Roddy Got Raided!
You wouldn’t steal a car. You wouldn’t steal a handbag. You wouldn’t steal a movie – but Roddy McDowall did.
On Christmas night, bombed on Shirley Temples and Imodium, I plucked a worn volume from the bookcase. Mein Kampf. Tactfully sold as Patti LuPone: A Memoir in German-speaking countries. A faded piece of paper fell out. It read:
Dear Mark,
Remember no man is a failure who has friends.
Thanks for the wings,
Love, Glenn.
Wait. When did I spend time with spirits? I haven’t touched vodka since I was diagnosed with the hernia. It’s three-and-a-half inches, you know. Oh, trust my intestines to have a sense of irony! But the poltergeist’s message got me thinking. “Am I a failure?” Striking up friendships as an Other Bus-er is jolly difficult. In fact, it makes sudoku look simple! Being gay is to be threatened by most men and locked in a competition with t’others. The ones in the caste we assign ourselves. I think I’m far Too Good to be around low-rent fairies – as though I was a great catch! – but not fit to wipe the elites’ boots. I do have a lot of online pals, mind. One of whom I call ‘Roddy McDowall’.
I christened him thus after the former child star-cum-Gay Friday to the stars. The real Roddy McDowall (1928-1998) accompanied Lauren Bacall, Maureen O’Hara and Elizabeth Taylor when they were between husbands. He also had a prodigious career as a character actor. A five-term Academy governor, he missed his own try at the trophy through a technicality. Fox mistakenly submitted him, and the entire company of 1963’s Cleopatra, as leading players. Given the gravity of the snub, the studio printed an apology in the Hollywood Reporter. “We feel it is important that the industry realise that your electrifying performance as Octavius in Cleopatra, which was unanimously singled out by the critics as one of the best supporting actor performances, is not eligible due to a regrettable error on the part of 20th Century Fox”. To add insult to injury, the year’s Best Actress went to Patricia Neal’s twenty-one minutes of screentime in Hud, instigating future guidelines on category placement. (The rules don’t apply if you’re called ‘Olivia Colman’, though. She opened the floodgates for any second banana to punch up to Oscar Number One – even when, like this year’s Lily Gladstone, there aren’t previously winning co-stars to shaft. You never saw Thelma Ritter demanding to be considered a leading lady!)
Unlike me, both my and the real Roddy were fantastically anndowd. Think Jeremy Allen White in those Calvin Klein advertisements. Frank Langella recounts: “An important quality that did not appear on his resumé but was certainly in his basket of goodies was the fact that he was very well-hung. Never hurts – unless in a good way. He was available, ready to serve, and agreeable to the disparate needs of both sexes. Perhaps growing up on a film set, and from an early age being trained to please, had made him such an adaptable companion”. Moreover, the Roddys share a large video collection.
You could have the most mortifying sexual fetish imaginable, and my Roddy would have the pornographic film for you. His encyclopaedic knowledge of blue movies is unnerving! (He also runs an Old Hollywood social media empire whose following eclipses my own by the thousands of hundreds.) To think, I feel licentious when I occasionally use dodgy sites to watch awards contenders. Granted, I borrowed my sister’s Netflix password for La Vie en Nose. The Leonard Bernstein biopic “directed” by D.W. Cooper and starring Miss Carey Mulligan. In a stunning move, the Academy is to consider Maestro an Adapted Screenplay; potentially making it history’s first contender culled from a Wikipedia page. I haven’t asked Roddy if he’s seen it yet – legally or not. His namesake was a greater pirate than either of us, although films weren’t readily available for home consumption in those days. On the 18th of December 1974, the FBI invaded Mr. McDowall’s home in North Hollywood and rinsed him of a thousand prints and cassettes. His stash had a “street value” of five million dollars.
