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| The myths of Mae – first
lady of Hollywood |
Far from being a dumb blonde bombshell
Mae West was a highly articulate woman and a feminist to boot, writes
Piers Plowright
It AIn’t No Sin by Simon Louvish
Faber and Faber, £20
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Mae West and below with WC Fields in ‘My Little Chickadee’
Piers Plowright
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WHAT is it about Mae West that makes the heart lift?
It’s not just the sexiness, the shoulder-swinging lope, the
drawl – like honey poured through broken glass – the
one-liners. It’s not even the chutzpah, the cheek, the willingness
to take on the men and win. It’s something only the greatest
entertainers have and it amounts – for the audience –
to ‘liberation’.
I remember going with my father to the Hampstead Everyman Cinema
around 1950 to see My Little Chickadee, a piece of Wild West hokum
in which Mae as Flower Belle Lee and WC Fields as Cuthbert J Twillie,
temporary sheriff of Greasewood City, spar, connive, and compete
to take the mask off ‘The Masked Bandit’. It’s
not a great film – ‘a classic among bad movies’,
critic Pauline Kael called it, but as long as those two are on
screen, sheer joy. And Mae West wins on points.
Born Mary Jane West on the August 13 1893 (Mae was to update that
by at least 10 years in one of her many rewritings of her own
history) in Brooklyn to a one-time part Irish prize-fighter and
his fashion conscious German wife, Mae moved through dance-school,
vaudeville, comedy theatre and film to become by 1934 the highest
paid performer in the USA, earning close to $400,000 a year, over
three times as much as Marlene Dietrich.
She stayed at the top for the next 30 years, was never out of
the news and three years before her death in 1980, starred in
the admittedly freakish Sextette, as an 83-year-old vamp, adored
by everybody from Ringo Starr to George Raft. How did she do it?
In this highly entertaining new biography, Marx Brothers and Fields
biographer, Simon Louvish, gives us the fullest answer yet.
Louvish is the first West biographer to have access to Mae’s
recently uncovered personal papers and that allows him to explode
a few old myths and to reveal a lot more about the way she worked.
How hard she worked, to begin with, late into the night on her
scripts and gags – Mae never ad-libbed.
How strongly she could write too, prose as well as one-liners.
On Chicago night-life for example: “Big black men with razor-slashed
faces, fancy high yellows and beginners browns – in the smoke
of gin scented tobacco…got up from the tables, got out to
the dance floor, and stood in one spot, with hardly any movement
of their feet, and just shook their shoulders, torsos, breasts
and pelvises…we thought it was funny…but there was a
naked, aching, sensual agony about it too.”
On the Brooklyn where she was born: “..a city of churches
with their great bronze bells walloping calls to the faithful
from early dawn, and a city of water-front dives where the old
forest of the spars of sailing ships was rapidly being replaced
by funnels and the Sand Street Navy Yard already had a reputation
for girl chasers.”
Or on the jazz she loved: “It suited me – I liked the
beat and the emotions, the low husky blues – the wild shouting
laments of love and pleasure – the sad bounce of lovers and
jazzmen and the music of honkey-tonks and hot spots.”
Here was a highly articulate woman, who came up the hard way,
without a shred of sentimentality, and who wasn’t going to
allow anyone to use her, on-screen or off. A feminist who saw
off male bullies, whether in the courts during one of her several
trials for alleged obscenity, or in the profession, but who loved
men beyond the gags she made about them: “A hard man is good
to find” or “I’d rather have life in my men than
men in my life” and “I don’t expect too much from
a man, just what he’s got.”
This is an unashamedly celebratory biography but not blindly so.
Louvish knows when to take a pinch of salt while guiding us through
Mae’s ‘reinventions’ of herself, and, unlike some
other biographers, he doesn’t believe all the stories. What
he does, is give us a convincing and rounded picture of one of
the 20th century’s greatest and most attractive women.
• Piers Plowright is an award-winning BBC drama and documentary
producer. Documentary-making has earned him three Italia prizes
and several Sony Golds. He lives in Well Walk in Hampstead. |
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