Bibliography
Bavar, M. 1975 Mae West. New York, NY: Pyramid Publications
Curry, R. 1996. Too Much of a Good Thing: Mae West as Cultural Icon. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Eells, G. and Musgrove, S. 1982. Mae West . New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1982.
Hamilton, M. 1995. When I'm Bad, I'm Better: Mae West, Sex, and Entertainment. New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers, Inc.
Leonard, M. 1991. Mae West: Empress of Sex. New York: Birchlane Press.
Miller, F. 1994. Censored Hollywood: Sex, Sin, & Violence on Screen. Atlanta: Turner Publishing, Inc., 1994.
Reitz, R. 1987. Mae West, "Queen of Sex," Sings Sultry Songs, liner notes to CD of same name, Rosetta Records, RRCD 1315, New York.
Schlissel, L. 1997. Three Plays by Mae West, including "Sex," "The Drag" and "The Pleasure Man." New York: Routledge.
Sochen, J. 1992. Mae West: She Who Laughs, Lasts. Arlington Heights, Illinois: Harlan Davidson, Inc.
Tuska, J. 1992. The Complete Films of Mae West . New York: Citadel Press.
Ward, C. Bio-Bibliography.
Weintraub, J. 1967. The Wit and Wisdom of Mae West. New York: Avon Books.
West, M. 1976. Goodness Had Nothing To Do With It. New York, NY: Manor Books Inc.
West, M. 1975. Pleasure Man. New York: Dell Publishing.
Wortis, E. 1997. Becoming Mae West. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.
Goodness Had Nothing To Do With It by Mae West. New York: Manor Books Inc., 1976 (288 pages).
Mae West's autobiography is the first book I'd read about her, and the best. The World According To Mae describes her beginnings as a child performer in the vaudeville circuits, breezes deposition-style through her marriage and love affairs, naturally concentrates on her years of film stardom, and concludes with her later stage tours (most notably in England), Vegas, the paranormal, and in this 1976 edition, her rehabilitation as Hollywood's living legend, including her top-billed return to the screen (after three decades' absence) in Michael Sarne's "Myra Breckinridge."
Like one of her scripts, we are treated to an unbroken string of success-upon-success; informed about how stunning were her looks; how brutes fought each other to be her champion, only to be devoured at her pleasure; how to succeed in life; how to always get your way; how to be constantly in-demand; and how to maintain stardom for sixty-odd years. It's all there in black-and-white.
What do you mean, it's whitewashed? What do you mean, it's too rosy? This is Mae West. Argue all you want about whether she was a self-absorbed vamp or a pioneering camp, about whether she was an innovator or a thief, a feminist or an opportunist, a genius or a trash, and at the end, whether to laugh with her or laugh at her. In the mercurial business of stardom, the line between reality and illusion blurs, so that the two realms sometimes become difficult or impossible to distinguish, and so maybe it doesn't really matter, does it? Perhaps this book is airbrushed history, perhaps it is not the most accurate one available, but it is definitely the best book about her, because it evokes her personality, savvy and experiences better than can any doctoral thesis or Kenny Kingston seance. To feel that presence is the real value of this book. Do you thirst after those objective elixirs of Truth and Reality? Like I said, here you get "Mae West," and Mae West is far superior to Reality. And a smirk and a roll of the eyes tells you she was certainly in on the joke.
However you'd characterize her, she had what a woman needed to succeed on her own terms in the male dominion of 1930s Hollywood, a most improbable and unique achievement. Even today, decades after Women's Liberation, in an era where stars generally exert a great deal of control over their careers (like West did within the confines of the studio system), you'd be hard-pressed to find actresses (or actors) who act and sing on stage and screen using their own material, and then be able to perpetuate and extend their celebrity in a variety of avenues for generations afterward. And by 1954, when this book was first published, she could add to her many hats one other: that of best-selling author (with uncredited ghostwriter Stephen Longstreet).
"Goodness" is out of print, so if you see it in a used bookstore, snap it up. Fortunately, it is readily available in libraries, through interlibrary loans. In Miss West's own words, "I always say, keep a diary, and some day it'll keep you." So, what're you waiting for? Go on up!
Pleasure Man by Mae West. New York: Dell Publishing, 1975 (253 pages).
