Yul Brynner

This is an update of a controversial post from 2012. Be sure to read the shit storm of four dozen reader comments at the end.

Bisexual Russian-born actor Yul Brynner (1920-1985) began his career playing guitar and singing gypsy songs among Russian immigrants in Parisian nightclubs. His fluency in Russian and French enabled him to build up a following with the Czarist expatriates in Paris. After a brief stint as a trapeze artist with the famed Cirque D'Hiver company in France, he started acting with a touring company in the early 1940s. He was soon on his way to becoming the first ever bald stage and movie idol.

In 1941 Yul Brynner traveled to the U.S., where he began an affair with American actor Hurd Hatfield (1918-1998), best known for playing the title role in the 1945 film The Picture of Dorian Gray. Both men were enrolled at the Michael Chekhov Theatre Studio in Ridgefield, Connecticut, and many of their classmates have since confirmed the affair. Michael Chekhov (1891-1955, nephew of Anton), mentored performers such as Marilyn Monroe, Jack Palance, Patricia Neal, Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck, Leslie Caron, Gary Cooper, Clint Eastwood, Anthony Quinn, Jennifer Jones, Robert Vaughn and many others.

A year later, twenty-two year old Brynner (before he shaved his head) posed in full-frontal nude positions (photo at right) for noted gay photographer George Platt Lynes. Those who would like to view those uncropped photographs should avail themselves of Google search (you know you want to). You'll have a better understanding of what all the excitement was about.













Two decades later, at age 43, Brynner appeared wearing only slightly more in the campy film Kings of the Sun (1963, below), his youthful body betraying not a single passing year.

After several years of regional acting, Brynner was hired by the Office of War Information as announcer for their French radio service. He made his Broadway debut with Mary Martin in Lute Song in 1946, but he began playing his most famous role, the King of Siam, in The King and I in the Broadway production of the Oscar and Hammerstein musical in 1951 (photo at top of post). Mary Martin had recommended him for this role. At his first meeting with Irene Sharaff, The King and I’s costume designer, Brynner asked what he was to do about his mere “fringe” of hair. When told he was to shave it, he was horror-struck and refused, convinced he would look terrible. He finally gave in during tryouts and put dark makeup on his shaved head. The effect was so well-received that it became Brynner's trademark.

After more than three years and 1,246 performances, he starred in the screen version in 1956, winning an Oscar for Best Actor. He then returned to the stage for an additional 3,379 stage performances that stretched all the way to 1985. Brynner, 35 years old and married, was virtually unknown when he was cast in The King and I, and 52- year-old Gertrude Lawrence’s name appeared above his. Yul and Gertrude were having an affair at the time. Rodgers and Hammerstein often told the story that when Lawrence died during the run of the show, Brynner finally got top billing, and he burst into tears at the news (of his getting top billing – not the news of Lawrence’s death).

Cecil B. DeMille, impressed by Brynner's performance in The King and I, cast the actor as the Pharoah Rameses in the multi-million dollar blockbuster The Ten Commandments (1956, dressing room photo above). Along the way, Brynner also starred in such classic films as Anastasia (1956), The Brothers Karamazov (1958), and The Magnificent Seven (1960).

Brynner was also a talented published photographer and author of two books, Bring Forth the Children: A Journey to the Forgotten People of Europe and the Middle East and The Yul Brynner Cookbook: Food Fit for the King and You. I’m not making this up.

Brynner's romantic life included throngs of women, as well as men. He had four wives – actress Viriginia Gilmor, Chilean model Doris Kleiner, Jacqueline Thion de la Chaume, ballerina Kathy Lee – in addition to numerous affairs with such stars as Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, Joan Crawford, and Ingrid Bergman.

Brynner was possessed of a massive, nearly uncontrollable ego. In the mid-1960s, while filming Morituri aboard a freighter with co-star Marlon Brando, Brynner demanded in his contract that a landing pad be built on the ship so he could get a private helicopter to take him ashore after each day's shoot. He got his way, as usual.

According to Frank Langella’s recent memoir, no actor ever talked about himself so much as Brynner, whom Langella described as “never far from a full-length mirror.” Brynner explained how he’d had a special lift – big enough to fit a car – installed in the Broadway theater where he was starring in The King And I. His chauffeur could thus drive straight in and spare the star from having to “deal with the public.”

Brynner's last major film role was in the sci-fi thriller Westworld (1973) as a murderously malfunctioning robot, dressed in Western garb reminiscent of Brynner's wardrobe in The Magnificent Seven. What could have been campy or ludicrous became a chilling characterization in Brynner's hands; his steady, steely-eyed automaton glare as he approached his human victims was one of the more enjoyably frightening film-going experiences of the 1970s.

Yul Brynner died of lung cancer on October 10, 1985, in New York City at age sixty-five – on the same day as Orson Welles. When he developed lung cancer in the mid-1980s, he left a powerful public service announcement denouncing smoking as the cause, for broadcast after his death. The Yul Brynner Head and Neck Cancer Foundation was established in his memory.

Update July 14, 2023: His final performance (his 4,625th) of "The King and I" came on June 30, 1985, less than four months before he died of cancer. His lungs were so damaged that he had to use an oxygen tank to soldier through his last performances.

Sir Ian McKellen

English born Sir Ian McKellen (b. 1939) is perhaps the most famous openly gay actor who has played more straight than gay characters. His work is known to generations of movie, TV and theater-goers. During the 1960s he began his career as a classical actor specializing in Shakespeare. Six decades later, he was playing King Lear during the 2017 season of the Chichester Festival Theatre.

Although he began a modest film career in 1969, it was not until he appeared in several Hollywood blockbusters that he was introduced to an entirely new generation of movie-goers. The X-Men (as Magneto) and Lord of the Rings (as Gandalf) franchises of the early 2000s and the more recent Hobbit films have brought world-wide fame and recognition. Recently he was seen in the live-action film version of Beauty and the Beast, in which he portrayed Cogsworth. As well, his December 2016 London stage performance of Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land with Patrick Stewart was broadcast to movie theaters worldwide as part of the National Theatre Live Encore series.

Sir Ian came out publicly on BBC television in 1988, just shy of his fiftieth birthday. Since then, he has been involved as an activist for multiple LBGT rights issues. He freely uses his name recognition to advance international causes that could use a boost. 

McKellen was knighted twice. In 1991 he was appointed Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (which granted him the use of the title “Sir”) and again in 2008 for services to the performing arts, becoming a part of the Order of the Companions as Companion of Honor (CH).

Mckellen.com
Sir Ian’s official web page, launched in 1997, contains an in-depth look at his enduring career. There are hundreds of photographs, both personal and professional biographies, essays and links to his blog and the many causes he champions.

He has received a Tony award, a Golden Globe award, a SAG award, two Oscar nominations, five Emmy Award nominations and four BAFTA nominations – as well as every major theatrical award in the UK.

