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Forty years after her death, people still imitate Mae West’s voice: that slinky contralto drawl that hit each Brooklyn-inflected vowel like a cab driver leaning on his horn. The voice would be memorable even if she had by some wild mischance wound up playing dowagers and spinster aunts. Thank goodness this plush-figured goddess of stage and screen is instead in the pantheon of great American one-line comedians.
“She always played herself” is wielded as a put-down for the stars of classic Hollywood, to say sure, they were memorable, but they weren’t
real actors. It’s usually a bogus charge but I come in praise of Mae West, and for her, it was true, and it was the whole glorious point. Do you complain that a sonnet always has fourteen lines? In the cinema of Mae West, she was lushly garbed, she was a good egg, she was surrounded by slavering men (“suckers,” as she pithily describes them in ....

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