Category: DavidGeeBlog

What I’m reading: a Superstar’s busy – and varied – Sex life

Wow. This is a deeper dirt-digging biography than any of those by Kitty Kelley. Darwin Porter charts the long career of Paul Newman – ‘the man with the baby blues,’ it says on the cover, referencing his eyes, not his tears in the crib. The author also charts Newman’s sexual history – and what a history it is!
Mr Porter’s main sources seem to be Eartha Kitt, Shelley Winters and an actress known as Vampiria, all of whom claimed close confidence with the blue-eyed star. Porter reports whole conversations which can only be recon-structions based on ‘information received’. There are some startling revelations here, starting with the main one: Paul Newman’s bisexuality which will come as a shock (unbelievable even) to many of his lifelong fans around the globe.

Grace Kelly: (not) ‘the ice princess’
Early in his career Newman was competing for roles with Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and James Dean. According to the author, he had sex with all of the above – even ‘love affairs’ with some of them. Some stellar ladies’ reputations are also trashed here. Gary Cooper is quoted as saying that Grace Kelly ‘looks like a cold bitch before you take her pants down – and then she explodes.’ As well as Grace’s sheets, Newman got to perform on Joan Crawford’s, Lana Turner’s and – OMG! – Sandra Dee’s and Audrey Hepburn’s.

We all (nearly all) like juicy gossip, don’t we? But at close to 500 pages this is tittle-tattle ‘overkill’: an exhaustive – and exhausting – catalogue of all the roles Newman played or failed to get, plus all the men and women he ‘dated’. There are a few gems among all the sleazy details: Judy Garland unzipped his trousers on a nightclub dance floor; ‘I like to check out what I’m getting.’ There’s a memorable ‘cross-over’ moment when Newman is having sex with Kim Stanley (whom he met at the Actors Studio in 1952); after Paul ticks her off for calling out the name of ‘Marlon’ in the heat of passion, she tells him: ‘You don’t know what it’s like to be fucked by Marlon Brando.’ Paul’s answer cannot have been the one she was expecting!

Newman & Woodward: the ‘Golden Couple’
Joanne Woodward, the second Mrs Newman, knew she was marrying a serial philanderer, although it’s clear that she was the great female love of his life. As to the great male love, we are told that Brandon de Wilde, his cute young co-star in Hud (1963), played a supporting role in Paul’s private life for many years after Hud; but so, if Darwin Porter is to be believed, did Steve McQueen. It really is La La Land out there.

It’s not all sex. Actually, it mostly is. And it’s not all about Paul, although, again, it mostly is – obviously. A jaunty incidental revelation is Anthony Perkins’s claim that he lost his (hetero-sexual) ‘virginity’ at the age of 44 with none other than Dallas’s Victoria Principal. And – a spooky detail I’d not heard before – Tony Perkins’s widow, Berinthia Berenson, was a passenger in one of the jets flown into the Twin Towers on 9/11.

The ‘Casting Couch’ is back in the headlines this year. In Newman’s early days it was seen as going with the territory that he would kneel to or be knelt in front of by agents, producers, directors, studio execs – not all of the time, but a lot of the time. More surprises when the author names men who have, however briefly, trod the ‘lavender path’. Tyrone Power is quoted telling Paul that director John Ford ‘used to throw John Wayne on his casting couch back in the Stone Age.’ Pass the smelling salts! Robert Stack, an early lover of Paul’s, claimed to have shared his sheets with, among many others, Howard Hughes and Jack Kennedy. Come on!

After he married Joanne Woodward (1958) Paul Newman had a stock answer when interviewers asked if he was ever tempted to ‘stray’ with any of the gorgeous leading ladies he partnered onscreen; his regular reply was “Why go out for hamburger when you’ve got steak at home?’ This revealing biography suggests that Paul got through a lot of hamburgers during his marriage to Ms Woodward. At the risk of sounding crude (this is a fairly crude book) I’m tempted to say that quite a lot of sausages were also consumed. 

Newman and Brandon de Wilde in HUD (1963)

What I’m reading: A box of gay goodies

A BOXFUL OF IDEAS

It’s not comme il faut to review one’s own work, but my contribution to this new anthology (their sixth) from Paradise Press is only a brief piece of Flash Fiction (‘Alice Swings’ – on the ‘B’ theme of LGBT), so perhaps it’s okay if I only mention it in passing.

