My Life in Pieces

by Simon Callow

  Gay men and women have now entered the mainstream of cinema, losing their exoticness on the way. They are, increasingly, just a part of life, though still generally a somewhat marginal part. Sexual roles are less fixed, not in a 1960s androgynous way, but in the sense that it might be possible to have sex or even an affair with someone of the same gender and not compromise one’s masculinity or femininity. Rose Troche’s Bedrooms and Hallways (1998) played most entertainingly with this idea: a gay man joins a men’s group, whose sexiest, most rampantly heterosexual member falls for him; the gay man himself later has a fling with the straight guy’s girlfriend. A highlight of this film about sexual musical chairs is the speech by the hunk (James Purefoy) hymning the unexpected delights of being anally penetrated. I played the coordinator of the group – straight. In fact, not a single gay character in the film was played by a gay actor. One of the ironic side effects of the new dispensation in movies was that straight actors were queuing up to play gay, and it became increasingly hard for gay actors to get the parts for which they were uniquely qualified. This issue, though scarcely a subject of deep concern, raises interesting questions about authenticity. It is striking that not a single gay person had anything to do with Brokeback Mountain, from the author of the original novella, to the director, to the actors. (Perhaps someone in make-up or wardrobe slipped through? Who can tell?) Would it have been different had gay artists been involved? Better? Or perhaps, to return to my earlier point, it isn’t really a film about being gay at all, simply about deep friendship which, under certain circumstances, turns sexual.

  What, if anything, is missing from the gay cinematic scene? In fact, the single most significant piece of gay celluloid was a television series, Queer as Folk, which, in telling it like it is (at least for the young and pretty), broke so many taboos that almost everything else was left looking pretty silly. Russell T. Davies’s stunningly witty and truthful script was an account of what it is to be part of the scene today. But of course, many – perhaps most – gay people aren’t part of that scene. There is a gay world elsewhere. Early in the 1970s, as part of a theatre company called Gay Sweatshop, I appeared in a little play by Martin Sherman called Passing By which I still regard as one of the most radical gay plays ever written. It showed two men meeting, falling in love with each other, falling out of love and then parting. At no point did they ever mention the word gay or homosexual, there was no reference to mothers or even Judy Garland. They simply found each other highly attractive and one thing led to another. It was amusing, touching, sexy, and entirely normal. This little play has had few successors, on stage or screen. Jonathan Harvey’s Beautiful Thing, the film version of which Steven Paul Davies describes very well in his book, was a sort of 1980s version of the same thing, though the youthfulness of the characters lent it a special poignancy; My Beautiful Laundrette showed another sort of a tender relationship which defied race and class in the most spontaneous, natural, innocent fashion. Ferzan Özpetek’s exquisite Hamam, a film I think Davies is somewhat inclined to underrate, showed the gradual, delicate development of feelings between a heterosexual Italian and a young Turk, a story which conveyed the gentle seduction of one culture by another. These are all quietly persuasive, lifelike accounts of the birth of homosexual desire.

  What I personally would like to see is a story of overwhelming passion, a gay Antony and Cleopatra or Romeo and Juliet, on a grand scale. For that I suppose we need a gay Shakespeare. The gay directors who might have told that story – Zeffirelli, Visconti, Schlesinger – didn’t. Let’s hope that their successors will take the plunge. And let’s hope that two huge box-office stars who fully acknowledge their own gayness will be playing the leads. Meanwhile, Steven Paul Davies’s book describes the astonishing, moving, witty (and sometimes blissfully silly) things that have been achieved so far.

  If the honest representation of gay people on film is still not quite completely achieved, the pioneers had an infinitely tougher job. This is a review for the Guardian in 2002 of Richard Barrios’s Screened Out.

