Hollywood Gays (44 page)

A: But if you print this, even after I’m gone, you’ll have to remove Miss Foster and Eric Douglas and whoever else.

Q: Because the law puts more store by longstanding bigotry than truth? One can be sued for telling the truth. (Jodie Foster much later came out and Eric Douglas died.)

A: The one that gets my goat is Liberace. Every time they called him queer or gay, he sued.

Q: And won!

A: If he’s that all damned uptight, why didn’t he get married? Shit!

Q: Well, you know, he was “engaged” to (ice skating movie star) Sonja Henie, but then she died, and he “considered” Princess Margaret, but she married someone else. Although…well, never mind. Many people in Britain know.

A: That right? You oughta interview ole Liberace. And save your good questions for the end. Ask him if he prefers roses on his piano or his tulips on an organ. That’s a little joke he likes to tell—about other guys.

Q: (Both smile.) He’s very particular about doing interviews.

A: Small wonder. (Grins.) Why don’t they do a study about guys who hide in their closets. How small are they? I think men who are a little more honest have—ya know—more to offer. (Winks.)

Q: I don’t think you’re ever going to grow old.

A: I’m still growing. (Leers.) As an actor too. Just that once you’re past 70, they shrink your lines. Your talent grows, but your chances shrink. I’m not what I call rich, even after so long being an actor, but it’s good I got some savings. I’ll never have to write that book about Marilyn. Say, which one is right? “Marilyn and Me” or “Marilyn and I”?

Q: “Marilyn and I.”

A: If I make 90, I might reconsider. ‘Course by then, who’s gonna remember “The Seven Year Itch”? Do you think they’ll still remember Marilyn then?

Q: I think so. What do you think was the cause of her death?

A: I’ve been asked, and I still get asked…I don’t always give exactly the same answer. I’ve gotten a few…some intimidating notes about that. I’d rather not say.

Q: Were you ever threatened about discussing her death?

A: I lived through the witch hunts you brought up. We were all scared. Even if there was nothing to be ascared (sic) of. Now the Kennedy thing…the affair and maybe…something about her death, some cover-up. That’s not anything for me to get involved in. I’m no expert.

Just so she rests in peace. She’s practically a bigger star now than when she was alive. I guess it kinda pays to die young.

Q: From the point of view of those who live on. But you’ll always be in
The Seven Year Itch
.
You’ve achieved your celluloid immortality, Mr. Ewell.

A: Tom, call me Tom. Mr. Ewell’s some old man.

Q: Your father?

A: Nope. That was Mr. Tompkins. Remember?

Q: That’s right.

A: That’s why I’m Tom—from Tompkins. Or Tommy, if you like.

Q: I had a high school teacher, an Italian-American, who explained on the first day of class, “I’m Mr. (so-and-so). My first name is Randy. It’s not a kid’s name, it’s
my
name, and I’ll
always
be Randy.”

A: (laughs) Good ole Randy! I hope he’s still enjoying himself. I know I do. One way or another. C’mon. Let’s drink to that.

Before we met to chat, Tom Ewell asked on the phone if I’d be willing to sign “an agreement” to not publish the resultant material during his lifetime. I said certainly. Then he suggested we wouldn’t need “any paper between us” if instead I gave him my word. I did. He giggled confidentially, adding that we could really discuss any star names we wished since they could never see print because they would be removed first—presumably if not by myself, then by an editor or lawyer.

Toward the end of our interview Tom admitted he wasn’t comfortable with the word “gay.” Nor “homosexual,” which he didn’t consider applicable to himself. I inquired whether he deemed himself bisexual (although most or all of his non-marital relations were with other men, while the marriages had been by way of duty)?

“Something like that,” he nodded. “Yeah, like the Greeks and Romans.”

The day of our interview I met the actor in the parking lot of a department store near Western Avenue. We got in my car and drove—following his directions—to a bar in the vicinity. I parked behind it in an alley, while he went inside. He returned a few minutes later, rather flushed. “We want a
friendly
place,” he declared. We drove a few miles west, to a bar—not apparently gay, with hardly any customers—on Santa Monica Boulevard. He didn’t go inside till after I parked, and I wondered but didn’t ask how he knew this bar was a friendly place (and since he later swore it was his first time in this bar).

