Original sheet music for ‘Das lila Lied’, 1920
CHAPTER 5
Europe Before the War
‘London is gayer and more full of people than at any time since the war. This is the opinion of people who have known all the capitals of Europe in their greatest and palmiest days. Vienna, Berlin, Madrid, Paris, all have been known in their turn as the “gayest city in Europe”’
‘London – Gayest City In Europe,’ Adelaide News, 30 June 1932
In 1835, James Pratt and John Smith became the last men to be executed in England for committing ‘an unnatural act’. Although no man would again be murdered by the state for the simple act of loving another man, the death sentence for same-sex acts (specifically between men; sex between two women was never outlawed) would stay on the statute books until 1861. Sixty years after Pratt and Smith died, Oscar Wilde was convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years’ hard labour, and despite the three-decade moratorium on murder, there were those who demanded a rope for his neck. The press, on the whole, was damning, but occasionally people would speak out in defence of Wilde: Hugh Stutfield wrote a piece entitled ‘What we Owe to Oscar Wilde’ for the June edition of Blackwood’s Magazine in which he asked the question ‘Whence, then, sprang the foolish fear of being natural?’1 The general feeling was that the playwright, poet and aesthete had been too severely punished by the court.
By the start of the new century, change was in the air. Britain had come a long way in a very short space of time. The educated classes had begun to discuss the idea of Edward Carpenter, Havelock Ellis and other social reformers that an intermediate or third sex (dubbed ‘Uranian’ by Carpenter) existed. Attitudes – and tastes – were changing, and Wilde’s imprisonment and subsequent death in exile had done much to direct people’s sympathies towards the plight of homosexuals.
The British music hall had provided a home for both female and male impersonators since the Victorian era. Vesta Tilley, the undisputed queen of male impersonators, made a number of recordings for the Edison Company in the first decade of the twentieth century, including ‘When the Right Girl Comes Along’ and ‘I’m The Idol Of the Girls’, but she was the epitome of womanhood off stage, married to a British politician and dressed in the latest fashions. No one ever questioned her sexuality. Vaudeville and music hall offered a camouflage of sorts and a safe space for gay, lesbian and bisexual artists to express themselves and, during the 1920s and early 1930s, a number of LGBT performers who were out and open enjoyed a level of fame that they would not see again until the 1980s, making records, movies and national headlines. With suffragettes celebrating their victorious campaign for votes for women in both the US (at least as long as you were white) and Britain, songs with titles such as ‘Masculine Women, Feminine Men’ (1926, written by Edgar Leslie and James V. Monaco) and ‘Let’s All Be Fairies’ (recorded by the Durium Dance Band) were all the rage. Women were wearing their hair short and their skirts shorter, and Hollywood had introduced Middle America to both the well-groomed man and the mannishly attired woman. Garbo, Dietrich and other exotic megastars of the era were challenging perceptions and the world seemed to be becoming more tolerant towards people deemed to be different, especially in the bohemian circles of the world’s major cities.
But not everyone was prepared to be as broad-minded: homosexuality was still against the law, and governments were keen to crack down on overt displays of perversion. In one of the most famous cases in British history, at a private ball in London’s Holland Park Avenue, more than 50 men were arrested in a police raid after two undercover officers had watched them dancing, kissing and, they claimed, having sex wearing make-up and dressed in women’s clothes. The organiser of the private event – Austin Salmon, a 23-year-old barman known to his friends as Lady Austin – told officers: ‘there is nothing wrong [in who we are]. You call us nancies and bum boys but before long our cult will be allowed in the country.’2 Thirty-three of the men (and one woman, Kathleen O’Farrell) appeared in court: because there were so many of them they were forced to appear with ‘cards around their necks bearing numbers’;3 27 of them were jailed for up to 20 months apiece. In Liverpool, a man known as Augustine Joseph Hull was prosecuted for ‘masquerading as a woman’4. Newspapers and magazines were filled with such scandals, and lurid stories began to appear featuring popular actors and actresses of the day. The prurient interest of syndicated gossip columnists in the private lives of famous people would titillate readers around the globe for decades to come.
