Vamp and Camp

Mae West’s earliest memory, we learn from Emily Wortis Leider’s eloquent, scrupulous, intelligent account of the star’s life and times, was of “her mother massaging her with baby oil.” We also learn that in her vaudeville days, West “adopted her lifelong habit of giving herself a daily enema in response to theater bathrooms that were ‘so filthy I couldn’t face them.’ ” Oil, enema: such details set a fan’s pulse racing. Glimpses into a star’s erotic, scatological origins justify the existence of the much-maligned genre of the celebrity bio, which this important study is not.

Author of a book on Gertrude Atherton (“California’s Daughter: Gertrude Atherton and Her Times”) and of the seductively titled “Rapid Eye Movement and Other Poems” (imagine Mae’s REM states, in her swan-shaped bed in the Art Deco-style Ravenswood Apartments on Rossmore Avenue), Leider sets her sights higher than Kitty Kelley’s. Tidbits, however, surface: West loved musclemen (“A hard man is good to find”). Marlene Dietrich reportedly made a pass at her. West donated used cars to nuns. She was only 5 feet tall. She held a seance with Amelia Earhart. But the book subordinates gossip to social history and to a wise celebration of West as a performance artist who understood that sex is a business and that moneymaking hits are forms of orgasm.

Paradoxically, the censorship that would eventually ruin her career made her an icon in the first place: The obscenity trials surrounding her 1920s plays, “Sex” and “Pleasure Man,” ensured their popularity. Prison terms made her theatricals seem hotter than they were; Leider argues that West wasn’t much of a writer, that the play scripts and novels were wooden and banal and that West had no qualms about claiming sole authorship for works she half-pilfered.

As Leider smartly observes, “Mae West was first a showman, a virtuoso entertainer who veered into writing in order to extend her sphere of influence, enlarge and enhance her limousine-scale celebrity profile, and to expedite delivery of her letter to the world.” The phrase “letter to the world,” of course, is Emily Dickinson’s, whose “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” is the dark opposite of West’s “Come up and see me sometime”: West would eventually learn what Dickinson always knew: the difficult glamour of isolation.

It is on the subject of West’s Dickinsonian reclusiveness--the noble way in which, after Paramount Pictures fired her and Hollywood, sunk into the mire of the puritanical art-killing Production Code, abandoned her, she stuck to her unloaded guns, refusing to change, refusing to compromise or learn new tricks; it is on the subject of West’s self-destructive decision to, as Dickinson wrote, “select her own Society” and then “close the Valves of her attention--/Like Stone”--that Leider proves less sympathetic to West’s weirdness. The biographer tells only the first half of the story.

Focusing exclusively on the years in which West was shaping her stage and screen persona, Leider dumps the star just when Paramount did and summarizes the twilight years in a tantalizing yet too brief epilogue. Leider is not sufficiently interested in “Myra Breckinridge”; in West’s rock ‘n’ roll records; in her encounter with Diane Arbus; in the solitary, Adonis-haunted years at the Ravenswood, where she truly became a figure of Gothic proportions, nursing invisible Oscars. I respect Leider’s decision to ignore the fall and to concentrate on the rise, but stinting the post-fame decades--the world’s refusal to accommodate her largeness and her refusal to accommodate the world’s--pathologizes our star and ignores continuities between her classic “She Done Him Wrong” mode and the pathos of her crepuscular cabaret appearances.

Imagine a biography of Joan Crawford that ended with “Mildred Pierce.” Admittedly, the difference between late Crawford and late West is enormous: Crawford continued to make movies, admittedly bizarre ones (like “Trog”), while West altogether retired from the screen. But late Mae shares with late Joan, and late Bette, and late Judy the power to teach the viewer that the comeback is the grandest point in any career and that, sometimes, the failure to come back, the inability to rise again to public consciousness, is a superior (albeit self-annihilating) mode of star grandeur. If vintage West’s “I’m No Angel” persona is a masterful act of self-creation along the lines of Wilde’s dandy or Chaplin’s tramp, then West’s disappearance (like Wilde’s, like Chaplin’s) is an act of cultural treason and midnight performance on a par with Howard Hughes’ defection from sight and sanity or Jean Rhys’ long silence between the early novels and the tardy “Wide Sargasso Sea.”

