Born On This Day- June 15th... Simon Callow

He is not Simon Cowell or Stephen Fry. Top drawer character actor of stage & screen, writer & director- Simon Callow is in a large percent of my top favorite films: Amadeus (he was the original Mozart in the play’s stage premier), A Room With A View, Maurice, Howard’s End, Shakespeare In Love, Notting Hill, Angels In America, 4 Weddings & a Funeral . Along with Ian McKellen, Callow is an out gay actor who has successfully made the transition from respected theatre actor to film star. Callow is also prolific writer: 2 volumes of memoirs, 3 volumes of the biography of Orson Welles, Charles Laughton, & Oscar Wilde.

Gay films are few, & most films featuring gay people are “important” films like Philadelphia or Brokeback Mountain, sad & stately affairs, with no true specifically gay sensibility. I tend to like the films with less agenda & where gays are part of the world at large. Callow has a role in what I find to be one of the most important gay themed films- 4 Weddings & a Funeral.  Callow plays Gareth, flamboyant but not camp; he doesn’t fit any stereotype; & he dos not die of AIDS, which during that era was ravaging the gay community. Gareth dies of Scottish dancing.

Callow: “When I read the script, it was immediately evident that this was a new kind of a gay character in films: not sensitive, not intuitive, kind & somehow deeply sad, nor hilarious, bitchy & outrageous, but masculine, exuberant, occasionally offensive, generous & passionate. He was also deeply involved with his partner, the handsome, shy, witty, understated Matthew. In the original screenplay, they were glimpsed at the beginning of the film asleep in bed. In the final cut, the film-makers removed this sequence, in order to allow their relationship to creep up on the audience. They were right to do so: before they knew it, viewers had come to know & love them individually, & were hit hard, first by Gareth's death, then by Matthew's oration ('with a little help from another splendid bugger, WH Auden').”

Callow turns 62 years old today. He is single & lives in London. He will always be Mr. Beeb in A Room With A View to me. Callow is certainly an actor who is more than the sum of his parts.

Born On This Day- June 10th.. Francis Ethel Gumm

How can I come up with a gay connection to Judy Garland? Lets see… her father was gay, 2 of her husbands were gay, the man she hand picked as a husband for her daughter was gay, her gay fans remained her most steadfast fans through the drugs & the booze ups & downs, the fruit of her loins was Liza Minnelli & then there is that little film- The Wizard Of Oz.

42 years after her death, Judy Garland remains the very definition of gay icon. Her failed relationships, her self-doubt, & her battle with substance abuse are aspects of a life that most of us can identify with, while her live performances reflect a truth & freedom that are desired by anyone that has wasted time hiding their own emotions.

Gay culture can't escape Garland's influence. The Stonewall riots have been attributed to the anger & grief felt on Garland's funeral that day. The term- "Friend of Dorothy," is from our identification with Garland's most famous role.

Garland's 1961 concert at Carnegie Hall is a landmark in Show Biz. 2 years earlier, she had been advised to retire from performing after being diagnosed with hepatitis, but instead she took on a series of concerts in Europe & the USA that reestablished her reputation as the top entertainer of all time. The Carnegie Hall show is regarded as the greatest evening in show-business history. The live recording of that concert spent more than a year on the Billboard charts & won 7 Grammys, including Album of the Year.

Last year, my dear friend- WCK3 & I stayed up late into the night watching CDs of her TV show from the early 1960s. I was entranced by her presence & horrified by the histrionics. Sometimes when listening to her recordings, I am off put by the feeling that she sings every single song as if it were her last. Her over the top interpretations of the great standards push me away. But, then I hear her original version or her late in life version of Over The Rainbow & I end up crying. Judy Garland loved her fans & they loved her back. I love her for that.

Born On This Day- June 7th... Film Great James Ivory

When asked for my favorite film I always answer with1985’s A Room With A View, although it is not quite true. The famous Merchant/Ivory film is in a 10 way tie with other much loved films, but I name this film based on the E. M. Forster novel,  because of the time & place that I saw it & because it eventually led me to the trip of a lifetime, 3 weeks in Italy in 1991.

A Room With A View was nominated for 8 Academy Awards, including Best Picture & Best Director, & won 3, for Adapted Screenplay from Forster’s novel, Best Costumes & Best Production Design. A Room With A View was also voted Best Film of the year by the Critic’s Circle Film Section of Great Britain, the British Academy of Film & Television Arts, the National Board of Review in the United States & in Italy, where the film won the Donatello Prize for Best Foreign Language Picture & Best Director for James Ivory.

James Francis Ivory is known for his work in a long collaboration with Merchant Ivory Productions formed in 1961, along with Indian-born producer Ismail Merchant & screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Their films won 6 Academy Awards. Ismail Merchant was also Ivory's longtime partner in life. Their professional & romantic partnership lasted until Merchant's death.

Oregon’s own Ivory studied at the University of Oregon, majoring in Architecture & Fine Arts & University of Southern California Film School. He wrote, photographed, & produced Venice: Theme & Variations, a 30 minute documentary thesis film for his degree at USC. The film was named by The NY Times as one of the 10 best non-theatrical films of 1957.

