Word has it that Mae West—that “plumber’s idea of Cleopatra,” as W.C. Fields once wise-cracked—haunts her Hollywood estate; her reflection has been seen in the mirrors that in life she approached with the concentration of a card shark. In a world of haves and have-nots, West knew any man could be had; she called them all “suckers.” As Broadway’s bad girl who brought her play Sex to the stage and then as a Hollywood newcomer who at age forty broke box-office records set by Garbo and Dietrich, she shrewdly stuck to her winning formula. “People want dirt in plays, so I give ’em dirt, see?” she told the New Yorker in 1928, a few years before she came to the movies, armed with her self-penned scripts, to become the headache of movie censor Will Hays. West’s idea of dirt, of course, had little to do with any actual sexual performance—but a lot to do with the quick-witted suggestion of it, via well-timed quips and the exaggeration of every bit of her look. Never a true beauty, she was still determined to convey some larger-than-life quality, and reshaped her figure to accomplish this feat. In her Broadway turn as Diamond Lil, for one, she trimmed the top off a standard corset and wore it upside down to emphasize the bust and shoulders over the waist and hips. So successful was she in creating her sexually exaggerated persona that almost anything she said was taken as sexual innuendo. In a 1939 spot on Edgar Bergen’s radio show, for instance, she invited dummy Charlie McCarthy to “come up and play in my woodpile”—and was promptly banned from the airwaves. “People seem to read double meanings into every word I speak,” she once said. But nowadays, it’s the puritan apostles of race, class, and gender who are scrutinizing Mae West’s words. Today, she is increasingly viewed as a cause célèbre: a First Amendment pinup girl; a campy, vampy icon for gay men; a “complex,” “revolutionary” artist challenging a “patriarchal” society. Of course, West—the wisecracking dame who advised gals to “take all you can get and give as little as possible”—deserves more than today’s critics’ humorless praise. For one thing, she never aimed to change the world. (Take a look at My Little Chickadee, in which West plays a pistol-packin’ mama whose biggest concern in her shoot-’em-up with Indians is a broken fingernail.) The daughter of a boxer, West fought her way up from her earliest days in vaudeville. She was at her most successful in such Gay Nineties period pieces as She Done Him Wrong, where as Lady Lou, “the finest woman who ever walked the streets,” she swaggered and sallied her way through a world of Victorians. Only in an era of deeply entrenched social taboos could her double entendres pack a wallop. (In our own toxic times, her approach is seems merely camp.) West was a firm believer that what you don’t show—or say—is more tantalizing than what you do. The result was her word play: “Don’t ever let a man put anything over you except an umbrella,” “It’s better to be looked over than overlooked.” When critics in the late 1960s began calling her early work “thoughtful social commentary,” West was all too eager to fuel this new myth. Never one to miss a chance to give the public what it wanted, West played the left-leaning critics as smoothly as she had her vaudeville audiences. When the intelligentsia came knocking, West was ready with the right tune. She heartily endorsed the 1960s slogan “Make Love, Not War.” “There should be more loving and less fighting,” she cooed. When a reporter from Jet magazine stopped by her home, she gushed, “I was the first film star to establish a rapport with black maid characters in relationships that were virtually on a peer level.” (In her films, her treatment of the black maid includes calling her “shadow” and “eightball.”) Feminists, for their part, had a harder time accepting West; that she disarmed patriarchy by merely exploiting her female attributes didn’t sit well with them. But eventually they came around, too, and in 1971, West, a freshly circumcised “phallic woman,” donned her corset to accept UCLA’s “Woman of the Century” award. The latest sucker to reinvent West is Jill Watts, an associate history professor at California State University who has written Mae West: An Icon in Black and White. Dotting her writing with every tired cliché, Watts asserts that West was a “radically subversive artist” who borrowed heavily from black music, dance, and humor to challenge society’s views on race, class, and gender. Watts argues that West accomplished this through an African-American practice of signifying “a subversive rhetorical device that uses multiple and conflicting messages to obscure rebellious meanings.” Conveniently, racist elements in West films are explained as the work of a “trickster,” using “racism to sabotage racism.” Watts infuses every scene with some radical message—even extracting meaning from West’s appearance on the 1960s show Mister Ed: “Ed and Mae were a good match. They were both tricksters who wreaked havoc on a society they had little power over.” One of Watts’s assertions happens to be true: West did borrow from black culture, though not to impart some socially conscious message. Far from being an iconoclast, West bought into the fad of her day, when white fascination with the Harlem Renaissance fueled the stereotype of blacks as more sexual and raw. As a vaudeville performer, West traveled to Chicago’s south side, where in the black entertainment district she saw African-American couples dance the shimmy, shaking, as West later recalled, their “shoulders, torsos, breasts and pelvises.” In their dance, West said she saw a “naked, aching, sensual agony,” and soon she incorporated it into her routine. (Later, in her Hollywood days, press materials described her as “the first white shimmy dancer.”) Watts herself clearly accepts a prim-itivistic viewpoint, insinuating that West’s own potent sexuality may have come from secret black blood. In the first paragraphs of her book, she ventures that West’s grandfather, a sailor, may have been black. “Many enslaved African-American sailors took advantage of their mobility and escaped north; some of those were light-skinned,” she writes. “While no documents substantiate that [West’s grandfather] did, none prove that he did not.” West always loved to recall how she found inspiration for Margy Lamont, her famed prostitute character in Sex. Stuck in traffic with a companion, West glanced at the nearby West Side Manhattan waterfront and saw a cheap woman—with frizzy bleached hair, a wrinkled coat, and runs in her stock-ings—wearing a pricey Bird of Paradise plumed hat, likely the gift of one of the two sailors with their arms around her. West’s companion wagered the woman was a streetwalker who got as little as fifty cents a trick. West later recalled: “I kept thinking, ‘Fifty cents! How many guys would she have to have to pay her rent, buy her food?’ I thought, Jeez, this dame is stupid. I thought if I could only talk to her, she could always get one or maybe two guys to keep her if she was too lazy to latest work at anything else. . . . I was making her over in my mind.” Now it’s Jill Watts who’s trying the same thing on Mae West herself: making her over in her mind. The attempt proves less successful. “Through her immersion in African-American signifying,” she writes, the actress “reminds us that all polarities are really constructions of a society that operates to promote and preserve the status quo.” Even in death, Mae West is making suckers of them all.
