Australian writer Joel Greenberg discusses the last biography of Mae West in this article, "Mae in motion"
[published 21 Jan 2006]:
• • • •
Mae West: It Ain't No Sin • • • •
By Simon Louvish [Faber & Faber, 491pp, 2005]
I ONCE had the opportunity to observe Mae West at close range. At 82, standing beside the 101-year-old Adolph Zukor, founder of Paramount Pictures, she was the main attraction at a 1975 Hollywood studio function marking the end of shooting of a deservedly forgotten film,
Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood. Althoughs eemingly well preserved, her physical components - - hair, eyelashes, teeth, bosom - - looked as though they owed more to art than nature, giving her the appearance of a slightly animated waxwork. Yet this was a woman who had created her own legend, who in her heyday was, as she justly claims in her 1959 memoirs, "the most famous and popular motion picture star in the world". And, she might have added, the most notorious, largely responsible for the 1934 tightening of the Motion Picture Production Code that kept American films straitjacketed in hypocrisy and immaturity for the next 30-odd years.
• • As Simon Louvish points out in this latest biography, West's career as an important movie star was quite brief (1932-37) and began when she was in her 40s, having been preceded by years of trouping in vaudeville and burlesque and on the legitimate stage.
• • What Louvish
fails to mention is that she was
half-Jewish and thus part of that extraordinary generation of American entertainers who came to prominence in early 20th-century New York and included Sophie Tucker, Fanny Brice, George Burns, and the Marx Brothers.
• • Born in 1893 and debuting on stage in 1911, West took some time to develop her unique persona, modelled in part on such stars as Eva Tanguay but with an in-your-face sexuality all her own. By the time she'd written and starred in such plays as
Sex and
Diamond Lil, and served eight days of a 10-day jail sentence for obscenity in 1927, she'd perfected the slow libidinous drawl, sensual slouch and suggestive double-entendre repartee that became her trademarks.
• • The amazing makeover job done on her appearance by Paramount when she entered films in 1932 transformed what Louvish aptly calls "a somewhat dumpy, short and almost nondescript figure" into a platinum-blonde glamour queen, banishing her double chin, downplaying her generous physical proportions and concealing her unlovely legs beneath floor-length gowns.
• • An instant screen hit, West was by 1934 America's highest-paid performer, earning $US399,166 a year, with her films, most of which she also wrote or co-wrote, box office smashes everywhere.
• • Today, like those of her contemporaries Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich, they've achieved a fresh lease of life on DVD, their pictorial beauty stunningly restored.
• • West was more than just a movie star, however. A pioneer women's liberationist, she defiantly asserted their claim to sexual equality with men, proclaiming in her memoirs: "The one departure I have made from the average citizen's way of life has been personal and sexual, and here I have only done openly what comes naturally; I have never felt myself a sinner, or committed what I would call sin." For her, the double standard, not sex, was the real obscenity.
• • Her film vogue more or less over by the 1940s, West dabbled in spiritualism and invested shrewdly in property, furs, and jewels. She also resumed her stage career with a successful revival of
Diamond Lil and an idiosyncratic Westian take on Catherine the Great. Following the example of Dietrich, she debuted in Las Vegas in 1954 with a chorus-line of muscle-men, an act she subsequently toured throughout the US.
• • She did appear in two more films before her death at 87 in 1980, the bizarre
Myra Breckinridge (1970) and the inept
Sextette (1976), but by then she had become grotesque, a campy joke.
• • Louvish has had the advantage of
access to a recently opened archive of West memorabilia held at Los Angeles' Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which includes manuscripts of her plays, some previously unknown, and 2000 pages of jokes she assiduously collected for future use (many of
her most celebrated quips were not strictly original).
• • While these documents help Louvish flesh out his portrait, they ultimately add little to what we already know. For me, the best Mae West biography remains Maurice Leonard's 1991
Empress of Sex.
• • "Mae in Motion"
• • by: Joel Greenberg
• • © The Australian 21 Jan 2006
- - - From http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/ - - - ________________________________
Source:http://maewest.blogspot.com/atom.xml
Mae West• • Photo: Mae West
NYCMae West.