Merchant Ivory productions were noted for their literary adaptations, restoring characterization, subtlety & period feeling to films in an era of explosions, aliens, cyborgs, & high-tech escapism. Their early movies were dismissed as yawners. A Room With A View,at a cost of $7 million, grossed $45 million, & left much anticipation for their next effort- Maurice.

Maurice is an impassioned gay love story. E.M. Forster, who was gay in a period when homosexuality was a crime in Great Britain, decreed that the book he wrote in 1914 be published only after he died. Forster passed away in 1970.

Forster's literary executors tried to steer Merchant Ivory toward the author's works. They found it harder than usual to find investors. Collaborator- Jhabvala declined to write the screenplay. Ivory co-wrote the script with Kit Hesketh-Harvey, 30, an actor & writer who graduated from Cambridge, where much of Maurice takes place. Just before shooting began that year, Julian Sands, who had co-starred in A Room With A View, withdrew from the title role claiming personal reasons. Ivory was warned that a salute to homosexual passion during the AIDS crisis was hardly exemplary timing.

Merchant & Ivory stood firm. The R-rated film depicts men courting, kissing & making love.

Ivory: "It would have be wrong to turn our faces from the homosexual community. We wanted the audience to root for a happy ending for the film's male lovers. People should be saying, 'I know what's in their hearts, I can feel for them.' Although the book was written over 90 years ago, it's completely relevant to today. The laws may have changed regarding homosexuality, but people's feelings—the dismay, panic & compromises they endure—remain the same."

In 1987, Maurice received a Silver Lion Award for Best Director at the Venice Film Festival as well as Best Film Score for Richard Robbins & Best Actor Awards for co-stars James Wilby & Hugh Grant.

They are the most impressive, impassioned, inspired & influential gay partnership in film history.  The films of Merchant Ivory will always be noted as visually sumptuous, well-acted period pieces based on literary works, produced on tiny budgets. The couple & their work were so closely intertwined that many assumed that "Merchant Ivory" was the name of one individual. Associated in with British literary & cultural traditions, their professional & personal relationship actually brought together diverse elements of American & Indian culture.

Other Merchant Ivory works based on gay literary sources include their adaptations of Forster's Howards End, Carson McCullers's The Ballad of the Sad Café, & Henry James's The Golden Bowl .

Ivory had no problem gathering A-list actors willing to work for scale. Actors associated with films directed by Ivory: all of those darn Redgraves, Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, Sam Waterston, Alan Bates, Maggie Smith, Judi Dench,  Bernadette Peters, Christopher Reeve, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward,  Anne Baxter, Stanley Tucci,  Helena Bonham Carter, Daniel Day-Lewis,  Julie Christie, Ralph Fiennes, Nick Nolte, Natasha Richardson, Leslie Caron, & my past lover- Jeremy Northam.

Ivory & Merchant circa 1970

In 2005, Merchant died from a bleeding ulcer, after a short illness. Ivory's latest film, 2010’s The City of Your Final Destination, is the first he has made on his own.

Ivory: "But Ismail was very much there to plan it, he bought the rights to the book & we went down to Argentina together to scout the location. We then went to China & made The White Countess &, when we returned to London, that was when he died. I had to finish The White Countess without him & – how can I put this? – it took me some time to recover."

Ivory continues to work in film & lives in the 3 houses, on 3 continents that inspired his work as partners in film & life with Merchant. His films include:

 The Householder

Shakespeare Wallah

The Guru

Bombay Talkie

Savages  

Autobiography of a Princess

The Wild Party

Hullabaloo Over Georgie & Bonnie's Pictures

Roseland

The Europeans

Jane Austen in Manhattan

Quartet

Heat & Dust

The Bostonians

A Room with a View

Maurice

Slaves of New York

Mr. & Mrs. Bridge

Howards End

The Remains of the Day

Jefferson in Paris

Surviving Picasso

A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries

The Golden Bowl

Le Divorce

The White Countess

The City of Your Final Destination (based on openly gay Peter Cameron’s novel)

Born On This Day- May 29th... Film Actor Helmet Berger

It sounds like a weekend at Post Apocalyptic Bohemia: anguished souls, sinister villains & twisted Nazis, but I am actually considering Helmut Berger on his Birthday.

Helmut Beger by Helmut Newton 1970

In 1964, Helmut Berger met Italian director Luciano Visconti, who would become his partner in life. Visconti gave him his first acting role & he gained international fame in Visconti's from 1969- The Damned, a movie that fascinated me for its depravity when I was 15 years old. In this film, Berger mimics the role of Lola, as played by Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel . In the equally twisted role of King Luwig II of Bavaria in Visconti's Ludwig, Berger reached the apex of his acting career: he portrays the monarch from youth, to his dissolute final years, & creates a lunatic lord of decay drawn from his own weaknesses & depths.

Visconti introduced Berger to musicians, models &international artists: Rudolf Nureyev, Maria Calla, Leonard Bernstein & Mick Jagger. Berger had an affair with Nureyev, but didn’t appreciate the dancer’s passion for garlic & vodka. He claims one time encounter withJagger. At least I went twice with the Rolling Stones singer.

