Born On This Day- July 7th... George Cukor

I just am crazy for the scene in one of my favorite films- Gods & Monsters: director James Whale brings his hot gardener stud to a party at George Cukor's home, with Princess Margaret as a honored guest. So well filmed & telling, director Bill Condon claims he shot the budget wad on that scene, but it was worth it.

George Cukor's private life was well known in Hollywood. His Sunday afternoon pool parties were legendary in gay circles, having been described at lurid detail by some of the party guests, including writer John Rechy. His home, decorated by actor-turned interior designer William Haines, was the spot for Hollywood homosexuals to gather. The close knit group included Haines & his partner Jimmie Shields, Alan Ladd, Somerset Maugham, James Vincent, screenwriter Rowland Leigh, costume designers Orry-Kelly & Robert Le Maire, & actors John Darrow, Robert Walker, Anderson Lawler, Robert Seiter & Tom Douglas. Frank Horn- secretary to Cary Grant, was a frequent guest. Cukor & his sophisticated & artistic friends socialized with their boyfriends- often hustlers, rough trade, actor wannabes, or ambitious artists & writers who saw his parties as way into the exclusive Hollywood life.

My favorite anecdote: Hunky, young Forrest Tucker, who was straight, would show up at Cukor's Sunday afternoon parties & swim naked in the pool for the viewing pleasure of Cukor's famous gay guests: W. Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward, Cecil Beaton & other assorted influential gays in the art, literature, & movies. Tucker realized these men were important contacts & was one of many up & coming young studs who were willing to make a naked appearance for the sake of their careers. Among them was handsome, hunk, hairy Aldo Ray, whom Cukor seemed to like well enough to cast him in Pat & Mike& The Marrying Kind with Judy Holliday.

Cukor's personal reputation has suffered somewhat from these anecdotes. Rechy: “Cukor was a catty, sometimes cruel queen who was as gifted at separating his private & public personas as he was at making films.” Yet among his close friends, those important enough to him to have his home filled with their photographs: Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Joan Crawford, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Lauren Bacall & Humphrey Bogart, Claudette Colbert, Marlene Dietrich, Laurence Olivier & Vivien Leigh, Stanley Holloway, Judy Garland, Gene Tierney, Noël Coward, Cole Porter, James Whale, Edith Head, Norma Shearer, Irving Thalberg, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, Aldous Huxley, Ferenc Molnár, Christopher Isherwood & Don Bachardy, & close friend Somerset Maugham.

As a semi-closeted gay artist in Hollywood, one of Cukor's constant themes was how to reconcile a double life, an outsider or artist always at war with his or her own demons & the limits imposed by relationships & society. In other films, there is the meeting of 2 sides. For Cukor this seemed to represent true happiness. In Holiday (1938), Cary Grant rejects his rich, stuffy fiancée in favor of her spinster sister, played by Katharine Hepburn. who turns out to be a dreamer like himself.

Cukor is often given the title. “women’s director”, but he was the 1st to show Cary Grant as a romantic comedian in Sylvia Scarlett, & he launched the careers of Jack Lemmon, Aldo Ray, Tom Ewell & Anthony Perkins as well as Katharine Hepburn & Angela Lansbury. He directed W. C. Fields, Lew Ayres, Spencer Tracy & James Mason to performances that should have won Oscars, & James Stewart, Ronald Colman & Rex Harrison to performances that did. Plus: Max Carey in What Price Hollywood?, John Barrymore in Dinner at Eight, Cary Grant in Holiday& The Philadelphia Story, Ronald Colman in A Double Life, Spencer Tracy in Adam's Rib, & Laurence Olivier in Love Among The Ruins. All these actors discovered new dimensions to their screen personalities under Cukor's smart, shrewd & sympathetic direction.

Among his most personal films: Little Women, The Marrying Kind, Pat & Mike& A Star Is Born. None of them is glossy, & none of them started as theatre.

Cukor usually filmed from the viewpoint of his female main character. This is evident in his Katharine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy romantic comedy Pat & Mike & as it is in more obviously female-centered stories such as Little Women, & Gaslight . His concentration on strong women, along with Clark Gable's "ick factor"over Cukor's homosexuality, were the reasons for the director's firing from Gone With the Wind byproducer David O. Selznick.