[NOT YET REVIEWED]
Three Plays by Mae West, ed. by Lillian Schlissel, including "Sex," "The Drag" and "The Pleasure Man." New York: Routledge, 1997 (246 pages).
This is a fun book, presenting three early plays long out of print--"Sex," "The Drag" and "The Pleasure Man"--all penned by Mae West, and establishing her as America's premiere badgirl and sexual comedienne. At the time, the ambitious West's strategy (later lifted by Madonna and others) was to distinguish herself from the vast pool of entertainers which comprised heyday vaudeville and burlesque, by exploiting topics which grew more sensational with each outing.
Each of these plays broached subjects taboo in 1920s New York, and all met with pressure, threats or prosecution from authorities and the media. Not surprisingly, those controversies are laughable to the modern reader, but I suppose the plays served their Mistress well.
"Sex" is the story of a prostitute who follows the Royal Navy (in real life, prompting a shocked, shocked British embassy to take public notice and "investigate"); "The Drag" touches the subculture of transvestism, and features at its climax a dragqueens ball; and "The Pleasure Man" follows the exploits of a gigolo stagestar, who dies by castration at play's end. If all are tame or melodramatic by today's standards, they certainly raised the hackles of the moralists of the day; each of the productions was shut down or threatened by authorities, and two of them went to trial on obscenity charges. West's trial for "Sex" ended in a conviction and a truncated eight-day incarceration, but the entire affair became a highly publicized circus, ending with a smirking Mae strutting away a free woman and a national celebrity. A few years later, she was Hollywood's reigning star and the highest-paid woman in America.
All three feature the snappy dialogue for which West would become famous, and all are very entertaining, even if "The Pleasure Man" eventually bogs down into soap opera (the infamous castration isn't even specifically stated by the characters, which shows how determined the authorities were to haul her into court by that point--and they shut it down after only a few performances).
"Sex" shows the Mae West character just about perfected, and already contains the themes West would trot out time-and-again in her movies: casting her as the streetsmart, independent hooker with the heart of gold; the build-up of the West character before her stage entrance; the mockery of the self-righteous upper classes (ala "Goin' To Town"). Like "Sex," "The Drag" has the trademark hilarious interchanges between street-characters. In an introductory essay, editor Lillian Schlissel suggests that "The Drag" was revolutionary because it treated with homosexuality and transvestism beyond the mere exploitation identified by Marybeth Hamilton in "When I'm Bad I'm Better." In its outrageousness, "The Drag" was certainly one of a kind, but it also reads like the Ed Wood Jr. film "Glen/Glenda," teeming with kitschy dimestore psychobabble. Like West's treatment of blacks in her work, her portrayal of gays seems at times cold and opportunistic; however, she was decades ahead of her peers in that she included these groups as characters having lives and feelings of their own, apart from their dealings with mainstream white America. The result is rich and lively.
It was a treat to finally see these heretical texts that I had heard about only second- and third-hand. I would love to have seen any of these performances. Schlissel's essay is also interesting, and at the end of the book are actual court documents from the Mae West obscenity trials.
Now, here's a brainteaser for you: on the first page of the book is a picture of a 1926 advertisement for "Sex," and on the bottom of the poster is the line "OUTSTRIPS 'DIAMOND LIL.'" Since "Diamond Lil" didn't premiere until April 9, 1928, 1 and 1/2 years later, where would that reference come from? (The same poster is found in Leider's "Becoming Mae West.") Am I missing something? Any ideas out there?
Mae West, by Michael Bavar. Pyramid Publications, New York, 1975, (154 pages).
This is a series of synopses of West's films. It is a quick read, consisting mostly of film photos, and good ones at that. However, it is worth having, if you can find it. Bavar writes in savvy Hollywood style, and he offers some interesting insights into West's career. The book includes an excellent filmography (although incomplete, as it was published before the release of "Sextette"), including cast lists, and a bibliography. You can find all this information in "The Complete Films of Mae West" by Jon Tuska and "Mae West" by George Eells and Stanley Musgrove, but this is a snappy, easy-to-read collection with cover-to-cover photographs.
Too Much of a Good Thing: Mae West as Cultural Icon, by Ramona Curry. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1996 (193 pages).
