Band of Thebes

Born July 14: Arthur Laurents

Arthur Laurents turns eighty today, and really the man has a lot to celebrate. Born in the Jewish section of Flatbush, he wrote the book for the musicals West Side Story, Gypsy, Anyone Can Whistle, and Hallelujah, Baby!; the novels and the screenplays for The Way We Were and The Turning Point, the screenplay for Rope (starring his then-love Farley Granger); the play that became the movie Summertime; and he directed I Can Get It for You Wholesale, La Cage Aux Folles, Anyone Can Whistle, and the Broadway versions of Gypsy in 1974 and this year's triple Tony winning revival starring the Patti Lupone. Laurents was openly gay even during the McCarthy era, when he received less work but avoided being blacklisted. Smart people can discuss the obvious and subtle gay substitutes and outsider figures who run through all of Laurents' work. His candid autobiography is called Original Story By. He and his partner Tom Hatcher lived together fifty-one years, mainly in Quogue, Long Island, until Hatcher's death in 2006.

Born July 11: Tab Hunter, Vito Russo

The blond movie star and the brilliant movie watcher.

Born July 7: George Cukor

You might make the case that Katharine Hepburn owed her career to George Cukor. He gave Hepburn her first movie role in A Bill of Divorcement, then cast her as Jo in Little Women, then as Sylvia Scarlett. Their last collaboration was 47 years after their first, when Cukor directed her in The Corn Is Green for television. He famously paired her with Cary Grant in Holiday and The Philadelphia Story, and perfected the Hepburn - Tracy subgenre with Adam's Rib and, less so, with Pat and Mike. According to William J. Mann's biography Kate, she was also indebted to Cukor for the way he perpetuated the fabled Hepburn - Tracy offscreen romance, which Mann says was fabricated to mask the never married star's lesbian affairs. Cukor was much more open in his own gay pursuits, hosting weekly Sunday afternoon pool parties where Hollywood's brightest mingled with aspiring actors and rough trade. Depending which version you choose, Cukor's being fired from Gone with the Wind after two years of prep and three weeks of filming was either because Clark Gable refused to be directed by a "fairy" or because Gable was terrified Cukor knew about his own past gay relationships. Nevertheless, even after Victor Flemming took over, Cukor continued to coach Vivien Leigh and Olivia de Havilland on their roles. As for his way with male actors, no director has coaxed more performances winning the Oscar for Best Actor than did Cukor. Among his other great achievements are Dinner at Eight, David Copperfield, Camille, Romeo and Juliet, The Women, Gaslight, Born Yesterday, A Star Is Born, It Should Happen to You, Travels with my Aunt and My Fair Lady.
 

Born July 1: Farley Granger

Early last year, the 1940s and 50s movie star Farley Granger finally confirmed his many same sex affairs in his autobiography with the Goldwyn catchphrase title Include Me Out. Bravo, for someone about to turn eighty-two, and yes he can be included out as of 2007. Yet like so many people who wait too long to be honest, Granger wants to rewrite the past to cast himself as braver than he really was. Of his sexual life, he claims, "I never hid it or felt guilt about being who I was, but I didn't blare it either." I never hid it? An interview in The Villager with Granger and Robert Calhoun, his co-author and partner for the past 45 years, offers an even more delusional exchange:

It seems to me you’ve never actually been in the closet, the journalist said to the actor. “No, I never was.” Granger quietly replied.
“That’s why he resents labels,” Calhoun said. “And ‘gay’ — in itself, destruction of a perfectly good word — is just another way of saying faggot.”

Granger's breakthrough role, in Rope, was based partly on the real life Leopold and Loeb case from 1924 in which two bright gay homophile lovers, 19 and 18, committed a murder apparently for the excitement of seeing if they could get away with it. In the movie the debonair killers are in their twenties, played by Granger and John Dall, also gay Uranian in real life. As filming began Granger had just fallen in love with the screenwriter, Arthur Laurents, and the couple would soon move in together. If no one were hiding anything, a studio flack just might find a publicity hook in all this. No chance. Granger and Laurents told everyone they were merely roommates, and publicly, in order to go out together, they dated women. (Laurents wrote about this in his own autobiography, As Written By, which Knopf published in 2000.) Granger's greatest role, again directed by Hitchcock, was in Strangers on a Train, and it too had a strong gay Sodomite subtext and pedigree, coming from the much more explicit novel by Patricia Highsmith, a lesbian Sapphist. Obviously in the era of McCarthy witch hunts, a movie star could no more be openly gay Pederast than openly Communist. Granger would earn more respect if he admitted, "I felt I had to hide it," and he might have done more good if he had been more open when it really mattered.

The Hollywood Reporter: Why Gay Films Fail

Writing in The Hollywood Reporter, Gregg Goldstein examines the failure of gay films to find audiences in theaters. Last year, Strand Releasing put twenty-two movies in art house cinemas and their total gross, combined, was $462,000. Even the New Fest's director, Basil Tsiokos, says most lgbt film festivals have devolved from launching theatrical runs to launching direct to DVD releases. But no one knows why. The photo above is from C.R.A.Z.Y. the internationally praised movie that swept eleven Genie Awards (Canada's Oscars) in 2006 but still can't find a U.S. distributor because it's g.a.y.

