When Mary Jane West, later the stage and film star Mae West (1893-1980), was growing up in Brooklyn and Queens she was known as “the German girl.” Her mother, Mathilde/Matilda West (née Delker), had been born on 8 December 1870, probably in the Kingdom of Württemberg, now part of the state of Baden-Württemberg in Germany. Known as “Tillie” to friends and family, Matilda had to learn English, which she spoke with a German accent since arriving in the US in 1882 with her mother and five siblings. Tillie’s German father (Mae’s maternal grandfather), Jacob Delker, had come to New York a year earlier.

Brooklyn-born Mary Jane “Mae” West always carefully controlled the mythology of her life story, including her age, her marital status, and her parents’ background. West embellished her autobiography with versions of her life in that did not always reflect reality. This is one reason why many aspects of Mae West’s ancestry are unclear or even conflicting. West claimed that her maternal grandmother Christiana had French/Alsatian roots, and her maiden name was French-sounding Brimier. But Christiana’s maiden name is also recorded as Brüning. Mae West even claimed some Jewish background, despite baptismal records verifying that the Delkers, her mother’s family, were German Lutherans, as they declared upon their arrival in the New World.

Mae West wrote and was credited with the screenplay for the 1936 Paramount film GO WEST YOUNG MAN, in which she co-starred with Randolph Scott and Warren William. Directed by Henry Hathaway, the film’s camerawork was done by the New York City-born German-Jewish cinematographer Karl Struss (1886-1981). Besides the screenplay, West had much more say in the production than was normally the case for film stars at the time. PHOTO: Paramount publicity photo

Conflicting Information
Some books and online sources about Mae West (including Find A Grave and Wikipedia) offer inaccurate information about the Delker family, in part caused by Mae West’s own fanciful and misleading claims in her autobiography and interviews. But the confusion is also the result of people not doing adequate research. A prime example of this confusion originated with West’s claim that the Delkers were related to the well-known, much more prosperous beer-brewing dynasty of Peter Doelger (Dölger). According to Mae West, her branch of the Doelgers changed their name to Delker when they left what is now Germany.

Mae West’s signature line, which she first uttered as the character Lady Lou in the 1933 film She Done Him Wrong, eventually became, “Come up and see me sometime.” But the famous quote actually began as, “Why don’t you come up some time and see me?”

However, available ancestral information indicates that the Delkers never changed their family name. After arriving in the US, they simply kept the last name that they had had in Europe. While Delker is not a very common German surname, it is still found in Germany today, primarily in North Rhine Westphalia, Baden-Württemberg, and Bavaria. (A web search in German for “Nachname Delker” or “Dölger” will discover many people and companies in Germany with both of those surnames.)

But the official website of the Bavarian town of Kleinwallstadt repeats the false story of the Dölger/Mae West connection, tying native son and beer-brewer Johann Adam Dölger and his sons to Mae West. This is how the story goes:

In the 1840s, Johann Adam Dölger (b. 1795) was the proprietor of the Gasthaus zur Traube (roughly “Grapevine Pub”) in Kleinwallstadt. (Fact: This historic establishment once had its own small brewery, and remained continuously in business from the 1840s until 2015!) Due to turbulent times, four of Adam’s seven sons left Bavaria to find better opportunities in the New World. The four Dölger brothers ended up in New York to try their luck in the German district (Kleindeutschland) there. Two of the brothers, Joseph (1819-1882) and Peter Dölger were very successful entrepreneurs, becoming millionaires through beer-brewing, real estate, and investments. The American dream!

In this telling, Josef Dölger (Joseph Doelger in the US), the eldest brother, married and had two sons and a daughter. One of his sons, Jacob Dölger, married Christiana Brimier in New York and had six children with her. One of those children was a daughter named Matilda Dölger, who married John Patrick West. Out of that marriage came a daughter named Mary Jane West, later known as the famous stage and film star Mae West.

Or so the story goes. On Kleinwallstadt’s official website (as of August 2024), and elsewhere in similar versions. There’s only one problem: It’s simply not true.

