Decoder Ring16 Aug 2022

The “Sex” Scandal That Made Mae West

In the early 1930s, Mae West’s dirty talk and hip swiveling walk made her one of the biggest movie stars in America. But before West hit the big-screen, she was prosecuted for staging not one, but two scandalous plays. In this episode, we look at how West honed her persona when she was under the bright lights of Broadway and the flashbulbs of the tabloids — and briefly behind bars. More than a century later, her career arc offers a blueprint on how to survive a scandal…and maybe even come out ahead.

This episode relied heavily on a lot of archival material and innumerable books: When I’m Bad, I’m Better: Mae West, Sex and American Entertainment by Marybeth Hamilton; When Brooklyn was Queer by Hugh Ryan; Lillian Schlissel’s introduction to Three Plays by Mae West, Mae West: a biography by George Eells and Stanley Musgrove; Mae West: An Icon in Black and White by Jill Watts; Becoming May West by Emily Wortis Leider; Gay New York by George Chauncey; Mae West, She Who Laughs Last, by June Sochen: Goodness Has Nothing to Do with It by Mae West; and Linda Ann Losciavo’s play “Courting Mae West” and her blog, which you can find at Maewest.blogspot.com.

This episode of Decoder Ring was written by Willa Paskin. It was produced by Willa Paskin and Katie Shepherd. Derek John is Sr. Supervising Producer of Narrative Podcasts. Merritt Jacob is our Technical Director. Thank you to Benjamin Frisch for this topic.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, email us at DecoderRing@slate.com

If you love the show and want to support us, consider joining Slate Plus. With Slate Plus you get ad-free podcasts, bonus episodes, and total access to all of Slate’s journalism.

Need to set up your Slate Plus feed? If you subscribed through Slate.com, check out our FAQ at slate.com/podcastfaqs for easy instructions. Members subscribed via Apple Podcasts get automatic access—no setup required.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(154)

Preview: Decoder Rings Back | Duck, Duck, Jeep

Earlier this year we debuted Decoder Rings Back, our new feature exclusively for Decoder Ring Plus subscribers. In each installment, Willa gets a listener on the phone and tries her best to answer the...

27 Mai 10min

No Pulp: The Killing of the Florida Orange

Like the palm tree, the Everglades, Disney World, and the “Florida Man,” the orange is a classic symbol of the Sunshine State. But maybe not for much longer. Production has declined to catastrophic le...

20 Mai 41min

Mailbag: Spooky Strings, Phone Menu Options, and Eye Rolls

We are lucky to get fantastic questions from our listeners here at Decoder Ring, and in this episode, we’re going to open up our mailbag to answer three of them. What are the origins of an eerie horro...

6 Mai 48min

How to Make Dollars Make Sense

Money is everywhere. Money influences just about everything. We think about money all the time. But how much do we really know about it? In this episode of Decoder Ring, we explore the obscure histori...

22 Apr 34min

One Year: 1995 | Hitting the Spot

Last week we aired an episode about lonelygirl15, one of the first proper YouTube stars, and perhaps the most famous example of playing around with the boundaries of fiction and truth on the internet....

17 Apr 57min

Who Was Lonelygirl15?

In the summer of 2006, a teenage girl began posting video diaries to a then-new site called YouTube under the handle lonelygirl15. Within weeks she was a phenomenon—even though no one knew the truth o...

8 Apr 58min

The Johnlock Conspiracy (Encore)

For over a century, fans of Sherlock Holmes have been analyzing, debating, and creating new texts with Arthur Conan Doyle’s characters. But when a fan theory emerged about the BBC TV show Sherlock tha...

25 Mar 53min

Was "Eyes Wide Shut" a Warning?

When Eyes Wide Shut opened in the summer of 1999, it was widely considered a disappointment. This final film from legendary director Stanley Kubrick had been sold as an erotic thriller, and potentiall...

11 Mar 46min