Band of Thebes

We, the Animals: Isherwood - Bachardy Love Letters

Naturally when you see that title, The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy [and Kindle], out this week from FSG, you want to know which animals. Chris was an old workhorse/stallion named Dobbin and Don was kitten named Kitty.

You'll be forgiven for thinking those names dim compared to the ark of human names that vivify these charming, sometimes smart, sometimes gossipy pages: Ackerley, Albee, Julie Andrews, Antonioni, Peggy Ashcroft, Astaire, Astor, Auden, Bacall, Bacon, Balanchine, James Baldwin, JM Barrie, Alan Bates, Beaton, Beckett, Sybille Bedford, Betjeman, Bogarde, Bouvier, Bowles, Brando, James Bridges, Britten, Bunuel, Richard Burton...all the way to Vidal, Visconti, Warhol, Weisman, Welles, Wells, Wescott, Williams, Wood, Woodcock, Woolf, Wyatt, Yeats, York, and Zeffirelli.

Born April 6: Rob Epstein, Joseph Olshan

A trailblazer way ahead of the zeitgeist, Rob Epstein alone or with Jeffrey Friedman, won two Academy Awards, three Peabodys, four Emmys, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among many other honors, for his/their gay documentaries The Times of Harvey Milk, Common Threads - Stories from the Quilt, The Celluloid Closet, and Paragraph 175. Then they decided to try narrative features, making the Allen Ginsberg obscenity trial movie Howl, starring James Franco, Jon Hamm, Jeff Daniels, and Mary-Louise Parker, which grossed $617,334. Last year saw their first non-gay feature, the biopic Lovelace starring Amanda Seyfried as the porn starlet, Sharon Stone as her monstrous mother, and again James Franco as Hugh Hefner. It grossed $356,582. (To compare, The Celluloid Closet grossed $1.4 million in 1996.) More than a year ago they announced a movie about Anita Bryant, starring Uma Thurman, which does not appear to have begun production. In December, for World Aids Day, HBO aired their new short The Battle of amfAR. In February, TCM screened their 90-minute special offering an inside look at the Oscars. Masters of the documentary, Epstein and Friedman have written a how-to book called The Art of Nonfiction Movie Making.

Auspicious from the start, in 1985, Joseph Olshan saw his first novel Clara's Heart win the London Times/Jonathan Cape Young Writers Competition, get great reviews, and three years later become a movie starring Whoopi Goldberg as a Jamaican housekeeper in Rye, New York who transforms a boy's life. In 1994, he published his best-known gay novel Nightswimmer, the story of Will Kaplan's struggles to reconnect with life, and a new boyfriend, a decade after his partner Chad either drowned or intentionally disappeared. In 2008 he released his eighth novel, The Conversion, again about a gay man untangling memory and doubt in the aftermath of his lover's death (this time in Paris and Tuscany, an American translator mourning a famous older poet). Yet again Olshan earned impressive reviews comparing his work to that of Graham Greene and Andre Aciman. His most recent book Cloudland is a mystery inspired by the real, unsolved serial murders of six women in the Connecticut River valley of New Hampshire and Vermont, where he lives. His work has been translated into sixteen languages.

Born March 5: Matt Lucas, Pier Paolo Pasolini

In fact, the only gay in the village lives in West Hollywood with Rebel Wilson and plays Derrick on her show Super Fun Night. Eight years after Little Britain, Matt Lucas has been Tweedledee and Tweedledum in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, Benny in Gnomeo and Juliet, and Kristen Wiig's roommate in Bridesmaids. He and longtime collaborator David Walliams reteamed for a BBC mocumentary called Come Fly with Me and more recently he guested on Community and Portlandia. In December 2006 Lucas and Kevin McGee, his partner of four years, celebrated their civil partnership with an over-the-top ceremony at which the elaborately costumed guests included Elton and David, Neil Tennant, Courtney Love, Graham Norton, Stephen Gately, Will Young, and novelist Ben Elton. Within two years they divorced and ten months later Kevin killed himself. Today, Matt is forty.

