School of Humans.
So I'm thirty two and I'm not a star. It's okay, guys, I've accepted it. But I've tried various things over the years. You know, I tried to be a rock star, a pop star. I've had a couple podcasts, I do stand up comedy, I post reels and TikTok.
Singing humiliating songs and bringing shame to my family's name.
You know, I've done a lot in my quest to become the most famous person who have ever existed. It's not a noble quest, but a combination of mental illness and American individualism has led me down this path. All the same, if you're like me, when you reached thirty two and looked at your efforts, you might have been like, well, maybe it's not going to happen for me, Maybe I don't have star power factor. You might have gone to the Internet and asked your search engine questions, like at
what age did this famous person make it? Who are some stars who made it later in life. There's two people who give me hope. The first, of course, is Jesus Christ. Yeah, Jesus was pretty obscure until he turned thirty three, and now He's one of the most famous guys out there. Another person is the movie star May West. She didn't make a big splash until she was just like me thirty two, and she made it in the
same way that Jesus did with sex appeal. Oh no, am, I about to lose all my Christian listeners with that comparison. But also, if you're a Christian and you listen to this podcast, good for you.
You're very open minded.
I'm just saying how Jesus was posing on the crucifix, he looked a bit spicy. May West was also very spicy, and what she did was right and star in a Broadway production with the simple title that got right to the point sex and in part because of that, she was launched from small time notoriety to big ass notoriety. So let's see what tips and tricks she has so that all of us can do the same thing and make it at the age of thirty two.
Cue the theme song. This is American filth. I'm Gabby Watts.
Every week I tell you a filthy story from American history.
This week's episode sex do pe pe doy do boo bity do boop.
Pity doo Unfortunately, in my research I found I am already far behind May West because she is funnier and wiser than me. She also just oos sexuality and confidence and bad bitchery. And I want to say, I'm not into celebrity worship, but I can do some celebrity respect. And here are some of the funniest things.
She said.
A hard man is good to find. Too much of a good thing can be wonderful. When I'm good, I'm very good. But when I'm bad, I'm better. Love thy neighbor. And if he happens to be tall, debonair and devastating, it will be that much easier. Personally, I like two types of men, domestic and foreign.
Is that a gun in your pocket? Or are you just happy to see me? Pew pew.
Love conquers all things except poverty and toothache.
Wow. Pretty good.
And I think it's fair to say that a West was an American icon of the stage and then the screen.
She was a bleach.
Blonde bombshell whose career was characterized by sexual innuendo, comedic irony, being provocative and causing chaos, or, as the censors would think so, inappropriate and ruining the youths.
She was an.
Actress, dancer, singer, writer who started as an obsolete actress in the theater world, but then went on to be a big star in the movies and yas. She was considered a sex symbol, but before all of that, she was a child. You perverts, and that is something I can relate to with May West, I too was once a child. May was born in eighteen ninety three and group in Brooklyn, New York. Have you heard of this place?
And her life in showbiz started early. She was a wee babe of five when she did her first performance at her church, and then at seven she started doing talent shows, amateur plays, and at fourteen she entered the world of vaudeville. How did people see vaudeville at the time, Well, it wasn't one of the high arts. It featured review shows mixing comedy and song and dance. It could be provocative, raunchy, sexy, depending on the show. On the other hand, Broadway was
considered the legitimate stage. May got a few opportunities on Broadway early on, but she didn't get enough work to sustain her, so she hit the touring vaudeville circuit. She toured around the country singing and dancing in vaudeville shows through nineteen seventeen, when she was about twenty four. She had done so much performing by that point she even had a bit where she would wear men's clothing as a male impersonator. When she got back to New York,
it seemed that things might be looking up. In nineteen eighteen, she got cast in a high profile review show called Sometimes, and then in nineteen twenty two she had a successful double act with this pianist Harry Richmond that hit the premiere vaudeville stages, but she still wasn't back on Broadway, and then the pianist Harry Richmond dumped her ass to team up with a more notable actress.
Poor May, What's she gonna do well? At that point, she was getting desperate.
In her autobiography, she sort of skips over what happened between nineteen twenty two and nineteen twenty six.
She's like, if I don't mention it, no one will know.
But historians, those snaky historians, they discovered what happened to me. She had descended from the vaudeville stage to burlesque. Oh no, oh, the shame see, burlesque was like Vaudeville.
