Garbo Talks

“Gif me a visky, ginger ale on the side,

 & don' be stingy, baby.”

A production still of me working with Garbo

I am employed by a well known Portland Gourmet Food Emporium as a wine/beer/chocolate/gift buyer & manager. In this capacity I also do the hiring, training, schedules & upkeep for fifteen 19-34 year olds. I have been at this position for a decade & the kids teach me a great deal…& not so much in a good way.

I provide a daily trivia question for the customers, a free coffee drink & pastry for the first correct answer. The question is placed in a frame at the cash registers. The customers seem to think it is fun & I am trivia trippy, which causes consternation in my circle.

Saturday, early morning, I am pondering possibilities for the challenge & my little gay Puerto Rican staff member pops into the office & offers: “Mr. R, how about a question about movies like something about the silent era; how about something about Greta Garbo?”

Stephen: “None of our customers will have any idea who Greta Garbo was…”

Gay Puerto Rican: “Everyone knows Great Garbo. I love her so much & I am positive that most people find her interesting.”

Stephen: “Hmmm… I stand by my claim, in fact I feel certain that 80% of the American Public would have no idea who Garbo was.”

Gay Puerto Rican: “No! Well, a Bette Davis question then. Everyone knows Bette Davis.”

Stephen: “I am afraid you are mistaken young man. Most customers would not know who Bette Davis was. We best go with a Star Wars question.”

Gay Puerto Rican: “Oh! I love Star Wars, but do a Garbo question, please! Please?”

Stephen (sticking his head out of the office, addressing 5 young staff members): “Hey! Listen Up! Can any of you tell me who Greta Garbo is?”

Staff (looking lost): Who? What? Lady Gaga?

Stephen: Can you name a film with Bette Davis?

Staff: (looking frightened): Huh?

Barista Girl: “My mom loves her. She made watch this movie with her… Beaches?"

Stephen: (to gay Puerto Rican): “My point.”

The customer question of the day was: Greta Garbo was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress for this 1930 film. The ad campaign for declared- “Garbo Talks!”, as it was her first talking film. Be the first to name this film & you will win a coffee drink & pastry.

We did 520 transactions that day & not one customer or staff member knew the answer... except the gay Puerto Rican. He enjoyed an Americano & a yummy pain au chocolat. I returned to the office & banged my head against the wall.

The "Vamp" & The "It Girl" Share a Birthday On July 29th

I really do understand. I know first hand, the pain & shame of a brilliant acting career cut down by sex scandals, men, drugs, drink & mental problems. My flame burned out all too soon. I was known briefly & in a select circle as the "IT GUY". I was forgotten all too soon... but you can still re-live the magic with my work on Beta, VHS, & DVDs. Sometimes the world is not ready for the heat that we sex symbols produce.  Still, I have not yet been buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park. Indeed, I am living in impoverishment & obscurity in Portland, Oregon, in a house that is little more than a squatter's shack, with too many dogs & an unhinged, unglued & unzipped husband.

In the 1920s, Clara Bow's spirit & sex appeal defined the newly liberated woman of the flapper era. Clara Bow was Hollywood's brightest light during this time. Clara was known as the-"It Girl", & Clara Bow had "It". The people she worked with claimed that she was full of charm & wit, & a thorough professional.

Clara Bow was an actress of range & depth, but she played mostly manicurists, waitresses, & department store clerks. Her movies helped emancipate young American girls from the restrictive morals of their parents. Clara's characters were unashamed about being attracted to men. Her shop girl in It (1927) spies the boss’s son & says:"Oh Santa, gimme him!" Her characters wore their dresses short, cut off their hair, drank & smoked in public, & danced all night long. At the height of her career, she received 45,000 fan letters a week. She was the idol of working girls & the dream of blue collar guys.

The It Girl was so hot & bright, it seems inevitable that she would burn out personally & professionally. It is shocking to think that her career was over in 1933 at 26 years old, after she had made millions for her studio- Paramount, & was one of the most well known stars in the world. She was condemned by the Hollywood community for her questionable morality. Producer Budd Schulberg, in his book Moving Pictures: Memories of a Hollywood Prince:  "Hollywood was a cultural schizophrene: The anti-movie Old Guard with their chamber music & their religious pageants fighting a losing battle against the more dynamic culture who flaunted the bohemianism of Edna St. Vincent Millay & the socialism of Upton Sinclair. But, there was one subject on which staid old Hollywood establishment & the members of the new culture circle would agree: Clara Bow, no matter how great her popularity, was a low-life & a disgrace to the community."