Poet, philosopher, novelist, newspaper columnist, playwright, painter, actor, and atheist, Pier Paolo Pasolini was also a communist until he was kicked out of the party in 1949 for being gay, which they discovered when he was charged with corrupting minors and obscene acts in public. He was twenty-seven and he was not convicted, but he had to leave their small town northwest of Trieste. With his mother he moved to Rome. Enduring difficult years being unemployed or underemployed, he published his first important collection of poems in 1954, followed the next year by his first novel, Ragazzi di vita [Boys of Life], which caused a sensation for its raw look at the aimless lives of petty criminals and sometimes hustlers in Rome's roughest neighborhoods.

In 1957 he helped write Fellini's Nights of Cabiria, and three years after that he landed his debut acting role. The following year, 1961, he directed Accattone, the first of his twenty films. In Teorema, Terrence Stamp plays a stranger who moves in with family in Milan and one by one has sex with everyone: the religious maid, the artistic son, the frigid mother, the wallflower daughter, and lastly the father, then leaves and they all fall apart. That was an original screenplay, but many of his later and most celebrated films were adaptations of classics, often infused with nudity and sex: Oedipus Rex, Medea (starring Maria Callas, not singing), The Decameron, Canterbury Tales, Arabian Nights, and 120 Days of Sodom. Several of his movies featured Ninetto Davoli, his boyfriend since 1963 when he was fifteen.

Throughout the summer of 1975, as he was trying to complete his version of de Sade, Pasolini warned friends he would be killed by the mafia. In November, he picked up a seventeen year-old hustler and was murdered by being run over by his own car. In 2005, the hustler recanted his confession and said three men with Southern Italian accents killed Pasolini. Key details of the crime make it seem impossible to have been perpetrated by a lone person. A longtime friend, the artist Giuseppe Zigaina, is just one of many who believes the always theatrical, always contrarian Pasolini organized his own death. He was fifty-three. Forty-one years after its release, 120 Days of Sodom was named by Time Out's Film Guide as cinema's all-time most controversial film. Steve N. says you must experience Anna Magnani in Mamma Roma.

Disney Cuts Boy Scouts, NBA Funds Gay Groups, Mayors Won't March

Since he signed with the Nets, Jason Collins' jersey has been the top seller at NBA.com. He chose number 98 to honor Matthew Shepard who was killed in 1998. Last week in Denver to play the Nuggets, he finally met Judy, Dennis, and Logan Shepard. The NBA announced they are donating the profits from sales of Collins' jersey to GLSEN and the Matthew Shepard Foundation.

Time: "The Walt Disney Company announced Saturday it would withdraw funding from the Boy Scouts of America beginning in 2015 unless the scouting organization overturns a policy banning gay leaders."

New York and Boston mayors refuse to march in St. Patrick's Day parades that exclude lgbt people. Bill de Blasio did appear in yesterday's Queens inclusive parade. No word yet if the first compromise in twenty years from the Boston bigots -- who now say they will allow gay vets to march in the military section -- is enough to get Martin Walsh in step.

George Will appeared on Fox to discuss Arizona SB1062 and offer his view that the victims are the bullies: "...This too must be said: It's a funny kind of sore winner in the gay rights movement that would say, 'A photographer doesn't want to photograph my wedding -- I've got lots of other photographers I could go to, but I'm going to use the hammer of government to force them to do this.'... It's not neighborly and it's not nice. The gay rights movement is winning. They should be, as I say, not sore winners."

Tennessee! Truman! Gore! Famous! Members! and Entourages!

After oodles of splashy, breathless bios Darwin Porter uncaps his purple pen for Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of Their Entourages [Kindle]. Some smouldering tidbit maybe about the Kennedys -- oh this, Jackie + Nureyev! and Nureyev + Bobby! -- has already been picked up by the Globe. No, not the Boston Globe. The trashy tabloid.

