Mr Grant and Mr Scott at home ... / Ewan & Jude lark about

We are surely all familiar with those classic photos from the mid-'30s of Cary Grant and Randolph Scott living and playing together, two classic Hollywood bachelors who shared a house in beween all their marriages [as did Erroll Flynn and David Niven]. I have now though come across another batch of these pictures, which I had not seen before. So, following on from Scotty Bowers' book which has quite a bit about them, it really begs the question: were people really that naive back then that they saw nothing odd in these photographs - if any two rich and famous actors (who could clearly afford their own establishments) did shots like these today people would automatically assume they were a couple and think nothing more of it, so were Cary and Randy just play-acting or were they, as they say, hiding in plain sight? Whatever! It certainly makes for fascinating photos though!





It seems Grant and Scott remained friends into their old age (Cary got to 82, Randolph 89) with Scott wealthy from real estate after his later screen years as that tough cowboy in those Budd Boetticher films in the 50s; while Cary (a notorious tightwad, so perhaps he was just saving on rent money?) - after his 30s and 40s hits - perfect with Hepburn and Bergman to name just two, had that great run in the '50s, ideal for Hitchcock and those leading ladies like Grace Kelly, Deborah Kerr, Sophia Loren, Eva Marie Saint, Ingrid Bergman (again), Audrey Hepburn, Doris Day etc.

Now for 2 more lads around town: Ewan McGregor and Jude Law have teamed up for photos lots of times - but no rumours to quash about their sexuality - though they have played gay more than a few times (like Colin Firth)... good to see the boys larking around and at those various events actors have to force themselves to attend ...

Scotty's services

Its certainly a fascinating read! - the book they are all up in arms about ... Scotty Bowers' story of the sexual services he provided for the in-crowd of Hollywood during the 1940s and later, from his gas station in downtown L.A. - the biggest stars turned up ...

I feel I am the only one in on the joke - this is surely Gore Vidal's last throw of the dice, a gigantic spoof, on the lines of his novels MYRA BRECKINRIDGE and MYRON - that pansexual world he advocates where everyone can have sex with everyone else regardless of gender or age, and may be his final revenge on people he doesn't like ...

I can well believe Scotty really exists (he is now 88) and was pimping out not only himself but also other guys and gals at the gas station in L.A. back in the '40s - Gore certainly knew him and has taken his story and added all the star stuff - "spilling the beans" on Hepburn, Tracy and the rest. Scotty seems to get his dates mixed up quite a bit - just after the war in about 1946 he describes a lunch meeting with Hepburn and Cukor and hair stylist Sydney Guilaroff (another happy client of Scottys of course) and they are arguing over Kate's hair style in ADAMS RIB, which is a 1949 film !

Also rich famous and goodlooking stars like Cary Grant and Randolph Scott would surely have to be very careful if they needed hunky marines to spice up their relationship between all those marriages of theirs. And then there is the peculiar story of Spencer Tracy and Scotty - and Walter Pidgeon (who knew? my mother's favorite actor!) outed as an early client of Scottys! Of course closeted stars back then couldn't be seen hanging out in bars, cruising the seafront or attending George Cukor's or Rock Hudson's exotic parties - not after Tab Hunter was caught at a "pyjama party". Also a lot of these actors had lines to learn for the next day, and could not be out late at night - so a discreet service set up by a hunky ex-marine who kept his mouth shut would have been ideal.

Despite my fascination with this tawdry side of hollywood it is not gossip as such I am after, but the truth of things - it is always the work that is important to me, and they certainly worked in those days, with 2 or 3 films a year !

I don't know how the lesbian scene works but would one of hollywood's top stars like Kate Hepburn want (or trust someone to get) young girls sent to her ? Supposing they talked afterwards ... why have none of them come forward, some must still be alive. And I think Vivien Leigh was quite adept at picking up truck drivers on her own, without Scotty's help ...

The book seems very disjointed - it begins with him being an innocent arriving in hollywood in 1946 after the war - Gore's golden age, as he often wrote about - and starting work at the gas station - as if he was an innocent and knew nothing about the goings on of the early 40s ... but as he tells his story in the following chapters he is the new kid in town in the early 40s on a weekend pass from the marines, and the first guy who picks him up turns out to be Orry-Kelly ! the famous dress designer (and a close pal of Cary's - who is not mentioned then). Then George Cukor turns up and invites him to his pool party the next sunday ! Then he is having threesomes with Cary and Randy - whom I thought lived together in the mid-30s - but this was the early 40s when they were at the height of their carrers and married to women, so they were hardly living together then, so maybe Scotty is getting his wires crossed - and he says he also bartended at a party/orgy of theirs in 1950!

