Hollywood Gays (47 page)

Q: Long, but not boring. But after
Bewitched
you were a TV star. Did they try and star you in another series?

A: Did they?! That’s what I meant. About frustration. Always try and repeat a successful formula. I mentioned
Down to Earth
. Instead of having a witch for a wife, I had an angel for a maid. You know, since coming out, I’ve told people that I may never be hired as a father symbol again, but the truth—as a very frank friend pointed out to me—is that by now I am a grandfather figure, not a father.

Q: It’s funny—I should say peculiar—that TV thinks fathers are never gay. Only uncles.

A: Like Uncle Arthur. (Grins.)

Q: True. You’ve done how many movies?

A: About two dozen. I found that with time my roles did get somewhat bigger but the quality of the pictures generally went downhill. You can sort of judge from titles like
Rock-a-Die Baby
,
The Clonus Horror
,
Body Count
and even
Teen Witch
.

Q: But you were fourth-billed in Paul Schrader’s
Hardcore
(starring George C. Scott).

A: A grim movie about a grim subject (a man’s daughter runs off and gets involved in pornography). It went…
phffft
.

Q: Paul Schrader….

A: (Clears throat.) I don’t know that he’s….

Q: He did
American Gigolo
, which had more than its share of homophobia. (Costar Lauren Hutton later said the writer-director was in love with her and Richard Gere.)

A: In this business, you offend those you can afford to offend. Hopefully someday it won’t be okay for anyone, whatever their orientation, to needlessly offend gays. Just certain offensive gays. You understand?

Q: Yes. Like J. Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn. Has homophobia off-screen diminished much in Hollywood since the 1950s?

A: I think it’s just as homophobic a town. Or business. The point being what the behind-the-scenes powers-that-be put on the screen in terms of actors and material….Casting directors of all persuasions are still reluctant to recommend casting anybody known to be gay or lesbian.

Q: So it’s still gay men working in the service of heterosexuality in Hollywood, as in most of the mass media.

A: If the general public knew how many of their favorite movie stars and sitcom stars, etc., were gay, it could change overnight.

Q: You’ve made a point, since coming out, of saying that not all gay people are recognizable as such.

A: Which in a way is the problem. Those who can pass almost always do. Those who pass are rewarded. Those who don’t are punished.

Q: What Christopher Isherwood termed “the heterosexual dictatorship.”

A: When I first heard that, I thought it was kind of extreme. Then I thought about it…it’s not extreme.

Q: I recently saw two Marilyn Monroe movies where two of the leading men were gay. In
The Seven Year Itch
—

A: Tom…what’s his name?

Q: Ewell. Do you know anything about him?

A: I understand he went to even more gay bars than I did. And drank a lot more in them. That’s all I know. Except I think he’s married…to a woman. (Tom Ewell also died in 1994, age 85.)

Q: And
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, where Jane Russell’s good-looking boyfriend is Elliott Reid, and I know he’s gay from various friends of his and mine.

A: He didn’t marry, but in our business, marriage doesn’t…it doesn’t signify.

Q: Since coming out, have you ever been apprehensive about encountering homophobic fans?

A: If they’re homophobic, they’re not my fans.

Q: Or anti-gay TV watchers who like
Bewitched
but root for Darrin?

A: And still miss Dick York? (Smiles.) No. I worried a little, at first. But this is Los Angeles. If it was the Bible Belt, that’s something else again. What still makes me shudder a little is when somebody very loud or outgoing sees me and yells out, “Hey, it’s Darrin! The guy from
Bewitched!
Samantha’s husband! Come on over and meet him!” Like I’m a stuffed animal on display or something. I don’t mind being recognized, but sometimes it’s what follows the recognition….

Q: I recognized you right away (in a Sav-On drugstore on Santa Monica Blvd. in the strip mall that includes the gay Yukon Mining Company restaurant). I was surprised and delighted, frankly.

A: I saw your eyes go wide, then you sort of pulled back, and I knew you weren’t one of those big-mouths.

Q: I figured you were approachable, and I wasn’t about to say, “Hi, Darrin,” but it took me a half second or so to remember: Dick Sargent.

A: Right, it’s understandable. So many people get their Dicks wrong, and call me Dick York—if they know the last name at all. When they say “Dick Sargent” it’s actually gratifying. Not many people know the whole name. Then sometimes I get Dick Darrin or Darrin Dickerson or…one time it was Sargent Dick. (Laughs.)

Q: Do gay men come on to you at gay venues and in West Hollywood?

A: (Nods, smiling.) Did you routinely come to the Yukon Mining Company?

Q: No. More often to the French Quarter (restaurant in WeHo). It’s closer to the West Side.

A: I was glad when you asked me to go join you at the Yukon. I thought maybe you knew I went there on and off. But then I wondered, if you’d seen me there before, was this some kind of set-up? I quickly realized it wasn’t.

Q: And I had no idea of interviewing you. I just wanted to meet you.

A: I’m glad you did. Once you mentioned
Conversations with My Elders
(later retitled
Celluloid Gaze
), which I’ve read, I began wondering if you might want to interview me, although I’m in awe of the men in that book.

Q: Only two were actors (Rock Hudson and Sal Mineo). Three were directors (George Cukor, Luchino Visconti, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder), and one a designer (Sir Cecil Beaton).

A: How on earth did you get Rock Hudson, being such a big star, to talk?

