Hollywood Gays (36 page)

Q: Ah, but you movie stars are immortal.

A: (Snickers.) At least we were good-looking then. (Small shrug.) Sorry I can’t oblige now. (Winks, then begins to rise.)

WILLIAM HAINES

(1900-1973)

Columnist Richard Gully used to be Jack Warner’s “right-hand man.” In 1995 he wrote in his column in
Beverly Hills
(213),
“Boze Hadleigh’s book
Hollywood Babble On
is a treasure trove of anecdotes and observations about Hollywood, which are both clever and amusing. I quote them continually. In it is a comment by Joan Crawford that I find especially interesting:

“‘The unfortunate truth is, in this town men and women do compete....The happiest marriage I’ve seen in Hollywood is Billy Haines and Jimmy Shields.’

“At one time Bill Haines was an MGM star who later became a prominent interior decorator. He decorated Ann and Jack Warner’s palatial home. Over the years Bill became very rich, but as he grew older he lived more quietly. This led people to say that when his charming boyfriend, Jimmy Shields, gets Bill’s money he will really make whoopee. Ultimately Bill died and Jimmy got the money, but there was no merry-making.

“On the contrary, Jimmy withdrew into a period of intense mourning. Without Bill he was so miserable that six months after his death he committed suicide. Joan Crawford was right.”

Sadly, except for one belated biography, Billy Haines has gone missing from many, even most, reference books about the movies—partly because his heyday was the silent era (in more ways than one). When he has shown up, it’s usually not as a former star but as tinsel town’s leading interior designer. Authors and others who should know better (including columnist Robert Osborne, a Turner Classic Movies cable-TV host), typically skip the reason for Haines’s transition from actor to decorator: that Hollywood homophobia and a boycott by all its studios destroyed his screen career.

More recently, in books by this author and others, Haines pops up in the long-suppressed story of why director George Cukor was fired from
Gone with the Wind
well into production. Back when Haines was a Roaring ‘20s pudgy-but-boyish star at Metro, Clark Gable was a struggling, ambitious newcomer (his first two wives were older women who helped him up the ladder). Haines fancied the sexy male starlet and discreetly flirted with him at parties and industry functions. One rumor had it that Gable may have been a gigolo when he began trying to earn a living via show business (a 2007 biography by British David Bret claims Clark was bisexual). Another rumor held he wasn’t above—when money demanded or a big break proffered itself —being serviced by orally-minded men of means or gay actors. Whether Haines paid Gable in coin or a boost is unknown, but worship at the aspiring MGM actor’s shrine the MGM star did, later apprising a few confidants like MGM director George Cukor. In the sound era Gable’s star eclipsed Haines’s; for one thing, Haines—just a year older than Gable, who died in 1960—had become too mature to keep playing the eternal college boy.

The difference is that Gable was allowed to keep his screen career after accidentally killing a woman in an automobile accident in 1933. Louis B. Mayer covered up for him. But Haines, caught with another man (a sailor) in his cot at the YMCA that same year, had his screen career killed by Mayer, who covered up any publicity but fired Haines and saw it to that no other studio would hire him, not even as a supporting actor. Haines lost his stardom and any future hope of work in film. His wasn’t the only career destroyed; Haines had a thing for men in uniform, and sometimes met them at Pershing Square in downtown L.A. This particular sailor, reportedly ten years his junior, accompanied him to the nearby “Y” where Haines had a room on the seventh floor. There, the house detective and members of the so-called vice squad—more concerned or threatened by consensual adult same-sex sex than by heterosexual prostitution or violence against women—burst in, handcuffed both men, and ended both their careers....

Ironically and coincidentally, Haines’s final movie, released in 1934, was titled
The Marines Are Coming
.

It was a 1926 movie via the newly merged Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer that made Billy Haines a star—
Tell It to the Marines
. Born January 1, 1900, Haines attended a military school in Virginia and later informed
Coronet
, “I didn’t care for some aspects of such a regimented, strict life, but I liked the company. I was always a smart aleck, and the other boys sort of liked me.” In the late 1920s he apprised
Motion Picture
, “You have to remember, I’m a Virginian,” when asked why he hadn’t yet married.

