Hollywood Gays (17 page)

The revelation that Davis had to live secretly with AIDS for some six years helped lead to the foundation of Hollywood Supports, an industry organization supportive of people with AIDS and working to end anti-gay discrimination. (For example, by 1996 every Hollywood studio but one was offering spousal benefits, including health and dental coverage, to domestic partners of its gay and lesbian employees. The holdout was Rupert Murdoch’s 20th Century Fox, known in some quarters as 19th Century Fox.)

News coverage empathized with Davis’s plight and his understandable anxiety over not getting more work if he were found out. However, he kept his secret even after work seemed impractical, and novelist Armistead Maupin opined, ‘‘I’m tired of people being congratulated posthumously on their brave battle. It wasn’t that brave if we didn’t know about it while it was going on.”

The publicity emphasized Davis’s widow and their eight-year-old daughter Alexandra, without stating Brad’s bisexuality. (Alexander, born in 1983, is now a “transman” and musician.) Davis had met Susan Bluestein, his agent, in 1971. They were “friends” for five years, he said, and then married for 15 more. Davis appeared in gay activist Vito Russo’s documentary
Our Time
: “It was a modest educational entertainment,” explained the actor, “mostly for gay viewers, and even though it was gay-themed, I wanted to be part of it. I wanted to contribute something without being front-and-center out there.”

Russo offered, “I know Brad from way back to unknown. I remember he was in this off-off-Broadway play,
Sissies’ Scrapbook
. He was devastatingly sexy to me, a hustler type, and then the play was retitled
Four Friends
and moved to a bigger theatre. But it didn’t do well and closed.

“Brad was nonchalant about his gayness before he headed out west. He was always horny, and the first to say so....I had no idea he had a bisexual side. He either hid it well or going Hollywood just coaxed it out of him—if
out
is the right word, and in this context it ain’t.”

The ambitious Davis never achieved superstardom but hit temporary stardom with
Midnight Express
. Ironically, he played a real-life individual who was openly bisexual in the memoir upon which the film was based. The movie—surprise—made Billy Hayes entirely heterosexual. Even in prison. Even in a Turkish prison.

But Davis’s big screen success “made me more restless,” and his bigger income went partly to drugs and alcohol. In 1981 he joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and after Fassbinder’s death in 1983 from a drug overdose, Davis confessed that he, too, had tried “every known drug under the sun, singly and in combinations.

“I have this excess of energy, and when I’m not working, one thing I try and do with it is to write. I’m not a professional writer, but I write about me and the things I go through.”

After he died, Ms. Bluestein revealed that a book would be forthcoming based on Brad’s journals covering the years of hiding and dealing with his illness and that it would be a strong indictment of how Hollywood treats its own.
After Midnight
finally came out, or was published (starring a 100-percent-heterosexual Brad Davis), in 1997. The result disappointed some who said it was a watered-down version of what had been intended.

Ron Vawter, an openly gay stage and film actor (
Philadelphia
,
The Silence of the Lambs
) who acknowledged having AIDS, believed, “Hollywood was shamed by Brad’s death into reacting, to a limited degree. Behind the camera, of course. With the usual tsk-tsking about why didn’t the poor actor feel he could come to us with the truth? Brad was able to experience more commercial success than I was, but his trying to re-create himself as a mainstream, married hunk pushed him deeper into the closet. It made the lies more pressing.

“Toward the end, I saw him a few times, and he looked like a scared, unhappy man. When you’re living out your final few years, by then you hope to be able to experience some measure of inner peace and freedom from worry or pretense. Brad was once so joyous, even reckless, but the last few times I saw him, he just looked haunted and guilty.”

Vito Russo noted, “Hopefully Brad has his family’s acceptance, if not his own. But the mere fact of his heterosexual lifestyle and his presenting himself now as a mainstream actor work against his ability to be honest on any level....I know lately the talk is that Brad has been distancing himself from gay and bi characters. He’s rejected some good roles because they don’t fit what he’s now trying to project.

“I wouldn’t call him homophobic, I think it’s more his galloping ambition. For some reason he’s turning his back on a past of artistic risk-taking, so something must be up....” This was in the late 1980s, when Davis and Russo each knew he had AIDS.

Several in Hollywood knew that Davis visited the occasional gay bar or adult theatre and a geographical assortment of bath-houses. A few admitted to having slept with him. One was Timothy Patrick Murphy, who played Mickey, Charlene Tilton’s lover on
Dallas
. Before he died of AIDS at 29 in 1988, he informed
Gold
magazine:

“I caught Brad in [Joe Orton’s] play
Entertaining Mr. Sloane
in the early ‘80s, and a few years later he was living in Studio City near L.A. I had a friend there, on Camellia Drive, who I used to trick with. I knew Brad informally, and at some point I mentioned Studio City and my friend, who was tall and not very dark but awfully handsome. My friend wasn’t an actor, which was an inducement, because most actors prefer to have sex outside the industry, when possible....Brad had one physical insecurity—he was on the short side. So he had a thing for tall dudes with long legs.

“To cut a long story short, we used to drive over to Camellia, separately, and have three-ways. But when my friend moved out of town, Brad had nothing more to do with me. I’m not exactly chopped liver, or short-changed in any way. I think he fled because he didn’t want it to possibly get around that he and another actor were making it together. Like I was gonna tell! This is
Hollywood
, where the money’s big-time and the closet’s as wide and as ‘friendly’ as Texas.” Put another way: Hollywood, where the truth lies...still.

* * *

Just before
Midnight Express
came out, I was assigned two interviews by
Showbill
, a Canadian magazine. One with newcomer Mary Steenburgen, discovered for film by Jack Nicholson —
Goin’ South
, directed by him, would be a flop. As for
Midnight Express
, which would prove a hit, I was asked whether I preferred to interview Billy Hayes, whose story it was, or Brad Davis, the actor playing him. I chose the nonfiction version and enjoyed the interview with Hayes, whose book I’d just read. I’d not yet seen the movie, which of course compared unfavorably with the less self-conscious and xenophobic, more honest book.

I did think of trying to interview Davis after
Querelle
, for my eventual book
The Lavender Screen,
but didn’t get around to it. Then in 1987 I got a letter in which Brad Davis introduced himself as “the screen incarnation of Genet’s Querelle de Brest, by way of my great friend and colleague—and your excellent interview [sic]—Rainer Werner Fassbinder.” He enclosed a clipping, an interview in which he allowed that he cried for two weeks after Fassbinder’s death. And another note reiterating that he’d “loved and was mesmerized by your dramatic encounter and interview with Rainer, which makes me very hopeful that you will answer at your soonest convenience and we can arrange to meet soon.”

(The Fassbinder chapter was one of six interviews with gay men of cinema—three directors, two actors, one designer—in
Conversations With My Elders
, so titled by my editor because I was between 18 and 28 when I met the celluloid sextet. The reissue was retitled
Celluloid Gaze
.)

The letter had been sent via my publisher, but Brad didn’t enclose his phone number—on purpose?—so I sent a reply with my number, and within days he called. I’d recently moved to Beverly Hills, so when he asked at which restaurant we should “do lunch,” I left it up to him. He chose the French Quarter in West Hollywood. “It’s great. It’s a gay hangout, and all the waiters I know are gay, but it’s straight-owned and it doesn’t matter if you’re spotted there.” By “you’re” he, of course, meant his acting self.

Bear in mind that when I interviewed him—we lingered for hours but never met again—I had no idea he was HIV-positive or would die in four years. Stereotypes, again: although I’d heard through the grapevine time and again that Brad Davis was gay or bisexual, the fact that he was married and a father put any notion of AIDS that much further from my mind. Vito Russo wrote, “More often, it [AIDS] strikes the closeted male who engages in frequent and preferredly anonymous sex than it does the gay male in a longtime relationship with another man and who seldom, if at all, cheats on him and typically not as secretively as the closet case who sneaks out to cheat on his wife, whether or not she’s aware of his dominant sexuality.”