Visconti's death in 1976 drove Berger into deep despair & financial collapse. Visconti's will, in which Berger was to be heir, could not be found. The former lover of Visconti, Franco Zeffirelli, berated Berger publicly, accusing him of exploiting his mentor. Berger attempted suicide on the first anniversary of Visconti's death, & fell into alcohol & drug addiction. In his 1988 memoir- Ich, he refers to his relationship with Visconti as a marriage &  claims to be the director's widow.

Berger worked in B-movies & a few high profile films like Ash Wednesday in 1973 with Elizabeth Taylor. He also worked in TV, including the role of Peter De Vilbis on Post Apocalyptic Bohemian favorite- Dynasty. Since Visconti's death no director has been able to bring Berger's considerable talents to the screen again.

I was very drawn to Helmut Berger in the 1970s. I swooned at photos of him in After Dark magazine & in fashion layouts. Check out his work in Dorian Gray, a warped Italian version of the Oscar Wilde tale, set in sexually loose 1970’s London. Berger turns 67 today. He continues to work in film.

Berger Today

Born On This Day- May 29th... Rupert James Hector Everett

We were already big fans of his good looks & his talent. The Husband waited on Rupert Everett, in town for the Seattle International Film Festival showing of Another Country, at the then famous gay dining spot- The Ritz Café on Capitol Hill is Seattle. The Husband came home with the sordid tale of Everett’s bad behavior, culminating in his passing out, face first into a plate of food. I somehow loved the actor even more.

At 15 years old, Rupert Everett ran away from boarding school & went to London to become an actor. He starred opposite Kenneth Brannagh in the play Another Country when he was 23. He did the film version, based on the life of the  gay spy Guy Burgess, with Colin Firth when he was 25. He came out when he was 29 & the offers dried up. He gave interesting & deft performances in Pret-a-Porter & The Madness of King George, but when he starred opposite Julia Roberts in My Best Friend’s Wedding, the industry was abuzz with the idea of the “gay best friend” as an asset for a story line. It was unique to have a gay character who is happily partnered, not a victim, not dying, or not a sissy. He carried the film with the charm of Cary Grant.

That charm followed with roles as gay Christopher Marlowe in Shakespeare in Love, An Ideal Husband, Inspector Gadget, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Next Best Thing, The Importance of Being Earnest, & the overlooked- Stage Beauty. He is the voice of Prince Charming in the money making Shrek franchise, disproving his own theory that out actors can’t get work.

Everett has written 2 novels & a memoir, in which he included the fact that for a time he was a rent boy. I very much enjoyed reading Rupert's memoir- Red Carpets & Other Banana Skins.  He names names, something I admire in a memoir. He is honest, hugely funny & deeply wise about human nature, particularly his own. His beautiful face, his lovely manners, all his attractive qualities seemed worth the cash to me.

Rupert Everett has been urging gay stars not to come out & to keep their sexuality a secret as it could end their film career. He came out as gay 25 years ago & admitted that since then, he has been given only supporting roles.

Everett is now suggesting that aspiring actors stay in the closet as it could harm their career: “It's not that advisable to be honest. It's not very easy, &, honestly, I would not advise any actor necessarily, if he was really thinking of his career, to come out... The fact is that you could not be, & still cannot be, a 25 year old homosexual trying to make it in the British film business or the American film business or even the Italian film business. It just doesn't work & you're going to hit a brick wall at some point. You're going to manage to make it roll for a certain amount of time, but at the first sign of failure, they'll cut you right off. I'm sick of saying: ‘Yes, it's probably my own fault.’ Because I've always tried to make it work & when it stops working somewhere, I try to make it work somewhere else. But the fact of the matter is, & I don't care who disagrees, it doesn't work if you're gay.”

Everett added that he does believe he is happier than those other major stars who are keeping their sexuality a secret: “I think, all in all, I'm probably much happier than they are. I may not be as rich or successful, but at least I'm vaguely free to be myself.”

John Schlesinger was a great director, responsible for Midnight Cowboy & Sunday, Bloody Sunday, ground breaking gay themed films. But, I think The Next Best Thing is one of the worst movies I have ever had to sit through. Drek, not Shrek. I stayed with it for Mr. Everett.

Everett turns 52 years old today & is looking his age. I would still do him. but then like Everett, I can be very shallow.

Alla Nazimova Was Born On This Day- May 22nd

 

She wasn’t in therapy, didn’t wear a fanny pack, had never sang along with the Indigo Girls & she didn’t play on a softball league, but Alla Nazimova was one luscious lesbian.

Nazimova was born Miriam Edez Adelaida Leventon, in the Ukraine, on this day in 1879. She studied with Stanslavski at the Moscow Arts Theatre. Nazimova was a mjor star in Moscow, Berlin & London by the time she arrived in NYC in 1905. She became an acclaimed actress & the toast of Broadway in the first deacde of the 20^th Century with success performing the works of Chekov, Turgenev & Ibsen. 

In 1918, Nazimova began producing, writing, & starring in films of her stage triumphs. Her film adaptations, her own film making techniques, & her acting style were considered daring at the time. 