Born May 21: Raymond Burr

It wouldn't take Perry Mason to figure out Raymond Burr was "acting" when he invented heterosexual details about his life in order to hide his gay relationships. He claimed to have had three wives and a son. His alleged first wife, "Annette Sutherland," was supposedly a British actress who died in the plane crash that killed Leslie Howard, but, as you've already guessed, British Equity has no record of an actress with that name and the fatal plane had only three women on it, all of them otherwise accounted for. Later Burr claimed to have had a son who died at ten of an incurable disease, possibly leukemia, and he even said he took a year off to travel the country with him as his dying wish. Yet his publicist at the time said Burr was working steadily that entire year, 1953, and that Burr "never mentioned any wife or son." One marriage, short-lived, can be documented. Happily, Burr did have a very long relationship with fellow actor Robert Benevides. They met on the set of Perry Mason, together bought an island in Fiji where their passion for orchids eventually became a business back in California, sold their Fiji land in 1983, and spent their time on their farm in Sonoma, where they later started a vineyard. Among his many movie roles, his menacing turn as the killer in Rear Window came three years before his beloved television series Perry Mason, which ran for 271 episodes from 1957 to 1966, and remained so popular it was later revived in 26 tv movies. Burr's next series, Ironside, ran for 195 episodes from 1967 to 1975 and it too spawned a tv movie comeback in 1993, the year Burr died of cancer. One of his nieces fought with Benevides over Burr's vast estate, questioning his right to it. They were together thirty-one years.

Born March 14: Kevin Williamson

Kevin Williamson was accepted at NYU Film School but couldn't afford to attend, and after graduating from East Carolina University, and drifting through a series of dead-end jobs in New York then Los Angeles, he wrote his first screenplay in three days so that he would have a sample of his work when applying for tv writing jobs. Instead, his script sparked a bidding war between rival studios and the finished movie, Scream, became the highest grossing horror movie of all time. After the success of Scream 2, Scream 3, and I Know What You Did Last Summer, and after coming out publicly, Williamson tried television. The result was the autobiographical, allusion-packed Dawson's Creek, the generation-defining teenfest that made the WB. So important was the show to the new channel that when the network went off the air in September 2006, the final program they played was the Dawson's pilot. His recent projects, the movies Cursed and Venom and the tv series Wasteland, Glory Days, and Hidden Palms, have not met with the same success, but the man has bank. Apparently his parties are still so crowded with cute it's scary.

Born February 21: David Geffen

David Geffen's entertainment career began with a lie, fabricating family connections to famous people and claiming a college degree, in order to get a job in the William Morris Agency mailroom, but his success is indisputable. Having triumphed three times starting record companies from scratch, backing blockbuster musicals on Broadway (Cats, Dreamgirls), financing extremely successful movies (Risky Business), and co-founding DreamWorks, the boy from a humble corner of Brooklyn sold his first company for $7 million, sold his second for $540 million, and now is worth more than $6 billion. According to Forbes' list last September, he's the 52nd richest person in America. How did he do it? With an uncanny sense of what would be popular, he signed The Eagles, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Linda Rondstadt, Jackson Browne, John Lennon's comeback album, Asia, Aerosmith, Guns n Roses, XTC,  Sonic Youth, Blink-182, Peter Gabriel, Neil Young, Nirvana, and Cher. He's been equally prescient about the art market and in the fall of 2006 he sold a de Kooning for $63 million, a Jasper Johns for $80 million, and a Jackson Pollock for $140 million, the most expensive sale of a painting ever. Ditto, his real estate investments. Hit hard by the death of his friend Studio 54 owner Steve Rubell, Geffen began making multi-million dollar donations to aids foundations in the late 80s, yet he was criticized for remaining in the closet. In 1992, he finally came out. In the years since, his philanthropy has kept pace with his wealth. He gave an unrestricted gift of $200 million to the UCLA medical school. Geffen turns 65 today and still suffers from what he told the New York Times fifteen years ago, when he was fifty:

If Geffen has had one conspicuous failure, it is a personal one: his inability to maintain a long-term relationship. Although Geffen is remarkably candid, he winces and struggles when talking about his current personal life. "I aspire to have a relationship with somebody," he says. "I haven't always been successful at it. But being gay is very different from being straight in the area of relationships. Of course, there are gay people who've had a long-term relationship for 50 years, but they're not the rule. And it's difficult to be in a relationship with someone as well known and wealthy as I am. There's a disparity that works in heterosexual relationships that doesn't work in homosexual relationships."

Balderdash.

