Born On This Day- July 23rd... Hollywood's Gavin Lambert: Or What as I Smoking?

I met Gavin Lambert at a coke fueled, debauched, all-male party at the home of producer Robert Fryer in the Hollywood Hills. The year was 1973 & it was the only period that I was briefly considered an ingénue. I actually didn’t mind being objectified & passed around. I liked being the object of desire, & being a bit of a slut, I was feeling very democratic & exceptionally open minded. I was hungry for experiences, & was not above putting out for my crack at show biz.

I had smoked a joint that must have been enhanced with something extra, because I don’t remember how I ended up in bed with the handsome older man. In the early morning hours we started in for round 2, & when the little strands of conversation revealed that this man had written the novel & screenplay for one of my favorite childhood movies- Inside Daisy Clover, featuring my favorite star- Ruth Gordon, I went absolutely nutty, screaming- “oh my god, oh my god, that is my favorite movie, I love that movie! Oh yeah, that feels so good. Tell me about working with Ruth Gordon! Do that again, but slower, harder & lower! Oh, I can't believe your created that movie. I love that movie! Will you autograph my ass?” I think I ruined the hot mood with my sudden outburst of fandom.

For 50+ years, the “go to” guy for bitchy, witty & perceptive gossip about Hollywood was screenwriter, novelist & biographer Gavin Lambert, who has died. For much of the 1950s & 1960s, he lived in Hollywood, the inspiration & setting for most of his novels, including The Goodbye People (1971), The Slide Area (1960) & Inside Daisy Clover (1963).

Armistead Maupin: "Decades before it was fashionable, Gavin Lambert expertly wove characters of every sexual stripe into his lustrous tapestries of southern California life. His elegant, stripped down prose caught the last gasp of old Hollywood in a way that has yet to be rivalled."

Lambert wrote the biography- Mainly About Lindsay Anderson (2000), about his friend & roommate at Oxford, director Lindsay Anderson (This Sporting Life, O' Luck Man & If ). He & Anderson founded the short lived but influential film journal- Sequence (1949-51), while still at Oxford. Unlike Anderson, who was tortured throughout his life by guilt about his homosexuality (he fell for happily married, heterosexual young men), Lambert was happily gay. He had a series of fulfilling relationships.

Lambert had an affair with director Nicholas Ray, whose films- Bigger Than Life (1956) & Bitter Victory (1957) Lambert wrote. His longest relationship, however, was with Mart Crowley, who wrote the influential gay play- The Boys In The Band (which I performed in- Boston, autumn 1972). The couple had a home together in L.A.

Lambert wrote & directed Another Sky in 1955, & the film was shot in Morocco. The rather modest film tells the story of a young English woman who discovers her sensuality in North Africa, a reflection Lambert's own sexual liberation in Tangier. He lived in Morocco from 1974 to 1989 on the suggestion of writer Paul Bowles, whom he met in L.A. at the home of Christopher Isherwood & Don Bachardy.

One of my favorite movies from childhood- Inside Daisy Clover (1966) was made into a film from Lambert’s novel with a screenplay by the author. Directed by Robert Mulligan, it tells the tale of how the fame & fortune of a young star, played by Natalie Wood, leads to misery & a nervous breakdown. Lambert first met Wood when he went to Hollywood as an assistant to Ray on Rebel Without A Cause. In 2004, he wrote a revealing biography of the star- Natalie Wood: A Life, admitting they had shared at least one lover. According to Lambert, a 17 year old Natalie Wood lost her virginity to Lambert’s boyfriend Nick Ray. Lambert's biography includes Wood's relationships with Elvis Presley, Robert Wagner, Warren Beatty, Paul Mazursky, & Leslie Caron. In his book, Lambert claimed that Wood frequently dated gay & bisexual men, including Nick Adams, Raymond Burr, James Dean, Tab Hunter, & Scott Marlowe. Lambert also said that Wood helped support his lover- playwright Mart Crowley making it possible for him to write his play, The Boys in the Band (1968).

Lambert's best screenplays were adaptations with gay overtones: Sons & Lovers (1960), based on the novel by D.H. Lawrence, was Oscar nominated, & The Roman Spring Of Mrs Stone (1961), from Tennessee Williams' novel, I Never Promised You A Rose Garden (1977), & Liberace, Behind The Music (1988).

He wrote biographies: On Cukor (1972) , Norma Shearer: A Life (1990), & Nazimova: A Biography (1997) which was the first full scale account of the private life & acting career of lesbian actress Alla Nazimova. He also wrote GWTW: The Making of Gone With the Wind (1973). Lambert was able to interview & gain personal remembrances of those involved with the classic 1939 film, including dismissed director George Cukor & star Vivien Leigh .

I have reason to believe that before his death in 2005, Lambert was working on a book- The Greatest Sex in Hollywood: The 1970s, where I was to be mentioned in the chapter- Live Fast & Die Young, but I was probably there as a footnote. Mr. Lambert was every inch the gentleman. Today is his birthday. He would have been 87 years old.