Oh, and he meets Katharine Hepburn at the first Cukor pool party he attends, where she comes across as a very mannish lesbian ... so was Kate a regular at George's famous pool parties then? and it turns out George hates Garland ! It seems too that these guys like Cukor and Cole Porter are only interested in oral sex -maybe back then famous gays always paid for every sexual encounter and never wanted a relationship or to live with someone, but just to suck off an endless parade of johns - what a way to live!

And it seems every man Scotty ever met wanted to have sex with him, even when he was a kid, even all the married ones! Its a great read but one can hardly believe some of it! - plus no notes or index. Trash, then - utter trash, but try putting it down ... Scotty comes across as a saint, he never charged for his services, and didn't even want a cut on the sale of (then hard to get) pornographic pictures he posed for! Of course gay liberation and the gay lifestyle did not exist back in that post-war 1940s golden era, so young guys (and gals presumably) could sleep with or provide tricks for either sex without thinking about it too much or having to label themselves ... and there wasn't that 24 hour news media, mobile camera phones, or internet or inquisitive press to spoil things - as long as the fan magazines were kept happy!

Then of course in the '50s he helps out Roddy, Rock, Monty, Tony Perkins et al, but certainly didn't like Jimmy Dean! - his view on Rock's sham marriage is certainly interesting too - she, Phyllis, was of course a lesbian. How did they get away with it?, with all the PR people and fan magazines colluding in the fantasy; that couldn't still happen today could it? An interesting companion too to that William K Mann's tome on KATE a few years ago ... which also mentions Scotty. Plus if you read it you won't ever see Charles Laughton in the same light again!
(Coming soon: all those photos of Cary and Randolph ...)

Actors 2

A lovely still from Antonioni's L'ECLISSE, 1962, with Alain Delon. The link below, if you copy to your browser, features a terrific page of animated stills of this and other movies like TAXI DRIVER, BLADE RUNNER, 2001, LOLITA etc with brilliant animation of the stills. Enjoy!

http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2011/09/cinematographs_living_breathin.html

10 great male performances: (or my favourites at any rate)

Robert De Niro - TAXI DRIVER & RAGING BULL (and his sax player in NEW YORK NEW YORK!)
Dirk Bogarde - THE SERVANT / MODESTY BLAISE / DEATH IN VENICE
James Mason - A STAR IS BORN
Maurice Ronet - LE FEU FOLLET
Peter Finch - SUNDAY BLOODY SUNDAY / THE TRIALS OF OSCAR WILDE
Anton Walbrook - THE RED SHOES
Ralph Richardson - THE HEIRESS
Montgomery Clift - WILD RIVER
David Hemmings - BLOW-UP
Cary Grant - NOTORIOUS
Gary Cooper - FRIENDLY PERSUASION
James Dean - EAST OF EDEN
and sneaking in Jack Lemmon as Daphne in SOME LIKE IT HOT - Tony ain't bad either!

Revisits ...

... back to the houseboat, Naples, Paris and Padua ...

I had been meaning to re-visit HOUSEBOAT for some time, as I last saw it when I was 12 back in 1958 and I was pleased I enjoyed it just as much this time. It is a very pleasing comedy with Cary Grant in his prime, as he was back then in the late '50s (he was going on to NORTH BY NORTHWEST next) and Sophia Loren of course in her early 20s, as she was then when co-starring with all those older guys like Gable, Ladd, Wayne and Cary. It seems this script was originally by Grant's then wife Betsy Drake, but the script was considerably revised when Loren came on board! Melville Shavelson keeps it nicely afloat. Cary as the widower moving to the houseboat has some good moments with the children, particularly Paul Petersen as the oldest (Petersen went on, as per his biography on IMDB, to work for the rights of child actors). Sophia delighted us back then as Cinzia the fabulous Italian girl who escapes from her music conductor father and meets up with the youngest son at the funfair - soon she is the new maid, despite being a socialite on the run! The run-down houseboat soon looks a treat, no wonder country club girl Martha Hyer is worried! She chooses a horrible gold gown for Cinzia to wear but it soon looks sensational when Loren is wearing it ... this is all just a very nice treat, and probably the best of Loren's American films of the late '50s. Of course by then her so-called relationship with Grant was over ...


Back in Italy for 1960's IT STARTED IN NAPLES, also helmed by Shavelson, is equally still very enjoyable as stuffy Clark Gable arrives in Naples to sort out the estate of his late brother, only to find there is a cute streetwise kid who lives with aunt Sophia ... it is all very colourful as we explore Naples, Sophia sings and dances in a nightclub, the kid stays out late and Vittorio De Sica is on hand to help Sophia in court. I loved it back then and it still works now, despite Gable really being too old here (he must have been about 30 years older than Loren) - this was his penultimate movie as back in America he began THE MISIFTS ...