In 1920s Hollywood, she counted as her many lovers: Patsy Ruth Miller, Anna Mae Wong, both of Rudolph Valentino's wives- Jean Acker & Natacha Rambova, Eva Le Gallienne, director- Dorothy Azner, & writer- Mercedes de Acosta. She coined the term "sewing circle" as code for her lesbian group of gal pals.  

Her private lifestyle was the topic of widespread rumors of decadent & debauched parties at her mansion on Sunset Boulevard, in West Hollywood known as The Garden of Allah. The Moorish palace was built in 1919. 

In 1927, Nazimova converted her estate into a 3.5 acre semi tropical trysting resort. She retained a private apartment upstairs in her former mansion, with the bottom story converted into a café & bar. The property became a complicated colorful collection of Spanish style bungalows & detached apartments, 25 villas were constructed around the pool, designed with drama & dash; the pool was shaped like the Black Sea.

The Garden Of Allah went bankrupt within a year & was bought by a developer who raised the rent. Nazimova stayed & among those who chose to live there: Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, Clara Bow, Buster Keaton, Ramon Navarro, Harpo Marx, Ava Gardner, Errol Flynn, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Ernest Hemingway, Lillian Hellman, Joe E. Lewis, Artie Shaw, Marlene Dietrich, George Kaufman, F Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Benchley & Laurence Olivier.  

 
Sham marriages, fights, feuds, egos, liquor during Prohibition, spoiled celebrities, recreational sex, drugs, drunken rages, loach liaisons, writer’s block, orgies, money problems, sudden changes of plans, the Garden Of Allah was a true Post Apocalyptic Bohemia. 

At the corner of Sunset & Crescent Heights, The Garden Of Allah is now a strip mall. The Joni Michell Song- Big Yellow Taxi is about the destruction of the site. Nazimova died in 1945, at the age of 66. She is buried at Forest Lawn.

If you should find yourself in LA & you desire the expert attention of a true insider, I recommend my blogger friend Felix & his World Class Tour Of Hollywood... take his tour!

Born On This Day- May 6th... Silent Star Rudolph Valentino

Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Piero Filiberto Guglielmi di Valentina d'Antoguolla was born in Italy. He arrived in NYC in 1913 where he became a taxi dancer & an exhibition dancer. He found his way to Los Angeles, where he played a number of small parts in silent movies. He was impressive enough to be cast as the lead in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921). The film was a success & made him a star. Later the same year, The Sheik made him a legend.

In 1926, Rudolph Valntino collapsed with a perforated ulcer; after an apparently successful operation, peritonitis set in & 8 days later, the greatest romantic leading man of the silent era was dead. He was just 31 & had been a star for just 5 years. More than 100,000 distraught women mobbed his funeral.

Male audiences were offended by Valentino's extravagant dress, makeup, & willingness to display his body on screen. Valentino disrupted the era's rigid codes of sex & gender.
 

His legendary star status is set in history, but the legacy of his work died with the silent film era. He retains an extraordinary beauty, star quality & charisma on screen,  but the body of work is lacking compared with other cinematic greats. Like his style of acting, Valentino's work is frozen in time & almost incomprehensible to modern viewers with the heavy makeup & exaggerate, melodramatic emoting. Accused at the time of denigrating masculinity with his perceived effeminacy, time has not been kind & Valentino now appears camp.

Valentino's sexuality was a badly kept secret in Hollywood gay circles, despite his marriages to & divorces from Jean Acker & Natacha Rambova, both lesbian.

Role Models

John Waters was born on this day in 1946. He is one of my favorite people on the planet & one of my best reading experiences of the last year was making my way through his book- Role Models, a collection of essays about his idols, some living, some dead, most dating back to his teenage years. Under the New Austerity Program, I borrowed this book from the library after making a pledge to check out books from my local branch rather than purchasing them in hardback. I loved Role Models so much, I bought it anyway, even though I had already studied every page, before returning the library edition.

Waters & I share a passion for Tennessee Williams that started early in life. The nuns in Catholic school told Waters that if he saw a movie written by Tennessee Williams he would go “straight to hell”, so naturally he headed for the library to find a “joyous, alarming, sexually confusing” writer who “saved my life”.


We both have a thing for Johnny Mathis. In the Mathis essay, Waters remembers seeing a basement full of his friends French kissing to Johnny Mathis, Waters explains: “I knew then that not only did I want to be a teenager… I wanted to be an exaggeration of a teenager.” Note that Waters wanted to be a teen, as if being a teenager were not simply a matter of putting in the time, but a lifestyle or a choice. You could actually fail at teenagerdom.


One of my favorites of the essays is about Mexican porn director Bobby Garcia, “who has blown hundreds & hundreds of really cute marines & lived to tell about it”, & whose favorite film turns out to be The Hours. Garcia: “I saw it at least 20, 25 times.”


Waters writing is stealthy & surprising, full of devotion & delight. I often feel that writing for the screen is the ultimate place that all writers dream of escaping, but here we have the opposite: a filmmaker who writes a book that feels like liberation, a place where he can be the fan he wants to be.


Maxims from John Waters:

“Be interested in other people's behavior & try to figure out why they did it. That's what's so interesting to me, & it's not quite so obvious, & everybody has horror stories, everybody has secrets, everybody has things they've done that they're still trying to explain why they did. So if you can understand why other people did it, then maybe you'll be better with yourself & you can be a happy neurotic, which is what I'm trying to be.”