Born February 14: Kevyn Aucoin

The world's most famous makeup artist "married" his much younger boyfriend in an unofficial ceremony in Hawaii in July 2000 and after that Kevyn Aucion referred to Jeremy Antunes as his husband. In less than two years, the man who easily earned $10,000 a session doing makeup for superstar celebrities' magazine cover shoots or Oscar appearances, the author of three #1 New York Times bestsellers about beauty, the only makeup professional ever honored by the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and the founder of a new line of beauty products bearing his name, was dead at forty, without a will, and his husband was locked out of their two shared homes without any legal recourse. His estate went to his adoptive parents back in Louisiana who embody more than their share of contradictions: They are unsophisticated but full of heart; initially repelled by homosexuality, they started the first PFLAG chapter in Lafayette yet refuse to give their son in law even the bed he shared with Kevyn. It's possible that Kevyn and Jeremy were on the verge of breaking up, or merely experiencing a typical rough patch in what might have been a long marriage. Jeremy had left a sick and hurting Kevyn to go to Paris for a week alone, which sounds selfish and indulgent but could be seen as a tough love ultimatum to someone ruinously addicted to many kinds of pain killers and sleeping pills, who had in the preceding six months dropped out of two programs to overcome substance abuse, and who had screwed up his friend Cher's "Song for the Lonely" video shoot (needing to be hospitalized twice) so notoriously that not one star had asked him to do her makeup for the Oscars that spring. In any case, the trip was cut short by Kevin's final hospitalization. The pills were to relieve Kevyn's intense suffering from acromegaly, a pituitary gland disorder that causes excessive growth and had given him an ever enlarging brain tumor, undiagnosed since he was nine years old, at which time he had already discovered makeup. From childhood, his ambition for glamor and success was matched by his generosity of spirit. Two ex-boyfriends continued to work closely with him and even after he had achieved his own fame, he took enormous pleasure and considerable time to do makeup for shopgirls, neighbors, and even the homeless teenage drag queens of the Hetrick-Martin Institute, of which he was a vociferous supporter. Topping the wildly devoted praise by Cher, Janet, Tina, Tori, Gwyneth, Liza, Courtney, and Celine, Mary Tyler Moore said, "There were three men in my life I met who had the ability to make you feel like you were the only person in the world just by looking at you, just with their eyes: One was Sinatra, the other was the current pope, and the third was Kevyn." Despite his instructions that his ashes be scattered in Hawaii where he was married, Kevyn's parents are keeping his cremated remains in Louisiana because they like to visit him.

Born January 31: Portia De Rossi

What do you do if you're a fifteen year old lesbian named Amanda Rogers who feels destined for something bigger than a suburb a Geelong, Victoria, Australia? It's 1988, you love Shakespeare, you romanticize Italy, you tell your parents Amanda is history and you're legally changing your name to Portia. Not only that, Mr. & Mrs. Rogers suddenly have a high school daughter whose last name is de Rossi. Just because you felt like it. Well, Geelong can't hold you back, and the University of Melbourne Law School can't keep your interest. You land a part in the Australian movie Sirens, then you go Hollywood and appear in Scream 2. Your giant break comes in 1998 when you get the role of lawyer Nelle Porter on Ally McBeal, which you'll play through its end in 2002, without any noticeable difference when your castmates and family learn you're lesbian by seeing tabloid pictures of you and your girlfriend, singer Francesca Gregorini. (Possibly it's connected to your Italian craze because she really was born Countess Francesca McKnight Donatella Romana Gregorini di Savignano di Romagna, daughter of Bond girl Barbara Bach and stepdaughter of Ringo Starr.) After Ally McBeal you star in Arrested Development for three seasons, and by now the whole world has noticed your good looks: You've ranked on the Sexiest Women lists from Maxim, Blender, Stuff and Femme Fatales, then People includes you in their Most Beautiful list. Also by now you've left your Italian for an all-American named Ellen. You've come out. The two of you are named one of TV Guide's A-list Power Couples. Let others say what they will, your frequent appearances on the red carpet together, naturally arm in arm or stealing the occasional happy kiss, do more to promote gay visibility than all the sad, victimy public service announcements combined. Name any American male star who treats his boyfriend like a boyfriend in the celebrity spotlight.

Eight Razzie Nominations for Pretend Gay Movie

Yesterday, on the eve of the Oscar nominations, the Razzie Awards for the year's worst movies announced their nominations for their 28th annual celebration of all things awful. Proving their merit, they heaped eight nominations on the pile of celluloid called I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, in which two NYC straight firefighters must pretend to be a gay couple in order to receive health benefits. Cue two hours of exaggerated stereotypes for comic effect, nonstop pandering to hetero discomfort, wrapped up with a plea for tolerance. Their nominations:

Worst Picture
Worst Director (Dennis Dugan)
Worst Screenplay (Barry Fanaro and Alexander Payne & Jim Taylor)
Worst Actor (Adam Sandler)
Worst Supporting Actor (Kevin James)
Worst Supporting Actor (Rob Schneider)
Worst Supporting Actress (Jessica Biel)
Worst Screen Couple (Adam & Kevin)

Here's hoping they sweep the awards, given on February 23.