McKellen’s performance as Gandalf the Grey in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring brought him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor and a Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Award. He received his first Academy Award nomination, for Best Actor, for his portrayal of gay film director James Whale, in Gods and Monsters (1998). McKellen starred as Richard III (1995) in his own screen-adaptation of Shakespeare's play, which he also produced. Other film credits include Six Degrees of Separation, Cold Comfort Farm, Bent and The Da Vinci Code.

McKellen has also been honored for his extensive television work, from the miniseries The Prisoner to his monumental performance in King Lear, from his reincarnation of Tsar Nicholas II in the tele-film Rasputin, to his classic guesting as himself in HBO's Extras. He co-starred with Derek Jacobi and Frances de la Tour in two seasons of ITV's series Vicious, which aired on PBS in the US. On the first night of Channel 4 in the UK, McKellen played a mentally handicapped man in Stephen Frears' Walter. He delighted everyone with his 10 episodes in Britain’s longest running soap, Coronation Street.

Sir Ian is also a co-founder of Stonewall UK, which lobbies for legal and social equality for gay people.

Sal Mineo

Bisexual actor Sal Mineo (1939-1976) was defined by two things: his unforgettable Academy Award–nominated role opposite James Dean in the film Rebel Without a Cause (at age 15), and his murder in Hollywood at the age of 37.

Nevertheless, the Bronx-born actor of Italian heritage appeared in 22 films, directed stage plays and operas and made many television appearances. While still a youth he was mentored by Yul Brynner in the stage musical The King and I,  Mineo had taken over the role of the young Prince Chulalongkorn three months into the show's initial run.

Sal Mineo was so convincing as Plato in Rebel Without a Cause* that he was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor, leading to his being forever typecast as a troubled youth. It was difficult for him to sustain an acting career when he became too old for such parts. A welcome exception came with the role of a Jewish emigrant in Otto Preminger’s film Exodus (1960), for which he won a Golden Globe Award and received a second Academy Award Nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Another escape from typecasting was his star turn as drummer Gene Krupa in The Gene Krupa Story (1959).

*Rebel Without a Cause also starred Natalie Wood. All three of the leads – James Dean, Sal Mineo (photo still from the film at left) and Natalie Wood – met with tragic, untimely deaths.

His mother, a quintessential stage mother, acted as his manager and spent his fortune faster than he could make it, leading to a series of financial crises, especially as his career tapered off.

In 1976 Mineo was stabbed to death in an alley next to his apartment building in West Hollywood by an unknown assailant. A year later actress Christa Helm was killed in the same neighborhood and in a similar fashion, and a pizza deliveryman by the name of Lionel Ray Williams was charged and convicted of that crime. Police had overheard him admitting to the murder of Sal Mineo, stating that at the time of the stabbing he did not know that his victim was Sal Mineo.

In “Sal Mineo: A Biography” (2010) by author Michael Gregg Michaud*, several rumors and speculations about Mineo’s private life are cleared up. British actress Jill Haworth, to whom Mineo was once engaged to be married, was not just a “beard” to mask a homosexual orientation. Although Sal Mineo idolized his bisexual film star James Dean, the two did not engage in sexual relations. The same with actor Don Johnson, who co-starred with Mineo in a stage production of Fortune and Men’s Eyes (1969), a play with a homosexual theme; Johnson and Mineo had once been roommates. At the time Mineo was murdered, he had been in a six-year relationship with male actor Courtney Burr III.


*From a book review by Gerry Burnie:
This exhaustive biography is not only a tribute to Sal Mineo, a talented and misunderstood individual who lived life to the fullest – no matter what he did – it is also a tribute to the author’s unrelenting dedication. For example, the writing of “Sal Mineo: A Biography” took Michaud ten years and three years of research to complete. Moreover, numerous interviews were conducted, most particularly with Jill Haworth and Courtney Burr (both were Sal Mineo’s lovers), to give it a personal insight beyond the written record...Full of details and previously undisclosed anecdotes, the biography captures a career of ups and downs and a private life of sexual impulses.

It's a little-known fact that Sal Mineo was the model for The New Adam, a colossal 8-foot-tall by 39-foot-long male nude painting (1962), precisely and sensually rendered in full frontal anatomical detail over nine linen panels by artist Harold Stevenson (1929-2018).

   Since 2005 the painting (panels separated, above) has been  part of the permanent collection of the New York City Guggenheim Museum, as shown in the image below. Note: currently not on display.

Stephen Sondheim

Update: Mr. Sondheim died suddenly on November 26, 2021,

at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut.

He was 91 years old.

 

 

Photo: Fred R. Conrad/NY Times

Original post from 2012 - I have not changed the verbs from present to past tense:

On September 15, 2010, eighty-year-old Stephen Sondheim, one of the greatest theater composers of our time, joined other legendary theatre artists who have had Broadway theatres named after them – Ethel Barrymore, David Belasco, Edwin Booth, George Broadhurst, George Gershwin, Alfred Lunt & Lynn Fontanne, Richard Rodgers, Helen Hayes, Eugene O'Neill, Neil Simon and August Wilson.

Sondheim (born March 22, 1930) gave a speech during the unveiling ceremony of the new marquee on the former Henry Miller’s Theatre at 124 W. 43rd Street. The signage on the marquee is Sondheim’s signature. The  restored neo-Georgian brick façade, which dates back to 1918, fronts an entirely new 1,055 seat theatre placed below street level. The restoration retained the “Henry Miller’s Theatre” letters, still visible etched in stone high above the Stephen Sondheim marquee.

 

 

It should not be lost on my readers that Stephen Sondheim is a homosexual Broadway artist. Sondheim did not come out as a gay man until he was 40 and did not live with a partner (dramatist Peter Jones) until he was 61. Update: In 2017 Sondheim married Broadway singer/actor Jeffrey Romley, who survives him. Romley (b. 1980) is 50 years younger than Sondheim.

Sondheim wrote the lyrics for the landmark musical West Side Story (1957) in collaboration with bisexual Leonard Bernstein’s music and gay Arthur Laurents’s book. Laurents, born in 1918 (the same year as Bernstein), died on May, 2011. Sondheim, the baby of that creative team, was just 25 years old when he was hired to work on West Side Story. He followed with another smash hit with his lyrics for Gypsy in 1959.

Sondheim helped establish what is known as the “concept” musical, which sought to tell stories in fresh ways – Company (1970), Follies (1971) and Pacific Overtures (1976), for example. He changed the nature of musical theatre forever and has influenced subsequent generations of writers.

Sondheim is the winner of a Pulitzer Prize (Sunday in the Park with George), an Academy Award (for Sooner or Later, as performed by Madonna in the film Dick Tracy) and multiple Tony and Grammy Awards. He was the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Kennedy Center Honors (1993), the National Medal of Arts (1996), the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Gold Medal for Music (2006) and a special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre (2008).

Sondheim (above left) with Leonard Bernstein in 1965.