Brad Davis had enacted a small part in
Chariots of Fire
(1980), starring Ian Charleson as the fanatical or “devout” runner. Charleson, the same age as Davis, would die of AIDS a year before Brad.

A: Did Rainer say things about me that weren’t in the book?

Q: Yes. There’s not always room for everything.

A: What did he say?

Q: You’re very attractive.

A: He did?

Q: Didn’t he tell you in person?

A: He was shy. What do
you
think?

Q: About what?

A: Attractive?

Q: Oh, yes. He also said you’re sexy and that it’s not always the same thing.

A: (Laughs.) For sure. What else did he say?

Q: Um, that you had guts to accept such a homoerotic role, that few Americans would have, and no Hollywood star would have.

A: Oh....Well, it’s a great book.

Q: Thank you.

A: But his chapter’s my favorite. I’d love to play Rainer in some classy, honest little art film. I could even direct or cowrite it. As a homage, but also it could make a great human-interest story.

Q: And a cautionary tale about drugs and excess?

A: That’s the human interest. His career was gangbusters, nonstop. He
was
German film. But off the set, a wreck, emotionally. He had no self-esteem.

Q: Several who knew him said he put on all the weight because of that lack of self-esteem.

A: I’m with that. Rainer just felt he was worthless, so he might as well look worthless.

Q: But that’s so sad, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A: He didn’t even always enjoy food. He punished himself with it.

Q: He did the opposite of what some young women lacking self-esteem do via anorexia.

A: People ought to love themselves more.

Q: That’s like a line—applicable to Fassbinder—from
The Boys in the Band
, at the end: “If we could just learn not to hate ourselves so much.”

A: Yeah....Like I said, I’d be the best actor, of anyone, to option that chapter from your book. (Makes a tsking sound.) But I know I’d face this opposition from my crowd....For sure I’d need European financing. It’d have to be done in Europe, a coproduction, German-French or something like that.

Q: It would be worthwhile and would have a market—over there. But time will tell.

A: Yeah. And I couldn’t afford to pay much for the option, at this point....

Q: You were born Robert Davis. Is it true there was one on the Screen Actors Guild rolls?

A: (Laughs.) Brad’s a better name for me.
Robert
’s blah. Brad’s more butch, isn’t it? (Laughs.) When your name’s real ordinary and you want to be an actor, sometimes it forces you to be creative and rig up a new moniker.

Q: Like the British James Stewart. There already was an American one, so he became Stewart Granger.

A: No kidding! That’s lots better anyway.

Q:
He’s
bisexual.... (My tone/emphasis meant to convey: He was bisexual too.)

A: No kidding. But jeez, your chapter about Rainer...I haven’t read all the rest of the book—I skimmed the ones with Rock Hudson and Sal Mineo. But I bet it’s the wildest chapter, huh?

Q: At the time, it was frustrating and frightening. Now I’m glad I had to go through it because it reads interesting.

A: I could play him. I can do a German accent, you know.

Q: Oh? (No sample given.) I...you don’t look like him.

A: No, but I could pad up. And a beard, the accent...I got to know all his mannerisms and expressions, we worked so close.

Q: You would, of course, depict him as he was? (No reply.) It wouldn’t be a fictional Hollywood version?

A: (Grins.) No way. If you mean gay, I know he was gay. He made no bones about it. To tell you the truth, he wanted to spank me.

Q: Oh. Well, there’s spanking and there’s spanking. Two of his lovers committed suicide. That may indicate something.

A: He was very unhappy, some of the time.

Q: A biography—book or film—should include the highs and lows, don’t you think?

A: Yeah, and a movie about Rainer would have plenty of lows. Highs too, but lows are more dramatic. It’s always more visual when someone’s sad. Or angry.