In 1914 Billy ran away and began life on his own, never fully explaining why he left home (or perhaps was made to leave). He told one periodical, “I wanted my freedom.” Few 14-year-olds want it that early and with that much responsibility. Over the next years he worked at jobs in a powder plant and a rubber factory, as an assistant bookkeeper, and as an office boy on Wall Street, where a casting director for Samuel Goldwyn noticed him and entered him in a New Faces contest, which he and Eleanor Boardman won. Each was put under contract and sent to Hollywood.

Haines’s screen bow in 1922 was in
Brothers Under the Skin
. His film persona was the smart aleck who treats the young lady honorably and wins her heart and hand by the last reel. His movies did well at the box office, and he was a leading ‘20s male personification of carefree youth. As a major asset to MGM (he starred in the studio’s first talkie), he was able to boost newcomers’ careers—not only Gable, who kept on Haines’s good side until the star was no more, but platonic pal Joan Crawford.

Via arranged studio “dates” and working together, Haines and Crawford became chums—he nicknamed her “Cranberry,” for she hated her screen name (chosen for her by a magazine reader in a studio-sponsored contest). The dancer-turned-actress born Lucille LeSueur felt that “Crawford” sounded too much like “crayfish” (Mayer had vetoed LeSueur because to him it sounded like “sewer,” but then, he initially opposed Greta Gustafsson’s new surname of Garbo because to such a mind it sounded like “garbage.”) Ambitious, Crawford proposed matri-phony to the star, who declined.

Haines already had a partner for life, his stand-in Jimmy Shields, whom everyone agreed was better-looking than Billy. The two lived together—which annoyed Mayer no end—and around 1930 bought an antique shop together. Their home was a showcase, and customers began asking for decorating advice, which Billy was glad to give for free. After Hollywood terminated him, there was no guarantee that Haines—and Shields, for despite the non-publicity they were professional partners as well—would succeed as an interior decorator. That he did was largely thanks to the patronage of such loyal pals as Marion Davies, Carole Lombard, and Crawford, who then recommended him to their friends.

But in 1936 the men had to weather another homophobic storm—described in detail in
Hollywood Babylon II
. Basically, it was due to the friendly couple giving a neighbor boy of six money to buy some candy or ice cream (or to get lost). Haines and Shields were staying at their beach house at El Porto, California. The boys’ parents asked where he’d obtained the six cents, and that night the father and fellow white trash attacked the two men and their car. The homophobic bullies were gowned in white sheets with eyeholes, for they were members of the White Legion, the Southern California equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan. The cretins even kicked the couple’s white poodle, the diminutive Lord Peter Whimsy (sic). (Legend had it that Haines’s subsequent aversion to white sheets led him to create the first color-coordinated designer bed sheets for his clients.) Battered and bleeding, the men left town in their egg-and-tomato- splattered auto.

The haters tried to make a legal case of what they imagined to be or hoped was a molestation incident. The parents took their son to the police station to testify, but the case was dismissed, lacking evidence. Some friends in L.A. urged the pair to sue, but the two men preferred to drop the matter entirely, and never returned to that beachside community again. Thanks to genuine taste, personal popularity, and good business-sense, the men prospered over the decades. The Haines office-and-showroom on Sunset Boulevard (in what is now West Hollywood) was a “must” for anyone with big bucks who aspired to tasteful interiors. It was later the headquarters for designer Don Loper (best remembered from an
I Love Lucy
fashion-show episode) and then the site of Le Dôme restaurant, all now starry memories.

As for Gable and Haines, writers have disagreed about how often “it” happened. As Kenneth Anger says, Billy was “not lip-lazy.” Writing of the ‘20s and ‘30s, he explains, “Haines loved his boyfriend Jimmy...but like most gay men—like most
men
—he liked to play around from time to time.” Anger believes Haines serviced Gable “a few” or “several” times; some writers believe it happened but once.

(In 1987 the
New York Post
ran three short articles about revelations in my
Conversations With My Elders
. One was titled “Would You Believe Clark Gay-ble?!” and was based on the story of Gable being serviced by Haines. As ever, the media fixates on all-gay or all-het; had the sexual interlude or interludes affected a presumably-hetero Gable’s sexuality, the more realistic headline would have been “Would You Believe Clark Bi-ble?!”)

