Cukor’s Boys
“Say them, Ramón. Those Three Little Words I love to hear.”
“Is it in?”
“No! Glenn was robb– ugh, never mind. Why don’t we try a little… roleplay?”
“Oh, not Janet Gaynor and Adrian again?”
“I was thinking: ‘George Cukor and his boy’.”
When I die, I hope “Directed by George Cukor” flashes before my eyes. With the exception of William Wyler and Elia Kazan, no one shepherded stars to awards glory like the great “woman’s director”. It was a moniker he hated and a misnomer. More men (James Stewart, Ronald Colman and Rex Harrison) received Oscars under his charge than ladies: Ingrid Bergman and Judy Holliday. Cukor’s touch brought the talents of another Judy, Judy Garland, to their peak in A Star is Born, twenty-two years after he invented that narrative with What Price, Hollywood?. This was the man who introduced Katharine Hepburn in A Bill of Divorcement and directed her nine subsequent times. He was responsible for Garbo’s apogee in Camille and fall in Two-Faced Woman. He helmed Marilyn Monroe’s unfinished final film. Fired from Gone With the Wind, his private coaching of Vivien Leigh and Olivia de Havilland fleshed out their performances in a way replacement Victor Fleming never could. As one door closes, another opens. Cukor and a hundred Scarlett O’Hara rejects, led by Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford and Rosalind Russell, brought us 1939’s all-female extravaganza The Women.
There’s no part of Old Hollywood lore George Cukor didn’t touch. It was he, temporarily subbing on The Wizard of Oz, who finalised the look of Dorothy; removing the Shirley Temple façade suggested. In 1965, a sixty-six year old éminence grise, he finally won Best Director for My Fair Lady. Made in a vacuum, the film is a static preservation of Cecil Beaton’s designs and Rex Harrison’s performance from the stage show. Still, it was a fitting retirement gift. As the studio system collapsed, contractors like Cukor who didn’t write or produce their own material were on the out.
Indeed, he’s better remembered for hosting gatherings where Tinseltown elite mingled with rent boys. “Cukor has all these wonderful parties for ladies in the afternoon,” said arts patron Baroness d’Erlanger “then in the evening, naughty men come around to eat the crumbs!”. Popular re-appraisal has escaped him. Unlike other gay directors: Vincente Minnelli with his musicals or James Whale, subject of Bill Condon’s Gods and Monsters, with his horrors. In his lifetime, laurels were reserved for the John Fords and Hustons who hewed close to heterosexual mom-and-apple-pie idylls. (“Huston directed Bogie,” a board member of the American Film Institute grumbled in 1983 “Cukor directed ladies.”) He always suspected people confused him with Adolph Zukor, the founder of Paramount – their common Hungarian patronymic, “Czukor”, was Anglicised one letter apart.
“(Cukor),” said David Lewis, James Whale’s partner, “was more of a company man. He had a good feel for the printed word and for good stories. But he would accept an assignment and do his best. Jimmy didn’t take on just anything. Cukor lasted longer because he made more compromises. In his work and possibly in his life. He never found one special man to share his home with. Cukor and Jimmy didn’t get along. They were the same but they were different. Cukor was a closeted poop. Cukor did his job well, but he was an old stuffed shirt.”
This month on Oh, Shut Up!, we’re highlighting Pride heroes. Although I really ought to do a dyke next! (The only one I can think of is Margarethe Camembert, the lesbian cheesemonger in whose life story Our Number One Lady triumphed.) After my Thom L. Higgins, George Cukor materialised as the natural follow-up. His is the universal queer story. “How to invent yourself.” Someone who overcame petty rivalries and put artistry and talent first.
And David Lewis was wrong. Cukor did have a long-term suitor: attorney George E. Towers, thirty-six years his junior, whose education he financed. Like Henry Higgins, Cukor oversaw the young man’s metamorphosis. From virile rough trade to upper-class professional. While movies disappointed (Star is Born was notoriously butchered), George Towers was Cukor’s pet project. By the time the lawyer, wealthy from property investment, married and had children; he was the Adonis figure Cukor always wished he could be. A man’s man who put puerile same-sex leanings behind him. A grandfatherly figure to Towers’s family, he never spoke about his protégé. For Cukor’s generation, self-preservation meant emotional unavailability. And romance? That was something you paid for.