Earlier titles from the well-oiled Porter machine include:

• Brando Unzipped: Marlon Brando: Bad Boy, Megastar, Sexual Outlaw
• Merv Griffin: A Life in the Closet
• Hollywood's Silent Closet: The Lusty Saga of America's First Star F*#%er
• Frank Sinatra, The Boudoir Singer: All the Gossip Unfit to Print from the Glory Days of Ol' Blue Eyes
• Paul Newman, The Man Behind the Baby Blues: His Secret Life Exposed
• J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson: Investigating the Sexual Secrets of America's Most Famous Men and Women
• Steve McQueen, King of Cool: Tales of a Lurid Life
• Elizabeth Taylor: There is Nothing Like a Dame
• Marilyn At Rainbow's End: Sex, Lies, Murder, and the Great Cover-up 
• Damn You, Scarlett O'Hara: The Private Lives of Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier
• Inside Linda Lovelace's Deep Throat: Degradation, Porno Chic, and the Rise of Feminism
• Those Glamorous Gabors: Bombshells from Budapest

Born February 10: Bill Tilden

Tilden [left] with Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Manuel Alonso

Although he disliked sports growing up in Philadelphia and didn't make the team on his first try at Penn, Bill Tilden became a tennis legend, easily the sports' greatest player in his lifetime and as famous nationally as Babe Ruth. In 1920 he was the first American to win a Wimbledon singles championship, and he won the US singles seven times, doubles five times, and mixed doubles four times. A feat that has never been matched is Tilden's leading the US team to seven consecutive Davis Cup championships. He finally turned pro in 1931 and earned half a million dollars in six years. The never-married Tilden's homosexuality was an open secret, as was his preference for teenagers. He traveled with his own ball boys. As he aged he is said to have become more brazen about those relations; or maybe he wasn't more obvious, maybe people were simply less inclined to look the other way once he was a has-been.

In November 1946 he and a fourteen year-old hustler were parked in Beverly Hills when a policeman saw them and arrested Tilden. Although he wrongly believed his status and celebrity friendships with the likes of Charlie Chaplin would protect him, he was only charged with a misdemeanor (contributing to delinquency) rather than a felony (lewd and lascivious with a minor). He was sentenced to a year in jail and served seven months. In January 1949 Tilden picked up a sixteen year old hitchhiker and did it again. Again he could have faced felony charges but was only charged with violating his probation. Again he was sentenced to a year in prison and served ten months.

Within months of his second release, in 1950 AP conducted a nationwide poll of sportswriters to determine the greatest athletes of the half-century in each sport. Overwhelmingly they voted the twice disgraced Tilden #1 in tennis, by a wider margin than any other athlete earned. He was increasingly, though not entirely, shunned on the country club circuit. 

Tilden died at sixty in 1953 with a net worth of $88.13. He had squandered his fortune investing in bad Broadway shows, some of which he starred in. He also wrote popular tennis manuals, and some unsuccessful novels, though his most enduring spot in literature is his cameo in Lolita. Contrasting Humbert Humbert's heterosexual underage love is a gay former star "with a harem of ball boys" whose name is Ned Litam. Typical of Nabokov's endless wordplay, spelled backwards that's Ma Tilden. In nonfiction, he is the pivotal coach in Marshall Fisher's riveting A Terrible Splendor [Kindle] about the 1937 Davis Cup match between straight American Don Budge and queer German Gottfried von Cramm.

