Scott Sublett
Book Review: “Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness” by Michael Koresky, 320 pages, Bloomsbury Publishing
In 1934, when Lillian Hellman finished her play The Children’s Hour, homosexuality on Broadway was unthinkable, yet somehow the play got on. Her villain was a conniving little rich girl who doesn’t like her boarding school and invents a story that the two women who run it are lesbians. The lie destroys their lives, and is exposed too late to save the school. And here’s where we give away the surprise ending that made the play really pop: one of the women confesses that although nobody did anything actually ‘lesbian,’ in her heart she in fact had those feelings, and now she feels so “sad and dirty” that she better go upstairs and kill herself. Hellman would later change the line to “so damned sick and dirty.”
The playwright claimed that the play that launched her career was “not about lesbianism” but about “lies.” Then again, as novelist Mary McCarthy famously said about Hellman on “The Dick Cavett Show”: “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” Hellman sued, died before the case was settled, and while McCarthy’s remark was hyperbole, Hellman, a master of dramatic construction, tended not to let facts get in the way of a well-told story. Michael Koresky, in his astute yet tender new book Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness speculates that, in fact, Hellman based the character of the lying child on herself. Of course, lesbianism was central to the play, made it a cause célèbre and then a huge hit: the fifth longest running Broadway show of the 1930s. The New York intelligentsia judged it a brave and progressive treatment, and if the queer doesn’t make it out of act three alive, well, sick and dirty thoughts are often punished if you speak them aloud.
From the perspective of the present, justly or not, there’s a whiff of appropriation about The Children’s Hour. Nowadays, a straight woman could write the play (who’s to stop her?) but good luck getting it produced. Lillian Hellman, whose lover was detective writer Dashiell Hammett, was not a lesbian and didn’t want any misapprehensions about it. When an interviewer described her as “butch,” she tartly replied that she got the implication and didn’t like it. Risky subject matter had made her play a buzzy hit and eventually a classic, but she kept saying, decade after decade, the play is not about lesbianism, as though the nature of the lie was a mere dramatic device. And perhaps to her it was, much as to another master storyteller, Alfred Hitchcock, the actual nature of the “McGuffin” – microfilm? industrial diamonds – didn’t matter, just so long as everyone chased it. In any case, in 1934 the play had to be written by a straight or not get written, since homosexuals had to lie low. Koresky mentions some evidence that Hellman was casually homophobic, in the way even progressive people sometimes were in those days. Yes, she leaned Communist, bravely so during the Red Scare (her lover Hammett was officially a Party member and did five months in federal prison for refusing to name names), but communism and homophobia have not always been mutually exclusive.
It’s surprising that Hollywood wanted the rights. It was banned in Chicago, Boston and, by royal edict, London, where it wasn’t performed until the 1950s. But in New York it was a proven hit. So, in 1935 the colorful producer Samuel Goldwyn bought the screen rights for a lot of money. Told that the subject matter was problematic, he supposedly said, “They’re lesbians? That’s all right, we’ll make them Americans.” Like so many Goldwynisms, the malaprop makes crazy sense, since ‘lesbian’ derives from the Isle of Lesbos, home of the homoerotic poet Sappho. The censors demanded that “all possible suggestions of Lesbianism” be excised (back then, “Lesbian” was capitalized) and so Hellman, a realist about Hollywood who had been a screenwriter for Goldwyn before she became a playwright, uncomplainingly changed the little girl’s lie to something more heteronormative: one of the women was dallying with the other’s fiancé. Under the Production Code, dallying was about all you could do. The title became These Three. It was directed by the great William Wyler, and starred Miriam Hopkins and Merle Oberon, an actress who knew something about secrets, because she had to conceal her mixed British and Sri Lankan ethnicity to work in movies. The bowdlerized picture worked fine, maybe better than the subsequent, much more faithful 1961 film adaptation of The Children’s Hour that starred Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine (also directed by Wyler).
In his watershed 1981 history of queerness in cinema, The Celluloid Closet, Vito Russo famously called out the stereotype of the doomed homosexual and condemned the 1961 remake. To be fair, the trope of the homosexual hounded into suicide wasn’t invented by Hellman – it appears at least as early as the 1919 German silent Anders als die Andern (“Different from the Others”), a film meant as a plea for tolerance and understanding, co-written by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, the gay sexologist who was later labeled by Nazis “the most dangerous Jew in Germany,” and whose books were burned.