Born January 18: Cary Grant

 
Cary Grant and Randolph Scott met on the set of a movie called, in something of an understatement, Hot Saturday, and almost immediately they began living together in a house nicknamed Bachelor Hall, which they would share off and on for twelve years (1932-1944). Their affair has always been spun, desperately, as two stars who enjoyed each other's company but shared a house merely because both were "tightwads." Cary Grant was married to Virginia Cherrill from February 1934 to March 1935 and to Barbara Hutton from 1942 to 1945. Two questions: What sort of man keeps his house with his bud even after he gets married, and what sort of tightwad prefers spending the money to maintain two households rather than one? George Cukor confirmed that Randolph Scott would talk about their affair to friends, and a slew of recent biographers have also verified their relationship. Grant himself told an interviewer that his first two wives, overlapping with Scott, "accused him of being homosexual," though, of course, he always denied it and was as quick as Tom Cruise to sue for libel. (He sued Chevy Chase for saying, "What a gal!") Yet somehow the legend factory has made the later wives the authority on his early sexuality. Dyan Cannon, who lasted only 18 months with him, says the "rumors" are "lies" but she wasn't even born until after Grant's first divorce. Grant's fifth and final wife was 47 years his junior. Several other men have said they had affairs with Grant, including his chauffeur in 1957 and fashion arbiter Richard Blackwell, who wrote in his autobiography of having sex with both Grant and Scott. (Totally pointless subtextery, but given the persistence of the whispers throughout his career, look how many of Grant's film titles play off a closety or gay suggestion: I'm No Angel, Born To Be Bad, Topper, The Awful Truth, In Name Only, Suspicion, Notorious, I Was a Male War Bride, Crisis, People Will Talk, Monkey Business, Indiscreet, and Charade.)

Born January 14: Cecil Beaton

Avoiding sports as a child, Cecil Beaton learned photography from his nanny on her Kodak 3A, and avoiding academics at Cambridge, which he left without a degree in 1925, he took his first published photo, printed in Vogue, of one of England's leading Shakespearean scholars dressed in drag: To be exact, George "Dadie" Rylands, a Cambridge Fellow for 72 years, was costumed as Webster's the Duchess of Malfi. From there Beaton had to go work for his father's timber company, which he suffered for eight miserable days. After that he returned to his rightful place in the world in design, creating book jackets and studying photography until Vogue hired him fulltime in 1927. Although his style is flowery and theatrical, many of his most enduring images are serious people captured at critical times: a tense Churchill in 1940, Queen Elizabeth II's coronation portrait, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor's wedding portrait. During the war, he volunteered and was posted to the Ministry of Information, capturing images of the Blitz, its young injured on the cover of Life, and RAF pilots in their cockpit. Broadly talented, Beaton designed the lighting, sets, and costumes for many Broadway musicals, winning four Tony Awards, and for several Hollywood extravaganzas, winning the Oscar for best costumes twice, for Gigi and most famously for his high camp creations in My Fair Lady. Although he never consummated his longtime, unrequited love for Peter Watson, a gay art collector whose interests lay elsewhere, Beaton did enjoy possibly the greatest consolation prize of the twentieth century, an affair with Gary Cooper. For his entire life, he kept his childhood diary in which he first realized he was a "terrible, terrible homosexualist" and that shame never fully disappeared, driving him to a few misguided affairs with women later in his life, including one with Greta Garbo, who dumped him and went back to women. When he was seventy he suffered a major stroke that left him partially paralyzed, and though he adapted to drawing and photographing with his left hand, he never recovered his earlier ease. He died six years later, in 1980.

Born January 10: Sal Mineo

Although he was twice nominated for an Oscar, Sal Mineo's career peaked when he was sixteen, playing Plato, Rebel Without a Cause's universal everyman, for who among us g/l/b/t/q/str8/w hasn't at one time harbored an unreciprocated crush on James Dean? As if it wouldn't be equally exhilarating and nerve-wracking enough to be a gay sixteen year-old acting opposite the bi twenty-four year-old susperstar and Miss Natalie Wood, Mineo was also said to be having an affair with the director, Nicholas Ray, who was forty-four. Well, it was all downhill from there. He was praised for his roles on stage and in Exodus and Who Killed Teddy Bear? and he even recorded a couple albums with two Top 40 hits, but he had been typecast and that moment had passed. Unfortunately, the movies' sensitive, gay teen devolved into television's deranged psycho killer, with guest starring roles on Hawaii Five-O, Columbo, S.W.A.T., Police Story, and Ellery Queen. When he was thirty-seven, walking at night through an alley near his home in West Hollywood, he was stabbed once in a botched mugging, and died. John Lennon offered a cash reward to find his killer. Many people, including Mineo's family, believe the courts convicted the wrong man, who had confessed and recanted, was released in 1990, and reincarcerated for parole violations. Two books have been written about Mineo's life and death, the better one is H. Paul Jeffers' biography.

Born January 3: Dorothy Arzner

In 1929, when Paramount wanted to make their first talking picture, The Wild Party, which director did they trust to do it? The prolific Dorothy Arzner, who had completed four features for them in the preceding two years.  Usually seen wearing men's shirts, suits, and neckties, Arzner was open about being a lesbian and the next year made no secret of the choreographer Marion Morgan moving in with her, a relationship that would last more than four decades. Although her movies were always studio fare, her Pre-Code pictures show a strong feminist streak, examining careers, independence, class, extra-marital sex, pregnancy, and prostitution. She helped launch the careers of or gave breakthrough roles to Katharine Hepburn (playing an Amelia Earhart-style pilot in Christopher Strong), Rosalind Russell (Craig's Wife) and Lucille Ball (Dance, Girl, Dance). After an illness in 1943, Arzner never again directed a feature and no one knows exactly why. She made Army training movies and taught film at UCLA, and she shot some Pepsi commercials, probably at the express request of her longtime friend and rumored lover, Joan Crawford. The Directors Guild of America, which she was the first woman to join in 1936, finally honored her work in 1975, four years before her death. Women in Film gives a directing award named for her, but still today so few women are making features that they've had to open the field to television as well, and even so have only given the award sporadically, seven times since 1993, last year to Nancy Meyers.

