Hollywood Gays (7 page)

“Above all, I think Cary Grant has an intense desire to be liked. At almost any cost. Then, as now. Professionally, it’s probably cost him, in terms of art roles and an Academy Award. Yet who can fault such a successful career?”

I wondered aloud whether stars with commercial success don’t envy—for one often hears it—those with widely recognized artistic success?

“It’s not that simple. Few real artists become so-called superstars. And Cary did his homework. He wasn’t as lazy as some find it fashionable to believe. That seeming lack of effort you’ve seen on the screen—that elegant jauntiness—he rehearsed it with his life, nothing less. All his off-screen hours, he was practicing to be Cary Grant.

“He wasn’t born that way. He worked on everything. The masculinity, as well. When he was very young, he was quite neutral. Not feminine, but not effortlessly masculine, either. He worked at it, probably practiced on his wives and the fond admirers who imagined him the better half of a happy couple. In the end, he attained a low-keyed masculinity—by American standards. But it had become inherent.”

“You don’t mean to say you think his marriages made him more butch?”

“No, my dear. Not ‘butch,’ as you so provocatively put it.
Convincing
. A man who has married more than once is no longer boyish. The effort of it robs him of that quality.”

“I think you’re right. I’m thinking of gay actors I know about who never married, and most still seem rather boyish.”

“You
see
...Cary Grant is a gentleman in a business which dotes upon brutish men. Yet he holds his own quite nicely in terms of reassuring women. But you’ll notice he isn’t an active sex symbol. He’s rarely done love scenes, and his screen kisses have been brief. In no way could one define him as that Hollywood culinary absurdity,
beefcake
.”

“I never thought him sexy, but rather, charming and good-looking in a non-spectacular way. Sir Noël, do
you
find him sexually appealing?”

He rolled his eyes and cooed, “Even today,” then tapped his forefinger against the side of his nose. “You hit on something by saying he’s reassuring. His manner and longevity
are
comforting, aren’t they?”

“They are. So is his class. Nobody would label Cary a snob. But he does embody motion pictures’ classiness, as Americans would put it.”

“May I ask if you ever wanted to be more like Cary Grant, Sir Noël?”

“
No
, my dear boy. On the
contrary
.
He
always wanted to be Noël Coward! Until he made it big in Hollywood. Then he realized his future was there, that he’d never become Sir Cary Grant, and so he set about creating and rehearsing an entirely new character. For that particular place. You see, Hollywood is a state of mindlessness.”

Edith Head gave Cary Grant good wardrobe. Not coincidentally, he retired from Hollywood in the mid ‘60s, when anti-glamour was taking over and words like “style,” “class,” and “gentleman” had become box-office poison as well as uncool, man. Queried what Grant was like to dress, Head noted with her trademark severity, “You could call him a perfectionist or incredibly vain. You can take your pick.

“But he wasn’t difficult. Big stars aren’t. The difficult, insecure ones are the up-and-comers. Kids who don’t know who they are or what they’re about, who don’t trust the experts. Stars, being established, are secure in their image. Unless they’re trying to come up with a new image every decade, like Joan Crawford did. Cary Grant found his and stuck with it.

“He was very fussy about what he would and wouldn’t do. He had to look good, which wasn’t difficult. Mostly, it meant good tailoring. He knew what he should wear and shouldn’t. He was no hayseed, certainly not the denim type. He didn’t care for revealing clothes. Had a good body but didn’t like to display it. Of course, before the 1950s men were never considered pin-ups, so he had that in common with most actors then.

“Cary Grant wanted to have his cake and eat it too, and he came closer than any star I’ve worked with. For example, he was always well-dressed, but he cringed at the idea of best-dressed lists or being called vain. To him, it was unmanly. It was my job to make it appear as if he lounged about in well-cut suits, or even got out of bed looking like that.

“As a man, Cary Grant is hard to get to know. People who’ve repeatedly worked with him say he’s unknowable. Katharine Hepburn, who did some wonderful pictures with him, said somewhere that Cary Grant didn’t have that much of a personality to get to know. I doubt she meant it disrespectfully. But the face he showed his colleagues was a simple and professional one.
Personally
, who knows? I’ve heard he has complexes—who doesn’t?”

