Of Mae West, Radio & Dummies

On December 12, 1937, Mae West appeared in two sketches on ventriloquist Edgar Bergen's radio show, The Chase and Sanborn Hour, then the currently the highest-rated program of the year. She appeared as herself, promoting her Paramount Pictures film, Every Day's a Holiday. On the radio show, West, as to be expected, flirted with Charlie McCarthy, Bergen's dummy, and displayed her risqué wit & sexual euphemisms.


Here's an snippet of the second sketch, via the Mae West Gala blog:

Charlie: Could you even like Mr. Bergen?

Mae: Ah, Mr. Bergen. He’s very sweet. In fact, he’s a right guy. Confidentially, yuh’ll have to show me a man I don’t like.

Charlie: That’s swell! Bergen’s your man. You know, he can be had.

Mae: On second thought, I’m liable to take him away from yuh.

Charlie: Well, if you take Bergen away, I’m speechless. (Laughter.)

Mae: Why don’t you come up … uh, home with me now, honey? I’ll let you play in my woodpile. (Laughter.)

Charlie: Well, I’m not feeling so well tonight. I’ve been feeling nervous lately. I think I’m gonna have a nervous breakdown. Whuup! There I go.

Mae: So, good-time Charlie’s gonna play hard to get? Well, yuh can’t kid me. You’re afraid of women. Your Casanova stuff is just a front, a false front.

Charlie: Not so loud, Mae, not so loud! All my girlfriends are listening.

Mae: Oh, yeah! You’re all wood and a yard long …

Charlie: (weakly): Yeah.

Mae: Yuh weren’t so nervous and backward when yuh came up to see me at my apartment. In fact, yuh didn’t need any encouragement to kiss me.

Charlie: Did I do that?

Mae: Why, yuh certainly did. I got marks to prove it. (Snickering from audience) An’ splinters, too. (Laughter).

If that last line sent the NBC censors and the FCC into panic, it was the earlier sketch which was the most trouble.

The earlier sketch starred West and Don Ameche as Adam and Eve in the Garden Of Eden. Here's part of it, as reported by Time on Jan. 24, 1938:

Snake: That's the forbidden tree.

Eve: Oh, don't be technical. Answer me this—my palpitatin' python—would you like to have this whole Paradise to yourself?

Snake: Certainly.

Eve: O.K., then pick me a handful of fruit— Adam and I'll eat it—and the Garden of Eden is all yours. What do ya say?

Snake: Sssounds all right . . . but it's forbidden fruit.

Eve: Listen, what are you—my friend in the grass or a snake in the grass?

Snake: But forbidden fruit.

Eve: Are you a snake or are you a mouse?

Snake: I'll—I'll do it. (hissing laugh)

Eve: Now you're talking. Here—right in between those pickets.

Snake: I'm—I'm stuck.

Eve: Oh—shake your hips. There, there now, you're through.

Snake: I shouldn't be doing this.

Eve: Yeh, but you're doing all right now. Get me a big one. ... I feel like doin' a big apple.

Snake: Here you are, Missuss Eve.

Eve: Mm—oh, I see—huh—nice goin', swivel hips.

Snake: Wait a minute. It won't work. Adam'll never eat that forbidden apple.

Eve: Oh, yes, he will—when I'm through with it.

Snake: Nonsense. He won't.

Eve: He will if I feed it to him like women are gonna feed men for the rest of time.

Snake: What's that?

Eve: Applesauce.

The sketch was written by Arch Oboler (before his Lights Out fame). According to Old-Time.com:

NBC wanted to present something special for Miss West, so the powers that be turned to one of their most promising young writers, Arch Oboler. "That script came about this way," Oboler recalled on television’s The Merv Griffin Show on August 2, 1973. "NBC called upon me one day in Westwood . . . they were in trouble on the Edgar Bergen show. I knew they always were in trouble on that show, but they were in particular because John Erskin had written a book called Adam and Eve. Miss West didn’t like it, Charlie didn’t like it, Edgar . . . didn’t matter [jokingly laughs], and Don Ameche was playing the lead. So they asked me, would I write this ten-minute sketch? Well, I wasn’t interested in writing for Miss West. Finally, they waved enough money at me, and my good resolves went down the drain, but I made one condition: I said I would write about Adam and Eve only if I could take it out of the book – which I collaborated with years before – that is the Bible [jokingly]. The show was to be rehearsed on Saturday, going on the air on Sunday. This was Thursday, so I stayed up all night with my dear wife, who I married because she knew how to take things down, and I wrote this sketch. It was taken right out of Genesis."

