Women Who Bite Back

Did you know that silent film seductress Theda Bara was responsible for the addition of “vamp” to the English language? Or that Mae West wound up in the slammer because her play “Sex” was ruled too obscene? (By the way, West continued to make headlines as a jailbird by insisting on her right to wear silk underwear instead of prison-issue skivvies.)

These fabulous facts and more can be found in “Drama Queens” (Conari Press, 1998), the latest installment in the “Wild Women” collection. Far from a solemn pocket biography, “Drama Queens” is a campy dish on Hollywood’s most iconoclastic stars of today and yesterday written with biting wit by Berkeley author Autumn Stephens.

With quotes from “bad-ass beauties” and “reprobate role models,” the book proves that women have always dominated Hollywood--and not just as pretty faces: West battled the Hays Office, which enforced moral codes in movies; Bette Davis clawed her way to the top despite being first rejected by studio heads as not sexy enough; and Josephine Baker escaped from American racism to become the toast of Paris.

Other titles by Stephens include “Wild Women in the Kitchen” and “Wild Women: Crusaders, Curmudgeons and Completely Corsetless Ladies in the Otherwise Virtuous Victorian Era.” “For years, unless you were a famous virgin, you were written out of the record,” the author explains. “‘Wild Women’aims to set the record straight. For everything a woman might do today that is kinky or bizarre, chances are she wasn’t the first one to do it.”