I asked why Head thought that Grant—whom she habitually called by both names, like, say, Proctor & Gamble—had consented to appear in drag in
I Was A Male War Bride
(1949), a movie he reportedly later rued. “Darned if I know! I think Howard Hawks did a hard sell on him. Hawks was a man’s man; they did some of their best work together. He probably felt Hawks would do it in a strictly comedic way, nothing gauche.

“But I strongly doubt Cary Grant would have done that picture if it had been directed by George Cukor...” whose image was “a great women’s director.” Plus, Cukor was gay.

Cukor directed Grant (and Hepburn) in such stylish outings as
Sylvia Scarlett
(1935, with Kate in perfected drag),
Holiday
(1938), and
The Philadelphia Story
(1940). As with Noël Coward, over the years Grant became a virtual stranger to the contractually single Cukor, despite the latter’s “discretion.” “Sometimes husbands are more comfortable around other husbands,” Cukor observed quietly.

Cukor’s tone while discussing Grant was notably strained. Perhaps by hurt or regret. “He began as an acrobat, you know. That’s how he came to America, to work in the circus. Then he became a star and not being married, that was unusual, but living with another handsome chap [Randolph Scott] made him a circus freak in the fan magazines’ eyes.

“So he became a juggler, balancing fiction and reality. He became adept at juggling several wives and millions of women who thought he was their ideal, regardless how old he got or how many revelations about taking LSD or undergoing long-term psychiatry or abusing his wives or letting down his peers.

“Because the major revelation has yet to be made. The only one that can turn them against him.
That
particular revelation may not be made, even after his death. He’s too revered, too much the institution, no longer just a man.” More like Proctor & Gamble?

Cukor exaggerated the press’ reticence, if not their and the general public’s indignation. It was inevitable that there be rumors about Grant’s bisexuality. Printed, after decades in circulation, then more crudely voiced by Chevy Chase on TV.

After his death, Grant’s sexuality could finally feature openly in articles and biographies, inevitably denied by conformists who knew little about him except his film turns and the general twists of his marital life—that he
had
a marital life. Never mind that the marriages reflected Irene Dunne’s line in
The Awful Truth
: “I wouldn’t go on living with you if you were dipped in platinum” (and none of his wives, save the widow, did go on).

Of dozens of women whose paths crossed Grant’s, only the wives as a whole dared to oppose the publicly enshrined notion of Cary Grant as platinum-plated. The men sometimes carped, but not too loudly (ironically, Grant was never considered “a man’s man”). Douglas Fairbanks Jr. admitted that Grant, less than a generous costar, deliberately stole scenes from him in
Gunga Din
(1939). After Grant’s death, Fairbanks stated in his memoirs his conviction that Grant was the inspiration for Noël Coward’s song “Mad About the Boy.”

David Niven, who hotly refuted biographer Charles Higham’s claims that his ex-roommate Errol Flynn was bisexual, readily conceded that Grant “and I were never really close, and definitely not on intimate terms, unlike him and some of the fellows I understand he fancied.”

James Mason knew Grant in England, then supported him, as a villain, in the 1959 Hitchcock classic
North by Northwest
. He told a UK reporter, “If a man can be frigid, Cary Grant is frigid.... One gets the impression he’s also frigid with women.”

Fittingly, one of Grant’s most enduring relationships—at one point romantic, as chronicled in Higham’s posthumous
The Lonely Heart
—was with another cold, insecure, and manipulative Hollywood fixture, Howard Hughes. Director Jean Negulesco felt, “They were two of the most mercenary men in Hollywood, not exactly enamored of humanity.”

Ingrid Bergman informed Kenneth Williams, “Cary always envied Howard Hughes because of his money and invulnerability to public opinion. Hughes envied Cary’s public image as a great lover, or at least a man irresistible to women.” Grant’s image as a perfect lover accrued after the marriages had piled up (though a few critics remarked that he still had no offspring...) and his callow youth had faded. He became less a screen ingénue or deft comedian than an unvarying star, a suave, solid, and incidentally middle-aged Lothario. Fan magazines touted him as the consummate man and lover, who improved with age and could always be trusted—a gentleman who would have no woman before her time.

To this propaganda, Zsa Zsa Gabor publicly responded, “They’re trying to show he’s a great lover, but they’ll never prove it by me.” Grant had allegedly spurned the amorous Hungarian, who said all she dared at the time via her dissenting opinion.

