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tuckinpodcast-blog · 7 years

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EPISODE 8: THE LONGEST SUICIDE.

LISTEN: SOUNDCLOUD / iTUNES / GOOGLEPLAY

SOURCES: will be listed in separate post (Yes, I know I still haven’t posted sources for the James Dean episode yet, I’m a mess, I’m sorry)

NOTES: Just a quick reminder that there’ll be no episode next week because I’ll be in Los Angeles for the weekend. Expect some photos and things from me while I’m o my trip though!

TRANSCRIPT:

Hi, I'm Jack, and this is Tuck In We're Rolling: Queer Hollywood Stories. Before we get into today's story, I just wanted to mention again that there'll be no episode next week because I'm going to be spending my weekend in Los Angeles visiting a friend and doing touristy things like taking selfies with the Hollywood sign and visiting a few cemeteries so I can pay my respects to some of my favorite Golden Age stars. We'll be back with our regularly scheduled programming in two week's time, and I thank everyone for their patience. And real quick, I want to go ahead and give a content warning for the entire episode – there's a bit of, I guess, body horror and a lot of talk about addiction and conversion therapy. Here we go:

I'm very excited for this week's episode, because it's essentially the reason I made this podcast. We're going to be talking about Montgomery Clift, his struggle with his sexuality, and why we don't talk about famous queer people when they're not young and beautiful anymore. If you're not familiar with Monty's movies, I'll forgive you, but I think because his life was so short – not as short as James Dean's, but short enough – it's all the more important to watch his films. Like Brando, he was from Omaha, and also like Brando, he employed the Method – though he bristled at his style being categorized that way. In the beginning of his career, he was incredibly handsome. I mean, it hurts to look at him handsome the way young Kurt Russel and Patrick Swayze were. The camera loved his face – probably because it had a lot of ins and outs. I mean, he's gorgeous. In A Place In The Sun, when he smiles at Elizabeth Taylor, it's like – I don't know how to describe it without getting cheesy and maudlin. But I think that's kind of the thing about Monty Clift. He makes it okay to get cheesy and maudlin, because that's what he did. So if you're going to binge on Monty's movies, start with A Place In The Sun – and give it a chance. I swear, in your memory, it's a million times better than the first time you watch it.

And that's the thing with Monty, I think. In your memory, he's a million times better than he ever was in life.

So, after you've watched A Place in the Sun and maybe From Here to Eternity – which you've probably seen clips from or homages to, whether you know it or not, because of the scene where Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr's kiss in the breaking waves – switch it up to the movies he made in the second half of his career. Watch Suddenly, Last Summer and The Young Lions. You'll notice something very different, and that's his face. That handsome boy from Omaha with the stars in his eyes doesn't look so handsome anymore. He's different. His characters are wild-eyed, tired. His face is different – he still looks like himself, but … wrong. So, what happened?

I think I've mentioned “post-accident Monty Clift” before, and now I'm going to explain the distinction. There were really two things that defined Monty's life and his career: meeting Elizabeth Taylor, and the car accident that destroyed his face. I know that when I say it like this, it sounds simple – but it's a lot more complicated than that.

Clift got his start around the same time as Brando, in the same place as him – in New York on the stage. He was only a few years older than Brando, and the two of them were friendly their whole lives. There are some rumors about them being involved, and maybe it's true, but Brando never said anything in the affirmative – and, you know, even though Brando admitted that he had relationships with men, he never named names. But I think it's worth pointing out again that theater and drama nurture this vibe of weird, queerness, but especially in the late 40's and 50's when Brando and Clift got their start, they were very actively denying queer people their right to exist.

So Monty is hands-down one of the most handsome men to ever grace the screen, but Monty is queer. And I say queer and not gay because because he had sexual relationships primarily with men, but fell in love primarily with women. I honestly don't think that he really gave it much thought until he met Liz. He had a few relationships with women before her, and he had been arrested for soliciting a male prostitute at least once, but you know, then he meets Liz. She's seventeen, eighteen. She's the most beautiful girl in the world. They met because the studio forced them to go out on a date for a premier of one of his movies, to drum up some buzz about Place In The Sun, but they ended up getting along like a house on fire.