Scandal ruined Clara Bow. She had a breakdown & had to recover in a sanatorium. She left films for good, & moved to Nevada with her new husband- cowboy actor Rex Bell. They had 2 sons, but Clara Bow was battling mental illness. She was a doting mother to her sons, but haunted by a weight problem & profound depression, Clara Bow was eventually confined to a psychiatric hospital & not allowed to see her children. She died of a heart attack in her small house in West L.A., on September 26, 1965, while watching a Gary Cooper movie. She was 60 years old & living in poverty & obscurity. Clara Bow is buried Forest Lawn Memorial Park.

Most of Bow's films have been lost. Of her 56 films, silent & sound, only 27 exist in their entirety or in pieces. Only 16 are available on video. The remaining films that survive are in the Library of Congress Film Archive.

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Theodosia Burr Goodman was was one of the most popular screen actresses of her era, & one of filmdom’s original sex symbols. She earned her the nickname "The Vamp" (short for vampire). The term "vamp" soon became a popular slang term for a sexually forward woman.

The glamorous star of the 1910s, Theda Bara is also the most inaccessible & mysterious today. Only Mary Pickford & Charlie Chaplin were more popular, but today it's nearly impossible to view her work. Of the more than 40 films she made from 1914 -1926, only 3 remain. Her image remains with film fans 80+ years after her retirement, & she is the only star responsible for a word being placed both in the dictionary. Songs were written about Theda Bara, postcards & magazines featured her face. Dangling earrings, kohled eyes, languorous looks & the catch phrase- "Kiss me, you fool!" became part of the public lexicon.

Theda Bara did not end up as a disillusioned, destitute recluse, like other sex symbols of the Silent Era. In 1921 she married successful director Charles Brabin, a marriage that lasted until her death in 1955. The Brabins were wealthy world travelers, & Theda's Bara’s talent as hostess & gourmet made their Beverly Hills home a favorite with the film community into the 1960s. Theda Bara is buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park.

The fact that Theda Bara never spoke on screen makes her even more fascinating & mysterious. We are able to hear the voices of Mary Pickford, Lon Chaney, Charles Chaplin & Norma Talmadge, only a few stars: Theda Bara, Rudolph Valentino, Wallace Reid, Constance Talmadge are silent forever. Theda Bara remains almost invisible as well. It makes me impossibly melancholy that her legacy is crumbling away to dust.

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.

God & Monsters... Considering James Whale On His 122nd Birthday

I have done several posts about my admiration for one of my all time favorite films, Bill Condon’s film- Gods & Monsters & Sir Ian McKellen’s masterful performance as director James Wale. Thinking of James Wale this morning on his birthday, I landed on the moment when McKellen's James Whale murmurs about the hunky Brendan Frasier’s "architectural skull." Who else could appreciate a skull more than the man who designed the impressive & imposing head of the Frankenstein monster?

"It's the horror movies you'll be remembered for" the geeky fan/ interviewer tells the aging Whale in the film, & despite his gentlemanly manners, you can see irritation in McKellen's eyes. But, the geek is correct of course. Whale's other movies, even his successful version of the musical- Show Boat are mostly forgotten in the 21st century, but people still watch Frankenstein & The Bride of Frankenstein. The look of the monster: square head, seams, scars & neck bolts is a visual icon of the 20th century.

James Whale was a painter before he was a stage & film director, & his eye for design is part of what makes his films so memorable. Besides the look of the monster, played by Boris Karloff, he also created the hairstyle & elegantly stitched scars of the Bride played by Elsa Lanchester. Whale had seen the great German silent horror movies that were never widely released in the USA, & from them he took the starkly dramatic lighting & impressionistic sets, & along with his art director Charles Hall, created the style of Universal Studios Gothic: huge shadowed interiors with enormous doors, imposing staircases & long shadows.

Gods & Monsters asks us to consider that a major influence on Whale's work was his time in the trenches in WW1. The film uses flashbacks of a foxhole lover to provide Whale with awful memories of the young lover’s death. But the war really did the same for the actual Whale. He was in the thick of some intense battles, before ending up in a POW camp, where he began his stage career by producing amateur theatricals.

