Arts
by Tim Miller
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William J. Mann’s new book Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood is a breath-taking , wide-angle, Panavision examination of how gay people helped form, and were formed by, the movies. Skillfully mixing equal parts kiss-n-tell dish and in-depth cultural history of gay people’s lives, Mann’s book is an enormous achievement of cultural history. Always informed by a soulful love of motion pictures and a real empathy for the gay people who in such major ways created the industry, the author sheds brave, new light on queer Hollywood. Mann describes how he sees these pioneers, “I definitely don’t see these folks as victims, and neither would they have. One of the main points of the book is that virtually no where else in American society at the time did gays and lesbians have the opportunity to live and work with such authority and authenticity, without the need to hide their true selves.“ I caught up with William Mann at his home in Provincetown and we talked about his remarkable new book.
Behind the Screen really turns the table on the old saw that tars the golden age of Hollywood as being the most homophobic place for gay people and charts how the film industry was in fact one of the only businesses where gay people had any agency and authority in the workplace. What was the “deal“ gay people had to make to be allowed that freedom?
To understand the experience of gay people historically you really have to understand the context of the times. Of course the “deal“ you are suggesting is about presenting a public image of heterosexuality in exchange for being allowed to live private authentic gay lives. On the surface, from a 21st century viewpoint, this would seem to be the same old paradigm of the closet.
But bear in mind that in the 1930s and 40s and 50s there was no such construct as an “openly gay or lesbian“ person – at least not in the way we would view, say, Ellen or Harvey Fierstein or Tim Miller today. So therefore there was not the opposing construct of the closet, either. These people of Hollywood’s Golden Age weren’t so much “pretending“ to be straight as they were simply living according to the protocol of the times. Of course the situation was different for movie actors and for people behind the scenes. Someone like Rock Hudson was actively engaged in promoting a heterosexual image for himself– you know, the photo-op dates and then the arranged marriage – where somebody like William Reynolds, a famed film editor, or Henry Grace, a well-known set decorator, didn’t have to go to such lengths.
They each lived very undisguised gay lives, but knew to take women as escorts to the Academy Awards.
The dichotomy and tension of this “deal“ really interested me as I read Behind the Screen. Of course gay people still have to make such deals at work and in the world. I was inspired how you keep pulling these gay people’s lives away from any easy “victim“ trope. What were the ways that Hollywood lied about gay people and what were the ways that perhaps queer folk managed to get Hollywood to tell the truth?
Again, I think it’s important to see the full picture. A gay man might have become a bigwig in, say, the insurance industry, or become a politician, or the CEO of a major corporation. But his sexuality would have needed to have been deeply disguised. Certainly average joes and janes working in most American industries would have had to be very discreet about their gay lives. But in the movie studios, being gay was, in some fields, actually seen as a career advantage. In wardrobe, costume design, and set decoration, for example, gays actually had a degree of hegemony, where the heads of the department were almost always gay and there was no need to obfuscate that fact. Sure, they took dates of the opposite gender to industry functions but they lived with same-sex partners and often were very open about themselves at work. The MGM set decorators would make campy comments over the intercom; costume designers were known for being flamboyant and effeminate. None of this affected their careers. Where would this have been true in any other industry in America? The theater doesn’t fit as a comparison, because it wasn’t run like a middle-class corporation in the way that the Hollywood studios were.
So are you saying that Hollywood didn’t, in fact, lie about gay lives?
There’s a difference between Hollywood the industry and Hollywood the concept, the myth-maker, the shaper of popular culture. Of course Hollywood lied about gay lives. While the studios permitted an extraordinary degree of license in how gay people could live and work, the product that they were all manufacturing – movies – was designed to deny their existence. This is especially true after the enforcement of the Production Code in 1934. The Hollywood product was designed to put forward a white, Christian, heterosexual myth of what America supposedly was. So while allowing their workers to live undisguised gay lives, gay life remained disguised on the screen.
Didn’t that begin to unravel with the end of the studio system and the beginning of modern American moviemaking?
Yes. By the late 1960s and 1970s we began seeing some alternative visions of America and the world on the screen. But interestingly, the images of gay life during these decades were almost entirely pathological and derogatory. Part of the reason for that, I argue, was the lack of an overt gay presence in filmmaking in immediate post-studio Hollywood. The studios, while officially denying the existence of gay life onscreen, had still been havens for undisguised gay creative talent offscreen. So the images that came out of the studios, even if ostensibly heterosexual, could often be seen as queer-affirming and inclusive.
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What were some of these ways that gay people in Hollywood subtly -and sometimes not so subtly- subverted the Hollywood-American heterosexual myth? What reaction did this engender?
Take a look at nearly any of the musicals of MGM’s legendary Freed unit. These are filled with a gay sensibility or alternative worldview. Films like Meet Me in St. Louis or Easter Parade or Kismet or The Pirate or An American in Paris. The Freed films were nearly all produced by Roger Edens, an undisguised gay man. Many were directed by Charles Walters, who was also undisguised in his gayness. There were so many gay people, so much queer talent in the Freed unit – composers, arrangers, writers, designers. Even Vincente Minnelli, who was pretty circumspect and hidden in his gayness, brought a particular queer poetry to his work. The Freed films are filled with alternative worldviews. I believe that it’s important to take a second look at the films of directors like George Cukor, Mitchell Leisen, Dorothy Arzner, and James Whale, seeing them as products of artsits who were gay. Not only gay, of course, for each artist brought a whole life of experience and influences to their work. I don’t mean to be reductive in my analysis. But understanding the way Cukor or Arzner lived in the world does allow us to see their work in particular ways. Arzner never settles for the typical love-and-marriage course for her female protagonists. When her characters have to choose between career or marriage, they usually opt for their former. Gay directors brought their sensibilities into their films in so many ways. Mitchell Leisen eroticized the male form– something rare for those days. James Whale completely challenged the codes of convention. Just look at “Bride of Frankenstein“ – he throws out every cherished heterosexual code. This is true for writers, too: DeWitt Bodeen’s “Cat People,“ for example, can be read as a parable of queer desire and alienation.
You have a finely-tuned eye for the breadth of lesbian and gay experience in Hollywood. You pay attention not only to the stars, but also to the designers, press agents, screenwriters, set decorators etc. What did you discover by taking this wide view?
That you must never generalize. Just as gays had near-hegemony in wardrobe and set decoration, they were de facto prohibited from jobs as cameramen or in the other technical fields. Of course, there may well have been gays in those positions, but not overt gays, and it’s only the overt gays who are revealed to us through history. I discovered that certain fields were considered “male“ – like cinematography – and so both women and overt gay men were kept out. This changed when the studio structure was broken apart, and by the late 1960s we see gay men and women both gay and straight popping up in fields previously denied them. I was also struck by how many gays and lesbians were publicists during Hollywood’s golden age. It makes sense: gays have experience with telling the truth without telling all of it. It’s actually a fascinating irony that the myth and magic of Hollywood has, in large part, been spun by gay men and lesbians themselves.
The book must have been a daunting research challenge. How did you manage to uncover these hidden histories?
Writing gay histories requires reevaluating old rules of evidence. I went through thousands of obituaries in Variety to come up with a preliminary list of names – the ones who left “no survivors,“ the “lifelong bachelors,“ and so on. Then I embarked on a massive series of interviews with survivors of the era. I also went through records not usually used in film history research. Census records told me who was living with who, probate records revealed who estates and gifts were left to. I was fortunate to find a few unpublished manuscripts and considerable old correspondence. I know a lot of these figures – most of whom are deceased – would not have felt comfortable talking about their gay lives on the record, but in many cases their surviving partners were younger than they were and so had “moved with the times,“ so to speak. They were usually glad to share their recollections. They felt the need to preserve, to document the stories. I’ll never forget legendary costume designer Miles White telling me he was so glad gay Hollywood was finally being put on the record. “It’s time,“ he said.
You write that the “burden of proof“ is much higher for homosexuality than it is for heterosexuality. Can you give me an example of how that could hamper the research?
This is perhaps the most frustrating aspect of writing gay history. You can’t just tell the story of the experience the way you can in African-American history or women’s history. You’re constantly being stopped and asked to justify yourself, to prove how you “know“ so-and-so is gay. Of course you have to be precise and responsible in who you embrace in a study like this, but no one’s ever asked for “proof“ that Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy were lovers. Most people I’ve interviewed have insisted, in fact, that their relationship was devoted but platonic, at least for most of its duration. But writers have long written about it as a fairy-tale romance. Meanwhile, some still get all bent out of shape if you suggest that Cary Grant and Randolph Scott were lovers. I know over the last few years there has been a spate of unwarranted labeling of historical figures as gay. But too many writers refuse to even consider stories of gay experience in their subjects’ lives because there is no “proof.“ I feel that allowing for the possibility that people have always been multi-faceted human beings with limitless opportunity for experience and identity is the most responsible course for a biographer or historian. For this study, I chose not to try to do the impossible – to prove who had genital contact with whom – and instead I looked at the “homosocial“ nature of these people’s lives. For, in truth, I was more interested in the wider gay experience in the studios– not whether a certain actor occasionally picked up male hitch hikers for sex.
It must have been both inspiring and harrowing to explore this lesbian and gay cultural history. What did you learn from these contradictions and collaborations that gay people experienced working in Hollywood?
I came away with a real respect for these people. Long before the modern gay movement and before there existed public role models on “how to be gay,“ these people lived and worked in an extraordinary environment in which they not only helped shaped popular culture but also were creating gay communities for themselves. To say they were doing so consciously or intentionally is to overstate the truth. But still, for the most part, they lived lives that were striking in their authenticity and honesty – especially the behind-the-scenes people, but also some stars, like William Haines and Marlene Dietrich and Clifton Webb. Character players, too, lived far more openly than movie stars of today, people like Patsy Kelly and Franklin Pangborn. Few elsewhere at the time had such freedom. I was also struck by the power of the course of history. We are so much the product of our times. The 1920s allowed for cultural experimentation and challenge, and the World War II years offered a chance for gay people to find each other and begin shaping a public identity. But the 1930s and 1950s were culturally repressive eras, and this is reflected in the stories I tell in the book. My hope is that Behind the Screen helps illuminate a very rich and ever-changing history – not only for gay men and lesbians, but for the study of film and popular culture as well.
Tim Miller is a solo performer and the author of Shirts & Skin, published by Alyson. He can be reached at http://hometown.aol.com/millertale/timmiller.html