Among the many shows for which Sondheim wrote the music and lyrics are Into the Woods (1987), Sunday in the Park with George (1984), Sweeney Todd (1979), A Little Night Music (1973), Anyone Can Whistle (1964) and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962). Five shows are anthologies of his works: Side by Side by Sondheim (1976), Marry Me a Little (1981), You're Gonna Love Tomorrow (1983), Putting It Together (1993/99) and Sondheim on Sondheim (2010).

It is a lesser known fact that he has composed film scores, written songs for television productions and provided incidental music for stage plays.

Sondheim is currently working on a new musical, tentatively titled All Together Now, in collaboration with playwright David Ives, whose play Venus in Fur (2010) is enjoying an extended run at Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre.

In 2009 the Signature Theatre, in my home state of Virginia, established a new honor, The Sondheim Award, as “a tribute to America's most influential contemporary musical theatre composer.” The first award was presented at the Arlington, VA, theatre’s gala fund-raiser. Sondheim himself was the first recipient of the award, which includes a $5000 honorarium for the recipients' choice of a nonprofit organization. The 2010 honoree was Angela Lansbury, and in 2011 the recipient was Bernadette Peters.

Losing My Mind ("Follies" 1971) performed by Jeremy Jordan:

Cole Porter

At the time he sang second tenor in the Glee Club at Yale, Cole Porter (1891-1964) also appeared in stage roles and performed cabaret sets at private parties. It became his habit to step out of the chorus just before the choir’s last number to sit at the piano to accompany himself in a solo performance of songs and patter, much of the clever and cheeky material his own. Although he was listed just once in the program, the audience usually kept him there until he had gone through 10-12 encores. Reviewers called him the “highlight” of the concerts, “a clever imitator, strong singer and comedian”. Then, as later in life, Porter wrote both the words and music to his songs.

After one year he dropped out of Harvard Law School, where he had resided with Dean Acheson, the future Secretary of State. His unwavering D-grades in all his law courses resulted in a transfer to the School of Music in 1914 for his second year at Harvard. For a time he studied music with Pietro Yon, who went on to become famous as organist at NYC’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Porter, who was exclusively homosexual, met his future wife Linda at a 1918 wedding reception in Paris, where he had lingered after serving in France in a volunteer ambulance unit during the final year of WW I. At least that's what he told Linda. Although Cole appeared on the streets of Paris in various military uniforms, later biographers revealed that Porter never served in the military of any country. Porter maintained a luxury apartment in Paris, where he entertained lavishly. His parties were extravagant and scandalous, with a little of everything sprinkled in for good measure – much gay and bisexual activity, cross-dressing, international musicians, Italian nobility, and a large surplus of recreational drugs. For a twenty-something boy born on a farm in Peru, Indiana, things were moving fast.

Linda Lee Thomas (at right), a fabulously wealthy socialite divorcée, was descended from the Paca family (one of whom was a signer of the Declaration of Independence) as well as from the Lees of Virginia. Linda was well aware of Porter’s homosexuality, but they nevertheless married on December 12, 1919, and remained based in Paris as bon vivants of hedonistic high style until 1937, when war clouds forced their return to the U.S. Many of their circle suspected that Linda might be lesbian or bisexual, while others thought of her as asexual. Whichever was true, their marriage was without sex, but certainly not without love. They adored each other. Years later Linda miscarried, but it is not certain whether Cole was the would-be father. Linda was known to have affairs of her own, but it cannot be determined if they were sexual. It’s all a cloud of ambiguity.

After their honeymoon in southern France and Italy, Cole sought further formal musical training, enrolling at the Schola Cantorum in the Latin Quarter of Paris. He soon abandoned his notion of writing serious orchestral music, however, and did not complete the curriculum.

Linda, thirteen years older than Cole, provided him with a passport to social landscapes he could never have traversed on his own. Their world was a fusion of outrageous Bohemianism and mad-cap Roaring Twenties liberation, tossed together with moneyed misfits, exiled royalty, show business personalities and assorted impoverished creative geniuses. Included in their social circles were Coco Chanel, Lauritz Melchior and Arthur Rubenstein, who loved to sit down at the piano to play Cole Porter songs. In short, they knew anyone worth knowing.

Soon after their marriage, Linda bought a much larger Parisian residence in 1920 at 13, rue Monsieur, a street just one block long, not far from Les Invalides and the Rodin Museum (and purchased for more than $10 million in today’s money). The rear garden backed up to the house of Nancy Mitford, the British novelist, biographer and socialite, who was involved in a romance with the homosexual Scottish aristocrat Hamish St. Clair-Erskine. But I digress.

Linda’s house in Paris was so large that they rented a suite of rooms to Howard Sturges, a close friend of Linda’s who became Cole’s dearest life-long friend. Sturges lent Linda a beautiful painting by Christian Bérard, which hung for years in their Parisian drawing room. Sturges, a witty, old-money Boston socialite, was a trained violinist who kept a pet bear and walked a pig on a leash through the streets of Paris. I’m not making this up.

Hostess Elsa Maxwell (a closeted lesbian) leans over a smiling Cole Porter. The legendary society maven was a huge fan and patron.



Sturges often traveled with Cole and Linda, wherever their journeys took them, and Cole and Howard made this three-way friendship more complicated when the two men entered into an affair. The Porters were peripatetic to the extreme. They always traveled with an entourage of servants and friends, usually picking up the tab for their guests, and quickly became acquainted with Egypt, Monte Carlo, Italy, London, Biarritz, Spain and New York. To say that the Porters lived large is understatement.

Cole and Linda befriended wealthy American ex-pats Gerald and Sarah Murphy, and together they made the South of France a fashionable year-round resort destination. There were striking parallels in the lives of the Murphys and Porters, not the least of which was the fact that both Gerald and Cole were married homosexual men.

In 1923 Cole’s wealthy grandfather died. Long disapproving of Cole’s choice of a career, he made no mention of Cole in his will. Of the four million dollars left to Cole’s mother, however, she gave half to her son, then 32 years old, who later said the inheritance didn’t spoil or ruin his life – it just made it wonderful. Well, not everything was wonderful. It was about this time that Porter tested positive for syphilis.

Soon Cole and Linda became part of the social set of Prince and Princesse Edmond de Polignac. The princess, based in Paris, was heir to the singer sewing machine fortune. She was a captivating lesbian married to a homosexual (and financially destitute) prince, who was himself a talented amateur composer. They hosted private musical salons that drew on the talents of Stravinsky, Fauré, Satie, Ravel and Milhaud. The Polignac’s musical afternoons were for decades the most important and influential venue for new French music.

For five summers during the 1920s, the Porters descended upon Venice, renting the fabulous Palazzo Rezzonico. During the summer of 1925 Cole became completely smitten with Boris Kochno, a Russian poet, librettist and Ballet Russes dancer who was Diaghilev's collaborator. Their correspondence survives, and Porter comes across as a love-sick puppy. Soon thereafter, Porter returned to the U.S. to write shows for Broadway and Hollywood. While living in New York, Porter found that paying for sex was less complicated emotionally, and it allowed him to indulge his taste in sailors, marines and assorted prostitutes.

