Signifying Sex

Mae West: An Icon in Black and White. By Jill Watts. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 374 pages. $35.00 (cloth).

THE FEW BOOKS ABOUT MAE WEST THAT APPEARED AFTER HER DEATH IN 1980 were heavily illustrated, mass-market biographies of a fondly (if dimly) remembered star. The past five years, however, have seen an explosion of critical interest in West, not simply in her status as a camp-and-vamp Hollywood icon, but in her controversial work as a playwright and novelist, her experimentation with sexually and racially coded performance styles, and in the way that West—"the greatest female impersonator of all time," rumored to be a gay man or a black woman in disguise—continues to challenge popular assumptions about identity. ¹ The 1990s saw four full-length critical studies devoted to West: Marybeth Hamilton's "When I'm Bad, I'm Better": Mae West, Sex, and American Entertainment (HarperCollins, 1995); Pamela Robertson's Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna (Duke, 1996); Ramona Curry's Too Much of a Good Thing: Mae West as Cultural Icon (Minnesota, 1996); and Emily Wortis Leider's Becoming Mae West (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1997). Claudia Roth Pierpont celebrated West in the pages of The New Yorker, in an essay later collected in Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World (Vintage, 2000), and in 2000, Mae West returned to Broadway in Claudia Shear's Dirty Blonde, a tribute to her life and legacy. Now historian Jill Watts has published a new biography, Mae West: An Icon in Black and White, which argues for West's significance as "a cultural agent that celebrates and perpetuates the African presence within American society" (318). Speculating that West's paternal grandfather was black, Watts reconsiders West's career in the context of the African American practice of signifying, embodied in the figure of the trickster, and of an African American womanist consciousness, represented in the female blues tradition of the 1920s.

Why Mae West? Why now? For a society that values individualism and self-realization, Mae West's flamboyant invention of herself continues to impress and inspire: "I'm my own child," she once declared (65). As a precocious child actress, "Baby Mae" saw the stage as a ticket out of her dead-end Brooklyn neighborhood. She was working steadily by the age of six, perfecting her impersonations of Bert Williams and Eva Tanguay, mimicking ethnic accents and grown-up dances, even working up a routine as a "coon shouter" in blackface. For the next eighty years, through stints in almost every mass medium of the twentieth century—vaudeville, burlesque, Broadway plays and musicals, Hollywood movies, radio, television, and the recording industry—the performer celebrated for her "low sex quality" would live her life with one eye on her audience (73). The success of her self-penned character Diamond Lil sealed West's fate: "I'm her and she's me and we're each other" (110). The strut, the purr, the glance, the smirk: Mae had permanently adopted all of Lil's stage mannerisms by the late 1920s. West's clothes became costumes, her Ravenswood apartment a carefully lighted set. She surrounded herself with straight men, in more ways than one, and avoided scenes that she could not direct. Her autobiography, Goodness Had Nothing To Do With It, was a fiction about a bulletproof heroine named Mae West, whose irresistible allure assured her rise to stardom. After her death, the few who "told all" about Mae West did not have much to tell; no private letters or diaries emerged to complicate her legend. The woman W.C. Fields labeled "a plumber's idea of Cleopatra" (237) died a Sphinx.

For cultural critics like Pamela Robertson and Ramona Curry, the question of West's personal life (or lack of one) is secondary. Her biographers, however, find themselves torn between their desire to celebrate West's self-invention and their insistence on an elusive, essential self that existed apart from West's relentless theatricality...