Weekend, July 9-10, 2022 – THE SHOW “SEX” PLAYED BROADWAY LONG BEFORE IT WAS RAIDED.

By admin

UPDATE

Finally, at 2 p.m. on Friday, 4 days after the sidewalk was fenced off,( probably with the nudging by our local politicians who were contacted) a pathway was established.

FROM THE ARCHIVES

WEEKEND,  JULY 9-10,  2022



THE  723rd   EDITION

Mae West and Sex Updated

Stephen Blank

I thought it would be interesting to write an RIHS essay about Mae West’s Broadway play, Sex, the play that led to her arrest and brief incarceration in our island’s jail. What research revealed was a more interesting tale. Sit back in your seat and enjoy the show.
 
Here’s what we knew. On February 9, 1927, Mae West was charged with obscenity for a play she had written and was starring in. The play was called Sex.  Cops closed it down and hauled in Mae, who wound up here in our jail.
 
The story turns out to be much more than that. Mae is not the only player in this drama-comedy and Sex is not the main subject.

First, West wasn’t busted after just a few performances. The play had been poorly reviewed. But bad press had not kept audiences away and it had been open for more than a year.
 
The New York Times considered it to be a “crude and inept play, cheaply produced and poorly acted” while Billboard condemned it as “the cheapest most vulgar low show to have dared to open in New York this year.” In a 1925–26 New York theater season with new plays by O’Neill (The Great God Brown), O’Casey (Juno and the Paycock), and Coward (Hay Fever), critics agreed that Sex was the rock bottom.
 
Nonetheless, for more than a year, Sex drew full houses, playing 375 performances. The play outlasted nearly all the competition and was the only play on Broadway to stay open through the summer 1926 season into the following year. Variety christened its heroine, a Montreal lady of the evening with a fondness for sailors, “the Babe Ruth of stage prosties.” Thousands (some say 325,000!) people had already been in the audience, including members of the police department and their wives, judges of the criminal courts, and seven members of the district attorney’s staff before the New York Police Department decided it was obscene. 
 
Mae explained, “When you tell people a play is naughty, they rush to see it. I can’t help that, can I? People thought it vulgar, ridiculous, or funny, or a perfectly terrible play, laughed—and sent their friends to see the show”. The New York Times explained in 1928 that “It became the fad in not a few quarters to see ‘Sex’ two or three times, and some of our best people were caught entering or leaving Daly’s Sixty-third Street Theatre.”
 
Newspapers were reluctant to advertise the play. No problem, Mae said, and plastered the town with posters. “When the newspapers refused my advertisin’, they gave me headlines about my havin’ my nerve producin’ such a play,” West said in a March 1934, interview with Movie Classic magazine. “I couldn’t’ve bought that space for any amount of money. That sent my prices up and packed ‘em in.

 

 1926 Show Posters advertising Sex

Second, Sex wasn’t the only play that was closed that night. Three curtains were rung down and 40 actors and actresses, managers and producers were hauled off by the police to the 54th Street night court on charges of participation in immoral productions – Sex and also The Virgin Man and The Captive. All had been denounced as “dirt plays” by the city’s moral guardians. Mae wasn’t the only top name arrested: “The star turns of the late-night show at 54th Street were the respectable Helen Menken, playing a lesbian in The Captive, and the most unrespectable Mae West, writer and star of Sex.”

Sunday News front page, February 10, 1927

The raids didn’t just happen. The struggle between morals reformers and theater owners had boiled up in the past year. In the 1925-26 Broadway season, an unusually large number of plays had treated sexual issues. The French writer, Edouard Bourdet’s The Captive, starring the glamorous Helen Menken, dealt with a lesbian love affair. The Shanghai Gesture focused on the travails of Mother Goddam, a corrupt Chinese madame; Lulu Belle presented the story of a mulatto hooker who seduces everyone she meets, and, of course, Sex. 
 
Unlike Sex, The Captive had been praised by critics: “Bourdet has wrought a play of gigantic proportions, of compassion and candor, and, above all, of terrific dramatic effect… From the moment that the sullen mystery is invoked until it lands its ultimate smash, the play proceeds with adroit balance and cunning. … Adapted sensitively by Arthur Hornblow, Jr. … The movement is intense, swift and perpetually provocative.” —John Anderson in the New York Evening Post (For movie fans, Basil Rathbone was the male lead of The Captive.)
 

Helen Menken and Basil Rathbone photo by Vandamm

Tension heightened when West’s second play, The Drag, opened in Bridgeport. Its plot involved a young woman married to a gay man, with lots of female eroticism and what, for the time, was a sympathetic view of gay men. West wanted to bring it to Broadway – and reformers were determined to keep it away.
 