Until recently Porter's piano (right) stood on the cocktail terrace of the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria hotel in NYC, where Cole and Linda Porter kept an apartment* in the Waldorf Towers, the residential wing of the hotel. The 1907 Steinway grand, with a hand decorated walnut case, was a gift from the hotel in 1945. Upon Porter's death in 1964, the piano went downstairs to the lobby.


Monty Woolley, who often joined Cole to cruise New York City's waterfront bars and bordellos, recounted that one night, a young sailor they approached by car asked outright, "Are you two cocksuckers?" Woolley responded with, "Now that the preliminaries are over, why don't you get in and we can discuss the details?"

Cole’s numerous male lovers included Nelson Barfeld (a dancer/choreographer who was a former U.S. Marine), Robert Bray (a married Californian) and Jack Cassidy (a character actor). Not to mention architect Ed Tauch, director John Wilson and longtime friend Ray Kelly, whose children still receive half of Porter's copyright royalties. After relocating to  Hollywood, he was a regular guest at George Cukor's Sunday all-male pool parties, but soon the two became rivals. While renting a beautiful Hollywood home owned by renowned homosexual actor-decorator Billy Haines, Porter held competing all-male parties, and Cole’s became the more valued invitation. Porter was not discrete. A recent biography recounts that in his later years, Cole kept "breaking appliances so he could lure cute repairmen into his lair". As well, Scotty Bowers's recent Hollywood tell-all recounts that Porter had a decided taste for giving oral sex to Marines while suffering verbal abuse and humiliation. The homosexual relations were not casual. All of Porter's sexual activity was homosexual, and he became more brazen in the more open and permissive atmosphere of Hollywood. Linda reacted by staying away from California, sailing back and forth between her residences in Paris and New York. She was quietly making plans to divorce Cole.

Then in 1937, Cole was involved in a tragic horse riding accident and fractured both his legs. This was especially debilitating and humiliating to the ego of a vain man who placed enormous value on looks and a dashing appearance for both social and sexual reasons. He was in the hospital for months as his mental and physical health waned. He was in constant pain from his leg injuries and underwent 34 operations, all ultimately unsuccessful. Linda changed her plans and returned to Cole's side; they shared quarters at the Waldorf Towers in NYC, and before long he returned to writing songs.

Porter hired a driver and a personal assistant, who tended to details such as getting Cole into and out of wheelchairs, elevators and buildings. Soon enough Porter was reviving his lusty male/male activity. Once he graduated from a wheelchair to a cane, he maintained a small house overlooking the ocean at Lido Beach on Long Island, which he used for male/male trysts. Frank Walsh, a soldier stationed at Governors Island, recalled attending a party at Porter's Lido Beach residence, describing it as "a drinking and sex party, nearly orgiastic, with fifty or more soldiers kissing, drinking and engaging in lots of very graphic sex." At about this time Cole tripped on a stair and broke his left leg again, causing a major setback to his recovery.

Cole Porter portrait by Richard Avedon, 1950.

In 1945, he lent his permission to the movie project Night and Day, allegedly about the life of Cole Porter. Although a great boost to his ego, the plot was a wildly fictionalized biography. His friends thought it hysterically funny, knowing the divide between fact and fiction. The movie overlooked Porter’s overly pampered and controlled youth, his notorious gay life and his sexless marriage of social convenience; instead it lent credence to the tall tales Cole spread about himself, such as his (fake) war record and injuries. According to friends, Cole enjoyed the movie's wildly fictional account, and he especially savored having closeted movie star Cary Grant play a heroic, straight version of himself. Fortunately Porter did not live to see the 2004 film De-Lovely, a wretched misstatement of facts and an utter bore. I do not know how it was possible to make the extravagant, over-the-top lives of Cole and Linda Porter, portrayed by Kevin Kline and Ashley Judd, appear so dull.

Porter's greatest hit musical came late in his career. Kiss Me Kate (1948) is a play within a play about a troupe putting on Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. W. H. Auden even called it a much better piece of theater than The Taming of the Shrew (!). A film version hit movie theaters in 1953, also to great acclaim, but Porter's risqué lyrics had to be sanitized to avoid the Hollywood code censors, thus robbing the musical of much of its comedy. The film was originally released in 3-D.

A major blow came with Linda’s death in 1954. She died after a long illness from chronic respiratory problems at their apartment in the Waldorf Towers in NYC. Although they had separated only to reunite several times, they remained devoted to each other. She left an estate of over $1.5 million, in which Cole had a lifetime interest (Cole had also inherited the bulk of his mother's half million dollar estate, but needlessly worried about money constantly). He was given Linda's Williamsport, Massachusetts, estate outright (description below), as well as all of Linda's personal belongings.

Unfortunately, Porter descended into further creative silence and social isolation in 1958, when his right leg was finally amputated. Porter was embarrassed and incapacitated by the surgery. Linda Porter had acquired a 40-acre estate in Williamsport, MA in 1940, and after her death, Cole became a virtual recluse at Buxton Hill**, as the property was named (current photo below). In a bizarre act Porter ordered the Tudor-style main house razed after  Linda's death and moved a caretaker’s cottage to the location of the original house. According to one of his biographers, visitors to Buxton Hill became fewer and fewer, because most weekends Porter was wicked drunk and ignored his invited guests, some of whom dubbed the farm, “the torture chamber.” At Cole’s death from kidney failure in 1964 (at a nursing home in Santa Monica), the Buxton Hill estate went to Williams College, but returned to private hands a few years later. It recently served as a luxury inn, with tennis courts and a 30' X 50' swimming pool. And the whole shebang (structures and 40 acres of land) subsequently hit the market for $4.5 million. 1425 Main St., Williamstown, MA. It has since gone off the market.

**When Cole Porter formed his own publishing company, he named it Buxton Hill.

* Porter’s 5-bedroom apartment in the Waldorf Astoria was available for rent last year at the rate of $150,000 a month. No lie. The Porters had lived in several apartments at the Waldorf Towers from 1939 to 1954, but Cole moved into this much larger unit just after the death of Linda. When Porter moved to apartment 33-A (1955-1964), he hired Billy Baldwin to do the interior design work. Baldwin was so well-known for his love of slipcovers that Cole Porter joked that he didn’t want to come back to find his piano slip covered! After Cole Porter died, Frank Sinatra moved in. Quite a pedigree for Waldorf Towers apartment 33-A (floor-plan porn below).

Of note: Porter’s wildly successful 1934 musical Anything Goes was revived on Broadway in 2011, and a touring company took the show to audiences all across the country.

