MAE WEST: It Ain’t No Sin
by Simon Louvish
Faber £20, 356 pages

In the 1930s, Mae West greeted visitors to American screen culture as iconically as the Statue of Liberty greeted actual immigrants. She stood in Hollywood Harbour - if we can invoke that fantasy location - dressed to the nines, radiating light from her peroxide head, and like Liberty waved a torch that looked suspiciously, to mischievous eyes, like a giant ice cream crone.

But here was no ordinary statue or liberty. Here was a priestess of pleasure, an archangel of hedonism. West was a small woman who seemed to tower over everyone on screen, including the young Cary Grant, placed below her on a staircase to receive that legend-making injunction, “Why don’t you come up some time and see me.” (The word order tends to be rearranged by posterity).

That was in She Done Him Wrong, her second feature film, made after half a lifetime of stage and vaudeville warm-ups. By then West had already defined her version of “liberty”. It was to cock a defiant snook (and how many off-colour puns could she have made from that phrase?) at puritanism and patriarchy, those twin impediments to the pursuit of happiness as written into America’s charter.

West spoke up for sex. Her country had barely escaped Prohibition before it was deep in draconian censorship, as sex-related shibboleths multiplied under the tyrannical Hays Code. Though the code began life as a supposed support system for the film industry - its advice being intended to prevent later prosecution by other authorities - it soon became a monster with its own life. It extended its ravenings from indecency to mere indelicacy. Even a line about “breaking sweat” was blue-pencilled from a West screenplay.

Between the double whammy of She Done Me Wrong and I’m No Angel (both 1933) and the later double cropper of Myra Breckinridge (1970) and Sextette (1978) - all four films lightly censored if at all - West’s work was mercilessly mauled by the minions of repression. In a way, though, that suited her. The double entendre, as well as being funny, is show business’s version of wartime encryption. Wrap the message up enough and it will appear innocent - although it is secretly strong enough to sink a navy, or launch a thousand ships, depending on your negative or affirmative view of free-thinking sexuality.

So the innuendoes tumbled forth. “When I’m good I’m very good. But when I’m bad I’m better.” “It’s not the men in my life that count, it’s the life in my men.” Or in response to an admirer’s “Goodness, what beautiful diamonds”, “Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.”

Many of these were culled from joke books, the biographer Simon Louvish reveals. Louvish researched new archives that startlingly change our view of the off-camera West, if not of the screen diva. This writer-performer was a near-workaholic. As well as penning her own plays and screenplays she exhaustively combed other sources for some of those great Westisms which, we now see, were gag almanac one-liners done up with style and mannerisms.

But what style, what mannerisms. That preening, almost reeling stance (like the undulations of an overfed python, commented the film critic Graham Greene); that hand held to hip while the other hand pats the piled candy-floss hair; those weird murmurings from deep in the adenoids that coalesced into the single syllable “hhhhmm” and made it the most louche in the language.

Amazingly, this one-woman counterculture was once Hollywood’s highest-paid performer. In 1934 her income of $399,166 was more than twice Charlie Chaplin’s. In 1935 she earned more than anyone in the US save William Randolph Hearst. By then she was Citizen Mae, an institution at age 42 (though, finessing her birth date, she preferred 36). She was persona grata with the public even though she had a jail record after a stage play’s busting in 1927, and even though the Hays Code gunned for her so determinedly that a few years after Wrong and Angel had escaped proscription the two were banned from re-release. “Both pictures are now... thoroughly and completely in violation of the Code,” wrote Joseph Breen in 1935.

This career is as heroic, in its knockabout way, as Freud’s or Kinsey’s. West spoke the unspeakable. She said it was okay to take pleasure in sex. “I think you’re a one-man woman,” a character says in a film. “Yes, one man at a time,” comes the unerring reply. And if she sometimes gift-wrapped these utterances in periphrasis, didn’t that draw more attention to them? By the time audiences had worked out what she meant, they had probably spent a minute rather than a second on first anticipating, then experiencing, then savouring the salacity.

Louvish comes to West after books on W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy. He is becoming the biographer laureate to classic Hollywood comedy. I would have liked him to stand back more and see West in wide angle. Sometimes he seems too nose-to-subject: a scholar mumbling to the converted as he rifles through his trunks of esoterica. I sometimes thought, who cares if Mae modified this or that gag, line or comma between stage and screen versions of a play?

Something is also wrong when a book’s most memorable lines are quotations from other people. Not just West but the hilarious New York World description of that notorious late-teens solo dance, the shimmy. Mae performed it, says the newspaper, “as if it were an attempt to get out of a straitjacket without the use of hands”. Louvish attempts to get out of the labyrinth of West’s contradictory genius - or to penetrate to its heart - without the use of style.

A lighter touch, a sense of joy, fun and shared discovery might have appealed to the non-converted too and made them see the light that still radiates from Hollywood’s luminous Miss Liberty.

Nigel Andrews is the FT’s chief film critic.