Hollywood Gays (37 page)

A: (Smiles.) Not exactly. But he would have picked his career....He asked me to stop living with Jimmy, and then I asked him how he would feel if someone asked him to stop living with his wife.

Q: And did he hesitate?

A: (Smiles.) I think he was shocked. My reason for asking that was to show that that’s how much Jimmy meant to me.

Q: It’s inaccurate, isn’t it, when books say that your acting career was a casualty of talkies?

A: Times were changing rapidly. Some foreign-born stars were hurt, on account of their accents. The things you read about men stars with high-pitched voices losing work, I don’t know of one case where that happened.

Q: They say it about John Gilbert, but also about men like Ramon Novarro and you....

A: They
would
. But it’s not true. Sound didn’t hurt me. I had an accent, on account of my background, but we had voice teachers at the studio. They were always busy dusting us off. Anything rural-sounding was the first to go. But most of the accents they worked the hardest to erase were the Brooklyn accents. Some actresses, it took years!

Q: So many movie stars in the 1930s sounded semi-English.

A: The studios wanted respectability.
Clahss
(with an English accent).

Q: One of my teachers used to say about class, you either have it, or you belong in one.

A: I’ll borrow that. That’s where silence was golden—in silent movies it didn’t matter what you sounded like.

Q: Joan Crawford wrote a book in the early 1960s, and she said your and Jimmy Shields’s marriage was the best in Hollywood.

A: Joan is a good friend.

Q: Is it true she proposed to you?

A: She...brought up the subject. I was getting closer to being coerced into a marriage. By the studio. What was fairly commonplace then (in the 1920s) was a husband and a wife who each had the same inclinations (eyebrows rise).

Q: Both gay.

A: So I explained that to Joan, and later, when the studio thought I could wait no longer, the publicity had me opposite Pola Negri.

Q: Lesbian?

A: Yes. But so very privately. In public, it was always men. When Valentino died,
then
she said she was engaged to him. Pola was very willing, she loved the attention. Some of the ladies who liked other ladies wanted as little to do with that (fake publicity) as possible.

Q: Such as Garbo? (He nods.) I hear that you not only helped Joan Crawford at work but socially?

A: I helped her, but so did Eddie Goulding. He was a (gay) director, and I worked with him too. I think at first we felt sorry for Joan. Not everyone accepted her. She was brash and she wanted to make it big, but she had a strong accent and people looked down on her socially. Some made up stories about her past (even prostitution and appearing in a “stag film” that never turned up). I liked her. She was fun, she listened, she liked me and my friends. She would often date my friends, knowing they liked her for herself and not as...an experience.

Q: You also went out with her?

A: We’d be at the studio by day doing
Sally, Irene and Mary
(1925) with Eddie, then at night we’d go out dancing, and later I’d return home to Jimmy.

Q: Crawford’s first two husbands were from socially-elevated families. Do you think the marriages were for advancement in Hollywood?

A: She did love the men, but Cranberry has said as much to me. I remember she used to call Douglas (Fairbanks Jr., her first husband) “Dodie,” and he called her “Jodie.” Joan was older than he was, and she paid for their (Brentwood) house. I had already introduced Joan into social settings that might have been closed to her; but as Mrs. Fairbanks she entered a new cycle of being accepted. However it still took a long spell for (Joan’s stepmother-in-law) Mary Pickford to take Cranberry to her bosom.

Q: Joan wanted to get into Pickfair?

A: And how! Mary made her wait.

Q: Is it true you introduced her to her second husband, Franchot Tone?

A: No, false. But I did tell him not to talk nasty about Joan in my presence. At a party. At Tallulah’s house or Bette Davis’s—they were all convinced he and Bette were like
that
(having an affair). I think they were doing some film together (
Dangerous
, 1935, which won Davis her first Oscar). Seems like everyone cheated on everyone when they were doing a film and had love scenes.

Q: An actor and an actress?

A: That’s the combination that dared to do it.

Q: An actor who liked men had to go beyond the acting community for satisfaction?

A: Because of anonymity. If the studio got wind of an actor and actress committing adultery, they’d disapprove, but they would see that it didn’t get into the papers. If it did, it would be in a blind item.

Q: But if an actor was even known as gay, then what?

A: Then his future was open to discussion. Or the whim of whoever ran the studio....There were blind items about me, and about me and Jimmy. Too many blind items, and the studio would panic.

Q: Is it true you later had to introduce Jimmy as your “secretary”?

A: It sounds funny now, but in those days most secretaries—and the really important ones, the executive secretaries—they were men.

Q: Yes. But I meant having to disguise his relationship to you.

A: Words...that was important. Not to ordinary, everyday people, but the Hollywood watchdogs. I remember after I was out of the movies, a guest told us at a party how the censor had gone and decreed that in the new Frankenstein picture, the monster couldn’t use the word “mate.” That would imply marriage, which certainly implies sex. So somebody at the studio said they’d say “companion” instead. Then they watered it down some more, and said “friend:” but the studio decided to call the whole movie
The
Bride
of Frankenstein
, so that brought marriage and sex right back into the picture, monster and all!

Q: What do you think brought on that extra-repressive censorship?

A: The Depression, of course. When people started escaping from Hitler’s Germany and coming to Hollywood about that time, they told us how it all began there after the war (WWI), with their own depression. Times were so tough, and people want scapegoats at times like that.

Q: And they listen to the crackpots more at such times.

A: The same in Italy. Mussolini got in when they were real poor. So times were tough, and during the Depression leading men had to be more tough. My type was going out the window. Not only I was too old, but the college boy was too soft and pampered for the ‘30s. Very few men went to college in the ‘20s. Fewer went in the ‘30s. Audiences wanted real tough guys.