But more lude and more nude.
And a humiliating step backwards for any self respecting performer. And see, her family was already divided on her career. Her mom loved everything she did, go Mom, but her dad's side of the family they seemed to disapprove of her acts.
And I was just doing.
Vaudeville because in the vaudeville shows even there, May was doing crazy stuff like this nude dance move called the shimmy. And now she was doing burlesque, and not just that, she was working with the Mutual Burlesque Wheel, which was notorious for having the ludist of lude acts. So yes, burlesque could be seen as a step backwards, but honestly, it wasn't that far off from what May was doing before.
And it seems that she took ownership of this provocative material and ran with it, because what she did next was write her own play under her pen name Jane Mast and through some dubious financial backing aka people think she found herself a sugar daddy who has given her money, she was able to rent a Broadway theater, hire director and put on her own production where she would star as the main character, Margie Lamont, and she named the play sex.
And what was this show about? A sex worker?
Of course, Margie Lamont romps from Montreal to Trinidad to the suburbs of New York, going on various adventures and sex capades in the pursuit of money. Yeah, the plot, it's convoluted. It doesn't always make sense. It's a long, unwieldy story filled with lowbrow sexual innuendo and la else. For example, in one scene, one of Margie's customers is this dude named Lieutenant Greg, and he says, I've got something for you, and then Margie's like, well, come on and let me see it.
And Greg's like, you'll get it, you'll get it.
I don't mind telling you. I had an awful time saving it for you. Why all the women were fighting for it. And then Margie's like, well it better be good, and then Greg's like it's good, alright, It's the best you could get, but you got to be very careful not to bend it. Oh he he haha. Doesn't it sound like they're talking about his waner? But no, joke's on you. The gift that Lieutenant Greg got Margie was not his big old dong. No, it was an ostrich feather.
So May West opened the show in nineteen twenty six. It's during prohibition when the government was like, te Prince is so important, let's be teetotal ers. And you had all these activists, you know, men and women, being like, we need to keep the old values of the Victorian era when we were repressed and policing poor people's behavior to make sure they didn't get any bright ideas and have fun. And we got a censor provocative art so that people don't think that kind of stuff is okay.
And censorship had reached the arts. For example, a few years earlier, New York State created the New York State Motion Picture Commission, which had to approve movies before they were released. They could demand cuts and other changes to the films if they deemed them inappropriate. And that was before people were even talking in the movies. And commissions like that had popped up all across the country because lots of folks were concerned with the devilry in Hollywood
with their loose morals. But of course, as we all know, while there is prohibition, there was of course the backlash to it where you had flappers, speakeasies and provocateurs like May West. Sex premiered on April twenty six at the DALYs sixty third Street Theater. And a fun fact about that theater was the organization that financed the final construction of that building was going to use it to host religious lectures and show biblical films, and then after that
it was a children's theater. But then by nineteen twenty six it was time for sex, and wow, wee did the critics freaking hate sex. The critical rage against the show was almost universal. Almost every critic was like, this show is a pile of garbage that will ruin the morals of the youths literally. One review said it was garbage. The New York Daily Mirror had the headline sex an offensive play, monster atrocity plucked from garbage can destined to sewer.
The New York Times said it was a crude and inept play, cheaply produced and poorly acted, and Billboard said it was the cheapest, most vulgar low show to have dared to.
Open in New York this year.
One of the most positive reviews was from the New York Herald Tribune, but it was still hating on the play. It said, never in a long experience of theater going have we met with such a set of characters so depraved. All the barriers of conventional word and act that the last few seasons of the theater have shown us were swept away, and we were shown not sex, but lust, stark naked lust. But not only did the reviewers think the show was bad, some of them were like, this
show should be illegal. Call the police on this play, like in that article that called the show garbage. The New York Daily Mirror reviewer went even further. It said, this production is not for the police. It comes rather in the province of our health department. It is a sore spot in the midst of our fair.
City that needs disinfecting.
Not only did the haters dislike sex because it was dealing with vulgar subject matter, but also the main character, Margie. She was a woman, and she had sexual agency, made her own decisions and was confident that must have been super awful for all those male reviewers to see. And may west just her whole vibe was offensive to her critics. One police officer who saw the play said that Wes moved her buttocks in other parts of her body in such a way as to suggest an act of intercourse.
