Customer Reviews

Mae West: It Ain't No Sin

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Simon Louvish's biography of Mae West, "It Ain't No Sin" is a workmanlike examination of a remarkable show woman's career that spanned the entire gamut of 20 Century showbusiness from vaudeville, the Broadway stage, talkies, sound recordings, Las Vegas, and eventually television.
Placing the accomplishments of this extraordinary performing artist in chronological order and making sence of her impact at the time and beyond represents a yoman's task, which for the most past, Mr. Louvish is well prepared.
It is disappointing that the much ballyhooed entree to "her previously unaccessed papers" offers so little insight to the workings of her mind. However Mr. Louvish does point out that Mae West spent a lot of time pushing the pen well into the wee hours of the night polishing and perfecting her craft , giving her adoring public the impression that she was pushing against something mightier than the proverbial pen.
Mae West endured well past her initial Hollywood prime and continued to thrill new audiences well into the 1950's, Sixties and Seventies. Unfortunately, this aspect of her career and life are skipped over lightly. Mae West flowered during the Free Love Generation of the 1960's and became a cultural icon that outgrew her initial camp second coming.
Her contribution to Gay Liberation and the legions of fans gay, hetrosexual and try anything who befriended and encouraged her in the later stages of her career are sadly overlooked. Perhaps this is because Mr. Louvish did not have the time available to dig beyond the surface in regards to this remarkable period of her public and private persona.
I have had the remarkable good luck to become acquainted with many of Mae West's "gay mafia" and been privy to many of the remarkable adventures they shared with her. Through the stories her confidantes related during the last two decades of her life, one comes to understand the truly personable and lovely individual Mae West really was. It is my hope that my manuscript, "Saint Mae Our Lady Of Hips & Quips", researched over a ten year span, will eventually find a publisher, and give Mae West's adoring public another aspect of this truly unique individual, who was like a diamond in her ability to focus light on the facet of her life she wanted seen at any given time.
In the meantime, Mr. Louvish's tome is as good a read on Mae West currently available, and is well worth having in your personal library.

She loved to push the envelope . . . and push it she did. There was her highly publicized arrest in NYC on moral charges and a 10-day jail stay, but few people know that Mae West pushed that #10 a bit too far on radio---a 1937 sketch about Adam and Eve (she was Eve, Don Ameche, Adam) was so far out of bounds that she was barred from NBC and did not appear on radio again for 31 years. Proof, indeed, that when she was good, she was very, very good, but when she was bad, she was better. Simon Louvish's biography of the sexpot is a detailed, unapologetic work on the woman who reinvented herself artistically while constantly maintaining an aura of sexuality uncommon in public display at that time. Enlightening and exhaustively researched (this is the first West bio to make use of her recently uncovered personal papers), but the publisher still has done her wrong: The reproduction of the photos is dismal and distracting.

This biography chronicles Mae West's life and achievements very well. However, the author's writing style could have used some editing to avoid repetetive phrasing and over-use of "as we shall see". A fact checker might also have helped since the New York hotel mentioned as being on the site of Mae's old theatre is not called the "Marquess Marriott". It's the Marriott Marquis. I know because I worked there a few years after it opened. One would think a British author would be better versed in noble titles.
But back to Mae. This book shows just how hard Mae West worked at her craft in order to make everything she did seem effortless. She was a dedicated performer and this book does a better job than most in conveying that fact.

In the days of vaudeville and burlesque, people created performing persona's for themselves that came to identify them so strongly, that it became their entire character. Charlie Chaplin was the Tramp. WC Fields was the befuddled hustler. Buster Keaton was the acrobatic Stone Face.

Mae West created herself as a sex goddess, and it came to identify her throughout her life. She lived it so strongly, that it overtook her entire being, for better and for worse.

Simon Louvish points this out, and does a solid job of getting into Ms. West's intentions, her performing highlights, and what little he can dig up of her personal life.

She was a highly intelligent woman of great inner strength, huge ego, and a predilection for self-promotion we can now compare to Madonna. The only difference being that Mae West never re-created herself. She just continued to build the myth and the creation.

