I Know Where I'm Going by Charlotte Chandler

“I want you to know, this is the last interview I’m ever gonna give.” That she was 86 at the time, Mae didn’t consider a problem. The only problem that concerned Mae was that Cukor was “getting up there in age”. She was still hoping that she would write and star in a film that he would direct. “I don’t have anything I want to sell, so I don’t like to give it away free.”īut she could not say no to George Cukor.

Mae West was not anxious to give any interviews, especially to a woman. Marriage: “They used to ask me, ‘How come, Mae, you never married? Was it because you couldn’t find the right person? Because you never found Mr Right?’ It wasn’t because I didn’t find the right man. Our meeting had been arranged by director George Cukor, who had known Mae since the mid-1920s, when they were both working on the stage in New York. Only after Mae had been speaking for a while did I realise that it was the sound of her heavily mascaraed, multi-layered false eyelashes brushing her cheeks whenever she blinked. The sound continued at frequent intervals. Trying not to appear inattentive to what Mae West was saying, I could not resist glancing around the living room of her Hollywood apartment. I found myself aware of a distracting sound, something like the fluttering of the wings of little birds. Knowing what you want is the first step toward getting it.” Everything’s in the mind.” She touched her forehead.

“Maybe that’s what one has to believe in order to get them,” I said. There’s nothing better in life than diamonds.” But you’ve gotta try, and you’ve gotta know how to try. She studied me for a moment, then said encouragingly, “You could, honey. “But you have some at home?” I shook my head. “Oh, my, you poor kid! You don’t have any!”įor a moment she regarded me silently with amazement and pity. They were given to me by admirers.” Her gaze settled on my own unadorned hands. Holding out her hands she said, “Look, they’re all real. These, she explained, were just her “daytime diamonds”. She wore a diamond necklace, a diamond bracelet, and a diamond anklet. All of her fingers were covered with diamonds. As I took it, I scratched my palm on one of her diamond rings. On my arrival in the afternoon that Mae and I met, she held out her hand to me. But in the beginning, I did some tinkerin’.” Mae West, 1893 – 1980

I didn’t turn out exactly this way all at once, though I wasn’t very different when I was a little girl. “You know who Mae West is? I’m Cinderella in modern dress, and I wear high heel wedgies, cause those glass slippers are too fragile! I wouldn’t change my image for no one.

I Know Where I'm Going by Charlotte Chandler