A beguiling mixture of daring and dignity

Mae West would have hated “Dirty Blonde,” even though it offers a loving, carefully researched overview of her life and career.

As conceived by actress-playwright Claudia Shear and director James Lapine, “Dirty Blonde” is two plays intercut with each other. One charts touchingly how two lonely, individuals are drawn together by their admiration for West, whose bold personality proves empowering to both.

The other traces West’s evolution as a performer who discovered herself as the up-to-her-hips-in-quips Diamond Lil, a Gay ‘90s queen of the Bowery, a resplendent figure ablaze with jewels and clad in feather boas and sequin-encrusted gowns.

As talented an actor and writer as Shear is, however, she is simply too ample to play West, whose indelible image is based on the enduring hourglass figure she managed to preserve to the end of her long life even though the sands of time may have shifted things a bit. Always “pleasingly plump,” West early on discovered how a corset could set off her opulent curves. In short, the physical profile is so crucial to the West image that it allows little room for artistic license.

Yet the problem of “Dirty Blonde’s” conception of West goes beyond mere appearances, for it suggests that the actress carried on as outrageously offstage as she sometimes did onstage. West, whom I came to know well in the last decades of her life, was a truly daring performer -- a suggestive dancer and singer who discovered the shimmy in Chicago clubs and a playwright who dealt with prostitution and homosexuality. But at heart she was a lady, which is precisely why she could get away with so much when she combined a split-second timing and the famous quips that made her one of the most quoted performing artists of all time. Her innate dignity and ironclad self-confidence allowed her to be breathtakingly direct with a man who attracted her, but at the same time she valued privacy and took pains to preserve hers, which only added to her mystique.

West was a “tough girl” in her vaudeville acts and loved to push the envelope in her singing and dancing, but evidence suggests that offstage, she did not behave in a boisterous manner. She was even described by a neighbor as a young woman who liked to stay home with her mother. This is not to say that West wasn’t always a strong, determined woman prepared to stand up for herself and wasn’t always fast with a comeback.

“Dirty Blonde” presents West in her later years as game but feeble. In truth, West was alert and engaged until felled by the stroke that preceded her death at 87 in 1980; and despite the stroke, her personality remained feisty. Although the line had indeed blurred between Diamond Lil and Mae West, there was a remarkable and endearing woman behind the image. She was easygoing, kind and hospitable and went out of her way to avoid unpleasantness -- but when it struck, she displayed a healthy temper in response. She loved folksy, small gatherings and was always welcoming to newcomers. She was always a gracious, interested listener.

She wanted her friends to have a good time in her company and loved to entertain them with stories from her life. Quite frequently, she would sing favorite songs, and when she had made a new recording, she would sometimes get up and perform along with it. She could do a wickedly hilarious impression of Sarah Bernhardt. Although sometimes accused of living in the past, West always looked ahead and had a contagious gift for enjoying life in the moment. Time spent with her was always filled with good cheer.

West took great pride in her appearance and had an extraordinary peaches-and-cream complexion that nonetheless tanned deeply on the rare occasions she sunbathed. She actually used makeup sparingly but favored dagger-like eyelashes -- to set off her blue eyes -- and a rich red lipstick. In her private life, she had a preference for simple, figure-flattering pantsuits and long coats and left most of her fabled jewels in a safe deposit box, to be brought out only for special occasions.

In life and in her art, West was a paradox. As a comedian, she spoofed sex, encouraging audiences not to take it so seriously, and thus became a liberating social force. Yet, though she described herself as a sex personality rather than a sex symbol, she took herself seriously as an enduring sexual icon. One of her shrewdest moves was early on to own up to a vast ego, which she poked fun at frequently, and which drove her, rightly or wrongly, to play the eternal temptress at age 85 in the movie “Sextette.” But West did not ultimately kid herself.

Several years before attempting “Sextette,” she gave what proved to be her last public live performance, a tab version of her ‘50s nightclub act, when she was honored by the Masquers Club, the venerable actors organization. Clad in a simple but elegant gown designed for her by Edith Head, she ditched the platform shoes that made her look more statuesque for flats that allowed her to move around the stage freely and maneuver a lightning-fast costume change. Long nearsighted, she also wore contact lenses that evening so that everything would go without a hitch. After the performance, she headed with friends to her favorite Chinese restaurant, Man Fook Low, in the downtown produce district and felt so energized that she said, “I could do another show right now.”

On a personal level, West could seem an enigma, at times the most self-absorbed woman on the planet. Yet that was part of the pleasure-loving Diamond Lil image, for behind it was a woman who was almost secretly thoughtful and caring and who supported her parents and her brother and sister and countless others throughout her life. Despite wise investments, her status as the highest-paid woman in America in 1935 and her own essential frugality, West actually grew concerned about her finances as she grew older, but she successfully kept up the illusion of fabled wealth to the end.

After her death, it was revealed that Mae West had been down to her last million, but she left her friends and fans with priceless memories.

An expanded version of Kevin Thomas’ eulogy written for Mae West’s funeral and originally published in The Times on Nov. 30, 1980, has just been published in “Farewell, Godspeed: The Greatest Eulogies of Our Time,” edited by Cyrus M. Copeland (Harmony Books).