Mae West was in some ways an enigma, but in others very transparent. A hugely successful woman, a shrewd investor, a lively personality. Louvish captures her in her entirety pretty well.

Mae West provided civil libertarians with new limits for permissible discourse at a prudish moment in US history. Louvish presents the cases brought before the courts in which she stretched what was allowed to appear on stage and in print. I found this the most fascinating part of the book, making it a must for those who want to know more about US censorship and its nefarious effects on artistic creativity. The amazing thing is that Mae persisted in the face of harrowing restrictions that would have daunted anyone else. Louvish's chronicle of how she faced the censors, and thrived anyway, is a study in courage in the face of state controls. The research is thorough and revealing as he presents Mae West as a crusader against censorship of any kind. The fact that she continued her career despite major restrictions placed on her scripts attests to her fighting spirit. Behind this dolled up woman was a steeled professional.

Yes,we all make ourselves over and grow, but Simon captures an Icon exisiting not for that goal but end result of logical self adornment by a soul searching for self acceptence.
A brain placed into the body of a female at a time beyond our concept of today, women were not suppose to have a concept of selfworth.
Her role of history, written by a male , is generous in detail and seemingly balanced in fairness and FACT. But written by a male.
Thanks to you Sir. It was nice to see my name mentioned and be part of her story by default, she is part of my story that is of my heart , mind and soul. It was a privledge to know her the greater part of my life, alla because I was blessed to be born to a family that my great uncle, Boxer, Kid Broad was a friend to her father and herself. She extended friendship to me that I found to be a treasure.
John Henry Broad, Las Vegas NV

Academic, even pompous, full of text, armed with facts and scrupulous about avoiding conjecture, Louvish writes the kind of bio I can dig. The emphasis is on West the ARTIST. There's plenty of quoted material to just let West be herself. Occasionally, though, Louvish indulges some fanciful prose (eg, his description of West's Presidential bid) - very nice. (My only complaint is he missed the story with Sgt. Pepper.) Smart stuff, all in all.

This book covers a great deal of the years up to her Hollywood days.
However, the author spent too much of the book on this and left out the personality of Ms West.

A wonderful read.
Mr. Louvish clearly spent a lot of time researching not only Mae West's beginnings and all the hard work that preceded her Hollywood arrival------at the age of FORTY (can anyone top that?), but for those of us who crave for a fuller portrait he offers us a complete socio-cultural, economic, artistic account of all those years of her youth when she came to master the Vaudeville circuit and the truly TOUGH job she faced again and again in trying to become a star.Talk about DRIVE and hard work! No wonder most of us never end up "anywhere", so to speak.
Persecuted by the law (including a curiously obsessive nemesis named W.R. Hearst), she had to fight for every inch of it all (no pun intended...). Perhaps not until she is close to her debut in Hollywood can you say that she could rest on her laurels-------and even then......
Mr. Louvish is perhaps a little too severe on her at times (for some of us who love her) and he tends to lean towards a portrait of an opportunistic, cold, calculating manipulator. That she may have been, but he tends to leave out the beauty of the private woman.
No matter. Mr. Louvish deals with FACTS, and embellishes very little.
A most succesful addition to the literature that seems never to stop concerning this spectacularly RARE individual.
If you want an in-depth look at the whole panorama of the early part of the century this may prove a very satisfying experience.

This is a very badly-written cut-and-paste book. Long quotes from newspapers abound and ultimately weigh it down. There was apparently no proofreader. Spelling errors are too numerous. "Neeeded"? One woman is called a "confidante," while another woman is a "confidant." He doesn't know whether the past tense of "slink" is "slinked" or "slunk," so he uses both.

After the 422 pages of the main text, I still didn't feel as if the author had given us the secrets of what made this extraordinary woman click. It's as if an entire layer of her personality is still missing, perhaps because there were no newspaper articles he could quote about it.

The best part of the book is about how vaudeville worked in its early days, and its difference from burlesque. I was hoping for a similar exploration of early sound film, but this book just doesn't have it. There are some good archival pictures. The worst part is the prolonged quoting of each objection of the Code Office to what they read in the proposed scripts for West's movies. Reading one list was enough to get the point across; there is no need to print so many of them.