Born January 23: Sergei Eisenstein, Randolph Scott

It figures that the Russian supergenius whose innovations in The Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Oktober (1927) still dictate how movies are shot and edited today would have no trouble creating private visual diversions for himself in an age before internet porn: He drew sketches of gay sex. Re-entering the U.S. from Mexico in 1932, his drawings were discovered by American customs officials who were not "artistic" and not amused. Eisenstein was a Bolshevik after all, and had been run out of Hollywood on his first visit after a campaign against him by fascist Major Pease (and because Paramount hated his treatment of Dreiser's An American Tragedy). The customs debacle capped off a fifteen-month fiasco that was supposed to have been a four-month shoot to restore his reputation. Post-Paramount, Charlie Chaplin had introduced him to Upton Sinclair whose wife Mary Kimbrough financed the Mexican picture, which Eisenstein began filming without a script or even a concept. Complicating matters further, Mexico had no diplomatic relations with the USSR and therefore claimed rights to the film as it was being made, including the right to censor. Ordered home by Soviet authorities angry that he had overstayed his visa, Eisenstein realized that thus removed and having hugely antagonized the Sinclairs, he would never be allowed to edit his Mexican footage. He suffered a nervous breakdown. Worse was on its way. His next film, Bezhin Meadow, was plagued again by his ill-conceived grandiose schemes (this time to shoot simultaneously adult and children's versions) and by his dictatorial style. Soviet officials hated his movie. Eisenstein endured the horror of having his film destroyed, which was mild compared to the fate of the government's executive producer for film, Boris Shumyatsky, who should have been supervising more closely and was executed by firing squad. Eisenstein did triumph again with a biopic of Alexander Nevsky, famous for its beautiful, majestic build up to battle. He followed it with another success, Ivan the Terrible Part I, only to see his Ivan the Terrible Part II confiscated and Part III destroyed. Although he had two wives, historians say neither marriage was consummated. He wrote in his diaries about his endless infatuations with men. He died of a brain hemorrhage at fifty.

The 6'3" Virginia stud -- an alum of Woodberry Forest and a vet of WWI in France at nineteen -- Randolph Scott was 34 when he met Cary Grant on the set of Hot Saturday. Soon they were sleeping together at their shared Malibu house winkingly named Bachelor Hall, which they kept even while married to women. In 1934 Grant married actress Virginia Cherrill from City Lights and divorced in 1935. In 1936 it was Scott's turn to provide cover and he chose heiress Marion duPont, whom he knew from having been best man at her first wedding. They spent most of their time apart and divorced in 1939. In 1941 copycat Grant married his heiress, Barbara Hutton, and also lasted three years before divorcing. Tall, debonair, funny, and radiating a steel-hard stoicism, the versatile Scott was cast in comedies, adventures, melodramas, and war movies, but he was at his best in the saddle. The star of dozens of westerns, Scott reached his widest appeal in his fifties when he was a top ten box office draw three years running. After making more than sixty westerns, ending with Ride the High Country in 1962, Scott retired at 64 with a fortune of $100 million from investments. He lived in Beverly Hills for another twenty-five years, dying of lung ailments at 89. He was still married to his second wife, Patricia, with whom he'd adopted two children, one of whom wrote books celebrating his dad and hotly denying the persistent homo talk. For a different opinion read Hollywood Gays: Conversations With: Cary Grant, Liberace, Tony Perkins, Paul Lynde, Cesar Romero, Randolph Scott... which also contains a chat with William Haines.

Comments

[Sandy]

Randolph Scott's adopted daughter Sandra worked at WGBH when I did. I think you arrived on that scene after she had left. I liked her. And I'm sort of glad I didn't know her lineage until after we were no longer in daily contact. I would have gushed, I'm afraid. She married the head on-air pledgemeister Sam Tyler and they both moved on to greater things.