Hollywood Gays (6 page)

A: Did he make a pass, and you rejected it?

Q: No, I did not reject a pass....

A: What’s Rock doing, these days? You fans always seem to know more about our goings and comings than we do.

Q: I don’t know what he’s doing. Nothing major. The reason I brought him up is that for years, I was fascinated by a photograph of you and Rock Hudson and Marlon Brando—whom I would love to meet!—and Gregory Peck. All four of you together, in one room, seated, as though for a meeting. I mean, what a quartet! Talk about the Fab Four. Do you remember that photo?

A: No.

Q: You don’t?!

A: Not offhand.

Q: Well, I’m...surprised. My question to you was going to be what goes on inside your mind when you, Cary Grant, enter a room and pose for a photo with other superstars like Hudson, Brando, and Peck? You know, what kind of emotions do you feel? Envy, insecurity, jealousy, desire, or...?

A: Desire?

Q: Well, all I know is, any movie fan looking at such a photo would desire like crazy to be invisible in that room with the four of you.

A: Why invisible?

Q: Because otherwise one would be scared to death—I mean, intimidated. So I wondered if it at all intimidated each of you, individually?

A: I wish I could remember....

Q: You really can’t?

A: (Testily.) Of course I can’t!

Q: I wish I’d brought a copy of the photo. I bought a used book once, just to cut out that photo from it.

A: Your four favorite actors?

Q: Not necessarily, but a true portrait of power.

A: (Thoughtfully.) Powerful then. Not so much now.

Q: Mmm. Did you ever work with a director you hated?

A: Yes, all of them. At one moment or another. Directors are con artists, and they’re your boss. So you like your boss, when he’s playing up to you, and sometimes you hate him for ordering you about. Well, you’re a stage actor—don’t you hate your directors, sometimes?

Q: I hate when they don’t direct. The kind that don’t give you input or feedback—the traffic-directors.

A: That’s a good way to put it. They herd the cattle. As Hitch might put it.

Q: Was Hitchcock homophobic?

A: Have you heard that?

Q: Yes, I have. Was he?

A: I don’t know. But he once said that if he hadn’t married Alma, he’d probably not have become heterosexual.

Q: But one doesn’t
become
heterosexual.

A: Married, then.

Q: He hardly struck me as a man who reveled in marriage. Or anything indeed but food.

A: No, Alma is no beauty.

Q: Was Barbara Hutton beautiful when you married her?

A: She wasn’t a classical beauty. She had good features, a...handsome face.

Q: I’ll bet women hate it when they’re called handsome instead of beautiful.

A: You think so?

Q: Well, handsome is not beautiful. I don’t mean Ms. Hutton, but in general.

A: Nowadays they call some men beautiful.

Q: Yes, and I’ll bet most men don’t mind it. Unless they’re insecure or overly macho.

A: How secure are you?

Q: Extremely. And you?

A: Not very.

Q: Well, that’s honest. When I said “extremely,” I meant in general. Not absolutely. May I ask what you’re insecure about?

A: No, because I’m too insecure to discuss it (smiles).

Q: Do you keep in touch with Randolph Scott?

A: He’s a nice man. You like him, don’t you?

Q: He strikes me as a decent man. The sort that represents the good side of America.

A: How interesting. Then who represents the bad side?

Q: Well, that would lead us back into politics.

A: Oh, let’s avoid that, and have another beer. This is good, very good. Why aren’t you drinking more?

Q: I like wine or champagne, but not beer or the hard stuff. Just don’t like the taste. Can I bring up another quote I read that was attributed to you?

A: If you must. (Drily.) What a horribly good memory you have. (That, although I read the few quotes off a small paper pad that was on the coffee table when he shuffled in and on which, from time to time, I took as many notes as I discreetly could, in tiny shorthand. Cary Grant focused on my mouth when I asked a question, but about half of his response time—he spoke considerably slower than in the movies—he directed himself to the lower part of the opposite wall. After the next quote, he zeroed in on the paper pad, which he’d already noticed, and frowned quizzically.)

Q: You once, very honestly, said that you fully understood why all your wives had divorced you, that you were—in the quote—”horrible and loathsome.”
Did
you say that?

A: If you read it, I must have said it. I don’t know...I don’t know. I must have gotten out of the wrong side of bed that morning, if I did... (annoyed while he quickly finishes the last available can of Heineken).

Q: I won’t bring up any more quotes.

A: I’m afraid you won’t be able, because I have to be going.

Before he left, Cary Grant said I should change the marigolds’ water each day, to make them last, and to put in a “smidge” of sugar every other day. I listened raptly, though I was leaving town the following day and the owners were returning that night.

“Can I drop you anywhere?” he asked politely and maybe a bit stiffly.

I wasn’t about to miss the chance to ride with Cary Grant in his limo, so I asked—as a matter of form—where he was headed. “Up to Bel-Air,” he answered. Foolish question.

“You can drop me at the gate to Bel-Air.” There were two, and one was in Westwood, in front of UCLA, from whence I could get a taxi back to where I’d come from.

I threw on a new jacket, locked the door, and we headed for his limo. Whether it had waited there the whole time, or gone and come back, I didn’t know. Grant didn’t address the chauffeur except to mention the Bel-Air gate.

In the car, we were mostly silent. Grant pointed out some of the nicer homes, or restaurants he’d heard about. I pointed out the immaculate gardens and the flowering trees; we agreed that the purple jacaranda from Brazil was the most beautiful of trees, if very messy.

“Do you go everywhere in a limo?” I finally asked. I wanted to but didn’t ask if he knew how to drive—if the answer was yes, it would sound like an insulting question.

“I like to walk, now and then. But I rely on transportation,” he said idly.