On our mutual love of Johnny Mathis: “I remember when I was 11, I went to a party across the street, & they were playing Johnny Mathis music, & all the older kids were making out to it. He makes everybody in the world want to make out, even 80-year-olds, & that's kind of hilarious to me. He doesn't participate in the fame game, & he's still incredibly famous. Do you ever see him at a premiere? Or on a talk show? I went to his Christmas show, & it was completely sold out. & there was no interview with Johnny Mathis in the local paper.

“I asked Mathis, ‘Don't you get sick of singing the same songs? He said, "No, you pretend you're the audience every night, & you haven't heard it." So I respect him, & I still like to hear him sing.

On being a “gay artist”: “I write about it in a refined way. I'm trying to give it grace — a word I would never normally say. I also hate the word "journey." & "craft" & "rigorous." & "openly gay," which always makes me laugh. Do they say, “Openly heterosexual So-and-So is appearing tonight’? & that phrase "practicing homosexual." Like, if he keeps practicing, he'll get it right... First of all, I never call myself an artist. History decides if you're an artist. I certainly think I'm equally right for gay & straight people."

On same sex marriage: “I don't have a gay agenda, although I vote gay. If someone said they were against gay marriage, I wouldn't vote for them. But I have no desire to mimic something Larry King does 8 times, & I like Larry King. Good for him! He's helping us. I hope he gets married 10 more times. Just don't make me do what you want to do.”

My Favorite John Waters film is the rather sweet- Pecker. Do you like his collection of films? Do you have a favorite?

Born On This Day- April 6th... Rob Epstein

He is a Director, Editor, Executive Producer, Cinematographer, Producer, Sound/Sound Designer, & Screenwriter.From the beginning of his career, Oscar winner-Robert Epstein has sought to explore issues of homosexuality onscreen. At 19 years old, he responded to an ad looking for a director to contribute to the nonfiction film Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives (1977). The finished film is a compilation of gay lives that shatter common stereotypes. The film was an impressive debut from such a very young man. Epsteins’ next work was the hugely successful The Times of Harvey Milk (1983), Epstein’s heroic homage to our hero, Harvey Milk, the gay city supervisor & assassination victim. It won an Academy Award for Best Documentary & a host of other honors. The film was screened at festivals & in mainstream theaters.

In 1987, Epstein teamed up with filmmaker Jeffrey Friedman to form Telling Pictures Production in San Francisco, California. Their first film together was Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, inspired by the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt on the Mall in Washington DC. Narrated by Dustin Hoffman, Common Threads tells the dramatic story of the first decade of HIV/AIDS in America through stories of 5 individuals featured in the Quilt. Epstein won his second Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for Common Threads.

Next was The Celluloid Closet (1995), another collaboration by Epstein & Friedman. It took 9 years to finance, produce, & release; started in 1986, it finally had a theatrical release with the help of HBO Films. Narrated by Lily Tomlin, this star-studded film offered one of the first serious, in-depth explorations of Hollywood's onscreen treatment of homosexuality.

In 2000, Epstein & Friedman directed & produced Paragraph 175, a film about the experiences of homosexuals during the Nazi regime in Europe. Narrated by Rupert Everett, & filmed in Germany, France & Spain, Paragraph 175 was awarded the documentary Grand Jury Prize for Directing at Sundance in 2000, with European premiere at the Berlin Film Festival where it was won the International Film Critics Association Award.

Epstein moved to a fiction film scripting & producing 2010's Howl, a dramatization of the 1957 obscenity trial surrounding beat poet Allen Ginsberg, played in the film by my boyfriend- James Franco, & my occasional lover- Jon Hamm.

Rob Epstein lives & works in San Fransisco. He turns 56 years old today.

Born On This Day- April 5th... Ruth Elizabeth Davis

"Everybody has a heart. Except some people."

Bette Davis

I believe All About Eve to be a perfect film, with not a wasted piece of dialogue or an unnecessary scene. It is one of the greatest films about theatre of all time. For me, Margo Channing is the finest & bravest Bette Davis creation (she lost the Oscar to Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday).

Davis was a movie star, but also the most fearless & the least vain actresses of the Golden Age. I am fan of all her 6 decades of work on stage, & on film with Of Human Bondage, The Petrified Forest, Jezebel, The Old Maid, Elizabeth & Essex, The Letter, All This & Heaven Too, The Little Foxes, Old Acquaintance, Pocket Full Of Miracles, & What Ever Happened To Baby Jane among my favorites.

Besides Margo Channing, my favorite would have to be Bette’s work in 1987’s The Whales of August, featuring an understated Vincent Price, a rare & delicate late career performance by the great Lillian Gish, whose career stretched back to the films of D.W. Griffith, & Ann Sothern in her only Oscar nominated performance. But for me the true enjoyment of this film came from seeing Bette Davis do again what Bette Davis always could do: create an indelible, complex character & command every scene in which she appears.

