Salacious Biographies

[Polybius]

I wish this had all come out in the 60's. The idea that Spencer Tracy was not only gay, but regularly getting full service at a Gas Station To The Stars...Lenny Bruce would have constructed something resembling the Hanging Gardens of Babylon with that.

[Gregor Samsa]

What revelations have we learnt so far?

[Michael]

From William Mann, author of the new Kate bio:

"I've been gratified by the reviews Kate has gotten so far. Thomas Mallon, in Sunday's New York Times Book Review, writes a very smart essay about the book and about what I was trying to do. But in other coverage, the sensationalism continues, and it's disappointing.

This "billboarding" of the book's contents—sensationalizing the stories I tell about Hepburn's (and Spencer Tracy's) sexuality—is an indication that much of the media simply does not know how to talk about sexuality. People magazine, in its positive review of the book, made it seem that Kate's 600-plus pages are all about sex. The Hartford Courant summed up the book with a staggeringly reductive tagline: Hepburn had "a pattern of caring for secretly gay men with drinking problems.â€

[Matt]

I understand where he's coming from, but it's laughably unrealistic (not to mention disingenuous) to expect People Magazine or the Hartford Courant to offer a nuanced review of a work that does, to be frank, drop quite the bombshell. You can, at best, hope for such from The New York Times (which he got), but even that's a crap shoot.

[dadaistnun]

Can anyone recommend a good Bette Davis biography? Looking for one for a Christmas present.

Something closer to the recent Kate end of the spectrum as opposed to, say, Mommie Dearest would be nice.

[Matt]

Can anyone recommend a good Bette Davis biography? Looking for one for a Christmas present.

The recent Charlotte Chandler book, The Girl Who Walked Home Alone has some very candid revelations from Miss Davis, but I didn't think much of it as "biography." The Barbara Leaming book Bette Davis: A Biography is more exhaustive, but it's still "meh"--not very engaging despite its subject. Unfortunately, those are your only options for books still in print. If you have to pick between the two, get the Chandler. It's available in hardcover and will make for a better gift.

For sheer entertainment value, I'd recommend picking up one of Davis' "memoirs" such as This 'n' That or The Lonely Life, but both are long out of print. Also recommended but out of print is Charles Higham's Bette: A Biography of Bette Davis.

You will most definitely want to avoid daughter B.D. Hyman's My Mother's Keeper. It makes Mommie Dearest look like a paragon of literary restraint.

[dadaistnun]

Thanks, Matt; the Chandler it is.

[David Ehrenstein]

Where's David Ehrenstein when you need him!

Present! Yes Kate was a closet dyke, Spence a closet queen and abusive alcoholic, and Cary and Randy had an on-and-off arrangement (more fuckbuddies than lovers) that spanned a decade.

[David Ehrenstein]

And in my interview with Gore Vidal in the current Written By he reveals that Clark Gable got Cukor fired from GWTW because he was a hustler in his youth and Cukor was one of his customers. The source? Mr. Cukor himself.

[Polybius]

Gore Vidal knows everything 8-)

An absolute national treasure =D>

[David Ehrenstein]

Howard (Austen) was the man he lived with (best buddies, not lovers)

Harold (Lang) was an old boyfriend (circa 1947)

Gore slept wiith everyone in the cast of Fancy Free except Jerry Robbins.

[Via_Chicago]

And in my interview with Gore Vidal in the current Written By he reveals that Clark Gable got Cukor fired from GWTW because he was a hustler in his youth and Cukor was one of his customers. The source? Mr. Cukor himself.

That little piece of information can also be found in Anger's Hollywood Babylon.

[David Ehrenstein]

That little piece of information can also be found in Anger's Hollywood Babylon

Gore is a far more trustyworthy source than Mr. Angerim.

I recall Anger quoted Cukor as saying William Haines gave Gable a blowjob when he started at MGM.

Actually the story was that Andy Lawler said Gable was "One of Bill's old tricks," meaning Haines. But it was George.

True - they never had sex, and Howard loved NYC while Gore hated it. But I can assure you from my own life a LTCompanion/not-husband (24 years for us) has been the most important thing in my life

SING OUT LOUISE!

