Reviewing Simon Louvish's recent tome on
MAE WEST for
The New York Times, critic Richard Schickel seems friendlier the second time around. Though Schickel's peppery review of Louvish's biography of W.C. Fields [in 1997] branded him as "a writer of astonishing ineptitude," on this occasion he finds more fault with the star than the men who scribble books about her.
The New York Times published this critique on 3 December 2006.
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No Angel • •
• • By RICHARD SCHICKEL • •
• • A surprising number of essentially affectless people — George Raft, Richard Dix, Nelson Eddy, to name but a few old-timers — have been movie stars. Or at any rate, so proclaimed by Hollywood, at least for a moment. These are triumphs of good looks over good sense, for generally speaking, handsome blankness leads, sooner rather than later, to B pictures, television guest shots and an inevitable drift out of all but the most cultish of consciousnesses.
• • Adding Mae West to that all-male list may seem rather dubious. But as early as 1934 a writer named George Davis called her the greatest female impersonator of all time — an identification that, in all the better critical circles, has forever clung to her — so it is probably O.K. to lump her in with the boys. In all other respects, her ability to push you out of a movie, rather than to welcome you into it, remains virtually unparalleled.
• • Mae West had a very short movie career. She made her first picture, with — yes! — George Raft, in 1932, and emerged as major box office phenomenon the following year, with “She Done Him Wrong” and “I’m No Angel.” But her appeal waned quickly after that, and by 1938 one columnist labeled her “poison at the box office.” Even though West made her best film, “My Little Chickadee,” opposite W. C. Fields, in 1940, she was finished as a movie star — if not as a curiosity. For the next 40 years, she tended her legend, touring in plays, writing some books, and, in the ’70s, appearing in two increasingly ludicrous movies, while endlessly granting interviews that recycled her old double-entendres and stressed charms that she alone was certain remained ageless — a grotesque icon, with a leftover life to kill.
• • But there had always been something decidedly weird about her, beginning with her appearance. “She is a large, soft, flabby and billowing super blonde who talks through her nostrils and whose laborious ambulations suggest that she has sore feet,” a critic wrote in 1931. More kindly, at the outset of her fame, one might say she was an anachronism, a Gay Nineties gal plunked down in the Flapper Age. But that was not the essence of her problem. As Simon Louvish writes in “Mae West: It Ain’t No Sin,” his demonically researched biography, “the main, supreme object of the adoration and love of Mae West was herself” and as West herself admitted, “I never loved another person the way I loved myself.” In short, it was her narcissism — her inability to relate to anyone in any intimately persuasive way — that so quickly destroyed her screen career.
• • The character she created was completely of her own devising. Even the industrious Louvish cannot find anyone else who significantly aided her in its creation. Somehow, in the course of two decades of largely inconsequential vaudeville trouping, the Brooklyn-born and sketchily educated West made herself into a playwright, devoutly scribbling (and occasionally filching) her one-liners and crafting the primitive narratives in which they were embedded. However lumbering the results — it is hard to find in these pages many kindly notices for her efforts — she did create a unique (and, to me) unconsciously monstrous figure only she could play. There was something mannish in her pro forma pursuit of mechanistic and, if possible, nonstop sex, but the suggestiveness of her one-liners was also a dour commentary on the female’s (at that time) unspoken sexual needs. They were never an invitation to make their satisfaction a mutually playful pleasure; there was always, I thought, something grim about going up to see her sometime. This scarcely makes West the heroine some feminists have tried to make her. Nor were her jokes quite the blatant challenge to morality the censors thought they were. Never “dirty,” they were merely suggestive.
• • Still, once New York’s puritans busted “Sex,” her first dramatic effort, on a morals charge in 1927 (she served 10 days [
sic] on Welfare Island for writing it) she was forever trapped in her self-creation, forever sui generis. “Diamond Lil,” one year later, was another hit, and soon she was in Hollywood. At first, she was lucky in her timing. The immobile cameras and microphones of the early sound era locked everyone down and West’s stasis did not seem exceptional. More significantly, the censors of the Motion Picture Production Code fought West’s scripts for her first two films almost line by line, but innuendo is ever a slippery target and so are line readings. Enough got through to make Mae seem more transgressive than she actually was.
• • Some historians have suggested that her movie career declined so quickly because the film production code’s censors started to more rigorously enforce its many inane provisions in 1934 (why in the world was the word “bedbug” banned from the screen?). But by that time the movies were starting to move again, an art West never mastered. When she sang her racy songs, she tended to stand stock still and almost expressionless. When she danced, she wiggled her hips a bit, but was scarcely a female Astaire. Worst of all for her, the new movie age created a new feminine ideal: the crisp, brisk, slender women of the 1930s’ most seductive genre, romantic comedy. Claudette Colbert, Irene Dunne, Barbara Stanwyck, Myrna Loy — these women, in their sharply tailored suits were capable of trading sharply tailored quips on an equal basis with men. In West’s movies — most charitably understood as one-woman shows supported by a few dispensable stooges — the men stood around feeding her lines and awaiting her zingers. Even Cary Grant, not yet the sublime actor he would soon become, was reduced to polite puzzlement in her presence. Only Fields, a much greater self-creation, drew her into a little banter, but “Chickadee” was too little, too late.
• • Louvish does his best to explore the enigma of West’s true sexual nature, but he never quite gets at the reality behind the drawling invitations. There were, to twist one of her more famous aperçus, men in West’s life, but not much life in her men. She evinced no grand or even discernible passion for any of them, nor they for her, and Louvish often seems to wonder if they ever actually made it into the bedroom.
• • It’s interesting to observe that the same 1932 column that called West box office poison also included three other androgynes: Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo and Katharine Hepburn. Their legends, and to a greater or lesser degree, their immediate careers, recovered from the blow. West’s did not. That may be because the other women all had authentic, if not necessarily commonplace, sexual energy, whereas, on Louvish’s evidence, West was pretty much a peeled grape. Which is also — despite the author’s enthusiastic efforts on her behalf — her status in film (and social) history.
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• • Richard Schickel’s “Elia Kazan: A Biography” was just reprinted in paperback.
• • Published: December 3, 2006
• • Source: The New York Times
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West• • Photo: Mae West • • 1938 • •
NYCMae West.