There is a beauty, perversity, & wit in Whale's Frankenstein films. His dark, horrid, funny work paved the way for directors like Brian De Palma, David Lynch, George A. Romero & Tim Burton.

Whale was an uncloseted gay man in Hollywood during the1930s. While Gods & Monsters is fiction, his real last lover was a gas station operator who for a while had to share Whale with a male nurse. I have read that the Frankenstein films were a way for Whale to give a coded guide to his sexuality & his feelings of being a misunderstood outsider, a lonely monster. Gods & Monsters evokes this with an understanding & even elegance. But, Whale's longtime partner, David Lewis stated: "Jimmy was first & foremost an artist, his films represent the work of an artist, not a gay artist, but an artist." Whale may have identified with the monster not because of his sexuality, but because of his background as a member of a lower class in England.


Whale directed the 1928 play Journey's End on London’s West End & then on Broadway . He moved to Hollywood to direct the film version & lived there for the rest of his life, most of that time with his longtime companion, David Lewis, the prodicer of films such as Dark Victory & Raintree County. They were a couple for 22+ years.

He will always be remembered most for his work in the horror film genre: Frankenstein (1931), The Old Dark House (1932), The Invisible Man (1933) & Bride of Frankenstein (1935), but Whale directed many films in other genres, including what is considered the definitive film version of the musical Show Boat (1936). He became increasingly disenchanted with his association with horror & never returned to the genre.
 

Having experienced WW1 first hand, Whale seemed an inspired choice to direct The Road Back, a sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front in 1937, but the film was a critical & commercial failure. A string of more failures followed & by 1941 his film directing career was over. Whale continued to direct for the stage & also rediscovered his love for painting. He had invested wisely & he lived a comfortable life until suffering several strokes in 1956 left him in pain. Whale committed suicide on 29 May 1957 by drowning himself in his backyard swimming pool. His former partner- David Lewis would later reveal the details of Whale's suicide note.

There is a terrific chapter on Gods & Monsters in Christopher Bram's (the author of the novel) memoir- Mapping The Territory. I recommend this very entertaining & emotional book to anyone that is interested in the process of writing.

Born On This Day- July 7th... George Cukor

I just am crazy for the scene in one of my favorite films- Gods & Monsters: director James Whale brings his hot gardener stud to a party at George Cukor's home, with Princess Margaret as a honored guest. So well filmed & telling, director Bill Condon claims he shot the budget wad on that scene, but it was worth it.

George Cukor's private life was well known in Hollywood. His Sunday afternoon pool parties were legendary in gay circles, having been described at lurid detail by some of the party guests, including writer John Rechy. His home, decorated by actor-turned interior designer William Haines, was the spot for Hollywood homosexuals to gather. The close knit group included Haines & his partner Jimmie Shields, Alan Ladd ,W.Somerset Maugham, James Vincent, screenwriter Rowland Leigh, costume designers Orry-Kelly & Robert Le Maire, & actors John Darrow, Robert Walker, Anderson Lawler, Robert Seiter & Tom Douglas. Frank Horn- secretary to Cary Grant, was a frequent guest. Cukor & his sophisticated & artistic friends socialized with their boyfriends- often hustlers, rough trade, actor wannabes, or ambitious artists & writers who saw his parties as way into the exclusive Hollywood life.

My favorite anecdote: Hunky, young Forrest Tucker, who was straight, would show up at Cukor's Sunday afternoon parties & swim naked in the pool for the viewing pleasure of Cukor's famous gay guests: W. Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward, Cecil Beaton & other assorted influential gays in the art, literature, & movies. Tucker realized these men were important contacts & was one of many up & coming young studs who were willing to make a naked appearance for the sake of their careers. Among them was handsome, hunk, hairy Aldo Ray, whom Cukor seemed to like well enough to cast him in Pat & Mike & The Marrying Kind with Judy Holliday.


Cukor's personal reputation has suffered somewhat from these anecdotes. Rechy: “Cukor was a catty, sometimes cruel queen who was as gifted at separating his private & public personas as he was at making films.” Yet among his close friends, those important enough to him to have his home filled with their photographs: Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Joan Crawford, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Lauren Bacall & Humphrey Bogart, Claudette Colbert, Marlene Dietrich, Laurence Olivier & Vivien Leigh, Stanley Holloway, Judy Garland, Gene Tierney, Noël Coward, Cole Porter, James Whale, Edith Head, Norma Shearer, Irving Thalberg, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, Aldous Huxley, Ferenc Molnár, Christopher Isherwood & Don Bachardy, & close friend Somerset Maugham.