The evening after we re-met, Tom Ewell phoned. I was out, so he left a message to call him. I did, and there was no answer. He called next morning and asked if I was “doing anything special,” suggesting—before I could note the two appointments lined up for my final day in town—that we might “go to the beach.” I was genuinely sorry to disappoint him, and explained that were I able, I’d extend my stay by one more day. He chuckled, paused, then said he couldn’t the next day, either. “An assignment,” he said. I’d heard he wasn’t working much anymore, so didn’t pursue it, not wanting to put him on the spot.

I volunteered that if I returned to L.A. later in the year, or the next, I’d call him.  

“Really?” he said.

“Of course,” I said.

(Next time I came to town, I did call. The number was no longer in service.)

The morning of the day I left, Tom phoned again. “You’re still leaving today?”

“I wish I didn’t have to.”

“Well, listen. You got a pencil and paper?” He wanted to give me a “story” he hadn’t told me. “You’ll like it, ‘cause it’s about Marilyn,” he said. I didn’t think I’d shown undue interest in her. I’d found him an interesting interview subject and individual apart from his most famous film and costar.

“Tom, you’re quite interesting without or with Marilyn Monroe.”

He chuckled with pleasure. “Do you really think so?”

Then he proceeded, “Several years after Marilyn died, someone asked me on a radio show what ever happened to the tan loafers I wore in
The Seven Year Itch
? I didn’t know what the guy was talking about. He said he would give almost anything to be in the same shoes as the man who stood next to Marilyn Monroe in the infamous white-dress scene.

“He asked again, and I said I didn’t know what happened to the shoes. I hadn’t even remembered what color they were. After that, I got several inquiries about the shoes, but I wasn’t sure if I’d gotten to keep them or if they stayed studio property. All I know is, each time someone offered me money for the shoes, the price kept going up and up…I sure wish I had those damn shoes today. I could maybe retire on them.”

I thanked Tom for the story, and he asked if he phoned again in the afternoon, would I still be there? I thought perhaps he hadn’t understood that I was leaving before noon, then realized he was questioning whether I was truly departing that day, that maybe I was just saying it to avoid him. The thought saddened me, and I emphasized that he was a pleasure to talk with and a truly charming man.

“At my age?” he said softly.

“Charm never dies.”

“Huh.” A pause. “Just most all’s else, I guess.”

I did see him again, years later and more than once, at the Motion Picture Country House. We talked and sometimes held hands, especially when he had nothing to say. He regularly squeezed my hand, gently, as if to reassure himself. Tommy had aged considerably, and a female employee said he was often lonely and depressed. Nonetheless, when something struck him as funny—or naughty—he had the same mischievous gleam in his eye as during our 1984 chat and as in
The Seven Year Itch.

DICK SARGENT

(1930-1994)

Bewitched
, the TV sitcom about a witch married to a mortal man, resonates with gay viewers because it’s about an individual hiding who she really is so she can fit into a dull suburban community. The long-running hit series was at least partly inspired by
Bell, Book, and Candle
, a popular play by gay playwright and theatre director John Van Druten. Its 1958 hit-movie version starred Kim Novak as a beautiful blonde witch and James Stewart as the stuffy mortal with whom, despite her colorful relatives’ objections, she falls in love, stereotypically happy and willing to give up her powers and otherness to be with and like him. Richard Quine, the film’s director and an eventual suicide, explained in 1965, a year after
Bewitched
debuted, “If John were still alive, he would have every right to sue, and I’d be tempted to support him.”

Bewitched
ran for eight years (compared to three for
Gilligan’s Island
) and still reruns worldwide. Its two consecutive leading men—who played the stuffy Darrins married to blonde Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery)—had comparatively less healthy runs. Dick York left the show after five years due to severe back and other problems and died in 1992 at 63 of emphysema.

Dick Sargent was the first choice to play Darrin, but was tied to a Universal contract. He replaced York from 1969 to 1972. Dick (original surname Cox) officially came out of the closet in 1991 and died of prostate cancer in 1994 at 64.

