Mae West: it ain't no sin Simon Louvish Faber & Faber, 512pp, £20 ISBN 0571219489

Mae West's legendary bust led the Royal Air Force to adopt her name for its life jackets. But her sex appeal didn't stop at her chest. She could drive male audiences wild simply by wiggling. In 1913, as a young vaudevillian dancing for an audience of Yale boys, her shimmying hips prompted a riot. Not for the last time, West was blamed for the reaction she provoked.

Born in Brooklyn in 1893, the daughter of Battlin' Jack West, a former prize-fighter made good in the livery business, West was brought up in prosperous circumstances and had a private education. From her German mother, Tillie, she inherited a love of the theatre, and at 14 she joined a local stage company (play-ing, among other roles, Little Lord Fauntleroy). Aged 16, West started in vaudeville. From the first, she possessed two remarkable assets: her "curves in motion" and her innate ability to make the tamest material sound dirty.

After more than a decade of playing small-time vaudeville gigs, West began to look to Broadway for a vehicle that would better showcase her talents. Unable to find a suitable play, she wrote her own, entitled Sex. A musical melodrama about a prostitute who escapes her pimp for an honest relationship with a sailor, Sex opened in New York in 1926 to apoplectic reviews. (One critic noted that even after West's heroine turned into a good girl, she still flaunted herself and her body "as if she were drumming up business as a bad one".) Naturally, critical condemnation turned the show into an instant commercial success. It ran to packed houses until the city authorities brought it to an end by arresting the cast and producers on charges of immorality. West was convicted of obscenity in her "personality, look, walk, mannerisms and gestures", and was jailed for eight days.

Unbowed, she went on to produce and star in a string of risque plays - most notably her critically acclaimed naughty-Nineties drama Diamond Lil - before once again being hauled before the courts for obscenity. On this occasion she was acquitted, but not before enough publicity had been generated to make her a commodity that Hollywood wanted to buy.

West was 39 when she made her first film, Night After Night, in 1932. Her part was small, yet she "stole everything but the cameras", as even the film's intended star, George Raft, admitted. For her second film, She Done Him Wrong, West wrote the screenplay and starred alongside the then unknown Cary Grant (whom she claimed to have discovered). The combination was box-office dynamite. Three more West screenplays followed, with the result that by 1935 she was not only America's highest-paid actor - outstripping her nearest rival, Marlene Dietrich, by more than $100,000 - but also the country's second-highest income-tax payer, after William Randolph Hearst.

But West's Hollywood career was short. Her overtly sexual style and outre dialogue ensured the constant attentions of the Hays censorship office. It became impossible for her films to make it to screen without being drastically altered. The heavy cutting left the films flat and staid, and by 1937 West's celluloid career was in effect over. She devoted the rest of her life to ensuring the endurance of her mythic status: she successfully revived Diamond Lil in 1948, conquered Las Vegas in 1954 and starred in two films in the 1970s. By dint of extraordinary make-up and costumes, the Mae West she showed the public was forever young and forever synonymous with sex. In her last film, made when she was in her eighties, she is seen romancing the then youthful Timothy Dalton.

West's witty, smutty persona dominates Simon Louvish's careful - if sometimes pedantic - biography. The book promises new insights based on Louvish's access to a previously unstudied archive of West's papers held by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles. What emerges is that, although West presented her literary output as the product of short creative bursts, it was in fact the result of steady graft and endless redrafting. Her conscientious approach to her work extended even to the material that sounded most spontaneous: many of her famous quips were culled from professional joke books.

That is not to say West was incapable of off-the-cuff humour. When she suffered the first in a series of strokes that would eventually kill her, she fell out of bed. She insisted the fall was prompted by a dream. Asked whether the dream had been a bad one, she replied: "No, a good one. How bad can a dream about Burt Reynolds be?"

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