"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 a romantic relationship 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 even 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 (1935), 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.
The plot of Sylvia Scarlett finds embezzler and gambler Henry Scarlett and his daughter, Sylvia, on the run from both Henry's creditors and from the law. He vows to leave his daughter behind because they'll be on the look-out for a man and his daughter, prompting Sylvia to cut off her hair and pose as a man during their escape from France. Their only asset is a bolt of fine lace that Henry stole from his employer on the way out. On the crossing, they encounter con-man Jimmy Monkley, who convinces them that he can get their stake past customs in England. At first, it appears as if Monkley has swindled them by alerting the customs officials in order to divert them from the jewels he himself is smuggling, but he's two steps ahead, and after demonstrating his bona fides, invites Henry and Sylvia to join him as traveling grifters and entertainers. At first, Sylvia is an inept swindeler, but she gets better under Monkley's tutelage. They hold up in the house of a wealthy family that Monkley knows to be empty; the family has taken holiday on the continent. His source is the maid, Maudie, who conspires with the troupe to steal the household jewels, a plan Sylvia foils. Maudie is smitten with Sylvester, though, and attempts to seduce him. Their vaudeville act catches the attention of artist Michael Fane, whom Sylvia takes a shine to, and vows to reveal her true gender to him, but before that can happen, Fane's current girlfriend, Lily, discovers the truth, and shatters all of the relationships in Sylvia's orbit. When Henry is found dead on the beach, all masquerades end...
This is a weird movie. It changes genre every other reel, from melodrama to farce to crime film to romance to epistemological mind fuck. It's worth keeping in mind that the word, "genre", shares an etymology with "gender," so it's appropriate that it keeps changing both. This is very much a film of appearances, and not just Sylvia/Sylvester's gender shenanigans. Everyone in the film, except maybe for Fane, is wearing a mask. This subtext would mark the film as queer even if it wasn't muddying the waters of gender. But it is. Sylvia/Sylvester is a frontal attack on rigid gender assignment and represents a chaos agent thrown at the culture at large. Everyone in the film is attracted to Sylvia's androgyny, including Sylvia herself. This spreads to the audience. I was having a conversation with a queer woman of my acquaintance about the way actresses of this period often looked like trans women, a phenomenon that stems from the era's fashions, which were designed to minimize the bustline rather than enhance it. I showed her a photo of Katharine Hepburn as Sylvester and another of my queer woman friends butted in to opine, "Welp! I'm gay." There are other films from the period featuring crossdressing actresses--Dietrich in Morocco, for example, Garbo in Queen Christina, or more broadly Louise Brooks in Beggars of Life, but none of them really sells the identity even if they were bisexual or gay in real life. Hepburn manifestly does. You can believe her as a man, or even as a trans man in Sylvia Scarlett. She sets off the viewer's transdar, if you'll pardon the phrase, in a way that other actresses of the era never did. That she ends up in a conventional relationship as a woman at the end with Brian Ahern is one of the film's bitterest disappointments. Assuming, that is, if you're watching the film through a queer lens and thirst for queer happiness. I am such a viewer, and I imagine that most queer audiences are too, but that audience wasn't a cohesive thing in 1935. This film would have to wait a very long time for American culture to even crack the door for queerness to enter it. The film's queerness isn't subtextual the way it is in other films, and it paid a price for it. To an extent, Sylvia Scarlett is a case study in the mechanism of transphobia, in which everyone in Sylvia's orbit is disturbed in some way by her gender presentation and no one relaxes until she retreats to a conventional femininity. Just because this film is queer as hell doesn't mean it isn't also kind of regressive.
 |
| This is the picture I showed my queer friends, FWIW |
My initial reaction to Sylvia Scarlett back when I first saw it was that it was very much the least of the films Grant and Hepburn made together. All these years later, that opinion more or less still holds. All things are relative, though. The other three films are such stone-cold classics that there's no shame in failing to measure up to them. I don't think it's a bad movie, in spite of its reputation as one, but it is a maddeningly inconsistent one. The film rushes through its initial scenes, the ones that set up the premise. Hepburn is dreadful in these scenes, and one can see the actress Dorothy Parker allegedly roasted when she quipped, "(she ran) the gamut of emotions from A to B!" This part of the film is actor-y and theatrical, and it's not just Hepburn. Edmund Gwenn is equally dire here. Once the plot actually kicks in, the performances improve, possibly catalyzed by the arrival of Cary Grant. Grant's first appearance in the film is the kind of shot that creates movie stars. It's a bit like the first appearance of John Wayne in Stagecoach, in which the persona of "Cary Grant" arrives fully formed out of shadows and fog and shot from a low angle to give him an air of power. It's a "star is born" moment in a film in which Grant is categorically not supposed to be the star. Here's the shot:
Hubba hubba, right? And the next shot after a cut back to Gwenn and Hepburn:
Grant was more than twenty films into his career at this point and not a single one of his previous directors provided him with an introduction like this. Not even Mitchell Leisen, who was also gay and presumably had an eye for male beauty. Maybe it was a matter of taste. Maybe Grant was more to Cukor's specific tastes. He surely saw what no other director before him saw in the actor. His introduction here provides the audience with a hint of the dark side of the Grant persona, too. Grant's skills as a comedian follow, but the man to whom we are introduced here has an aura of danger to him. It reminds me of some of the shots in his Hitchcock films; the shot ascending the stairs in Suspicion, maybe, or the distorted spinning shot of him in Notorious. And then later in the film, Cukor dresses him like a clown. This film almost encompasses the polar extremes of the Grant persona.