George and Howard met at the Everard Baths and discovered immediately they aren't each other's type (both being Tops.) But they got on in absolutely every other way and so decided to live together. I met Howard a couple of times. He was a delightful, bubbly man.

[David Ehrenstein]

"If you believed in this you'd have to believe in a heterosexual sensibility and heaven only knows what that would be like."

Spoken like the Truly Grand Queen that he of course is.

[GringoTex]

And in my interview with Gore Vidal in the current Written By he reveals that Clark Gable got Cukor fired from GWTW because he was a hustler in his youth and Cukor was one of his customers. The source? Mr. Cukor himself.

I guess that explains why Lombard thought Gable was such a lousy lover- he just wasn't interested.

[David Ehrenstein]

Maybe, but don't forget she was a major Fag-Hag. Billy Haines was one of her very closest friends.

[Polybius]

Palimpsest is a recommended prequel to the new book.

And if anyone wants to bask in the man's wide ranging intelligence and breathtaking erudition, get your hands on United States, his collected volume of essays.

[GringoTex]

I can out a famous gay filmmaker for having a girlfriend. But is it outing if he wasn't hiding her?

[David Ehrenstein]

Who are you talking about Tex?

[David Ehrenstein]

Check your e-mail Tex.

[GringoTex]

Check your e-mail Tex.

Well of course I didn't have any scoop on David, who has assured me that said filmmaker has recovered from his brief bout with bisexualitis.

[souvenir]

From the NY Post

January 28, 2007 -- SHE was one of the most alluring sex symbols of the 20th century, but Marlene Dietrich was so broke toward the end of her life that she solicited money from an obsessed fan in exchange for singing to him five nights a week - while he performed an act of sexual self-gratification.

In "The Grand Surprise," a collection of previously unseen journals of Leo Lerman - the late, flamboyant Vanity Fair magazine editor who was a lifelong pal of Dietrich - he writes that her daughter, Maria Riva, told him how the star had plummeted into the pits of "degradation" to survive in Paris in the late 1980s. Dietrich died in 1992 and Lerman in 1994.

"Marlene received a letter from a man in the San Fernando Valley. He told her how much he adored her, etc.," Lerman writes. "When she saw, from his letterhead, that he was a doctor, she rang him. This began endless telephone exchanges, during which he became more and more enslaved."

But when the doctor offered to fly to Paris to rescue her, Dietrich cut off communication for several weeks, only to start up the calls again and find him depressed about being out of touch and seeing a shrink five times a week for $90 a session.

" 'Why don't you give me that money,' she asked. 'I'll sing to you five times a week,' " Lerman wrote. "He sent her a $5,000 check. She cashed it." Dietrich then began her task, singing tunes like "See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have" to the doctor every night. "She sings to him," Riva told Lerman, "and you should excuse me, but I have to put it blankly - he [achieves sexual gratification] . . . If she was some woman from Oshkosh I could have her committed."

In the book, due out this April from Knopf, Lerman also reveals an unappetizing secret about the hygiene of another sex icon, Greta Garbo. "Marlene says Garbo has only two suits of underwear. They are made of men's shirting. She wears one for three days, then washes it, does not iron it. Then she wears the other," Lerman writes.

"Marlene says she doesn't mind the not ironing, but three days! Garbo uses only paper towels in her bathroom, has two pairs of men's trousers, two shirts, and little else in her wardrobe. She is very stingy."

[David Ehrenstein]

Fascinating stuff. Proving that whatever our fantasies might be Garbo and Dietrich probably never did the deed.

Marlene wouldn't tolerate anyone so unhygenic.

Was looking at Anna Karenina again just last night. Wow was Garbo teriffic!

[Matt]

The Dietrich story sounds like the plot of a von Sternberg film.

[devlinnn]

While not terribly salicious, Farley Granger's recent autobiography Include Me Out proves those that sit on the fence do have the most fun. I'm halfway through, and so far he's namechecked Patricia Neal, Arthur Laurents, Shelley Winters, Leonard Bernstein, Ava Gardner, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford and Tyrone Power as very good friends. Sadly for Danny Kaye, Granger had little time.