Movie Stars

Behind the scenes with some of Hollywood's legends.

The Dame

Mae West bragged of being "no angel." As Simon Louvish shows in his shrewd, informed Mae West: "It Ain't No Sin" (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's, $26.95), she was no accident, either.

Had you actually gone up and seen West sometime, chances are you would have interrupted a woman hard at work on her writing: the plays she authored as vehicles for herself, along with the jokes and quips she invented or stole, then polished and squirreled away in notebooks, to be doled out as needed for scripts and interviews.

That industriousness helps account for Mary Jane West's rise from burlesque to vaudeville to Broadway to Hollywood and finally to camp iconography (I remember her being caricatured as a zaftig hen in the TV cartoons of my youth). Her timing was good, too. Americans were ready to cut loose in the late teens and '20s, when West was on stage demonstrating her bawdy wit and her "Shimmy Shawabble," described by one critic as "an attempt to get out of a strait-jacket without the use of the hands."

In her scripts she championed the disrespected and the reviled: gamblers, prostitutes and homosexuals. And she cultivated a liberating persona: the female free agent who, in Louvish's words, liked "to have as much fun with the opposite sex as powerful men saw as their right from time immemorial."

At the height of her popularity, censors sanitized West's movies and curtailed her radio appearances, but she bided her time and popped up elsewhere: in Las Vegas revues, on TV programs and, following the defeat of the censors in the '60s, in films again. The killjoys might as well have let her shawabble. For in addition to her work ethic and way with a phrase, Mae West had the unquenchable ability to make even her single entendres seem double.

The Straight Arrow

About a quarter of the way through Marc Eliot's Jimmy Stewart: A Biography (Harmony, $25.95) comes a telling moment. The bosses at MGM, the studio that employed the skinny young actor with a small-town background and an Ivy League education, decided that Stewart had trouble projecting sex appeal. They recommended some manly therapy: visiting "a private brothel built within walking distance of the studio's front gate." Stewart took his medicine under protest, grousing that "he'd rather be in love when he 'did it.' " It's a powerful anecdote that sheds light on the studio system, the actor's homespun values and what a fellow will do -- and rue -- to stay employed.

Eliot, whose other books include a biography of Cary Grant, is also good on the darkening of Stewart: his transformation from a callow, often comic leading man in his pre-World War II films (with the notable exception of "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington") to a somber, anguished hero of Westerns and thrillers afterward, especially under the direction of Anthony Mann and Alfred Hitchcock. Particularly illuminating are Eliot's discussions of Hitchcock's 1956 version of "The Man Who Knew Too Much" and the same director's "Vertigo," released two years later.

But Jimmy Stewart is marred by mistakes, clichés, careless writing and gush. German novelist Erich Maria Remarque was not Jewish, as Eliot states, but Roman Catholic. To say that Stewart and his wife considered building a house "just off the coast of Pacific Palisades" puts the putative dwelling in the ocean. Referring to Stewart's leading role in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," Eliot writes, "Jefferson Smith, like his three historical namesakes (Thomas Jefferson, Adam Smith, Jesus Christ) is a purist and literalist." Not even someone playing anagrams, I submit, can make "Jesus Christ" into a namesake for "Jefferson Smith." When his subject scores at the box office, Eliot reaches into his vocabulary and comes up with "Jimmy Stewart had become a superstar and everyone wanted a piece of him now." I could go on, but you get the point. For insight, you might want to consult this book; but for precision, I would stick with Gary Fishgall's 1997 Pieces of Time: The Life of James Stewart.

The Delight

The delightfulness of Audrey Hepburn hardly needs to be explicated -- if you have a DVD player, you can dig it for yourself (or just turn on the tube these days and catch her dancing in Gap commercials). Even so, in Enchantment: The Life of Audrey Hepburn (Harmony, $25.95), Donald Spoto ably unpacks his subject's appeal. For one thing, there was her inimitable manner of speaking, which Spoto accounts for by quoting the star herself on a childhood divided between Holland (her mother's country) and England (her father's): "There is no speech I can relax into when I'm tired, because my ear has never been accustomed to one intonation. It's because I have no mother tongue that the critics accuse me of curious speech."

Then, too, as Spoto notes, Hepburn brought relief from the 1950s breast fetish. In the decade of Jane Russell, Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield and, yes, Mae West, the flat-chested Hepburn undermined the attempt to equate sexiness with mammary splendor. She also kept her love life as private as possible, a tactic that gave her an air of mystery, if not unattainability. And unlike many actors, she was a person of real substance: In later life, she didn't just dabble in worthy causes, she devoted herself tirelessly to UNICEF.

Though admirably concise, Enchantment has enough room in it for Spoto to demonstrate his Hollywood savvy (he has also written biographies of Alfred Hitchcock and Marlene Dietrich, among others). I liked his explanation for a piece of advice Cary Grant gave the chronically nervous Hepburn on the set of "Charade": "You've got to learn to like yourself a little more."

"Perhaps the most distressing aspect of movie stardom -- especially for women," Spoto writes, " -- is the fact that they are pitched into a kind of constant self-criticism, the result of knowing that one is always being assessed by studios, directors, agents, colleagues, the press and the public. . . . [In Hepburn's case] Grant was both correct and gently encouraging." ·

Dennis Drabelle is a contributing editor of Book World.