high-heeled step beyond, from the Twilight Zone, the return of May West.

The incomparable Charles Pierce. He hated the term drag queen and built himself a male actress. His performances of Hollywood, Dames from Joan Crawford to Carol Channing helped establish the drag queen canon. I've always said that sex is a misdemeanor. The more you miss demeanor you get. Sex is like bridge. If you don't have a good partner, you better have a good hand. They asked me the other day my definition of a perfect lover. A man who could make love to you until four o'clock in the morning and then turn into a pizza. I'm Dr. Pamela Wojig.

I am the author of Guilty Pleasures, Feminist Camp, from May West to Madonna. Sontag described Camp in a number of different ways. She's thinking about it as an emphasis on style over substance, on theatricality, performativity, a kind of aestheticism. She aligns it with gay male taste, and particularly a kind of Oscar Wilde, wit and aestheticism. Sontag credits May West as successful camp. She wrote that even when it reveals self-parody,

May West's work reeks of self-love. May has not a bit of self-loathing or lack of confidence in herself. May is fully convinced that she is the most attractive woman in any room that she is the most sexually desirable. And this is both the May West character in films, and it's also May West, the actress, the screenwriter, the celebrity, that May does not have anything but self-love.

And that's part of her appeal, I think. You took the idea of camp, and please correct me if I'm wrong about this, but were you one of the first to say, look, it's not just a critique available to a gay subculture. It's much more widely available than that. Well, I developed the idea of feminist camp. What I was looking at was if gay camp so often plays with and hinges on images of women, you know, whether it's men performing in women's clothes or gay men's fondness for certain female stars or divas,

it seemed to me to think of that as a one-way street didn't make sense, that the idea that women were just objects of camp and not subjects and not active participants. And so it seemed to me worth asking what is women's relation to camp. And I don't think it's identical to gay male camp, but I think there are similar investments in a kind of gender parity, in a kind of play. with sex and gender roles and a kind of simultaneous, you know, identification and distancing from those roles that happens through camp. Take me then to your idea of it being feminist, in particular, a feminist critique. Well, I think that with someone like May West, there's a way that a sort of feminine masquerade denaturalize that assumed gender identity. And I think that denaturalizing and distancing from that raises questions about it that

I think are feminists and are critical at the same time that they're very playful and that they can revel in those roles. May West herself was asked, and I kind of can't believe she was being interviewed by Playboy in 1971, but she was, and they asked her to define Camp. Can you give me her definition? She said, camp is the kind of comedy that imitates me. And I think in 1971, it's an interesting way to frame it, because on the one hand, it could be taken as camp is the kind of comedy that impersonates me or makes fun of me, right? Because May was very old, and the idea of an older woman being sexual is still problematic culturally, right? So May was a big joke.

But I think what she is possibly getting at is Camp is the kind of comedy that acts like me, that performs gender in the way I perform gender, right? It is fascinating that Playboy is talking to her, but Playboy is really interested in fighting against censorship of sexuality, and May was a really important figure for that. So it's, in a way, not that surprising that she'd be of interest, but it's also a winking joke. relationship to her as an older sexual woman. Playboy wanted May West's thoughts on camp. That same year, 1971, she was invited to speak at UCLA, where the audience wanted to know her thoughts on men. Yeah, Ms. Wes, what do you think about men, in general?

What do I think about them? Yeah. I like all men. In fact, I don't think there's, I don't, there isn't a man that I don't like. Sounds like Will Rogers. I like two types of men, foreign and domestic. How did you discover Carrie Grant? How did I discover Carrie Grant? Well, I was at the studio, Paramount, and I was ready to make my first pictures. She done them wrong, and we were ready to shoot and we didn't have a leading man.