There's a lot of talk about whether or not Monty and Liz ever had a “real” romantic relationship. Liz broke a thousand hearts, but after his death, she said that she always knew Monty was supposed to be with a man – which makes me think that he might have really been one of the only ones that ever broke her heart. So you know, like I said, I really don't think Monty thought about his split sexuality too much – not because it didn't cause him anxiety or anything, but because it really did, and sometimes when you think on something that causes that much pain, it's just too much. And he meets Liz, and it's like – all of a sudden, he realizes that he can't love Liz the way he feels like he's supposed to or the way that he should, and I think – I think really, that's a pretty big contributing factor to some of his emotional issues. I mean, when Liz had her first baby, he spoiled that kid so bad that people joked about it being his, and he would answer them with: “I wish.”

So when I say that meeting Liz Taylor was a defining moment in Monty's life, I say it because I think it ended up dredging up a lot of things that he would have rather kept locked up. Monty was prone to being “that weird guy” at a party. I've heard stories about how he did things like cook a steak in a fireplace at a party and then carve it up and serve it right there, and how he and Liz used to hang out when she was pregnant surrounded by magazines with their faces on it. His apartment in New York was covered with mirrors so that he could look at himself constantly. I mean, you can't make this stuff up. He and Liz really had a tendency to bring out the worst in each other, and he was already hooked on pills and booze by the time he got into the accident that ruined his face, but he was supposedly mostly sober when it happened.

The other reason I list Liz as a defining moment is simply because Montgomery Clift had his car accident when he was driving home from a party at her house – a party that she had pestered and goaded him to come to. Now, I kind of debated how in depth I wanted to go into exactly what happened to Monty in that car accident. On the podcast You Must Remember This, Karina Longworth's episode about Liz Taylor has a pretty graphic description of how it looked when Liz and her husband followed Roddy McDowall down to where Monty had crashed his car and how she saved him from choking to death by pulling his teeth out of his throat. Sufficed to say, most of his teeth were knocked out, he had fractured ribs and vertebrae, and his face was in shreds. He had a lot of reconstructive surgeries after that, but he never looked the same. The thing is: he was notoriously vain. Remember how his apartment was covered with mirrors? I guess if I looked like him, I would want to look at myself all the time too, but it was an immense blow to him that his looks were gone. Looking at photos of him post-accident now, you almost can't tell the difference. But you look again, look a little longer, maybe look at a picture of him from Judgment at Nuremberg and feel completely jarred. His upper lip was completely paralyzed, and there's something a little wrong about his face around the eyes. He looks pinched and pained, and a little – as one of his friends put it – stuffed. He was in constant pain for the rest of his life after that, and it really only worsened his addiction to pills and booze.

So you know, I could talk about Monty and how people called his death “the longest suicide” for literal hours – and he did die young, at the age of 45 from heart failure as a result of his addictions. He's buried in an unmarked grave in a Quaker cemetery in Prospect Park that no one's allowed into. And this is a really sad ending for a man who had so much promise and was such a talented actor. But even though I could talk about him and just him forever, I wanted to sort of use his story to talk about something else: the way queer people torture themselves to deny who they are out of fear, and the way we reject and queer people once they're not young and beautiful and perfect anymore.

I'm finally going to explain to you why I have beef with David Thomson, you guys. This is probably the last time I'll talk shit about him in the entire series – no promise, though. So, my big issue with Thomson is that he was very flip and dismissive of Monty. He mentions somewhere in the text that John Wayne was totally unimpressed with Clift while they were filming Red River – which really makes no sense to me, because the two have been compared to one another quite a bit. Seriously, if you've seen a picture of young John Wayne, he's a dead ringer for pre-accident Monty. So, fine, okay, maybe it's true and Wayne was just giving a young buck a hard time. Okay. But Thomson really put the nail in his coffin for me when he started in on Monty for turning down the main role of Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard. The role was written for him, and it's been said that Clift turned it down because he felt uncomfortable playing a man who was in love with an older woman because he felt it would hit too close to home for him. Thomson had another idea, positing that, and I quote: “[…] Clift would have made Gillis insidiously charming instead of a desperate scrambler. You would have wanted to save Clift (that was his trick); [William] Holden knows that Gillis is beyond salvation.”

Let's unpack this for a second, shall we?

