Mae West

Mae West was a Manifesting Generator — built to run several careers at once and burn through conventions on the way — and she did exactly that, writing her own plays, headlining them, rewriting them during the run, and then conquering Hollywood in her forties when most actresses were being quietly retired. She started in vaudeville as a child, worked the circuit for two decades, and arrived on Broadway in 1926 with a play she'd written herself called Sex. The New York police shut it down and sent her to jail for ten days on obscenity charges. She served eight, got two off for good behavior, and gave interviews from Welfare Island about prison reform.

Her 2/4 profile showed up in the way she worked: she wrote alone, longhand, in bed, for hours — then emerged with material tailored to the exact community of showmen, newspapermen, and censors she'd been navigating for years. The hermit-and-networker rhythm let her develop material in private that only she could have written, then hand it to a public that had no comparable frame of reference. Her screen persona — the shoulder-roll, the sidelong glance, the drawled aside — was perfected in the mirror of her own apartment long before Paramount ever saw it.

Paramount signed her in 1932 when the studio was nearly bankrupt. She Done Him Wrong and I'm No Angel made so much money the next year that she is often credited with saving the studio outright — a textbook case of generating prosperity through work she genuinely loved. She wrote or co-wrote nearly every line she spoke on screen, which was unheard of for an actress then and largely unheard of now. "Why don't you come up sometime and see me" was hers. So was "When I'm good, I'm very good, but when I'm bad, I'm better." She had a tastemaker's instinct for which lines would land and which would detonate.

The Production Code of 1934 was written, in no small part, to contain her. She responded by making the innuendo more elaborate — provoking the censors into revealing exactly what they were afraid of, which was her point all along. She also insisted on casting a then-unknown Cary Grant opposite her, having spotted him walking across the Paramount lot. That was the kind of gut-level recognition she trusted without needing a second opinion — though her actual decisions about contracts, scripts, and lovers were famously slow, mulled over, walked around for days before she committed.

She owned her own apartment building in Hollywood, invested shrewdly in San Fernando Valley real estate, and lived in the same Ravenswood apartment from 1932 until her death in 1980. She managed her image, her money, and her men with the autonomy of someone who refused to be managed by anyone else. In her seventies she made Myra Breckinridge; at eighty-five she made Sextette, playing a bride on her sixth honeymoon. She was built for variety and extremes and never pretended otherwise, and the persona she'd invented in a Brooklyn bedroom in 1910 outlasted every studio head who tried to tame it.