Behind the Screen:How Gays and LesbiansShaped Hollywood 1910-1969
by William Mann. Viking, 407 pages, $29.95.

Hollywood, especially the studio-driven dream factory of the so-called Golden Age, abounds in rich material about carefully crafted mythmaking and scripted illusion, and how it both reflected and shaped American popular culture. William Mann’s new Behind the Screen How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood 1910-1969 explores how the many gays and lesbians working in Tinseltown influenced, directly or covertly, the product on screen. The book also looks at how the industry itself molded and manipulated these individuals, from manufactured romances and marriages to the infamous Hays Production Code, which in effect kept deviant voices from the screen.

As the title of Mann’s ambitious work indicates, he isn’t just out to re-examine the fairly well-documented gay and lesbian lives of such stars as Rock Hudson, Cary Grant, Ramon Novarro, Nazimova, and Marlene Dietrich. He’s equally interested in directors like Dorothy Arzner, George Cukor, James Whale, Arthur Lubin, and Edmund Goulding, costume designers like Adrian and Orry-Kelly, writers, set decorators, editors, producers, even columnists and publicists. His book asserts that it was the presence of gay men and lesbians, living in varying degrees of openness, in numerous studio departments and in the press that helped create Hollywood’s mythology from earliest silent films to the 1960s, when the boom in personal, unconventional movies coincided with the modern gay-liberation movement.

It makes sense that gays and lesbians from small towns across America would be drawn to Hollywood. Here was a place where a man with a penchant for designing elaborate gowns could not only make a handsome living but become a star in his own right. A place where eccentric writers like Zoe Atkins could collaborate with kindred spirits Arzner and Cukor. Connections and contradictions abounded: conservative gossip-monger Louella Parsons often gay-baited stars, but her own daughter, Harriet Parsons, was not only a lesbian but a prominent producer for RKO during the ’40s and ’50s, when few women had broken the gender barrier for producers.

Mann has chronicled Hollywood in other books, most notably Wisecracker: The Life and Times of William Haines (Penguin). Haines, who also figures prominently in the Behind the Screen, was a box-office star at MGM in the 1920s and lived relatively openly with lover Jimmy Shields. His fall from stardom was due to a number of factors, Mann points out, but his indiscretions and his disdain for the charade that so many other gays and lesbians were willing to play were certainly part of it.

Behind the Screen makes clear distinctions between pre- and post-Hays Hollywood, detailing how the draconian production code of the ’30s, as administered by the office of publicist Will Hays and heavily influenced by the Roman Catholic Church, exorcised all manner of " perversion, " including any hint of homosexuality, from films. A Variety article from the period lauded the Hays office for " attempting to keep the dual-sex boys and lesbos out of films. " But in the new, censored atmosphere, subtext reigned. One of Mann’s more tantalizing themes is that from James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein to George Cukor’s Sylvia Scarlett (which he calls " one of the most subversive films of the Post-Code studio era " ), gay men and lesbians refined the technique of carefully placed subtext.

After World War II, the climate changed again, with economic, social, and political factors leading to the McCarthy witch hunts. Behind the Screen has a powerful chapter about a 1945 labor strike by set decorators, many of them gay, that was led by prominent gay designer Henry Grace. In a climate of suspicion, the strike allowed conservative forces and scandal sheets like Confidential to link homosexuals and Communists, " pinkos and queers, " an idea that endured into the 1970s.

In addition to conducting interviews, Mann delved into archival material, biographies, films, letters and memos, and articles in fan magazines like Photoplay and show-biz trades like Variety. Since many of the people he writes about are dead, he includes recollections by friends, colleagues, journalists, and other survivors of the era. His chronicle sometimes bogs down in the minutiae of obscure early lives, but overall the book is a compelling, thoughtful portrait of Hollywood — and by extension American — culture. The Golden Age of Hollywood was a time when pretense seemed a prerequisite for work, and the resulting subtext leaps from the frames of thousands of films.

Issue Date: November 22 - 29, 2001

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