His body of work includes some 1,400 songs. Some are one-offs which continue to astonish listeners today. For example, in Miss Otis Regrets (1934) we are told by a servant of a polite society lady how her employer was seduced and abandoned. In just a few lines of lyrics, we learn that Miss Otis hunted down and shot her seducer, was arrested, taken from the jail by a mob, and lynched. The servant conveys Miss Otis's final, polite, apologetic words to her friends: "Miss Otis regrets she's unable to lunch today." There is not another song like it.

Carmen McRae's impassioned reading of "Miss Otis Regrets..."




Among Cole Porter’s classic American standards are:


Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye (1944)
Ray Charles and Betty Carter’s classic reading of Porter’s extraordinary tune and lyric:

When you're near there's such an air of spring about it.
I can hear a lark somewhere begin to sing about it.
There's no love song finer, but how strange the change from major to minor
Everytime we say goodbye.





Begin the Beguine (1935)

Don’t Fence Me In (1934)

From This Moment On (1950)


I Love Paris (1952)

I Get a Kick Out of You (1934)

I’ve Got You Under My Skin (1936)

In the Still of the Night (1937)


Let's Do It, Let's Fall In Love (1928)

Night and Day (1932 - one of ASCAP's top 10 all time money makers)

You’re the Top (1934)






True Love (1956)
Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly sing a duet aboard the yacht True Love in High Society, the musical remake of Philip Barry’s 1939 stage play, The Philadelphia Story (made into an acclaimed film in 1941).

 

Some songs have remained inexplicably obscure. After You, Who? was a great favorite of Mabel Mercer, but I had not heard anyone else sing it in years. Imagine my surprise when John Barrowman included it on a recent album.



After You, Who? - The Gay Divorce* (1932)

Though with joy I should be reeling that at last you came my way,
There's no further use concealing that I'm feeling far from gay,
For the rare allure about you makes me all the plainer see
How inane, how vain, how empty life without you would be.

After you, who could supply my sky of blue?
After you, who could I love?
After you, why should I take the time to try,
For who else could qualify - after you, who?
Hold my hand and swear you'll never cease to care,
For without you there what could I do?
I could search years but who else could change my tears
Into laughter after you?

* Hollywood codes forced the 1934 film version to be called The Gay Divorcée. Censors would not concede that a divorce could be something joyous. I kid you not.

Trivia: Cole Porter was left handed and found it awkward to write down music on staff paper. He worked out a solution by turning the paper at a right angle, so that the staff lines were vertical. True.

Jerry Herman

Jerry Herman (1931-2019) is the only Broadway composer/lyricist in history to have three musicals run more than 1500 performances each: Hello, Dolly!, Mame and La Cage aux Folles.

Raised in NYC, he spent summers in the Berkshires directing plays and musicals at his parents' camp. After college Herman produced the off-Broadway 1954 revue I Feel Wonderful, forged from material he had written at the University of Miami (the university’s theater, the Jerry Herman Ring Theatre, is now named after him). It was his only show his mother was able to see, since she died of cancer at the age of 44, shortly after the revue opened. Her death caused a crippling depression for Herman.

In an attempt to dispel his grief, Herman put together a revue called Nightcap in 1958. It ran for two years. His Broadway debut came in 1960 with From A to Z, a revue that featured contributions from newcomer Fred Ebb. Producer Gerard Oestreicher approached him after seeing his work and asked Herman to compose the score for a show about the founding of the state of Israel. The result was 1961's Milk and Honey, his first full-fledged Broadway musical.

In 1964, famed producer David Merrick hired Herman for a project that was to become his most successful endeavor, Hello, Dolly!, starring Carol Channing. The original production ran 2,844 performances, the longest running musical of its time, and the show fostered three revivals. It won 10 Tony Awards, a record that remained unbroken for 37 years, until The Producers won 12 in 2001.

Herman wrote in his memoir that David Merrick was "a very tough man who loved to intimidate people." After Merrick saw Milk and Honey, he asked to meet with Herman. Merrick was looking for a composer-lyricist to write the songs for Hello Dolly! Herman requested a copy of the script and asked if he could have the weekend to come up with some songs. "Those three days were the turning point of my career. I produced those four songs in two days of the wildest, most intensive writing binge of my life. I was like a crazed person, pacing up and down in the middle of the night, scribbling down lyrics and popping candy in my mouth. But I was young, I was full of energy, and I wanted this happy, brightly colored American musical more than anything in the world. I was determined to get this job. There was a new aggressiveness in me, this desperate need to prove something to myself. I killed myself for this job." On Monday morning, after hearing the songs, Merrick said, "Kid, the show is yours."

The production was an enormous hit and Herman developed a close friendship with its star, Carol Channing. Working on the show, however, was emotionally traumatic because of the difficult personality of Merrick.

In 1966, Herman delivered another smash hit, Mame, starring Angela Lansbury. Both shows introduced a string of Broadway standard tunes. A 1969 movie version of Hello Dolly! starred Barbra Streisand (ouch!), and Lucille Ball (double ouch!) starred in the film version of Mame (1974). For years both Streisand and Ball suffered invidious comparisons to Channing and Lansbury.

Hello Dolly! star Carol Channing (Dolly Levi) and Lee Roy Reams (Cornelius Hackl) flank composer/lyricist Herman in a photo at the time of the show’s 1978 Broadway revival.

Three disappointments followed: Dear World (1969, starring Angela Lansbury), Mack & Mabel (1974, starring Robert Preston and Bernadette Peters), and The Grand Tour (1979, starring Joel Grey). Interestingly enough, Herman considers the score of Mack & Mabel his personal favorite. The show had a successful revival in London’s West End in 2006.

After the initial failure of Mack & Mabel, Herman became depressed and did not want to write musicals anymore. The financial success of Dolly had allowed Herman to buy a rowhouse from playwright Edward Albee at 50 W. 10th St. (Greenwich Village), NYC, and refurbish it. The structure dated from 1868, when it served as stables. Prior to Albee, it had belonged to renowned Shakespearean actor Maurice Evans. House Beautiful ran an article on Herman's renovation, and a second career was born. During the 1970s, he turned to renovating and decorating houses and reselling them, finding decorating projects therapeutic.

In 1983, Herman struck gold again with La Cage aux Folles, breaking box-office records at the Palace Theatre, and winning another Tony Award for Best Musical. After the phenomenal success of La Cage aux Folles, Herman left the world of Broadway and moved to Bel Air, California, where he mourned the death of his long-term partner and dealt quietly with his own HIV-positive status, which was ungracefully made public in 1992 by New York Post columnist Cindy Adams.

His 1996 memoir, Showtune, relates stories “about that fabulous era when there were 20 musicals a season. Mary Martin in one and Gwen Verdon in another. It was a very heady, exciting time, and I had a little part in it," he says. "I also wanted to tell the story honestly of a gay man in America who was comfortable with that persuasion. But almost more than the stories about Ethel Merman and Pearl Bailey, I wanted to tell people in my situation that there are medications now that can normalize your system.”

