I just finished reading She Always Knew How: Mae West A Personal Biography by  Charlotte Chandler. Unfortunately, I can’t recommend it and I am still wondering why I finished the book. Reading it was like watching a train wreck… you know you shouldn’t watch but yet you’re oddly compelled to. While I read the book, I had a nagging feeling that I could be better spending the time elsewhere and yet I managed to read through the entire book.

I can’t decide who gets the full blame for this bizarre, disconnected biography. The author interviewed Mae West shortly before she died in 1980 and yet this book was not realized until 2009 almost 30 years later. I have to wonder if the book was finished closer to the time Ms. Chandler interviewed Mae if this biography would have been more compelling and fluid and less like an anecdotal time line of Mae’s conquests and accomplishments.  On the other hand, the subject being interviewed was Mae West, who at the time was well into her 80′s and still playing the public and private role of worlds greatest sex goddess. And at one point as I suppose age will do to anyone- the sex goddess persona becomes strangely campy and that makes for an uncomfortable read.

Regardless, I have to say Mae West is incredibly fascinating but she isn’t one of my favorite actresses. I am hesitant to call her an actress as she is more a persona or  a “brand name”. Calling Mae West an actress is like calling Pamela Anderson an actress… (I am not making a comparison of the two by no means- just trying to illustrate my point).  An actor or  actress can be themselves in public or private once the camera stops filming and they put down the role, but a person that is a brand name or persona has to be this object  their whole life and work  really hard to maintain the persona. After years, or even decades of trying to maintain this larger then life persona the  lines blur between the real person and the persona; and that is where it starts to become surreal and sad in my opinion.

Mae West worked her whole life to maintain her public persona, often referred to as “Diamond Lil” a character she created or  by referring to herself as Mae West in third person. Her persona was the dame that no man could resist sexually and the woman- women admired for her unwillingness to be ashamed of her great love of sex. Her trademarks were a lot of risque quips and a sort of shimmying around. At several times in her early career she was heavily censored and even served jail time for public obscenity in relation to her stage shows. Today- she would be seen as quite tame, but in the 1920′s (her Broadway years) and 1930′s (when she moved to Hollywood to make films) she was a groundbreaking star who helped put female sexuality on the map and on an equal foothold with men. She practically dared people to tell her not to enjoy sex!

At her best, Mae West can be seen in the movies costarring with Cary Grant or W.C Fields. Below is the trailer for the 1933 film I’m No Angel .

At her worst- (towards the end of her life) she starred in the highly controversial Myra Breckenridge and Sextette. In Sextette- Mae had such notable costars as Timothy Dalton, Keith Moon, Ringo Starr and Alice Copper. Here in a clip from Sextette, is Timothy Dalton as Sir Michael Barrington serenading his new bride Marlo Manners (Mae West) on their honeymoon.

After reading She Always Knew How, I felt I wanted to know more about Ms. West, even if the biography was somewhat less then enjoyable. And I think Mae would have been okay with that, because if anything was important to her was that she always left her public wanting more of her…