More people saw me than saw Napoleon, Lincoln and Cleopatra. I was better known than Einstein and Picasso. ... I changed the fashion of two continents. The style of the Gay Nineties became the rage ... women were trying to walk and talk like me. Women became more sex-conscious - sex was out in the open and fun.
Mae WestToo many Broadway actors in motion pictures lost their grip on success--had a feeling that none of it had ever happened on that sun-drenched coast, that the coast itself did not exist, there was no California. It had dropped away like a hasty dream and nothing could ever have been like the things they thought they remembered.
Mae West