Cary Grant: Hints and Closets in the 1930s

On November 29, 1986, Cary Grant died in Davenport, Iowa, right across the river from my home town of Rock Island.  I was living in West Hollywood at the time, but still, it felt weird to know that a film legend had died right next door.

Cary Grant had a brilliant career, usually playing suave, sophisticated types driven mad by a free spirit or a series of catastrophes.  Must-sees include Topper (1936), Suspicion (1941) directed by Alfred Hitchcock, The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947), To Catch a Thief (1955), North by Northwest (1959) by Hitchcock again,and  That Touch of Mink (1962) with Doris Day.  Many of his movies have gay subtexts.

In Bringing Up Baby (1938), his character answers the door in a frilly women's nightgown (because a woman stole his clothes), and declares "I just went gay all of a sudden."  He continues: "I am sitting in the middle of Time Square, waiting for a bus."  This is one of the first uses of "gay" in its modern sense, augmented by the reference to cruising.  It's an ad-lib, not in the shooting script. How would he know it?

The perennial question is, was he gay?

The facts of the matter are:

1. He met Randolph Scott in 1932, and the two lived together, on and off, for the next ten years ("to save on expenses," heterosexist biographers claim) and remained close friends for the rest of their lives.

2. But neither have been associated with any gay stars, or with the gay subcultures of Hollywood in the 1950s, 1960s, or 1970s.

3. Friends and acquaintances noted that he was often seen in the company of young men.

4. He was married five times. His first two wives "accused" him of being gay, his last three denied the rumors, stating that they had sex a lot.

5. He sued Chevy Chase for suggesting that he was gay.

6. His daughter stated that he liked the rumors, because they motivated women to "cure him" through sex.

7. His last movie, Walk, Don't Run (1966), is obviously about a gay romance.

8. He never acknowledged his gay fans.

9. My friend Randall claims that he had a three-way with Cary Grant and Groucho Marx in 1958.  The story is on Tales of West Hollywood.

Answer: there's a ton of evidence for both gay and heterosexual identity.  Most likely he was bisexual and highly closeted.

10 Gay Facts about "Psycho"

If you haven't seen Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), get it now.  It's a suspense classic, a precursor of the psycho-slasher genre, and over-loaded with gay texts and subtexts. (Spoilers below.)

1.It isn't really about Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), who is murdered in the shower at the creepy Bates Motel.  It's about boyfriend Sam (John Gavin) and Marion's sister Lila (Vera Miles) investigating her disappearance. John Gavin played "straight" men who confront "queer" villains several times during his career.

2. With Marion out of the picture, one expects the requisite "fade out kiss" to be between Sam and Lila, but in fact they don't get involved.  Lila expresses no romantic interest in any man, and can be interpreted as a lesbian.


3. When Vera Miles was getting her start as a contract player for RKO, a chauffeur named Bob Miles drove her to acting class every morning.  Eventually she married him, which enraged Howard Hughes so much that he insisted that all future chauffeurs be gay.

4. Psycho Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins)  in the original novel was fat, middle-aged, and lecherous, obviously heterosexual, but the Hitchcock script made him young, slim, and gay, with the smothering mother supposed to be the origin of gay identity in those days. He has no interest in Marion, sexual or otherwise; his "mother" gets the wrong idea, and does the murdering.

5. Anthony Perkins was gay in real life, and had affairs with many of the top stars in Hollywood, including Paul Newman, Rock Hudson, Troy Donohue, and Tab Hunter.

6. He avoided gay roles, but he did play a gay-vague character in How Awful About Allen (1970).

7. The Hayes Code forbade open depictions of gay characters, even as villains, but the notoriously homophobic Hitchcock usually found some way to signal that his villains were gay.

8. The unique explanation of transvestism, as a type of multiple personality with male and female "sides" struggling for control, was seized upon, and appears often in movies and tv series during the next twenty years, notably in The Streets of San Francisco (with John Davidson as the conflicted drag queen).




9. Robert Bloch wrote a sequel to the original novel, Psycho II, about a movie crew working on a film version of the events. Paul Morgan, the actor playing Norman Bates, researches his character by going to a gay brothel, where the prostitutes dress like Robert Redford, John Travolta, and Clint Eastwood.

10. The various movie sequels, Psycho II, III, and IV, and the prequel Bates Motel, generally heterosexualize Norman Bates by giving him a girlfriend.

Perry Mason: the Gay Lawyer of the 1950s

Many of the first generation of Boomer kids were inspired to become lawyers through watching Perry Mason (1957-66), who represents only people falsely accused of murder, and uses courtroom theatrics to compel the real murderer to confess: "I had to do it!  He would have ruined me!  Don't you understand!"

I never saw it, but older Boomers tell me that Perry (Raymond Burr) was a refreshing change from the girl-ogling swinger-detective-adventurers of the period: he didn't ogle, didn't have a wife back home, didn't express any heterosexual interest.  Indeed, other than his secretary, Della Street (Barbara Hale), he surrounded himself completely by men: detective Paul Drake (William Hopper), district attorney-antagonist Hamilton Berger (William Talman).  

How did the writers manage to avoid heterosexualizing Perry?  

Raymond Burr wins the honor of having the longest Hollywood career without playing any significant characters who get girls. 

He has a wife in Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954) (but no romantic scenes of any sort), but there's no girl-ogling in His Kind of Woman (1951) with Robert Mitchum (top), Tarzan and the She-Devil (1953) with Lex Barker (left), Khyber Patrol (1954), A Cry in the Night (1956), The Curse of King Tut's Tomb (1980), or any of the Perry Mason reunion movies. 

Or in his other famous tv program, Ironside (1967-75): the wheelchair-bound detective, doesn't date women.  But he does have a cop buddy (Don Galloway) and a juvenile delinquent-turned-bodyguard, Mark (Don Mitchell).

Of course, the portly Burr would not be often cast as a romantic lead anyway.  But the almost complete omission of hetero-romance is curious.

Raymond Burr was gay in real life, partnered with Robert Benevides (right) from the early 1960s to his death in 1993.  He was strictly closeted, always covering by discussing the girls he found attractive and making up ex-wives. But surely he had some control over how his characters were played, particularly after he became famous as Perry Mason.