Biography: In chapter 18 of Simon Louvish's meticulously researched biography of Mae West, we discover WC Fields musing on the business of defining one's public persona.
"The first thing I remember figuring out for myself was that I wanted to be a definite personality," West's co-star from My Little Chickadee says. "I had heard a man say he liked a certain fellow because he was always the same dirty damn so-and-so."
In the decades before the Actors Studio bamboozled movie stars into thinking they might be human beings, it was commonplace for performers to fashion fantastic identities early on and hide behind them throughout their careers. Sarah Churchwell, in her recent book, The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, wearily points out that many writers still think it clever to drop inverted commas round that star's name when discussing one version of her. Cary Grant, who Louvish claims, contrary to popular belief, was not quite discovered by Mae West, reportedly wished that he too could be - with apologies to Churchwell - this "Cary Grant".
Yet the ornamental carapaces of Grant and Monroe were thin indeed compared with the construction that West built around herself. From her blinding supporting turn in 1932's Night After Night to her experiments in geriatric camp for the 1976 atrocity, Sextette, the Brooklyn battleship managed to conceal any vulnerability behind the persona of a brash, self-confident, endlessly witty sexual libertine. She didn't use the words "come up and see me sometime" in quite that order in She Done Him Wrong (1933), but, once the entreaty was established as her catchphrase, this master publicist made a point of slipping it into virtually every public appearance. She liked to give the impression that she churned out each of her scandalous plays in an afternoon and that those famous one-liners occurred to her spontaneously. But Louvish reveals that hours of late-night labour - ploughing through joke books, drafting and redrafting dialogue - went into the creation of her work.
Grant owned up to not being entirely himself. Entire industries have grown up around the examination of Monroe's various miseries. But Mae West was so assiduous in the maintenance of her formidable image that, even after absorbing more than 400 of Louvish's busy pages, this reader felt no closer to understanding the woman within. Indeed, the author trims away so many myths and rubbishes so many fashionable reinventions that one's initial hazy impression of his subject seems, if anything, further obscured by the book's close.
Louvish is reluctant to fully endorse Mae as an unalloyed champion of African America and its culture. (Some nuttier voices on the internet claim that she was black and others that she was a man, though I have yet to come across anyone arguing that she was both.) Pondering the issue, he quotes dialogue from her plays so racially dubious that it could now not be delivered outside Ku Klux Klan circles.
Similarly, he describes her proto- feminism in pragmatic rather than ideological terms. No man could write the dialogue Mae required, so she was forced to dream it up herself. But she was no gender revolutionary. "Women much prefer to be feminine," she is quoted as remarking. "And don't forget your frills and ruffles and anything else that feminises you."
Nor is Mae's status as an apologist for the gay community beyond challenge. Her early play, The Drag - heavily censored, as was so much of her work - may have featured homosexual characters, but Louvish digs up some terrifyingly severe quotes on the perils same-sex relationships pose to society. "In many ways homosexuality is a danger to the entire social system of western civilisation," she wrote.
Louvish, one of the most learned authorities on pre-war comedy and the author of fine books on the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy and WC Fields, qualifies these myths about West not because he has any beef with voguish identity politics - though I suspect scribblings on such matters may not be to his taste - but because he is fanatically scrupulous in recording only what he knows to be true. Was West really a pioneer in all things inclusive? Let's check the records, he says.
Louvish's caution is the source of the book's greatest strength and its most frustrating weakness. It Ain't No Sin is a mine of information, but is so wary of speculation and analysis that it often reads like a report by some government body.
Drawing on papers from West's personal archive, to which he had extensive access, the author quotes a little too liberally from press books, contemporaneous reviews and official documents. The plot of every film is explained in gruelling detail. The story of West's tussles with the censors is initially fascinating, then becomes a tad repetitive until, as Louvish unearths yet another list of unacceptable phrases and situations, it turns downright boring.
The description of her career displays a reluctance to confirm the most mundane details that one might forgive in a study of the Venerable Bede, but which seems a tad over-careful when examining events in the 20th century. We know she was born as Mary Jane West in Brooklyn on August 17th 1893. She first performed in vaudeville as a teenager and at some stage got hitched to one Frank Wallace, who inconveniently turned up years later when the movie star was presenting herself as unmarried. Her irresistible presence enlivened a handful of delightfully scrappy films in the 1930s before age and fashion caught up with her and she drifted towards spiritualism, wrestlers and Las Vegas. This much, though little more, will Louvish verify.
It also seems certain that in 1980 something happened to finally frustrate her naïve believe that she might be eternal. She died. One wouldn't be surprised to learn that, just to be sure, Simon Louvish had travelled to the Cyprus Hills Cemetery with a shovel.
Donald Clarke writes about film for The Irish Times
Mae West: It Ain't No Sin By Simon Louvish Faber and Faber, 512pp. £20