THE LAST TIME I SAW PARIS was one I saw as a kid and I remember being upset by the scene where Elizabeth Taylor is locked out in the rain and then dies very prettily in hospital (just like Kim Novak in THE EDDY DUCHIN STORY - traumatic for a 10 year old!). It may not be very F Scott Fitzgerald but in 1954 Taylor looked astounding and is ravishing here [she was Mrs Wilding and the mother of two at the time and this one of her 4 films this year] - but whose bright idea was it to team her with Van Johnson? He is tolerable in something like BRIGADOON but just seems all wrong here, stuffy and boring and just not interesting and so is the self-pitying character ... Donna Reed and Walter Pigeon and a very young Roger Moore are on the sidelines and the young moppet is very resistable!



THE TAMING OF THE SHREW is one I had not seen since its release in 1967 and its been rather forgotten but the BBC showed it as part of their Taylor tribute (along with a good new documentary) and I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. Taylor looks great and has some nice moments - despite being rather shrill in her shrew scenes - and she looks like she is enjoying herself. Good cast of English thespians too, it is always a pleasure to see Michael Hordern mugging, and there's young Michael York, Cyril Cusack, Victor Spinetti etc. and of course Zeffirelli makes it all look terrific. I am not sure how much Shakespeare is left in the movie, but it certainly made the 2004 film of THE MERCHANT OF VENICE (which I learned and played at college, on after it) look dull by comparison!

Television treats

It is time to turn off the movie projector for the rainy weekend and wallow once again in all those favourite movies on television - one has seen them so many times so one feels one can dip in and out of them at leisure - though of course if it is a Hitchock one usually gets drawn in and has to see it unspool all over again. It is quite a good weekend actually, there are at least 4 Hitchocks on, and several Audrey Hepburns (I watched HOW TO STEAL A MILLION again during the week, its an oddly over-laboured trifle but Audrey and Peter look a million dollars, even cramped in that broom cupboard - and those '60s fashions and cars...!)

NORTH BY NORTHWEST seems to be on every day here in the UK at the moment, on one channel or another, as I said before, like PSYCHO, it is the most modern 50 year old film of all. Does one ever get tired of Cary and Eva Marie on the train or running across Mount Rushmore? Ditto THE BIRDS - I love that scene where Mitch and Melanie are chatting and discovering each other at the children's party just before that first bird attack, and remember liking it the very first time I saw the movie, a year after its release at the little Classic cinema above Waterloo Station in London in 1964.... and of course that set from REAR WINDOW and good to see THE WRONG MAN again. Hitch's movies will just never date or go out of fashion, which is why stars like Cary Grant and James Stewart are so enduring - unlike contemporaries like Cooper or Gable who didn't star for Hitch and whose later films are not that visible now, whereas those Hitchocks are always out there.



CHARADE must be the best film Hitchcock never made - Audrey and Cary are perfect throughout and (like Grace Kelly in TO CATCH A THIEF) she has the most perfect wardrobe here, from of course Givenchy - I particuarly like the mustard yellow coat.
Channel 4 here is running an Audrey a day in their lunchtime movie slot, one will have to watch them once again: ROMAN HOLIDAY, SABRINA, FUNNY FACE [it looks amazingly fresh and vivid in HD], and TIFFANY'S, which is currently back in cinemas too. (One could - and might - do a whole post on Audrey in Paris, as so many of her films are set there...)

YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN and THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW are on too (a must now,after GLEE's Rocky Horror show episode last week), as well as LAURA and L.A. CONFIDENTIAL. Not bad, not bad at all. I simply love how the off-screen horses whinny at every mention of Frau Blucher's name in surely Mel Brooks' best film, and Cloris Leachman and dear Madeline Kahn with that silver streak in her hair as she and the monster do it again - and of course Terri Garr saying he (the monster) would have to have to be enormous!