And most of the leading men were on other pictures. So they said, well, we'll have to wait six weeks for this leading man. We'll have to wait 12 weeks for this man and so many weeks for that man. And I said, gee, I said, you haven't got enough men around here. So, well, we settled on, we were going to wait six weeks for a certain man. So as I was walking out of the studio on the line, I happened to look over this way and I see this man coming along and I said I says who is this looks like the best looking thing in Hollywood who is he so they said oh that's Carrie

Grant but we haven't used them in a picture as yet we just use them for test scenes I said well if this guy can talk I'll take him yes let's take another question from the right sight. The question is, what does Ms. West think of women's liberation? Oh, I'm foreign. Miss West, what is your favorite picture of recent times, and what do you think of the industry today as the type of picture it usually produces? Well, I don't care for all, I don't go in for nudity. I don't think it's necessary. And all this sex, it's all right, the freedom of sex, but not on films. That may seem counterintuitive. May West, not going in for nudity.

But it was a deliberate thought-out choice about how she wanted to be portrayed on screen. Pam, you mentioned how her most successful films were set back in the 1890s. She could wear these wild costumes. There was something, too, that she was able to do in these movies. She was always some version of the gold digger. I'm sorry you think more of your diamonds

than you do of your soul. I'm sorry you think more of my soul than you do of my diamonds. The gold digger is a really central figure for feminist camp, because I think feminist camp is often playing with and getting at the economics around female sexuality and the limitations of what women are allowed to do in terms of work and professionalization and some sense of, you know, some kind of prostitution or being a gold digger, being involved in the sort of negotiations of sexuality that happened. with that. I mean, the interesting thing with May West is she's a gold digger, but she's not kept. She's never contained by the man. She's always fully in charge. And that's the kind of tension that I think is where her comedic approach to this comes in. And it's not the melodrama of being a prostitute or a gold digger. It's sort of about manipulating men and joking. And in some ways, making fun of them through that role.

You know, I've been mad about you from the first time I laid eyes on you. Well, you're my whole world. What do you want to do, drive me to a madhouse? No, I'll call you a taxi. With May West, it's about, you know, what they always said was it's not what she says, it's how she says it. And this is why she was such a difficult figure for the censors, because if you read the scripts on the page, they seemed fine, right?

a woman saying, come up and see me, that's a perfectly reasonable statement. But when May says it, she growls, she's rolling her hips, she's rolling her eyes, she's looking at the man, she's enticing. So that the double entendre comes through performance as much as sort of the phrasing. And that's where she was really difficult to censor and control, because she could make anything sound filthy. That's quite a talent. You were wonderful tonight. I'm always wonderful at night. There's also doubling, I think, in the sense that she saw her sexual appeal and used it as a pose and as a joke. But it was also a real source of power. Yeah, I think so. And, you know, there's moments in her films where you get that sense of both those things at exactly the same time.

So, and I'm no one. Angel, she's playing this kind of low-level circus performer, and there's this big build-up to it, you know, where this announcer comes out. With the right kind of encouragement, she'll throw discretion to the winds and her hips to the north, east, south and west. It's the only show on earth where the tickets are made of asbestos. And now inside, Tyra! Tira!

The woman who discovered you don't have to have legs to dance and the most beautiful woman in the world and all this. and Mae West comes out and she just barely shimmies and she's wearing this kind of sexy but ultimately not revealing costume and that's part of the trick too is she doesn't really show you anything and she just kind of growls and winks

and the house of a saint on the level it ain't pain beware of these eyes and then just as she's leaving and they're going crazy the men are hooting and hollering and salivating. And then just as she's walking off stage,

you just hear her mutter. Suckers. Suckers. And it's that thing where she's both being sexual, enjoying her own sexuality, asserting her own sexuality, making it funny,

but also making fun of the men for getting so whooped up about it. 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. May West is right.

She is no angel. She's the cagey, campy, complicated diva of the Depression era who knew exactly who she was and who made sure that everyone else knew it as well. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. Let's see if Toronto advisors know their life insurance providers, who offers whole life insurance with a whole lot of cash value. Beneva. Beniva.

