You may recall that in 2019, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s annual gala celebrated all things camp (this was the year Jared Leto carried his own head as an accessory and Billy Porter arrived, swathed in gold sequins and actual wings, on a litter borne by six extremely muscular gentlemen). The accompanying exhibit attempted, in a mint-green text panel, to define the whole affair in the words of actress Mae West: “Camp,” she commented in 1971, “is the kinda comedy where they imitate me.”
West had good reason to say this. In the long arc of a career that went from vaudeville to 1980s B-movies, West was a hardworking actress who loved to push envelopes. From obscurity to fame, comeback to caricature, she spent decades delighting in the stylization, excess, and shock value of what we would come to know as camp culture.
Susan Sontag is largely credited with popularizing the phrase “camp” to describe the long-running cultural vogue for and fascination with things that are just a tiny bit extra; her proto-listicle “Notes on Camp” is an attempt to wrap arms around the cultural concept and its embrace of exaggerated artifice. Sontag, too, turns to Mae West as an example of camp well done, writing that while unwitting camp is the best kind, West could give something just as good—a performance that, “even when it reveals self-parody, reeks of self-love.”
Born in 1893, Mae West was performing in vaudeville by her teenage years. She debuted on Broadway as an eighteen-year-old dancer and hustled her way through various song-and-dance roles, becoming semi-famous for doing “the shimmy” in the Broadway revue Sometime. Still, by the 1920s, she was a theater veteran with little name recognition and few prospects.
To bring her career in line with her ambitions, West started writing plays herself. Cobbling together financing and theater rental, she put together a Broadway production, cast herself as the lead (a Montreal sex worker), and debuted it in 1926 under the rabble-rousing title: SEX. As historian Marybeth Hamilton writes,
The play was unanimously panned by New York’s theatre critics, all of whom predicted its immediate failure and some of whom called for police intervention. Yet despite this condemnation—or rather, no doubt, in part because of it—SEX became one of the major hits of the 1926 season, playing to mostly full houses until forced to close in March 1927.