Mae West: Between the Covers (hardback)

Collected for the first time are some of the most revealing, amusing, and rare interviews covering Mae West's ten-year career in movies. West's celluloid image was explosive and trendsetting, but her outspoken and progressive thoughts about women and sexuality shocked and seduced the public. Her feminist riffs and screenplays made her a cultural icon for sexuality and social subversion. In the 1930s, she was not only considered scandalous, but positively dangerous. In a male dominated industry, she stood alone. "I don't mind telling you," she told a journalist, "I'm about as fed up on this pseudo-frigidity in women as a lot of men are. It all started a few hundred years ago with some religious fanatics who decided because the religious leaders had been supernaturally conceived, it naturally followed that any expression of sex through the human body must be sinful. Bosh!"