Mae West: An Icon in Black and White by Jill Watts OUP £35, pp374

IT IS A dispiriting fact of American life that dutifully 'returning to normal', as per presidential orders, must perforce include reading academic biographies with none-too-hidden political agendas, obscured only by the tortured language in which they are couched. I felt guilty, I confess, ploughing through this polemic account of a particularly frivolous American life as New York still smouldered outside my window; strain as I might to be charitable, in the bloodied but unbowed mood of the moment, the task proved beyond even a disposition as sunny as mine.

You don't have to lack a sense of humour to find Mae West one of the dullest of thuds among twentieth-century American icons, or to raise a sceptical immigrant eyebrow when she is dubbed 'as much a part of American folklore as Paul Bunyan or Tom Sawyer or Babe Ruth'. So, in her hammy way, Mae pushed the sexual envelope, battling Hollywood's censors to bring her own unique brand of innuendo and double-entendre to a wider audience than the Broadway audiences who lapped it up in the tremulous Twenties. Good for her. End of story.

In so far as it seeks to chronicle the period vicissitudes of West's eventful life, Jill Watts's account is meticulously researched and commendably thorough. But the associate professor of history at California State University would not have tackled this unlikely subject - and nor, one suspects, would have OUP's US brethren have published the results - were it not ripe for some earnest socio-political revisionism.

Can West's saucy one-liners - most famously, 'Come up and see me sometime' - really be called proto-feminist, 'empowering' womankind to challenge the 'patriarchy' then still exerting its dread stranglehold over Western civilisation? Do you have to be a wholly unreconstructed male to see her curiously unerotic sexual posturing as quite the opposite, promoting sassy seduction at the expense of emancipation, thereby setting back the cause of womankind a decade or three?

Can the last line of her favourite song, 'Frankie and Johnny' - 'There ain't no good in men' - really be seen as a 'pointed critique of male privilege and authority'? Are we actually to believe that West saw her role as a lion-tamer in I'm No Angel in terms of 'resistance to patriarchy', viewing her 'preoccupation with lion taming as a manifestation of her own "animal instincts" - her connectedness to primitivism'?

But this ain't the half of it. Before Mae West's death in 1980, at the age of 87, there were rumours of a dark, deep secret which would be revealed only posthumously. The received wisdom, based in part on the drag-act appeal of her screen persona, was that she had really been a man. Watts authoritatively dismisses this on page one as an unworthy canard: 'Her death certificate, signed by a physician and an undertaker, confirms that she was all woman.' But she spends the next 373 pages insinuating another deep, dark secret in its place: that whiter-than-white Mae West was really black.

Professor Watts adduces no genealogical evidence for this startling claim, beyond the fact that the 'ethnicity' of West's paternal grandfather, a hardy seafarer named John Edwin West, is 'harder to pinpoint' than those of her other three 'undisputedly European' grandparents. More to the point, it seems, is her upbringing amid the part-black, part-criminal underworld of Brooklyn in which herds of deer still roamed, and her adoption of black burlesque routines as she graduated from child star to teen thesp to vaudevillian. Central to Watts's thesis, beyond the 'shimmy', a black dance on which West based her distinctive 'pimp walk', is the African-American comedic practice of 'signifying', 'a subversive rhetorical device that uses multiple and conflict ing messages to obscure rebellious meanings'. Subversive and rebellious we may grant of the Mae West we know from her caricatures of herself in the handful of movies which made her name. But previous exegesists have missed a crucial distinction: 'Black and white signification are distinct practices. In the white community, signifying refers to implying meaning. But among African-Americans, signifying involves the act of implying meaning. Hence the process of creating double meanings is as important as the double meanings themselves.'

Got that at the back? West was clearly a performer of the latter camp, argues Watts, having learned from her African-American mentor, Bert Williams, that 'black signifying rests in double-voicedness and encompasses innuendo, double-entendre, parody, pastiche, cajoling, rapping, boasting, insulting and many other verbal, visual and/or literary forms'. So there you have it. Mae West was black. As West's larger-than-life unfolds, a forlornly familiar trajectory from stage to screen to temperamental diva to sad decline, the word 'signifying' appears almost as often as 'empowerment' and 'patriarchy'. West's self-confident sexuality, as rebellious in its way as Watts's lack of evidence about her 'countless' offscreen affairs (which, as one lone voice of reason points out, 'she doesn't seem to have enjoyed much, anyway'), is apparently far more persuasive about her true skin colour than any mere DNA evidence.

Lappers-up of showbiz bios will relish this book if they can ignore its unsubstantiated central thesis and shut their eyes to the references to 'signifying' on almost every page. Historians of the civil rights and the women's movements should look elsewhere for new heroes and, indeed, source material. The most memorable lines in the book belong to Graham Greene and West's co-star W.C. Fields, who respectively called her 'an overfed python' and 'a plumber's idea of Cleopatra'.

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