The 25-year span of time between the heavily censored screen version of the play released soon after the Production Code took hold in 1934, and the 1961 remake, which arrived as the Code was crumbling, is the organizing principle of ‘Sick and Dirty.’ Mr. Koresky, Editorial Director of New York’s dazzling Museum of the Moving Image, uses the two film adaptations of the play as bookends for his examination of how Hollywood depicted homosexuality during its Golden Age. Unlike The Celluloid Closet, rather than encyclopedically addressing any and all Hollywood representations of queerness, Koresky digs into just a handful of movies, finding meaning in how they omitted homosexuality, or dealt with it in coded ways, or struggled to get as much as they could past the censors. Among them: Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), Vincente Minnelli’s Tea and Sympathy (1956), and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Suddenly, Last Summer (1959). A great virtue of Koresky’s book is that he has real affection for these movies, seeing them not as crippled by censorship but rather as having another layer of interest, conferred by the necessity of addressing homosexuality indirectly.
The mechanism that prevented the pollution of good Americans was the Motion Picture Production Code. It started with the alleged misbehavior of silent comic ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle, who did nothing wrong but was smeared, causing conservative elements to rise up in outrage. Hollywood did what they do when afraid of outside censorship: they promised to police themselves. The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (later renamed the Motion Picture Association of America and now known as the Motion Picture Association) was founded in 1922 and headed by political fixer Will Hays. In 1926 the “Hays Office” came up with a remarkably specific list of “Do’s and Don’ts,” among them adultery, interracial marriage, and “sexual perversion,” the last mostly meaning ‘gay.’ White slavery was out. Black slavery was fine. The Hays office was a fig leaf and producers treated its proscriptions as suggestions. Then came the stock market crash of 1929. To boost ticket sales Hollywood turned to sexier stories – the so-called “pre-Code movies” – so the Catholic Church’s Legion of Decency threatened a boycott by all Catholics, which would devastate the industry. To placate them, influential Catholic layman Joseph Ignatius Breen was appointed to head the Hays Office’s Production Code Administration. Breen gave the Code teeth. He rigorously scrutinized productions, starting even before the first draft of the screenplay was written. For example, if a producer so much as acquired the screen rights to a controversial play such as The Children’s Hour, the Breen office would start hurling memos. Breen would show those ‘lousy Jews’ and ‘kikes,’ as he referred to the studio moguls in letters. Koresky points out the irony that an industry invented by Jews and dedicated to presenting a white, Protestant America was being strictly censored by Catholics, but perhaps the moguls had the last laugh, because in 1934, coincident with the implementation of the Code, box office recovered.
When it came time in 1961 to do a remake of The Children’s Hour, the Code was already wounded. As far back as 1953, the long-time Code warrior Otto Preminger had made The Moon is Blue, a romantic comedy in which a woman forthrightly discusses love, marriage and virginity – that’s right, you couldn’t say “virgin” in 1953 – and when Preminger went ahead and released it without the Code Seal of Approval, it was a hit. That was the beginning of the end for the Code, but acceptance of queer content would take much longer.
For “sexual perversion,” the worm turned on May 10, 1961, when Arthur Krim, President of United Artists, wrote the MPAA that his company was contemplating ‘several pictures in which references to homosexuality are made.’ Two were smart political dramas, both of which would star Henry Fonda and include subplots about politicians with gay secrets: a screen adaptation of Gore Vidal’s witty play The Best Man, and Otto Preminger’s superb, sprawling story of a senate confirmation hearing, Advise and Consent. The third was a new adaptation of The Children’s Hour. But when the film was released, it wasn’t as popular with the public as the first version, and while anyone who was alive at the time can tell you that gays were very far from “liberated” in 1961, a number of important critics found it mild and old-fashioned (perhaps, Koresky suggests, denigrating the movie to underline their own hipness).
Koresky sincerely loves these films that tried to represent queerness within the limits of a time that forbade its mention, and he excuses the moviemakers: “The grandstanding moral righteousness of business-minded figures like Krim, Preminger, and Wyler would lead to films that sought to humanize gay people the only way they seemed to know how: by casting them as sad, desperate, suicidal outcasts.” That was progress, for as Oscar Wilde once said, “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”