So what happened is, Haines and Cukor stayed good friends and became decorator and client. Cukor’s house on Cordell Drive was reputed to be the finest in Hollywood, and in 1937 Cukor threw an even more than usually memorable party to celebrate the completion of Haines’s decorating his home. Less than two years later, Cukor was suddenly fired from
Gone with the Wind
. The typically foggy “creative differences” were cited as an excuse, and later film historians declared it was because Cukor, a noted “women’s director” (code for a gay director, yet he guided more actors through Oscar-winning performances than he did actresses), had favored Vivien Leigh and Olivia de Havilland over Gable! (Englishman Leslie Howard was never said to utter any such complaint.)

Box-office-wise, Gable was aka “the king” of Hollywood. (Third wife Carole Lombard once stated, “If Clark had one inch less, he’d be the queen of Hollywood instead of the king”—no wonder he was often so cranky; it makes one stop and think about the more obsessively homophobic evangelists and politicians...and by all accounts, Bill Haines was the bigger of the two men....) Yet his insecurity caused him to resent being directed by Cukor, who knew what Haines knew. Eventually, Gable blew his top and insisted to producer David O. Selznick that he fire “that fag.”

Which Selznick did, replacing Cukor with Gable’s equally homophobic drinking buddy Victor Fleming. For most of his life, Cukor hid the real reason, out of embarrassment, generally evading discussion of the incident and underplaying his disappointment and fear when it looked like perhaps his career would also be sacrificed to Hollywood homophobia.

It was Cukor biographer Carlos Clarens who first told me the story of the
GWTW
firing. And it was Carlos who in 1972 arranged for me to interview William Haines at his and Shields’s beautiful estate on North Rockingham in Brentwood (a few blocks from Shirley Temple’s house and also near the
Mommie Dearest
house—decorated by Haines—where Joan Crawford ruled from 1929 to 1959). First, I had to pass a few tests. Mr. Haines asked Carlos to view my driver’s license, to prove I was 18. Then I was asked to meet Haines at some friend’s house in Pacific Palisades. It was a barbecue, and besides the three of us (not Jimmy, who was visiting an ailing actress friend at the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills), there were five or six other guests, including a young woman and Estelle Winwood, who was close to 90 and would live to 101 (and was a future interviewee for a British book of mine).

I was forewarned not to ask “call me Bill” any questions. It was social, and if I made the grade, I’d get to interview the celebrity who was very social but not prone to do interviews, especially about his first career. Carlos advised, “It’s, going to be on tape. See, Billy does want to speak for the record, but nothing that can do him or Jimmy any damage...and he wants me to help with some questions and also he’ll do it if he can keep the tapes for seven years.” I knew nothing was to be published within Haines’s
or
Shields’s lifetime, but I’d thought Carlos was going to sit in—at least on the first session, if there were more than one—and keep the tapes himself; he was a film scholar, and maybe in time we’d cowrite a book. I didn’t realize the tapes (three of them, it turned out) would be kept from me until I was all of 25.

But of course I agreed, and Carlos—he did contribute some questions, on paper—absented himself. Alas, I didn’t get to see the famed home in Brentwood, for we met the same week at the same house in Pacific Palisades (the owners were in Europe, I found out). Jimmy Shields, smiling and still boyish like his mate, looked in on us twice. The time flew, we were both pleased, but it was the first and last session. Billy Haines—during the interview he said, “Call me Billy”—died of cancer just before 1974, the year I began (while at UCSB) freelancing for a myriad of periodicals.

Jimmy Shields sent the tapes to Carlos Clarens, who sent them to me in Santa Barbara after Jimmy died. (For some reason, instead of mailing all three at once, he sent two and then the other, but the third one never reached me.)

In 1974 Jimmy Shields took his own life. The note said, “It’s no good without Billy.” Haines and his other half (not a mere “boyfriend”) had been together since the early 1920s. Despite the “golden” era of the silver screen.

Q: Is it true that when Mayer gave you a choice between your career and Jimmy, you asked him whether he would choose between
his
career and Mrs. Mayer?