Hollywood Gays (11 page)

A: Both. And I’m very negative at times. It helps me balance the positive. So that I can appreciate it. To me, pessimism is the face of realism, and optimism is hope. Hope’s not always justified, but you need it, in doses.

Q: Can one overdose on hope? Or optimism?

A: A public figure can. (Long sigh.) Do you often ask celebrities about people they can’t stand?

Q: A dislike-list?

A: A hate-list!

Q: Not usually. Sometimes it comes up—an unliked co-star, and then I ask about another costar or a particular director....But about Capote. What can you say positive about him? (No reply.) Think hard, Tony.

A: Yes, Mother. Well, he went out in daylight. (Snickers.) If I looked and sounded like him, I’d only come out at night.

Q: I can see you in his
In Cold Blood
.

A: No, you can’t. They wanted unknowns.

Q: Is it true you were offered
Lawrence of Arabia
, but you didn’t want to don “drag” again, after
Psycho
?

A: I may have been a contender. It was not offered to me.

Q: You’ve heard the
Florence of Arabia
joke?

A: I have (grimly).

Q: Can you say something nice about Truman?

A: Good president. He had a long relationship with that dancer he met so long ago.

Q: Jack Dunphy. I think he switched from dancing to novels before 1950. It’s odd that one almost never hears about Capote’s longtime companion, but quite a hit about his friendships and feuds with women. Or is it odd, knowing the media?

A: The media.... Phooey!

Q: Don’t you think the media intentionally cover up long-time gay relationships?

A: I’d say they do. But so do the majority of people in those gay marriages.

Q: This is true.

A: It’s not easy knowing the particular value or intensity to the people involved in it of any relationship or marriage or whatever. I know a guy, married a long while to a woman, and when I used to glimpse him, I didn’t know. I just knew he had a kid and a long marriage. Then we had a talk, and I
knew
he was gay or bi, whatever. You know
how
I got it? He used the word “heterosexual.” Straights don’t use it—they don’t think of themselves as having a sexual preference.

Q: As if only gay people have a sexual orientation.

A: I don’t like either, “orientation” or “preference.”

Q: I know. “Orientation” is better because it sounds less arbitrary, but even that doesn’t indicate something innate. It sounds like something one’s trained for.

A: You go to an orientation meeting, then you leave with your own sexual orientation!

Q: Besides, sexual-this or sexual-that leaves out affection, crushes, and love.

A: A dancer I once knew said you could tell your real sexual orientation not by who you have sex with, but who you get crushes on.

Q: That’s astute, because many closeted or repressed gay or bisexual men have never had sex with a man.

A: So far.

Q: You know what amazed me? I read that Tennessee Williams never had sex—

A: No, no:
made love
. That’s the Hollywood term.

Q: Well, Hollywood
excludes
.... Anyway, he never had sex with another man until he was 29.

A: I don’t believe it.

Q: It’s hard to believe, till you think back to past decades. And self-repression. The closet does the homophobes’ work for them....

A: Yeah, but even if he grew up on a farm...lots of kids on farms experiment. Most straight boys had some gay sex when they were teens.

Q: Actually, Tom—Tennessee—grew up mostly in St. Louis.

A: Not many farms in St. Louis. Still...
29?

Q: It was clever of you to note that most people don’t use the word “heterosexual.” But did you later find out for a fact that the contractually married man was non-het?

A: I did, absolutely. I came on to him and he said he would. I didn’t intend to, I was just testing, and he passed the test.

Q: You led him on, then when he said yes, you said no?

A: Not in a mean way (grins). Besides, later he got divorced, and now he’s been with his boyfriend for years. Which doesn’t mean he isn’t a good father.

Q: No one said he isn’t.

A: He sees his kid regularly, and really enjoys fatherhood.

Q: Yes, I can think of at least one heterosexual father who doesn’t enjoy children.

A: I think most men become fathers out of duty. They don’t
want
kids, the way women do. They just feel they ought to. I’m different—I wanted kids. Eventually.

Q: I knew one gay boy in high school who always wanted “a baby.” Didn’t want a wife, but longed for a baby. Of course, to get one, he had to get the other. Deeply closeted, as we speak.

A: Yeah, and he couldn’t very well have a kid, then divorce the wife and keep it.

Q: You said Capote was phony because he apparently never completed that novel. Who do you consider a phony, period?

A: Several people I know or knew; not all famous...Joan Crawford.

Q: Why Joan? The loving-mother image?

A: She gave herself over completely to the star-trip. The phoniness of Hollywood. That looks-is-everything philosophy.

Q: Appearances, appearances.

A: She even had a special outfit just for answering her fan mail.

Q: Only one? Why do you think they say “clothes
horse
”?

A: Because clothescow isn’t as polite.

Q: Who else is phony?

A: Miss Michael Jackson. Best example of all.

Q: I believe he’s the only person in showbiz history to have called a press conference to announce he wasn’t gay.

A: To claim he wasn’t gay....

Q: Let’s move on. Any other phonies?

A: That’s a book unto itself. Don’t you think some people would put me in that niche? Strike that. Let’s not pursue that.... I know another phony. Do you know Jerry Zipkin?