Though his shows have raised the spirits of millions, Herman believes his participation in the mid-1990s experimental study of protease inhibitors was more important: "My medical records were sent to the FDA along with hundreds of others to help get the drug approved. I think that's the best thing I've done for this world." Update: Mr. Herman lived for 34 years after his HIV-positive diagnosis in 1985.

Herman had settled down with partner Marty Finkelstein, whom he met at a Christmas party.  They started their own business renovating Victorian houses in Key West, winning numerous architecture and restoration awards. But after five years together, Finkelstein came down with a bronchial infection that wouldn't go away. Two and a half years together, Finkelstein died of AIDS at the age of 36. "When I saw the grief of his mother, that hit me more than my own grief," Herman said.

At the Palm Springs, CA, home he shared with recently retired real estate broker Terry Marler, his partner of a dozen years, there is a 61-foot swimming pool. "That's my exercise," Herman said. "I'm there a great deal of the time; I swim and swim and swim as often as I can. It gets harder every year. You don't like to think of age as being a problem, so swimming keeps me fit. Terry keeps my life going. He's responsible for laughter and companionship. He's just a great, great partner."

The best Jerry Herman song you've never heard of:
TIME HEALS EVERYTHING (Mack & Mabel)
Sung by Bernadette Peters, who created the role on Broadway.



Herman was awarded a 2009 Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement, at age 77. "It's the most exciting thing that's ever happened to me, it really is," Herman said. "It doesn't get any better than this. That's an award from the people that I've worked with all my life. It's beautiful." The award was presented to him by Angela Lansbury, the inimitable star of Mame.

In 2010 he was a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors, at age 80. The next year three of his works were staged in Australia: Milk and Honey, Dear World and Hello, Dolly! The PBS 90-minute documentary, Words and Music by Jerry Herman (2007), is available on DVD.

Update to original post: Mr. Herman died in a Miami hospital on December 26, 2019, at the age of 88. His partner, Terry Marler, survives him.

Kander and Ebb

After studying music composition at Oberlin and Columbia, John Kander (b. 1927), at left in photo, settled in New York City, where he worked as an arranger, accompanist, and conductor. He met lyricist Fred Ebb (1928-2004), at right, in 1963, and they formed a four-decade-long song writing team that produced such stage hits as Cabaret (1966) and Chicago (1975), both of which were made into award-winning films.

In 1965 Kander and Ebb joined forces with Harold Prince and George Abbott on a show called Flora, The Red Menace, which made a star out of nineteen-year-old Liza Minnelli, who won a Tony Award for her performance. In fact, Miss Minnelli and Chita Rivera went on to debut much of their material. The rest is Broadway history: The Happy Time/1968, Zorba/1968, 70, Girls, 70/1971, The Act/1977, Woman of the Year/1981, The Rink/1984, And the World Goes 'Round/1991, Kiss of the Spider Woman/1993, Steel Pier/1997 and The Visit/2001. Most of their collaborations were shows that explored the dark side of relationships, and few resulted in a happy ending.

Their contribution to the film score of Martin Scorsese's New York, New York/1977 yielded one of their most celebrated songs, sung by Liza Minelli in the film; however, it is Frank Sinatra’s cover that has become the most enduring interpretation.

Kander and Ebb – their two surnames were indivisible – it was impossible to say one without the other. Both were openly gay, and it was wrongly assumed by many that they were long-term lovers. In 2003, Kander, who has lived for nearly thirty years with Albert Stephenson (a choreographer and teacher) addressed those rumors in an interview in which he described the nature of his non-professional relations with Ebb as "his 40-year partner in creativity but never in domesticity, much less romance."

Marvin Hamlisch said of Kander and Ebb, "All I can remember is that working with Fred Ebb was a lot of fun. You know, John Kander and Fred Ebb wrote as a team. So, most of the songs that were written when we usually worked with Liza (Minnelli) were written by them. However, when it came to doing arrangements and working on Liza with a Z and putting things together, I loved working with Fred Ebb. We had the best time. He and I were really good friends. It was just delightful. He was a very, very smart man. And he was very funny. And he was very caustic. I think he probably wrote for her better than anyone in the world could have written for her. He just understood her so well."

After Ebb succumbed to a heart attack* in 2004, Kander continued working on the unfinished collaboration Curtains/2007, a murder mystery musical for which David Hyde Pierce won a Tony Award for best actor in a musical. Rupert Holmes supplied additional lyrics to complete the work. Alas, Curtains was not A-list Kander and Ebb. On a happy note, in 2010 John Kander wed his long-time partner, dancer and choreographer Albert Stephenson. Kander, who turns ninety this year, continues to work at his life-long profession. His most recent musical is The Landing/2013, with book and lyrics by Greg Pierce.

*Frank Ebb is buried at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, also the final resting place of Leonard Bernstein.

Update: July 28, 2014

John Kander was present at the White House to receive a prestigious award presented by President Obama, who spoke these words:


The 2013 National Medal of Arts (is given) to John Kander for his contributions as a composer. For more than half a century, Mr. Kander has enlivened Broadway, television and film through songs that evoke romanticism and wonder and capture moral dilemmas that persist across generations.

Roger Edens

Multi-talented Roger Edens (1905-1970) was a key player in the creation of classic MGM musicals from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Edens was a part of Arthur Freed’s production unit derisively called “Freed's Fairies”: director George Cukor, prop master Edwin Willis and Roger Edens (although Freed himself was not gay). Edens brought a unique combination to MGM's movie musicals as an arranger, songwriter, musical supervisor, composer and producer.

Although born in Texas, Edens grew up in Richmond, VA. He worked as a pit pianist in NYC during the 1920s. When Ethel Merman’s pianist left Girl Crazy in 1932, Edens was hired as his replacement. Merman was so impressed that she hired Edens as pianist/arranger for her nightclub act and brought him to Hollywood; but when Merman returned to Broadway, Edens stayed on in Los Angeles. Hired by MGM as Arthur Freed’s musical supervisor and associate producer, he became part of the legendary "Freed Unit", creating some of the finest ever Hollywood musicals: An American in Paris, Singin' in the Rain, Meet Me in St. Louis, Babes in Arms, Easter Parade, On the Town, Showboat, Royal Wedding and The Bandwagon.

At a time when known homosexuality was a death blow to a career in Hollywood, Edens managed to keep his under wraps. After a brief marriage ended in divorce, Edens appeared in public with his talented friend and co-worker Kay Thompson in an effort to throw others off the scent. Kay Thompson was a vocal arranger at MGM. By the time he worked with Judy Garland (shown in photo with Edens), he was living as a gay man.

Edens also appeared on screen opposite Eleanor Powell in a cameo role in Broadway Melody of 1936, and he continued to compose, score, and arrange MGM musicals throughout the 1940s. His most visible projects from this era included Easter Parade (1948), for which he earned an Academy Award; On the Town (1949), for which he wrote several new songs and won a second Academy Award; and Annie Get Your Gun (1950), for which he received his third Academy Award. During his career he was nominated eight times for an Academy Award.

