Mae West
Motion Pictures Category Star
- Ceremony was on February 8, 1960
Mae West
Autographed Matchbook
Mae West
Movie Vamp Mae West Dies
From AP and UPI
LOS ANGELES - Legendary Hollywood bombshell Mae West - who starred in vaudeville, plays and films as a brassy, bosomy sex symbol - died Saturday at her apartment here. A Police Department spokesman said Miss West, believed to be 87, apparently died of natural causes. The aged sex queen died just three weeks after leaving a hospital where she had spent three months recuperating from a mild stroke that left her speech impaired. Her death at 10:30 a.m. Pacific time (1:30 p.m. Detroit time) Saturday in her Hollywood apartment was confirmed by Stanley Musgrove, a spokesman for the actress.
Musgrove said she was being cared for at her home by Paul Novak, her companion for the past 26 years. "She just closed her eyes. Thank God it was peaceful and there was no pain," said Jerry Martin of the William Morris Agency, Miss West's longtime public relations representative. She claimed to be 87, but Dr. Jules Stein, founder of the MCA show business conglomerate, says he met Miss West when he was 18 and she was 26. He played violin for her act in Chicago and unsuccessfully tried to date her. Stein says he is 84 today which would have made Mae West 92 years old.
For the most part, she had been rarely seen in public in recent years. She lived in palatial splendor near Beverly Hills, almost a recluse, on enormous wealth resulting from shrewd real estate investments and top salaries in her years as a star. Exhibiting a 37-27-37 figure clothed in what she called a "sex personality," she earned a flat $450,000 a picture during the peak of her popularity in the 1930s. Ironically, Miss West deplored the current trend toward sex and nudity. "I don't approve of it," she said. "It's just not right."
