Curio Cabinet | April 23, 2026

Good Bad Girl: Becoming Mae West

When I’m caught between two evils, I generally like to take the one I never tried.

Mae West delighted in making myths about her life and career. She told several versions of what inspired her to write Sex, the Broadway play that made her famous after she toiled for decades as a minor performer in vaudeville. The core of the story went like this: one evening on the Manhattan waterfront, she saw a young woman with frizzy bottle-blond hair, rumpled clothes, and an expensive plumed hat “entertaining” two sailors. Mae assumed that the men had given her the hat and would pay her between fifty cents and two dollars a trick. As the three revelers with their shared bottle of cheap liquor disappeared into the night, the predicament of the prostitute played on her imagination.

When Mae was a child, her father ran with a rowdy crowd and introduced her to a rough-and-tumble world of boxing and horse racing. In youth, she had witnessed earlier versions of “the lady with the hat.” Mae understood how in that world, a woman might slide into a life of sex for pay. She herself had plenty of “gentlemen friends” who paid her bills when she was broke. They also lavished her with diamonds in exchange for affection. But settling for such lowly circumstances as the lady with the hat appalled her. She pondered how the young woman might keep herself out of the gutter. Mae was a realist; she knew there were no easy answers. Later in life, after a long, tumultuous career, she said she’d climbed the socioeconomic ladder “wrong by wrong.”