An anthology is like a box of chocolates: they are all perfectly edible but some are more ‘delicious’ than others. Some have ‘a soft centre’; rather more have a harder edge (nothing too ‘hard-core’).  Not every-thing here is on a gay theme (don’t be put off: most of it is), and there is poetry as well as prose. There are several poems by Mike Harth who died last year, one of the founders of both Paradise Press and its ‘parent’, the Gay Authors Workshop (which he naughtily mocks in a story called ‘Group Reading’). Mike’s warmth, his wit and his wisdom are sorely missed by those of us in GAW who came to know and cherish him.

Jeremy Kingston contributes some delicious verse (as he always does at GAW meetings) and a clever story – ‘The Twist of the Vice’ – that revisits Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw from the viewpoint of one of the children and makes the governess more villain than victim. The narrator of Les Brookes’s ‘You Farzan, Me Duane’ recalls the summer when he fell in love with an Iranian boy in his school: this resonated with me! Beth Lister, another of my GAW favourites, has a story, ‘Dog Minder’s Monday Morning’, in which an 80-year-old lesbian yearns for a younger lover/companion. In contrast to this, Alice Wickham’s bitter-toned ‘Love and Hate’ shows a lesbian relationship that fails to take off.

Psychiatrist Donald West, GAW’s eminence grise, contributes an essay called ‘Facing up to Paedophilia’ which invites us to ‘understand’ the mind-set of child-molesters. Our bishops and pastors urge Christians to hate the sin but love the sinner – something many of us find a hard pill to swallow where paedophiles are concerned. I was 68 when I met my Iranian partner, who was 35. Had I met him twenty years earlier he would have been 15 (and probably very delectable, like Farzan in the story mentioned above!), so perhaps I must accept Professor West’s injunction not to be too judgmental.

You don’t have to be gay to appreciate the myriad pleasures of A Boxful of Ideas, though it helps if you are!

RIP: Helen Lambert Gee – a fine artiste, a true friend

RIP


Helen Lambert, who has just died at the age of 80, was one of my oldest and dearest friends. If you think you recognise her in the photo, it might be from BBCtv’s The League of Gentlemen where Helen ran a (poison!) pie stall during one and a half series in Royston Vasey. Or you might have seen her in one of her many TV commercials, most famously for Flash cleaning products.

I met Helen in the Nell Gwynne club in the crypt of St Martin’s in the Field when I was a 20-year student in 1962 and she was an out-of-work chorus girl. The following year she joined the touring cast of Joan Littlewood’s Cockney musical Fings Ain’t What They Used To Be; her dressing-room in the Devonshire Park Theatre when the show came to Eastbourne was the first dressing-room I’d ever been with – unless you count the vestry at Hailsham Methodist Church where I used to write/act/direct shows in my teens!

In Scotland in 1963, still with Fings, Helen had a fall onstage but carried on performing despite agonising back pain which was eventually diagnosed as a fractured spinal disc. Hospitalised for more than a year and told she might never walk again, Helen – typically and literally – did not take this lying down. After months of therapy she was back on her feet and by 1968 was dancing on stage with Harry Secombe in a musical version of The Four Musketeers; Helen understudied Elizabeth Larner in the lead and took over for many performances.

Helen had a fine coloratura soprano voice and could belt out a song as ‘powerfully’ as Ethel Merman; her comedic skill was at least as good as several other contemporary actresses and comediennes  (as we used to call ladies of the theatre in those days). But she never got that big break and had to rely on working as a guide for the British Council to supplement her sporadic earnings on stage and screen. As well as commercials and appearances with Dick Emery, the Two Ronnies and two series of ‘Uncle Jack’, she was in the chorus of the movie version of Oliver! and had a featured role in the 1979 remake of The Lady Vanishes.

She was very active in Equity, the actors’ union, and served on the executive committee for many years. After retiring from The British Council, she became a magistrate in Camden. Her spinal injury was a recurring problem and required further surgery, but despite this and other health issues Helen carried on working, mostly in commercials, at home and abroad, into her seventies. After an unhappy first marriage (I gave her away at her first wedding) Helen found happiness and lasting companionship with Ray Gee (no relation to David Gee!), who this year has also suffered declining health.

Loyalty was Helen’s most notable characteristic. She was a pro-active friend to many people, in ‘the business’ and outside. She was a tireless supporter of my slow-burning writing career: I dedicated The Bexhill Missile Crisis to her in 2014, though she thought it was a bit too rude! Those of us who were privileged to know and love her at a personal level, will miss her hugely. She was a woman of substance with a substantial talent that did not get the recognition it deserved. 

