Playing sex for laughs
Richard Shone
MAE WEST: IT AIN’T NO SIN by Simon Louvish Faber, £20, pp. 356, ISBN 0571219489 ✆ £16 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Hollywood biographies are invariably indigestible slabs of cake, their chief ingredients being tedium, titillation and triviality, the icing flushed pink from the author’s hatchetry or hagiography and the reader’s blush of embarrassment. The star in question usually sinks under the sheer availability of detail. In this vein there have been a number of studies of Mae West, but this latest biography is well-researched, decently written and does not gush. Simon Louvish takes nothing on trust, questioning all Mae West’s and others’ accounts of her life, and arrives, give or take a few longueurs, at a compelling narrative.
There is, however, one difficult problem in writing this great star’s life. Her best films were all squeezed into the years 1933-37, the period in which she became internationally famous. This is an almost indecently short span in a long life (1893-1980). Until the 1930s, she was a hard-working, bump-andgrind vaudeville actress on Broadway and in touring companies. Although press-cuttings abound for this pre-Hollywood stretch of her professional career, there is scant information on her personal life (a very brief marriage came back to haunt her in her years of stardom).
After the late 1930s, there is a long decline into an old age of increasingly toe-curling cabaret appearances and her final apotheosis as an icon of camp in which armour-plated artifice hid whatever thoughts and feelings lay behind the wigs, eyelashes and slap. A biographer has to make the best of this sandwich and, rightly, Louvish restrains himself either side of the tasty filling on which he lavishes most attention.
When people complain, as they do, that they don’t find Mae West sexy or alluring, they’ve missed the point. True, she was no great beauty, no femme fatale, not even a girl next door. But through the utmost contrivance and a bookful of beauty tips, she managed to suggest sexiness while at the same time, in her demeanour and double entendres, making fun of it. She played sex for laughs while at the same time intimating she enjoyed it. This mixture of comedy and sexual frankness was something quite new in films and something she made entirely her own.
Although it has long been known that Mae West was a prolific writer, Louvish emphasises quite how much she wrote novels, plays and film scripts, as well as copious notes of dialogue and one-liners (nothing with Mae was spontaneous). The themes of her otherwise creakily plotted plays were startling for their time: transvestism, homosexuality and interracial liaisons. Famously, her 1926 play Sex, which ran to capacity houses at Daly’s Theatre on 63rd Street, earned her a wellpublicised eight days in prison on Welfare Island for ‘corrupting the morals of youth’; in several countries her novel The Constant Sinner was banned; and her name was taken off the airwaves by NBC Radio. When she finally made it to Hollywood, the censors on the notorious Hays Committee hounded her and her producers at Paramount studios. (‘Page B-28: Ruby’s line “Don’t try to get to heaven in one night” should be deleted’ is one example of hundreds of expurgations.) But she was peerless at investing an often innocent-sounding quip with the bluest of linings. ‘It isn’t what I do but how I do it,’ she would say with her Brooklyn purr. ‘It isn’t what I say but how I say it, and how I look when I do it and say it,’ an explanation that seems a cross between a Marie Lloyd song and a page of Gertrude Stein. The public loved her outspokenness, raunchiness and outrageous costumes, her two-toned repartee and her guying of (male) hypocrisies and authority. She had her critics, of course, and small-town America wasn’t always welcoming. But it paid off. In 1934 she earned just under $400,000, more than any other performer in the USA.
Her best films — like her men — came in quick succession: Night After Night (with George Raft), She Done Him Wrong (which launched Cary Grant), I’m No Angel (again with Grant and perhaps the best of all with many great lines — ‘Peel me a grape!’ being the best-known — and the immortal scene of Mae in the courtroom defending herself: ‘How’m I doin’, Judge?’), Belle of the Nineties (for which Mae had to fight Paramount for the hiring of Duke Ellington and his orchestra to accompany her in ‘My old flame/I can’t even think of his name’, the finest song she ever recorded), Goin’ to Town (with seven leading men, profligate even for Mae) and Klondike Annie of 1936, heavily cut (the song ‘I Hear You Knocking But You Can’t Come In’ was dropped by the censor) but with some of her funniest lines and an extravagant Sino-Hollywood-Baroque set for the number ‘I’m an occidental woman in an oriental mood for love’). Later, Go West, Young Man was disappointing, but the 1940 My Little Chickadee with W.C. Fields in which the two stars, for their scenes together, were separately filmed, has its classic Mae-moments. Louvish, with unpublished letters from Fields to West, explodes the myth that the two performers loathed each other.
Thereafter, the heat was definitely off. There were some rather grisly come-backs (not a word that Miss West would have used however), especially the disastrous Myra Breckinridge, cabaret turns with gleaming beefcake in tow, television appearances, and her famously rehearsed interviews which have their amusement and a sort of uncommon common-sense about life, even though wrapped up in the inanities of a self-obsessed octogenarian in a pink-and-white apartment, living light years from reality. Mae West’s career was a triumph of style and chutzpah over the odds stacked against her. From day one she knew just how to deal with any situation to her best advantage (‘A dame that knows the ropes isn’t likely to get tied up’). In her eighties at an awards party in Hollywood, she was fêted but too far gone by then to enter into any rational conversation. To everyone who was brought up to her to pay homage, she chose the same all-purpose rejoinder, whispering in their ear, ‘Lurved your movie.’ To judge from the reactions to the recent Mae West fest at the National Film Theatre, we still love hers.
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