The author is a University of Illinois-Urbana film professor who examines Mae West's cultural legacy and impact in this academic work. This is not a biography, but an appraisal of the body (pun!) of West's career as viewed through the prisms of censorship, feminism, film and entertainment history, and gay studies, among others. Particularly good are her descriptions of the cultural and economic machinations behind mid-1930s film censorship (West was its most acclaimed victim), imparting an intelligent and almost sympathetic appreciation of the political pressures on censors and studio heads, which is a rich contrast to the stark goodguy/badguy portrayals offered by most of West's biographers. Also provocative are the discussions of West as sexual revolutionary, as gay camp queen and as delusional octogenarian sexkitten, an assumption which Curry reassesses quite convincingly, arguing that since West parodied sex throughout her career, that any stigma arising from the supposed grotesquery of West's later work is a function of a critic's hang-ups and not West's.
This is a thoughtful appreciation, though occasionally a difficult text if you haven't encountered scholarly prose in a while, but still worth battling though to the end. Even when the verbiage grows thick (summaries of Freud never fail to make me drowsy), one realizes when slogging through that this in itself is yet another tribute to West, when almost 20 years after her death, her every move, word and nuance from a 70-year career is analyzed with a fine-toothed comb by people from so many perspectives. Talk about having the world in the palm of your hand. Beulah, peel me a grape!
Notes from a 1996 interview of Ramona Curry by Victoria Lautmann, host of "Artistic License" on WBEZ-FM, Chicago:
* Mae West remains a cultural icon, beyond movie stardom, into the current day.
* She was a bawdy comedienne, which was uncommon before the 1980s and stars like Roseanne.
* West was an accomplished and strong woman, and people still know this about her and about her witty sayings (Curry related a story about a young girl knew who Mae West was, from playing Trivial Pursuit), even without having seen her films (unlike Lucille Ball, who is still seen regularly on television).
* She demonstrated a remarkable staying power, including a career lasting more than sixty years, and a fame enduring past her death.
* She marketed herself and her image, and was 40 when she moved to Hollywood, already a seasoned, confident and clever performer.
* The Mae West film formula was: a 5-10 minute buildup when other characters describe how captivating and desirable the West character is, then West makes her entrance to great adulation, then there's singing, fighting (between jealous suitors), [ed., add plenty of melodrama and tawdry plot devices] and finally West emerges victorious and unrepentant, toting in her hand whatever diamonds and man she had her sights on all along.
* Hollywood's pattern of dealing with sex is that it shows and then reins in, displays and then represses, so that bad women are dangled in films, and then punished. They dealt with Mae West similarly, creating a sensation by importing a "bad girl" from Broadway, and then stymieing her through the Hays Code.
* In West's films, her licentious characters aren't punished.
* Her films were her material, her characters and her themes.
* In New York, she was jailed for public indecency for one of her plays, and she was also banned from radio.
* She was also a camp, a feminist and a gay icon.
* She flaunted convention throughout her life and believed in herself, even into old age when she continued to insist she was a sex icon.
* She was also ahead of her time in her attitudes and portrayals of race relations and interracial relationships.
* In her appearance on the 1960s television show "Mr. Ed," there are distinct gay and bestial overtones in her humor.
* Her image crystallized the controversies of the time, and the way her image as an icon developed is because her work meant so many different things to different groups of people.
Mae West by George Eells and Stanley Musgrove. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1982 (316 pages).
A great biography of the celebrity, which sprinkles the facts and timeline of her long career with generous helpings of lively anecdotes and quotes by people who knew or worked with her (this was published only two years after her death, when many of her associates and acquaintances were still alive). It's a good mix, and so is a lively and entertaining read. Of course, the book covers West's spectacular screen fame and controversial impact (the later discussed more exhaustively in Ramona Curry's "Too Much of a Good Thing"), but with an emphasis on her personality, and especially her drive (some might call it toughness, others bitchiness) to be an independent female in a male-dominated industry and world, and even covers her personal life more plausibly than the gossipy speculations of Maurice Leonard's "Mae West: Empress of Sex."
Besides her autobiography, this is my favorite book about Mae West, because it blends a good factual treatment of her life and career, with a vibrant invocation of her spiritedness and character.
When I'm Bad, I'm Better: Mae West, Sex, and Entertainment by Marybeth Hamilton, New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers, Inc., 1995 (254 pages).
