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Her errant memory caused a few problems during the shooting of Sextette, and when Mae couldn't remember her lines, the schedule began to slip. Director Ken Hughes (Cromwell) finally found the solution, and a small radio receiver was placed over her left ear, where it was conveniently hidden by her enormous wig. Hughes would broadcast the lines to her, and she would repeat them word for word. Spiteful gossips are spreading a story that Mae's radio once picked up the signals from a police helicopter and that, still on cue, she began reporting traffic conditions on the Hollywood Freeway. Not true, declares Dom DeLuise indignantly. What is true, he says, is that she once repeated Hughes' directions to the cameraman. "But in all fairness," he adds, "she laughed more than anyone else when she realized what she had done."
Now she is back in her old routine. She gets up at noon and goes to bed between 1 and 3 a.m. Occasionally she and Novak go out to dinner, and her chauffeur frequently drives them out to her ten-acre ranch in the San Fernando Valley, where her sister Beverly lives and where Mae exercises by walking on an old, half-mile horse track. When she is at home, she faithfully pedals on a stationary bicycle in the kitchen and lifts weights. Along with all the other bric-a-brac in the living room are two 10-lb. dumbbells, "Mae West" engraved on either end.
Can she really lift them? Again Novak answers. "Flex your muscles, dear," he commands. Mae lifts her arm, and shows a biceps that many men a third her age might envy. "I've been doing that," she says matter-of-factly, "since I was ten." And, such is her belief in herself, perdurable and everlasting, she will probably still be doing it when she is 110. — Gerald Clarke