As a semi-closeted gay artist in Hollywood, one of Cukor's constant themes was how to reconcile a double life, an outsider or artist always at war with his or her own demons & the limits imposed by relationships & society. In other films, there is the meeting of 2 sides. For Cukor this seemed to represent true happiness. In Holiday (1938), Cary Grant rejects his rich, stuffy fiancee in favor of her spinster sister (Katharine Hepburn) who turns out to be a dreamer like himself.


Cukor is often given the title. “women’s director”, but he was the 1st to show Cary Grant as a romantic comedian in Sylvia Scarlett, & he launched the careers of Jack Lemmon, Aldo Ray, Tom Ewell & Anthony Perkins as well as Katharine Hepburn & Angela Lansbury. He directed W. C. Fields, Lew Ayres, Spencer Tracy & James Mason to performances that should have won Oscars, & James Stewart, Ronald Colman & Rex Harrison to performances that did. Plus: Max Carey in What Price Hollywood?, John Barrymore in Dinner at Eight, Cary Grant in Holiday & The Philadelphia Story, Ronald Colman in A Double Life, Spencer Tracy in Adam's Rib, & Laurence Olivier in Love Among the Ruins. All these actors discovered new dimensions to their screen personalities under Cukor's smart, shrewd & sympathetic direction.

Photo by Cecil Beaton

Among his most personal films are Little Women, The Marrying Kind, Pat & Mike & A Star Is Born. None of them is glossy, & none of them started as theatre. Cukor usually filmed from the viewpoint of his female main character. This is evident in his Katharine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy romantic comedy Pat & Mike & as it is in more obviously female-centered stories such as Little Women, & Gaslight . His concentration on Strong women, along with Clark Gable's "ick factor"over Cukor's homosexuality, were the reasons for the director's firing from Gone With the Wind by producer David O. Selznick.


All of his life Cukor fought an inferiority complex based on his ugliness, weight & life in an anti-Semitic America. His biggest secret was his active homosexuality. Among the major directors of the golden years of Hollywood, only he & James Whale were, more or less. basically openly gay. He died in 1983, 2 years after his last film- Rich & Famous. He is buried in an unmarked grave at Forest Lawn Memorial Cemetery.

My favorite Cukor Film: Philadelphia Story. My Favorite Cukor moment: Cary Grant's speech on kindness to haughty Katherine Hepburn as haughty Tracy Lord.

What is your favorite Cukor moment? I really want to know.

Born On This Day- July 1st... Farley Granger

He had a career on stage & screen from the early 1940s through the early aughts. Farley Granger is known best for starring in a pair of Alfred Hitchcock Films with legendary homosexual subtexts: Rope & Strangers on a Train.

His first starring role in They Live by Night, directed by bi-sexual Nicholas Ray, is considered to be one of his finest film performances. Granger’s sensitive portrayal of the bank robber Bowie caught the attention of Alfred Hitchcock. While preparing to shoot Rope a movie inspired by the notorious Leopold & Loeb murder case, Granger & co-star John Dall (whose homosexuality was also well known in the Hollywood community) were cast as a pair affluent young men, who set out to commit a " Prefect Murder".The men’s sexuality is never made explicit in the film, but the relationship between Granger’s & Dall’s characters has a strong homoerotic subtext, skillfully sewn together by Hitchcock & his actors. The film became notorious for it’s continuous, uninterrupted 10-minute takes, the amount of time a reel of Technicolor film lasted. It was a difficult feat as Hitchcock ran into numerous technical problems which frequently brought the action to a halt throughout the 21 day shoot.

 

3 years after starring in Rope, Granger again worked with Hitchcock in the classic thriller Strangers on a Train, based on the first novel by acclaimed lesbian writer Patricia Highsmith, who authored The Talented Mr. Ripley & a series of Ripley books. Although Hitchcock himself was dissatisfied with the end result, Strangers On A Train was a box office hit & the first major success of Granger’s career & is one of my favorite Hitchcock’s films.