Born January 2: William Haines

In 1925, MGM's leading male actor was the charming William Haines and he remained a top five grossing star from 1928 to 1932. Handsome and funny, his typical character was a clever, athletic young narcissist whose giant ego was deflated before he finally won the day. As for that self-adoring trait, Haines fell in love with his double, Jimmy Shields, whom the studio had hired as his stand-in, and starting in 1926 they lived together openly for nearly fifty years, causing their friend Joan Crawford to declare them "the happiest married couple in Hollywood." Perhaps, but their happiness came at a high price. In 1933, seven years into their relationship and still at the height of his fame, Haines cruised a sailor in Pershing Square and they went back to the YMCA to have sex, only to be busted by the police. Louis B. Mayer, the genius tyrant running MGM, insisted Haines enter into a fake marriage and when he refused, choosing instead to stay with Shields, Mayer canceled his contract, virtually ending his career. As plucky as his characters, Haines and Shields opened an interior design studio which was an immediate success. Two years later, a neighbor claimed they propositioned his son and as a result members of the Ku Klux Klan broke into their house, hauled them outside, and savagely attacked them. Once again, rather than shunning the gay couple, their famous friends and colleagues rallied to support them: Haines' co-star Marion Davies begged her lover William Randolph Hearst to get the neighbor arrested and many others, including Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, Kay Francis, Charles Boyer, and even George Burns, implored them to tell the police about the attack, but given their past experience they did not. Their design studio flourished for decades. They created interiors and furniture for a top tier of international clientele beyond the Hollywood luminaries, George Cukor, Jack Warner, the Annenbergs, the Regans, and Gloria Swanson, who urged Haines to accept a part in her own comeback movie, Sunset Boulevard, which he declined. Although Haines died on Boxing Day 1973 and Shields killed himself with an overdose of pills soon after, in their shared bed, wearing Haines pajamas, their design studio was recently revived. Look at their lovely work here, and if you still have room on your list of new year's resolutions, add reading William J. Mann's excellent, illuminating biography of Haines, Wisecracker.

Born December 4: Samuel Butler, Cornell Woolrich, A. Scott Berg

Born to a family of Anglican clergymen, Samuel Butler attended Cambridge, worked with the poor in London, then cut loose for New Zealand. There, he became a sheep rancher, and in the manner of Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar, fell into an intense relationship with Charles Paine Pauli. They were so close that when Butler returned to England in 1864, Pauli went with him, and for the next thirty years, as Butler wrote his books, most notably Erehwon and The Way of All Flesh, he supported Pauli financially. Through three decades of playing poor, Pauli was in fact ferreting away a fortune, because he was simultaneously accepting money from several men. His duplicity was revealed only after his death. In 1899, Butler wrote Shakespeare's Sonnets Reconsidered, arguing that the poems are about a sexual relationship between an older writer and the beautiful young man who betrayed him.

Cornell Woolrich's life presents so many cautionary tales that his biography is called First You Dream, Then You Die. A hard-nosed crime writer ranking with Chandler and Hammett, his prolific stories and novels became the movies Rear Window, Phantom Lady, The Bride Wore Black, and Mississippi Mermaid, as well as more than twenty other films. That and his book sales explain why he had nearly one million dollars in the bank when he died at sixty-four in 1968, but why did he live for thirty-five years, with or near his mother, in a seedy residential hotel in Harlem? Although he was already in his fifties when she died, rather than exploring his freedom, he moved in with his aunt in a worse hotel. He had torrid gay affairs, which he described in his diary, discovered by his wife of three months. She learned, among other things, he had a sailor's uniform that he wore to go looking for late night adventures. Their marriage, never consummated, was annulled. In his final years, he moved into a luxury hotel, alone, yet he continued to treat himself badly. After wearing shoes that were too tight and seeing his foot become infected, he ignored it until finally doctors had to amputate his leg. A chronic smoker and alcoholic, he died weighing eighty-nine pounds. Why? His life was full of mysteries.

A. Scott Berg grew up in Los Angeles, his brother is uber agent Jeff Berg longtime CEO of ICM, and his partner is Kevin McCormick, executive producer of Saturday Night Fever and Dying Young, so sure why wouldn't he be the screenwriter of the groundbreaking 1980s gay drama Making Love? Well, because he's literary nerd A. Scott Berg, named for F. Scott Fitzgerald, who geekily attended Princeton because Fitzgerald had gone there, and wrote his senior thesis about Fitzgerald's editor Maxwell Perkins, which he turned into a full length biography that won a National Book Award. His third, Lindbergh, won a Pulitzer. His fourth, a memoir of his long friendship with Katharine Hepburn, held until her death and published eleven days later, was more problematic. Called exploitive by everyone from Robert Gottlieb in the New York Times to official Hepburn friend Liz Smith in her gossip column, Kate Remembered is a soft-focus glance that perpetuates the myths Hepburn wanted to endure. (For a deeper look, including her relationships with women, read William J. Mann's excellent Kate, just out in paperback.) Berg's next biography, scheduled for 2009, is about Woodrow Wilson.

