Andy Warhol's Red Beard - influence of Ben Shahn and Shirley Temple on Warhol

(56.) Variety, Oct. 17, 1933, 19, quoted in Marybeth Hamilton, "Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It: Censoring Mae West," in Movie Censorship and American Culture, ed. Francis G. Couvares (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. 1996), 187.

(57.) "The very man who will guffaw at Mae West's performance as a reminder of the ribald days of his past," a Production Code Administration office memo stated, "will resent her effect upon the young, when his daughter imitates the Mae West wiggle before her boyfriends and mouths 'Come up and see me sometime'"; ibid., 202.

(58.) Quoted in Robertson, 39.

(59.) Mae West, quoted in Leonard J. Leff and Jerold L. Simmons, The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood. Censorship and the Production Code from the 1920s to the 1960s (Nose York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), 23-24.

(60.) Leo McCarey, quoted in Robertson, 39.

(61.) George Davis, quoted in Ramona Curry, Too Much of a Good Thing: Mae West as Cultural Icon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 18. Garbo, Dietrich, and West all realized their tremendous screen presence and authority through a type of androgyny. The distinctive sexual charge of both Garbo and Dietrich seas founded in particular on their deep, husky voices, their regular cross dressing, and the autoerotic play back and forth between temptress and vampire, aggressor and supplicant, male and female halves of their personas. West's charms were different,

(62.) Rosen (as in n. 46), 154.

(63.) She engaged directly and frankly with sexuality without the burden of love or worry about commitment, without the threat of loss of virtue. She "divests sex of everything that is dark, dangerous, primeval," writes one commentator on West as camp, "under her aegis, it becomes a children's romp"; Mark W. Booth, Camp (London: Quartet, 1983), 134. Even William Satire, who reports interviewing West in 1949, explains her distinctive appeal and power as camp: "She proudly mocked her sexiness even as she exploited men's interest in sex. Unlike glamour girls and sex goddesses before and after, she was nice-tough, good humored and forthright--which made her invulnerable"; Safire, "I Remember Mae," New York Times, May 22, 2000, A23.

(64.) Mae West, "Sex in the Theatre," Parade, Sept. 1929, 12-13, quoted in Curry, 3.

(65.) Colette, quoted in Robertson, 46.

(66.) Robertson, 39. See also Hamilton (as in n. 56), 187-211.

(67.) Seldes, 86.

(68.) Ibid.

(69.) Graham Greene, The Graham Greene Film Reader: Mornings in the Dark, ed. David Parkinson (Manchester: Carcanet, 1993), 106.

(70.) Ibid., 128.

(71.) Ibid., 233-34.

(72.) Ibid., 234.

(73.) It was Cagney who was given the leading role in Warner Brothers's G-Men of 1935.

(74.) The solution developed by Busby Berkeley, it might be argued, was simply cumulative. Instead of an excessively sexual Mae West, he put together as many young women who just passed the test as he could fit onstage at any one time. The abstract and spectacular sexual form that had made Mae West so successful is transposed into geometric arrangements of bodies coordinating themselves into a combined excess for the viewer's pleasure in Berkeley's films.