Cukor was conservative, and post-My Fair Lady efforts struggle to reconcile this with a looser era’s morals*. But he never became embittered. He held his head high despite his proclivities. Not dissimilar to Amy March in Little Women – Cukor oversaw the first major adaptation in 1933 – he was respected if not loved.
Helen Keller could see that a gay man was behind the Cukor canon. Conversely, we contextualise his films with our projection. The rivalry between Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer suffuses The Women, much as Audrey Hepburn bypassing Julie Andrews informs My Fair Lady. “Woman’s director” isn’t merely a polite way of saying “homosexual”. It’s branding Cukor as a cat tamer, able to mediate jealous stars and temperamental egos.
“George was anti-everything he received at birth,” kvetched professional complainer Arthur Laurents “especially his face. He decided if he was grand enough – as the years went by, his As got broader and broader – he would rise above being an unattractive Jewish queer by becoming an elegant silver-and-china queen and a Republican”. Scotty Bowers, pimp to the stars, added: “He had a very strange manner of speaking. Every word he said, he articulated unusually clearly. He bared his teeth, hissing, as he precisely pronounced each syllable. It was hilarious but looking back, I figure that it was his way of imparting his innermost feelings, thoughts and ideas. Perhaps that was how he managed to get such superb performances”.
Cukor crossed paths with even bigger fairies. A soirée at his sumptuous home (designed by his compadre, leading man-turned-decorator William Haines) might find Clifton Webb next to Gladys Cooper, Orry-Kelly adjoining Billie Burke or Cole Porter beside Ethel Barrymore. Friends of Dorothy ingratiate themselves with success – or at least, the young and beautiful. Tennessee Williams was born only twelve years later, but called upon his sexuality in a way Cukor envied. Christopher Isherwood, too, lived long enough to become involved with Gay Liberation – anathema to George. (“Is there anything gay people can do to accelerate the process?” Cukor was asked by The Advocate before his death. “Behave themselves.”) With Cecil Beaton, he fought like a lion! Somerset Maugham, on the other hand, was less of a threat to his vanity. Meeting at the beginning of his career, Cukor found a kindred spirit in the Of Human Bondage author. Another erudite but admittedly plain man whose carnal needs went unfulfilled. Like all prudes, Cukor was fascinated by the mechanics of sex and inquired after these titans’ love lives with the innocence of Pollyanna.
Not that he wasn’t above bitchy queenery. “Take away his cranes,” he said of Vincente Minnelli “and you’ve got nothing there!”. And when James Whale was blackballed, Cukor had little sympathy. Rocking up to functions with your live-in boyfriend (and thus upsetting male-female-male-female seating charts) was, to his mind, “asking for it”. Even Billy Haines felt slighted when a liberal hostess placed him next to beau Jimmie Shields and not some starlet or producer’s wife.
Cukor and Haines had reason for their prudence. Both were arrested in the 1930s on vice charges. “No one knew which way it would go,” Haines later confessed. Although he had a fallback. After refusing Louis B. Mayer’s order to ditch Shields for a lavender marriage, he became Los Angeles’s pre-eminent interior designer. “But (Cukor’s) not an actor, they can’t discard him so easily.” There lied the rub. Discreet, though not necessarily dishonest, gays could thrive. “Out” ones risked ruination. Association with pansies meant scandal – something the King of Hollywood, Clark Gable, discovered in 1939.
As the legend goes: Gable ousted “that fag” Cukor from Gone With the Wind and instated Victor Fleming, his drinking buddy, because of a queer skeleton in the closet. Cukor knew Gable had started out as a hustler who serviced male clients (among them Billy Haines). But George kept the secret, evading discussion of Gone With the Wind for the rest of his life. He proffered vague excuses: the King was afraid a “woman’s director” would throw the picture to its female stars. “I don’t know for sure,” Cukor lied “Gable was always very polite with me.”
That was the measure of the man. For me, George Cukor is a Pride hero for the way he hid his disappointment and channelled it into something, I’m sorry, fruitful. He never confused meekness for weakness in embarrassing and frightening situations. Moreover, he is an example that lonely people can lead full lives – even in the face of appalling homophobia and a whole generation of gay men who were more sinned against than sinning…