Q: But you see, I interviewed him first for a movie magazine, and it was understood that it would be the usual thing. Nothing to be printed about his private life, except his desire to have been a father. It got published, no problem. Then I met him again.

A: Very sexy man, I understand.

Q: Yes.

A: If you and somebody got together after an interview, you know…would you include that in an interview? Or a book?

Q: No, because that’s private. One’s been approached many times over the years, by both sexes, sometimes people old enough to be one’s father—or grandmother, in the case of…a famous Hungarian.

A: Oh, no.

Q: Oh, yes. Fingernails like talons, digging into my thigh, on her couch in the mock-Versailles mansion. I was semi paralyzed with shock, so I didn’t notice the pain for what seemed an eternity. But I managed to laugh it off, then fortunately she laughed, and we resumed the interview. Somewhere I’d read that “a gracious recourse” to an unwanted advance is to try and deflect it with humor.

A: What else happened?

Q: I could write a book, but wouldn’t. There was one older superstar, with a toupee. Another mansion, another couch, and as he approached, it slid slightly forward. It reminded me of a Mae West movie where she told Victor Moore, “Don’t look now, honey, but your rug’s slipping.” Of course I couldn’t say that.

A: Did you use humor?

Q: Psychology. In his youth, he was a beauty. I reminded him that we had to complete the interview, and he alluded to the passing of time, so I said it was too bad that I wasn’t as young as I used to be. Even though I’m about 30 years younger than him. But I’m not ageist—this sounds awful, like I reject people just for their age.

A: Still, you have to be turned on too.

Q: Yes, and a man at 60 can be very attractive, while some at 30 are…no longer dishes— they’re tureens.

A: I’m about 60.

Q: And very attractive. (Both smile self-consciously.) How do you still stay slim?

A: By not overeating.

Q: How else. A question: How would you ever
know
if you weren’t given a role because of homophobia?

A: It would be almost impossible to tell. More so when you’re not working a lot. If you’re working a lot and you come out and then it drops off, you can tell.

Q: You can tell, but you can’t do anything about it?

A: No. In this town, this business, you’re not allowed to protest when they do you wrong. (Smiles ruefully.)  If you complain, and worse if you sue, it’s goodbye career. They’ve got us

coming and going.

At the time in 1991 that I interviewed Dick Sargent (twice at the Yukon Mining Company’s patio), I had no knowledge of the prostate cancer that would take him three years later. I also didn’t know, for he never referred to it, that he’d had a life partner for 20 years who died prematurely of a cerebral hemorrhage circa 1979. Nor did Dick talk about his charitable work for the Special Olympics, World Hunger, and eventually for gay causes; he received a humanitarian award from the Human Rights Campaign.

Dick occasionally referred in public to “lost jobs” after coming out, mostly to apprise uninformed people of the unfair cost of living honestly. However, he never regretted his decision, which was all the braver in view of his cancer and the fact that in his final years he had to support himself doing stage work and voiceovers for the small-screen medium that had largely forgotten him (except during newer
Bewitched
reruns). Dick admitted, “I may even have to sell the house someday, but this is more important. I like myself, probably more than I have most of my life.”

What’s not to like?

EPILOGUE

After publication of my celebrity-quotes collection
Hollywood Babble On
(translated into, among others, Croatian), I received a non-fan letter asking why I was “so obsessed with homosexual stars.”

I was unable to answer her, as there was no return address. Had I chosen to do so, I could have mentioned some of the following points:

When I did a book about
Hispanic Hollywood
, the first on another long-overlooked subject, no one wrote to ask why I was “so obsessed” with Hispanic or Latin stars. I wonder why.

Hollywood Babble On
comprises some 1,500 quotes, each uttered by one star about another star. So if she didn’t like a quote noting that Tyrone Power was bisexual—he was indeed bi or gay, not heterosexual, despite some people’s obsession with heterosexuality—don’t blame me. Blame the star who knew him personally.

Since that book, out of eight chapters, has one about stars who were/are b.l.g. (producer David Lewis’s useful acronym for bi/lesbian/gay), the person focusing on the non-heterosexual stars wasn’t this editor, but the discomfited reader.

I can understand that the average Ms. Bookbuyer or Moviegoer might be disappointed if her favorite male icon turns out to be gay. (As for being disappointed if the guy is bi, that can only be due to homophobia.) But don’t get mad at the truth. Or if you do, expect a little of it to come back your way:

I gifted an Englishwoman friend with a copy of
Conversations With My Elders
, and her primary response after reading it was
such
disappointment—via the Sal Mineo chapter—that James Dean had been bisexual. My response to her was a smiling shrug. What I felt like saying was, “First of all, he’s dead. But even if he weren’t, do you think you’d ever have had a chance with him? If and when he went to bed with the opposite sex, it would have been with someone of Hollywood physical standards....”

Many or most people corresponding to the sexual norm equate gay invisibility—practiced by the mass media and by closeted gays—with the mistaken notion that there are relatively few gay people, or that one can always “tell” them. But show business happens to be one of the fields with a higher percentage than usual of gay people, especially men. So why act indignant when it turns out that more than one or two stars were gay? The word for that is bigotry.

Off the top of my head, I could recite a list of ten Golden-Age stars who were gay, or ten today who are. If I did, some people would say I was “obsessed” or exaggerating. Yet if I recited a list of 25 past stars who were heterosexual, or 25 today who are, that would elicit either no reaction, no challenge (some stars hide their non-heterosexuality very well), or even smugness.