MOVIES : Remember Her Sometime : Mae West’s 100th (or so) birthday is coming up. What was it about this larger-than-life actress that changed Hollywood forever? A look back by a friend and observer.

Mae West would have turned 100 on Aug. 17--or would she have already reached that milestone five or six years ago?

Both Dr. Jules Stein, the founder of MCA, who once played a fiddle in her jazz band when she appeared in vaudeville, and veteran TV director Herbert Kenwith, who early in his career was the stage manager for the tour of her 1948 revival of “Diamond Lil,” were firmly convinced that she was older than she admitted. But her first and best biographer to date, George Eels, discovered records in the Bureau of the Census that confirm her birth year as 1893. In any event, any woman who readily stated that she was born in 1893 deserved the benefit of a doubt.

Somehow this uncertainty is fitting. In her inimitable way Mae West was a truthful woman, especially about sex, maybe embellishing the family tree or the box-office take for the sake of appearances, yet she always retained a true star’s essential mystery.

In the years since her death in November, 1987, after a series of strokes, there have been a number of books and articles, and even a TV movie, that have told us a lot about her life and career, yet she retains in our collective imagination that enigmatic quality that she shared with a radically different screen siren, Greta Garbo (whom she met late in life, prompting her to declare that Garbo could still work “if she’d just accept character parts”). Just in time for West’s centennial, Universal has just released its “My Little Chickadee” and her eight Paramount pictures on cassette as “The Ultimate Mae West Collection.”

Her status in the firmament of American popular culture is secure, right up there with her onetime co-star W. C. Fields and Groucho Marx, who loved to inquire when he ran into her in their later years: “Gettin’ much, Mae?” But West was more than a bawdy comedian with a vaudevillian’s faultless timing and a cache of immortal quips, for she helped free Americans from Victorian prudery with her healthy, amused view of sex. “I take sex out in the open and laugh at it,” she said. Has there ever been a star who had such an impact on social mores? Can this be said even of Charlie Chaplin?

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The outlines of West’s life are as familiar as her hourglass figure. She was born in Brooklyn to a onetime prizefighter and his wife, whose frustration at not being able to become an actress herself seemed to have shaped West and her destiny from her earliest childhood. “When your parents put you on the stage at the age of 6 you learn to take care of yourself,” she once remarked with unaccustomed wryness. (She generally spoke of her mother with unalloyed affection and with respect for a father from whom she felt distant.)

From singing in lodge halls--with a voice low and rough for a child--to acting in stock and finally appearing in vaudeville, with her Broadway debut occurring in 1911, West developed her stage performer’s skills, often shocking audiences and critics of the day with songs, dances and repartee considered outrageously suggestive at the time.

It was not, however, until she had reached the age of 35 and devised “Diamond Lil” that she was able to create the enduring image that would sustain her and her career for the rest of her life. By reaching back to the decade of her birth, West found a distancing context that would make her fabled double-entendres seem more funny than raunchy and costumes that were flattering to her always-opulent figure.

Mae West was born for corsets, blazing diamonds, feather boas, big elaborate hats and spangly long-skirted gowns that may have hid her good legs but allowed her to increase her height (about five feet) with high platform shoes. Even in such modern-dress pictures as “I’m No Angel” (1933) her costumes seemed but streamlined versions of Gay ‘90s models.

Although it is true that the line blurred between the public image and the private person, West was at heart paradoxical: She was disarmingly honest about the immensity of her ego, but if she saw herself at the center of the universe it had the effect of making her democratic. With the possible exceptions of producers, Paramount founder Adolph Zukor and the theater’s Brothers Shubert in particular, money men for whom she had the greatest respect, she pretty much treated everybody alike. You didn’t have to be rich, famous or good-looking to qualify for her attention; you just had to be interested in her.

But if you were, and you were admitted to her circle, she gave her best in return--even to those who weren’t in a position to do her any good but who she simply liked. It was important to her that she looked her best at all times and that you were entertained by her stories and her songs.

Not surprisingly, West could be tough, even ruthless, in protecting her image, but she was wonderful company, always an upper, relaxed and easygoing, capable of listening to others and never fighting to be the center of attention, which gravitated to her naturally. Many who never met her accused her of living in the part, and though she enjoyed recounting cherished moments, the truth is that she had the rare capacity of enjoying herself fully in the here and now.

In later years West was subjected to occasional unkind photographs, those of Diane Arbus especially--”My friends in Greenwich Village are going to get her,” West said--but to the end of her life in person she could dazzle. She described herself as “a sex personality, not a sex symbol,” and even in her 80s she was a magnetic presence.

West was gallant in her determination to retain her glamour but did not kid herself about the passing of time, even as she strived to project an aura of agelessness. She had a flawless complexion and intense blue eyes framed by dagger-length false eyelashes and highly sensual lips and nostrils. Her most remarkable feature was not her figure but her hands, which were exquisitely shaped and astoundingly youthful. She never had a face lift and could prove it with an absence of surgical scars at her hairline. Her friend director George Cukor said her Brooklyn accent was perfect of its kind.

She wore surprisingly little makeup, which she expertly applied herself. She loved to augment her hair, which she kept, in her words, “movie-star blond,” with elaborate falls and hairpieces. In her private life she favored simple gowns and pantsuits, invariably either white or in soft pastel colors, and wore one simple but big diamond ring and one even bigger, with several stones, which she once admitted were paste. Her negligees and peignoirs, with their exquisite lace inserts, were made by Beverly Hills’ legendary Juel Park. The famous diamonds were kept at the bank, to be taken out for premieres and grand events, and which she wore with more elaborate but always flattering gowns; nothing she ever wore overpowered her personality.