Roger Edens became the musical mentor to Judy Garland and was an uncredited coach in almost all of her musical films. Because of his exclusive contract with MGM, Edens was not credited with Garland's “Born in a Trunk,” the landmark sequence in the Warner Brothers production of A Star Is Born (1954). Edens nurtured and established a creative relationship and friendship with Garland that would last for more than three decades.

Photo at right: Audrey Hepburn, Richard Avedon, director Stanley Donen, screenwriter Leonard Gershe and producer Roger Edens arriving in Paris to film Funny Face, 1956.

When MGM cut back on musical productions, Edens continued to work at other studios, producing Funny Face (1957) and Jumbo (1962) while breaking into television work. His final screen assignment was as associate producer of Hello, Dolly! (1969), directed by Gene Kelly. Edens coached Katherine Hepburn for her Broadway musical stage debut in Coco (1969).

A year later Roger Edens died of lung cancer at the age of 64. He was interred in a columbarium at Westwood Memorial Park’s Sanctuary of Remembrance, a resting place for Hollywood royalty in Los Angeles (just off Wilshire Boulevard, east of I-405 [San Diego Freeway]). His eternal neighbors include Eddie Albert, Burt Lancaster, Eve Arden, Fanny Brice, Janet Leigh, Sammy Cahn, Jack Lemmon, Truman Capote, Oscar Levant, Eva Gabor and Merv Griffin (and on and on). Not to mention Natalie Wood, Marilyn Monroe and Billy Wilder.

George Forrest & Robert Wright

Robert Wright (1914-2005) and George Forrest (1915-1999, b. George Forrest Chichester, Jr.) were professional and life partners for over seventy years. They worked as a team writing music and lyrics for film, stage and club acts. While both men were credited equally as composer-lyricists, it was George who worked chiefly with the music. Although their specialty was providing lyrics for melodies from classical compositions, their output also included much original musical material, such as their score for Grand Hotel (1989). They worked exclusively with each other throughout their careers, and the peak of their creative output was during the late 1930s while under contract with M-G-M.

However, Wright and Forrest were best known for the 1953 Broadway musical and 1955 musical film Kismet, for which they had adapted musical themes by Alexander Borodin. Enduring songs from that show include Baubles, Bangles and Beads, Stranger In Paradise and And This Is My Beloved. The pair won a Tony award for their work on Kismet, and in 1995 they were awarded the ASCAP Foundation Richard Rodgers Award. They also received three Academy Award nominations for Best Song.

Wright and Forrest provided scores for dozens of films, chief among them After the Thin Man (1936), Boystown (1938), Marie Antoinette (1938), Our Gang Follies (1938), The Women (1939), I Married an Angel (1941) and Song of Norway (1970, adapting the music of Edvard Grieg). They wrote the hit song The Donkey Serenade (based on a musical theme by Rudolf Friml) along with composer Herbert Stothart. In total they worked together on over 50 films, 18 stage productions, and 13 TV specials, writing 2,000 songs during the course of their careers.

The two men met as Miami High School classmates in 1929. While still a teenager Wright was working as a pianist accompanying silent films, and he conducted his own high school orchestra. He met fourteen-year-old Forrest when George auditioned for the school’s glee club, and the two soon became lovers. They later auditioned as a pair for M-G-M in the mid-1930s and moved to Hollywood for the duration of their contract, which lasted until 1942.

The Wright and Forrest relationship represents the longest-running songwriting collaboration in the history of American show business.

Alfie Boe, who starred in a 2007 revival of Kismet, sings Stranger in Paradise. For those impatient types, the music starts at the 0:45 timing mark:

Nigel Hawthorne

Englishman Nigel Hawthorne (1929-2001) was a sensitive and intelligent actor whose work captivated the public during the 1980s when he appeared in the BBC television comedy series Yes, Minister and its sequel, Yes, Prime Minister. His star turn in the movie The Madness of King George (1994) brought him world-wide attention and spectacularly displayed his talent for dramatic roles. Hawthorne’s acting career spanned more than fifty years, but he struggled for recognition for the first thirty years, until he appeared in the popular Yes, Minister TV series, by which time he was more than 50 years old.

He had worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1980s and played King Lear with that troupe in 1999. He won too many BAFTA awards to count, and he won a Tony Award for Best Actor for his Broadway role as C. S. Lewis in the 1990 production of Shadowlands.

For over twenty years Hawthorne shared his life with screenwriter Trevor Bentham. Although he was an intensely private person, Hawthorn made no secret of his homosexuality. Nonetheless, he deemed it bad manners to "embarrass" people by talking about it. He was thus upset at being "outed" involuntarily in 1995 in the publicity surrounding his Academy Award nomination for the 1994 film, The Madness of King George. The movie was an adaptation of openly gay playwright Alan Bennett’s play, The Madness of George III (1991). Hawthorn had starred in both the British stage and Broadway productions of the play. Bennett insisted that Hawthorne also star in the Broadway staging, refusing to give him up for an actor more familiar to Broadway audiences. Hawthorne attended the Oscar ceremony with his partner Trevor (photo below), who spoke disparagingly about Hawthorne’s outing by the press:

“We have never made a secret of it, and you news people haven’t been that bothered, because he is not Tom Cruise, and he is not Robert Redford. He is a dear, sweet, kind man, hard-working and conscientious, and people respect that. We don’t go screaming around in leather trousers and go to gay bars. We are not interested in that, not remotely. We are two middle-aged people living totally ordinary, conservative, boring lives. We don’t party, we don’t riot, and we don’t have wild times. We are not those kind of people.”

So there you have it.



Hawthorne later spoke openly about being gay in interviews and in his autobiography, Straight Face (2003), which was published two years after his death. Hawthorne became Sir Nigel Hawthorne when he was knighted in 1999. He died from a heart attack in 2001 at age 72. He was survived by his partner, Trevor Bentham. On hearing of Hawthorne's death, Alan Bennett described him as "courteous, grand, a man of the world and superb at what he did...”

Sources:

Post Apocalyptic Bohemian blog:
http://nopoboho.blogspot.com/2012/04/april-5th-birthday-roll-call.html

Keith Stern: Queers in History (2009)

Wikipedia







A 3-minute clip from his star turn in the film "The Madness of King George":

Hurd Hatfield

Throughout his career in film, television and stage productions, American actor Hurd Hatfield (1918-1998) was always associated with the Hollywood film, “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (1945). Playing the title role in Oscar Wilde’s tale of a vain young man who trades his soul to retain his youthful appearance made him a star. That fame was a double edged sword, however, because he was unable to shake the notoriety of the role, and just five years later he was appearing in a string of B-movies. 

"I have been haunted by 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'," he said. "New York, London, anywhere I'm making a personal appearance, people will talk about other things, but they always get back to Dorian Gray."

