Hollywood Gays (2 page)

New to this collection are
Tom Ewell
and
Dick Sargent
. “Tom who?” you might ask. He was the male lead in one of Marilyn Monroe’s classic pictures, the very hetero yet very funny
The Seven Year Itch
, wherein he literally stood by as MM posed for probably the most famous still in movie history. Ironic that the coveted role went to a (necessarily secretly at that time) gay actor. Several of Marilyn’s dresses have sold for well over $1 million each, and Tom told me he’d often been asked if he still had the tan loafers he wore during that scene. Today they might conceivably have fetched a half million or so. Film clips and stills of Ewell were featured in most of the books and documentaries in 2012 that commemorated the 50th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s death.

Dick Sargent is an ongoing TV presence via
Bewitched
, as the second Darrin—and the second Dick to play Darrin. Again, an ironic assignment, in that Darrin is a stuffy heterosexual husband who wants and orders his wife not to be different from the majority, to not be herself.
Bewitched
has often been called TV’s gayest sitcom, via its underlying premise and its cast.

Outrageously, Sargent wasn’t allowed to die (from prostate cancer) in peace, due to the persecution and hate-mongering of fundamentalist Christian Fred Phelps of Kansas, whom the Supreme Court favored over the father of a soldier killed in Iraq when Phelps was taken to court for heckling the deceased at his funeral. Additionally, the gay serviceman’s father was ordered to pay the court costs of the “God Hates Fags” minister. Phelps and followers had also heckled the 1998 funeral of Matthew Shepard.

So, happy reading, friends—you’re in for some intimate and revealing chats with ten unique performers. Did I have questions! And got to ask most of them—and got most of them answered. When I queried one man, “May I ask an indiscreet question?” he replied a la Oscar Wilde, “Questions aren’t indiscreet. But answers sometimes are….”

Beverly Hills

August 16, 2013

CARY GRANT

(1904-1986)

Cary Grant was born 50 years before I was, in 1904. We met soon after my thirtieth birthday, in 1984, late in May. He was 80, although age was not something he would have spoken about, much less admitted.

Many years before we met, an American magazine tried to find out Grant’s real age (he usually subtracted four to eight years from his true age). The magazine reportedly sent Grant a telegram: HOW OLD CARY GRANT? He responded with another telegram: OLD CARY GRANT FINE STOP HOW YOU? It was both vague and witty—and vagueness and wittiness were trademarks of Grant’s movie persona. The man once told the press, when asked who he’d most love to be, ‘‘I’d like to be Cary Grant.”

Who was the real Cary Grant? If the man born Archibald Leach knew, he wasn’t telling. Not publicly, anyway. He sometimes candidly admitted that his was a confused personality. And sometimes he contradicted himself—so numerous were his lies, which began in childhood.

In his “notorious” biography of Cary Grant (who co-starred with Ingrid Bergman in
Notorious
), Charles Higham documented a man who began life with little white lies about himself and ended it by having lived a huge lie. The portrait in that biography is not a pretty one. The charm and cool suave of Cary Grant—the Grant perpetuated by the media even after his hallowing death—are missing.

And most people want to hold on to the Cary Grant they think they knew. I have a literary friend whose best female friend is the ex-wife of a 1950s matinee idol. She claims to have had a platonic affair with Cary Grant. My literary friend told me, “She and Cary would get in bed together, naked. But they never did anything. She says he never penetrated her. And there’s no reason for her to lie about it—on the contrary, most women would invent a hot, torrid affair with him, if they could!

“All they would do would be to snuggle together, and they’d eat pizza and read the newspapers and just chat. Naked. Together. In bed.”

Yet this woman—who knew that the
reel
Cary wasn’t the real one—chose not to speak with Higham, whose book caused fury throughout the land because it admitted—with proof—that Grant was bisexual. That is, primarily homosexual, but choosing to live a multi-wedded (if not often-bedded) heterosexual lifestyle. Why didn’t the woman speak to Higham?

“Because she knew Higham would unmask Grant as non-heterosexual. So, instead, she agreed to be interviewed by Grant’s widow, who is doing an authorized—but largely false—book portrait of her late husband.”