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your income, from everything you've built. Explore online graduate programs at uab.ca.s. step up. I wish you'd forget your principles, Ruby, I must have you. Your golden hair, your fascinating eyes and luring smile and lovely arms, your form divine. Wait a minute. Is this a proposal or you take an inventory? Again, the derision. The derision. Yes. She does this doubling thing where she attracts and knows exactly what she's doing in terms of attracting male attention. And then she turns around and mocks them for it. She's kind of upending the objectification that goes on at the time.

That goes on to this day. To this day. Yeah. Good point. Linda Shorten's documentary is called When she's bad, she's better. The legacy of May West. May West made 10 movies in her first 11 years in Hollywood, but in 1934, Hollywood adopted the Hays Code, a self-censorship guide.

The code and a resurgent Puritanism throughout the United States meant scissor-happy censors began to rob her films of both their innuendo and their audiences. But May West's natural habitat was transgression. And in 1937, she outraged America with an NBC radio parody, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Under a spreading fig tree rests one Mr. Adam, sprawled out lazily in the hot sun. Eve, obviously, is bored beyond endurance as they play a game of cards with a deck of fig leaves.

The girl's going to have a little fun once in a while. There's no future under a fig tree. Eve entices the serpent to grab an apple from the tree of knowledge. Get me a big one. I feel like doing a big apple. Adam takes one bite and finds himself booted out of paradise. Oh, Eve, what have you done? I've just made a little more history, that's all. I'm the first woman to have her own way and a snake will take the wrap for it.

But Eve, we've lost the Garden of Eden. We're just... Eve, it's... It's as if I see you for the first time. You're beautiful. And you fascinate me. Your eyes. Oh, tell me more.

Your lips. Come closer. I want to hold you closer. I want to... You want a what? Eve, what? What was that? That was the original kiss.

One thing that happened on radio, how could she perform? She couldn't perform her toss of the head, her wriggle of the hips, except with her voice. I think if you think the usual story is about how the reason we have difficult life is that women couldn't contain themselves. And so it's blaming women, the story is. It's telling a story that you've got to be careful of sexual women because we'll have no more paradise, no more Eden. So they reenact that in a way, but she's being May West. And so I think what brings it to parody is her image is already known. In the skit, Adam is dull.

And so she is really, she plays up the idea of being a temptress, makes it sound like fun, makes him, Adam sound like he's in desperate need of awakening. She just challenged and turned on its head the idea of blaming women, and she did it on a Sunday evening. She said too much of a good thing can be wonderful. She, in the culture, was too much for a lot of people. NBC not only banned May West from its airwaves, it banned the mere mention of her name.

She wouldn't make another appearance on radio for 12 years. May was undeterred. She went back to the stage and to nightclubs, and by the 60s, she was playing herself in occasional and occasionally cheesy TV appearances. It was decades before she returned to movies. The film, was Myra Breckenridge.

The book that couldn't be written is now the motion picture that couldn't be made. Myra Breckenridge. The movie that couldn't be made was made in 1970. It was written by Gore Vidal and starred Raquel Welch

as a transgender woman. In one scene, West plays a talent agent, be wigged, be furred, and corseted to the nines. She sashes past a long line of studly young men lined up outside her office, all waiting for their turn on her casting couch. Hi, cowboy.

How tall are you without your horse? Well, ma'am, I'm six feet, seven inches. Well, never mind about this, six feet. Let's talk about the seven inches. It's a hoot. I mean, it is outrageous. It's the kind of thing you have to watch with the right people, probably not alone. You need to be able to make comments on it as you go,

and you need somebody who's not just going to be outraged and leave the room. Critics called the movie distasteful, offensive, a sex-changed nightmare, as funny as a child molester. It's now considered one of the worst films of all time, right alongside They Saved Hitler's Brain and Sex Lives of the Potato Men. And then she did it again. In 1978, May West released Sex Tet based on a play she'd written in the 1950s. In the movie, she plays a longtime Hollywood star and beauty queen, about to embark on her sixth marriage.

