Hollywood Gays (39 page)

Q: Not much. I’m not bad at it, but to work with it daily. Ugh!

A: How about acting?

Q: You obviously won’t mind my saying that I think movies were more interesting in the old days. I see so little one would want to play today. It would just be for money. Not much fun.

A: In the long run, it’s what you enjoy that matters. Do that.

Q: Thank you. Is it true you were almost engaged to Thalberg’s sister?

A: (Laughs.) Good night! Who said that? Not at all. But I was, it was my understanding that I was her unofficial escort. Irving had some other escorts for her....Oh! I altogether forgot, and this is very important about Irving Thalberg. After the...the 1933 arrest, he could easily have turned his back on me. Jimmy and I had a party—I was, we were, celebrating the success of our new venture. Irving and Norma attended. And what Irving and Norma did, all of Hollywood knew about. It was like a royal blessing.

Q: A question: how did Mayer get to cover up so many things?

A: Company town. Corrupt cops, corrupt D.A.’s or assistant D.A.’s, people in high places, informants, the newspapers, of course—the press was the easiest to control and the biggest columnists owed everything to their cooperation and conniving with Mayer and all the other studio skunks.

Q: No wonder people could be frozen out so easily. Were you ever called a male flapper?

A: (Smiles.) I was called lots of things...”oldest living college boy.” “The big lug”—being over six feet. A “pretty-boy”—I never thought I was so pretty!

Q: You’ve aged very well.

A: Aren’t you a dear. I had a friend, passed away recently, who said George (Cukor) used to call Clark “dear” on the set. I can’t feature it. George might’ve called some other actors “dear,” but not that weasel. George knew which side his bread was buttered on.

Q: Actors are sometimes represented as dumber than they are, but is this true? Gable was introduced to William Faulkner (who was doing a screenplay), and he didn’t know who Faulkner was?

A: That, my dear, is entirely possible. An eyewitness to their meeting said that they shook hands, then Clark asked, “What do you do, Mr. Faulkner?” Faulkner said, “I write. And what do
you
do, Mr. Gable?”

Q: Fabulous.

A: Most actors don’t read. Except scripts.

Q: What other actors hired you to redecorate their homes? Your big three were Lombard, Crawford, and Davies.

A: Cranberry also invested in our business, when we had to hire. But, yes, there were...there was the Mocambo, Jack and Ann Warner, Claudette Colbert, Lionel Barrymore, George Cukor, the list goes on...the Annenbergs’ house near Palm Springs, and thanks to that, Ambassador Annenberg’s residence in England. It doesn’t end, and we get to work as much as we want.

Q: As a decorator, you’re familiar with closets....

A: And
you
(pointing forefinger) want to know...a little—I hope—about the more recent sort of closet, is that right?

Q: It’s not recent, but that name for it is. What surprises me is that so many areas, including the ones people assume to have gays in them, are and stay closeted.
Fashion
designers...I
mean!

A: Money. (Rubs fingers and thumb.) That’s why. Greed, insecurity, but some people don’t want to chance losing a customer. I know interior designers—decorators—who are homosexual, but they pretend not. In order not to lose, possibly lose, that sort of client. But with us—well, because it is
us
, we’re a
couple
—it’s harder to pretend, if we even wanted to. On top of which, my life story, and my travails, are fairly well-known.

Q: It’s as if gays don’t allow themselves any profession to be open in.

A: It’s not that they’re so brainless they think clients will be shocked to meet a gay fashion designer or interior decorator. It’s the greed—that they think a client might be offended to meet someone homosexual, so to prevent losing any clients, they pretend the opposite.

Q: Never thinking they might lose gay clients that way?

A: No.

Q: And do they really fool anyone?

A: A gay actor can...whether a gay designer does (shrugs)? There is a...couturier who’s been in America some time (from France: Mainbocher). When he designs for a particular actress, she pretends he’s straight.

Q: What, she’s embarrassed on his behalf?

A: He does go along with it, he likes that image. It means success to him. But the reason
she
does it is her own camouflage. She’s not straight, either (Mary Martin; nor was her husband).

Q: One closeted individual closets another...?

A: In show business, some of the worst (smiles) “closeters”—of other people—are those who are themselves in the closet.

Q: As in misery loves company?

A: They’re not so miserable. Just paranoid. Some gays don’t want to publicly admit they know anyone who’s homosexual. Pandora’s box—you know that story?

Q: I’ve grown up reading all kinds of mythology, from ancient Egyptian, Greek, Judeo-Christian, through to Viking, Aztec, you name it. But I understand what you’re saying. These people don’t even want the topic to come up. I guess they’re that terrified.

A: It’s why most would never play a homosexual role.

Q: Too close to home?

A: If the subject was brought up in an interview, they might blush or get nervous or...lactate. One exception: Barbara Stanwyck did play a sapphic lady (in
Walk on the Wild Side
, 1961), and I think she was the first in Hollywood to do that. Everyone was agog.

Q: And then she did
The Big Valley
.

A: She was made for Westerns. With
Stella Dallas
, watching it now, half of me wants to cry and half of me wants to titter.

Q: But do you think knowing that a performer is different in reality from the character portrayed should affect a viewer’s perception of the performance, if it’s well-done?

A: It shouldn’t. It does, sometimes. But finally I have to laugh at the hypocrisy. So much for Stanwyck and those ladies. Her deportment in private—at parties and places—always reminded me of a young man in need of finishing school.

Q: When Cukor was fired from
Gone With the Wind
, did you imagine that that might be the end of his career in film?