Born January 27: Ethan Mordden

Best known for writing on opera, his six-volume study of Broadway musicals, and his five-book Buddies cycle following a group of gay characters -- I've a Feeling We're Not In Kansas Anymore, Buddies, Everbody Loves You, Some Men Are Lookers, and How's Your Romance? --  the unstoppable Ethan Mordden also offers all-in-one versions covering much the same ground: last year's Anything Goes: A History of American Musical Theatre [Kindle] and his earlier sweeping novel of the emergence of gay America over four decades, How Long Has This Been Going On? PW raved about his

"...masterfully crafted pages. Beginning in L.A. in 1949 and concluding at New York City's 1991 Gay Pride Parade (with interim stops in San Francisco, rural New Hampshire and small-town Minnesota), this singular work chronicles gay consciousness with trenchant humor, editorial observations tinged with a soupcon of cynicism and scenes of often devastating emotional impact. Mordden pulls no punches as he presents a compelling assortment of quirky characters who connect, disconnect and reconnect in a constantly affecting game of musical lives. Bitter and sweet, it's all here: the barely opened closets of the 1950s, the 1969 Stonewall riots, the growing prominence of San Francisco as a gay capital and, of course, the coming of AIDS. Evocative descriptions make appropriate, occasionally campy, references to pop culture , while comic and poignant passages commingle throughout the detail-packed narrative... an astonishing scope... achingly real... stunning work."

A former regular contributor to The New Yorker, he says his favorite of his novels is The Venice Adriana, whose heroine is an opera diva much like Callas. His most recent gay fiction is The Passionate Attention of an Interesting Man [Kindle]. Among his many, many other books are A Guide to Orchestral Music: The Handbook for Non-Musicians, The Hollywood Studios, Ziegfeld: The Man Who Invented Show Business and Love Song: The Lives of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya.

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.

Today in Gay Hollywood News

 

Laura Linney, 49, had a surprise baby and named it Bennett Armistead Schauer, just in time for Tuesday's release of the final Tales of the City novel, The Days of Anna Madrigal.

Salon says, No, Hollywood’s not post-queer: The complicated politics of coming out with a discussion about Ian McKellen "outing" Lee Pace (L) and Luke Evans (R). The quotes are needed because in 2002 Luke identified himself as a gay man saying he'd never hidden it, and in 2004 he told the media his career had never suffered for being out and explained to the Advocate what he looks for in porn is "an enormous big fat c--k!" Surprise! Now that he's franchise meat in Fast & Furious 6 and The Crow reboot, Luke is suddenly silent about his sexuality and does not dispute planted stories about his girlfriend Holly Goodchild and their possible wedding. Lee Pace has always been mum about his orientation.

Of Dallas Buyers Club, Slate asks, Was the Real Ron Woodruff Bisexual? 

(Sadly, today Slate also has to ask, Why Do So Many Gay People Smoke?, citing new stats that put the rate of queer smoking 68% higher than the general US population's.)

Critics slammed Jared Leto and Matthew McConaughey for not mentioning aids in their Golden Globes speeches Sunday night. Thursday morning in their statements on their Oscar nominations they did, and Thursday afternoon, a terrified-looking Leto opened his thank yous at the dreary Critics Choice Awards by dedicating his win to people living with hiv. Tonight, they're both up for SAG awards.

Tomorrow night at the Producers Guild Awards, Dallas Buyers Club, Behind the Candelabra, and Modern Family again compete for top honors.

Your daily schadenfreude: After its honking antigay flap, Duck Dynasty's season 5 premiere viewership plummeted DOWN 28% from the season 4 premiere.

Born January 18: Maulik Pancholy, Cary Grant

Having played Jack Donaghy's jealous, lovesick, quasi-closeted assistant Jonathan on 64 of 30 Rock's 138 episodes, Maulik Pancholy came out in November and nine days ago tweeted this photo of his engagement to his longtime boyfriend Ryan Corvaia at the Taj Mahal. Maulik also played Sanjay in 26 of Weeds' 102 episodes, the bisexual Neal on 22 episodes of Whitney, and voices the straight-A neighbor Baljeet Tjinder in nearly all episodes of Phineas and Ferb, the Disney Channel's longest running series. Today he's 40.

