Becoming Mae West.

Sexy Mae wiggles her way into history

Emily Wortis Leider's Becoming Mae West (Farrar Straus Giroux, 431 pp.) would have been better titled "Being Mae West." For the heroine of this somewhat distant biography seems to exist in a determined present tense. Mae West is. Even during her early career in vaudeville, she bears a finished personality, and it is that carries her through a career that climaxes on screen, with films like She Done Him Wrong and I'm No Angel. She forges a trail for herself, with her own sensuality, wit and earthy aggressiveness as her only compass points.

West, a keen and devoted self-observer, was aware of this phenomenon. In a Philadelphia vaudeville appearance, she sang a song called "I've Got a Style All My Own" and then told the audience that "It isn't what you do, it's how you do it." She was a member of that club of celebrities who are famous less for the strength of a particular talent - singing, dancing, acting - than for an ineffable quality basic to themselves.

West hit vaudeville stages in the decade just before the Roaring '20s, at a time when, as one journalist put it, "sex o'clock" was dawning in America. West's shimmy dances and innuendo fit in perfectly, according to the biographer, with this climate of (fettered) sexiness. A certain subtlety crept into West's act because she was, even at this early stage, subjected to censorship by the managers of the Keith circuit, a censorship that prefigured later problems in the movie phase of her career. Objection to the words she could say and the lyrics she could sing encouraged a tendency toward hidden humor and the use of body language.

When World War I hit, Leider states, American society turned away from European culture and acquired a taste for homegrown entertainment - another trend that perfectly suited West, who was born in Brooklyn, spoke a wisecracking vernacular and associated with working-class people and tough boxer/gangster types both on stage and off. After the war, people wanted fun and entertainment, the author asserts, and again West fit the bill. During the Depression, West's physical fullness was comforting, as was her personification of a strong, confident woman.

In fact, no matter what the historical trend, Leider manages to connect it with West.This is one of the weaknesses of the book, which contains pages of exposition on vaudeville, on historical events, on contemporaries of West. The chapters on West's childhood feature speculation and mildly cloying fictionalization. At times the book feels as padded as West's costumes for the hit play Diamond Lil, in which she played a voluptuous 1890s belle. It all seems very distant, as though the biographer has very little personal knowledge of her subject and has to substitute whatever filler she can.

On the positive side, West's cleverness shines through, as do her eccentricities. Although not the most educated of women, West comes up with unforgettable lines like "Beulah, peel me a grape" and "Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?" Or the brilliant exchange in I'm No Angel: Cary Grant says, "I wish I could trust you" and she responds, "Hundreds have." Or the poignant beauty from West's novel The Constant Sinner. "There are women who live a normal, conventional sex life and enter into marriage and motherhood.And then there are women so formed in body and mind that they are predestined to be daughters of joy" West captures herself and her image with a perfection that escapes her luckless biographer.

Of course, this line may not be entirely West's. She had a tradition throughout her career of demanding, and stealing, writing credits from others, often paying the writers to remove their names from productions that she felt must be wholly hers. Beneath her swagger, there must have been insecurity, because what was initially an astuteness in steering her career in the right direction eventually developed into the bizarrely demanding traits of a diva. West insisted that the characters she played must always be pursued by and triumphant over men. She avoided roles in which her character was only focus of attention; Cary Grant, who starred with her in I'm No Angel and She Done Him Wrong, said that when she was in a production every other actor became "just a feeder." She refused from her early vaudeville days to appear with attractive young women, particularly other blondes. She chose Victor McLaglen to appear opposite her in the movie Klondike Annie in part because he was big and heavy and would make her look thinner. In productions of Diamond Lil, she made the other actresses darken their teeth so that her smile would appear brightest. And, most wonderfully, during the shooting of Go West, Young Man, she made tall co-star Randolph Scott stand in a hole while filming scenes with her.

While West was imposing these strange strictures on those around her, worse limitations were being placed on her. Censorship plagued her, eventually weakening her confidence in her tried and true sexual persona, even though the publicity and the aura of illicit pleasure that the censorship conferred probably did as much for her career as she herself did. In response to criticism of the homosexual themes in 1927's The Drag (a play West wrote but did not star in), a group of managers, actors, authors and representatives of Equity and the Theatre Guild refused to allow the play to open on Broadway. Shortly afterward, West and the cast of her play Sex were arrested for indecency. West and two others were fined and sentenced to 10 days in jail. In 1928 West was arrested again for Pleasure Man, a play produced by but not starring her; a long trial ended in a hung jury. When West hit Hollywood, her movies were subjected to special scrutiny by the Hays Office, the Production Code Administration and the Legion of Decency. Words, songs and situations that all seem amazingly mild today were cut from West's films. Excisions ranged from words like "punk" and "jeez" to the Hays Office's racist demand that no blacks appear in scenes with West in Go West, Young Man. At times it seems that more was cut from her movies than remained; one wonders wistfully what a real West film would have looked like. As the biographer says, West was laundered in Clorox bleach.

In what would be a painful blow to any actor, the Production Code Administration ruled in the mid-1930s that She Done Him Wrong and I'm No Angel could never be shown again. The two films did not resurface until the late 1960s, when America had loosened.

The arc of Mae West's star marked the changing course of America's celebration and condemnation of sex. When the country was in the mood to revere pleasure, West was up. When the U.S. succumbed to the voice of its Puritan ancestry and rejected sex as immoral, her fame fell... to be rediscovered by subsequent, hedonistic generations.