Fred Barnes, an unashamedly out-gay man who was a huge star of the British music hall, had been sold on the idea of a life on stage ever since seeing Vesta Tilley when he was a small boy. Born Frederick Jester Barnes, the son of a butcher in 1885, and called ‘the best dressed man in vaudeville,’5 Barnes helped popularise the stage perennials ‘On Mother Kelly’s Doorstep’, ‘If you Knew Susie’, ‘Sally the Sunshine of Our Alley’ and Irving Berlin’s ‘When I Lost You’. His big stage hit, a sketch and song titled ‘The Black Sheep of the Family’ was a self-penned confessional about his own difficulties: ‘it’s a queer, queer world we live in; and Dame Nature plays a funny game. Some get all the sunshine, others get all the shame.’ He was effete and immaculately groomed, and his audience would often heckle him with calls of ‘Hello Freda!’ Fred’s father, seemingly sick of his son’s shenanigans, committed suicide with one of his own butchery knives. Barnes inherited his father’s not-insubstantial estate and drank most of it away: in 1917 he spent some time ‘recuperating’ from a mystery illness in Brighton – presumably he was actually drying out.
In 1919, he announced his engagement to an American heiress, Kathleen Aldous (broken off, apparently, because her parents insisted Fred give up the stage)6 and, in an elaborate hoax, eight years later he faked a marriage to Australian actress Rose Tyson – celebrating the occasion in hotels and restaurants around London before admitting that the ceremony had never taken place. Fred was a drinker, and less circumspect than he should have been: he walked about London in white plus fours and pink stockings, his cheeks rouged and with a pet marmoset perched on his shoulder. At night, he would cruise the streets of the capital in his Rolls Royce, picking up male prostitutes.7 In October 1922, he set sail for Australia for a string of engagements; however, his hard-drinking ways caused him to miss a date and he was thrown off the tour after just two weeks; his booking agent took pity on him and found him some dates in South Africa which he fulfilled before returning to England.
Fred Barnes
While Barnes was drinking his way around the antipodes, back in London, Noël Coward was enjoying his first successes and soon became one of the world’s highest-earning writers. Although he would not come out during his lifetime, it was no secret that Noël was gay: ‘I should love to perform “There Are Fairies in the Bottom of My Garden” but I don’t dare,’ he is reputed to have said to a friend. ‘It might come out “There Are Fairies in the Garden of My Bottom”.’8 Society was willing to accept homosexuality as a passing fancy of the upper class or the bourgeoisie: Coward’s unquestionably louche lifestyle and affectations were simply accepted as ‘artistic’. Yet although he was not out, Coward was an essential element of Britain’s version of the Pansy Craze, and his songs ‘Green Carnation’ (from his hit operetta Bitter-Sweet), ‘I’ve Been To A Marvellous Party’ and ‘Mad About The Boy’ can be seen in hindsight as less-than-guarded attempts to out himself. Oscar Wilde had popularised the wearing of a green carnation – a flower that does not exist in nature – and it was later adopted as an underground symbol by gay men: Coward similarly adopted Wilde’s mantle as the leading light of London for a time. ‘Mad About the Boy’, first performed in London in the 1932 revue Words and Music, was written to be sung by a woman, although Coward rewrote the lyrics for the New York production which were to be performed by a male singer and contained explicit references to homosexuality. This version, which featured the line ‘People I employ have the impertinence to call me Myrna
Loy,’ was never performed.