Hedda Hopper was one of Grant’s few acknowledged foes, a rabid homophobe who called up and berated journalists who granted Cary the great-lover build-up. “He’s nothing but a phony, and a very dangerous man for a girl to fall in love with!” she fumed. (Hopper’s sometimes public meddling earned her a lawsuit after she wrote that she’d warned Elizabeth Taylor not to wed “queer” Michael Wilding. He sued and won, despite his bisexuality.)

Doris Day found that costarring with Cary Grant did not constitute an introduction. After
That Touch of Mink
(1962), she admitted, “He was distant.
Very
distant,” then quickly praised his “gentlemanly” manners. Barbara Stanwyck was among the tough-dame actresses who never teamed with Grant. She told her pal Joan Crawford, “The mouse is a man, or thinks he is.” Likewise, Tallulah Bankhead told
her
pal Beatrice Lillie and a male friend-turned-biographer, “Charles Laughton used to say Gary Cooper was the best-hung man in Hollywood, and Cary Grant was his ‘number 1 groupie.’ Or was it his ‘number 2 Lupe’?” The reference was to Cooper’s very public lover Lupe Velez. Whether Coop and Grant were ever private lovers has long been a source of speculation and rumor, along with Cooper’s reported bisexuality during his early years in Tinseltown.

In his Grant biography, Higham quoted sources as diverse as Marlene Dietrich and George Burns on the star’s non-heterosexuality, allowing that “Cary Grant is not spinning in his grave only because he was cremated.” Its sexual frankness notwithstanding, the Higham tome sought more to shock than enlighten. Gay reviewer Vito Russo pointed out, “Writers of this kind of book have a vested interest in keeping the topic of homosexuality as controversial as possible and are loath to demystify it, lest it become just another mundane fact of life—which, in truth, it is. The everyday doesn’t sell books.”

Reviewer Wesley Harris compared Higham’s
Lonely Heart
with another posthumous but less honest bio: “The stupidity, and the insult, is that these authors undertake to
explain
Grant’s homosexuality! This makes sense only if biographers try to
explain
the heterosexuality of figures like Picasso, Clark Gable, or Hitler. Sexuality is a personality factor, but is not the result of it.”

Elsa Lanchester knew Cary Grant socially. Both Brits lived in Hollywood from the ‘30s on. As previously noted, Charles Laughton starred with Cooper, Bankhead, and Grant in the 1932 non-hit
The Devil and the Deep
. Some two decades after Laughton’s death, Lanchester created a minor bombshell when she revealed, in the introduction to a Laughton biography, the true sexuality of her late husband, whom she supposedly didn’t know was gay until after their marriage.

“Back before the 1960s, when everybody started ‘doing their own thing’ and becoming more antisocial, I saw Grant at several parties a year. He had a fantastic smile. Pity he seldom used it. He wasn’t a social creature, and my guess is he got to be paranoid about being looked at. Especially the older he got, when he was said to be so marvelous-looking for his age.

“I think that’s why he retired, why he stopped going to very many parties. Vanity! Besides which, he had trouble relating to others. He’s selfish. Hates standing in line, and because he is who he
was
,” she grinned, “he thinks he shouldn’t have to. And tight with a dollar!...Likes women to smile at him, but has little interest in what they have to say. Not a man of ideas, unlike Charles, who had great intellectual pretensions.

“I think Cary Grant is a fabrication. One of Hollywood’s best—glossy, appealing, nearly age-proof, and almost entirely convincing. Unless you look too closely.”

Rumanian Jean Negulesco helmed such classics as
How to Marry a Millionaire,
Three Coins in the Fountain
, and
Boy on a Dolphin
. As a production assistant, he worked on what was also Cary Grant’s first film,
This Is the Night
(1931). “That movie starred Lili Damita, who was French and very matter-of-fact about her affairs with women. The moguls thought this most alarming, and married her off to Errol Flynn—it was a first marriage for both the ‘Battling Flynns,’ as the press called them. On the set, it was a strange situation, because you had these two foreigners—Lili and Cary—casually flirting with members of their own sex! The crew didn’t know what to make of it, or whether to take it seriously. Being a newcomer myself, it took me a while to notice their discomfiture.