"She feels that curves are far more appealing than angles, and won’t accept photographs that do not show her a bit more voluptuous and rounded than the slim silhouette the modern woman has succeeded in making popular."

I'm reading something written in The New Yorker in 1928: "Mae West, the Queen of New York/The writer and star of 'Sex' and 'Diamond Lil' is calm, clear, and eager for success," by Thyra Samter Winslow. 

If you do a certain puzzle, which I won't spoil by naming, you too may have clicked on the link to this article from a century ago.

... Mae is courteous, amused, always optimistic, glad to see everyone, dropping fairly good, though somewhat trite, epigrams, peppered with bad grammar and made important because of her drawl and her insinuations. She ends her sentences with “Know what I mean?” or “See?”—sometimes combining the two.... 

She is slow, rhythmic, insinuating. She moves with almost feline intensity, a curious sort of wiggle, inside her corsets of the nineties. Her voice is low, husky, magnetic.... 

Miss West writes her plays on bits of paper, sometimes between the acts of another play. Now she has taken to using a dictaphone. “When all my notes are put together and typed I have a play. See? I put in the real stuff at rehearsal. Know what I mean? I let the actors write a lot of their own lines. I pick them out for types, and then let ’em talk. You can’t tell how lines will go over until you try them out on the stage. You have got to hit an audience hard, keep ’em interested every minute. If the action starts to get dull I lift a scene from another act and put it in. See?"

ADDED: The puzzle was the New Yorker's "Name Drop" yesterday. I like this puzzle. Each weekday there's a set of 6 clues for a famous name. The clues get easier as you go along, and I got Mae West after the second clue: "My silhouette inspired the shape of the bottle for Elsa Schiaparelli’s Shocking perfume, and my lips inspired the shape of a sofa designed by Edward James and Salvador Dalí." 

Last night, I happened to watch a Mae West movie, her first, "Night After Night." It was another one of the Criterion Channel's series of pre-code Paramount movies. She has a secondary role and doesn't even show up until the movie is halfway over, and it looks like this, at the door of George Raft's speakeasy:

The character West plays — Maudie Triplett — was based on the real life personage, Texas Guinan. Here's some documentary footage of Guinan in a speakeasy in 1928:

According to Wikipedia, George Raft wanted Guinan to play the role that went to West, but "but the studio opted for West since she was nine years younger. Raft believed that the part would have launched a major film career for Guinan (then aged 48), which proved to be the case for West instead. (West was reportedly a fan of Guinan and incorporated some of the flamboyant Guinan's ideas into her own acts)."