Claudia Shear: Blonde ambition

From whorehouse receptionist to photocopier, Claudia Shear has had a vast array of jobs. Now she's impersonating Mae West in a production she wrote herself. It's an exhausting role, she tells Rhoda Koenig, but not for the reasons you'd think

The girl crossing the road outside Claudia Shear's London hotel might be surprised to learn that the saying on the front of her T-shirt – "When I'm good, I'm very good..." – was written by a mould-breaking sex symbol more than 70 years ago. Or that anyone who knows about Mae West doesn't need to turn round to know that the back reads: "...but when I'm bad, I'm better."

West combined the voluptuous, built-for-comfort look of the 1890s (when she was born) and the cynical flippancy of the 1920s and 1930s (when she was the scandalous white-hot mama of the New York stage and of pre-Hays Code talking pictures). Independent and imperturbable in real life as well as her screen persona, West didn't flout the morals of the period so much as ignore them: at a time when E F Benson's Lucia spoke for many by referring to "that horrid thing that Freud calls 'sex'", West made that short word the title of a hit play she wrote and starred in. It's no surprise that a present-day actress has written a hit show in which she plays West, but less predictable that it's an actress as familiar with Benson as with Broadway.

Shear has had some trouble explaining the title of her show, Dirty Blonde. A Frenchman to whom she said it meant "blonde comme moi", pointing to her locks of several shades of gold and light brown, replied: "Ah, fausse blonde." The other dinner guests, she says, fell about, not unlike her American audiences. But such enthusiastic responses were unknown to Shear in the long first phase of her career, which took her down many strange byways, even for an actress starting out.

Shear, now 39, grew up in Brooklyn, the daughter of the deputy chief of the New York City Fire Department and an elegant, artistic, eccentric Italian mother, the main influence in her life after her parents' divorce when she was a child. In her own culture quest, Shear studied art in Rome and dance in New York, and came to Britain "to study Shakespeare and stuff" but never "went to any established drama school or writing course". Stagestruck from an early age, she got a dogsbody's job at the respected Public Theatre in New York while still a teenager, though the deciding factor, she says, was probably her declaration: "I'll work here for free."

But that job was only one of the 65 that Shear reckons she had before writing Blown Sideways Through Life, the autobiographical show that brought her "a tsunami of success" in 1993. "My world changed completely from Tuesday to Wednesday," she says of the off-Broadway play that recounted a job history not so much chequered as kaleidoscopic. Along with cleaning toilets or making Xerox copies for office juniors, Shear held the possibly less degrading post of whorehouse receptionist. The place was a dump, but in a classy neighbourhood – "Right around the corner from you," she later told Stephen Sondheim. Though all she touched was the telephone, the work was actually more dangerous than that of the legover artistes.

"If you use the telephone to promote prostitution, that's a federal rap," says Shear, whose vocabulary is sometimes that of the New York of Mae West's day. Though Shear once had to be an impromptu bouncer, and a pair of G-men knocked at the door of another unsavoury place she worked – "That was two guys who were trying to set up a whorehouse" – she was left to get on with her main interest. "Life," says Shear, "is what interrupts my reading." Of all the queer circumstances in which Mapp and Lucia has been read, the front desk of a bordello, between rattling off a list of fees for services, would probably take some beating.

Since Blown Sideways..., Shear has written TV pilots and screenplays for Meg Ryan and Steven Spielberg, articles for fashion and travel glossies magazines – "I've got the biggest bottom of anyone ever photographed for Vogue" – and is now rewriting the libretto of Noël Coward's Sail Away for a forthcoming New York production. Dirty Blonde began in 1996, when the director James Lapine, a long-time Sondheim associate, told Shear he wanted her to write and act in a play about West. "Mr Lapine, as I always call him, brought a great gift to me. His thing is structure, the way things fold into each other. He would say, 'We need this here; we don't want that', which was what I needed – I'm not a great linear thinker."

Nothing was written, however, until Shear had spent nearly a year on research. "I went to the Library of Congress, the New York libraries, the Paramount archives." She went back to West's years in vaudeville, digging up such obscure characters as Frank Wallace, a dancer with whom West had a brief teenage marriage, who reappeared and tried to exploit her when she was famous. In the three-character play, Shear is not only West but a fan of the present, who, together with a male fan, takes her obsession with the star to a life-transforming degree. The other actor portrays various men in West's life – though, of course, as she said, what counted was "the life in my men". Shear prepared thoroughly for them as well. "I read WC Fields's biography and saw all his films in order to write three lines for him."

Though Mae West, with her rolling gait that suggests both streetwalker and prizefighter, her dated looks (marcelled hair, thick figure, dark rosebud lips) and her iron-clad invulnerability, may not seem a sex symbol for these times, Shear enthusiastically disagrees. "Oh, no, she was hot! Having sex with George Raft in closets when he was a bag boy for the Mob? And there were all those boxers – once, after she had made love to a new one, he went over to the window and waved. She asked what he was doing, and he said, 'I bet my manager a hundred bucks I'd make it up here.' Can you imagine what most women would have felt at that point? But she just threw her head back and laughed and said, 'Well, ya won.'"

It's not the erotic frenzies but the numerous quick changes and elaborate costumes that make Dirty Blonde by far the most exhausting play Shear has ever done. "I get 17 or 18 seconds for each change, and that corset is so tight, the dresser tying the strings has a permanent groove in his index finger throughout the show. But when I have it on, boy, do I feel sexy."

Shear's identification with West has led to some confusion between the two. "I worked myself so deep into her mind that people have thought lines I wrote for the show are really hers – like when I have her say, 'I made myself platinum but I was born a dirty blonde.'"

Or, as Mae West put it: "I used to be Snow White, but I drifted."

'Dirty Blonde' opens at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds (0113-213 7700) on 5 July and runs to 3 August