Mae West: screen legend, international pin-up, actress, writer, comedienne, sexual icon - the biography should write itself, shouldn't it? Unfortunately, Simon Louvish wrote it...Mae West obviously lived an interesting life; breaking out from vaudeville and burlesque into Broadway Theatre and then into cinema. Becoming a bonafide diva and then slowly, inexorably believing her own hype and going bananas.
Louvish takes this set of ingredients and turns it into literary porridge. His cataloging of the scripting revisions are positively turgid and just kill the narrative. It reads like a stenographers portrayal of a juicy court case and leeches all lurid fascination out of the subject matter. He seems to, as well, miss out swathes of her life that I found interesting: how did she really became a theatre pioneer? why didn't she make the leap to talkies earlier? Her later life when she became a self-parody - surely a book in itself?
The best bit of the book is the last fifth (it's a whopping 420 pages - too long, in my opinion, by 100 pages or so)telling the story of her life after her heyday - but it's just skimmed, which is a shame, There was something sad about her reclusion and I wanted more of a glimpse into that life and that of her faithful companion. Also her utterly, utterly bizarre 'comeback' pictures are just skimmed over and that is a shame. Finally, the amount of references made to Mae West's own books makes me wonder if I shouldn't have just read them instead.
Mae West obviously lived a interesting life, one of the original Hollywood pin-ups and a real 'legend' but this review is not of her, but of Louvish who writes like a college lecturer with too much time on his hands. I would read another biography of her but this is just dull and I wouldn't read anything else by this author again as his long winded and microscopic literary style kills the subject.