Born November 23: Bruce Vilanch

If you've laughed during the Academy Awards show any time since 1989, chances are you should thank Bruce Vilanch, "the man who the F.U. in funny" and the Oscars head writer since 2000, for which he's won two Emmys. He's also written for Richard Pryor, Joan Rivers, Lily Tomlin, Diana Ross, David Letterman, Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, and, before anyone else, Bette Midler. In 1970 she read a Chicago Tribune review of her show and called the critic, who told her to use more jokes in her act; she asked him to write them and they've collaborated ever since. As the Demure Miss M puts it, "Bruce was the first man to put something in my mouth that made us both money." He has punched up many, many Hollywood scripts, including films that don't immediately seem to bear his razor humor, like Die Hard 2 and Raiders of the Lost Ark, and he has acted in Mahogany, Ice Pirates, and The Morning After. Vilanch has become well-known in his own right, especially after his stint on the New Hollywood Squares, and starring on Broadway as Edna Turnblad in Hairspray, for which he shaved off his signature thirty-year shaggy blond beard, and off Broadway in his own show Almost Famous. He is the subject of the documentary Get Bruce! and also appears in Laughing Matters: Gay Comedy in America. Beyond being funny, Vilanch has been a tireless and vocal supporter of many aids and gay rights causes.

Born November 21: Christine Vachon

Killer Films' Christine Vachon turns forty-five today, coinciding with the release of Todd Haynes' Bob Dylan movie I'm Not There, which happens to be the forty-sixth movie she's produced. (If only she could have convinced him to cut the awful section starring Richard Gere.) Beyond wondering where Todd would be without her, because she also produced his Poison, Safe, Velvet Goldmine, and Far from Heaven, you might consider where independent cinema would have ended up without her vision. Just the highlights: Swoon, Go Fish, Kids, Stonewall, Office Killer, I Shot Andy Warhol, Happiness, Boys Don't Cry, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Storytelling, and One Hour Photo, as well as a couple dozen interesting misses like Robert Altman's The Company, John Waters' A Dirty Shame, The Notorious Betty Paige, Infamous, Party Monster, and A Home at the End of the World. As if making forty-six movies wasn't enough, in her spare time she's written two books about making meaningful movies with no money, Shooting To Kill and A Killer Life.

Born November 9: Anthony Asquith

Everyone knows that Anthony Asquith's father was Prime Minister during the Great War but remember too that years earlier he was the Home Secretary who signed the "gross indecency" arrest warrant against Oscar Wilde, so it's lovely, isn't it, that his youngest son should be gay and best known for directing Pygmalion and The Importance of Being Earnest. After graduating from Oxford, Anthony went to Hollywood not to struggle but to live in high style as a houseguest of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Sr. for six months. Of course he met everyone, returned to London, and within a few years directed his first feature, a romance called Shooting Stars set among actors at a movie studio. Scholars today consider it almost equal to Hitchcock's famed silent Blackmail, and it was a success at the time too, launching a career that would span forty films, including three Shaw adaptations and ten collaborations with Terence Rattigan, among them French Without Tears, The Winslow Boy, and The Browning Version. Asquith was at ease in many genres--war movies, comedies, costume dramas, thrillers--and directed actors as diverse as Leslie Howard, Laurence Olivier, Michael Redgrave, John Mills, Dirk Bogarde, Rex Harrison, and Richard Burton. Closeted but not shrinking, he was widely believed to be the man in the mask at the orgy in the Profumo affair. That person's "theatrical display of masochism" crystallized the public's notion of the Empire in decay and a government run by degenerates...basically, the gross indecency trial of its day. He remained president of the film technicians union from 1937 to his death from cancer in 1968. The British Academy Award for best music is named in his honor.

Born October 30: Néstor Almendros

Like so many great artists, Néstor Almendros did not follow a straight path to his genius. Born in Barcelona in 1930, he became disgusted with Franco's Spain by age eighteen and followed his father to Cuba, then went to film school in Rome, tried and failed to work in New York, left for France, was ready to give up at thirty-four, and got an absurdly lucky break: He happened to be on set the day the director of photography quit a short project with Eric Rohmer. From there Almendros became one of the world's greatest cinematographers, carefully composing each frame and using natural light like a painter on over fifty films, including, in order, My Night at Maud's, Claire's Knee, Two English Girls, Chloé in the Afternoon, The Story of Adele H., The Marquise of O., his legendary Days of Heaven [above] for which he won an Oscar, Kramer vs. Kramer, The Blue Lagoon, The Last Métro for which he won a Cesar, Still of the Night, Sophie's Choice, Pauline at the Beach, Places in the Heart, Heartburn, Imagine: John Lennon, and Billy Bathgate. For anyone seriously interested in cinema, his book A Man with a Camera is essential reading. Not only does he clarify how the director of photography differs from the cameraman (union rules prohibit the DP from operating the camera) but he devotes a brief chapter to each of forty films, describing the challenges and innovations working with the directors (again and again it's Rohmer, Truffaut, or Robert Benton) to decide what colors they want the costume and set designers to use and how Almendros will light and shoot each scene. They usually start with fine art. Their initial inspiration for Kramer vs. Kramer, set on the Upper East Side of the 1970s, was Piero della Francesca, with a little Hockney and, for the child's bedroom, Magritte. For The Blue Lagoon, he concentrated on Gauguin. For the Meryl Streep - Robert DeNiro psycho-thriller Still of the Night (originally called Stab), he looked to old Fritz Lang movies and Edward Hopper. Remarkably generous with the secrets of his working trade, his autobiography completely ignores his private life. And yet, even though he was closeted, when he had the opportunity to direct his own movie in 1984, he chose to make a documentary about Cuba's persecution of gay men, Mauvaise conduite [Improper Conduct], which won the audience award at Frameline. He died of aids in 1992 at age sixty-one. Human Rights Watch gives an annual film award named in his honor.

