Mae West: An Icon in Black and White.
By Jill Watts.
Oxford University Press; 400 pages; $35 and £25
WHAT do you get if you mix the exuberant and curvaceous Mae West with an analytical professor? Egg on your face is what. As we do here. It is almost impossible for a narrowly correct stance on a most incorrect lady not to be absurd. Indeed, any Mae West biographer starts with a hefty handicap, since there already exists the star's own life-story, “Goodness Had Nothing To Do With It” (Manor Books, 1976), and a dozen other biographies.
Nonetheless, Jill Watts covers some intriguing issues. Did Mae have a black grandfather? Was her mother Jewish? Was Mae a man? Did she have an affair with Marlene Dietrich? And why, when she generously promoted the careers of Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and others, was she so reluctant to speak out against racial intolerance? The answers to the above questions are, in order: probably; probably but by the time she arrived in New York she had reinvented herself as a Lutheran; no; probably not, although she flirted with her; and who knows?
The story of her life takes in Brooklyn, burlesque, Broadway, and ultimately Hollywood, bootleggers and boxers. The constant themes are her battles against the censors—she had a short stint in jail in 1927—her adoption of black culture, jazz, the blues and, especially, the shimmy, her avowed promiscuity set against her childlessness, a loveless marriage to a small-time vaudevillian, and a regular pattern of critical failure followed by huge popular success. Her energy was extraordinary. Besides acting, singing and producing, and those extra-curricular activities which she claimed took up so much of her time, she wrote books and plays and films. In 1949 she was voted equal with Eleanor Roosevelt as “the most famous woman in the world”.
Ms Watts, who teaches history at California State University, takes the interesting view that as a “trickster” and “signifier”, Mae West appropriated black survival characteristics and lived the life of a black woman passing for white. But does this really catch what made her special? More telling, to this reviewer at least, is that, like Marilyn Monroe and Madonna, she was unashamedly working class, and it was this, more than her sex appeal, which endeared her to those who feel themselves to be excluded from American culture.