Born in New York City in 1918, Hatfield (1951 photo at right) won a scholarship to study acting at Michael Chekhov's Dartington Hall company in Devon, England. Returning to the United States with Chekhov's company in 1939, he began a sexual affair with fellow troupe member Yul Brynner a year later. Unlike Brynner, however, Hatfield remained exclusively homosexual his entire life. During the time the company was playing on the West Coast, Hatfield was signed by MGM and within a year director Albert Lewin’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” was released in movie houses.

It is somewhat astonishing that Hatfield was even cast in the role, having made only one film prior to “Dorian Gray”. At any rate, he was thrust into the big leagues of a spare-no-expense production, and among his co-stars were the likes of Angela Lansbury, George Sanders, Donna Reed, Richard Fraser and Peter Lawford. This movie still is of Hatfield portraying Dorian Gray:

Hatfield's passive, somewhat delicate and androgynous performance was delivered with little feeling, as apparently intended, but the film’s huge success did not ignite his career. "The film didn't make me popular in Hollywood," he commented later. "It was too odd, too avant- garde, too ahead of its time. The decadence, the hints of bisexuality and so on, made me a leper! Nobody knew I had a sense of humour, and people wouldn't even have lunch with me."

It is telling that his next film for MGM was titled “The Beginning of the End” (1947), a tale of scientists working on the atom bomb. By 1950 Hatfield had decided to return to the stage. In 1952 he appeared on Broadway in Christopher Fry's “Venus Observed”, directed by Laurence Olivier, and the following year played Lord Byron and Don Quixote in Tennessee Williams's “Camino Real”, directed by Elia Kazan. He was Prince Paul in the Broadway production of “Anastasia” (1954), played the title role in Julius Caesar in the inaugural season of the American Shakespeare Festival at Connecticut, Stratford (1955) and appeared as Don John in John Gielgud's legendary production of “Much Ado About Nothing” (1959). Nevertheless, he still couldn’t shake the specter of “Dorian Gray.”

Hatfield returned to Hollywood, notably for two sexually ambivalent roles: the epicene follower of Billy the Kid (Paul Newman) in Arthur Penn's film of Gore Vidal's “The Left-Handed Gun” (1958) and a homosexual antique dealer considered a suspect in “The Boston Strangler” (1968).  He was also cast in two 1965 epics, “King of Kings” and “El Cid”, and in 1986 returned to the screen to play the ailing grandfather in “Crimes of the Heart”. He enjoyed a prolific television career, as well, including appearances in episodes of “Suspense”, “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and “Murder She Wrote.”

Having been introduced to Ireland by his colleague Angela Lansbury, by the 1970s Hatfield was commuting between a 17th century estate in Ireland and his house on Long Island for acting assignments. Ballinterry House (above), his home in Ireland’s County Cork, was filled with the antiques and art he loved to collect. It was there that Hatfield died peacefully in his sleep at age 81, soon after having Christmas dinner with friends. Michael Garvey and Ann O'Sullivan now run Ballinterry House as a high end bed-and-breakfast accommodation. Oddly, their promotional materials make no mention of Hatfield's ownership.

A series of clips from “The Picture of Dorian Gray”

Ralph Burns

Jazz great Ralph Burns (1922-2001) was one of the most important arranger-composers you’ve never heard of. In the early days of his career he worked as a pianist, composer and arranger for swing bands. Fresh out of studying classical piano at the New England Conservatory of Music, he found himself working with ensembles that included jazz royalty such as Nat King Cole, Stan Getz and Art Tatum. In 1944 he joined the Woody Herman band, writing and arranging some of their greatest hits for a span of fifteen years.

During his years as a touring pianist with jazz bands, he kept a closely guarded secret. He was a gay man in a field dominated by libidinous straight guys. Burns did not have a Duke Ellington to protect him (as did Billy Strayhorn), so he lived in utter fear of being found out. In his 1971 memoir “The Night People”, jazz trombonist Dicky Wells recalled the main topic of conversation on the Count Basie band tour bus: “Chicks. What else?” Burns knew that those who did not join in the banter faced big trouble, so he walked on egg shells his whole career. Burns recalled, “Everybody would joke, ‘Oh, that fag!’, and if they wanted to be funny, they’d lisp. My one fear was that at one time or another they’d turn on me, but luckily they never did.”

During the 1940s in New York City, all that was available to Burns socially as a gay man was the  opportunity to fraternize at friends-of-friends private parties behind closed doors. Many of those events were hosted by fellow gay musician Billy Strayhorn, with whom Burns loved to play piano duets for the assembled guests. The talent of both Strayhorn and Burns was so great that, out of respect for their careers, their straight colleagues never mentioned their sexual orientation, even though nearly everyone knew their secret.

Early Autumn (1949, composed & arranged by Ralph Burns)
Woody Herman band, featuring tenor saxophonist Stan Getz. Johnny Mercer added lyrics after the song had already become a hit.




Burns saw the writing on the wall for jazz bands and began to record under his own name in the 1950s, working with Billy Strayhorn (see entry in sidebar) and saxophonist Ben Webster. Ralph made a successful transition from big bands to bebop style. He went on to write material for singers such as Tony Bennett, Johnny Mathis, Peggy Lee, Natalie Cole and Aretha Franklin. He wrote arrangements for two mega-hits by Ray Charles: Georgia on My Mind and Come Rain or Come Shine – it was Burns’s idea to incorporate a string orchestra on those two songs.

By the 1960s Burns ventured into arranging and orchestrating Broadway musicals and movie soundtracks. Among his many successes were Funny Girl, Chicago, Sweet Charity, The Muppets Take Manhattan, Urban Cowboy, Cabaret (won 1972 Academy Award as music supervisor), New York New York, All That Jazz (won 1979 Academy Award), and Annie (1982 Academy Award nomination). Among notable television works was Baryshnikov on Broadway (won 1980 Emmy Award), followed by work with major cabaret performers during the 1990s, chief among them Mel Tormé, John Pizzarelli and Michael Feinstein.

In 2001 Burns died from complications from a stroke and subsequent pneumonia in Los Angeles at age 79. During the later decades of his life, Burns had lived as an openly gay man, and he was able to get commissions right up until his death. At the time he succumbed to his fatal illness, manuscripts for a planned musical lay upon his desk. A Massachusetts native, he was inducted into the New England Jazz Hall of Fame in 2004. Do not despair if you've never heard of this influential musician, since his entire career was carried out in behind-the-scenes work, providing the best possible support for the great stars. He liked it that way.

Regarding his legacy, Burns’s masterpiece was Summer Sequence, a 20-minute suite introduced to the world by Woody Herman at Carnegie Hall on March 25, 1946. “That was something I wish I could remember more,” said Burns years later. “It was a thrilling night. The band was at its absolute peak. We thought nothing of it at the time, like a baseball team that went on to the World Series.”