The Burt bio

Kate Buford's life of Lancaster

It would be lovely to affirm that the wonderful actor Burt Lancaster was the gracious artist/performer we probably imagine him to have been, someone who, because he didn't break into movies until he was 32, listened obediently to his directors and passed on to the less experienced his craft and wisdom.

Such a scenario did occur occasionally, as on the Scottish set of Local Hero (1983), where Lancaster and filmmaker Bill Forsythe clicked, and where the American star, available to every minion in the cast, entertained with glorious Hollywood tales. But most of the time, as author Kate Buford shows in her well-researched, well-written biography Burt Lancaster: An American Life (Alfred Knopf), the actor who charmed the world with his wide, toothy, friendly grin was a screaming, intimidating bastard. He bullied even his best directors -- John Frankenheimer for The Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), for example, or Louis Malle for Atlantic City (1980). Although he was a life-time political liberal who fought McCarthyism, gave to civil-rights causes, protested the Vietnam War, and was an early AIDS spokesman, he was fearful of personal intimacy and put up a wall to separate himself from his several wives and children, and also from other performers.

Born in 1913 in the slums of New York, Lancaster remained as scrappy and venomous as his powerful Irish-American mother had been, forever an alienated, paranoid outsider in LA whose best (and only?) actor friend was former Bronx Jew Tony Curtis, and whose most meaningful love affair in Hollywood was with another Eastern-based Jew, Shelley Winters. His closest pal by far was a high-school chum, Lancaster's acrobatics partner during lowly barnstorming years with one-ring circuses.

The press for decades liked to write of the off-screen friendship between Lancaster and his frequent co-star, Kirk Douglas, but Buford's book makes it clear that it was Douglas who was desperate to make their amity real, that he was jealous of Lancaster, that he wanted to be Lancaster. And Lancaster? He played hurtful, disdainful jokes on Douglas, such as hiding Kirk's lifts just before an important "macho" scene in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957). In turn, Lancaster was jealous of Marlon Brando. He'd wanted to play Stanley on stage in A Streetcar Named Desire, and he begged Francis Coppola to arrange a Don Corleone audition for The Godfather.

Is it reasonable to say that Lancaster could have managed either Stanley or Don Corleone? But there are equivalent parts that he played smashingly: the muscular truckdriver in the movie of Tennessee Williams's The Rose Tattoo (1955) and the Italian nobleman patriarch in Luchino Visconti's The Leopard (1963). If there was ever a film to demonstrate the almost-mystical charisma of the Hollywood Star, it's the latter. What on earth is more compelling and moving than beautiful, elite Burt Lancaster on screen lording over this great, feudal, foreign-language picture?

Not every Hollywood biographer possesses aesthetic taste. Credit Kate Buford with realizing which Lancaster pictures are the good ones, the lasting ones, not only obvious choices like From Here to Eternity (1953) and his Academy Award-winning Elmer Gantry (1960) but The Sweet Smell of Success (1957), Ulzana's Raid (1972), and Go Tell the Spartans (1978). Buford even makes a strong case for a flawed, disparaged movie that is being rediscovered as a stirring near-masterpiece: Frank Perry's The Swimmer (1968), from a Cheever short story, in which Lancaster, barechested and in trunks, travels from swimming pool to swimming pool across his Connecticut burb, a quixotic journey against conformity and for being (impossible!) ever youthful, ever vigorous, sexual for evermore.

The photo on the back of the bio is from The Swimmer, Lancaster bare-assed and about to make the plunge. Shame on Knopf for not identifying the picture, because it looks like a clandestine snapshot from Lancaster's real life. By innuendo, this homo-looking photograph becomes visual support for Buford's shaky speculation that he-man Lancaster was bisexual. Wouldn't Burt Lancaster: A Life have been just as successful without a protagonist who swings gay? Buford certainly doesn't prove it with her Hollywood Babylon-like rumors of Lancaster orgies with Rock Hudson and bevies of US Marines.

For an honestly gay Knopf-published show-biz saga, try Arthur Laurents's spill-the-seed autobiography, Original Story: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood. Laurents recalls that when Alfred Hitchcock wanted to cast Hollywood's two most famous closeted actors, Cary Grant and Montgomery Clift, as his closeted homosexual criminal leads for Rope (1948), a fictionalization of the Leopold-Loeb murder, they refused. Too close to home? So the principals were lesser-known gay actors John Dahl and Farley Granger. Laurents wrote Rope specifically for Granger, his long-time off-screen partner, who starred again in Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951).

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com

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