Q: Who’s he? He invented zippered napkins? The name rings a bell.

A: Ding dong. He’s Nancy Reagan’s best homosexual friend.

Q: That sounds like an oxymoron.

A: His I.Q. or hers? (Grins.) He’s this utterly closeted, utterly conservative, ass-kissing friend of the woman in red.

Q: Is he the one Truman Capote said had a face shaped like a bidet?

A: That’s the one. I heard that at a party. Phony, phony, phony. (Zipkin died in 1995 and was, with Reagan, a thinly veiled character in
Just Say No
, a play by Larry Kramer.)

Q: There’s a self-destructive, or destructive, army of phonies of that type, the world over.

A: Roy Cohn....

Q: Terry Dolan...names that will live in infamy. Onward. You have an excellent singing voice!

A: You’re referring to
Greenwillow
? (His 1960 Broadway musical.)

Q: No. You did some songs on various albums for Ben Bagley, starting in the ‘60s, I believe. One tuneful song stands out, “All My Friends Have Gone to California,” where you offer to service a man for the fare to L.A. (He frowns.)

A: I like the song anyway. Ben’s a fine record producer. ‘Course, he wasn’t
out
then, now he is, so some of what he wrote (in the liner notes) seems silly now. That closeting stuff about different celebrities who agreed to sing songs for him.

Q: One of his notes said that Noël Coward was engaged to Mary Baker Eddy Nelson. (Both laugh.) I remember another said your closest friend is your bike.

A: Was. He exaggerated. Did you read the one that said the only thing I ever went down on was the escalator at the Uris Theatre?

Q: The only thing?

A: That’s for me to know....

Q: Do you agree with the sentiment that sex is not a “sin” if you feel guilty afterwards?

A: Is that from the Jewish
Kama Sutra
?

Q: No, the Judeo-Christian one.

A: Seriously, guilt’s a pain in the neck, but if you’ve got it, you have to work through it. That’s where psychoanalysis comes in. Which I’m not here to rehash....By the way, it
wasn’t Florence of Arabia
, it was
Psycho
of Arabia
.

Q: I sit corrected. Who, if anyone, was Florence of Arabia?

A: Florence Nightingale? Didn’t she work, or whatever she did, in Turkey?

Q: Yes...some famous hospital across from Istanbul in westernmost Asia.

A: Wasn’t she a dyke? Probably not very active, but she was....Did you hear that?

Q: I’ve seen her name on lists of famous gays and lesbians. I’d like to read an unbiased book about her.

A: The establishment won’t give her up easily (grins).

Q: Why is that nebulous yet powerful group supposedly all-hetero?

A: It can’t be.

Q: No. But officially and dogmatically it is.

A: Because the Zipkins count themselves as honorary heterosexuals. It’s ridiculous but funny when you look in these movie reference books in a bookstore or at the library, and it includes the relationships that are opposite-sex, but for gays or lesbians it doesn’t say anything about their private lives.

Q: That is, for gays and lesbians who didn’t take wives or husbands. Appearances and covers....

A: What they sometimes say is, “He never married.”

Q: A woman.

A: But if you know many of the celebrities they’re writing about, it’s to laugh. (Giggles.)

Q: Most of that supposed hilarity is self-produced. Of course even nowadays sometimes a celebrity comes out, but the media try to keep him or her
in
.

A: A conspiracy of silence?

Q: For the most part.

A: What tickles me is that famous saying, “the love that dare not speak its name.” Like there’s some unwritten law that anyone who’s different, that way, has to forever be silent? Come on!

Q: It’s really “the people that dare not speak their love’s name.” I agree with you. When Oscar Wilde needed voices and support, where were all those men, at least in England, who were gay—writers or artists or politicians or clergy or rich or royal—or just plain humane?
Silent.

A: As the tomb.

Q: Good way to put it. Gays don’t know their own power.

A: Neither do women.

Q: And women have the best numbers. The majority, in fact.

A: Best numbers. Not necessarily the best figures.

Q: That’s an individual thing. Do you prefer boyish women, physically?

A: (Shaking head firmly.) I’m not going to grapple with that one.

Q: Many people were dismayed when in
People
you said that you’d had gay sex but it was “unsatisfying” to you. Of course this was said after you’d gotten legally married.

A: Oh, it’s all a
game
, what celebrities say.

Q: A game taken seriously.

A: I meant the relationships, anyway. Sex is great. Unless all you do is watch.

Q: Were you misquoted?

A: No. But...it doesn’t always come out the way you mean it.

Q: I’ve heard you like kinky sex—rough stuff. Was sex with another man competitive for you?

A: No.

Q: And do you like it rough?

A: Sometimes.

Q: Do you like the sight of blood?

A: Not real blood. Never. Another thing, I’m
not
a sadist—or the other one.

Q: A masochist. Do you find there are more and more comparisons with Norman Bates?

A: When there are, it’s always blown out of proportion in print, and it’s not my doing. I like Norman. He’s close to me. But he’s not what people think, a two-dimensional monster.

Q: You’ve said that you had a difficult relationship with your mother.