Entertainment Weekly: "Brokeback Changed Nothing"

Tomorrow's issue of Entertainment Weekly has Adam B. Vary's reality check on Hollywood's gay problem two years after Brokeback Mountain. It's a smart article as far as it goes. In mainstream movies, gay characters still "have to be the AIDS patient (Philadelphia) or the victim of violence (Boys Don't Cry), the closet case (Far From Heaven), or the tortured serial killer (Monster)." While avoiding the fact that two of Brokeback's cowboys were also victims of violence [the other in Ennis's flashback], the article struggles to end on a hopeful note about Gus van Sant's upcoming Harvey Milk biopic starring Sean Penn and Matt Damon. But let's be clear: It's another historical movie that ends with the gay man being murdered. The article rightly explains that decisions are still based on money: "'Big studio fare is about being as broadly appealing as possible,' says a top exec. 'Having Jason Bourne be gay would [mean having] Jason Bourne's dating life look different from 90 percent of the population's. Where's the upside in that decision?''' Avoided is the question of whether Hollywood believes that same 90 percent is only comfortable with gay movies where the gay character gets killed.

Vary is a little spotty on his history. He's smart to include long-lingering projects like The Front Runner and The Dreyfus Affair but he thinks Chicago relaunched the movie musical when it was Moulin Rouge, and he wrongly claims it was Brokeback that “obliterated an ancient Hollywood phobia that playing gay would kill an actor's career,” when actors as old as Meryl Streep and Daniel Day-Lewis began their careers playing gay and, in terms of A-list action heroes, it’s been twenty-five years since Christopher Reeve made two more Superman movies after playing Michael Caine’s lover in Deathtrap. Vary doesn't mention that Midnight Cowboy was supposed to change everything when it won Best Picture thirty-five years before Brokeback lost, ditto for the watershed, all-gay Boys in the Band in 1970, but he does wisely point out that “Hollywood still treats gay-themed hits as an exception rather than as harbingers of a changing rule.”

The problem with the article is that it examines half of the equation and ignores the other half, namely the gay audience. Despite their talk of the broadest population, studios make and market movies targeted specifically to black, Latino, Asian, or female audiences. Two weeks ago Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married was the number one movie in America with a poster featuring eight black actors and no one else. Never mind if the whites liked it or not, it was black, proud, and profitable. The even more apt comparison is how Hollywood has changed in the three years since The Passion of the Christ. Now they scramble to create and sell movies to a hardcore religious audience, non-believers be damned. The question journalists ought to ask is whether studios will ever court the gay audience openly, under the bright marquee lights, or if they'll always only like us if the straights like us too.

Born October 19: George Nader, Robert Reed, Divine

Golden Globe-winning, B-movie beefcake George Nader and his partner Mark Miller met when they both appeared in a musical at the Pasadena Playhouse in 1947 and stayed together for fifty-five years. Though they were not out publicly, they lived openly as a couple, much to the consternation of Universal Studios, which begged Nader to marry and divorce a willing secretary for cover. He refused. The couple was close friends with Rock Hudson from 1951 onward and nursed him through his death from aids in 1985, after which they came out. Hudson left them the bulk of his estate. Following his retirement from movies, Nader wrote Chrome, a love story between a man and a male robot, the first science fiction novel to feature a gay plot and sex scenes, which was surprisingly popular.

Wouldn’t the world have been a better place if everyone had known America’s #1 television dad, Mike Brady, was gay? Although much loved on the set, especially by the child actos, Robert Reed grew increasingly unhappy and resentful that his defining role was beneath his talents as a classical, Shakespearean actor. He fought frequently with the show’s creator, Sherwood Schwartz, which is why he was written out of the series’ finale, although he did return for the reunion shows. He died of aids in Pasadena in 1992, five months shy of his sixtieth birthday. Related: Maureen McCormick (Marcia), whose memoir Here’s the Story is coming out next year, says she made out with her tv sister Jan. You may recall Greg’s memoir from 1992, Growing Up Brady, which described his affair with his tv mom Florence Henderson. Quite the family.

Proving there is order in the randomness of the universe, Divine grew up six houses away from John Waters, who would later help him create his outrageous drag persona and give him starring roles in his movies such as Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, and Polyester with Tab Hunter, whom he was again paired with in Lust in the Dust. Divine released several disco songs and albums, but his greatest fame came with John Waters’ original Hairspray. After that breakthrough role he was chosen to play Uncle Otto on the new Fox sitcom Married... With Children, but his obesity caused a heart attack, killing him at 42 in 1988. Among the many ways Divine’s legacy endures is that he was the inspiration of Ursula the Sea Witch in the Disney animated hit The Little Mermaid. Safe to say he wouldn't have thought much of John Travolta's attempt to reprise Divine's role in last summer's Hairspray.