If Coward’s star was in the ascendant, then the one that illuminated Fred Barnes’ career was plummeting straight towards earth. A magnet for scandal, in 1924 Barnes was imprisoned for a month for being drunk whilst in charge of a motor vehicle. After knocking a young man and his (stationary) motorbike over, ‘he emerged from the car weeping, accompanied by a sailor, whom he met at a bar’.9 On top of the jail sentence, he was also fined £15 for driving in a dangerous manner. He was lucky to get away so lightly: Barnes had apparently attempted to bribe the arresting officer, hoping to keep the scandal (the sailor was said to be ‘half naked’) out of the press.10 Following the arrest, Barnes was deemed ‘a menace to His Majesty’s fighting forces,’ and he was banned from attending the Royal Tournament, a military tattoo held annually in London. He appealed against the charges, claiming in court that he was not drunk when the incident occurred but was suffering from neurasthenia, a medical condition whose symptoms included tiredness, headaches and irritability associated with emotional disturbance.11
Barnes recorded a number of sides for His Master’s Voice and Regal in the 1920s, but with his drinking and his personal troubles making him less and less reliable, by the end of the decade his career was all but over. In 1927 he received a bequest of $425,000 from a Mrs Gordon Browne, a New York millionairess he had befriended some 11 years earlier during a Zeppelin raid on London. Barnes donated $100,000 to hospitals in Yonkers,12 and the remainder should have seen him set up for life, however his extravagant ways – at one point he was paying out for garaging for four cars, a liveried chauffeur to drive them, a butler, a maid and an expensive apartment in one of the best parts of London – saw him burn through the legacy in a few short years, and by 1931 he was treading the boards again with old-time variety stars Vesta Victoria, Harry Champion and Fred Russell. Trouble seemed to follow Barnes wherever he went.
With work becoming harder to come by – mostly because his drinking had made him a liability – he moved to a small flat in Southend-on-Sea, which he shared with John Senior, his former chauffeur and now, apparently, his manager and lover; the rent on the apartment was paid by one of his previous managers, Charles Ashmead Watson. Reduced to singing in bars – accompanied by a pet chicken rather than his famous marmoset – and passing the hat around for tips, Fred Barnes died, aged 53 in 1938, ‘in a tiny room at Southend. The corpse was found dressed in an immaculate blue suit, overcoat, patent leather shoes, and muffler, surrounded by photographs of bygone stars’;13 the inquest found that he had died of gas poisoning.
One of London’s brightest stars was the openly gay British actor and female impersonator Douglas Byng, a close friend of Noël Coward. Billed as ‘bawdy but British,’ Byng’s songs – of which he recorded many – are full of sexual innuendo and double entendres, and he was noted for his camp performances on the music hall stage and in cabaret. In 1925, he appeared in the musical revue On With The Dance, in a sketch written by Coward, and shortly after he opened his own nightclub in central London where, in full drag, he performed the camp cabaret songs for which he is best remembered, including ‘I’m The Pest Of Budapest’, ‘Sex Appeal Sarah’, ‘I’m One Of The Queens Of England’ (recorded, in a futile attempt to avoid controversy, as I’m One Of The Queens Of Wengland’), and ‘Cabaret Boys’. In 1929, Byng and his performing partner Lance Lister ran foul of the BBC, when a particularly ‘daring’ broadcast the pair had prepared for their national radio debut had to be abandoned after they were informed that drastic cuts must be made. ‘In reply to our protests it was admitted that no complaints about the taste of the turn had been received,’ Byng told reporters, ‘But after various officials had been consulted, we were told that the cuts must definitely be made, as certain lines were considered too daring for London listeners’. Byng refused to cooperate. ‘I replied definitely that the programme would not be given in its mutilated form, as there was nothing left worth broadcasting, and accordingly the turn was abandoned. We were engaged as vaudeville artists, not for a Sunday school concert.’14 Byng was the first artist to sing Cole Porter’s ‘Miss Otis Regrets’ on stage, a song that has since become an LGBT staple, performed and recorded by Edith Piaf, Charles Trenet, Rufus Wainwright, Billie Holiday, Clare Teal, Ethel Waters and many more.
In 1931, Byng appeared in cabaret at the Club Lido, in New York, and although he claimed to have retired in 1962, he would continue to perform sporadically until the year before his death, aged 94, in 1987. ‘I decided to retire because I don’t like to see a lot of old people staggering around the stage breaking wind and forgetting their lines,’ he told an interviewer from the British gay men’s magazine Gold in 1978. ‘It’s no good trying to be an ingénue when you’ve got a bosom twice the size of the Oval [the famous cricket ground].’ Princess Alice and the Duke of Kent were fans: the Duke once suggested Byng write a parody of his old university fraternity song.