All of his life Cukor fought an inferiority complex based on his ugliness, weight & life in an anti-Semitic America. His biggest secret was his active homosexuality. Among the major directors of the golden years of Hollywood, only he & James Whale were, more or less, basically openly gay. He died in 1983, 2 years after his last film- Rich & Famous. Cukor is buried in an unmarked grave at Forest Lawn Memorial Cemetery.

My favorite Cukor Film: Philadelphia Story. My Favorite Cukor moment: Cary Grant's speech on kindness to haughty Katherine Hepburn as haughty Tracy Lord.

What is your favorite Cukor moment? I really want to know.

Kate Was Great... Considering Katharine Hepburn On Her Birthday- May 12th

Post Apocalyptic Bohemian favorite writer- Gore Vidal vouches for his buddy- Scotty Bowers, who claims that he set Katharine Hepburn up “with over 150 different women” in his dishy, juicy book- Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood & the Secret Sex Lives of Stars, which I read in 2 sittings back in February.

Vidal flew in to L.A. to be part the book’s release event. He wanted to assure attendees that Bowers is totally telling the truth. In a speech, he told partygoers he’s never caught Bowers in a lie in the 60+ years he’s known him, noting that in L.A. “you can meet 1,000 liars a day". I think there is a difference between never catching someone in a lie as opposed someone has never told a lie, but I will take Vidal & Bowers at their word: Katharine Hepburn was a very sexually active lesbian. That closet door is now open.

If you don’t want to go with Bower’s version, try noted film historian- William J. Mann's Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn, published in 2004.  Mann tells that the epic romance of Katharine Hepburn & Spencer Tracy was a fable cultivated by Hepburn to hide their bisexuality. The pair of stars were sexually complicated screen legends that had an enduring companionship but were only briefly passionate & never lived together intimately.

Hepburn fostered the belief that she & Tracy could never marry because he was a devout Catholic committed to Louise Treadwell, his wife of 43 years & mother of their deaf child. Mann used documents & interviews with people who wouldn't talk while Hepburn was alive. & 8 years before Bower’s book, Mann insists that it was at gay director George Cukor's estate that he met a Hollywood hustler identified as "Scotty," a mechanic who staffed his gas station with "handsome young bucks, just home from the war" who for $20 were "happy to wash their hands (or not) & take a trip with a client to the back room."

Mann writes that Scotty related: "Tracy would always be drinking when I arrived. He'd get so loaded. He'd sit there at the table drinking from five o'clock in the afternoon until two in the morning, when he'd fall onto the bed & ask me to join him. ... & in the morning he'd act like nothing happened."

According to Mann, Hepburn's notorious relationship with American Express heiress Laura Harding wasn't "lesbian," but it sure was sexual. Mann: "Hepburn admitted as much to friends like James Prideaux, cutting him off with a shrill 'Of course!' when he asked about Harding ... as if the subject were simply too obvious & boring to belabor."

There is a famous story about the making of the film adaptation of Tennessee William's notorious Suddenly, Last Summer that starred Elizabeth Taylor,  the very gay Montgomery Clift & Katharine Hepburn. Hepburn, as Violet Venable was so obsessed with her dead son, Sebastian, that she wants to have her niece, played by Taylor lobotomized rather than have it revealed that he was homosexual. 

Apparently Hepburn was clueless that this was a film about homosexual lust & the director, Joseph Mankiewicz, & screenwriter- the very gay Gore Vidal, had to explain it to her. Meanwhile, she nailed the role as the disturbed, evilly controlling mother. 

This anecdote works against the image of independent, smart Hepburn, the Connecticut feminist Yankee who supposedly seduced Hollywood’s leading men- Spencer Tracy, Gary Grant, Humphrey Bogart & James Stewart.  In her real life, Hepburn followed in the footsteps of her mother who pioneered reproductive freedoms & the right of American women to vote.

  

In the 1930s, where of the strict studio system made & crushed careers, Hepburn challenged studio execs & made it work for her. She grew as a businesswoman, commanding salaries & negotiating roles at a time when it was just not done.  She was a symbol of a true American original who could accomplish anything.

Hepburn's career spanned decades & her range was legendary, even while her roles were always secondary to her own personality.

Was there ever a gayer film than the1937 camp classic- Stagedoor in which Hepburn perfected the screen ingenue, uttering the line: "The calla lillies are in bloom again."  Cast opposite Gay Icons Eve Arden, Lucille Ball, Ann Miller, & Ginger Rogers, she played it broadly & autobiographically, as the daughter of a wealthy businessman who wants a career in the theater with no prior training. It remains a favorite Hepburn performance at Post Apocalyptic Bohemia,

Hepburn excelled in screwball comedies like Bringing Up Baby with bi-sexual Carey Grant who uttered the famous line: "I’ve turned gay all of the sudden!" For gay audiences, Hepburn inadvertently developed an androgynous image in such roles as the cross-dressing Sylvia Scarlet.

After being victimized by studio mouthpieces & being branded "box office poison" by the press, Hepburn refused to be ignored.  She starred on Broadway in Philip Barry‘s The Philadelphia Story, purchasing the rights to star in the film. More than any other actress of the period, Hepburn controlled her own career. 

In the 1940s & 1950s, Hepburn launched a classical stage & film career, transitioning beautifully, at a time in her career when most stars would retreat to predictable vehicles that would showcase them.  Among other things, she tackled Shakespeare onstage while in her 50s, at the same time becoming the first lady of American cinema, eventually nominated for 12 Best Actress Oscars & winning 4 times, a record.

She bravely stood with her colleagues Humphrey Bogart & Lauren Bacall during the trials of the Hollywood 10, screenwriters, actors & directors called before the Senator Joseph McCarthy's House on Un-American Activities Committee in protest of their unconstitutional Senate investigations, without risk of guilt by association. Hepburn made The African Queen (which is not about Ru-Paul) with Bogart.

 

Hepburn is a Gay Icon. She was a tough-minded authority as a liberal thinker. Gay men & lesbians love her equally, if for different reasons, & even if she didn't acknowledge he won gayness, it is impossible to ignore Hepburn’s impact on Gay culture, Gay minds & Gay hearts. Hepburn was Fierce.

I only saw her live once, in L.A. circa 1971, in a mess of a musical- Coco, playing Coco Chanel, with a book & lyrics by Alan J. Lerner & music by Andre Previn, with sets by the very gay Cecil Beaton, choreographed by  the very gay- Michael Bennett, with a  cast that included: René Auberjonois, George Rose, David Holliday, Bob Avian, Jon Cypher, Suzanne Rogers, Graciela Daniele,& Ann Reinking. To prepare for Coco, Hepburn received singing coaching with MGM’s very gay muscial producer Roger Edens. She was simply brilliant & breathtaking in the role. I loved her & ran out to by the cast album. I do a terrific imitation of Hepburn singing the title song. Ask me sometime.

My favorite Hepburn role was in 1975’s Love Among The Ruins with Lawrence Olivier, although I have studied every moment of The Philadelphia Story. The Husband’s choice is The Lion In Winter. What is your favorite Katherine Hepburn performance?

Girl Talk

Lucille Ball in the I Love Lucy episode "The Moustache" (originally aired March 17, 1952)

"When I worked with Katharine Hepburn, decades ago, I was terrified of her -- that voice, her jaw, the whole package. I'm still scared of her!" - Lucille Ball

Katharine Hepburn in Sylvia Scarlett (1935, RKO)

Off to the Races

Lupe Velez in East is West (1930, Universal)

Myrna Loy in The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932, MGM)

Dorothy Lamour (with John Howard) in Disputed Passage (1939, Paramount)

Ona Munson in The Shanghai Gesture (1941, United Artists)

Katharine Hepburn in Dragon Seed (1944, MGM)

Shirley MacLaine in My Geisha (1962, Paramount)

Eleanor Parker (as Marjorie Lawrence) in Interrupted Melody (1955, MGM)

Who's Counting?

"Katharine Hepburn may have had four Oscars, but Walter Brennan had three. The woman's a purseful of mannerisms and gaudy affectation...She doesn't act. She emotes." - Estelle Winwood

Words To Live By

"If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased"
Katharine Hepburn