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Review by Tom Shone The Sunday Times November 6 2005
Mae West’s reputation will never be the same again. There we were, thinking of her as the goddess of gyrating libidinousness, snacking on men like peanuts, and all the while her truly shocking secret lay simpering in the back of her bedroom. Make your way past the alabaster nudes and sepia prints of West in better days; step over the polar bear shagpile rug, and into the salmon-pink inner sanctum of her boudoir, and what would you find? West hard at work over a typewriter.
This was “Mae West’s great secret”, writes Simon Louvish, in his splendid biography: “that she went home to her apartment or hotel room at night and wrote”. Come up and see her sometime, and you would discover nothing more x-rated than West polishing her adverbs. In all, she wrote 12 plays, and three novels, not to mention the 20,000-plus bon mots in her joke-book, honed assiduously over four decades, and that she sprinkled over every film she was in, like confetti. Give a part in a movie to West and you also had to find supporting roles for West’s one-liners, crisp with sex-war sagacity: “A hard man is good to find”, “It isn’t the men in my life, it’s the life in my men” and so on. Hollywood’s first sex symbol (or “sex personality” as the Boston Herald quaintly put it) caused riots wherever she went.
In Hartford, in 1938, “Mae West Safe Driving Week” was disrupted when 30,000 fans flooded the streets, although it was really in the bedroom that DeMillean skills of crowd control were called for. Louvish keeps track of West’s conquests like a man racing mice: an accordionist, a xylophone player, a Frenchman named Dinjo with with whom she coupled 26 times in one night: “the results were like a high-speed film, blurred but exciting”. None of these men, he notes, was permitted to stay the night. Only her pet monkey Boogie got to share West’s breakfast table and, despite one short-lived marriage, she died childless, having put sex to every possible purpose except the one for which it was intended.
The closest West came to procreation was, it seems, the medical textbook she pored over with a friend, aged seven, when growing up in Brooklyn: “I had a funny feeling about my parents,” she remembered. “A peculiar feeling — disgust you might say. It took me a long time to get over it. They suddenly weren’t gods anymore.” A long time, indeed. That godlike tumble from grace is one she would replay again and again in her career, flushing society’s dirty little secret out into the open, and using sex as the great leveller. “I’m going to dig under your supposed respectability and show you who you are,” says a docklands prostitute to a society dame in West’s play Sex (1925), with which she kick-started her career. The play was shut down for indecency, and landed West in the slammer for eight days — the first of her energetic bouts of fisticuffs with the guardians of American decency. “I enjoyed the courtroom as any other stage,” she quipped.
Her first film, She Done Him Wrong, had the Hays Office crawling all over it; the film regulators cut 100ft of film out of her song I Like a Guy What Takes His Time — a considerable blow to the man’s prowess, one would have thought — and hacked away at most of West’s lines, but the result was to concentrate her oozing licentiousness even more: denied its obvious berths, it simply took up residence in the body language between her and Cary Grant, in the languid glances and pauses of their conversation, and in such seemingly innocuous phrases as “Why doncha come up and see me?”, “Do you get me?” and “You can be had.”
These days, of course, the true purpose of the Hays Office is known to all. At the time, they saw it as their God-given duty to keep America’s morals intact and save the nation from mortal sin. Now, it is clear that their real function was to provide comic relief for Hollywood biographies in the many decades to come. One of their best gags here involves a series of ever-more earnest communiqués about the song Pom Tiddley Om Pom, in Belle of the Nineties, whose acceptability “will depend almost entirely upon the manner in which the song is sung and the action accompanying the music”.
In a sense, they were quite right: they could hack away at one-linersall they wanted, but the most suggestive thing about West was the way she moved: undulating across the screen as if she were being poured into the room, or sashaying back and forth when she was supposed to be standing still, ike an idling motor. “In order to play this shady character and keep the sympathy of the audience there’s one thing I must have — dignity,” said West. Louvish’s biography allows her to keep that dignity at all times, even when she seems most in danger of losing it.
There is certainly room for horror when contemplating West’s later career, which was as tawdry as it gets: an appearance opposite Ed the Talking Horse, a film with Ringo Starr, an inevitable Vegas Comeback Tour, featuring gyrating “athletes” in loincloths and hosted by Liberace. But Louvish ploughs through it all, refusing the temptations of camp-critical reclamation, and rather paying tribute to the sheer steamship momentum of this woman. You have to hand it to someone who can step from a limo wearing a diamond- studded dress, two lavender orchids on her lapel, draped in “a white cape of close-clipped fur, as if an albino calf had made the ultimate sacrifice”. West was turning up for a court deposition.
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