He Done Her Wrong

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The best-looking Mae West in the room, outside of Mae West herself, was a Chinese guy named Richard Horn who wanted to be a comedian. I counted no less than forty Mae Wests in the room, at least one of whom was a thief.

I met Mae West the last day in April 1942, a cool day with no sun. I had called her number the day before, after talking to my brother Phil, and a man had answered and told me to come out the next morning. The man then told me how to get to her ranch in the San Fernando Valley, and I told my mechanic, No-Neck Arnie, that he had to turn all his magic on to keep my ’34 Buick going a few more days. He had taken half my last fee to repaint the car and fix the dents an angry elephant had made in it.

“Oliver ain’t gonna make it through the summer,” Arnie had said, shifting his cigar to the other side of his mouth and rubbing the new black paint job. “You shouldn’t sink any more gelt into it. I tell you for a fact.” It bothered me that Arnie had named the car Oliver, since I always thought of it as a female.

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