  ‘For Chrissakes, Charles,’ moaned Leo McCarey in 1935 as he attempted the always difficult task of directing Charles Laughton (in Ruggles of Red Gap on this occasion), ‘do you have to be so goddam nancy?’ To which Laughton replied, pleasantly, ‘My dear fellow, after five o’clock, a bit of it’s bound to slip out.’ Richard Barrios’s new book is essentially a study of the bits of it that slipped out in American movie history. He covers the terrain from the beginning of movies to the mid-Sixties, stopping there because after The Boys in the Band, gays had finally occupied centre screen, rather than the peripheries. It is a fascinating and thoroughly documented study in subversion, as much social science as movie history, which reveals how ultimately irrepressible minorities are, regardless of the weight of opposition ranged against them. In the case of homosexuality and the movies, the opposition came both from within and from without. Few of the moguls who ran the studios were sympathetic to homosexuality as such (though many of their employees were more or less openly gay), while the Hays Office, established by the industry for self-protection, and its militant cousin, the Catholic Church’s Legion of Decency, set their hearts implacably against any representation of what was officially deemed Sex Perversion, especially of what they invariably called the ‘pansy’ tendency. Under the influence of Henry J. Forman’s best-selling moral tract Our Movie-Made Children, which warned against the corruption of the American mind, they attempted to impose their manically sanitised vision of American life on the country. This was a world view which thought the word ‘pregnant’ unacceptable for public consumption, waged furious war on cleavage, and denied even married couples the comforts of the double bed.

  The Hollywood gay community, with exceptional ingenuity, determined to make its presence felt on film, not simply demanding acknowledgement for itself, but also propagating an alternative and antithetical view of human life where our impulses and aspirations refuse to conform to the arbitrary and unreal codes of the moralists – pan-sexuality rather than homosexuality. They played an extraordinary game of cat and mouse, and Barrios describes it with relish and some wit, in a prose style which sometimes slips into the chatty and even gossipy, but which is mercifully free of the structuralist, semiotic, and Saussurian modes which still dog so much writing about film. He is equally free of political correctness, and seeks to celebrate those gallantly effeminate actors (‘sissified’, in the language of their time) who from the earliest days of film embellished and enlivened the films in which they appeared. He sees them as the opposite of self-oppressive: they are rather, for him, gay guerrillas, fearlessly and cunningly bringing their sensibilities and subversions into the light. A tireless camp-hound, he hunts out these moments, just as gay audiences of the time must have done, looking for the hidden innuendo, marvelling at the outrageous excess. What, for instance, can audiences have made of George K. Arthur as Madam Lucy the (male) couturier in Irene crying, ‘As I live and hemstitch, she’s impossible!’ Sound gave a voice to gays, and that voice simpered, hissed and lisped. In tracing the lavender thread that runs through film history, Barrios unearths some wonderful curiosities – the character Clarence (Clarence and Leonard were frequent giveaway names for gay men) in the 1927 silent film Wanderer of the West announced by a title card which says: ‘One of Nature’s mistakes in a country where Men were Men’; the passionate friendship between Richard Arlen and Buddy Rogers in Wings of the following year, in which Arlen cradles the dying Rogers in his arms and finally takes leave of him with a passionate kiss on the mouth; Ladies They Talk About (1933), the first lesbian prison drama; one pretty boy slipping a slave bracelet onto the wrist of another in Noël Coward’s Cavalcade; and Dude Wrangler, now sadly lost, billed as ‘The Story of a Pansy Cowboy… oh dear!’ Very often, lesbian elements were used for titillatory purposes, in, for example, the notoriously steamy Naked Moon sequence from The Sign of the Cross, directed by the magnificently hypocritical C. B. DeMille to be, he claimed, a dreadful war
ning, or in Queen Christina, where Irving Thalberg, inspired by Mädchen in Uniform, had specifically briefed the screenwriter to create as much intensity as possible in the relationship between the cross-dressing Queen (Garbo) and her lady-in-waiting.

  The incidence of homosexuality on screen is thus a complicated two-or three-way traffic between the agenda of the gay performers, writers and directors (the famous ‘Fairy Unit’ at MGM musicals, for example), the commercial calculations of producers, and not rarely the professional instincts of performers who were often not gay. Gay roles are often fun to play; some straight comedians in the Twenties and Thirties specialised in ‘nance’ roles until they were no longer able to (one of the most famous ones – Bobby Watson – switched during the war to playing Hitler). Inevitably, film mirrored the prevailing social situation. There was, in the early Thirties, a brief period in which homosexuality emerged into the light, with thriving bars and clubs, especially in New York, where the glittering Pansy Club was the smart place to be seen, both for gays and straights. The supply of queer humour on the screen rose to meet the fashion. Paradoxically, this unexpected suspension of homophobia came to an end with the election of FDR and the ending of Prohibition. As Barrios remarks, it seemed as if America could take only so much vice, and from 1935, that was drink, and only drink. In a brilliant capsule, he notes that the framers of the newly enforced Production Code of 1934 declared war on Mae West, because she dared to treat sex as a joke: their demands ‘denatured’ her work, and caused it to flop. Before the enforcement of the new Code, West had been the greatest box-office draw; after it, it was Shirley Temple.

