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I.
In 1930, Paramount signed Mae West to a contract for a supporting role in Night After Night (1932), directed by Archie Mayo, starring George Raft and Constance Cummings. The role may have been small, but it was vital - it was also a way for Adolph Zukor and others at Paramount to test West's appeal on screen following her stage success. Soon, the script ran into trouble, delaying production by four weeks. Once the studio felt the script was ready, they gave it to West - who flatly rejected it. According to Zukor, "She had always written her own material and this was not the Mae West of her creation" (267). Executive Al Kaufman took West and her manager, Jim Timony, out for a nice dinner with a dash of persuasion. At the end of the evening, "Mae opened her handbag, took out a check, and handed it to Al. It was for twenty thousand dollars - her salary up to date" (Zukor 268). She told Kaufman she was leaving for New York; he told her she could rewrite her part. She did, and in Night After Night she "stole the show" with one particularly memorable line (268). A cloakroom girl exclaims, "Goodness, what beautiful diamonds." West as Maude Triplett replies, "Goodness had nothing to do with it." Zukor reflected in his autobiography years later, "It seemed to me that the incident described above portrays the true Mae West - honest, direct, extremely knowledgeable in her craft" (269). The line was memorable enough for the title of her autobiography; it was also memorable enough - in conjunction with her stageplays - to put her in the crosshairs of censors and citizen activists as she approached the script and starring role for her next film She Done Him Wrong (1933), directed by Lowell Sherman.
The late 1920s and early 1930s encompassed significant film industry as well as American cultural changes: the advent of talkies, the stock market crash followed by the Great Depression, Prohibition (1920-1933), the escalation of anti-Semitism, the rise of social activism - especially among Catholic and women's groups, the growth of Hollywood - and the excision of women from that very industry, fears concerning feminism and the fallen woman, the continuing shift...