..."Now one thing the powers-that-be forgot," recalled Oboler, "that in those days, unlike today, there were three things that an actress could not do. One was to have a child out of wedlock. Two, she could not swear, and three, she could not wear glasses. It was thought terrible for an actress to wear glasses. Well, Miss West, having all the usual good sense of all of us, didn’t wear her glasses during the rehearsals so she, being very nearsighted never saw my script. She bluffed her way through. It wasn’t until air time that she walked on stage waving these glasses, put them on . . . and for the first time saw the script. The result was disaster. What she did to ‘Adam and Eve’ the Arabs had never done so miserably."

Dorothy Lamour recounted in her 1981 autobiography, My Side of the Road, "One week our special guest was Mae West, who was to play Eve to Don Ameche’s Adam, in a takeoff on the Bible story. Church groups were outraged and the mail came pouring in. I can’t even remember what she said that was so terrible, but I’m sure it was mild by today’s standards."

What Mae West said wasn’t so bad as how she said it. Telling the serpent that "I feel like doin’ a big apple" was one comment ad-libbed, but when the serpent got stuck between the picket fences in an attempt to fetch the forbidden fruit, West exclaimed with the emotion of a woman going through an orgasm, "They’re – They’re! Now you’re through!"

Edgar Bergen was shocked. "We had to have a star each week," he recalled, "and she seemed a logical choice. She was a sex star. We were fully aware of that. ‘Adam and Eve’ as you probably know, had been performed before without any untoward incidents. Possibly our program being on Sunday and having a little fun with the Bible was dangerous. We always had two rehearsals; one on Saturday evening, after which we rewrite and tighten, and then we would do a Sunday afternoon read-through. At that read-through, Mae read her lines straight. It was obvious she knew what she was doing – how to lay out line – but she didn’t give things that Mae West twist until the broadcast. I’ve always said that we had far more permissive material on a previous show."

The conversation/performance was considered so risqué & bordering on blasphemous that not only was the FCC involved, but West was banned from being featured -- or even mentioned -- on the NBC network. She did not perform again on radio until 1949.

Of her performance, Mae West, in her autobiography Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It, said:

There was nothing offensive in the dialogue or it would never have gotten on the air in the first place. I only gave the lines my characteristic delivery. What else could I do? I wasn't Aimee Semple McPherson. Or Lincoln at Gettysburg, or John Foster Dulles, or even Eleanor Roosevelt. I was Mae West. Sunday on radio doesn't alter one's personality. The trouble wasn't caused by the portion of the program in which I traded wisecracks with the bundle of splinters called Charlie McCarthy. It was the 'Adam and Eve' sketch, with me as Eve and Don Ameche as Adam. The sketch had been approved by the radio people and their usual vice-presidents, as all material must be before it is permitted to be broadcast to an innocent America. I had scarcely had time to read over the sketch before the broadcast rehearsal.

But West's performance wasn't the only trouble with the Adam & Eve sketch.

A woman from Texas had written a story about Adam and Eve and claiming plagiarism she sued the network, NBC, and Arch Oboler. Oboler had to go to court and via that same Old-Time.com link, the writer recalls:

"His first question," continued Oboler, "was ‘Mr. Oboler, where were you on February twenty-second – blah, blah, blah.’ And as long as I live, I’ll remember my answer because I was under oath. I said, ‘In the bedroom’ because, you see, Miss West does all of her business in her bedroom. She pays her bills in her bedroom, and she rehearses in her bedroom. So the judge’s next question – he looked at me very suspiciously as if I were the Henry Kissinger of my time – and he said, "Exactly, Mr. Oboler, what were you doing – and remember you’re under oath – what were you doing with Miss West?’ And his face turned bright red and he said, ‘I withdraw the question.’ And that was the end of that."

Ha!

Few opportunities and heavy NBC censorship means there are few radio shows with Mae; you can find a few of them at Old Time Radio Show Catalog, and at eBay (including this record album).

When asked about being censored Mae West reportedly said, "I believe in censorship. After all, I made a fortune out of it."