Mae West-still sexy at 76

By Kevin Thomas

HOLLYWOOD

"Some-

one once asked me my definition of sex: Sex is an emotion in motion. Sex,” adds that noted authority Mae West, "is here to stay."

So is the one and only Mae West, who returns to the screen next month in "Myra Breckinridge" after a 26-year absence. She is not playing Myra she wants it made clear right off but rather Myra's friend Leticia, a recording star who inherits her agent's business.

RAQUEL Welch is play ing Myra. John Huston as Buck Loner, head of a Hollywood talent school and uncle to Myra, and Rex Reed as Myron i.e., Myra be fore that operation round out the offbeat cast which will be directed by the young English critic turned director, Michael Sarne.

"George Cukor introduced me to Robert Fryer, the producer. He came up to my apartment to talk about doing "Myra,'" Miss West explained. “I said first I want to to my own story 'Sextette,' the one where I have six husbands — all my fans are waiting for me to do it but as it turns out this one comes up now.

"I told him I'd read the script and said you don't want me to do Myra, but he said the other part was just as good. Of course, I've got to write it myself. Every time she opens her mouth she's got to say something funny

and sexy."

Mae West was in great form in more ways than

one

for her first interview since the announcement of her return to the screen. All eyes in the room swiveled in unison, like at a tennis match, toward this blond lady in a full-length white

crepe gown that hugged what Truman Capote has called "the Big Ben of the hourglass figures."

Her deep blue eyes sparkled as brightly as the two headlight-size pearshaped diamonds in her ring. Her complexion was the lovely peaches-and-cream it always is. Nobody in the world would have guessed that five days before she celebrated her 76th birthday.

NOBODY else, probably, would dare facing the cameras again at this age. But none of the rules that seem to apply to mere mortals have ever seemed to apply to Mae West, who has always made her own, both in her long career and in her very private, private life.

Miss West made her film debut and became a major screen siren when she was past 40 and in the process saved Paramount from bankruptcy with "I'm No Angel" and "She Done Him Wrong" the film version of her stage classic “Diamond Lil."

(These two pictures, incidentally, also launched a young actor named Cary Grant and helped bring about the Motion Picture Code. It is a tribute to Miss West's timelessness that when the films were revived recently at the Beverly Hills Music Hall they reportedly grossed more than any current first-run release from Universal, which now owns the rights to them.)

By 1936 Miss West was the highest salaried person in the United States. Always the complete original, the complete original, whose string of deathless whose string of deathless quips began with "Come up and see me sometime," she introduced the shimmy, went to jail when her play "Sex" became a target of bluenoses in the 41st

"That's me, Venus with arms,” quips Mae West, posing by a nude likeness of herself sculpted in 1935. week of its runand made the dictionary when the the dictionary when the RAF named its life-saving jacket in her honor at the outbreak of World War II.

No one else holds such a secure place in the history of motion pictures on the basis of so few films 10 up to now.

a mere

"THIS agency I inherit I run for fun.-I don't need the money," continues Miss West. "My first line is 'I'll be right with you, boys. Get your resumes ready.'

Now Miss West, who, when she is not performing when she is not performing has the demure manner of a sweet old-fashioned girl who's never grown old, did not seem to be deliberately giving her dialog one of her. inimitable double meanings

but then it's doubtful that she could recite the phone book without naturally drenching it with innuendo.

“That was an innocent line when I thought of it,” she insists. “I kept repeating it then it dawned upon

me.

Miss West is unabashedly excitd about resuming her film career, which she left in 1943 to return to the stage with her play "Catherine Was Great." She followed it up with a revival and lengthy tour of "Diamond Lil." In the 50s she launched her famous nightclub act with its chorus line of muscle men and wrote her autobiography "Goodness Had Nothing to Do With It," pub-

lished in 1959.

NOW Miss West is eagerly looking forward to her fit tings for costumes, to be designed by Edith Head, who 36 years ago got her big break creating Miss West's period gowns for “She Done Him Wrong."

From time to time Miss West takes in a new film, usually at a private screening at Universal, where Robert Wise and Stanley Musgrove are preparing her television special. As one of the pioneers in the fight against prudery she is not easily offended by the new freedoms on the screen.

"Nudity is all right, if it's done for art's sake. If it belongs in a picture, gives meaning to it, that's fine.

"But for real box office you got to take a picture like "The Sound of Music.' Now that really does the business. It's a great story, something for everybody. This guy Christopher Plum mer, he's got a sex personality. I'd like to have him as one of my husbands in 'Sextette.'

"I saw 'Rosemary's Baby.' That was great, but they shouldn't try to copy it. That was it. Let's go on to something new. And I saw "The Sergeant.'” Miss West admired it for Rod Steiger's performance as the repressed homosexual, but

found the film as a whole depressing.

“Back in 1927 I wrote this play "The Drag' and sort of glamorized the boys. I opened it in Paterson, N.J., but they wouldn't let me bring it into New York. These officials said it 'might upset the city and we're not equipped to handle it.'

"I DON'T like the police. abusing homosexuals. I tell them when you're hitting one of those guys you're hitting a woman because a homosexual is a female soul in a male body."

Miss West began performing at age 7 at Sunday concerts at the Royal Theater in her native Brooklyn.

From these appearances she moved on to a stock company where she spent her adolescence and began in vaudeville at 14. On Sept. 22, 1911, she made her Broadway debut in a revue called "A La Broadway and Hello Paris." In this era she vividly recalls seeing Sarah Bernhardt, who was then beginning her seemingly endless series of farewell

tours.

"Sarah Bernhardt would be sitting in this high-back carved chair and wearing this red wig. She'd have a 22-year-old leading man, and she was 80-something.

"He'd kiss her hand and

everything. He didn't under-

stand a word she said” — at this point Miss West offered her devastating impression of Bernhardt, complete with a stream of Sid Caesar-style "Every line French

sounded alike.

"But audiences loved it. Just the fact that it was her awed them. They knew," says Mae West respectfully, "they were hearing something that must be good.”

LA. Times/Washington Post Service