Yes, she’s been dead a million years — a million plus 10, actually, as she was strictly on autopilot in her last movies, Myra Breckinridge and Sextette, where her lines were radioed in through a teeny-tiny earpiece.

But Mae West lives, children!– as long as Nightcharm and YouTube have anything to say about it (more on that later).

At right, Salvador Dali’s famous take on the star: The Face of Mae West Which Can Be Used as an Apartment. The Mae West lip couch was actually built by Dali, and later copied by a slew of Las Vegas brothels.

Fittingly. In her movies, West always played a brothel madame, in style if not in name. She was forever on the vamp, with a keen eye for male horseflesh. Among her many trademarks — the hourglass figure, the salacious delivery — was a retinue of musclemen, usually half dressed, which would escort her about Hollywood and, in later years, co-star with her in a Las Vegas revue.

Writing her own scripts, Mae West celebrated sex — never love, mind you; pure carnal pleasure — with an epigrammatic precision on a par with Oscar Wilde. “When I’m good, I’m very good,” goes one of her most famous aphorisms. “But when I’m bad, I’m better.”

Like Wilde, Mae West cut away the distance between what people said and what they meant, what they professed and what they actually did. “It’s about a girl,” she once told a producer, describing a movie script that could well have been her autobiography. ” A girl who lost her reputation — but never missed it.”

Her own reputation — for shocking a delighted public — was one thing West never lost. Her first show, Sex, in 1927 got her thrown in jail on morals charges, which in no way put a crimp in ticket sales.

“I was sentenced to 10 days,” she vamped for the reporters, undulating her hourglass figure. “With two days off for good behavior.”

Her next play, Drag, celebrated gay men, gay sex and sparkly gowns. That got her banned from Broadway but continued its hit run in New Jersey. She was quickly snapped up by radio where again she was banned after the airing of her radio play The Garden of Eden, about the private life of Adam and Eve. Mae had played Eve. “Oh, Adam — mmmm,” she moaned with salacious connoisseurship. “Come over here with your little ways and wiggle them into my heart.”

By the time she was brought to Hollywood, she was already 39 years old. She was given a small part in another star’s movie, but insisted on writing her own lines: “My goodness, what lovely diamonds!” she has a hatcheck girl remark. “Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie,” came her famous reply.

The line caused an instant sensation and snagged her a two-picture deal, where she would write and star. The movies — She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel — saved Paramount Studio from bankruptcy.

An early — and vocal — advocate for gay rights (when asked by Playboy to define camp, she said “Camp is the kinda comedy where they imitate me”), she also advocated sex strictly for pleasure.

She took no damage, though she was persistently used for target practice by the Legion of Decency and the Hayes movie censorship office. The wide public loved her 19th Century figure and her plain-spoken Bowery burlesque house style, her worldly sayings that were never world-weary. Mae celebrated the sensation of being alive, the power of sex — without regrets, sugar-coating or pious euphemisms.

And the secret behind all her charms was this: Mae West was actually wholesome. Her humor was importuning, yes, but never smutty, never hehe-ing up its sleeve at the rubes. Her honesty, coupled with a flair for putting things acutely, always acquitted her. In one cockeyed situation she is put before a class of young children and given the task of teaching them arithmetic. “A man has one hundred dollars, ” she tells the girls. “You leave him with two. That’s subtraction.”

The character she created for herself she continued to play off-screen. “Good sex is like good bridge,” she wrote in her autobiography. “If you don’t have a good partner, you’d better have a good hand.” She was by then in her 70’s.

It was at this point that legendary photographer Diane Arbus was assigned to shoot photos and write a piece about the star. The photos that resulted (such as the one at left) are uncharacteristically gentle and full of affection. Arbus usually went for the moment when the mask slips, when illusion and truth stand side by side in stark contradiction. But there is no slippage here. Perhaps because Mae was so practiced at her art. Or perhaps because Arbus could find no air between the mask and the person. Isn’t that, after all, what an icon is, a living mask?

Though Arbus rarely wrote about her subjects, the article she wrote on Mae West, which originally ran in Show magazine and can now be found in Diane Arbus - Magazine Work, is full of the same sharp-eyed and offbeat observations that typify her photography:

On her 75th birthday, Mae West feasted on a rhinestone-studded birthday cake. She is as Mae West as ever. Nourished by her own legend, she has outlasted every lover and initiated a nation of boys into manhood….

But her fortress is almost as impregnable as Sleeping Beauty’s. There is a high fence surrounding her villa by the sea in Santa Monica, a broken telephone at the gate and a sign saying Beware of the Dog beside the bell — although there is no dog to beware of. Beyond the overgrown garden, across the gilded living room, among the nude likenesses of the mistress of the house, a pair of wild Wooly monkeys strain at their chains on a trapeze in the corner…

But when at last you come up and see her you know you are in the presence of a lady. Resplendent and familiar, she smiles between her superb teeth and rolls her eyes heavenward…. “Men are my kind of people,” she says. “I want them absorbed in me. … The man I don’t like doesn’t exist. They were all inspirations to me. Each one is different: the way they sigh, the way they moan, the way they move, even the feel of them, their flesh is a little different. … There’s a man for every mood … I have found men who didn’t know how to kiss. I always found the time to teach them. ”

She has always been careful of her health and shown a marked preference for strong men. Whenever possible she likes her boyfriends to have a blood test in advance. Once she asked a handsome man she was beginning to fancy if he would go and get a test. He was delighted because he thought she meant a screen test. …

Her monkeys adore her and try to mimic everything she does. “You know how it is,” she says, “sometimes you’re just fooling around and you take a rubber band between your teeth and pull it out with your fingers and strum … Well the monkeys do that too.”

Every night she comes down to dinner on [her muscleman companion's] enormous arm, looking suddenly fragile by candlelight in a peach satin nightgown, and takes her seat like the Queen of a mythical kingdom …

But the world of Mae West is not entirely physical. Her psychic eye has been opened. She has seen visions … “I knew,” she says, ” that in some marvelous way I had touched the hem of the unknown. And being me, I wanted to lift that hemline a little bit more.”

Mae West was 87 when she died after a succession of strokes in 1980. When she made her final film Sextette, she was a spry 85, as you can see in the two clips below:

In the first, Mae meets the “United States Athletic Team,” actually some very pretty musclebuilders that Mae probably picked up at Venice Beach… after an intensive talent search, we hope. The blown-out hair alone on these guys is vintage gayboy at its best — a style found now only on the odd televangelist:

The clip continues:

“I’m the kinda girl,” Mae West once said, summing up her life with a classic double entendre, “who works for Paramount by day, and Fox all night.”