"There's something that gives me a queer feeling every time I look at you."--Jimmy Monkley (Cary Grant) in Sylvia Scarlett.
Cary Grant's sexuality has been an open question for decades. Grant vowed that he was straight to the end of his days, but rumors circulated his entire life and afterward that not only was he gay, he and his friend, Randolph Scott, set up house together between lavender marriages to minor actresses. If true, it was an on again off again cohabitation of some twelve years. Grant was militant in defending his heterosexuality, though. He was litigious on the subject during his lifetime. And yet...several of his earliest directors were gay. He had a bit part in Dorothy Arzner's Merrily We Go to Hell and a more substantial one in Mitchell Leisen's The Eagle and the Hawk. He was perfectly happy to allow filmmakers to poke fun at his masculinity, particularly in two films for Howard Hawks. In Bringing Up Baby, Hawks dressed the actor in a marabou negligee and when pressed on his appearance by the film's straights, gave him the line, "I just went gay all of a sudden!" A decade later, Hawks dressed him up as a woman full stop in I Was a Male War Bride, assuming that the sight of Grant so attired would be hilarious. That gag hasn't aged at all well. Grant's daughter, Jennifer, continued to defend her father's heterosexuality after his death, but several of his ex-wives described him as bisexual at the very least. As a personal note: Grant set off my mother's gaydar, which was accurate enough to identify Rock Hudson as a gay man long before he was outed during the AIDS epidemic. So there you go. You have my mother's word for it.
In spite of Grant's defenses and denials, queerness circled his career and screen image, if only as background radiation. Three of the actor's collaborations with Katharine Hepburn were directed by George Cukor, whose homosexuality wasn't just a matter of rumor. Cukor knew all of gay Hollywood, and held parties for them in his home throughout his life. In 1936, Cukor was picked up on vice charges at the Navy pier with William Haines and Haines's boyfriend/husband for soliciting sex from men, something that MGM was at pains to cover up. Cukor was often relegated as a director of "women's pictures" ever after, including, appropriately enough, The Women in 1939 as a consolation prize for being removed from Gone With the Wind because Clark Gable wouldn't be directed by a "fairy" (his word). Cukor himself bristled at the idea that he could only work with women and, indeed, more men won Oscars in his films than did for any other director. He also directed more movies starring Katharine Hepburn--ten of them--than any other director.
Katharine Hepburn herself was no model of depression-era heterosexuality, either. She affected mannish fashions in a time when that was taboo. She frequently wore pants (gasp!). She consorted with known lesbians. Her second film, the very queer-coded Christopher Strong, was directed by Dorothy Arzner after all (her first was directed by Cukor). She was rumored to have had romantic relationships with multiple women and a long-term one with her "companion", Laura Harding, throughout the 1930s. Some of Hepburn's comments on her own persona suggest at least some level of gender ambiguity. She affected an alter ego named "Jimmy" in her youth, for example, and sometimes complained that she should have been born a man. History notes Hepburn's affairs with men, most notably John Ford (himself of a dubious sexuality if you believe Maureen O'Hara, among others), Howard Hughes, and Spencer Tracy. Tracy was accounted Hepburn's great love, but is it possible that he was a beard? Likely not, but some of her contemporaries, known lesbians all, believed that the actual love of her life was Harding, with whom she remained close throughout her life.
Does any of this matter given the enforced heterosexuality of movies during the Production Code era? Is it even useful to speculate about dead movie stars who never publicly acknowledged that they were some variety of queer? Maybe not as a rule. The Breen office and paranoid studios made damned sure that this is all reading tea leaves in the absence of documentary evidence. Even granting that, you cannot avoid the queerness of the imagery in Grant, Hepburn, and Cukor's first collaboration, Sylvia Scarlett (1936), in which Hepburn cuts off her hair and poses as a man for most of the film and kisses a girl. And if the film weren't queer enough already, Edmund Gwenn--Kris Kringle himself--plays Sylvia Scarlett's reprobate father in the film. Gwenn never remarried after he separated from his wife around 1916. He spent his later years living with the much younger Olympic bobsledder, Rodney Soher, and allegedly had multiple male side-pieces. One almost feels sorry for poor Brian Ahern, possibly the only prominent straight cast member in the film.
It is the overt queerness of Sylvia Scarlett that is most often cited as the reason it flopped. It is that same overt queerness that has granted it an afterlife in spite of its initial failure. It's a cult item these days, a film that figures prominently in the history of gay Hollywood. It's also an important film in the careers of both Grant and Hepburn, though it sent them in opposite directions.
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