When the war came, Coward wanted to enlist; however, Winston Churchill felt he could do more for the war effort by entertaining the troops: ‘Go and sing to them when the guns are firing – that’s your job!’15 Coward was popular with the troops, and in 1942 he starred in the patriotic film drama In Which We Serve, which proved to be a huge morale-booster. Byng, in his late 40s when the war broke out, was too old to enlist but, with songs full of sexual innuendo and double entendres such as ‘Black Out Bertha’, he, too, proved popular with the troops.
At the same time that Byng was wowing them in the theatres, a bisexual black man became the toast of London. Pianist and singer Leslie Hutchinson, known as ‘Hutch’, was one of the biggest cabaret stars in the world during the 1920s and 1930s and is rumoured to have had affairs with Ivor Novello (Somerset Maugham once claimed that Churchill had slept with Novello just to find out ‘what it would be like with a man’)16, Noël Coward and Tallulah Bankhead among many, many others. Born in Grenada in 1900, he first came to fame in New York, but his popularity among wealthy white socialites attracted the wrath of the Ku Klux Klan, and he moved to Paris, where he became Porter’s lover, and then to London where he soon became the highest-paid star in the country. Hutch recorded a number of Porter’s compositions, and camp comic Kenneth Williams often imitated Hutch’s trademark vibrato, yet when he died in 1969, just 42 people attended his funeral.
As the Pansy Craze palled, many American performers relocated to Europe. ‘Pansies Blow US’ screamed the front page of Brevities, claiming that artists, scholars and many of the ‘prominent pansies of this country are scramming for Berlin and Paris. In these two cities they have found a freedom not granted them in America. Instead of hiding their lavender shade under a fake maleness, they go completely margy and blossom out in all their repressed femininity.’17 The Texas-born Vander Clyde Broadway became the toast of Paris: performing as Barbette, the female impersonator and trapeze artist appeared in such venues as the Casino de Paris, the Moulin Rouge and the Folies Bergère. He appeared at the London Palladium but his contract was cancelled after Barbette was discovered engaged in sexual activity with another man. He would never perform in England again, but in Paris he became the muse of the bisexual writer and filmmaker Jean Cocteau and was photographed by Man Ray. Paris had a reputation for its free and easy attitude and tolerance. This laissez-faire stance allowed a number of gay and lesbian bars to thrive during the 1920s in and around Montparnasse, the bohemian enclave of Montmartre, and in the nearby Pigalle. In Paris the jazz was hot and the bisexual, cross-dressing Josephine Baker18 ‘the little colored girl from 63rd Street, New York’19 was the sensational star of the Folies Bergère. In Paris, Baker’s popularity had done much to dispel racism, and homosexuality was, to a degree, accepted. La Baker had made her recording debut in 1927 with ‘I Love My Baby’, a fun little jazz tune on which she appears to switch the gender of her lover from female to male. The disc was coupled with ‘I Found a New Baby’ which, although uncredited, contained a snatch of Tony Jackson’s ‘I’ve Got Elgin Movements in my Hips with Twenty Years�
� Guarantee’. In 1930, she caused a near riot when she turned up at Paris’ famed Théâtre de l’Empire (on l’avenue de Wagram) with her pet panther, Chiquita, and the animal proceeded to attack several members of the orchestra.20
Berlin had been known as a Mecca for LGBT people for decades before Brevities reported on the city’s ‘queer resorts’ which were ‘unrestricted as to the sex of the patrons, either lesbian, fairy or normal sexed are welcome into these gorgeously decorated nite spots’.21 Der Eigene (The Special One), the world’s first regular gay magazine, began in the German capital in 1896 and the city was widely recognised as being at the centre of European gay culture, with its own village, the Schöneberg (the area Christopher Isherwood wrote about in Goodbye to Berlin and Mr. Norris Changes Trains, the books that inspired the stage show and movie Cabaret). Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexual Science, a non-profit foundation which campaigned for gay rights and tolerance towards LGBT people, was a forward-thinking establishment that was well-regarded for its efforts to reform attitudes towards homosexuality. Hirschfield had, in 1919, co-written and acted in the ground-breaking gay film Anders Als Die Andern (Different from the Others).
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