West died in the sixth-floor apartment in the Ravenswood apartment building on Rossmore Avenue, where she had lived for 48 years. It was a perfect setting for her. Everything was a soft white, and the fancy Louis XV furniture was accented in gold. There was a baby grand, a gift from boxer Vincent Lopez, one of her many amours, and on it stood a nude statue--”That’s me, Venus with arms!” West proclaimed good-humoredly. Over a couch there was an oval painting of West, also nude--”They musta painted it when I wasn’t lookin’,” she quipped. A superb Meissen vase that had been converted into a lamp sat on a gold mirror-topped table, and scattered about were West’s favorite photographs of herself.

She was a gracious hostess, requesting only that no one smoke but offering drinks, though she was a lifelong teetotaler. For the last 27 years of her life her devoted companion was Paul Novak, who had been part of her muscleman chorus line in her nightclub act. Novak is a selfless, gentle man who made sure that her public entrances and exits were graceful, that she watched her diet and exercised regularly. So concerned was she with her image as a woman who belonged to no one man that only toward the end of her life was she inclined to acknowledge that she loved him as much as he loved her.

West loved many a prizefighter and, in keeping with living her life according to her own terms, had a major affair and enduring friendship with English-born gangster Owney Madden, proprietor of the Cotton Club and a backer of the original production of “Diamond Lil.” “Hmmm, he was cruel but he could be sweet ,” West purred in recollection. (She was also impressed that he had taken 26 bullets and lived to tell the tale. “Every now and then he had to go to the hospital to have one of ‘em dug out,” she said.)

Once when Madden wanted to visit Los Angeles, West cleared the way with a word with another of her great friends, then-Los Angeles Dist. Atty. Buron Fitts. It was Fitts, by the way, who indirectly inspired one of West’s most quoted lines. Too busy to meet her at the railroad station, Fitts sent over the handsomest deputy he could find, ordering him to give her a big kiss, saying “This is from Buron”--to which West replied: “Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?”

Before Novak, however, the most important man in West’s life was her mother’s attorney, James Timony, who briefly became her lover and then her longtime manager until his death in 1954. The only serious mistake she ever made in her love life was to marry song-and-dance man Frank Wallace, with whom she lived only briefly but 40 years later had to WHY? divorce amid much unwanted publicity.

West had a large Richard Neutra-designed beach house in Santa Monica, which was decorated like her apartment--most notably, there was a naughty mural featuring nude males in the upstairs hall. She frequently held ESP demonstrations with her favorite psychic, Richard Ireland; after she gave up the house she held them in one of the Ravenswood reception rooms. They attracted a wide array of people; it was possible to see the mothers of Gena Rowlands and the late John Cassavetes in attendance along with ‘20s singer Harry Richmond (who was once West’s piano accompanist), King Farouk’s sister and, if memory serves, fabled stripper Betty Rowland, the Ball of Fire.

Occasionally, West’s reclusive sister Beverly attended--”I wish she’d get a face lift!” West often said of the younger sibling, to whom time had not been kind. Roddy McDowall, I believe, once brought Joan Rivers, when Jayne Meadows and Steve Allen were also present. (West had baby-sat Allen when his mother, fellow vaudevillian Belle Montrose, was onstage performing.)

On the set West was always the trouper, unfazed by fluffed lines and retakes, saying, “I want it perfect.” When directing her in one of her postwar plays, “Come on Up and Ring Twice,” Herbert Kenwith recalled that though she was easy to work with, “you had to do everything yourself. I even had to play her part for her before she’d do it herself!” She was at ease everywhere she went, whether it be a personal appearance or dinner at Perino’s or, more humbly, a favorite Chinese restaurant in the downtown produce district. She took pleasure in encountering fans and signing autographs for them. She was as discreet in her countless acts of charity and kindness as she was in her love life.

“Once, after a show in Princeton, where she did both ‘Diamond Lil’ and ‘Come on Up and Ring Twice’ for me, I invited the audience to come backstage and meet Mae,” Kenwith said. “I told Mae that one girl, confined to a wheelchair with infantile paralysis, wouldn’t be able to see her. She said to me, ‘Don’t worry, dearie, I’ll go out and talk to her. And Herbert, do you mind if I give these flowers you gave me to her?’ That was Mae.”

Even Maila Nurmi, later famous as TV’s Vampira, who was fired by West for imitating her wiggle in Mike Todd’s Broadway production of “Catherine Was Great,” remembers her affectionately. “When my grandmother died Mae sent flowers to the funeral,” Nurmi recalled recently.

Just in time for her centennial, Tim Malachosky, her secretary for the last 10 years of her life, is publishing “Mae West,” a picture book composed of 275 photographs, including 60 in color, many of them unfamiliar and some unique. Interspersed with the stills is a text, which Malachosky wrote with James Greene. It offers a gloss of West’s life and career, enlivened by anecdotes from West presented in greater detail than ever before and with particular attention to her costumes, a number of whichz Malachosky has preserved.

Best of all is when Malachosky enters the picture himself to give a unique account of her day-to-day existence, telling of her extending a helping hand to friends down on their luck and spending much of her time answering requests for autographs. Malachosky estimates that she received 1,000 to 5,000 letters a week; “she really did sign all of the autographs herself,” he said.

Malachosky, who helped Novak and West’s longtime fan Dolly Dempsey nurse West in her final days, said, “I remember her for her amazing beauty . . . her quick mind and her kindness.” She explained to him that she downplayed her good deeds for fear it “would ruin my image.”

“She was probably the most wonderful person I ever met,” Malachosky said. “I sometime wonder if I’ll ever have the opportunity to equal that.”