It’s a curious thing, Other Bus-ers and our special interests. Like the two Roddys, Narcississy Spacek here pursued her love of movies with abandon. I’d circle the black-and-white epics that were airing on television midweek and the Grandmother recorded them. Friday nights were spent at Video Quest and Xtravision; hoping it was the Mother, not the Father, who drove so you could get toffee popcorn and rent The King and I. When I was a kiddie, a vast array of classic films were appearing on DVD – and nothing gave me a thrill as seeing things like the original Titanic with Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck or Marie Antoinette with Norma Shearer peering from the shelves. It made a nice change from my New Year’s ritual of video-ing RTÉ’s showing of The Sound of Music, carefully pausing the tape between commercials and designing my own cover art. Such behaviour drove my family to distraction! (Oh, if only I came from an effluent household and was properly diagnosed as “acoustic” at a young age. When some good might have come from it! Not flailing through life as a Lost Cause – like Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Confederacy, or Sigourney Weaver’s career.)
Rather like quicksand, I thought the ramifications of illegally pirating films would feature in my existence more prominently. Remember that ad, opening with a blast of music so strong it could knock you off your chair, alleging that it was a crime commensurate with vehicle and handbag theft? When I said this to Bil Antoniou, host of the Bad Gay Movies podcast, he put my guilty conscience to rest. Modern royalties are so pitiful that there’s simply no deterrent! Too tight to shill out for streaming services in 2024, Roddy McDowall – in ‘74 – saw himself as a preserver of Hollywood history.
Think back to the 2000s, waiting for classics to air on telly or surface on DVD. Now, we could have Clifton Webb’s Titanic opened in a new tab in seconds. Imagine how hard it was fifty years ago when Mr. McDowall had his brush with the law? If Roddy cooled his heals for another decade, he could have easily (and economically) purchased his performances on VHS or Betamax, and no one would’ve batted an eyelid. Efforts such as How Green Was My Valley, which infamously won Best Picture over Citizen Kane, My Friend Flicka and Lassie Come Home. A regular Norma Desmond, his pictures made up a substantial part of the hoard: among them, numerous Planet of the Apes specials – but also personal favourites, loaned by the stars themselves (Rock Hudson gave him a copy of Giant) or bought at auction (several items came from Errol Flynn’s estate sale). Each print would’ve cost the equivalent of monthly Dublin rent. True, Roddy did wheel and deal with one of the period’s notorious bootleg barons – Ray Atherton – but, while illegal, his actions weren’t unethical. This kindly man just became the scapegoat for a systemic problem.
Not unlike his classmate at MGM’s Little Red Schoolhouse Debbie Reynolds, Roddy was trying to keep these films alive. After all, the sixties and seventies saw their beloved studio system commandeered by oil men and soft drink companies whose cavalier attitude towards preservation was devastating. (Sadly, it continued right into our century – the shady Academy Museum, for instance, who refused to collaborate with Ms. Reynolds on several occasions, asked for the dregs of her memorabilia collection shortly before her death. Debbie sold the showpieces at heartbreaking personal cost in a series of well-publicised auctions in 2011 and 2014.) The evidence that Roddy paid for stolen prints was undeniable, but no charges were pressed. He never profited on the films he’d resold – always moving them along for the same price. The cause célèbre it became when the story broke in January 1975 was retribution enough. To save his skin, Roddy divulged other peers who held such stashes (such as Rock Hudson) and in some quarters his reputation never recovered. Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, chided: “The film pirates may have had a run in the industry but they are now on the run, and will be put out of the filthy business of stealing and selling motion pictures”. The Ford administration warned that stockpiling films potentially violated state and federal law. And McDowall’s treasured collection was forever lost.
“Roddy had the greatest gift for friendship of anyone I have ever known,” Betty Bacall admits in her 2005 autobiography By Myself and Then Some. It was a gift so powerful that two former Mrs. Richard Burtons, Elizabeth Taylor and Sybil Christopher, held either hand on his sickbed in fall 1998; their decades-long acrimony forgotten in mutual concern for his lung cancer diagnosis. Maureen O’Hara came from Ireland to say goodbye, but by the time she touched down at LAX, Roddy McDowall was gone. Frank Langella eulogised: “He never referred to himself or his career but offered anecdotes about each celebrity’s love life and career choices as they passed through. Never bitchy or cruel, just deliciously entertaining, pleasant, and often compassionate”.
Isn’t that the sort of Gay Friday you’d like in your life, but secretly wish to be?
Which reminds me: I must ring my mate Glenn who I split that bucket of chicken wings with…
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