All of this came to a head in February. The flamboyant mayor of New York, Jimmy Walker – no friend of the reformers – had left town with a girlfriend on a holiday in Florida. His deputy, Joseph V McKee, was in charge. McKee, a devout Catholic whose nickname was “Holy Joe”, launched the raids. The reformers didn’t stop with these three plays. On February 26, several burlesque theaters were raided, accusing entertainers of giving indecent performances.
 
It’s interesting that both The Captive and Sex had been acquitted of immorality by the Citizens’ Play Jury which was sponsored by the NYC DA. The DA had pledged acceptance of their verdicts, prior to the drive against immoral shows. This pledge was ignored in February.
 
The raids sheltered under New York State’s existing anti-obscenity statute which was a broad umbrella but lacked teeth since actions which would “tend to the corruption of the morals of youth or others” was charged only as a misdemeanor. In March 1927, reformers surprisingly won the support of Governor Al Smith to pass the Wales Padlock Bill, which allowed the DA to padlock a theater if it produced an “indecent” production featuring “sex degeneracy” or “sex perversion”, and to prosecute everyone associated with such a production.  The Padlock law remained in force until 1967.

Mae West in Sex, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/sep/29/sex-play-mae-west-new-york

Like Sex, The Captive had been a major feature on Broadway for months. But it stayed closed. As one paper reported, “The leading lady, the manager and director, the stage director, another actress, and one elderly actor walked out of the limelight today among the central figures in the police raided public censored play, ‘The Captive,’ promising they would no longer appear in the play or try to put it on again in New York. The withdrawal of Gilbert Miller as manager, George Mondolf, Jr., as stage director, and Helen Menken, Winifred Fraser and Arthur Lewis meant the closing down of the show at the theater where it has been a big box office drawing card for several months. These members agreed not to appear again in their roles under any management… The closing of ‘The Captive’ was interpreted as the first victory of the city authorities in their moral crusade along Broadway.”
 
Like the others, Sex stayed closed. But, West, far from being shamed, knew she had an opportunity on her hands. So, when given the option to close Sex and have all charges dropped, she declined. She knew that in showbiz, crime paid. The grand jury’s claim that her “obscene, indecent, immoral, and impure drama” would tend to “the corruption of the morals of youth” was better than any rave review.
 
At West’s trial, “12 stout citizens, all male, made up the jury, and the chief prosecution witness, Sergeant Patrick Keneally of the Midtown vice squad, began reading out lines from the play in a thick Irish brogue. Unable to find actual profanities in the text, the prosecution alleged that the offence was in the way Mae West moved on the stage, and the hapless sergeant was requested to demonstrate this too. He declined, prosecution counsel explaining primly that ‘everyone in the police force is not a dancer’. ‘Nor an actor,’ retorted the defence.”

Mae West and Barry O’Neill, two of the principal actors of “Sex,” in the courtroom. Bettmann

West played her conviction and 10-day jail sentence (she was released two days early on good behavior) into an experience that would create Mae West, the social critic, satiriser of the age-old battle of the sexes and advocate of the primacy of the surviving woman. Even bedecked with gems, as Diamond Lil, she remained a model for all those who felt that her sassy rebellion against conventional morality was a precious gift in a prudish, harsh world, which soon plunged into the Depression.

Mae West presents Warden Schleth with a $1,000 check for the prison’s new “Mae West Memorial Library.” https://1927-the-diary-of-myles-thomas.espn.com/sex-in-the-city-21ffa319ba1b#.ky9kadani

Mae’s last words: “’Some of the papers called my earlier plays garbage, but that sort of garbage was what my patrons wanted and I gave it to them,” West told The New York Times in 1928. “And, besides, Ibsen’s ‘Ghosts’ and ‘Sappho’ were called garbage and worse names than that when they were produced, and look at them now. ‘Ghosts’ is a classic, and maybe ten years from now they’ll want to see ‘Sex’ again and call it a classic ”

Thanks for reading.

Stephen Blank
RIHS
June 15, 2022

WEEKEND PHOTO

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rooseveltislandhistory@gmail.com

FRIDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY

QUILT MADE BY RUTHIE STEVENS FOR HER SON’S CLASSROOM IN 1978,
AT THE R.I. DAY NURSERY

Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS
Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website
Edited by Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c)

SOURCES

STEPHEN BLANK

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-01-10-ca-1343-story.html
Rachel Shteir, Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show (2004)
https://1927-the-diary-of-myles-thomas.espn.com/sex-in-the-city-21ffa319ba1b#.ky9kadani
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/sep/29/sex-play-mae-west-new-york
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2005/sep/16/1
https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-mae-wests-play-sex-scandalized-broadwayand-landed-her-in-jail
https://1927-the-diary-of-myles-thomas.espn.com/sex-in-the-city-21ffa319ba1b#.ky9kadani
New York Times, April 22, 1928

 GRANTS 

CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD

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