What I’m reading: Gore Vidal – America’s gay pioneer

 Gore Vidal: THE CITY AND THE PILLAR

Continuing my intermittent trawl through through the ‘classics’ of modern gay literature, I’ve just re-read this novel from 1948, which I think is the very first ‘home-grown’ gay novel in the US. The literary establishment – and the critics – were vicious in their condemnation of Vidal. He rewrote the book in 1965 with major changes and this version, still reprinting today, has sold millions. The revised ending is less melodramatic than the original (murder) but the hero’s “hell-hath-no-fury-like-a-wronged-faggot” action seems equally out-of-character.

Vidal’s writing, especially in the later volumes of his American History series, became verbose and flatulent, almost a parody of Henry James. The City and the Pillar, like many early novels from writers in the 40s and 50s (and still all too often today), shows clearly the influence of F. Scott Fitzgerald: lean, finely-honed prose with a kind of muscular elegance, which works supremely well for this chronicle of the coming-of-age and the coming-out of a gay high-school senior during WW2 and its aftermath. Jim Willard’s briefly reciprocated love for a fellow student casts a shadow over the next decade of his life as he becomes a sailor, then a tennis-coach (and kept boy) in Hollywood and New York.

Scenes in NY and LA offer early glimpses of the archness that were to characterise the author’s public persona in later life and reach an apotheosis in Myra Breckinridge and Myron, the two-volume high-octane farce which for many readers is at once his best and his worst writing. Ronald Shaw, the closeted actor who keeps Jim for a while, an on-screen macho-man who is privately needy and insecure, calls Rock Hudson to mind although the time of the story means he’s more likely to be based on Randolph Scott or perhaps another version of the author. Paul Sullivan, the writer Jim comes close to loving, doesn’t suggest Truman Capote or Tennessee Williams, the ‘obvious’ candidates for a gay author, but again he may just be a twist on Gore, as Jim obviously is. In fact there are many moments that seem to demonstrate how a writer chops his own life into pieces to provide the basis for different characters, although in his autobiography Vidal insists his protagonists are not based on real people except for Bob Ford, Jim’s lost love, and a woman ‘inspired’ by Anais Nin, whom Gore claims to have romanced. Many scenes – and many of the characters – could as well belong to New York or Los Angeles of today as to the 1940s. Except for some clunky conversations exploring the ‘Nature Of Homosexuality’ which must have seemed insightful as well as daring in 1948, this is a lot less dated than other gay novels of the era.

The sex scenes are almost as discreet as Mr Forster’s – there’s nothing as lurid or as dazzling as Gore would later concoct for Myra/Myron. But overall The City and the Pillar is not only an outstanding piece of gay fiction (better than many that were to come after Vidal opened the floodgates) but also one of the best novels of its era, different from but as exquisitely readable – still – as the early works of Capote and Carson McCullers.

In later life Gore overdid the bitchiness and bitterness, perhaps disappointed by his failure to make it as a realm presence in US politics, the role he most craved. But his output as novelist, historian and essayist was prodigious. Other writers may have left a bigger footprint (Roth, Mailer, Updike, Irving,), but Vidal deserves to admitted to the literary pantheon. He wouldn’t thank me for this, but he is probably, as Somerset Maugham is supposed to have said of himself, “in the very front rank of the second-raters”.

RIP, Jackie: “tasteless and flashy” to the end!

Jackie Collins: THE SANTANGELOS

We’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead – so here goes! I gave up on Jackie Collins many books back. Yes, her Hollywood novels are glamorous and gossipy, like the film and pop ‘fanzines’ whose style she writes in, but the formula became very repetitious. And this one is no exception. We’re not told how old Lucky Santangelo now is, the ruthless hotel and film studio mogul who is also the insatiable wife of comedian Lennie Golden and matriarch to a brood of gorgeous but dysfunctional children, now grown, who variously model, act, sing or run nightclubs. As always, there’s lots of sex, drugs and rock-n-roll. One of her characters uses “amazeballs” as a superlative, an adjective I’d only previously heard on TV’s Miranda show. Everyone else uses the f-word, of course, excessively. “Tasteless and flashy” is how one bitchy character describes Lucky to her husband. There’s no arguing with that.
Again as before, there’s a vengeful psycho stalking Lucky’s family and friends. This one, topically, is the ruler of an imaginary Arab state called Akramshar. His name is King Emir Amin Jordan – shouldn’t that be al-Jordan? And how did her editors let ludicrous King Emir get into print?
RIP Jackie: will she write from beyond the grave?

Ms Collins writes her own kind of prose, which almost defies criticism. An undercover cop “was Puerto Rican and verging on pretty, in a tough ‘don’t fuck with me’ kind of way.” The bar on this sort of writing has been lowered rather than raised by la Collins during her long reign as the Queen of Hollywood fiction. She was famous for her raunchy sex scenes, all written with sledgehammer subtlety in fifty shades of scarlet and often unintentionally (or intentionally?) comic: “Men got off on her nipples; in full bloom, they were quite spectacular.