Born October 17: Montgomery Clift

Montgomery Clift's life was defined by two crashes. After a charmed childhood of long vacations in Europe and the Caribbean, his financier father lost nearly everything in the stock market crash of 1929. The family moved to a modest house in Sarasota, and there Clift discovered acting. By the time he was thirteen he was on Broadway and by the time he was seventeen he was a star. Hollywood wooed him for years and he finally agreed to make his film debut in Howard Hawks' Red River opposite John Wayne, when he was twenty-eight. His second movie, The Search, earned him his first Oscar nomination. He followed that with The Heiress opposite Olivia de Haviland, and was nominated for another Oscar for his scorching pairing with Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun, and nominated yet again two years later for From Here to Eternity, the same year when he starred in Hitchcock's I Confess. He turned down Hitchcock's Rope, uncomfortably about a gay couple who kill a boy, and also turned down the starring roles in East of Eden and Sunset Boulevard. While filming another movie with his best friend Elizabeth Taylor, Clift drove into a telephone pole and nearly died, eight months after James Dean was killed in a similar crash.  Much has been made of Clift's downward spiral after the crash, often called "the longest suicide in Hollywood," but he starred in eight movies before the accident and eight movies after. Wasn't it spectacularly brave for a movie idol whose face was disfigured and partially paralyzed to continue to act? And for a closeted gay celebrity in such a hostile, hypocritical era to navigate the minefield of incessant whispers and threats of exposure? His fourth and final Oscar nomination came for his seven-minute role in Judgment at Nuremberg. Addicted to alcohol and pain pills, he died of a heart attack at forty-five, bitter and unemployable. Yes, he is the inspiration of R.E.M.'s song "Monty Got a Raw Deal."

Born July 19: Joseph Hansen

One notable spot in the long shadow of Ramond Chandler’s acolytes and imitators is Joseph Hansen, who wrote twelve novels starring Dave Brandstetter, another hardluck, tough guy, L.A. private detective who, breaking new ground, happened to be gay. Hansen was born in Aberdeen, South Dakota in 1923; when he was ten his family moved to Minneapolis and when he was thirteen they settled in to Southern California where he stayed the rest of his life. At twenty-nine he published a poem in the New Yorker, followed by other poems in the Atlantic, the Saturday Review, and Harper’s, and soon after began writing pulp novels under a pseudonym, allowing him to explore issues of gay life while adhering to the rampant homophobic code of the 1950s and early 60s. In 1970 he helped Harry Hay and others form the first gay pride parade in Hollywood, though for his entire life, to 2004, he preferred to call himself homosexual rather than gay. He was married for fifty-one years to Jane Bancroft, who died ten years before him. In all, Hansen wrote nearly forty books, including mainstream novels like A Smile in His Lifetime and Living Upstairs, a coming-of-age story in Hollywood during WWII that Publishers Weekly compared to Fitzgerald and Nathaniel West.

Born July 11: Tab Hunter, Vito Russo

Rock Hudson, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Anthony Perkins, Tab Hunter: Was any heartthrob movie star straight in the conservative 1950s? Hunter and Perkins dated each other for several years while the press reported phony stories that Hunter was involved with Debbie Reynolds or Natalie Wood. He made more than fifty movies, and his triumphs were Damn Yankees, Lafayette Escadrille, and That Kind of Woman. He recorded a pop song, Young Love, which was the #1 hit in the U.S. for a month in 1957, and made many subsequent albums. He had a short-lived television show and a famous flop on Broadway, co-starring with Tallulah Bankhead in Tennessee Williams’ The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, which closed after five performances. Smaller movies followed. In the 1980s he had a comeback, starring twice with Divine, first in Polyester, then in Lust in the Dust, which he co-produced with Allan Glaser. Hunter did not come out until September 2003, when at 72, he sold a book proposal for a memoir that would discuss his life candidly. Tab Hunter Confidential appeared in 2005 and revealed he and his producer Allan Glaser have been romantic partners for twenty-five years.

For ten years, from 1972 to 1982, Vito Russo toured the country giving what today would be a PowerPoint presentation about the portrayal of lesbians and gay men in the media. His devastating book on the subject, The Celluloid Closet, published in 1981 and revised in 1987, was years ahead of its time and remains essential reading today. The book was made into a documentary in 1996, six years after his death from aids. Russo’s sharp critique of the industry led him to co-found the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD). It is hard to imagine the principled visionary connected to today’s GLAAD, which endorsed such overblown caricature-fests as Boat Trip and, yesterday, praised the upcoming I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry despite the movie’s continual use of “stereotypes and slurs” according to Damon Romine, GLAAD’s director of entertainment media.

Bruce Willis in Time Magazine

Bruce Willis, the 52-year-old actor and vocal Republican, gave a long interview to Joel Stein at Time. Two quotes:

Which leads him to lament living in a time when Isaiah Washington is fired for calling a gay Grey's Anatomy co-star a "faggot." "I hate to think we live in a time when you can get fired from your job because of what you say," he says. "He didn't punch anyone. I think we'll think differently with hindsight."

and

"The Internet is a big dark hole. What if the Internet was the lead mugs that everyone in Rome was using that led to the end of that civilization? What if 20 years from now, the Internet led to the downfall of the world?"