Way out west

Susie Kennedy and Peter O’Brien are, obviously, buzzing about the idea of presenting a show on the life and music of Mae West. I meet them both during rehearsals for that show, Come Up And See Me Sometime, and it’s hard to tell who’s more excited. Susie, who came up with the original concept, or Peter, whose involvement with the show has totally opened up his eyes to the quality of music made my Ms. West.

Susie is especially engaged by the relatively radical Mae West, who not only penned all her own Broadway shows, such as Sex and Drag in the ’20s but also her own movies and revues yet was, in a sense, silenced because at least some of work was regarded as obscene.

“She was charged with obscenity and with ‘corrupting the morals of youths, and others’ as a result of those early plays and even put in jail for ten days because of Sex,” says Susie. “Then she made about six movies and eventually the censorship was so severe and they’d sanitise the films so much that she wasn’t happy with them and the public wasn’t, so she just stopped making them. But then she went back to the stage because there wasn’t censorship on stage and toured all over the world.”

Yet right up to the ’60s she was doing her muscle-men show in Vegas and, basically, worked till she was 80, or so. And, later in life, made movies like Sextet and Myra Breckenbridge, so she found a way to work around censorship all her life. She was so tenacious. The censors would close her down and she’d just bounce back. And she was incredibly astute, buying land in the San Fernando Valley in the ’30s investing wisely, really rich.”

Not surprisingly Mae was, says Susie, smiling, “really into sex herself. She liked boys, ‘straight or on the rocks’ she once said!” Peter O’Brien also notes that Mae West once joked that she liked to have at least eight boys a day though he seems surprised to find that the seemingly voracious West didn’t drink or do drugs. But all of this is the life they are telling in Come Up And See Me Sometime and much to O’Brien’s amusement there also is an Irish connection to the story. Her musical arranger, later in life, was Ian Whitcomb, who hailed from Dublin and had an international hit back in 1964 with the song ‘You Turn Me On’.

“He also wrote a book called After The Ball, which was a history of American songwriting,” says Peter. “But I knew him in the ’60s, he used to play in the Green Lounge on Stephen’s Green then he went to America with some group and ended up working with Mae West! But her music, overall, is great. They are unusual songs. Something like Easy Rider, which was written in the ’20s, is a wonderful blues. Rock Fox and I are transcribing all these songs from old records which is laborious but some of the music is super.”

And this point Susie can’t help but interject to educate those eejits among us who thought Easy Rider was a phrase from the late ’60s.

“An ‘Easy Rider’ is what the coloured girls used to call their pimp!” says Susie, laughing. ”That’s the song (sings ) ‘I wonder where my easy rider’s gone?’ But it has a double meaning because she’s also singing about horse riding and the music gets faster as the song goes along.”

Just like sex. So Come Up And See Me Sometime sure sounds like fun!

“It is,” says Susie. “And we really can’t wait to play it for the first time to an audience, because this is, after all, a world premiere.”