Title: Disappointing treatment of a famously satisfying subject.
Product review: Now that frankness and celebrity clay-foot-probing are in fashion, a new generation of biographies (Kenneth Silverman's "Houdini! The Career of Erich Weiss"; Patrick McGilligan's "Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast"; Maria Riva's brilliant "Marlene Dietrich") has probed beneath urban legends and P.R. disinformation to find the fascinating human beasts beneath show business icons. A fabulous creature like Mae West rates this type of quality creative journalism, but gets nothing of the sort in Leider's book. A scrappy assemblage of secondary-source research and dull "setting the scene" padding, it does tell the bare-bones story of West's feisty career, but it's an awfully tough read. Leider clearly admires her subject, but doesn't have the words (or enough facts) to even begin to bring her to life.
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