Granger remained secretive about his private life, but his homosexuality has been widely known in the Hollywood & Broadway acting communities. Among his many lovers was Arthur Laurents who wrote the screenplay for Rope. Laurents speaks kindly of him in Laurents memoir- Original Story By. Granger had shorter affairs with Leonard Bernstein & Robert Walker, he remained friends with both of them until each of their deaths. In 1995 he was one of many on-screen actors interviewed for Rob Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman’s ground-breaking documentary The Celluloid Closet, discussing the depiction of homosexuality in film, in particular Rope and Strangers on a Train.

Granger was a profoundly good looking actor of considerable range & style: Broadway, films, musicals, light comedies & noir. I found him to be the epitome of how to age with class. He was in a long domestic partnership with stage manager-  Robert Calhoun, who passed away on 2008. Together they had written Granger's dishy memoir, deliciously titled- Count Me Out. Granger died in the same week as Elizabeth Taylor this spring.

Born On This Day- June 10th.. Francis Ethel Gumm

How can I come up with a gay connection to Judy Garland? Lets see… her father was gay, 2 of her husbands were gay, the man she hand picked as a husband for her daughter was gay, her gay fans remained her most steadfast fans through the drugs & the booze ups & downs, the fruit of her loins was Liza Minnelli & then there is that little film- The Wizard Of Oz.

42 years after her death, Judy Garland remains the very definition of gay icon. Her failed relationships, her self-doubt, & her battle with substance abuse are aspects of a life that most of us can identify with, while her live performances reflect a truth & freedom that are desired by anyone that has wasted time hiding their own emotions.

Gay culture can't escape Garland's influence. The Stonewall riots have been attributed to the anger & grief felt on Garland's funeral that day. The term- "Friend of Dorothy," is from our identification with Garland's most famous role.

Garland's 1961 concert at Carnegie Hall is a landmark in Show Biz. 2 years earlier, she had been advised to retire from performing after being diagnosed with hepatitis, but instead she took on a series of concerts in Europe & the USA that reestablished her reputation as the top entertainer of all time. The Carnegie Hall show is regarded as the greatest evening in show-business history. The live recording of that concert spent more than a year on the Billboard charts & won 7 Grammys, including Album of the Year.

Last year, my dear friend- WCK3 & I stayed up late into the night watching CDs of her TV show from the early 1960s. I was entranced by her presence & horrified by the histrionics. Sometimes when listening to her recordings, I am off put by the feeling that she sings every single song as if it were her last. Her over the top interpretations of the great standards push me away. But, then I hear her original version or her late in life version of Over The Rainbow & I end up crying. Judy Garland loved her fans & they loved her back. I love her for that.

Norma Jean

"Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius & it's better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring."

It was announced at the Cannes Film Festival that Naomi Watts will play Monroe in a biopic based on author Joyce Carol Oates’s controversial, fictionalized memoir, 2000’s Blonde. The movie, also called Blonde, is to start filming in January 2011. Michelle Williams is to play Monroe in a film directed by Simon Curtis, which focuses on the screen legend’s time spent in England while filming 1957’s The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier.

She is long gone but never forgotten.

Marilyn Monroe, star of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The Seven Year Itch, Some Like It Hot, How to Marry a Millionaire & Bus Stop, was born Norma Jeane Mortenson on June 1, 1926 in Los Angeles.

She signed her first studio contract with Twentieth Century Fox in 1946 for $125 a week, Norma Jeane dyed her hair blonde & changed her name to Marilyn Monroe.

Monroe was pure & profane, & she soon became myth & metaphor as Hollywood’s most famous martyred saint. At the height of her fame, she had received 5,000 fan letters a week. Many were from men & women who talked about the sadness in her eyes, her vulnerability, &how they identified with her.

From Monroe’s first film, Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay!, in 1948, to her last, The Misfits, in 1962, she went from studio created blonde bimbo to a trained, heartbreaking actress of depth & soul. She is beyond camp. she was different than Jayne Mansfield & Mamie Van Doren, who Hollywood used to replace her. She was irreplaceable.



On an early morning in the summer of 1962, Monroe died in her sleep at her Brentwood, California home. Suicide, accident or murder? She was 36 years old. Monroe remains a gay icon. She would have been 85 years old today. If she had lived, Monroe could have tossed off her demons & would have probably become a nimble comic actor, making fun of herself & guest hosting on SNL to acclaim & high ratings.