  Barrios steers us through the Forties and Fifties, noting the development of the male bitch character as perfected by Clifton Webb, the tortured ambiguities of the relationship between James Dean and Sal Mineo in Rebel Without a Cause, the dramas over the filming of the pathetically mild Tea with Sympathy, Robert Walker’s dazzlingly gay interpretation of Bruno in Strangers on a Train for Hitchcock, and the Legion of Decency’s last great triumph, the excision of seven gay minutes from Spartacus (now restored). The relative triumph of the commitment to film of Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band is noted for what it was – a truthful account of some gay lives at a time of considerable oppression, though scarcely an affirmation of gay liberation. He ends by sombrely noting that six out of the nine actors in the cast have subsequently died of AIDS, a horror to eclipse any of the griefs endured by Crowley’s Harold, the ‘pockmarked Jew fairy’ of the play, and his friends. AIDS of course has changed everything for homosexuals and our representation on screen, for better and for worse.

  These developments are beyond the scope of Barrios’s book. The story he tells is of hidden history and witty subversion and in that sense it is a positive one. For me, however, it is finally a little depressing. His subject is the American cinema, and it has to be stated that the inability of that industry to deal with the realities of life as it is lived – not simply gay life, but the whole spectrum of human desires and aspirations – is a dispiriting phenomenon. ‘Movies are us,’ he says, rather overexcitedly, ‘we are the movies.’ But all human life most distinctly is not there. Again and again it is foreign movies or foreign artists making American movies that have pushed forward the possibilities. In pre-war Hollywood, of course, the vast majority of directors were European, and they – von Sternberg, von Stroheim, Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, James Whale – pushed as hard as they could against the pressures of the small-town morality which held such curious sway over the lives and work of movie artists, but it was an unending and often unequal struggle. America has still yet to produce films on gay themes as grown-up as Almodóvar’s The Law of Desire, or even the recently aired British film Bedrooms and Hallways. Britain, at least since the Sixties, has had a more impressive record altogether with films like Victim, Sunday Bloody Sunday and Tchaikovsky. And Four Weddings and a Funeral, apart from its other felicities, struck a really mighty blow by placing a gay couple acknowledged by all as ‘the perfect match’ at the heart of what has now become one of the most popular films of all time. As Charles, the Hugh Grant character says, ‘If we can’t be like Gareth and Matthew, maybe we should let it go.’

  There still remains the dream of a film about a great and overwhelming gay love affair, not to proselytise, simply to affirm the eternal diversity and richness of human experience. Alas, it seems unlikely to emerge from a Hollywood in which apparently and miraculously not one single American gay actor is to be found, where historical characters’ sexual preferences are still straightened out (as in A Beautiful Mind; one dreads to imagine what will be made of Alexander the Great’s adored boyfriend Hephaestion in the forthcoming films of his life) and where the success and failure of movies is predicated on vast nationwide box-office returns, demanding the approbation of the lowest common denominator. In fact – and this is where Barrios’s admirable book seems perhaps to be overstating the importance of the movies – television, both here and in America, is again becoming a great engine for social change, more adept at reflecting realities than its older brother. Queer as Folk, both here and in its somewhat less bold transatlantic version, shot from the hip (if you forgive the slightly nancy innuendo) in a way one scarcely believed could ever be possible. Television is again the medium of the future.

  A final note on Four Weddings and a Funeral: the film had an almost impossibly ideal cast, some of the older members of which – Kenneth Griffith, Robert Lang, Rosalie Crutchley, Corin Redgrave – have since left us, as has one of the poster boys and girls, one of the core team, Charlotte Coleman. Her death in 2001 was responsible for my only experience of being doorstepped: the tabloid press smelt a scandal. I refused to speak to any of them, but wrote this piece for the Guardian.