 

Cary Grant and Randolph Scott met on the set of Hot Saturday and soon began living together in a house nicknamed Bachelor Hall, which they would share for twelve years, 1932-1944. Their affair has always been spun, desperately, as two stars who lived together merely because both were "tightwads." During that time, 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 talked 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 to sue for libel. (He sued Chevy Chase for saying, "What a gal!") 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. Nevertheless, mainstream media continues to portray Grant as the apex of hetero elegance. His fifth and final wife was 47 years his junior. Born Archibald Leach in Bristol, England he died at 82 in Davenport, Iowa in 1986 rehearsing his one-man show.

Born January 14: Yukio Mishima, Cecil Beaton

Brilliant writer and fascist militant nut, Yukio Mishima published forty novels, many collections of stories and essays, and was thrice nominated for the Nobel Prize before, at 45, launching a deranged coup attempt against the Japanese government with four other men immediately after which he and another committed ritual suicide. Mishima wrote his first book in his early twenties and became a celebrity at 24 with his bestselling second novel, the autobiographical gay conformity story Confessions of a Mask. While that book chronicled a solitary experience, bigger shocks awaited in his novel Forbidden Colors exploring Tokyo's vast gay subculture. In dreaming of an all male world it also gave voice to Mishima's misogyny and gave rise to his dedication to a hyper-masculine ideal of beauty, starting with himself. He detested intellectuals' emphasis on the mind, instead espousing a life of physicality, muscle, and action, which led to increased scenes of sadomasochism and gay rape in his fiction and greater vanity in his life. On a hardcore workout regimen, he began posing nude for gay photographers and acting in movies. Highlights of his prolific output are The Sound of Waves, a hetero love story so popular it's been filmed five times; The Temple of the Golden Pavilion; The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea; and his Sea of Fertility tetralogy beginning with Spring Snow. In 1998 Jiro Fukushima published a book about his affair with Mishima and Mishima's son and daughter successfully sued him for invasion of privacy and copyright violation for quoting their father's letters to him.

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 in drag: To be exact, George "Dadie" Rylands, a Cambridge Fellow for 72 years, was costumed as 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 of 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.

Versatile in his talents, Beaton also 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 long 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. He had 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.

Click here, to re-read Sandy Leonard's immortal Beaton/Coral Browne memory.

Born January 3: Dorothy Arzner

In 1929, when Paramount wanted to make their first talking picture, The Wild Party starring Clara Bow, who did they trust to direct it? The prolific Dorothy Arzner, who in the preceding two years had completed four features. Usually seen wearing men's shirts, suits, and neckties, Arzner was open about being a lesbian. In 1930 she made no secret of the choreographer Marion Morgan moving in with her, a relationship that would last more than four decades. Although Arzner's 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 (shown together above on the set of The Bride Wore Red.) In 1936 Arzner became the first woman to join the Directors Guild of America, which finally honored her work in 1975, four years before her death. Women in Film gives a directing award named for her. Judith Mayne's 1995 book Directed by Dorothy Arzner examines her life and work through a feminist, lesbian perspective.

Firefly: Novel of Noël Coward's Final Days in Jamaica

In 156 pages Janette Jenkins imagines Noel Coward's last weeks at his Jamaican retreat, blending his final decline with memories of his entire life, including his many gay affairs and his decades-long relationship with actor Graham Payn. Appearing in the UK last summer to strong reviews, Firefly [Kindle] has yet to take off in the US after October's soft release. In a group review, the NYT called it "beautifully observed... moving drama." Writing for The Telegraph Mark Sanderson said,

"As he floats in his turquoise pool, dreams and memories waft him into the past, where he rubs shoulders with Dietrich, Garland and Olivier. From the window of his London flat he is transported back by the sight of a passer-by blowing suggestively on a hot chip. Thus two worlds collide: glamorous Hollywood and the amorous homosexual underground. There are many brief encounters.