Born On This Day, May 23rd... My Good Close Personal Friend- Betty Garrett

I was living in L.A. in the early 1970s & was fortunate enough to be an acquaintance of actress/singer Betty Garrett. We had met through a mutual friend, a Jesuit priest, who had taught her 2 sons. Her boys were actually my age, but I preferred to hang with the adults. I traveled in this circle for a couple of years, & although we never had a date, just the 2 of us, we saw each other with some frequency at dinners & parties. We knew each other by name & I found her to be friendly, engaging, warm, & she could spin a delicious tale.

Garrett told me about her husband- Larry Park’s political history, & that because of their past affiliations with the Communist Party, thanks to Parks' involvement with people from the Group Theatre, Garrett & Parks became embroiled with the House Un-American Activities Committee, although only Parks was forced to testify. While Parks willingly admitted he had been a member of the party, he had refused to name others, although it was widely assumed that he had, & he found himself on the Hollywood blacklist.
Garrett also had trouble finding work, although as the mother of 2 young sons, she did not mind being unemployed as much as her husband did. Betty related to me that the only person that would see them socially in Hollywood was Frank Sinatra( she played a woman in love with him in 2 films), who defied Hollywood convention & was open in his support of the couple with friendship & money.


The occasion was being received back stage by Betty Garrett, after her one-woman show- Betty Garrett & Other Songs at the Westwood Playhouse in Spring 1976. Betty Garrett had been my acquaintance for a while, but we had recently been at a very informal outdoor dinner thrown by mutual friends. Betty & I had a very special conversation that evening that ended with Betty offering house seats to her show the next evening. I took her up on the offer, & the show was terrific, after her last number, but before the curtain call, Betty looked into the house with her hands shielding her eyes & announced while pointing : “Celeste & Stephen… I want to see you both in my dressing room in a few minutes.” I turned to the person next to me & nudged & whispered- “That’s me… I'm that Stephen… I’m not Celeste.”


So, Oscar winner & consummate character actor Celeste Home, & & a very young Stephen hung out in the dressing room. While Betty Garrett got out of costume & make up, Celeste Holm & our hero made small talk & loudly praised Ms. Garrett’s show. I declined an offer from the 2 amazing stars of Hollywood’s golden era to move on to the next party. Instead, I would opt for Studio One in West Hollywood, hoping that some hot man would shove that little brown bottle under my nose, the one that makes me feel so sexy & really connect with music… & I will meet a beefy redhead that will take me home, use me for my considerable talents & then make me breakfast. I came to the fork in the road, & I made the wrong decision. I could have partied away the evening with the fabulous Betty Garrett & with the woman who introduced the world to the showstopper- I Can't Say No (by coincidence, the title of a chapter in my memoir), but I took the fork that got me forked later tha evening.


I always glow a bit when I when catch Betty Garrett in an old film or aTV show. She had a 70+ year career in Radio, TV, Film & Stage. Her last public appearance was this past summer. Garrett appeared alongside former 2-time co-star- Esther Williams during Turner Classic Movies' first annual Classic Film Festival. Their film Neptune's Daughter was screened at the pool of the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, while a Williams-inspired synchronized swimming troop, The Aqualilies, performed.


Betty Garrett left this life at 91 years old this past February. She was surrounded by her family. Thanks for the outstanding performances, the stories, the kindness, & the pleasure of your company, lovely Betty Garrett. You & your work will not be forgotten.

Alla Nazimova Was Born On This Day- May 22nd

 

She wasn’t in therapy, didn’t wear a fanny pack, had never sang along with the Indigo Girls & she didn’t play on a softball league, but Alla Nazimova was one luscious lesbian.

Nazimova was born Miriam Edez Adelaida Leventon, in the Ukraine, on this day in 1879. She studied with Stanslavski at the Moscow Arts Theatre. Nazimova was a mjor star in Moscow, Berlin & London by the time she arrived in NYC in 1905. She became an acclaimed actress & the toast of Broadway in the first deacde of the 20^th Century with success performing the works of Chekov, Turgenev & Ibsen. 

In 1918, Nazimova began producing, writing, & starring in films of her stage triumphs. Her film adaptations, her own film making techniques, & her acting style were considered daring at the time. 

In 1920s Hollywood, she counted as her many lovers: Patsy Ruth Miller, Anna Mae Wong, both of Rudolph Valentino's wives- Jean Acker & Natacha Rambova, Eva Le Gallienne, director- Dorothy Azner, & writer- Mercedes de Acosta. She coined the term "sewing circle" as code for her lesbian group of gal pals.  