When she was filming Whales of August, the cast & crew were having dinner when Davis started complaining about Joan Crawford. Cast member Harry Carey Jr, became unhappy & told Davis that Crawford had been his friend & that he didn't want to hear anything negative about her. Davis, without missing a beat, responded, "Just because a person's dead doesn't mean they changed."

Davis bickered with her directors over the smallest details, & had a reputation for being difficult to work with. Still, she was so beloved by audiences that she was in great demand, & is one of the few actors in history who worked until the very end of her life, making well over a 100 films. She would dare us to hate her, & we often did, which is why we loved her.

Warner Brothers treated Davis badly for many years, & they paid her far less than other stars. She sued the company & lost, but the court case gave her much valuable publicity. She was able to create a new persona for herself on her own terms, as a strong-willed independent thinker, as strong as any man.

Bette Davis has been an icon for generations of gay men. She helped them learn that with wit, style & camp, it is possible to transcend the hard, unhappy, hateful & often humiliating world that was given to us.

Born On This Day- April 4th... Closet Case Anthony Perkins

Artist Don Bachardy & longtime friend: ''Of course we'd heard Tony married. I thought that was just awfully odd behavior for him. Did he honestly think that marriage to Berry Berenson (sister of actress Marisa) could make him a heterosexual?'' Anthony Perkins had a taste of the best men of late 20th century, having had affairs with: Rock Hudson, Tab Hunter, Rudolf Nureyev, Leonard Bernstein, James Dean, Stephen Sondheim, & dancer/choreographer Grover Dale, with whom Perkins had a 6 year relationship before his marriage to Berenson.

He was a very talented, Oscar nominated actor of stage, screen & TV, but one unforgettable movie-1960's Psycho resulted in the kind of typecasting that kills a bright career. The heir apparent to James Dean after a string of star making stage performances in Tea & Sympathy & Look Homeward, Angel, by 1981, Anthony Perkins was reduced to doing Psycho sequels & commercials in Japan.

The era of Perkins, Tab Hunter & Rock Hudson was an especially claustrophobic & chancy period for gay actors. Longtime Perkin's affair- Tab Hunter: ''It was the excruciating dance of the 1950s''. There were men only private parties, the Times Square gay porno theaters where Perkins sometimes passively watched other men have sex, the arranged dates with starlets for Modern Screen, & the fear gay actors had that magazines like Confidential would expose them, the way it did with Tab Hunter, one of Perkins' first lovers. It was the 1950s, a public person could not go public, even if he wanted to, & Perkins didn't want to.

Who would have suspected that he way gay?

Perkins was nothing if not ambitious. Perkins' buddy Alan Sues:''Nothing was going to get in the way of his career". He lived platonically for years with a domineering older woman- Helen Merrill while enjoying sex with a long line of male lovers.

Yet Perkins' puzzling marriage to Berenson in 1973 seemed more than just a marriage of convenience. Berenson, who'd had a schoolgirl crush on Perkins, pursued him relentlessly, & the couple eventually had 2 sons- Osgood & Elvis. Perkins was devoted to Berenson & his boys, though his gay friends privately doubted his claims that he was faithful to her. Perkins, in trying to convince Hollywood he was straight by marrying, may have actually brought himself real happiness. Closeted Dominick Dunne:''It was a real sense of marriage betweeen them. Whatever they had, it was wonderful. I mean, it was a real & loving family."

Perkins acknowledged he had AIDS posthumously, in a statement dictated to his sons, Osgood & Elvis: ''I chose not to go public about this because, to misquote Casablanca, 'I'm not too much at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of one old actor don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy old world.'' Perkins died at age 60, on September 12, 1992, from complications of AIDS. He was cremated, & his ashes were given to his family. Berenson was killed on American Airlines Flight 11, on September 11th, 2001, the day before the anniversary of his death.



Footnote: As a youth I collected Original Broadway Cast Albums & in my collection was Greenwillow, a stinker, even with a score by the great Frank Loesser.This play was being rehearsed in New York while Anthony Perkins was simultaneously filming Psycho in LA. Over the years in interviews about the infamous shower scene in that film, Anthony Perkins has always said that during the whole week of filming required for that scene, his stand-in was used, because he was in NYC rehearsing for a Broadway play. Greenwillow was that play. The musical did have one magical musical number, a song I like a great deal, but never got to sing in my act- Never Will I Marry, odd, Perkins & I both got married.

Born On This Day- April 3rd ... The Talented Doris Mary Ann Hasselhoff

She is a favorite at Post Apocalypic Bohemia. All of us, The Husband, Larry, Junior, & I think that Doris Day is shamefully shrugged off as a star & a singer.

One of Hollywood’s most versatile & talented performers ever, Day conquered comedy, drama, musicals & suspense, working with master director Alfred Hitchcock on The Man Who Knew Too Much, featuring the song that would be her trademark: Que Sera Sera.

Not only bringing joy to millions of fans through her films & recordings, Day’s animal welfare work has meant even more to the 4 legged friends she has helped since her retirement from the big screen awith With 6 You Get Eggroll, in 1968.

Totally devoted to her work through the Doris Day Animal League & the Doris Day Animal Foundation in cooperation with the Humane Society, Doris Day is a treasure, onscreen and off. She is a Grammy winning recording artist, Oscar nominee, Golden Globe winner, as well as the recipient of the Cecille B. DeMille award for lifetime achievement.

