In August 2001, one of the best MAE WEST biographies was released: Mae West: An Icon in Black and White — — by Jill Watts [NY: Oxford University Press].• • In November 2001, The London Independent printed a review by critic Julie Wheelwright.
The title of her review is "The sex goddess who understood spin" and here are her comments.
• • • • Julie Wheelwright wrote:
• • BY THE 1930s, Mae West had established her reputation as a sexual liberator and camp vaudeville actress who had conquered Hollywood to star alongside WC Fields, Cary Grant, and Lowell Sherman. But her camping was not confined to the screen. Her black maid Bea Jackson (who doubled as an actress) would conduct visitors into a room emptied of furniture, except for a bed with a mirror emblazoned with the words "Mae West - SEX - Diamond Lil". After a few suspenseful moments, West would appear with one hand on her hip and sway past the visitor to recline on her silken bedspread. Male guests were invited to make themselves comfortable next to her.
• • From the earliest days, when Mae West cut her teeth on the vaudeville circuit in New York's roughest theatres, she understood the rudiments of spin. The new century's saucy sex goddess was born into a working-class Brooklyn family in 1893, in a neighbourhood where her father "Battling Jack" West was a well-known boxer and showman. Her sister remembered that "even as a little girl, Mae's character songs were risque." Through her twenties, Mae West became adept at reinterpreting other artists' acts for a more mainstream audience, and made her name by pushing the envelope of respectability.
• • This new biography argues that West became an icon not only because she plugged into the period's sexual zeitgeist, but because she offered a new interpretation of race. Jill Watts suggests that West's paternal grandfather may have been an African-American, and this could account for the "preoccupation with blackness that eventually dominated her work".
• • Her early novel Babe Gordon (originally entitled Black and White) shockingly featured a white woman who falls in love with an African-American "Apollo"; this stunningly beautiful couple become a magnet for Harlem celebrities. The novel drew on West's experience of downtown dancefloors during the 1920s, when white couples from Manhattan would seek out the exotic experience of shimmying alongside African-Americans. Watts suggests that the novel functioned as a "very personal statement" for West who, a few months before she began writing it, had told a journalist that she was planning an autobiography.
• • West's plays The Drag and SEX also blurred the boundaries between art and reality. The characters discussed transvestism, homosexuality and prostitution, in lines often delivered by West's gay friends. The 10 days she served at the Jefferson Market Women's Prison [sic] after being prosecuted for obscenity in 1927, proved a mine of stories. Watts writes that the experience "returned her to reality, reminding her of the destructiveness of poverty, discrimination, and sexual exploitation of women". The public responded, and although The Drag was forced to close on the grounds of decency, SEX proved extremely popular and ran for several more weeks.
• • Diamond Lil — — her best-known play, and later a Hollywood film — — was also inspired by an authentic New York character. A front-desk manager at a local hotel began reminiscing about his younger days as a police officer in the Bowery district, and about the area's most famous female con artist. The play represented the culmination of the years in which West had crafted her performance. "Lil was a composite of almost all the trends present in the previous 50 years of American popular entertainment — — a pastiche of a Bowery girl, Lillian Russell, George M Cohan, Eva Tanguay, a drag queen, Bert Williams, a shimmy dancer, and a blues singer".
• • Mae West is a fascinating character for contemporary audiences, particularly because her performance was so deeply ironic and sexually playful. But Watts often subjects her to an over-rigorous analysis that takes away from, rather than adds to, an understanding of her life. She regards West's memories of boxing in the ring with her father as tantamount to "abuse", while a family trip to the Coney Island circus becomes "the struggle between animalistic brutality and human intellect".
• • Jill Watt's Mae West may be only for the cogniscenti.
• • Source: Independent Newspapers UK Limited — — www.independent.co.uk
• • Book Reviewer: Julie Wheelwright
• • Published on: 8 November 2001
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
• • Photo: • • Mae West • • 1947 • •
NYC
Mae West.
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