Her private lifestyle was the topic of widespread rumors of decadent & debauched parties at her mansion on Sunset Boulevard, in West Hollywood known as The Garden of Allah. The Moorish palace was built in 1919. 

In 1927, Nazimova converted her estate into a 3.5 acre semi tropical trysting resort. She retained a private apartment upstairs in her former mansion, with the bottom story converted into a café & bar. The property became a complicated colorful collection of Spanish style bungalows & detached apartments, 25 villas were constructed around the pool, designed with drama & dash; the pool was shaped like the Black Sea.

The Garden Of Allah went bankrupt within a year & was bought by a developer who raised the rent. Nazimova stayed & among those who chose to live there: Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, Clara Bow, Buster Keaton, Ramon Navarro, Harpo Marx, Ava Gardner, Errol Flynn, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Ernest Hemingway, Lillian Hellman, Joe E. Lewis, Artie Shaw, Marlene Dietrich, George Kaufman, F Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Benchley & Laurence Olivier.  

 
Sham marriages, fights, feuds, egos, liquor during Prohibition, spoiled celebrities, recreational sex, drugs, drunken rages, loach liaisons, writer’s block, orgies, money problems, sudden changes of plans, the Garden Of Allah was a true Post Apocalyptic Bohemia. 

At the corner of Sunset & Crescent Heights, The Garden Of Allah is now a strip mall. The Joni Michell Song- Big Yellow Taxi is about the destruction of the site. Nazimova died in 1945, at the age of 66. She is buried at Forest Lawn.

If you should find yourself in LA & you desire the expert attention of a true insider, I recommend my blogger friend Felix & his World Class Tour Of Hollywood... take his tour!

Born On This Day- April 5th... Ruth Elizabeth Davis

"Everybody has a heart. Except some people."

Bette Davis

I believe All About Eve to be a perfect film, with not a wasted piece of dialogue or an unnecessary scene. It is one of the greatest films about theatre of all time. For me, Margo Channing is the finest & bravest Bette Davis creation (she lost the Oscar to Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday).

Davis was a movie star, but also the most fearless & the least vain actresses of the Golden Age. I am fan of all her 6 decades of work on stage, & on film with Of Human Bondage, The Petrified Forest, Jezebel, The Old Maid, Elizabeth & Essex, The Letter, All This & Heaven Too, The Little Foxes, Old Acquaintance, Pocket Full Of Miracles, & What Ever Happened To Baby Jane among my favorites.

Besides Margo Channing, my favorite would have to be Bette’s work in 1987’s The Whales of August, featuring an understated Vincent Price, a rare & delicate late career performance by the great Lillian Gish, whose career stretched back to the films of D.W. Griffith, & Ann Sothern in her only Oscar nominated performance. But for me the true enjoyment of this film came from seeing Bette Davis do again what Bette Davis always could do: create an indelible, complex character & command every scene in which she appears.

When she was filming Whales of August, the cast & crew were having dinner when Davis started complaining about Joan Crawford. Cast member Harry Carey Jr, became unhappy & told Davis that Crawford had been his friend & that he didn't want to hear anything negative about her. Davis, without missing a beat, responded, "Just because a person's dead doesn't mean they changed."

Davis bickered with her directors over the smallest details, & had a reputation for being difficult to work with. Still, she was so beloved by audiences that she was in great demand, & is one of the few actors in history who worked until the very end of her life, making well over a 100 films. She would dare us to hate her, & we often did, which is why we loved her.

Warner Brothers treated Davis badly for many years, & they paid her far less than other stars. She sued the company & lost, but the court case gave her much valuable publicity. She was able to create a new persona for herself on her own terms, as a strong-willed independent thinker, as strong as any man.

Bette Davis has been an icon for generations of gay men. She helped them learn that with wit, style & camp, it is possible to transcend the hard, unhappy, hateful & often humiliating world that was given to us.

Born On This Day- April 4th... Closet Case Anthony Perkins

Artist Don Bachardy & longtime friend: ''Of course we'd heard Tony married. I thought that was just awfully odd behavior for him. Did he honestly think that marriage to Berry Berenson (sister of actress Marisa) could make him a heterosexual?'' Anthony Perkins had a taste of the best men of late 20th century, having had affairs with: Rock Hudson, Tab Hunter, Rudolf Nureyev, Leonard Bernstein, James Dean, Stephen Sondheim, & dancer/choreographer Grover Dale, with whom Perkins had a 6 year relationship before his marriage to Berenson.

