I’ve always found that a little of Mae West goes a long way, which sounds like the sort of thing she should have said about Errol Flynn. But quite a lot of Mae West is going quite a long way on the New York stage these days. It’s been twenty years since her death, almost seventy since her career peaked, and, on a random sample, I find most people today have no very clear idea who she was. Yet she’s out there, the phrases she planted in the language still in common currency—“Come up and see me … ,” “A hard man is good to find,” “I used to be snow white but I drifted,” “Find ’em, fool ’em, forget ’em,” “Peel me a grape,” “Goodness had nothing to do with it,” “Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?” That’s not a bad tally for an occasional writer. By way of comparison, Dorothy Parker may still be beloved by the diction ...

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