Her groom is a young Timothy Dalton who'd go on to play James Bond. Stiff upper lip, you know? You've got to start somewhere. Previously discarded husband in the movie include George Everton Hamilton and, inexplicably ringo star. I think it's a wonderful spoof. It's a spoof of herself too. She knows what she incarnated. She also knows that things haven't changed that much. And she can still incarnate that and still be transgressive. But I think the fact that she's an older sexually voracious. I mean, like an 83 year old. She's not 50. She's 83. And our culture doesn't really

sexualize women of that age. Let's face it. And I think that was just, I mean, to me, it was just a eye-opener. I thought, oh, my God, go, go you girl. Some people disagree. I feel like at that point, she's being trotted out as a joke, that the idea of her being sexual at that time is considered ridiculous. And in something like Mara Breckenridge, you know, where she's pitted against Raquel Welch, it's hard to think of May West as sexually desirable in that context. Pam Wojek teaches film studies at the University of Notre Dame. And in sextet, she's given this sort of insane thing of, you know, being in her 80s,

and she's supposed to be married to, you know, this series of men, including Ringo Starr, Timothy Dalton is in there, you know, all these young men. And I don't think we've gotten much better at this. and I think that the idea of a woman of that age being sexual and sexually desirable comes across as only a joke. At best, I think there's a kind of nostalgic appreciation for what she used to be, but I don't think she's seen as being in control of the joke anymore. I think she is the joke. Now that's where the controversy kind of arrives. Ramona Curry is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Illinois.

Some feminist scholars have said, oh, very very. funny, very, as long, you know, up through the 40s, fine. But then, oh, oh, it's so embarrassing. Oh, how could she not see how she looked and how could she behave like that? And I say, so, it's the same act. What's your problem? Because I don't think it's a self-parody in a negative sense that she's embarrassingly unaware of how her age is dissonant to her sexual behavior. I think it's saying, and I can still act like this if I want to, and that the transgression there is to be a postmenopausal sexual woman. And that's a transgression that women sometimes have difficulty accepting. The trick with that is I don't know that May would ever have admitted that she was old.

I think that May is perceiving herself as exactly the same as she always was. And I think that's where potentially the power lies, but I think it's also where she gets rendered, outmoded. By the time Sex Tet was released in 1978, some who'd championed West as a rule model now condemned her as a sad parody of herself, trapped in her Diamond Lill persona. Yet others praised her for embodying the idea that older women have sexual agency. SexTet cost $8 million to make and grossed a paltry 50,000. The reviews were savage. Film critic Rex Reed wrote that the movie was, quote,

a monument of gulish camp, and that West looked, quote, like something they found in the basement of a pyramid. She was 85 years old. Two years later, after suffering a series of strokes, May West died. She'd fallen out of bed. 1980. She died November 22nd, 1980. I'm Scott C. Millie. I'm Scott C. Millie. I'm a special effects makeup artist, and before that I was an undertaker, a funeral director. So when we all got together with her bodyguard, which was her boyfriend, Paul Novak, he was Mr. Universe, I believe in 1955, and he handled all the arrangements. So we knew that it had to be special for her final performance.

He brought a wig, which we styled. I'm not a hairdresser, but one of the other ladies in the funeral home style, their hair in the beehive style, which was her last style. And she wore a white gown, this I remember well, and the cuffs were sequent, and she wore a boa around her neck. And I think it was pink, light, light pink, with sequins going through it.

So she looked like a million bucks. Is there one line of hers that you can think of that best sums are up? I just thought of one. When I'm bad, I'm better. You're good. There's hundreds. Baby, here I am. I'm a girl out of scene.

I can't give you what you want, but you've got to come home with me. I've got some real good loving and I've got some in start. When I get through throwing it on you, you've got to come back for more. Kills and things will come by the dozen, that ain't nothing but drugs all loving. Good-looking thing, livin, light your candle, because, baby, I'm sure how to handle, yes, I am. If May West were doing today what she did in the 30s and 40s, would she be able to get away with it? I hope so. I think so. The sad thing, I suppose, is that she might still be viewed as transgressive, that it's still hard to have women expressing their desire without it being a big deal, without it being somehow problematized as inappropriate or too much.

And we've had lots of people since, you know, but sort of every time it feels like it's new. And I think she should be outmoded by now that it shouldn't be a surprise to have a woman who can enjoy her sexuality and have fun with it without it being somewhat. questioned or demonized? I was trying to decide if May West was somehow marginalized because of being taken off the air. I thought marginal marginalization, it's a common word today to talk about people who transgress. But I don't see her that way. And I see her more as I prefer the term ex-centric. And she's eccentric and in the usual sense of her, but ex-centric.

Because she's off-center. But boy, does she know where the center is? And that's the interesting. I think that maybe the key thing here is positioning oneself on the, not the margin, on the side. Not the sidelines either, the side. But on the side where you can get a clear view of the center and take pot shots at it. What is she now? I think she's odd probably to a lot of people. And surprising in that what? Really? When was that? 1930s, really? People had sex in the 1930s? And yet for people, young people say now, to discover her image, I think it's a historical artifact of interest. And it affirms the potential for challenging gender conventions and restrictions. And it's like her story. It's finding women in history who've done things long before the current people think might

have been possible. I have a tiniest confession. I distinctly loathe the suppression Since I only have one life I want to live it While I've clowned around a lot Well, I've found what hits the spot If I've something good to give

If I want to give it Now those senses say I'm naughty And no dice But I've heard it said What's naughty Can be nice It's not what I say It's the way that I say it

that's all brother that's all it's not what I play but the way that I play it that's all brother that's all now maybe they'd picture me as little snow white Ramona there's one less thing I have to ask you to do can you get me one of your favorite

Maywest lines in her voice I doubt it you'd have to ask Trevor Noah or somebody to do the voices I'm not great. I'm not great with voices. Here's one. Between two evils,

I always pick the one I've never tried before. That's all. It's not what I tell. It's the way that I tell it. That's all, brother, that's all. It's not what I said. But the way that I sell it. That's all, brother, that's all.

Do you have a favorite, May West? line. Hmm. And if you do, can you do it in her voice? You know, ultimately there is just something about the way she manages to say, come up sometime that is so wonderful. Okay, let's hear it. Oh, I am not going to do a Mae West impersonation. Chicken.

I don't want to. I don't, no, no, no, no. She is, she is her own entity. I cannot. We will let May speak for herself. There's never been portray that maiden so sweet but good with the mortgage do and little to eat. But should I call the butcher boy

to bring me some meat? That's all, brother, that's all. There's never been anyone quite like May West ever. Pop culture's original blonde bombshell sex symbol comedian provocateur. I'll never forget. You know one ever does. No one ever does.

And no one ever will. She has the most incredible sort of posthumous effect on culture and on us. Everything from Susan Sontag's definition of camp now to drag to Judith Butler and a redefinition of what it is to perform gender. She lives on. She's unforgettable. She's unforgettable. I believe that everyone in life should have a mission. Making people happy is the height of my ambition.

And when I get them happy, well, they stay in that condition. I have a sister on my own. I got a lot of what I got. And I can show you if you're feeling blue, come up and sing it. You've been listening to When She's Bad, She's Better, the legacy of May West. Thank you to Dr. Linda Hutchin, Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Dr. Ramona Curry, Associate Professor Emerita of English at the University of Illinois. Dr. Pamela Wojek, Professor of Film Studies at the University of Notre Dame,

and Scotty Miller, makeup artist and retired undertaker. This episode was produced by Linda Shorten. because I'm free and you appeal to me. Special thanks to Peter Brown for his editing help. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Technical production, Danielle Duval, Gary Francis, Sam McNulty, with special thanks to Corey Haberstock in Edmonton.

This senior producer is Nicola Luxchich. The executive producer of ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayad. The room is five or three. It's not so... Come up and see me some time. It's soon a better. For more CBC podcasts, go to CBC.