“When I’m good, I’m very good. But when I’m bad, I’m better.”
– I’m No Angel (1933)

Yes, the part about Peter Doelger being a beer-brewing, real estate millionaire in Brooklyn is true. But Mae West’s mother, Matilda Delker, was born in 1870 in German-speaking Europe, not in the US. Peter Doelger (1832-1912), not Josef, did have a daughter named Mathilde, but she was born in 1875 in the US. The Dölgers were Bavarian Catholics; the Delkers were Protestants (Lutherans) from Württemberg.

An 1880 advertisement for “Peter Doelger’s First Prize Lager Beer.” Doelger, a Roman Catholic from Kleinwallstadt in northern Bavaria, made his fortune brewing German-style beer in Brooklyn’s “Kleindeutschland” German district. He became a millionaire and built a huge four-story red-brick mansion (no longer extant) on Riverside Drive at 100th Street in Manhattan. In May 1898 the wedding of Peter Doelger’s US-born daughter Mathilde to Adolph Hupfel, the son of another wealthy German brewer, was celebrated inside the mansion. Doelger and his eight children (with two wives) were often in the local society pages. Doelger’s son, Peter Jr., took over the brewery in the early 1900s. It is highly unlikely that he and his family were related to Mae West. PHOTO: taverntrove.com

The supposed Doelger/Delker connections (and confusion) arose because of Mae West’s desire to “upgrade” her family’s status. She herself claimed to be related to the Doelgers, without offering any proof. Besides claiming that her grandfather Jacob Delker was a cousin of Peter Doelger, in later years Mae West also publicly claimed that she and Henry Doelger, a San Francisco developer and Peter Doelger’s nephew, were cousins.

But Mae West is an unreliable source of information about her heritage. In her 1959 memoir, Goodness Had Nothing to Do With It, Mae West claimed her mother was born in Bavaria, “in a town near the elf-filled Black Forest.” She didn’t bother to name the town, but the Black Forest mountain range and region is located in Baden-Württemberg, in southwest Germany, not in Bavaria. And Mae actually made the case for Württemberg herself, when she wrote in her memoir: “My [maternal] grandfather, before coming to America with his family, had been a chemical engineer in a sugar refinery in Württemberg. There he married my grandmother, Christina Mosha (sic)”. In fact her grandmother’s name was Christiana Brüning. It’s unclear where the surname Mosha came from.

Sugar refining, from sugar beets (Zuckerrüben), is still an important industry in the present-day German state of Baden-Württemberg, as well as in other parts of Germany. Today’s Südzucker AG (“South Sugar, Inc.”) has a long history. The company was established in 1926 by merging five regional sugar refineries in Baden and Württemberg that dated back to the 1830s and 1850s. It is entirely possible that Jacob Delker, Mae West’s German grandfather, could have worked for one of those firms in the Stuttgart/Heilbronn region. Since Jacob was born in Württemberg, and he and Christiana were married there, it is very likely that Mae West’s mother was also born there, not in Bavaria.

No Proof of Any Real Delker/Doelger Connection
As far as I am aware, there has never been any documented proof that the Delkers and Doelgers were related in any way. Mae West is the only one who claimed there was a connection, but most West biographers have been doubtful. The better ones have tended to dismiss or minimize the Doelger connection. The two families are more like the Prince and the Pauper, with the wealthy Doelgers and the poor Delkers. The two families certainly never moved in the same social circles.

A well-written, well-referenced 2018 online article by Novelty Theater (noveltytheater.com) about several Delker/Doelger myths thoroughly debunks Mae West’s claims of a relationship between her family and the Doelger beer dynasty family. The author writes: “…although they shared German ancestry, the Doelgers and Delkers appear to have been from different social, geographic and cultural spheres there, with the former being Bavarian Catholics, the latter Lutherans from Württemberg.”

The marriage certificate for Mae’s parents bears only the names of Matilda Delker and John West – no Doelger. And no one seems to have asked the obvious question: If the Bavarian Dölgers from Kleinwallstadt left their name untouched in New York (except for dropping the umlaut in their name: Doelger), why would the supposed Dölgers from Württemberg have changed their name to Delker? It’s just not logical. And the claim that the alleged Württemberg Dölgers accidentally had their name changed to Delker by US immigration officials seems less likely in light of the fact that all four Bavarian Dölger brothers, arriving on two different dates, managed to keep their surname unchanged.

