Becoming Mae West by Emily Wortis Leider
Becoming Mae West by Emily Wortis Leider is a 431-page hardcover published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997, stated first edition. The dust jacket has some surface rubbing, bumping to the spine and some stains on the back cover. Inside, the book is crisp, clean, and the condition is very good. Book Summary Mae West loved big cities, form-fitting clothes, lipstick, jazz, sex in taxis, intrigue, gun-toting bootleggers, boxers lathered in sweat, and cops who read her the riot act. Born in Brooklyn in 1893, she was the child of a former bare-knuckles boxer and an immigrant whose aspirations made her a classic stage mother. Baby Mae was performing by age five; by the time she was twenty, she was a seasoned trooper on the Keith vaudeville circuit and had begun to write her own material. When prudery squelched her as a vaudeville headline, she moved to the more cosmopolitan legitimate stage. Here, too, censors tried to shut her down, but the headlines sparked by obscenity trials for