Doris turns an astonishing 89 today!

It is darn difficult to decide on a definitive Doris Day movie or performance, the clip below from Calamity Jane captures her vibrant talent through singing, dancing & sheer spunk. I think this song deserves a place in the list of Gay Anthems, who can not relate to this song:

The Doctor Is Out

Is it embarrassing that I shared a crush with my mother? 50 years ago, my mother & I would settle in to watch Dr. Kildare. It aired on Thursdays at 8:30pm, a school night. I am not sure how I got away with that, but I enjoyed that thrill of dreamy Richard Chamberlain making my head spin, my heart thump & a pajamas stir… all in black & white on NBC.

Richard Chamberlain has had a 4 decades long career in film, stage, pop music & TV as well. Chamberlain co-founded a Los Angeles-based theatre group, Company of Angels, & in 1961, blue eyed & dreamy Chamberlain gained fame & the attention of 7 year gay boys as young heartthrob intern- Dr. Kildare. The show established the handsome Chamberlain as a romantic leading man, & made him an overnight sensation, & his pin-up status was solidified by his singing ability which led to several hit singles in the early 1960s. I owned his album- Richard Chamberlain Sings & I would listen to him warble The Theme From Dr. Kildare & Love Me Tender, while getting all moony over his cover shot.

Chamberlain appeared in some of the most widely seen projects in TV history: Shogun, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Centennial, & of course- The Thorn Birds. 110 million viewers watched the tale of Father de Bricassart’s doomed love for Meggie, the Australian sheep rancher, making The Thorn Birds among the highest rated mini-series ever.

Chamberlain’s cinema career consisted of an crazy mix of projects: The Madwoman of Chaillot, Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers, The Towering Inferno, The Swarm, The Three Musketeers & my favorite Chamberlain performance in Peter Weir’s The Last Wave (rent this film!).

Deeply closeted for most of his life, Chamberlain was outed by the French magazine Nous Deux in 1989, but it wasn’t until 2003, at the age of, ironically, 69, that he acknowledged his homosexuality in his memoir- Shattered Love (which is oddly a chapter title on my own memoir- Jockstraps & Vicodin: the Early Years).

Chamberlain has continued to work in TV: Will & Grace, Chuck, Nip/Tuck, Desperate Housewives, & as the HIV-positive love interest of Ron Rifkin. He starred on Broadway in a revival of My Fair Lady, in the title role of Ebenezer Scrooge in Scrooge: The Musical, & as King Arthur in Spamalot.

Last year, Chamberlain broke up with his partner of 40 years, hansome actor-writer-producer Martin Rabbett, with whom he shared a fabulous home in Hawaii since mid-1970s.

This year, in an interview in The Advocate, Chamberlain says : “I wouldn’t advise a gay leading man-type actor to come out. There’s still a tremendous amount of homophobia in our culture. For an actor to be working is a kind of miracle… so it’s just silly for a working actor to say, ‘Oh, I don’t care if anybody knows I’m gay’ — especially if you’re a leading man… Look at what happened in California with Proposition 8. Please, don’t pretend that we’re suddenly all wonderfully, blissfully accepted.” In an era when the President of the United States signs a bill repealing a law banning gay soldiers from serving openly in the military, Neil Patrick Harris plays a ladies man on a popular TV series & hosts awards shows, & Ellen is the #1 daytime star, Chamberlain’s words gave me just a little pause. Maybe the key is stay in the closet until you are too old for leading man roles, & hope that the publication of your memoir will give your career a boost.

After that little diatribe, I have to admit that I stood at the stage door after his potent performance as Richard II at The Seattle Repertory Theatre in 1971 & nearly fainted from his handsomeness & talent. I so wanted to show him my special appreciation when I was 17 years old… & I think I might still go for the chance. Maybe we could star together in gay versions The Gin Game & On Golden Pond. Chamberlain turns 77 today.

Born On This Day- March 26th... The 100th Birthday Of Thomas Lanier Williams

"The best way to have new days is to travel or be sexually promiscuous or work with intensity on a long creation."

As I continue you to mourn the loss of Elizabeth Taylor, I am lightened by the turn around in the critical eye of her acting talent. She was indeed, a truly great screen actor, one of the best & possibly no more so than in her work in pieces by Tennessee Williams. Maggie the Cat in the film version of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof? Suddenly Last Summer?

In my fairly large collection of favorite gay writers, there is my holy trio: Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, & Tennessee Williams. Today marks the 100th birthday of Mr. Williams. I wish he could be here today to celebrate at Post Apocalyptic Bohemia. He would have liked being here with me. It looks quite like New Orleans & I am a big ol’ enabler.

I have never performed any of the works of Tennessee Williams. I have been lucky in life & theatre, but not that lucky I guess. Perhaps I am right for Big Daddy (a name often pinned on me) or even Amanda Wingfield.

Tennessee Williams was passionate, profound & prolific, breathing life into characters like Blanche DuBois & Stanley Kowalski in what I consider to be the best American play- A Streetcar Named Desire. Like his best characters, he was troubled & self-destructive, an abuser of drink & drugs.