Well-written and researched book on West's career, and how sensationalism and sex were so inextricably bound into her fame. West's success and eventual failures were tied to these engines, and to how the entertainment establishment treated these subjects and West's use of them. The book chronicles her rise from the obscurity of New York's vaudeville and burlesque stages, to the theatre, Hollywood, and afterward. This work, like June Sochen's "Mae West: She Who Laughs, Lasts" and Emily Leiter Wortis' "Becoming Mae West", provides an excellent social portrait of the era when Mae West came of age--the transition from post-Victorian to Prohibition and the Roaring Twenties--and a fantastic description of the extinct world of the vaudeville and burlesque circuits.
The author adopts a thorough, scholarly approach, but this is not dull reading. She demonstrates that West's career as a hot movie property lasted only five years or so, before the Hays Office shut her down. Adhering to this thesis, Hamilton focuses on the critical periods of 1920s New York and Depression-era Hollywood, but is spotty in other areas of West's life outside the book's purview (e.g., the move from the stages of New York to the movielots of Hollywood, and the 40-odd years after her peak). Significantly, Hamilton doesn't place the sole blame for West's late-1930s decline on Hays, but also cites an inability on West's part to move beyond her original sex-and-humor formula, and that both factors combined to make the production of her films a grueling process on her, her producers, the authorities and her movie-going public alike.
Mae West: Empress of Sex by Maurice Leonard. New York: Birchlane Press, 1991 (413 pages).
This one is about--Guess who?--the same as all the rest, but when you're around for as long as Mae West was, and raised as many hackles, there's plenty of food at the table. Leonard's book is the most gossipy of the pack, filled with speculation, asides and name-dropping. In the first twenty pages, he speculates that the young Mae was sexually molested by her father, boxer "Battling Jack" West, thus explaining her distant relationship with him, her aversion to drink and smoke (both of which he enjoyed), her lifelong promiscuity and her infatuation with muscular fighting men. I'm no expert on Freudism, and I can't prove Leonard wrong, but the fact is that he has absolutely no proof of his bold assertion, and none of West's other biographers come anywhere near making the same assumption.
Leonard would argue that he can't be proved wrong on this and similar points. Does this mean he shouldn't be allowed to publish such pure speculation? No; such is the free marketplace of ideas, and since West was dead for 14 years when Leonard published, she couldn't sue his ass off. Does this make for good biography? Also, no. But that's the First Amendment for you. For instance, in my soon-to-be-published "Mae West and Jim Morrison Are Alive and Well and Living in South Africa," I prove beyond a doubt my theory that Miss West maintained her creamy, unblemished complexion through an elixir which Paul Novak regularly procured by draining blood from cattle carcasses at ranches from Texas to New Mexico. It's all true, I swear.
My tirade and Leonard's cattiness notwithstanding, this too is a very entertaining book for the little nuggets of information it contains. This laudatory paragraph is much shorter than the criticisms of the previous paragraph. That's because when an author grants himself license to make sweeping, unprovable statements like the one above, it inevitably casts severe doubts upon his credibility in the next hundred or so pages. Yet still, by book's end, you come away with a palpable sense of Mae West's personality and accomplishments.
Censored Hollywood: Sex, Sin, & Violence on Screen by Frank Miller. Atlanta: Turner Publishing, Inc., 1994 (269 pages).
As with the creation of new media throughout history, the introduction of moving pictures met with traditional societal reflexes to regulate and censor, where paternalistic authorities and other professed guardians of public morality conferred upon themselves the power to suspend the First Amendment, that the masses might be protected from corrupting influences (sound familiar, Netizens?). So it was that politicians, clergymen, older established media concerns, academics, social-reform groups, state and local governments, and the movie industry itself constrained film content from cinema's inception. The later group understood that its own self-regulation might prevent sweeping, codified legislation regulating the industry, by alleviating the pressure of outside groups on governments to do just that. From this realization arose the Motion Picture Production Code, with its list of 'no-nos'--anatomy that could not be showed, behavior that could not be portrayed, themes that could not be explored--and its infamous enforcement branch, dubbed the Hays Office, after its longtime director.