"Nevertheless, Coward tries, as always, to maintain appearances and to put on a good performance. Lord Mountbatten described Coward as fourteen men in one, and Jenkins shows all the facets of this supremely multitalented man. 'The Master' – 'Jack of all trades; master of none' – is by turns witty, charming, kind, querulous, proud, dithering and distressed. This portrait reveals him to be delightful to know and frightful to live with – which is probably why no one does. Loneliness is the price he pays for splendid isolation.

"The result is not depressing, though Scenes of camp comedy relieve the encroaching darkness. One in which Coward mercilessly teases a Daily Express reporter... is hilarious.

"Jenkins evokes the early Seventies with aplomb. She also proves a virtuoso ventriloquist. To cover so much ground in so few words, to bring back such a big personality with such brevity, is no mean feat. Fireflyshimmers with the all the passion and transience of life."

After reading the novel, go back to Cowards' diaries or his letters or Payn's memoir My Life with Noel Coward [Kindle].

Born November 23: Bruce Vilanch

Listen to Bette Midler: "Bruce was the first man to put something in my mouth that made us both money." She and Vilanch began working together in 1970 after she read his Chicago Tribune review of her show saying she needed more jokes. She called him and said, So write me some jokes. Thirty-eight years later, in 2008, he co-wrote her Caesars Palace gig The Showgirl Must Go On. The Oscars' head writer and New Hollywood Squares star has won six Emmys. He's also created comic material for Richard Pryor, Joan Rivers, Lily Tomlin, Diana Ross, David Letterman, Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, Florence Henderson, and, recently, Tab Hunter. Vilanch has punched up many, many Hollywood scripts, including films that don't immediately seem to bear his razor humor, and he has acted in Mahogany, Ice Pirates, and The Morning After. He's also starred 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 A-list love explosion Get Bruce! and appears in Laughing Matters. Beyond being funny, Vilanch has been a tireless supporter of many aids and gay rights causes and appears in Christopher Hines' documentary about gay body image, The Adonis Factor [watch now]. 

Naming him to this year's Out 100 list, the magazine mentions his "upcoming memoir." Until then, get Bruce!: My Adventures in the Skin Trade and Other Essays.

1,000-Page Stanwyck Bio "Does Not Explore Issues of Personal Sexuality"

Why are critics giving Victoria Wilson a pass for degaying A Life of Barbara Stanwyck [Kindle]? Is it because she's an editor at Knopf? Or is it because they know diehard fans don't like their icons outed? At 1,044 pages this volume covers only half of the closeted actress's life and apparently avoids her orientation altogether. The very, very exhaustive index lacks entries for sexuality, homosexuality, lesbian, gay, or rumors, and the NYT critic hurries past the colossal implications in noting, "Ms. Wilson does not explore issues of personal sexuality. What she does tackle is the outrageous ways in which sexual stereotypes were marketed to pitch movies." 

In a long interview, Lara Fowler asked if Stanwyck's second marriage to Robert Taylor was to cover up their mutual homosexualities and Wilson only denies Taylor's queerness... with the "proof" of Harry Hay's word. [As Mattachine founder and fiery Communist, Hay possibly was not welcome in all Hollywood circles. Stanwyck was an ice-cold conservative.] Wilson said, with appalling nerve if the NYT is accurate that her book avoids personal sexuality,:

"I had one ambition for my biography of Barbara Stanwyck, and that was to write a book that reflected the truth about my subject and her world, regardless of what it was. I have written quite detailed portraits of Stanwyck’s two marriages; the first to Frank Fay; the second to Robert Taylor. Each marriage was complex and came about because of complex reasons – and stayed in tact because of equally complicated reasons; neither marriage came about because of homosexuality. I asked many people who would have a somewhat informed inkling about Robert Taylor’s sexuality, people who knew him at the time, or would have heard about the (then, of necessity) underground truth of his sexuality and nowhere did I come across any hint of his being gay, including interviewing Harry Hay, founder in 1950 of the Mattachine Society. If anyone would have known, or heard about the truth of Taylor’s sexuality over the years, it would have been Harry Hay. . ."

