Hogs and Monsters: The Laird Cregar Story
Although the title of this Substack is Oh, Shut Up!, it’s not advice I’m prone to take. Every entry brings a mortifying confession that a worldlier person would keep private. Sadly, ‘Mark O’Donovan’ and ‘tact’ go together like Laura Bush and a stop sign. Inspired by Troye Sivan and Andy Cohen – who’ve recently divulged their sexual positions: Miss Sivan is a Versatile Vera, and Miss Cohen, a top (and I’m the Queen of Sheba!) – I’ve decided to come out of another closet. Well, I say ‘closet’. It’s more of a pantry.
I like big guts and I cannot lie.
A fine thing to admit at my age! And for those interested, that’s “It’s about health, not vanity” years old. I said that, the other day, when I was trying to get my trotters on the latest miracle diet potion. It’s available without a prescription, but on the proviso that you’re weighed in the pharmacy – and, to cook up the humiliation, on a talking scale.
“What? It oinks at you?” I longed to trill coquettishly to the chemist, a fair-haired man with smiling eyes, “sure, I’d only Get Off on that!”.
When I was a child, I would pad my pyjamas with pillows and revel in the lovely plush feeling. The Father was never demonstrative – boohoo! – but even if he had been, his spindly chest hardly enticed. (Dad disapproved of nudity, too: a hang-up from his parents who turned off the television when actors kissed on screen – “Disgusting!”) Still, I longed to be ensconced in someone’s thick welcoming fur. I was already a “soft lad”, and I wanted to feel its corporeal extension. Lads aren’t meant to be soft: physically or Yentlly! It’s why Winnie-the-Pooh remains my great hero.
We could learn a lot from that “bear of very little brain”. About kindness, integrity and the joys of not wearing down-clothing. Let’s face it, the modern world is simply too cruel and brutal for most of us. If only we lived in a better age and were scribes in a monastery; illustrating our manuscripts and not minding having hairlines parted by Moses. Not that I have truck with the “body positivity” brigade. Fools looking to be congratulated for their poor decisions and lack of willpower! There’s nothing as tiresome as this Narcississy Spacek preoccupation with appearance, but my weight does go up and down. I’m in Reducing Mode at the minute. A polite way of saying: Diet Coke for breakfast, Diet Coke for lunch, Diet Coke for dinner and the contents of the corner shop’s goodie aisle for dessert. I have a hernia that requires surgical intervention – and you can be damn sure I’m not rocking up to those doctors for it to be viewed as a comeuppance.
That’s the fate of soft bodies. And poor bodies. And, I imagine, black and brown bodies. Look at Sinéad O’Connor. She gave her life fighting dismissive societal attitudes of “Who are you to know more than a doctor? A teacher? A politician? A policeman? A priest?”. She called out those sacred cows, and was relentlessly jeered for it. Last week’s panegyrics – from those most responsible for her demise – drove me to distraction. She was one of the bravest souls this country produced, but was tarred with the brush of being “soft”. Affected and undisciplined.
Does the name “Laird Cregar” ring a bell for you? I watched a picture of his, last night: 1944’s The Lodger with George Sanders and Merle Oberon. Cregar, towering over six feet and weighing three hundred pounds, plays a facsimile of Jack the Ripper. Both The Lodger and its 1945 spiritual successor Hangover Square are readily available online – and clocking under eighty minutes, I urge you to schedule them for your next Film Evening.
Laird Cregar apprenticed at Fox for five years, making fourteen movies. He was about our age but looked much older. Classic Hollywood has a grand tradition of fairies (Richard Haydn, Edward Everett Horton, Franklin Pangborn) and fatties (Oliver Hardy, Sydney Greenstreet, S.Z. Zakall), but there’s scant overlap. The only one I can think of is Victor Buono, who played Madonna’s pianist in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. Showbusiness never knows what to do with us FAGs: fat-and-gay. We play villains or castrated clowns. Nice work if you can get it! But Cregar shaded thankless roles like murky detectives, bewigged cavaliers and pirates with vulnerability. Consider Blood and Sand, a 1941 matador yarn. During the bullfighting scene, director Rouben Mamoulian is less interested in Rita Hayworth’s simpering girlfriend than Cregar’s pompous Fat Man. Cregar, who wouldn’t be out of place at Sitges Bear Week, literally whips himself into a sexual frenzy over Tyrone Power’s dashing toreador. One would never guess that, like Power, he was only in his twenties.
Samuel Laird Cregar (“Sammy” to his friends) came from Philadelphia. A purported descendant of John Wilkes Booth, he lived by the adage of never letting the truth stand in the way of a good story. He was born in 1913 which became “1916” in his Gatsby-esque reordering of facts (alongside a fictional spell at an English boarding school). The Cregars lost everything in the stock market crash, and our hero had to make his own way. Living out of a friend’s car, he toiled in odd jobs until he won a scholarship to the Pasadena Playhouse. On account of his girth, Cregar knew opportunities wouldn’t come easily: “I am, after all, grotesque. Too tall, too heavy. I don’t look like an actor”. Instead, he performed his party piece – an impression of Oscar Wilde – for anyone who’d listen. He eventually played Wilde in a full-blown Hollywood stage production, garnering the attention of the Big Five. After assurances that he would not be typecast, Cregar signed a contract with Darryl F. Zanuck at Twentieth.
