ODD BODY: Tori Spelling, a TV magnate's child.

MAE WEST, the famed Broadway star of the 1920s and 1930s, wanted more than anything, to be remembered as a playwright, as three of her scripts, to be published this year, reveal. These scripts have remained with the Library of Congress in America for 70 years, and will see the light of day after a two-decade legal battle over copyright.

The last decade has seen a revival of interest in West, with three biographies on her published in the past five years which have given her the status of a gay icon. Her three plays, Sex, The Drag and The Pleasure Man were all produced on Broadway, with the last two revolving around gays and transvestites. Sex, staged in 1926, gave West her first starring role as a prostitute.

Though the play was a success, the whole cast, including West, was arrested and jailed after it had been running for almost a year. The Drag, written in 1927, was set amongst homosexuals and transvestites and it opened in October 1928 after West rewrote it as The Pleasure Man. It was closed the next day with the police rounding up the whole cast and the reviews it received were harsh: it was described as "abomination...prostitution of the rankest sort", and "an attempt to capitalise on filth and degeneracy". West defended the play at the trial at a cost of $30,000 and it was finally dismissed. It was the homosexual content of these plays that established West as a gay icon and has renewed interest in her.

Mrs Brown gets lucky

Douglas rae, the maker of a low-budget BBC Scotland film Mrs Brown, about the relationship between Queen Victoria and her supposed Highland servant lover, John Brown, is still unable to believe his luck. Hollywood moghul Harvey Weinstein, who this year steered both The English Patient and Billy Bob Thornton's Sling Blade to Oscar glory, saw a small cut of the film and was so impressed by it that he decided it would be going to the Oscars next year. For Dame Judi Dench, who portrays Victoria in the film, it was the first starring role. Both she and Billy Connolly, who plays Brown, are unknown in the United States.

"But Harvey said he would make it his '97/'98 mission to get nominations in all the major categories of the Academy Awards," says Rae. Weinstein's Miramax finalised the purchase of Mrs Brown two weeks ago. So instead of awaiting a slot with the BBC, the film opens in the United States in July and will headline the Edinburgh Film Festival in August. And the Oscars? "Oscars? That's dangerous talk," says Dench. "That's very, very premature." For the moment, Mrs Brown will get its first showing at Cannes, in the art-house Un Certain Regard category.

Celebrity recipes

THE original recipes devised by celebrities for a 1950 charity cookbook, As We Like It: Cookery Recipes by Famous People, are to be auctioned by Christie's in New York on May 14. The collection of 160 recipes, mostly hand-written, signed and loosely assembled in an album, is likely to fetch between $6,000 and $8,000. The book itself has disappeared. Profits from the book were originally to go to British prisoners of war.

Check 90210 for Spelling

Tori Spelling, the 23-year-old daughter of American TV magnate Aaron Spelling, is best known for her role as Donna Martin in the television series Beverly Hills 90210. Though her father is the originator of more hours of television than any other man in history (Charlie's Angels, Starsky and Hutch, Love Boat, Fantasy Island, Dynasty, Melrose Place, to name a few), Spelling Jr is unpretentious and does not share her parents' opulent tastes.

In fact, as a child, she found them embarrassing and refused to bring her friends home from school, also asking her father to park the limousine a few blocks away when he accompanied her to school. She also seems to have escaped her parents' eccentricities -- her mother used to buy exotic shells and throw them on the beach so that she could find them as a little girl. After school, she had planned to go to college to study theatre and English literature, but was chosen for 90210, so she could never go.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.