THEY don’t make them like Mae West anymore.
In November 1947 the larger-than-life film star arrived in Glasgow to take part in her production of Diamond Lil, at the Alhambra Theatre. The former boxing champion, Ted ‘Kid’ Lewis, is photographed with Mae.
The play, when it opened, went down well with the Glasgow Herald’s man in the stalls. “Here,” he wrote, “is a piece of magnificent nonsense, a full-blooded melodrama of the ‘nineties ... The period is amazingly well recreated: the players get the spirit of it, and ‘ham’ it with zest.”
The setting was Gus Jordan’s saloon in New York City, “where are gathered nightly the bad men, the toughs, the light women, thieves, gunmen, dope fiends, and bosses ...Lil is the kind of a bad girl made familiar by the movies - one with a heart of gold.”
As for West, the star of the show, she “is all that one expected, and something more. The husky voice, the blonde hair, the famous figure, and the shimmy - for she shimmies rather than walks - are all there, with typical wisecracks added.”
West was in town for the show’s run, which meant that, come the 20th - the day, incidentally, of the wedding at Westminster Abbey between Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip - Mae was called upon to open the British Philatelic Exhibition, at the McLellan Galleries in Glasgow city centre.
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