Q: Dramas and musical fantasies. Gangster movies were popular, weren’t they? And actors—or personalities—like Clark Gable?

A: (Smiles briefly.) So when sound came in, plenty more things changed than just adding voices. I was in the movies a total of about 12 years, but the cycles went more quickly then. So by the early 1930s my cycle was ending.

Q: Is that why when your arrest occurred—which shouldn’t have occurred—the studio didn’t bail you out?

A: They blacklisted me, is what they did. Mayer, who was lower than a kneeling bedbug.

Q: People keep saying that about ten years later, the same thing occurred to another gay star at MGM, but they bailed him out because his movies were still making money for them.

A: This...actor, he had—he has (a warning finger)—the same initials as one of the celebrations of the end of the war (as in V.J. Day—Van Johnson). He’d risen up fairly recently, and it was World War II, when most of the men stars were away at war. So the studio had a number of reasons to keep the guy in clover, making honey for ‘em.

Q: I have a rumor that perhaps you can confirm.

A: If it’s a Metro rumor, possibly I can.

Q: It is. They say Lionel Barrymore fancied the lads, and one of them was Clark Gable (he frowns slightly). I believe Gable, very early on, was often referred to as Barrymore’s
protégé
(which means “protected one” in French). It’s said Barrymore secured Gable his first screen test.

A: Very possible.

Q: And it’s said that Gable allowed Barrymore to...sample his wares. Or ware.

A: (Huge grin.)
Quite
possible.

Q: Is it true Gable wore dentures?

A: That is true and no doubt verifiable from some dentist’s records. Unless the studio got hold of those too. Gable had all his teeth pulled and a movie-set made.

Q: Vivien Leigh complained that during their
Gone with the Wind
kissing scenes, the dentures gave him terrible breath.

A: Miss Leigh was a great actress.

Q: With movies, it’s what you
see
that counts.

A: That is
all
that counts, my boy.

Q: You know, since Gable was, to some extent, involved the way he was with men, what made him so anti-gay later on?

A: You are young. That can be a portion of the man’s self-cover, if he’s so adamant against it. But Gable got in with an unkind set of men who liked to drink a lot and bitch a lot. And they liked to hunt and to tell dirty stories, mostly about women.

Q: Is it true Gable was against hiring women writers because then he couldn’t tell his dirty stories in front of them?

A: He got around that, one time I heard tell of, by giving his blessing to a lady scriptwriter who told dirty stories herself. I don’t know how much of a
lady
she was....

Q: Were Gable’s pals—all conservative, I’ve heard—mostly non-actors?

A: You mean like himself? (Smiles.) I don’t know if he had any actor friends. I think he thought acting was “sissy.”

Q: For every actor except himself?

A: His set was directors, writers, and hunters. Oh, and they liked cars. A lot.

Q: Some cars are substitute phallic symbols.

A: Well, the Jaguar is...Gable and his cronies hated everyone, not just men who hankered for men.

Q: Anti-Semitic? (He nods.) Who else?

A: Well, the whole East Asia set. He hated “Chinks” and “Japs” and “Gooks.” When Pearl Harbor came along, he was practically the first to sign up. Went around saying he wanted to kill Japs.

Q: Is this story true? When Pearl Harbor was attacked, Joan Crawford was on the set, knitting (he laughs). And somebody ran in, yelling, “The Japanese have destroyed Pearl Harbor!” and Joan supposedly said, “Oh, dear. Who was she?”

A: (Laughs.) The knitting’s true as could be, and Joan probably didn’t even look up to ask the question,
if
she asked it. That’s very clever—I should ask her if she said it.

Q: Then, after the war, Gable was involved in the witch-hunts?

A: He was of that faction. Name on committees, in there with DeMille and...Wayne, Ward Bond...Ginger Rogers and mother, Robert Taylor, Adolph Menjou, let’s see...Charles Coburn, Robert Montgomery (father of liberal and pro-gay Elizabeth Montgomery of
Bewitched
), Gary Cooper....

Q: And our ex-actor governor (Ronald Reagan)? (He nods.) And certain directors and writers, and most studio heads. Didn’t Gable come between you and Carole Lombard?

A: Carole and I were very good friends. All through—it’s just...you cannot see someone as often as before and still stay friends.

Q: She was the one who helped launch you as a decorator?

A: I did her house for her. Color, lots of it, and to match her personality, to highlight her. I knew people would see what I did with her house, and if they liked it, we were
on
.

Q: And you didn’t charge her. (Bows his head.) You were very close, but in 1939 she married Gable, and he didn’t like her gay friends.

A: When she married him—after they’d known each other for some time—she let him pattern her life. They moved and it was...dogs and hunting, loads of outdoorsiness, and Clark’s hairy friends.

Q: What about Irving Thalberg?

A: We were friends. I’d go out with them, sometimes a foursome with some girl he asked along. But I’d gone out with Norma (Shearer, the MGM star whom Thalberg married) when she was single. She used to see particular actors she liked, but...not in public. In public, I’d go out with her...mid-1920s, that time.

Q: Didn’t Thalberg try and help you and other actors who were punished by Mayer for being gay?

A: He...interceded—of course while he was alive...so sad, so terrible his passing for everyone, except Mayer and his personal skunks—he tried to help. I did have some very good and loyal friends, Irving was one of them. But (publicity chief) Howard Strickling and Mayer got busy trying to clamp down on
us
, about the same time (‘33) the other skunks were pushing through the tougher new (censorship) Code (which took effect in July, 1934). Irving was having health problems, he and Norma went on a long vacation, and some of the dastardly work got done while he was gone.