Mae West.

She was not a smoker or a drinker.

When W.C. Fields called her his little broodmare, she almost hit him.

In April 1927, she was convicted of producing an immoral play, the title of which was Sex. She was sentenced to ten days in jail on Welfare Island, but was given one day off for good behavior.

She appeared with George Raft in both her first film Night After Night 1932 and her last film Sextette 1977.

Mae West died two days before her Night After Night and Sextette co-star George Raft.

Playing opposite Ed Wynn in Arthur Hammerstein’s Sometime, with music by Rudolf Friml, she introduced the shimmy to the Broadway stage in 1918. The dance requires hardly any movement of the feet but continuous movement of the shoulders, torso and pelvis. She had seen the dance at black cafés in Chicago.

Although critics thought that she and W.C. Fields worked well together on camera in My Little Chickadee 1940, off-screen they couldn’t stand each other.

Critic George Jean Nathan once called her The Statue of Libido.

She had a double thyroid. Her doctor wanted her to have one of her thyroids surgically removed, but she refused as the double thyroid was not affecting her health.

Her frank, sexual innuendo-laced play Sex opened at Daly’s 63rd Street Theatre on April 26, 1926. That theatre had been built twelve years earlier by two Christian societies that had intended it for showing biblical films and lectures.

She was named #15 Actress on The American Film Institute’s 50 Greatest Screen Legends.

She made her Broadway debut on September 22, 1911, at the New York Folies Bergère, co-owned by Jesse L. Lasky. Twenty-one years later, West signed with Paramount Pictures, which was co-founded by Lasky.

Her father built a stage for her in the basement of their house in Brooklyn.

She took morning enemas, which she claimed made her skin like silk and left her smelling sweet at both ends. On the set of her last film Sextette 1977, co-star Tony Curtis said she was given an enema after being made up, around 11:00 in the morning, as the last step of her preparations.

She always wrote her own plays and also the script for her first film. She published two novels, wrote the lyrics for several songs composed by Ralph Rainger for her film She Done Him Wrong 1933 and, in her spare time, did sketches and material for other performers.

Former Beatle Ringo Starr appeared with West in Sextette 1977. He was unpleasantly surprised at first at all the attention given her on the set, but came to admire West during the shoot and praised her afterwards.

She was banned from NBC Radio after a guest appearance in 1937 with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy that was loaded with flirtatious dialogue and double-entendres. She returned to the network as a guest on The Perry Como Show in 1949.

Ravenswood Apartments, West’s longtime residence on Rossmore Avenue, is shown in Hollywood Mouth 3 2018. Others who resided in Ravenswood over the years were Alice Faye, Clark Gable, Ida Lupino, Hedda Hopper, Judy Garland, Ethel Merman, and crime writer James Ellroy. West also owned a beachfront house at 514 Palisades Beach Road in Santa Monica.

She was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1560 Vine Street in Hollywood, California on February 8, 1960.

She turned down a role in Roustabout 1964, which eventually went to Barbara Stanwyck.

The US Congress list of highest salaries for 1936 published on January 7, 1937 had her as the highest Hollywood earner with £96,166 GBP ahead of Marlene Dietrich and Bing Crosby.

Sources are divided as to whether she was born in 1887, 1888, 1892 or 1893. Most reputable sources list 1892.

She was considered for the role of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard 1950 but Gloria Swanson was cast instead.

She died of natural causes after a mild stroke three months prior that impaired her speech. She also had diabetes in her last 15 years.

She has appeared in one film that has been selected for the National Film Registry: She Done Him Wrong 1933.

She is mentioned in Cole Porter’s song Anything Goes from his musical of the same name.

There is a photo in fundamentalist preacher Billy Sunday’s autobiography circa 1932 of him and West pouring out a bottle of beer into the river.

She was the sister of singer Beverly Arden.

The comedy entitled Sex she wrote in 1926 revived off Broadway in New York.

She was born Mary Jane West in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. Her father, John Patrick Jack West, was a featherweight prizefighter called Battling Jack West, and later a stable master; he was of English and Irish descent. Her mother, Matilda Decker Doelger, was an immigrant from Germany.

She had Jewish ancestry through her maternal side.

She attended and graduated from Brooklyn’s Erasmus Hall High School in 1911, as did silent film star Norma Talmadge.

During World War II, US Navy and Army pilots and crewmen in the Pacific named their inflatable life vests after her because of her well-endowed attributes. The term Mae West for a lifejacket continues to this day.

Her first starring role was in She Done Him Wrong, for which she wrote both the story and dialogue, while her screen debut had been in Night After Night with George Raft.

She was the eldest of three children of John Patrick West and Matilda Delker Doelger. A baby girl died before Mae was born, and a girl and a boy were born after.

On January 25, 1948, she appeared in the stage revue Diamond Lil with British actress Noele Gordon in Manchester and the Prince of Wales in London, where it was a box-office smash.

Guido Deiro claims that West married his father, Guido Deiro, in 1914 under an assumed name, Catherine Mae Belle West, and on the condition of secrecy. West filed for divorce from Deiro on the grounds of adultery on July 14, 1920. The divorce was granted on November 9, 1920.

She made her first professional appearances at Neir’s Tavern in Woodhaven, Queens, New York, which opened in 1829 and is still extant.