Harold Robbins, without any grand aspirations, was a much better writer: The Carpetbaggers and The Adventurers had all the greed and gossip of a Collins novel, but his style had a kind of Mickey Spillane crispness and grandeur. Jackie Collins occasionally reaches for crisp but she cannot (couldn’t) do grand.

Billed as ‘The Final Chapter’ in the life of Lucky Santegelo, this ninth instalment may not be the last. Harold Robbins carried on writing from beyond the grave, and so too may Jackie Collins. There’s gold in them thar cemeteries.

The fabulous Collins sisters – only Joan is left now

Two weeks ago I reviewed a Southern Gothic thriller that was one of the best books I’ve read in the last few months. The Santangelos is far and away one of the worst: scrappily plotted, poorly written and under-edited. Total tosh, in fact, but – although I skimmed through chunks of it – I had to read through to the end! Jackie Collins had her own kind of magic: RIP.

Selling books. It’s better for booksellers than for authors.

Paradise Press has received an order for a single copy of The Bexhill Missile Crisis from a leading London bookshop. The store demands a 35 percent discount on the retail price (£2.80 off £7.99). They expect us (me) to pay the postage (another £1.68 first class). The cost of the book from the printer works out at £3.61 per copy. Totting that up, you will see that I make a loss of 10 pence on this sale (that’s 15 cents for US readers) – not including the cost of a jiffy bag and wear-and-tear on my shoes getting to the post office. If I mail it second class I can actually make a profit of 7 pence (11 cents) – about the price of the jiffy bag!. Bulk orders allow me a slightly better margin, as does a sale direct from the Paradise Press website.

I am paying people to read my book! Funny old world, isn’t it? I could, of course, raise the book price, but £7.99 seems a fair (and competitive) price for a 215-page novel.

Do all authors have this problem?

What I’m reading: dishing the dirt on Hollywood royalty (and ex-kings)

In Chapter One of this bonk-and-tell autobiography the author gets a blowjob from Walter Pidgeon. I, naturally, fainted at this point but made a quick recovery and read on with mounting enthusiasm!

A farmboy from Illinois, Scotty Bowers headed for Los Angeles after his demob from the Marines at the end of World War Two (having seen some grim action in Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima). Working the evening shift at a gas station on Hollywood Boulevard, he was soon running a lucrative sideline as a “call-boy” (he calls it “tricking”) with well-heeled Angelinos, most of them in the movie business – both men and women (he claims to prefer straight sex). As well as turning tricks himself, he also set up many another hard-up young man (or woman) with movie people great and small. Then as now on Sunset Strip, straight guys willingly turned gay tricks for a few dollars of beer money.

Randolph Scott and Cary Grant,
 a Hollywood ‘Golden Couple’?

It’s all yesteryear tittle-tattle, mostly set during the Fifties and Sixties. Everybody mentioned is safely dead and unable to start libel proceedings. But there is some juicy stuff here: pool-party orgies at Cole Porter’s house, threesomes with Cary Grant and Randolph Scott, bondage parties with John Carradine. Somehow we’ve always sensed that our stage and screen idols have feet of clay; Scotty Bowers wants us to know that a proportion of their off-screen time is spent wallowing in mud. Charles Laughton and Tyrone Power had particularly extreme tastes.

The Duke and Duchess of Windsor,
better in bed than on the throne!

Many names here are familiar to the gay gossips: Noel Coward, Montgomery Clift, James Dean. I was only occasionally surprised by his revelations: moving on from deceased Hollywood ‘royalty’ to deposed royals, he says he bedded both the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and fixed Edward up with call-boys and Wallis with girls; ‘Eddy’ was “a damn good lover” (not according to Thelma Lady Furness, one of Eddy’s earlier ladyfriends); and Wally “really knew what she was doing,” said one of the call-girls. Wow. At a time when pornography was illegal in the US (hard to imagine, isn’t it?) he arranged a private showing of ex-King Farouk’s extensive personal collection for Dr Alfred Kinsey and his fellow researchers.

Rita Hayworth, a famous beauty
and famously stingy

Not all the scandal is sexual: Rita Hayworth was too stingy to buy her out-of-work brother new tyres for his beat-up truck. And Scotty reminds us just how terrible was William Holden’s decline (one of the non-gay clients) into the farther reaches of alcoholism.