For Hepburn, Sylvia Scarlett was the start of a period of career setbacks. Its failure, as well as the failures of some of her other films (including both Holiday and Bringing Up Baby with Grant), led to her appearance on the list of stars labeled "Box Office Poison" in an advertisement taken out by the Independent Theaters Association in The Hollywood Reporter in May of 1938. She was released from her contract with RKO later that year and went to New York to lick her wounds on the stage. She came back eventually, but that story also involves Grant so I will save that for another time. It wasn't all bad for her, though. During the production of Sylvia Scarlett, an airplane landed on a field just off the set. Grant informed Hepburn that the pilot was his friend (and future owner of RKO Pictures) Howard Hughes. Hepburn and Hughes hit it off and began an affair. As for Grant...
It is clear from the rate they charged for Cary Grant's services in 1935 that Paramount Pictures did not at all understand what they had in Grant. The fee they charged for both Sylvia Scarlett and for Suzy (at RKO and MGM, respectively) was a mere $12,500 a pop. Based on the films they had been slotting for him--his previous three films were Enter Madame!, Wings in the Dark, and The Last Outpost--I suspect that they saw him as a cut rate version of Gary Cooper, and because they had Cooper under contract, they gave Cooper the plum roles rather than the malcontented Grant. Keep in mind that Paramount was home to some of the era's great sophisticated filmmakers. It was their house brand. They could have paired Grant with Lubitsch--and Grant would have been a MUCH better fit in Bluebeard's Eighth Wife than Gary Cooper ever was. That film's writer, Billy Wilder, knew what Grant was. He wrote Five Graves To Cairo and Sabrina for Grant after Grant rose to superstardom, though Grant turned them both down, possibly because they were at Paramount. Imagine Grant in Trouble In Paradise rather than Herbert Marshall (no shade on Marshall, who is great). Instead, they mostly squandered his talents. Grant was profoundly unhappy at Paramount in 1935 and had made it known that he was not going to re-up with them once his contract expired. Paramount's loan-outs were punishment for those sentiments. In the case of Sylvia Scarlett, Grant's first film for RKO, it turned out to be a colossal blunder on Paramount's part. Even though the film itself was a commercial disaster, RKO recognized exactly what Grant was. Grant would ascend to superstardom in part due to the films that he made at that studio starting a mere two years later. Sylvia Scarlett planted that seed. Grant was by no means intended to be the star of Sylvia Scarlett. He doesn't get the girl and he's very much a side character, but he blows poor Brian Aherne off the screen. So much so that RKO promoted Grant to second billing for a part that wouldn't ordinarily merit it. It is entirely possible that Paramount finally realized Grant's potential when they loaned him out to producer Walter Wanger for Big Brown Eyes, a film that Paramount distributed but did not originate. That film's director, Raoul Walsh, certainly knew Grant's potential and used it. But by that time it was too late. In any event, Sylvia Scarlett is the linchpin of all of this because it was in this film that Grant's full spectrum of talents was revealed-- to the rest of the industry, at least. It would take the public a little more time to catch up.
There are a lot of speculations and inuendos in this post, so it's incumbent upon me to cite some sources this time around:
Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise by Scott Eyman, 2020, Simon and Schuster
The Films of Cary Grant by Donald Deschner, 1973, The Citadel Press
The Sewing Circle--Hollwood's Greatest Secret: Female Stars Who Loved Other Women by Axel Madsen, 1995, Birch Lane Press
The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies by Vito Russo, Revised Edition, 1989, Harper and Row
Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn by William J. Mann, 2007, Picador
My other posts about Cary Grant. Only about sixty more films to go:
This is the Night (1932)
She Done Him Wrong (1932)
The Eagle and the Hawk (1933)
Thirty-Day Princess (1934)
Enter: Madame (1935)
The Last Outpost (1935)
Wings in the Dark (1935)
Suzy (1936)
In Name Only (1939)
Only Angels Have Wings (1939)
Penny Serenade (1941)
Suspicion (1941)
Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)
Dream Wife (1953)
To Catch a Thief (1955)
North by Northwest (1959)
Operation: Petticoat (1959)
Charade (1963)
This blog is supported on Patreon by wonderful subscribers. If you like what I do, please consider pledging your own support. It means the world to me.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment