FOR SOME PEOPLE, a prison sentence is a tragedy. For Mae West, it was a career opportunity. Tried for obscenity in 1927 following the production of her play, Sex —largely on the basis of its title —West refused to accept a fine and insisted on serving a ten-day prison sentence. The 33-year-old playwright and vaudeville star thought she might find inspiration on the inside. “I was always fascinated by prisons and mental institutions,” she told biographer Charlotte Chandler years later. “I wasn’t going to be deprived of that experience. I saw those as ten very valuable days, a kind of working vacation.”
On 20 April, she was loaded into a ‘Black Maria’ prison van and taken to Welfare (now Roosevelt) Island to serve her sentence. Ordered to strip, West quipped, “I thought this was a respectable place!”, and claimed that the guards kept her naked for longer than was strictly necessary in order to get a look at her famed curves. As she dressed again, she insisted on keeping her own silk undies. She was allergic to prison undergarments, she claimed, and couldn’t possibly subject her delicate skin to such coarse clothing. The warden and guards, awed by her celebrity, acquiesced. People usually ended up giving West what she wanted.
We know all this because West told reporters about it on daily phone-calls from jail, and wrote an article about her experience soon after her release. “I got a million dollars’ worth of publicity,” she said of her prison term. “I never imagined the kind of promotion and press I’d get.”
Such media savvy became a hallmark of the Hollywood career that West’s new notoriety would soon help to launch. The future superstar knew the value of every column inch, and made herself the subject of as many as possible. When she wasn’t in the papers to discuss her work or a genuine scandal rocking her career, she’d fabricate fluff to get attention. West’s image was overtly sexual at a time when women were still supposed to be ashamed of any entanglement outside marriage, and she was in complete control of her career at a time when women were supposed to let a husband keep them. She blazed a trail for the badly behaved, self-directed women who followed her, from Marilyn Monroe (who West once mused could play her in a biopic) to the Kardashians, and changed the template for who could become a Hollywood icon.
DESPITE WEST’S IMPRISONMENT, that 1927 trial had been an embarrassment for the authorities. Police witnesses were unable to find a single clearly obscene word in her play and struggled to explain to the jury that it was the way she said things that made them offensive. When she made so much hay from her jail time, it seemed as though she’d gotten another one over on her prosecutors.
But West knew that her career was reaching a turning point. Post-Sex, plays like 1927’s The Drag —which included gay characters and a drag ball and was banned from Broadway —and The Constant Sinner —with themes of interracial sex —would face even more determined condemnation. 1928’s Pleasure Man was threatened with prosecution so fast that it only ran for two-and-a-half performances. West found success with her play Diamond Lil later that year, a huge commercial hit despite hostile reviews and circling authorities, but she was tiring of the constant threats. Giving up on performance, however, was never an option.