Okay. So we know that Clift did have a gift for playing sensitive, conflicted men – probably because he was a sensitive, conflicted man, and because he employed the Method school of acting, he brought some of himself to all of his roles. So. Thomson has a point, right? Well, sure. Kind of. But Thomson is mocking Clift for 'tricking’ people into saving him. I take this quote as derision as opposed to a compliment to the actor’s ability to play a role because of the overall scorn it appears Thomson shows for queer people and also women throughout the book, and because he seems to have so much scorn for Clift himself. You know, my thought process is more like: Could it be that maybe Clift had this knack for 'tricking’ people into thinking they could save him because of his own tortured inner workings and his need for support and validation due to the turmoil he felt because of his sexuality? I don’t think it would be a stretch to consider that maybe Clift’s close friendship with Elizabeth Taylor and his own film roles all contributed to trying to reach out to someone to ease his pain. And, you know, maybe - just maybe - Thomson has some kind of problem with this.

Clift ended up going to conversion therapy to try and “fix” his sexuality, along with his drinking. He had a fourteen-foot long medicine cabinet packed with every kind of drug he could get his hands on. His addiction was so bad that on the set of The Young Lions,Marlon Brando sat him down and had a long talk with him about going to therapy, going to AA, and getting help. He knew addiction firsthand, because, as I've mentioned, his mother had been the town drunk growing up. She dried out, got help, and started a few chapters of AA. Brando admired Clift, and I'm sure Clift admired Brando. But I think by this point, Brando had come to terms with his sexuality. It might have taken until 1976, but he fully admitted that he experimented and hooked up with men. And maybe if Monty had listened to Brando or even quit the sauce, he would have been around in 1976 to say something similar.

I think that we're looking at two sides of – if not the same coin, but something similar. Brando accepted himself and he came from this family of artistic weirdos that understood how to accept people who were different from them – with the exception of Brando's father, Marlon Sr, who he had a famously troubled relationship with, but you know – for the most part, he had a good family that he loved. Monty had a pretty troubled relationship with his father, too, but I think everything about his family life was troubled. His mother had been adopted, and she was convinced that she was part of a blue-blooded New England family, and she insisted that all of her children be given the best of everything. Monty's father could pay for it – up until he lost his job. So Monty was raised in a kind of rich boy vacuum. He never did well at school, never felt at home anywhere but up on a stage. You've got a lost boy in Monty, and a “not all who wander are lost” boy in Brando.

It's been pointed out that people sort of dismiss Monty after his accident. He's not as good looking, and he looks very old and somewhat rumpled by the time he reaches the age that he died at. Way more like a harried old professor than a forty-five year old movie star. The roles he took, too, turned dramatically. He's not that starry-eyed young man anymore. He plays men absolutely haunted. The scars on his face actually do lend to most of these roles – grizzled cowhand alongside Clark Gable in The Misfits, a witness to Nazi war crimes Judgment at Nuremburg, even as Freud in the creatively titled Freud. It's almost like losing his good looks opened up other avenues to him, because he wasn't pinned down as a young, pretty boy anymore. But it was hard to look at him sometimes, and it was hard for him to act – in Judgement at Nuremburg, he couldn't remember any of his lines and ad-libbed the entire scene. To go from being hard to look at because he was too handsome, to being hard to look at because his face was so unidentifiable – I can't even imagine what that could have been like. And I want to point out again, going back to the Brando episode where we talked about masculinity, how no one really talks about these roles. They all want to talk about A Place In The Sun, and it's a very good movie – but it's not Monty challenging masculinity and male beauty standards with a scarred face and chronic pain. People only want to remember their queer icon when he was gorgeous, but that's really only paying attention to half the story.

After the accident, it was hard for him to get jobs because he was deemed uninsurable by most of the big studios. Liz Taylor offered to put up some of her own money to insure him for a few movies, but he mostly backed out of them due to his health. He was supposed to play Brando's character in Reflections in a Golden Eye, and Liz had put in a lot of money to get him insured for the picture. He backed out, and some combination of Liz and Monty's suggestion both landed on trying to get Brando for the part. The studio said Brando was too expensive, so Liz offered up even more of her own money to pay his salary – to be paid back to her if the movie made enough money. It made enough money.

I've talked about this movie before – it was really one of the first on-screen portrayals of what everyone knew was a gay man, instead of being buried in subtext. Something in me thinks that Liz trying to get Monty into these roles was her convoluted way of trying to help him, but when I think about Reflections in a Golden Eye, I can't see Monty doing it. There's just so much violence that pours out of Brando's Major Penderton as a direct result of being closeted in the military, so much rage – maybe a post-accident Monty could have pulled it off. Maybe. But I think, ultimately, playing a closeted gay man who directs the anger and confusion and rage of being closeted outward – as opposed to Monty personally, who directed it inward – would be too much for him. The movie came out the same year he died, and part of me thinks that he knew that he had taken a toll on himself.