Oh god. So yeah.
Critically the show was a bomb, But in showbiz we all know there's no such thing as a bad review, because Sex ended up being one of the most successful plays of the nineteen twenty six Broadway season, with an almost sold out run through nineteen twenty seven. Those bad reviews just drummed up more attention and New Yorkers were like, I gotta go see what the deal is with this crazy show. So when we look back at the nineteen twenties, we might think that this show seems revolutionary, but nothing
happens in a vacuum, and this show wasn't alone. The same time that Sex was out, there were several other Broadway shows that had characters who were sex workers. For example, two of those shows were called The Shanghai Gesture and Lulu Bell, and those shows not only did they portray sex workers, but also interracial sex and marriage.
And it seemed there were.
So many of these shows going on at the time, but they got their own genre on Broadway. They were called sex plays, and as the censors and the temperance activists circled. Many people on Broadway were also not thrilled about these shows. But the thing is, while everyone was in a tizzy about sex, May West was already writing a new show, and it was going to induce people into an even bigger tizzy. The show was called The
Drag and it was a comedy drama featuring homosexuals. Be right back after these soothing advertisements, so May West play The Drag was about a guy named Rally. Then Raleigh is a homosexual, but unfortunately for him, his dad is a prominent judge who likes to use his power to persecute gay people. And then Raley is married to a woman named Claire, and Claire's dad is a therapist who does conversion therapy.
What a safe space.
Claire is unhappy because Raleigh has no sexual interest in her. And then in act too, Raleigh makes advances on one of his employees, Alan, but Alan is like you, no thanks, And then Alan is like, actually, I'm attracted to your wife though, and then Claire seems to be kind of into him anyway. The third act features a big ball where there are all these men in drag and a jazz band on stage. It's a big old party and
at some point Ralli gets shot and dies. The next morning, his dad, the homophobic judge, is trying to figure out who killed his son. They think it's Alan, but then a former lover of Rolly confesses.
Claire's dad.
The conversion therapist is like, hey, judge, let's be nice. Remember homosexuality is a disease and let me try to fix it.
The judge is like, okay, fine.
I'll say it's a suicide, but alsough discussing homosexuals. I don't want people to know my family was associated with such behavior. And then the gay lover goes off with Claire's dad to get cured of his homosexuality. So looking back at this play is a bit confusing, you know. On the one hand, the show was revolutionary. May West had been around drag before. Remember she had been a male impersonator at one point in her life, and being in vaudeville in the theater, she had been around a
lot of gay men. I'm sorry, I'm not stereotyping. The gays were just there in the theater. And during the run of Sex One night, she invited some of her gay colleagues to the show, and then the ones who showed up. She said, Hey, come audition for my new play. We're having open auditions at the gay bar. And now that was the thing that was really revolutionary. This was unheard of of having gay characters but then also having
them played by gay men. The Actors' Union had forbidden gay men from having speaking lines in productions, so this was huge. So yes, big ups to May West. But at the same time, her opinions on homosexuals were a bit more nuanced and changed over the course of her career. One reading of the message of The Drag is that the reason Rolly's lover wasn't convicted of murder was because the doctor said he was going.
To fix him.
Aka, homosexuality is a disease, and therefore you can't penalize gay people because they are sick. And may at one point was like, yeah, I didn't read Freud because it was too boring, but I agree that homosexuality is a
mental illness. In her autobiography that was published in nineteen fifty nine, she said that homosexuality was a danger to the entire social system of Western civilization, but then later in her life in the nineteen sixties and seventies, she was like, actually, I've just really been ahead of my time the whole time, Like, yeah, I am a gay pioneer for sure. In an interview, she said I glorified them to a certain extent and treated them very sympathetically.
