rev. 12/99
Like many fans of movies and television, you may assume that Hollywood people have it all. Ellen DeGeneres would disagree with you.
The former sitcom star told the Los Angeles Times that since she "came out" she and her girlfriend, actress Anne Heche, have been treated "unfairly" and "disrespectfully" by "major studios." She claims they are "shut out" of Hollywood, which they maintain is intolerant of homosexuality. "Everything I ever feared happened to me," she told the paper. "I lost my show. I¹ve been attacked like hell. I went from making a lot of money on a sitcom to making no money."
Is there not just a touch of whiney ungratefulness to her comments? After all, DeGeneres had a successful career as a stand up comic from which she could probably still derive an income. She had a bestselling (if utterly boring) book. She has a cute, successful girlfriend who has appeared in three movies in the last year, among them Gus Van Sant¹s much anticipated reshooting of Psycho. And unlike most people in America, she has actually had her own sitcom. What exactly is it that we owe her? What does Hollywood owe her?
True, Ellen was a terribly unfunny, unfocused, conflicted show that would have been cancelled eventually anyway. In an effort to save it, the comic orchestrated, or allowed her advisors to orchestrate, a slow self-outing of a star whose lesbianism was, at best, an open secret anyway. And indeed the show was slightly more popular for a time, with major stars attempting to establish their solidarity with liberal tolerance by making cameos on the program. But all the attention led to…cancellation. Which DeGeneres now seems to be blaming on homophobia. If so, DeGeneres¹s publicity hijinks only served to confirm the core belief of Hollywood gays, which is that to be open about one¹s sexuality is to court career suicide.
As many of the working professionals quoted in David Ehrenstein¹s Open Secret : Gay Hollywood 1928 - 1998 (Morrow, 572 pages, $25, ISBN 0.688.15317.8), maintain, Hollywood doesn¹t necessarily mind gayness. The city¹s entertainment industry just doesn¹t want its Tinsel Town gays to be open about their sexual practices, under the belief (probably true, if polls are to be believed) that mainstream Americans recoil from homosexuality. Such bad publicity would effect— what else?—profitability. If audiences knew at the time that Rock Hudson was gay, the theory goes, or if contemporary audiences were to know which of the top male stars were really gay, the women would not be so inclined to swoon at the love scenes and the men would not identify with their manly confidence.
One of the men who figures prominently in Open Secret is James Whale. The British born director of Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, and The Old Dark House (with Gloria Stuart of Titanic fame), he is remembered primarily as a genre director. In fact, Whale, whose first love was painting and who had gone to art school before serving as an officer in the trenches of World War I, had been a cartoonist and set designer in the post war years, and had turned to stage directing wherein he worked on a huge hit that brought him to America to work at Universal studios. He made anti-war films, and even what many consider the best of three versions of the musical Showboat. A series of flops led to his early retirement; ill-health inspired his suicide—he drowned himself in his swimming pool in 1957.
Whale didn¹t broadcast his homosexuality, but he didn¹t deny it either, often attending parties with his long time lover, producer David Lewis. This was public behavior that other prominent gays, such as George Cukor, would never permit themselves.
Whale¹s unique position in the world of genre films, Hollywood, and the history of homosexuality inspired novelist Christopher Bram to write a novel called Father of Frankenstein, based on his research into Whale¹s life. Director Bill Condon turned the book into the film, Gods and Monsters. The movie (whose title derives from a line in Bride) is also a key event in Ehrenstein¹s book. The author interviewed both the novelist (who loves the movie made from his book) and the director, as well as the producers, including Clive Barker, and most of the cast. Besides being a near-great film, Gods and Monsters portrays a world of films and feelings that belies DeGeneres¹s petulant hissy fit.
Gods and Monsters is set in Los Angeles in the last months of Whale¹s life. The director (played with touching charm by Ian McKellen) is in retirement, but thanks to good investments is well off. He paints and is attended to by his loyal housekeeper Hanna (Lynn Redgrave), a German Catholic who frets that his sexuality will send him to hell. As the movie opens, Whale has suffered a stroke. In his convalescence, he becomes fixated on the new gardener, Clay Boone (Brendan Fraser), an ex-marine from Joplin, Missouri, and a fictional character invented by Bram to explore Whale¹s psychology in the twilight of his life.
Gods and Monsters is one of those rare gay themed films that "crosses over" and appeals to many people. There is real poignancy in the tale as Whale asks Boone, who has a physique out of a Tom of Finland drawing, to pose for his sketches while he reminisces about his Hollywood days. Boone is uneasy about Whale¹s subtle lechery, but respects Whale¹s wit and experience, and finds him emblematic of the successful world that drew him to Hollywood in the first place. Boone is also in the market for a father figure, as we learn later in the film. Though Boone is straight, the legacy of his short friendship with Whale is lasting, and communicated in one of the most beautiful closing sequences I have seen in a movie in some time.
Gods and Monsters is only near great due to some missteps. One of them is a minor character named Mr Kay (Jack Plotnick), an eager college student on the make who professes to love Whale¹s work but whose crudity and insensitivity is extreme beyond plausibility— or at least to be tolerated by the characters around him.
Yet in almost every other way, Gods and Monsters is a supremely assured work of movie magic. Whale is a delightful character. His relationship with Hanna is wonderfully rendered. Condon, as screenwriter and director, balances well the real time scenes with crucial but brief flashbacks to Whale¹s past and fantasy sequences in which Boone and others figure. Subtle connections are formed. Boone is given a flat top hair cut, the fashion of the times, but one that gives him a resemblance to Karloff¹s monster, whose appearance Whale designed. Fraser, who almost has too much face for movies unless he is reined in by a director, here does a wonderful job of capturing Boone¹s ambiguity. He even gives his character a little head twitch that links him with the Bride¹s robotic movements. Condon also amusingly inserts a wealth of phallic symbols throughout the film.
Gods and Monsters is one of the great dying old men movies. Like Ikiru, Providence, and Wild Strawberries, it has no heroes or villains; it simply examines a man¹s life. Condon links the promethean medical experiments of Dr Frankenstein with the horrors of modern medical science. Whale suffers an electrical brainstorm in which he hallucinates or remembers turning points in his career. McKellen is simply wonderful as he captures Whale¹s affected stuffiness, such as the way he rearranges himself after a tender kiss from David Lewis (David Dukes), and the way he slips into vulgarity when talking about why one of his cherished projects failed: "The fucking studio butchered it." The film is also moving when Whale says with quiet simplicity that making movies is one of the best things in the world.
Though some believe that Whale was driven from the film business due to his sexual openness, both the film and the profile of Whale in Open Secret make it clear that Whale was thoroughly accepted within the small film community, and that his retirement was quasi-voluntary and due more to career difficulties and studio indifference rather than movie bitchiness (the circumstances are detailed in James Curtis¹s book James Whale : A New World of Gods and Monsters, from faber & faber).
The key thing is that Whale was not unique. Many gay directors thrived in the company town that is Hollywood, from Irving Rapper to Cukor to Mitchell Leisen. As Ehrenstein notes, "living openly" wasn¹t even in the vocabulary of Hollywood gays of the middle of the century. The tiny enclave of the movie biz served as a shield from the unacceptance they would have found elsewhere in the world. Within that context, and baring other contingencies, they could succeed. Ellen DeGeneres should be so lucky as to have a career and a life as sublime as Whale¹s.
Return to Cinemonkey Home Page