When he died, people like Lauren Bacall and Frank Sinatra showed up to the funeral, but Liz was in Rome shooting on location, and she just sent flowers. She talked about Monty a lot in her later years. She missed him. She missed their friendship. And I think – you know, I think she couldn't bear going to his funeral, as shitty as it was for her to skip it. Monty died from a heart attack because of coronary artery disease, and his autopsy revealed a whole host of other issues that he was dealing with – thyroid problems that would've caused issues with his balance and speech even when he was sober, problems with his digestive system from dysentery and colitis.

I want to say, I had a lot of trouble with this episode. I have a lot of trouble reading books about Monty and even watching his movies sometimes, and I thought at first that maybe it was secondhand embarrassment – knowing that he hated watching his own movies and always thought he looked terrible – but I think it also comes from knowing that he probably wants to be left in peace after so many years of suffering. They called his death “the longest suicide”, and I think that's fair. So I want to express that I did this episode out of the highest regard and the desire to not let Monty writhe in obscurity after his death. You know, the American Film Institute took A Place in the Sun off their Top 100 Movies list when they remade their 10th anniversary edition, and Monty isn't listed among their Top 50 actors – though Brando is number four, right after Jimmy Stewart, and James Dean made the list at number 18. Elizabeth Taylor made the number seven spot on the list of actresses. So I think that Monty was a phenomenal actor, an influential actor, but I just don't think he has the same sort of cultural pull that James Dean did – dying at twenty-four and capturing hearts and imaginations. And he certainly didn't have the same kind of sex appeal and back story that Marilyn Monroe does, which is why I think she's still on our radar so many years later. Monty fell off the face of the cultural radar because he lost his looks. He disappeared because his death was a steady descent into alcoholism and chronic pain. People don't talk about famous people, queer or not, when they're not young and gorgeous anymore – unless they're doing some reality show like Anna Nicole Smith. They care for a minute when they die, and then forget. And maybe Monty wanted to be forgotten, but I think we shouldn't lost the lessons we got from his life in the process of letting him rest in peace.

Before we go, I wanted to mention this quick aside – my roommates and I play this game where we ask each other stupid questions, mostly to do with whatever fandom we're into – you know, right now there's a lot of, “If you weren't your chosen house in Game of Thrones, what house would you be in?” but the other day, one of them asked me if I think Monty's ghost would have his perfect face or the one from after the crash, and I had to really think about it. I think maybe he would make himself perfect again, but then I thought that maybe he would let it go and keep his wrecked one. You know, maybe him having the scarred face that he did after the crash kind of … took a little bit of that pressure off, you know? He didn't have to be the most handsome actor in the entire world anymore, and he could take interesting, challenging roles – even if he was so far gone he could barely remember his lines. Just a thought I kind of wanted to share with you all.

Thank you so much for listening to Tuck In, We're Rolling: Queer Hollywood Stories. This week's episode was written, researched, edited and recorded by me, Jack Segreto. You can find a transcript of this episode and all our episodes, along with movie and book recommendations, fun facts and photos on our tumblr, tuckinpodcast.tumblr.com. You can also give us a like on Facebook at facebook.com/tuckinpodcast. We accept messages on both of those platforms, so please feel free to shoot us any suggestions for show topics and comments you might have. We put out new episodes every Wednesday, and you can listen to us on SoundCloud, iTunes and Google Play, so don't forget to rate and subscribe to us! We'll be back in two weeks with a round-table discussion featuring my roommates about why we care so much and cling so hard to stories about queer people in popular culture. See you next time!

#( TRANSCRIPTS & SHOW NOTES. )#( EPISODE 8. )#queer history #queer history podcast #hollywood history #hollywood history podcast #new podcast #montgomery clift #monty clift #elizabeth taylor #marlon brando #[ SEE Y'ALL IN A BIT MAN IT'S GONNA BE A GREAT WEEKEND ]

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tuckinpodcast-blog · 7 years

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EPISODE 7: LITTLE BASTARD

LISTEN: SOUNDCLOUD / iTUNES / GOOGLEPLAY

SOURCES: will be listed in separate post after work today (I’m running very short on time right now)

NOTES: I decided to just go ahead and make this the only episode I record this week, and next’s week episode will pick up with Monty Clift. I’m visiting a friend in LA soon, so I won’t have the time to write or record a new episode until after I get back. Also, apologies for my voice this week -- I am VERY tired.