A minute or so later, he pointed at a house on my side. “Isn’t that rustic looking? I like that.” It was a one-story house in brick, not really my taste, but I’d never say so. As he admired it, he leaned way over, and grazed my cheek with his. His was so very soft, almost not there—like a phantom cheek brushing mine. I stayed very, very still. “Well, I really like it,” he said as if reading my thoughts.

Sitting back, he laughed softly. “I don’t think you like brick houses,” and he patted my left leg above the knee, then let his palm roam up my thigh and stay there, lightly. I was still looking where the brick house had been.

“I do like it,” I said quietly.

“No, I can tell,” he chuckled.
How
could he tell?

I smiled.

“How much longer will you be in town?”

“Unfortunately, till tomorrow. I have to go to Santa Barbara, and then up the coast.”

“Oh, that’s too bad,” he said in the patented Cary Grant style, and when I turned to look through his side of the car, he had both his hands again.

“I’d stay over,” I said, not mentioning the husband-wife doctors, “but my father has a bad cold, and asked me to come see him.”

‘Well, that is too bad.” As he said it, I realized for the first time that my father, though 45 when I was born, was still younger than Cary Grant. “Well, you’re doing the right thing,” he said to his window. “Good boy.”

Several seconds later, we were in Westwood. Suddenly, I felt quite sad. This was it. I didn’t want to have to jump out after a quick good-bye, so I proffered my hand, and he took it, with an impartial smile. “It’s been most wonderful and memorable to have met you,” I said, trying not to gulp in embarrassment. “Thank you for coming over to see me.”

He said nothing, but held my hand in both of his, and right before the car stopped, squeezed hard. He pressed his lips together in a sincere expression, and I smiled on top of my smile and turned to get out. Then I was out, and the limousine was gathering speed, up toward the Bel-Air hills. I walked around Westwood a bit, not really seeing the cinemas or record shops or the students in all their unknowing youth.

An hour or so later, I realized I was hungry, and stopped in at McDonald’s, then took a taxi back.

That evening, earlier than planned, the house owners arrived home. They’d been to a medical convention and were full of news of a technical nature that they insisted on telling me, one interrupting the other. Had I bored Cary Grant at all, that afternoon? How easy it is to feign interest, and how different people’s interests are....

At 11 P.M., we were all watching the news, or rather the wife and I were. The husband was in the armchair, snoozing lightly. The phone rang. The wife was tired, I well knew, so I got right up and answered.

It was a personal call, for me.

Some minutes later, I went back to the spacious living room. “Who was that?” she asked. “Oh, it was Cary Grant.” She laughed tolerantly, then rose to go upstairs to bed. I looked at the armchair with its second occupant of the day, and decided to turn in myself.

“And you are
absolutely
certain you won’t try and market anything I say about Cary Grant?” Noël Coward raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips, resembling a squinting mandarin more than ever. Silently, I crossed my heart. He relented with a gradual smile. “If you do,” he warned, wagging a well-worn finger, “you shall give me cardiac arrest and be sternly rebuked by your superiors, you naughty boy!”

Just how close Coward and Grant once were is anybody’s guess, for even in 1972, in the twilight of his life, the Master wasn’t telling. “There have been biographies,” he sniffed. “None offers a portrait of the Cary Grant
I
have known.” The two had grown apart markedly as their lifestyles and reputations diverged.

Since 1972, the Grant bios have multiplied, for celebrities “numerically drawn to Hollywood matrimony,” as Coward phrased it, are automatically claimed by heterosexualdom and sympathetically, if often inaccurately, biographed for the delectation of housewives weaned on fairy tales of frogs and pretty maids who together yield up Prince Charmings.

“If you marry more than once, you excite interest,” said Coward. “It’s that elemental. People don’t care about the career as much as what went on with assorted spouses.

“Unlike Cary, I had to earn my fame solely on merit. My
career
made me, and in the end I feel
I
am luckier. In nonmaterial terms, and quite apart from the superficial adulation of people whose idols change yearly or monthly, on whim.

“I am less famous, but more comfortable. I am
free
,” he gestured expansively, taking in the space around us and indicating plenty more.

“My headlines never involved or encumbered other people. Neither contracts with them—which is marriage—nor contracts broken—which is divorce. They involved only my shows—
my
creations. But already I’m talking about myself, and you’re more interested in charming Cary Grant.”
Charming
as if a first name, not just the most frequent adjective. “What, within the bounds of memory and reasonable good taste, do you wish to know, dear boy?”

“Well, I’m told stardom changed his way of life. Or its facade. How did it change
him
?”

When Coward finally answered, he was less animated than usual, as if pronouncing a grim truth. “He became accepted—through his stardom and a reversal of a circumstance which most people don’t know or care about. The fact is Cary Grant and I both come from extremely humble working-class backgrounds. What you in the States
might
call white trash: Nobody imagines either of us was once veddy, veddy poor.

“But in this marvelous century, and in our profession, one can race up the social ladder via success, providing the success is grand enough. When this happens, people fail to realize, or pretend not to, that you weren’t at the top rung all along.

“Now, I don’t know if this made Cary consistently happy. But I imagine he stopped being quite so unhappy. He told me once how deeply and typically unhappy he used to be in England. How he hated it there, how destitute he always felt.

“Another thing stardom
should
have done for him was help him stop being miserly. Again, it’s a matter of degree. Stardom doesn’t solve problems, it only ameliorates them. I have never been as thrifty as Cary, though I am by no means recklessly extravagant. I’ve always believed in living well, and in hard times I had to make do without the necessities, but nevah without the
luxuries
. Except of course during wartime. The war was the exception to everything.