For a more honest look, get William Mann's Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969 or Boze Hadleigh's Hollywood Lesbians.

Universal Folds Gay-Friendly Focus Features, Schamus Departs

     

Hideous news for art house lovers: In a terrible corporate reorg, Universal has folded the gay-friendly powerhouse Focus Features into the commercial unit Film District and replaced arty James Schamus with ex-Sony exec Peter Schlessel. They are closing the New York office and will run operations from Los Angeles. As of January 2014, all their movies are to be released under the Film District banner.

A few of my all-time favorites from Focus: Billy Elliot, Being John Malkovich, Traffic, Topsy-Turvy, In the Mood for Love, 8 Women, Gosford Park, Lost in Translation, Far from Heaven, Brokeback Mountain, Atonement, Milk, and The Kids Are All Right.

Film District began releasing crap in April 2011. Their six most recent are: Insidious 2, Evil Dead, Olympus Has Fallen, Dead Man Down, Parker, and the rom-com flop Playing for Keeps. They did release Drive, Looper, and Safety Not Guaranteed but nothing smart since 2012 and nothing gay, ever.

Of course Schamus oversaw the degayed ad campaigns for Brokeback and Milk then ludicrously denied they were degayed, but that seems minor compared to today's annihilation.

Schamus is leaving the company to co-produce longtime cohort Ang Lee's 3D boxing movie. Next month, Focus releases another gay Oscar contender, Dallas Buyers Club.

    

Behind the Candelabra Sweeps Emmys

As promised, the Liberace biopic that Hollywood wouldn't release, Behind the Candelabra [now on dvd], has swept the Emmy awards, winning eleven of its fifteen nominations including best movie, best director, best actor, best art direction, best costumes, best makeup, best hair, and many more. 

I thought it was a surprisingly great movie about gay relationships and the imbalances in an older-younger power couple, but I sympathize with viewers upset that a closeted celebrity who did little to nothing to help gay rights and lied about aids is being lionized. That Elton John number was terrible and seemed like any old tune he had sitting around that he suddenly decided to call a tribute song. A song actually inspired by Liberace ought to have some flash: you should hear the capes and the rings and the poodles... and the lost chances and emptiness.

Coming Soon: "The Aids Film No One Wanted To Make"

Premiering next month at the Toronto Film Festival is the true story and certain Oscar nominee, The Dallas Buyers Club, a movie that took twenty years to make because, "It's about a racist homophobe with aids who befriends a man who dresses as a woman. Then they both die." The cowboy-hatted homophobe (played by a super-gaunt Matthew McConaughey, down to 130 pounds) is Ron Woodroof, a hetero Texan electrician and rodeo buff who contracted aids in 1986. With his typical screw-the-bastards attitude, when faced with FDA footdragging, he started smuggling unapproved but life-prolonging drugs in from Mexico. Word got around, and he began helping the gays he hated. Hello, Hollywood.

My question -- will the subtext be that while The Gays helplessly pranced around in high heels it took a Real Man to step up and do something useful, in the time honored tradition of aparthied movies centering on heroic whites and Holocaust movies about noble Catholics -- goes unasked and unanswered in today's big, buzzy L.A. Times profile. But the backstory is rich. First, this was a Woody Harrelson movie directed by Dennis Hopper, then a Brad Pitt movie directed by Marc Forester (which is how they eventually came to make WWZ), then years of nothing, then it was back as a Ryan Gosling movie directed by Craig Gillespie, but the money wasn't there. Enter Matthew McConaughey who in this telling is the movie's saviour. He insisted it get made and started losing weight for the role before they had financing. Auditioning via Skype, in drag, Jared Leto scored the major gay part. The Canadian director wanted Noomi Rapace for the scientist role but the studio said take Jennifer Garner instead. Also on board: Steve Zahn and Griffin Dunne.

