( United States: 1893- 1980)
Marlene San Miguel Groner
The daughter of a prizefighter and a corset model, Mae West began her stage career in an amateur-night performance as Baby Mae when she was eight. The crowd, as West later recalled in her autobiography, Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It, roared its approval and mirth when she refused to come out on stage to perform her song and dance routine without a spotlight (9-10). Leaving school at thirteen, she was already an established vaudeville performer as well as, with her mother's approval and encouragement, sexually active. Thus while on tour and still underage, she secretly married a dancer named Frank Wallace early in 1911 to protect herself from scandal should she become pregnant even though she never lived with him and even went on to deny the relationship until the 1930s.
More important for West's career was her Broadway debut in A la Broadway, which also took place in 1911. Although the show closed after only nine performances, West received good reviews for her comic and undirected use of dialect. Intuitively understanding that she needed a distinct stage personality, one that would be indelibly linked to her, West was already developing the earthy persona that would become her trademark, would transform even her most simple statements into sexual innuendo, and would lead to trouble with critics, censors, and police. In 1918, while playing the lead in the musical Sometimes, she was the first to introduce white audiences to the infamous shimmy dance that she had learned by visiting black nightclubs in Chicago. Despite the shock and titillated attention she received for this performance and others during