Sextette - Introduction

In her Twelfth film Sextette Mae West stars as former movie idol Marlowe Manners, who marries an English Lord, played by Timothy Dalton. Upon the couples arrival at the hotel for their honeymoon, they are greeted by the bellhops with the rousing song 'Hooray for Hollywood.' The newlyweds idyll is interrupted, however, when Marlowe becomes involved in some fancy mattress dancing with her former husbands.

Some background information on Sextette

Peter Brown and I pull up at the security booth at the Paramount gate. The guard nods, recognizing Peter as the Executive Consultant to Sextette. We drive on to the lot of the studio that Mae West single-handedly saved from bankruptcy. In 1933, her film 'She Done Him Wrong' did Paramount right, breaking box-office records throughout the country and sweeping Adolph Zukor's foundering fiefdom in solvency. The year before, she had arrived in Hollywood. At the Pasadena train station, the anointed Bad Girl of Broadway, full of sass and honky-tonk and sex, issued the above manifesto. With a volley of genius and energy and an unerring instinct for what the public wanted, she set out to fulfil it's brazen message. The annexation was swift. By 1935, she was the top box-office attraction in the country. Now she has returned to the place where the legend crystalized through the flickering black and white images of Lady Lou, Tira, Ruby, and the rest of the titillating gang of characters she played. She is starring as Marlowe Manners in Sextette, her twelfth film, adapted from a play she wrote in 1961. On this sunny morning in February, Mae West age eighty-three, is working on Stage 26 of the Paramount lot.

Peter slowly maneuvers the car through the narrow alleys lining the rows of beige bungalows, parking adjacent to a building acting as the center of operations for the film. Producers Danny Briggs and Bobby Sullivan, two men in their early twenties, and Executive Producer Warner Toub have brought Sextette out of idle cocktail gossip into its tenth week of filming. They are playing the roles that once belonged to Emmanuel Cohen and William LeBaron in the Westian Age.

On the way to Stage 26, Peter and I walk briskly through the lot. On this warm winter day, huge, yawning doors open out from the deserted sound stages. An expansive mural of the blue sky looks incongruous against the smoggy pall hanging over Los Angeles. A proliferation of television trucks appear like fungus growing over the ruins of a monolith. We pass girls looking like Farah Fawcett-Majors, boys looking like Jon Peters. In a ditch near the sound stage, the giant Buddha that majestically floated down the river in 'The Last Tycoon' lies scarred and neglected. In the distant hills, the endangered Hollywood sign advertises its tattered face.

The cavernous interior is black and quiet when we enter, but we can see the lights of the filming on the other side of the room. As we walk toward the set, our footsteps echo. In the eerie half-light, I imagine phantasms hovering in the rafters, trapped in celluloid limbo, like the black-and-white ghosts in the musical 'Follies.' We approach the set and my eyes jump from face to face on the crowded set. Then the camera swings out of the way and there stands Mae West - in a white wedding dress - flanked by chorus boys holding bouquets of roses and singing 'Hooray for Hollywood.'

Men are still lining up to see Mae West. When the producers ran full-page ads announcing the search for Sextette's leading man (before Timothy Dalton was signed for the role), 1100 men showed up at Paramoun. Warner Toub, Director Ken Hughes, and Mae West personally interviewed everyone, but nobody fit the part. Screenings of different films were arranged so that Mae West could peruse potential candidates. The first five minutes of the 1971 production of Wuthering Heights was enough to convince her that Timothy Dalton, who played Heathcliff, was her main man.

The above article on Sextette © Copyright After Dark Magazine - May 1977 All Rights Reserved.