The central tension arises in the fact that Hollywood is, after all, a business, and an entertainment business at that, so moviemakers will do what they must to make money, i.e., put fannies in seats. Therefore, despite its pious proclamations through overtures like the Code, Hollywood often reverts to controversy and titillation, using the very same tactics as the carnival barker or smut impresario, flaunting sex and violence in all their variety of incarnations. The trend is that hard-strapped producers push the bounds of decency for short-term impact, spawning a slough of imitators (Hollywood is indeed the capital of recycling, always has been), and then the industry reels everyone back to respectability, only to have the cycle repeat with the next economic downturn, and each time the bounds expand. The result is the present system, in which films are not subject to prior restraint of content so much as rated before their distribution, which of course carries a new set of controversies. New battles, same war.
This is Miller's argument, which he makes thoroughly, with some telling insights. He does an apt job of describing the ridiculous lengths to which the Code was interpreted, and also in illustrating the confusion of the current system, illustrating with case studies of certain milestone movies and how they were wronged or how they pioneered new freedoms. Sometimes his treatment bogs down into a laundry-list chronology from the 1920s to the 1990s, but in all, it's a good book that truly makes its point.
Mae West, "Queen of Sex," Sings Sultry Songs, by Rosetta Reitz (liner notes to CD of same name, Rosetta Records, RRCD 1315, New York, 1987).
A fan's appreciation of West's career, by the publisher of an excellent collection of West's songs. Reitz hails West's pioneering feminist spirit, as a woman in a man's world, who took and achieved what she wanted, challenging the social structure while making the public laugh. She attributes part of West's success to the Depression during which her film career skyrocketed: West's working class heroine always achieved success, by hook or crook (in West's own words, "the kind of girl who climbed the ladder of success wrong by wrong"), and provided an escapist model for her adoring audiences. Reitz describes the controversy, wealth, confidence, talent, boldness, innovation (in race relations as well as feminism and sex) and fame that made hers a unique life, elevating "Mae West" to as prominent a cultural icon as Mickey Mouse and FDR: "Mae West was equal in size to Paul Bunyan in spite of her being barely five feet tall."
Mae West: She Who Laughs, Lasts by June Sochen. Arlington Heights, Illinois: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1992 (145 pages).
Sochen is an academic who covered much of the same ground that Marybeth Hamilton would a few years later in "When I'm Bad, I'm Better"; namely, West's beginnings as a single performer in a vaudeville circuit flooded with versatile talents and hacks, where entertainers struggled merely to eke a living, much less aspired to fame and stardom. Sochen's treatment of New York's stage culture and its economics, and West's rise from the obscurity of this environment, are not as exhaustive as Hamilton's, but at the same time it is more readable. I strongly recommend both to anyone remotely interested in the topics, for their depictions of a bygone subculture that is completely lost to us now. Again, when put in this context, West's success (and that of her contemporaries) is truly a remarkable feat of determination and incredible good luck.
The Complete Films of Mae West by Jon Tuska. New York: Citadel Press, 1992 (196 pages).
This book is a must for Mae West fans. It is crammed with information and photos from all phases of her career, including stagework before and after her 1930s film stardom. It is arranged in chronological film (and play) synopses, cast lists, production/profit margins, and essays--not all of the points of which I agree with, but they are informed and well-reasoned. Tuska traces the eclipse of West's career to as early as 1934's "Belle of the Nineties," quoting lines and shots excised by censors already by that time, and his analysis gives you a real appreciation of her accomplishments and perseverance. Originally published in 1973, this updated version includes comments on her later films "Myra Breckinridge" and "Sextette."
Bio-Bibliography by Carol Ward.
[NOT YET REVIEWED]
The Wit and Wisdom of Mae West, edited by Joseph Weintraub. New York: Avon Books, 1967 (142 pages).
How do you publish a book of quotes that are wrong? This slender book contains a bunch that are off. Granted they were compiled before the advent of rewinding VCRs, but gees, this editor didn't even have to write anything! (Although a biographical essay, lifted from a magazine feature, is tacked onto the end.) Oh, but I quibble in expecting accuracy.
Regardless, this is a collection of the brilliant witticisms of America's most hilarious sexual rebel. In a man's world, this woman did things her own way when Madonna's mother was not even born, made one hundred times more money than Germaine Greer, and got laid and used men as often as she damn well pleased. These gems reflect all that. And funny, too.
Becoming Mae West by Emily Leiter Wortis. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1997 (35_ pages).
[NOT YET REVIEWED]
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