Like the Collected Works of Kitty Kelley, Full Service is written (ghost-written in this case) in a gushing Louella Parsons prose style straight out of the “fanzines”; gushing enough to read at times like Barbara Cartland (who would churn in her urn at the comparison, I’m sure). I feel slightly ashamed to have wasted a few hours reading this tawdry drivel, but – oh dear – it’s an undeniably compelling read. That said, I did find myself wondering how much of it is the sleazy truth and how much is money-minting fantasy.

David Gee makes Headline News!


The Bexhill Missile Crisis has made it into the pages of The Argus, Brighton’s daily paper.

Click on the link below:

http://www.theargus.co.uk/news/11289914.Raunchy_book_relegated_to_the_top_shelf_after_grandmother___s_purchase_error/?ref=var_0

Making the news in Bexhill

The Bexhill Observer has given me a nice write-up this week – and the De La Warr Pavilion (featured on the cover) has sold five copies of The Bexhill Missile Crisis and ordered 20 more.

Onwards and upwards!

What I’m reading: Wild about Wilde

Jonathan Fryer:

ANDRE & OSCAR
Gide, Wilde and the
Gay Art of Living

Not a recent book (published in 1997) but one I’ve only just caught up with. Jonathan Fryer has written a short and entertaining study of the friendship between Oscar Wilde and Andre Gide. They first met in 1891 when Wilde wowed literary Paris on an early visit, even before his first play (Lady Windermere’s Fan) took London by storm. 
The pair were friends but never, we’re told, lovers. They both liked younger men or in Gide’s case young boys. He hung out with pre-adolescent boys on extended holidays in North Africa (much as gays still do today!). Fryer thinks that his relations with these youngsters were probably platonic, adoration rather than molestation, but he was lucky not to have suffered a greater shame than Wilde.

The rise and fall of Oscar Wilde is an oft-told tale, but Fryer’s very readable style and admirable economy of words offers a  enjoyable ‘overflight’ of the familiar ground of Oscar’s fatal friendships with Alfred Douglas and the Piccadilly rent-boys they shared. He quotes Wilde’s most painful letter from Reading Gaol to his old chum Robbie Ross: “I curse myself night and day for my folly in allowing him [Bosie] to dominate my life.” And yet he resumed this dangerous liaison after his release, causing Constance, his wife, to cut off the allowance she was generously paying him. He died, as we know, penuriously, losing the battle with the wallpaper in a Parisian hotel.

Gide’s story may be less familiar. He seems to have been massively up himself, as we would say today but, like Oscar, he was a prolific letter-writer and a sharp observer of humankind. After his first meeting with Lord Alfred in wintry Algiers in 1895, Gide described him in letters to his mother as ‘Byronic [and] devoured by an unhealthy thirst for infamy‘. With considerable prescience he also writes: ‘If Wilde’s plays in London didn’t run for 300 performances, and if the Prince of Wales didn’t attend his first nights, he would be in prison, and Lord Douglas [sic] as well‘. There’s an element of hypocrisy in all this: Andre was only too keen to have some of Bosie’s teenage Arab rent-boys passed on to him.

Gide married his adored cousin Madeleine: a sexless and ultimately loveless union. Over time he came to treat her as shabbily as Oscar did Constance, flagrantly pursuing rent-boys on the streets of Paris and even fathering a child with a mistress. It was easy 120 years ago – it still is – for a woman to marry a man not knowing he was actually gay. Wilde and Gide’s treatment of their wives would be deemed marital cruelty today.

Jonathan Fryer has clearly done scrupulous research, but he is not overawed by the eminence of the writers he is exhuming and avails himself of a few opportunities to take the piss. Of Oscar’s own account of the ‘frenzy’ with which he completed the writing of his banned play Salome after listening to a gypsy band on a Parisian boulevard, the biographer comments: ‘Like many of Oscar’s stories, this is entertaining nonsense.’ He reminds us of Wilde’s famous pronouncement (to Gide in Algiers) that “he had put his genius into his life but only his talent into his works.

Was Oscar Wilde a genius? Clearly he was a gifted playwright, but his comedies are not in the same league as Shakespeare’s. You could make a case for Moliere and Coward being just as brilliant satirists of their times, even Joe Orton and Alan Ayckbourn, but do any of them deserve to be called geniuses? Genius is a word we should perhaps use more sparingly.

Gide lived twice as long as Wilde, dying at 82 in 1951. After selling his daring novels and travel books in pitifully small quantities for many years, he finally broke through to the big time and was even awarded a Nobel Prize. Oscar won no prizes and was awarded only infamy, but his plays have already given him a degree of immortality – something that may not happen to Monsieur Gide.