Despite Leider’s lack of interest in West’s downfall, this book has rare virtues. It pays exemplary attention to glamour techniques. West’s mainstay was slowness; languor, hardly laziness, was a monumental labor. Leider writes: “Few today are aware of Mae West’s inwardness, disciplined work habits, and social reticence; few remember her meticulous honing of verbal inflection, rhythm, and delivery style. . . . When Mae West finally achieved a success that had long eluded her, the new celebrity coincided with her mastery of slow motion.” Or, as critic Stark Young phrases it, West displayed an “audacity of leisure motion which becomes an intensity of movement by its continuity, but is almost stillness because it is so slow.” She understood that to overshadow competitors, she needed to enjoy a different speed: Because of her indifference to haste and productivity, she chose slowness.

Although Leider wittily describes West as “the perfect Depression diva, a human antidepressant,” she also notes that West is a human downer, “the soul of indifference in her gestures and drawling speech.” She is indifferent to the censors, to the turncoat public and to the sexual excess she seems so wantonly to advertise. Finally, she is an artist of restraint, averse to the rococo, a flint-hearted necromancer whose slow, chill, haughty movements pretend to desire men but more fervently desire her own perpetuation.

If, as Leider observes in a brilliant concluding line, “Mae West continues to stop traffic at the risky intersection of Vamp and Camp,” the star owes it to unseen collaborators--costumers, makeup artists and cinematographers. It’s about time that everyone who participates in beauty’s manufacture be accorded the cultural capital reserved for directors.

Leider mentions “a strapless black number trimmed with jet passementerie”: How many weighty tomes of film theory refuse the reader the pleasure--the particularity--of “passementerie”? Through the word “passementerie,” we can imagine the labor of sewing the dress and the labor of wearing it effectively. Also, Leider mentions makeup artist Dot Ponedel: “Cinematographer Karl Struss, aided by makeup artist Dot Ponedel, helped [West] achieve a luxurious, finished sheen, a high-contrast, porcelain-patina perfection on screen.”

Ponedel is part of the Mae West machine. And Ponedel, doubtless, knew details that elude the scholar, though Leider’s curiosity is such that she widens the canvas to include Ponedel and her ilk and to let the reader know that lighting West’s face was a task like other tasks in the world, worth doing well. Confessed Struss: “I lit Mae depending on the angle. If she was looking from right to left, my key light was from the left side and vice versa. That made the narrow side of the face brighter and narrows the whole face. It also put the chin line in the shade.” Leider is poet enough to hear the beauty of the iambic pentameter line, “It also put the chin line in the shade,” and to respect the poetry of the cinematographer’s kind deceit.

My favorite anecdote in “Becoming Mae West” concerns not the star but one of her emulators: “Even an anonymous schoolboy in Waldo, Kansas, tried to benefit from the Mae West boom. It was reported in Photoplay that, when asked why he had signed his math paper ‘Mae West,’ he answered, ‘Because I done ‘em wrong.’ ” Who knows whether this anonymous flunky grew up to become a Mae West impersonator? West imitated drag artists; indeed, she did not reproduce a natural set of female mannerisms but, like a surrealist, lunged toward the extreme, the unnatural and the uncanny.

When West began in vaudeville, she chose the role of the eccentric, the freak, the nut: the slow-motion woman who, wrote one critic, “sings rag melodies and dresses oddly” and is “one of the many freak persons on the vaudeville stage.” Leider notes: “Cousin of the circus freak acts and the old dime museum that exhibited two-headed babies and bearded ladies, the vaudeville ‘nut’ act sanctioned off-the-wall attitudes and conduct--within a structured and miniaturized frame.”

So West’s final years as the Recluse of Ravenswood, visited by freak-connoisseur Diane Arbus, swing back to the career’s roots as well as to cinema’s early history. When film moved away from its origin as what historian Tom Gunning has called “the cinema of attractions” and became a genre propelled by narrative, West had nothing to do but disappear. She never had much truck with plot. Her story began and ended when she made her appearance, delivered a one-liner, sashayed and smirked and ogled.

We do West posthumous justice by acknowledging the plotless freak as cinema’s beautiful beginning and by categorizing West not as a sex goddess but as a Parnassian personality whose splendors stop narrative, on which movies continue, to their detriment, to rely. The careers of West, Barbra Streisand and Elizabeth Taylor (and so many others) would have had entirely different shapes if our cinema had remained an art of attractions, like the circus or the burlesque, an art in which the star’s sublime weirdness (which includes sexiness as well as shock) justifies the show.