He won 4 Drama Critic Circle Awards, a Tony, 2 Pulitzer Prizes, & the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He was derided by the critics & blacklisted by the Roman Catholic Church, condemning his work as “revolting, deplorable, morally repellent, & offensive to Christian standards of decency”.

Thomas Lanier Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi in 1911, the son of a shoe company executive & a Southern belle. Williams described his childhood in Mississippi as happy & carefree. His sense of belonging & comfort were lost when his family moved to urban St. Louis, Missouri. It was there he began to look inward, & he began to write “because I found life unsatisfactory.” Williams attended 3 different universities, & briefly worked at his father’s shoe company. He moved to New Orleans, where he began his lifelong love of that city.

His first critical acclaim came in 1944 when The Glass Menagerie opened in Chicago & moved to Broadway. It won a Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. The film version won the New York Film Critics’ Circle Award. At the height of his career in the late 1940s & 1950s, Williams worked with the great artists of the time, including Elia Kazan, the director for stage & screen productions of A Streetcar Named Desire, & the stage productions of Camino Real, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, & Sweet Bird Of Youth. Kazan also directed Williams’ shocking screenplay Baby Doll.

In 1961, his longtime lover-Frank Merlo died of cancer. Merlo's death left Williams with a deep depression that lasted more than decade. He became quite insecure about his work, much of which was taking a critical beating. Williams began to depend on alcohol & drugs & though he continued to write, completing a book of short stories & another play, he had begun a downward spiral.

In the 1970s, Williams wrote plays, a memoir, poems, short stories & a novel. In 1975 he published one of my favorite book- Memoirs, which detailed his life & discussed his addiction to drugs & drink, & his homosexuality. I still have my first edition copy.

In the winter of 1983 Tennessee Williams died alone in a NYC hotel room filled with bottles of booze & pills. It was in this sort of desperation that Williams would so honestly write about & show his genius.

I find his 25 full length plays to be hauntingly lonely, lyrical, potent & hypnotic, even the difficult & experimental works of his later years. I started reading him in my late teens & he continues to fascinate me. I love Mamet, Shepard, August Wilson & Albee, less so Miller & O’Neill… but Williams is my sure vote for Greatest American Playwright.

Born On This Day- February 27th... Elizabeth Taylor Hilton Wilding Todd Fisher Burton Burton Warner Fortensky

She came into my focus as my mother sat me down at 5 years of age & explained the entire Elizabeth Taylor + Eddie Fisher – Debbie Reynolds = scandal equation. I got it. She remains my mother’s favorite star; they are the same age & were born in the same month. She is a favorite of mine & I think she is the last of the truly great Hollywood Royalty, & very possibly the most beautiful woman of all time. I love her deeply.

Taylor has been a trusted friend to the gay community, & we have loved her right back. She was very close friends & a confidant of gay men: Roddy McDowell, Rock Hudson, George Cukor, Noel Coward, James Dean & most famously to Montgomery Clift. Were there ever any 2 actors at the apex of their beauty, more stunning than Taylor & Clift kissing in A Place In The Sun?



Elizabeth Taylor is a conundrum: truly classy, but perfectly campy, deeply kind, but shamelessly embarrassing, perennially lonely, & serially monogamous. Pills, coke, booze, men, the commercials, the mascara, Studio 54, the guest appearances on soap operas… Elizabeth Taylor & I got through the 1970s together. She gave audacious performances in film adaptations of “gay” plays as Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer & Cat On A Hot Tim Roof, & Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

I met her once, at the 50th Anniversary of MGM Ball. I was thrillingly treated to a 7 minute conversation. She amazingly asked about me. I explained that I was a Theatre major at Loyola Marymount University & Taylor quizzed me on my curriculum & my stage roles. I told her was a huge fan of her work. She touched my arm & looked at me with the famous violet eyes & murmured: "I always thought that I was a fine actress, but I spent a lifetime feeling that I was held back because I have such a terrible speaking voice. The coaches at MGM attempted to help me & I did improve, but I will never shake the fact the dreadful small voice was what stopped me from being truly great..." She was only in her early 40s, wearing a beautiful canary yellow mini-dress with yellow flowers in her hair. She was smoking a cigarette with a holder. She was faultlessly beautiful. I nearly fainted.

I appreciate that, like me, she has had a taste for expensive pharmaceuticals, rich fabrics & rich men. I tremble at the thought of her 8 tumultuous marriages & the public denunciation by the Vatican as a home wrecker. I love her for her dramatic tracheotomy scar, of which she was never ashamed. I appreciate her love affair with jewelry that inspired a book simply titled My Love Affair with Jewelry… it looks handsome on the shelf with my own volume- My Love Affair with Whiskey. I admire her unswerving devotion to her friends, to gay people, & for gay activism & attention to fund raising for HIV/AIDS. My feelings are simpatico with Elizabeth Taylor. My mother loves us both, we have both lived with incidents replete with slurred speech, jokes about weight gain, inelegant gestures of elegance & displays of dignity in the face of devastation.


On Oscar day today, the Oscar winning actress turns 78  & she is hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for for treatment of congestive heart failure. I send her love & healing white light. A world without Elizabeth Taylor will not be a good place.