While some industry types mocked the long-stalled project as "that feel-good aids movie," the L.A. Times reports "people who've seen 'Dallas Buyers' say it has an arty feel, bypassing many of the Hollywood conventions of uplift while bearing other marks of an auteur piece. It is shot with no added lighting and no score." It opens December 6.

Jean-March Vallée also directed the popular gay coming-of-age movie C.R.A.Z.Y. and the predictably enjoyable historical romance The Young Victoria with Rupert Friend, a campy shrewish perf from the almost-forgotten Miranda Richardson, and a queendom of Oscar-winning costumes.

Born August 13: Jonathan Strong, Herb Ritts

By the time he was twenty-five, Illinois native Jonathan Strong had graduated from Harvard, won a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, had twice won O. Henry awards for his short fiction (including 3rd prize), and published his first book, Tike and Five Stories, winner of the Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. (Rosenthal recipients just prior to his win were Thomas Pynchon and Joyce Carol Oates; soon after him came Thomas McGuane, Alice Walker, and Richard Yates.) In the intervening forty-three years, Strong has published eleven more books. Two recent novels are the just terrific Drawn From Life (2008) and the Lammy finalist Consolation (2010). Both books' protagonists are out gay men, which may or may not contribute to why Strong is not as widely read as he ought to be; or it may simply be the unfair wheel of literary fate. Either way, he is overdue for his Barbara Pym moment of rediscovery. James Morrison offered an excellent survey of Strong's work, "Happiness in a Corner," upon publication of his opera novel More Light in 2011. Strong's Hawkweed and Indian Paintbrush was to be out this spring from a very small press. A longtime lecturer at Tufts, he is happily partnered and lives without the internet or email in Rockport, Massachusetts.

 

A classicist in the tradition of George Platt Lynes or Irving Penn, Herb Ritts' elegance was always overshadowed by his popularity. His friendships with superstars were somehow more newsworthy than his ability to capture the iconic instant and transform mortals into myth. Those friendships began early; he grew up in Brentwood, next door to Steve McQueen who on Sundays would take Herb riding on his motorcycle in the desert, and his first break came from shooting his buddy Richard Gere. As much as any other photographer, Ritts defined style for the ten years from 1982 to 1992 on the covers of Vanity Fair, Vogue, Rolling Stone, GQ, as well as in countless ad campaigns, the apex of which was the Marky Mark underwear shoot for Calvin Klein (not nearly as ripped as you remember). Ritts also directed commercials and more than a dozen music videos for Janet, Michael, Mariah, Tina, Toni, Britney, Bon Jovi, Chris Isaak, Tracy Chapman, N Sync, Shakira, JLo, and Madonna, winning two VMAs from MTV. Yet because his subjects were celebrities and supermodels, he was often deemed shallow and superficial. Perhaps in those early years straight critics found it easier to dismiss him rather than confront their discomfort with his work's homoeroticism. Openly gay throughout his career, he was a major force in fundraising for aids groups like Amfar long before it was fashionable. Forthright about his own hiv-positive status, he died of pneumonia at fifty in 2002 and is survived by his partner, Erik Hyman. The subject of a massive solo show last year at LACMA, his work is in the permanent collections of many of the world's best museums including the MFA Boston, the Getty, the Guggenheim, and the National Portrait Gallery in London. For more, read Charles Churchward's Herb Ritts: The Golden Hour: A Photographer's Life and His World.

   

Born July 14: Arthur Laurents

Two-time Tony winner Arthur Laurents died in 2011 at ninety-two. 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-lover 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 the later 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 two memoirs are Original Story By and Mainly on Directing. He and his partner Tom Hatcher lived together fifty-one years, mainly in Quogue, Long Island, until Hatcher's death in 2006. It was Hatcher's idea as he was dying to re-invent West Side Story as a bilingual musical to give Laurents something to do as a new widower. The revival earned four Tony nominations, winning one.