A self-professed former female lover of Grant’s also did a book, called
An Affair to Remember
(titled after another Grant film). In it, she admitted that Grant preferred to hire male secretaries, because his secretaries always tended to “fall in love” with him. His feeling, therefore, was it might as well be a man doing the falling....Yet the book paints Grant as an ideal and virile—in his seventies—
heterosexual
lover.

I never had any idea I would meet Grant. But my partner is a banker, and he had an associate—a closeted gay man, married to a lesbian—who was Cary Grant’s banker in Beverly Hills. (This second banker has since died of AIDS, leaving behind the widow and their adopted child.) This closeted banker, whom I’ll call Bob, used to dine regularly with Cary. Just the two of them.

I met Bob, and he spent 20 or 30 minutes talking to me about Grant. Of the many celebrities he got to deal with at the bank, Grant clearly impressed him most. Why? He was the biggest star among his clients. “And you really have dinner with Cary Grant?” I deliberately asked, more than once.

(In fact, I once saw Grant picking up a pizza at a Westwood pizza parlor. Local gossip columns often sighted him at cheap restaurants or fast-food places, picking up food to go. Grant was legendary for his cheapness. In the old days, he and Clark Gable used to swap their unwanted monogrammed Christmas gifts. Both men had experienced very poor, harsh childhoods—and Grant was emotionally abused by his mother, as Gable was by his father. Both men were homophobic and conservative, Grant even joining the Republican Party and helping raise funds for it as late as the mid-1980s, by which time it had become the party of the homophobes.)

I was needling Bob because I wanted somehow to meet, to talk with, Cary Grant—and saw no other means of doing it—and because Bob was the sort who invited needling. First, he was the type of “married” gay man who will make “fag” jokes in front of his coworkers (I knew this for a fact), and second, he was a very pretentious man. He used to make anti-Semitic jokes about some of his star clients, and found it hugely amusing that he would from time to time deign to attend synagogue services with some of them.

This, although he knew that I am Jewish on my father’s side. The second time we met, Bob challenged me, “Jews have to be Jewish on their mother’s side—or else they’re not really Jews.”

“Do Christians have to be Christian on their mother’s or their father’s side?” I inquired. He shrugged, like I was
meshugah
or something.

Then I took to challenging Bob, saying he’d never invite me to dine with him and Cary, because the two of them probably did more than eat steaks together. Bob was offended by my insinuation, at the same time that he was flattered that I’d think Cary Grant would find him sexually interesting (on the other hand, I would imagine that an 80-year-old man would find anything or anyone under 70 interesting).

“It is strictly platonic,” Bob would insist. Knowing Bob, I knew this to be the case, for even if Cary had been 30 at the time, Bob wouldn’t have jeopardized his position at the bank by diddling—much less fiddling—with him. For we’d both heard of several instances in which a movie star had a one-night stand with someone, then ended the professional relationship; stars tend to be fickle and funny that way.

I asked Bob, “Have you ever seen it?”

I meant Cary Grant’s cock. I’d heard Grant was part-Jewish.

Bob was at a loss. After a few long seconds, he smiled mysteriously. And I swear he said: “Wouldn’t you like to know?” Well, of course I would, you ditzy queen, that’s why I asked.

“He doesn’t want to be interviewed,” Bob coolly informed me. “Doesn’t need it.” For one thing, Grant had retired from films in 1965. At 60-plus, the very vain Grant felt he was too old for the screen, just as Irene Dunne, Loretta Young, et al., had felt when they turned 40ish.

Some critics have declared that Grant’s films do not merit study. That’s debatable, but some of the film titles offer a few clues, e.g.:

This Is the Night, Merrily We Go To Hell, Sinners in the Sun, Hot Saturday, The Devil and the Deep, I’m No Angel, Born to Be Bad, Wings in the Dark, The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss, Big Brown Eye, The Awful Truth, In Name Only, Suspicion, The Talk of the Town, Mr. Lucky, Once Upon a Time, Notorious, I Was A Male War Bride, Crisis, People Will Talk, Room For One More, Monkey Business, Indiscreet, The Grass Is Greener, Charade.

Some kind of autobiography is embedded in those titles. They weren’t his best films, but perhaps his most revealing—and more so, if not arranged in chronological order!

George Cukor helmed various of Grant’s better or more interesting films, including
Sylvia Scarlett, Holiday
, and
The Philadelphia Story
. During my extended sessions with Cukor at his Cordell Drive mansion in the Hollywood Hills, we discussed most of the stars this fabled “women’s director” had worked with. Detesting that label, Cukor tried to focus on the men he’d directed especially the ones he’d guided to an Academy Award and the ones he’d discovered. But then, after the shop talk, would come the gossip, which Cukor loved to dish.

A: Cary and Randolph Scott were probably the handsomest couple I ever saw. Of course, Cary aged so much better. He was still handsome at past 50. Randy just turned to leather...out in the sun too much. Still, as a Western star—which is all he ended up being—it didn’t hurt him. His films were leathery, and so was he. They could have wrapped him ‘round a book and gilded or embossed his spine!

Q: There has been so much talk over the years about their having been a couple, living together—even during their marriages—and working together by request (as in
My Favorite Wife
). Do you know whether Grant eventually denied those stories?

A: Oh, Cary won’t talk about it. At most, he’ll say they did some wonderful pictures together. But Randolph will admit it—to a friend. He has a male nurse, you know (Scott was house-bound in later years). He’s shown the nurse his scrapbook on Grant, and when the nurse asked him if
it was true,
Randolph just smiled and nodded....

Q: Do you know the nurse?

A: I have a friend who picks up books for me at A Different Light (a now-defunct gay bookstore in Silverlake, a partly gay Los Angeles suburb). He’s met the nurses there, and they’ve talked.

Q: Did the Grant-Scott relationship end because of studio pressure or talk?

A: That had something to do with it, of course. But so did Cary becoming a much bigger star, although at first it was Randy who seemed to have the brighter future.

Q: So there was love, but also competition?

A: More competition than with a husband and wife—men and women can’t compete for the same roles!

Q: David Lewis the producer told me that when Mae West found out Cary Grant was lovers with Randolph Scott, she decided against casting him in her next movie.

A: James Whale (Lewis’s late lover) told me the same thing.

* * *

And so she did—or rather, didn’t. Mae always claimed, falsely, to have “discovered” Cary Grant. She put him in her 1933
She Done Him Wrong
, which was her second film but first vehicle at Paramount. She subsequently stated that prior to it, Grant had had only bit parts in “minor” movies. One such bit was a male lead (the other lead was Herbert Marshall, a star of the time) in a Marlene Dietrich vehicle directed by Josef Von Sternberg,
Blonde Venus
. Rumor had it that West never bothered watching other people’s movies, and so she may have been unaware that Grant had already played consort to an actress of at least her stature.

After
She Done Him Wrong
proved a monster hit, West again cast Grant in
I’m No Angel
, which was an even bigger hit—West claimed that the two films helped stave off Paramount’s bankruptcy during the Great Depression. West was supposedly ready to use Grant a third time, but on the set of Angel, she found out about his homosexuality in this way.

Mae was playing Tira, a carnival “hootchie-coochie” dancer—one step above a stripper (remember, this was one year before a more puritanical movie code strangulated Hollywood with a new censorship that would last, unchallenged, until the mid-1950s). Tira had a big trunk, the inside top of which was plastered with photos of her beaux, most of them ugly brutes—boxers, ruffians, pimps, and hoodlums. But West needed some more hunk-photos for her lid, and Grant volunteered to loan some pictures of his roommate and lover; Randy Scott.

According to gay film producer David Lewis (who oversaw
Camille
, among other classics), “Cary made a comment that he had photos of his own ‘favorite man,’ and Mae didn’t arch an eyebrow; she just said, ‘Let’s see ‘im.’ Scott was of course a great looker then, and she wound up using his photos on her trunk’s inside—you can see Randy there, in the film and in film stills. But she suddenly became cool to Grant, and when his name was mentioned as a lead in her next Paramount extravaganza, she crossed him off the list, without any explanation.”

In other words, Mae could tolerate gay boys in the chorus of her plays or in minor parts in her movies, but not as her leading men, not as the gents supposedly paying her sexual court. She may well have known about Grant by reputation—he’d lived with gay men in New York prior to moving to Hollywood, where he still lived with a man, against Paramount’s wishes. But she may have soured on him when he “publicly” declared his and Scott’s romantic connection—a naïveté which he soon lost.