Alas, the gentle man who didn’t attain movie stardom because of his “baby face” and the industry opinion that he was “lightweight,” was not allowed to die in peace. He and his final partner—together until the end—were bombarded with hate mail by the “reverend” Fred Phelps of Kansas.
Vanity Fair’s
May, 2011, issue asked entertainer Tina Fey, “Which living person do you most despise?” Her answer: “Osama bin Laden. Unless we think he’s dead by now, in which case that guy who holds up the ‘God Hates Fags’ sign.”

Sargent came out on October 11, National Coming Out Day, appearing on TV’s
Geraldo
,
Sally Jessy Raphael
, and
Larry King Live
shows. He declared, “Finally telling the truth about who I am gives me more pleasure than any acting job I’ve ever had.” He also worried that he might never get another acting job.

Jobs did prove scarce, however Dick had experienced previous dry spells, and in his sixties already wasn’t in great demand.

He’d received his cancer diagnosis in 1989. Interviewed by Michael Szymanski for the gay magazine
Genre
in 1994, Sargent explained, “It’s still pretty painful, but I’m lucky to have a great partner and lover to go through this with,” about his almost-three-year relationship with Albert Williams, a producer, writer and ex-disc jockey. “He’s taking this as well as he can, loving someone who’s dying.” Dick added, “This protest stuff is wearing thin on him, and wearing him down. I wish I could change that for him.” He referred to the hate campaign of preacher Phelps, who as Szymanski put it, “seems to make a living protesting the funerals of homosexual celebrities.” The young writer spent “the most despicable 45 minutes on the phone with (Phelps), asking why he is sending Dick hate mail that says he is doomed to hell because he’s a fag, and the man of the cloth said, ‘God is a god of hate and punishment toward sinners.’”

Columnist John Price of the gay Los Angeles magazine
Nightlife
noted that Sargent didn’t receive hate mail when he first stated he was gay “or when he and Elizabeth Montgomery sat as Grand Marshalls of the Gay Pride Parade. Only now that Sargent disclosed on
Entertainment Tonight
that he suffered from terminal cancer did this evil winged-monkey from Satan’s own kitchen rear his ugly head.” In 2011 Phelps’s son revealed on CNN that his father had abused him. At least one bereaved father of a non-celebrity gay son has sued Phelps for picketing and demeaning his boy’s funeral, only to lose the case—via the Supreme Court that in 2013 overturned (5 to 4) the anti-gay-marriage California Proposition 8 and the so-called Defense of Marriage Act which philandering husband Bill Clinton had signed—and be ordered to pay Phelps’s legal costs as well as his own!

Like most everyone who met the smiling, easygoing Dick Sargent, Price liked him a lot. “I found it to be most shameful that such a genuinely sincere and decent man was subjected to the horror of this idiot’s maniacal and misguided ravings.”

Back in the mid 1990s, nostalgia-TV cable channel Nick at Nite promised viewers they would “never see” any color episodes of
Bewitched,
only black-and-white ones costarring Dick York as the repressive Darrin Stevens. How much of that advertising was covert homophobia? For, by then, many fans of the “classic” sitcom knew that Dick Sargent, all of whose episodes were in color, was gay.

Sargent came out half a year after being outed in tabloids like the
National Enquirer
and the
Star
. He waited until his anger over their homophobia and lies about his relationship with a decades-younger black man they implied was a gigolo had subsided. Sargent and the man did not live together, yet one tabloid wrote that the couple had “trashed” their West Hollywood apartment and that police were summoned to evict them. Dick sued, allowing that if he’d come out “years ago, they (the tabloids) couldn’t have put me in a position where I’m being treated shamefully.”

In March, 1998, four years after Sargent’s death, Nick at Nite went back on its word, airing color episodes among its 40-episode
Bewitched
marathon. Their advertising used cartoon figures of the two Darrins, depicting them in the usual way that men eventually have to relate to each other in mass entertainment: fighting. Over a woman—a passive, smiling Samantha. “Dueling Darrins!” the ads screamed. “Back to back! Mano a mano!” (Why not Dueling Dicks, or would that have been too suggestive, and a turn-on to the routinely ignored ten percent of the audience?)