TRANSCRIPT:

Hi, I'm Jack, and this is Tuck In, We're Rolling: Queer Hollywood Stories. This week, we're going to be talking about James Dean, the controversy surrounding his sexuality, and why his legacy seems to resonate into today. Apologies again for this week's episode being late – for those of you who don't follow the podcast's tumblr or Facebook, I went back to Connecticut last weekend to visit my family, and my mom's cat threw up on all of my notes. I guess that's what I get for leaving them out, but once I got home I had to restart my note-taking and go back to work immediately, so that's why this is so late. Even though this is technically last week's episode, I've decided that this will be the only episode I'll record this week – again, I apologize, but in about two weeks, I'll be in Los Angeles visiting a friend and taking a lot of selfies with the Hollywood sign, so I won't have anything recorded until after I get home. At least you guys can expect a lot of great photos on the blog, right? Right.

So, let's just dive on in now: James Dean. He's made it onto AFI's Top 50 Actors list at number 18, and he's long remembered as the guy that made three movies and then died in a fiery car wreck. And, if we're being honest, I think the car wreck is what makes people remember him so fondly, and why he got a spot on that Top 50 Actors list. You know, I think about these stars that died young – not Monty Clift young, but tragically, Marilyn Monroe young – and they might not have done anything really worthwhile, but it's the potential that people mourn. James Dean was twenty-five when he died, and he had only made a handful of movies – even Brando said the loss was tremendous. His movies were good, too. I had to watch Rebel Without a Cause for a class I took in high school called “What Happened In and to the Sixties” – interesting class. We were watching it to sort of explore the way young people felt and acted in the fifties after World War Two, and how they set the stage for the sixties. So, I watched the movie, I wrote my reactions to it in the little journal that we had to keep for that class – and I loved it, I'm not gonna lie. I think back then, I must have been 17, and I was just starting to cultivate this love of Golden Age Hollywood and classic cinema, and I remember being really excited to watch Rebel. But it kind of slipped right out my consciousness – I generally don't enjoy the legacy of tragically “dead before their time” actors, because I think people fixate on them and the gruesome ways they die. And yeah, I guess it really goes back to the mourning the loss of potential, but I also think that James Dean getting onto AFI's Top 50 while Monty Clift isn't even given an honorable mention is kind of bullshit. Monty didn't die in his car crash, so he never reached the legendary status that Dean did. I digress.

People remember Dean and they love and cherish his movies, and they fixate on his short life – but they tend to forget what he was actually like, and from what I've read, it wasn't exactly pretty.

James Dean was born on February 8, 1931 in Marion, Indiana. His family moved to Santa Monica after his father gave up farming to be a dental technician, and he was an only child – very close with his mother, by all accounts. She died of uterine cancer when he was nine and his father sent him back to Indiana to live with his aunt and uncle, where he was raised Quaker. Here's where things start to get a little weird. He meets a pastor named James DeWeerd, and they get very close. A lot of people have gone back and pointed out that DeWeerd is the one who got Dean hooked on fast cars and acting. History is on the fence about whether or not DeWeerd abused Dean, or if they had a consenting relationship in Dean's later teenage years – but either way, Dean supposedly told Elizabeth Taylor that he had been abused by a member of the clergy shortly after his mother's death. After he graduated from high school, he took his dog Max out to California. Eventually, he dropped out of UCLA to act – though at first, he could barely get cast in commercials. Around 1951, he went to New York to study at the Actor's Studio – the same place where Brando got his start. He did a lot of television work, and then finally in 1953, Elia Kazan cast him in East of Eden, after specifically requesting a “Brando type”. He made his last movie, Giant, in 1955 – though it didn't come out until 1956, the year after he passed away. He died on September 30, 1955 at the age of 24 from injuries sustained during a car crash on his way to a race. Interestingly, they named the stretch of highway he died on for him – which I think is a little morbid, even for my taste and I used to be a funeral director, but, hey. To each their own.

James Dean has been described as someone who “slept his way to the top”. Very famously, he and Marilyn Monroe actually had a fling. He said he wanted to marry her, and I guess they had plans to do just that – before they realized what a bad match they would actually be, in a rare moment of self-awareness for both of them. Besides Monroe, he's said to have had affairs with Liz Taylor, Joan Crawford, and Judy Garland. But besides his female conquests, he's also rumored to have had affairs with Brando, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Rock Hudson, and Spencer Tracy. The author Darwin Porter says of Dean: “He was difficult, selfish, and insecure – but he made love to some of Hollywood's greatest beauties.” Elia Kazan said about him: “He was a little nuts. Maybe a lot nuts.”