Mae West plays the saloon singer Lady Lou in SHE DONE HIM WRONG (1933) with Cary Grant and Gilbert Roland. Her claim to have discovered Grant wasn’t true. He had appeared earlier in BLONDE VENUS (1932) with Marlene Dietrich. PHOTO: Paramount publicity still

Mae West’s Legacy

The Trailblazer
Mae West was a woman ahead of her time. She was a sex symbol who was also a feminist and women’s liber in the 1920s and 1930s. Following a successful stage career, she went to California to begin work in motion pictures in 1930. At the height of her film career, in 1935, West was the highest paid woman in the US. Newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst was said to be the highest paid man. Hearst disapproved of West on moral grounds, and once editorialized: “Can’t something be done about Mae West [by Congress]?” Hearst also forbade any mention of West’s 1936 film Klondike Annie in his newspapers.

“I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.”
– interview in Life magazine (18 April 1969)

She enjoyed greater success with her pre-Code movies, quipping: “I believe in censorship. After all, I made a fortune out of it.” But the arrival of stricter Hays Code enforcement limited West’s witty and ribald dialogue and one-liners. Her films became less funny and less entertaining. Paramount, the studio she is credited with saving in the early 1930s, decided in the end that she was too much trouble. When she turned to radio (with the “dummy” Charlie McCarthy), she again ran up against the censors. But she made a few more movies for other studios, including My Little Chickadee (1940) with W.C. Fields, for Universal Pictures.

Family
Mae and her mother Tillie had always been close. When Tillie died in 1930, Mae was devastated. But she headed to Hollywood. Family was always important to her, and when her sister, brother, and father followed her to Hollywood, she provided them with homes, jobs, and occasional financial support.

Private Life
Even away from the limelight, Mae West also showed her open, independent side. During her entire time in Hollywood she lived in an apartment house in Hollywood, an Art Deco building called the Ravenswood on North Rossmore Avenue. (It’s still there.) She was renting the penthouse when she began a relationship with a Black boxer named William “Gorilla” Jones, whom she considered a close friend. When the Ravenswood management barred Jones from entering the premises, West bought the entire building. Mae also employed Black actors in her films, and saw that they were credited for their work.

“Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?”
– Sextette (1977)

Her longtime friend, confidant, and former lover James Timony also lived at the Ravenswood. He cared for Mae up until his death in 1954. After that, when she was 61, West became involved with Chester Rybinski (1923–1999), a muscle man in the cast of her Las Vegas stage show. Rybinski later changed his name to Paul Novak, and although he was 30 years younger than West, he moved in with her. Although they never married, they were like husband and wife. Novak was very devoted to West, and he even made her funeral arrangements when she died in 1980 at age 87. He once commented: “I believe I was put on this Earth to take care of Mae West.”

The “Mae West” Life Jacket
During World War II, Allied sailors and pilots called their inflatable life jackets “Mae Wests” in honor of West’s ample bust line. The first inflatable life preserver was invented in 1928 (US Patent 1694714) by Peter Markus (1885–1974), with subsequent improvements in 1930 and 1931. The Mae West life vest is credited with saving the lives of many servicemen during the war. Markus’s design, with a neck collar and front flotation, was a significant improvement over earlier devices in that it helped prevent an unconscious person’s head from aligning facedown in the water.

The Mae West Sculpture in Munich
Yet another, newer Mae West naming honor took place in Munich, Germany when an artistic competition for a new sculpture at a key intersection (Effnerplatz/Effner Square) resulted in the selection of a design by the American sculptor Rita McBride. Her 52-meter-tall (171 ft) carbon fiber reinforced polymer hyperboloid structure was completed in 2011, and now stands above the Effner Tunnel and a tram line in Munich’s Bogenhausen district. (See this German Way Facebook Page for a photo and info.) The designer proposed the “Mae West” name in a tribute to West’s famous hourglass figure and the corset-like shape of the sculpture. I’m sure Mae West would approve of the honor.

– HF

Also see our Notable German Americans pages for many more famous and not-so-famous German Americans.