  I suppose Charlotte Coleman will be always remembered now as Scarlett, Hugh Grant’s unexpectedly punk flatmate in Four Weddings and a Funeral, but for a generation of children presently growing into young adulthood she was Marmalade Atkins and for another whole section of the viewing public, she was Jess in the television adaptation of Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. That was quite a range, although all these parts and almost everything else she ever played shared a wholly unforced quirkiness which was the essential her. I had known her for some years before we worked together in Four Weddings and a Funeral, when she was still a very young woman, and she always cut a striking figure – sartorially, to be sure, as a clothes horse for the teenage chic of the moment, her nostrils sometimes be-ringed, her hair radically transformed every time you met her – but it was the intensity of her personality that caught you, wild with laughter one moment, plunged into deep melancholy the next, her huge sleepless eyes opening up deepest chasms of feeling. She was worryingly thin, but her energy was immense. She spoke brilliantly and wittily of herself, begging one to shut her up – ‘I know I’m emotionally incontinent’ – but always conscious of absurdity, in herself or in others. She struck me as a Sally Bowles de nos jours, outrageous and vulnerable and impossible not to watch. I believed that she was going to be one of the great comic talents of our time, with the special gift of creating her own outlandish rhythms, which made everything she ever said as an actress seem new and original and hilarious. The loss is terrible, for her family and for all of us. Thank God there is so much that is wonderful to remember her by.

  The only jobs I got out of Four Weddings and a Funeral were to be the voice of the Ancient Green Grasshopper in James and the Giant Peach, and to play the villain in Jim Carrey’s Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, which shot in Charleston, Carolina, in 1996, and was not, to put it mildly, a joyous experience. But the long hours of waiting in a sweltering caravan were not wasted: I sat there in my jodhpurs (villains always wear jodhpurs in these sort of films), translating the screenplay of Les Enfants du Paradis and adapting it into a play for the Royal Shakespeare Company, for whom I was going to direct it. I wrote the following for the Daily Telegraph just before the opening night.

  Last spring
, Adrian Noble asked me to direct Widowers’ Houses for the RSC. It is a splendid play in its way, acerbic, trenchant, relevant, but Shaw has never excited me, neither as actor or director, so when I met Noble to talk about it, I brought a list of twenty-seven possible alternative options with me. After reciting them, I casually added, hardly expecting to be taken seriously, that what I really wanted to do was to put Les Enfants du Paradis on stage. The effect was electrifying. Noble jumped up, eyes blazing. ‘My favourite film!’ he cried, as so many people would over the coming months. He’d seen it at the Academy Cinema when he first came to London as a kid, going back again and again and again. We trotted down Memory Lane: the old movie house on Oxford Street, the Peter Strausfeld woodcut posters, the polyglot babble of the foyer, the all-pervading smell of coffee too long on the hob. Then favourite moments from the film and favourite actors – ‘Arletty! Barrault! Brasseur!’ – the names alone enough to evoke a vanished world of expression, one of the greatest films ever made which is at the same time one of the supreme celebrations of the theatre. ‘Do you think it’s possible?’ Adrian asked and I said truthfully that I hadn’t the slightest idea but that I’d find out.

  What he didn’t ask was why I would want to do it on stage, with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He didn’t need to; it was obvious to both of us. It was an opportunity for actors and audience to encounter the French romantic tradition, with the human heart, eloquent, impassioned, at its centre. This form of writing calls for a very particular kind of acting, the head and the heart in perfect balance, in which the individual emotional experience is transformed, made mythic by force of personality, expressed in language both eloquent and concrete. Acting of this sort has not been seen on the English stage for many years, for the simple reason that the plays that call for it do not exist, or do not translate well. French nineteenth-century theatre has hitherto resisted at tempts to find a satisfactory English form; the nearest experience of it English audiences have had was in Alan Badel’s extraordinary performance of Jean-Paul Sartre’s version of Dumas’ play Kean, in which that astonishing and much-missed actor played the central role with a (rather un-English, in fact some what un-Kean-like) burnished articulateness, a smouldering eloquence, phrasing in huge paragraphs, exuding a sexuality of intellect, that was a perfect transmutation into English terms of a fundamentally French phenomenon. He did it again on television, in an adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo, no doubt long since wiped, in which his Edmond Dantès, too, was full of the uniquely precise passion he so consummately distilled.