It's really interesting to me that here's this guy who's remembered and beloved for the three movies he made, but everyone around him is kind of like, “Uh, guys? He's sort of crazy.” Natalie Wood, who co-stared with him in Rebel, said that he was into hurting his partners and also being hurt. I mean, after he and Spencer Tracy hooked up, he stole all of Tracy's cash and his wallet. Last episode, I mentioned that the relationship between Brando and Dean was juicy – but it was more fascinating than anything else. Now, again, I can't say that any of this is real or fictional – and this is one of those stories that seem like it might be a little stretched, if you know what I mean, but there's a rumor out there that Dean and Brando had a Dom/sub relationship, with Brando acting as the dominant one in the relationship.

So, this story is really detailed – and I've never really figured out if lies are simple or complicated, but the story goes that James Dean was absolutely in love with Brando, going so far as to follow him around and wait outside his apartment for attention. Brando used to make Dean watch him have sex with strangers, all some part of a game that Brando played with Dean. Brando claims to have met Dean on the set of East of Eden in 1954 – which is the same story that Mizruchi tells in her book. I mentioned this on the blog, but that book was sanctioned by Brando's estate, which might account for why it left some of the seedier details of his life out. In James Dean: Tomorrow Never Comes, Darwin Porter says that they actually met in 1949, when Brando came back from Paris and visited the Actors Studio in New York. The dates don't exactly match up – officially, Dean wasn't involved in the Actors Studio until 1951, but there's a chance he was hanging around, and given how big a fan of Brando's he was, he might have made an excuse to visit so he could see his idol. People who were close to the two of them – including Tennessee Williams – have claimed that the two were definitely an item, though Brando was absolutely not very nice to Dean, rubbing it in his face that he was out sleeping with other people, and denying that they were even friends after Dean's death.

Now we have two sides of a story – Brando claiming that he and Dean were barely friends, though he admits that Dean was particularly fixated on him, and people close to Dean claiming that the two of them had sadomasochistic sex on a frequent and regular basis. I think with this story, as with most stories, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Dean had a lot of serious girlfriends, and Brando had that appetite that we've talked about before. Dean also had the tendency to use the people he was seeing or sleeping with to further his career, and if we think about early 50's Brando – peak classic film Brando, as it were – then we're talking about someone who had the ability to make someone's career. Dean only got the roles in Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden because Brando turned them down and the directors wanted the next best thing. And Dean really wanted Brando's mantle. Do I think that Dean latched onto Brando in a very unhealthy way? Oh yeah. Do I think that Brando played mind games with Dean because he was an egomaniac? To an extent, yeah. When I talk about the trio of Brando, Dean and Clift, I'm talking about three people who were really into themselves. I mean, mirrors all over the place, looking out for number one only levels of selfishness. Combined with Brando's admitting that he was into men at some point and Dean reportedly being an “omnisexual”, I definitely think those two had some kind of relationship beyond what Brando admits to.

After Dean died, I think people kind of wanted to forget the bad stuff about him and just remember the good things. I have this feeling that Brando maybe wanted to distance himself from it – for whatever reason, whether it was because he was truly distraught that someone he supposedly loved had died, or because he wanted Dean's memory to go on without being colored by a sordid affair, or even if he just wanted to put it all behind him and get on with his affair with Rock Hudson – I don't know. This is all conjecture. But now I kind of want to pick up a thread I teased out a few weeks ago in our Cary Grant episode: this tendency to forget the bad about people after they've died and hold them up on high pedestals despite being really, truly terrible.

Cary Grant was from a different time in Hollywood, definitely. The money was pouring in, the studios had unlimited power, and the Hays Code was in full swing. This was the time when the studios had a roster of stars and they just picked one when they were making a new movie and said, “This is your new movie, go on now.” Grant definitely was one of the first to reject the studio system, which is why he never got an Oscar – but that's a story for another time. Dean was coming up when the studios had to compete with television, and he was on the TV for a little while. Fixers were definitely still running amok, making all the bad things go away, but the Code was slipping and the studios didn't have the same kind of hold that they once did. But: they were both people who notoriously had bad tempers, treated the people around them pretty poorly, and were violent towards their romantic partners.

Why, then, do we continue to look back at these two, and a lot of others like them, through these rose colored glasses?

With Grant, I think it's definitely nostalgia. There's enough time between the peak of his fame and now that people just want to remember the goofy, grinning guy from Arsenic and Old Lace, or they're diehard Hitchcock fans and they won't hear a bad word spoken about him. With Dean, though – I really think it comes back to this view of him as a lost boy who died too young and never got a chance to be the next Brando – which I'm sure Brando was a little relieved about, regardless of whatever kind of relationship the two of them had. And you know, going back to that whole parallel between today's actors and Dean and Brando – people really think he was something special. I'm not denying that he was, of course, but I mean, think about it. My very good friend James Franco and the internet's collective crush Ryan Gosling aspire to be – what? Vain, selfish, and mean caricatures of masculinity? Everyone is so focused on the brooding, mysterious and handsome part that they forget about the terrible things that come with it – the addictive personalities, the disregard for other people, the recklessness. Maybe that's why I find some of the contemporary stars I called out in my last episode so unpalatable. Whatever their level of talent, and whatever they're doing or have done, they're still trying desperately to be people that maybe, you know, weren't all that great. And I guess you can argue that someone can be brooding and mysterious and a talented actor without being abusive or just obnoxious, and you can admire someone's talent without admiring the selfishness, but I mean, come on now. Do you think that someone like Christian Bale ever sat down and thought about the dichotomy of famous persona versus intimate personality as it pertains to Hollywood in the Golden Age? Maybe James Franco has, but if he wrote that paper, he probably would have gotten a D on it.

There's this thing that I really haven't figured out yet about celebrities – and it's where to draw that line, the question of “When does this person do something so heinous that I stop supporting their work?” How many times does Mark Ruffalo have to talk over queer voices when he does things like cast Matt Bomer as a trans woman or think he understands the struggle because, again, he kissed Matt Bomer that one time? Like, do I stop watching movies starring Jeremy Renner because he refused to apologize for making shitty comments about Scarlett Johansen? What do I say about Chris Evans because he apologized for those same shitty comments, and why did I absolutely refuse to watch Manchester by the Sea because Casey Afflek is an abuser who got away with it but I watched Chinatown even though Roman Polanski also abused an underage girl? And you know, I'm coming at this from a place of – like, the classic movies are history now and what happened is what happened. But why is it still happening? When we watch Rebel Without a Cause and don't have the context to know that Natalie Wood felt uncomfortable on set with James Dean because he was a violent person, aren't we doing a disservice to not only Natalie Wood, but all the women who've ever had to sit in a room with someone that's made them uncomfortable? Aren't we, you know, kind of setting a precedent for this kind of thing? And maybe context is the key to this question. We can't just blindly consume media without context, I think. Like … we can't ignore the things that have happened in the past, and I've said that before on this show. When we ignore the fact that James Dean hit Pier Angeli and that Hollywood used to cast white people as people of color or even that fucking Gone With The Wind made people of color stars and then Hollywood refused to let them into the Academy Awards to collect their Oscars, we're denying that it even happened. And maybe knowing and understanding the context can help us navigate away from making the same mistakes people made back in the early years of Hollywood.

I mean, not yet, obviously. Mark Ruffalo never apologized for casting Matt Bomer as a trans woman and Casey Afflek is almost gleeful about getting away with sexual abuse, but we can use these moments to propel ourselves into demanding better, you know – not just from Hollywood, but just from the people we interact with on a daily basis.

Thank you so much for listening to Tuck In, We're Rolling: Queer Hollywood Stories. This week's episode was written, researched, edited and recorded by me, Jack Segreto. You can find a transcript of this episode and all our episodes, along with movie and book recommendations, fun facts and photos on our tumblr, tuckinpodcast.tumblr.com. You can also give us a like on Facebook at facebook.com/tuckinpodcast. We accept messages on both of those platforms, so please feel free to shoot us any suggestions for show topics and comments you might have. We put out new episodes every Wednesday, and you can listen to us on SoundCloud, iTunes and Google Play, so don't forget to rate and subscribe to us! We'll be back next week with an episode about Montgomery Clift and the way age and infirmity effect how we view queer personalities. See you next time!

#( TRANSCRIPTS & SHOW NOTES. )#( EPISODE 7. )#queer history #hollywood history #queer history podcast #hollywood history podcast #james dean #marlon brando #natalie wood

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