So in January nineteen twenty seven, May West and her cast of gays started running previews of The Drag in Connecticut and New Jersey. These were widely publicized because it was so scandalous again to have homosexuals having speaking lines in a show, and also it's about homosexuality, and the reviews were also pretty bad, but may was undeterred. She was like, these audiences are too childlike to face, like grown ups, the problem of homosexuals. But these previews that
ran over two weeks pretty successful. May West made bank about thirty thousand dollars, and she was like, I think we are ready to bring the show to Broadway. So while sex riled some feathers, the Drag made those feathers fall the fuck off. The purveyors of Broadway were pissed. They were like, don't you dare bring that filth to the New York stage. One Broadway producer said that it was the worst possible play i've ever heard of, contemplating
an invasion of New York. And the reason the theater people didn't want May West to do this production in New York was because they knew if she put homosexuality on Broadway, then Broadway was going to be under even more scrutiny and they would all get fucked over. And
they had reasons to be scared. Their artistic agency was at stake because, in early nineteen twenty seven, the New York City Assembly introduced a bill that would put the theaters under the control of the same commission that censored movies, the New York Board of Motion Picture Censorship, remember that. And the theater people were trying to propose an alternative.
They're like, instead of having the theater under the movie people's control, how about instead we create our own regulatory board called the Theater Supervisory Board, and then we review all the scripts to make sure none of these nasty May West type shows reached the stage. But may West was like, I'm doing whatever the fuck I want, you Pusseys, I released my own theater, the Dowley, so you literally
can't stop me. But unfortunately for may she literally did get stopped, and she brought several other productions with her. On February ninth, nineteen twenty seven, after the curtain came down on another packed out night of Sex, May was backstage and suddenly saw a bunch of police officers rounding up the cast of her play.
The police who were.
There were the officers from the New York Police Department's Municipal Vice Squad and had been sent by the mayor on charges of public obscenity. May West was probably like, this is not the encore I expected. But then the police grabbed her as well and shoved her and her cast into the back of a police ban. May was pissed,
and the Sex cast and crew weren't alone. The police raided a couple other theaters that were producing indecent plays, so May had to use half of her profits from the drag to get everyone out of jail fourteen thousand to bail out all of her actors and crew. After that, she had to go to court to deal with the charges, but she was going to do it.
In May West style.
For example, when she entered the courtroom, the judge was like are you May West? And she was like, don't you read the newspapers? See this didn't really seem that it was getting made down. She saw this as an opportunity. One journalist at the court asked her what she thought was going to happen, and she was like.
I expect this will be the making of me.
Despite the arrest, May refused to shut down sex at first. It did finally close in March nineteen twenty s and then in April May was sentenced to ten days in prison for corrupting the morals of the youth. She was sent to the women's reformatory on Welfare Island now called Roosevelt Island to serve her ten days, and she seemed to.
Have a really horrible time.
For example, she wasn't allowed to wear her silk underwear, she had to wear cotton underwear.
Ah, and also.
She had to eat dinner with a warden every night, which I'm sure was a huge burden. And then she got released eight days later. Yeah, she got two days off for good behavior. And May she never did stage
the drag in New York City. Technically, what she did instead was rewrite the play, name it The Pleasure Man, made the main character Raley straight, but then kept some of the gay stuff in, like The Drag Ball at the End that started running on New York City ages in nineteen twenty eight, and again the theater was rated fifty five. Actors, actresses, and musicians along with May were arrested.
Once they were out of.
Jail, the next day, May made some cuts to the production, you know, took out some of the more obscene parts, and they staged the play again, but this time she and the cast were arrested during the show. Two years later, she and the cast were on trial, but the jury was unable to make a final decision.
So all charges were dropped.
Oh I'm sure, but at this point May West was becoming an undeniable star. All of this laid the groundwork for her future productions and launched her onto a bigger national platform. People were like, damn, this May westchick is crazy. We got to pay attention to her along with a pleasure man. During this time, she wrote Diamond Lil, another story about a prostitute. It was staged on Broadway in
nineteen twenty eight and brought her mass appeal. A few years later, she signed a contract with Paramount and headed to California. From there, she became a huge movie star and ps. In her first film, she was like forty and voila. An icon was made. As always, we learn a lesson from American Filth, and the lesson that we learn here is that for me to get famous at the age of thirty two, I need to be even filthier.
I need to write a podcast episode so vulgar, so disgusting that one of you listeners call the cops on me.
Will it be you?
American Filth is a production of School of Humans and iHeart podcast As. Episode was written sound As I Am hosted by me Gabby Wants. Our senior producer is Amelia Brock. Our executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Elsie Crowley, and Brandon Barr. The theme song was by me and Jesse Niswanger. You can follow along with the show on Instagram at American Filth pod and please please please give the show a review wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps us with
the algorithm. Also tell your friends to listen to it. I need this. Thank you all right, Talk with you next week.
School of Humans