He was a very talented, Oscar nominated actor of stage, screen & TV, but one unforgettable movie-1960's Psycho resulted in the kind of typecasting that kills a bright career. The heir apparent to James Dean after a string of star making stage performances in Tea & Sympathy & Look Homeward, Angel, by 1981, Anthony Perkins was reduced to doing Psycho sequels & commercials in Japan.

The era of Perkins, Tab Hunter & Rock Hudson was an especially claustrophobic & chancy period for gay actors. Longtime Perkin's affair- Tab Hunter: ''It was the excruciating dance of the 1950s''. There were men only private parties, the Times Square gay porno theaters where Perkins sometimes passively watched other men have sex, the arranged dates with starlets for Modern Screen, & the fear gay actors had that magazines like Confidential would expose them, the way it did with Tab Hunter, one of Perkins' first lovers. It was the 1950s, a public person could not go public, even if he wanted to, & Perkins didn't want to.

Who would have suspected that he way gay?

Perkins was nothing if not ambitious. Perkins' buddy Alan Sues:''Nothing was going to get in the way of his career". He lived platonically for years with a domineering older woman- Helen Merrill while enjoying sex with a long line of male lovers.

Yet Perkins' puzzling marriage to Berenson in 1973 seemed more than just a marriage of convenience. Berenson, who'd had a schoolgirl crush on Perkins, pursued him relentlessly, & the couple eventually had 2 sons- Osgood & Elvis. Perkins was devoted to Berenson & his boys, though his gay friends privately doubted his claims that he was faithful to her. Perkins, in trying to convince Hollywood he was straight by marrying, may have actually brought himself real happiness. Closeted Dominick Dunne:''It was a real sense of marriage betweeen them. Whatever they had, it was wonderful. I mean, it was a real & loving family."

Perkins acknowledged he had AIDS posthumously, in a statement dictated to his sons, Osgood & Elvis: ''I chose not to go public about this because, to misquote Casablanca, 'I'm not too much at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of one old actor don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy old world.'' Perkins died at age 60, on September 12, 1992, from complications of AIDS. He was cremated, & his ashes were given to his family. Berenson was killed on American Airlines Flight 11, on September 11th, 2001, the day before the anniversary of his death.



Footnote: As a youth I collected Original Broadway Cast Albums & in my collection was Greenwillow, a stinker, even with a score by the great Frank Loesser.This play was being rehearsed in New York while Anthony Perkins was simultaneously filming Psycho in LA. Over the years in interviews about the infamous shower scene in that film, Anthony Perkins has always said that during the whole week of filming required for that scene, his stand-in was used, because he was in NYC rehearsing for a Broadway play. Greenwillow was that play. The musical did have one magical musical number, a song I like a great deal, but never got to sing in my act- Never Will I Marry, odd, Perkins & I both got married.

Born On This Day- April 3rd ... The Talented Doris Mary Ann Hasselhoff

She is a favorite at Post Apocalypic Bohemia. All of us, The Husband, Larry, Junior, & I think that Doris Day is shamefully shrugged off as a star & a singer.

One of Hollywood’s most versatile & talented performers ever, Day conquered comedy, drama, musicals & suspense, working with master director Alfred Hitchcock on The Man Who Knew Too Much, featuring the song that would be her trademark: Que Sera Sera.

Not only bringing joy to millions of fans through her films & recordings, Day’s animal welfare work has meant even more to the 4 legged friends she has helped since her retirement from the big screen awith With 6 You Get Eggroll, in 1968.

Totally devoted to her work through the Doris Day Animal League & the Doris Day Animal Foundation in cooperation with the Humane Society, Doris Day is a treasure, onscreen and off. She is a Grammy winning recording artist, Oscar nominee, Golden Globe winner, as well as the recipient of the Cecille B. DeMille award for lifetime achievement.

Doris turns an astonishing 89 today!

It is darn difficult to decide on a definitive Doris Day movie or performance, the clip below from Calamity Jane captures her vibrant talent through singing, dancing & sheer spunk. I think this song deserves a place in the list of Gay Anthems, who can not relate to this song: