Hooray for Hollywood Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969 by William J. Mann

For anyone who thinks Hollywood’s gay history started with Rock Hudson, William J. Mann’s delicious tinseltown tell-all Behind the Screen will open your eyes and drop your jaw. And even for those of you who know more gay movie trivia than a Celluloid Closet edition of Jeopardy, this non-fiction shocker will put a sprightly step into those ruby-sequined pumps. In your dreams, Oz on the Pacific was never like this . . . and won’t be forever after, either.

I mean, who knew? Okay, we’ve all heard about bisexual screen goddesses Garbo and Dietrich and their on-again/off-again affairs with that scary lesbian Svengali Mercedes de Acosta. We assumed top MGM designer Adrian was gay. Just look at those wacky costumes for The Women and the fact that he was married to little gay Janet Gaynor, who palled around the Brazilian jungle with her longtime honey, none other than Peter Pan herself, Mary Martin. We’ve known for years that Cary Grant and Randolph Scott played house in seaside Malibu; and that "women’s director" George Cukor used his casting couch exclusively for his pool boys; and that RKO director Dorothy Arzner was more butch than any of her studio colleagues. We’ve read all about sad director James Whale, who gave an outsider’s view and very gay reading to Bride of Frankenstein and Invisible Man and was himself the subject of Bill Condon’s Academy Award-winning 1998 Gods and Monsters. But it’s Mann who surprisingly documents Whale’s longtime loving partnership with MGM producer David Lewis.

Some Hollywood tales have been well-known and twice-told, but Mann unspools some real goodies. Employing exhaustive research into private correspondence, newspaper obits and death certificates (that tell-tale "never married"), police blotters, census records (who lived with whom), and interviews with friends and associates, Mann unearths a gay history of Hollywood that asks not who was, but ... was there anybody who wasn’t?!

From its very beginnings, Hollywood was a bastion for the outsider seeking acceptance and a refuge from small-town small-mindedness. It was wide-open territory and mostly forgiving of one’s sexual tastes, even those who flaunted them wildly, like Billy Haines, superstar deluxe at MGM in the late ’20s and subject of Mann’s fabulously detailed biography Wisecracker. The studios promoted image above all. So although stars who didn’t marry under a mogul’s edict had a rough time of it, as long as they were willing to date their supposed heterosexual honeys for the publicity shots, they could (and did) do as they wished out of the camera’s watchful eye. And aside from the stars, countless others in all areas of film production lived fulfilling lives together, out in the open clear California air. This is the amazing story Mann spins to his great credit.

We might snicker, knowing that of course some costumers and set decorators would emerge in the lavender ranks–but all of them? Adrian at MGM; Howard Greer and radiant Travis Banton at Paramount; Charles LeMaire at Fox; Orry-Kelly and Milo Anderson at Warners; Ernst Dryden at Selznick; Robert Kalloch at Columbia; Walter Plunkett at RKO. Although the movies’ golden-age set designers were mostly straight (Mann’s rather feeble explanation is that they came from technical schools, which tended to squash artistic impulse), the set decorators such as Howard Grace, Mitchell Leisen, Edwin Willis, Jack Moore, Sam Comer, et al., were family.

Producers were gay. Directors were gay. Writers were gay. Costumers and set decorators were gay. Film editors were gay. Publicists and fan magazine writers were gay. Agents were gay. All the supporting actors who portrayed onscreen sissies (Eric Blore, Edward Everett Horton, Franklin Pangborn) were real-life sissies. Even when historic social forces whipped up antigay whirlwinds (the late ’20s were especially virulent, leading directly to the damnable Production Code), for the most part gays in Hollywood withstood the stench of bigotry and kept working. Hollywood, USA, like Broadway, was very gay friendly. Blame it on talent.

Mann teases us with other tantalizing tidbits so that we can only hope there’s a sequel. I want to know more about Gable’s early hustling, Jean Arthur’s true story, and the very macho Henry Wilcoxon (Cecil B. DeMille’s discovery and star of Cleopatra and The Crusades) cruising Hollywood Boulevard picking up tricks. There’s no business like show business.