New York's 54th Street night court was busy on February 9, 1927. Up for arraignment was not the usual array of thieves, muggers, con men, hookers, pimps and Prohibition-era drunks, but a motley crew of actors, actresses and producers, fresh off the stages of Broadway. Around them surged a horde of bondsmen and police who had hauled them, in full costume, out of three major theatres, where shows that went by the names of The Virgin Man, The Captive and Sex - all denounced as "dirt plays" by the moral guardians of the city - were playing.

The star turns of the late-night show at 54th Street were the respectable Helen Menken, who played a lesbian in The Captive, and the most unrespectable Mae West, writer and star of Sex. Menken and the fur-clad West eyed each other in undisguised rivalry and hostility. Mae did not like lesbians, and was heard to remark, amid the hubbub: "Well, anyhow, we're normal!"

Quite how normal the cast and writer of Sex were was to be the subject of a sensational trial that opened at the end of March. At the Sex trial, 12 stout citizens, all male, had been found for the jury, and the chief prosecution witness, Sergeant Patrick Keneally, of the Midtown vice squad, began reading out lines from the play, a tale about a prostitute, 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.

This was the first, but not the last court action that Mae West endured for putting on transgressive plays: she was to be tried for The Drag, an even more transgressive tale of homosexuals on the stage, in 1930. When Mae wrote Sex she was 33 and had already ended a show-business career as a singer, showgirl, revue actress and all-round vaudeville entertainer, which had lasted almost 20 years.

In 1976, a full 50 years after the opening of Sex on Broadway, Mae West was once again playing sex, this time in the role of a movie star about to marry her sixth husband.

At the age of 83, this was her last movie, but she was still determined never to play anyone over the age of 26, or, in her exact words: never to "try to be anything but myself at all times ... except on stage and screen, for that's where acting belongs"; never to "cook, bake, sew, wash dishes, peel potatoes, eat onions or bite my nails"; never to "play mother parts, sad parts, dumb parts, or a virtuous wife, betrayed or otherwise. I pity weak women, good or bad, but I can't like them. A woman should be strong either in her goodness or badness."

Myths gathered around Mae like summer mosquitoes: Mae West was a man, and had to shave her beard every day; Mae West was a virgin; Mae West was black. And so forth.

When Salvador Dali - who never met her - painted Mae West's Face Which Can Be Used as a Surrealist Apartment, he portrayed her as a universal receptacle: her eyes gaze out of framed city landscapes, her lips form a blood-red sofa, her blonde hair forms drapes drawn back from the lower part of her face, represented as bare stage boards. The stage is ready for the play, and the divan for romance.

The subject of these fantasies was born Mary Jane West in Brooklyn, New York, on August 17, 1893. She was never a child star, though she acted in amateur shows and caught the theatre bug.

She was properly schooled and played one season in stock theatre. Then, in 1909 or 1910, aged over 16, she left home for vaudeville. Soon after, she met a young man named Frank Wallace, probably the first man she had sex with and, as was the wont of young ladies of her era in such a circumstance, she married him.

The liaison was brief and, inconveniently, in 1935, Wallace turned up, claiming his part in her fortune, setting off an eight-year court battle. Apart from this blunder, Mae West never married and speculation about her many lovers stoked her own legend. Paradoxically, though, Paramount producer William LeBaron said that she was one of the few stars who could dine out without being recognised.

In the flesh, she was a rather short, slightly dumpy blonde woman who looked oddly familiar. The photo-faked hourglass figure, the immense hats and gowns - Mae West of the movies - were all part of the illusion.

In what W.C. Fields, her great male vaudevillian counterpart, called Hollywood's "delirium tremens", West had a simple secret: she went home, every night, and wrote: old plays, new plays, versions of known scripts, projects for sketches, film proposals, novels and the bread and butter of every craft comedian - thousands of pages of jokes and gags copied from professional joke books.

These were the source of many of her great quips: "It's better to be looked over than overlooked." "Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before."

When she was convicted in 1927, for Sex, and sentenced to 10 days in jail, she parlayed that, too, into an experience that would inform 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.

In an age that forgets so easily, and worships the latest dull craze madly, she deserves to be recalled for one more curtain call - certainly not the last - to celebrate a life lived to the full.

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