A: We held our breaths. Part of the time. No one knew which way it would go. But as Jimmy said, the man’s not an actor; they can’t discard him so easily. There wouldn’t be the same excuse as for an actor—it is a half-valid excuse....

Q: It’s half-assed. Please go on.

A: I knew one thing. George can get very upset when he’s upset. And George can be litigious. He’d gone to court in the earlier part of the ‘30s when he felt he wasn’t getting his due, and long after the (
GWTW
) debacle, he told me he’d have gone to court if they’d tried to freeze him out. I think Metro gave him
The Women
(1939) as a consolation prize, and that was a plum.

Q: And he’s had this long, glittering career. Maybe it’s the ones prepared to scream, when they have to, that survive....

A: (Shrugs.) He’s a survivor, is George, and when need be, he’s a screamer.

Q: Someone recently said that the reason Tyrone Power got rather bloated-looking toward the end was drugs or medication. Was he an unhappy man?

A:
That
was a “pretty-boy.” If he was unhappy about it when he was young, then he was a fool. Looks like that are to be enjoyed. He did get more and more shopworn, worn down by care. Why he got puffy, I have no idea. My guess is food. He was some dish, but he was making himself into a tureen.

Q: He and Cesar Romero were lovers? (Nods.) One guy married more than once, had kids more than once, the other didn’t—and didn’t. Why, other than one was a star and one was a—

A: “Featured player.” That’s what they used to say. Why? (Shrugs, smiles.) Why is one guy different from the next one? Why are some persons more compulsive? I didn’t finish the thread of a thought, earlier. I was telling you that in her twenties many an actress was nagged toward finding a husband. In their twenties, the actors, not so much. The studios didn’t want an actor marrying too young—business reasons. But in his thirties, that’s when the skunks narrowed in on any unmarried actors, and gave them the works. Then they forgot about the actresses and zeroed in on us actors and nagged us full-time. I’m well out of that rat’s nest! (Laughs.)

Q: Cary Grant is another compulsive type, wouldn’t you say?

A: Phoney-baloney.
Boring
. Cheap—his only decorator is Hap Hazard. Frank Sinatra used to call him “Mother Cary” on the set of one of their movies—they must have done
one
.

Q: Is he bigoted?

A: Not spectacularly, that it shows, but...I’ve...learned a few things. (Elizabeth Taylor was turned down by Sinatra when she asked him to participate in Hollywood’s first major AIDS fund-raiser.)

Q: Do you agree with this quote? “Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear.”

A: Good night! (Laughs.) Half my clients could have said that! Who said it?

Q: Oscar Wilde.

A: The old darling! Half my clients would say that about other people’s interiors (shakes head).

Q: Why do you think a few men get into fashion design and others into interior design? How different are they from each other?

A: Oh, I couldn’t have gone into fashion design. It’s all personal taste, I’d have to say. And I’m not bragging. I just would have been bored silly, working with women’s clothes. I like beautiful objects and the blending and contrasting of colors, but...I’ll say this anyway, I happen to think it’s true: I think most of the men who design clothes for women are designing what
they’d
like to wear...but whether they’d want to be women, I don’t know.

Q: You’ve done Danny Kaye’s house?

A: Boy, you nearly gave me a coronary, the way you started to phrase that! (Laughs.) I did decorate his and Sylvia Fine Kaye’s house. They have good taste. He’s the one who loves to say, “I have a Fine head on my shoulders!”

Q: I know Danny Kaye played Hans Christian Andersen as a heterosexual, which he wasn’t, in the movie musical. What about Kaye himself?

A: (Pause.) You asked...so I’ll just say what I think, that he’s the most repressed innate homosexual I ever met. Do not ask me if he’s been with this one or that one, I have no idea if he’s ever done it. But it’s
there
, in
him
.

Q: Other people will often take it upon themselves to say, “Oh, he’s not gay,” or, “He couldn’t be gay.” How could they know that?

A: They might...if they’re with him 24 hours a day—and if they can read his thoughts and fantasies.

Q: Or the wife of a man who’s gay or bisexual will totally insist that he’s not....

A: Public relations. Sometimes
pubic
relations. She either lies, or she tells a half-truth: possibly he does do it with her. But not just with her....

Q: I think women who marry men who aren’t heterosexual worry that if the public knows, then they’ll wonder about the wife....

A: Or they feel, even if he’s gone to his reward or his just desserts, that they’re keeping up his reputation by denying everything. Chances are, if you leave anyone behind—anyone besides my Jimmy—they are going to deny, deny, deny. All innocent-like. (Grins.) But everyone’s an actor; and when you’re an entertainer, you have to be an actor in that other way, if it applies: you have to act, and act like you believe it—
all
the time, in public—as if you’re not gay.

Q: And it is easy to fool the public, isn’t it?

A: It is. They
want
to be fooled. But you have to keep fooling them...it’s tiresome. You have to act in your career, and
for
your career.

Q: Even non-actors. What do you think of Liberace?

A: Because he’s gay or he’s an eyesore? Did you catch him in hot pants last year? Everywhere I turned, there he was, same photo, over and over. (The most widely run wire-service transmission ever to come out of Las Vegas was a 1971 photo of Liberace in hot pants at Caesars Palace.) The man has taste-minus.

Q: His taste in home decor is pretty amazing too.

A: You call that decor? I call it Early Everything.

Q: He’s never asked you to decorate for him.

A: I’d have to start with a bulldozer, dear.

Q: Someone that obvious, why doesn’t he come out of the closet?