He was extraordinarily accomplished. A bon vivant who wrote plays, composed music and designed sets. Though physically imposing, he was charming and loveable and had a fondness for reciting poetry. Worshipped his mother. Wasn’t above dressing in drag when circumstances required it. (It was Laird who started the urban legend of Greer Garson’s rambling speech being the longest in Oscar herstory. At a 1943 party, a cross-dressing Cregar lampooned Mrs. Miniver’s oration, drawing it out to ridiculous lengths. In reality, she spoke for a few minutes. “It was funny for two weeks,” Garson sniped “but now I’m quite tired of it. Please clear up this myth!”)
One suspects the body fascists of the gay community scorned him, but, to borrow a crude Dublinism, he still “got his hole”. He always had beaux, though some were rougher round the edges. “Oh, you fat pig, if you don’t lose weight, I’m going to leave you!” a Hollywood hostess overheard one of his boyfriends lamenting. Another was a sickly chorus kid. When this dancer was too ill to perform, Laird went on for him – a heffalump in a tutu, among all the twiggy twinks. A third companion, a Universal bit-player named David Bacon (fitting given swine analogies abound with men of his size), was stabbed to death in a Venice Beach bathhouse. After the gossip columns painted Cregar as “such a good friend of the deceased”, Zanuck claimed that, despite Cregar’s size, many women found him attractive; including Dorothy McGuire, a Fox starlet.
I myself know the dichotomy between having a sensitive spirit and an intimidating body. (Oh, shut up! I recently went out without a hat, you see, sporting sunglasses and an unkempt beard and an old lady on the bus asked if I worked in security.) What was it like for kindly gentle Laird to have elevator attendants and cigarette girls cower in his presence, mistaking him for his monstrous performances? I did a whistle-stop tour of them on YouTube and naturally, I found him effeminate and unthreatening. In other words: Jack the Ripper would’ve had great time for me! (Now, before you start, a cohort of white girls and gays lusted after Evan Peters in that recent Dahmer thing. I’m not saying they’re bad people but Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims being mainly African-Americans, reduced to caricatures by Ryan Murphy, made many turn him into their perverse pin-up.)
In The Lodger, I couldn’t keep my eyes off him. He plays it as a soft-spoken teddy: a cultivated man, knowledgeable about science and religion. It undoubtedly consolidated the depiction of the Whitechapel murderer as some class of medic. The Lodger carries a Dorian Gray-esque portrait of his late brother at all times, an artistic prodigy led astray by the immoral world of actresses. Prostitutes were the real-life Ripper’s victims; here, they are music hall soubrettes. Incest as well as homosexuality pervades his vengeance. In short, he’s a deeply unhappy boy. A critic noted: “Laird Cregar, plump, soft-spoken, suggesting reserves of violence and rage held barely in check, found in the role of the Ripper an almost therapeutic alleviation of his private angst, the misogyny of a tormented homosexual”.
The Lodger was a triumph, and Cregar hoped to springboard it to full-fledged stardom. He was still bitter about his dismissal from another prestige picture at Fox. In Laura, Cregar was to have made a serious departure from monsters with Waldo Lydecker, the arch journalist who doesn’t “use a pen. I write with a goose quill dipped in venom”. Director Otto Preminger argued that as “a heavy”, Cregar would give away the twist ending at the outset. The slender Clifton Webb was cast instead. This disappointment led to Laird becoming irascible and difficult. Turmoil about who he was physically bubbled to the surface.
When Cregar appears two minutes into 1945’s Hangover Square, my jaw dropped. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan in King’s Row, I thought: “Where’s the rest of him?”. In the year since The Lodger, he had lost a significant amount of weight and undergone cosmetic procedures on his face.
Hangover Square was culled from Patrick Hamilton’s dour novel about underachievers in interwar London. Egged on by MGM’s success with Gaslight, another Hamilton play, Zanuck made the blunder of removing the contemporary setting and bringing Hangover Square back to the turn-of-the-century. Where Ingrid Bergman had played an opera singer, Cregar’s character became a composer. Crestfallen by this development (and even briefly placed on suspension by the studio), Cregar was promised the chance of using his own music in the film as an olive branch. Instead, his compositions were supplanted by a Bernard Herrman score (reputedly Sondheim’s inspiration for Sweeney Todd). What should have been Cregar’s big break from typecasting was, in effect, The Lodger Volume Two. The same director, John Brahms, and co-star, George Sanders, returned – with Linda Darnell substituting for Merle Oberon.
It was Ms. Oberon who’d planted the seeds of drastic transformation in Cregar’s mind. Oberon, whose own skin was pockmarked from a car accident, plastic surgery and mercury-laced skin creams to disguise her Anglo-Indian heritage, cajoled Laird. “You’d be so handsome if you only lost weight.” He began what he called his “Beautiful Man campaign”. A crash diet and dependence on amphetamines. Sadly, this regime was too much for his heart to bear, which coupled with the complications of an operation (to repair a hernia – eek!) led to his death at thirty-one. Vincent Price, who went on to have the career Cregar might’ve had, gave the eulogy at his funeral. George Sanders added: “He was an actor of great talent who was virtually assassinated by Hollywood”.
Modern Screen wrote:
Laird never really lived at all. At 28 years of age [sic], Laird was a young giant who had never known life or love or marriage or home or mental peace and happiness. He joked about his great weight and size but it made him unhappy. That’s why he dieted so strenuously to lose 100 pounds. He once told me, “No matter how nice people are to me, I’m still something of an oddity to them”.
To me, this ill-fated “soft lad” is the ultimate cautionary tale of not being at war with your body.