1930s: Kate and Sylvia Scarlett

SYLVIA SCARLETT has the reputation of being one of the oddest films of the '30s and was such a disaster on its release that its perpetuators Cukor, Hepburn and producer Pandro S Berman never experimented on such a scale again. They must have thought they were being very clever at the time, but Hepburn was soon on that "box office poison" list along with the likes of Dietrich and others. Also odd to think that the sublime BRINGING UP BABY was also not popular initially, as Howard Hawks himself admitted it was just too screwy with everyone around the bend in it! Hepburn re-established herself with Cukor's witty HOLIDAY from the Philip Barry play, again with Grant, and in La Cava's STAGE DOOR, playing to her patrician persona, as she initially refused to rehearse with the other stage door gals Ginger Rogers et al. She then cleverly got Barry to create a new play for her which was a success on Broadway and she then sold the package to Louis B Mayer placing herself back at the top of the pile for the 1940s. That was of course PHILADELPHIA STORY, which to me is rather over-rated. Then of course came the first of those with Tracy, WOMAN OF THE YEAR in '42. (Below, Cary going gay in BRINGING UP BABY)

It was good to finally catch up with 1932's CHRISTOPHER STRONG a while back where she is the dashing aviatrix, but a lot of her other early films like QUALITY STREET, SPITFIRE or even Ford's MARY OF SCOTLAND are not really much on view these days (I am not even sure if they are on dvd) [it was of this era that Dorothy Parker famously said that Hepburn "ran the gamut of emotions from A to B", but she was certainly different from those other prettier ingenues, her Jo in the first LITTLE WOMEN was certainly well regarded]. But back to SYLVIA SCARLETT - this was an important movie for Cary Grant too, he and Hepburn strike sparks off each other and she looks amazing as a male - rather like a young David Bowie sometimes.

She was certainly lucky in always being financially independent - no cheap horror movies for her! Also in being off the screen since 1959's SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER to 67's GUESS WHO... only added to her legend. The 1962 LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT may have been among her best performances and won the cast acting awards at Venice, but it was an independent release not widely shown at the time, but thankfully is on dvd now. The very names of Hepburn's characters sum her up: Tracy Lord, Tess Harding, Susan Vance, Linda Seton, Rose Sawyer, Jane Hudson (no, not that one but in SUMMERTIME) Lean's 1955 film set in Venice was another hit, along with THE AFRICAN QUEEN, THE RAINMAKER and those late Tracys PAT AND MIKE and DESK SET and of course Violet Venable in SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER. She had a nice line in the '50s of these quivering spinsters on the brink of finding love.

We revered Hepburn all over again back in the 60s when I was in my early 20s - GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER had been the most enormous success (even if its sadly dated today) with Hepburn re-discovered for a new generation, being on the cover of LIFE magazine etc, and then the even bigger success of THE LION IN WINTER, a key film for 1968 where she is Eleanor of Aquitaine to the manner born, with as another best actress award, even if was shared with Streisand in that other big hit of '68 FUNNY GIRL. THE MADWOMAN OF CHAILLOT which followed was less successful and I am going to catch up with THE TROJAN WOMEN shortly. Hepburn, like Davis, was now a living legend and soon teamed with the likes of Laurence Oliver and John Wayne, as well as that nice remake of THE CORN IN GREEN in Wales with Cukor in '78. Later television movies included pleasant enough fare like LAURA LANSING SLEPT HERE and MRS DELLAFIELD WANTS TO GET MARRIED as she got older. Suddenly Hepburn was everywhere, giving interviews in various documentaries - always with that red pullover over her shoulders - burnishing her legend giving us her version of her life and that romance with Tracy, including her own book "Me" a very selective view of herself. Lots of interesting new books on her too incuding some good picture books.The later Scot Berg and William K Mann books on her, after her death, painted other versions of her life and romances but only added to her legend and lustre. There was simply no-one else like her. Of American actresses perhaps only Davis had a comparable career - shame they could never agree to team up for at least a photoshoot. (Bette was willing, but Hepburn wouldn't). Another actress Hepburn did not get along with was Margaret Sullavan, subject of my next post .... Kate being perhaps too competitive with a rival? I got to see Bette up close in '72 but it must have been marvellous to have seen or met Hepburn - I love those '50s/60s shots of her striding on and off planes or dodging through hotel lobbies in her macs and khakis. At least New Yorkers got to see her on stage several times. She even did a musical: COCO (though Chanel thought they had meant Audrey to play her!)

Back in 1935 she and Cary and Brian Aherne etc were young and having fun playing games as they shot the quaint SYLVIA SCARLETT along the California coast, with their Cockney accents ... let's slip it into the projector and have another look.

SYLVIA SCARLETT is actually an intriguing failure due to its uneven tone - comedy or melodrama? - mixing in its crooked characters, travelling players, Hepburn posing as a boy, that odd relationship with Aherne and the other girl who fancies her/him, but Grant is maturing into "Cary Grant" and Hepburn is clearly having a field day, and her and Cary's pal Howard Hughes used to fly in to join them for lunch! but it is easy to see now why, in 1935, it would be such a failure: it's just too anomalous, too strange, too ambiguous.

Next: Margaret Sullavan and a Christmas treat: THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER