| “After ‘Sex,’ they wanted me to play a nun,” Mae West told The New Yorker, not long after she returned from prison. “ ‘Show ’em you can be a good woman!’ they said. I did . . . just the opposite.” In 1928, the writer Thyra Samter Winslow caught up with the actress as her career was rebounding—a steep climb after a precipitous drop. The previous year, West had been pushing boundaries in a Broadway play called “Sex” when, Winslow reports, Prohibition-era New York “became strait-laced over night.” Two rival productions shut down, but West refused to follow suit, and was briefly jailed for obscenity. The move may have been costly on a personal level, but it also proved savvy: the actress earned “a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth of free publicity,” and soon made a dramatic return to the site of her incarceration, this time as “a guest of honor.” The Profile captures West enjoying the sweeping success of her follow-up, “Diamond Lil,” an instant hit that became “one of the smart things to see.” West lives on in pop culture thanks to films such as “She Done Him Wrong,” for which she was too often dismissed as simply a bawdy blonde. Winslow’s piece acknowledges her ribald persona and working-class affectations, but it also admires what should have been obvious: West’s intuitive understanding of her audience, her professional ambition and achievement, and an unmatched knack for salesmanship. Men couldn’t conceive of the parts that West wanted, so she wrote them herself—and launched a string of other performers along the way. “I like her,” Winslow writes, near the end of the piece. Nearly a century later, it’s not hard to see why. | 
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