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.

George Platt Lynes

George Platt Lynes - self portrait 1940s

c. 1952

The American fashion and commercial photographer George Platt Lynes (1907-1955) discreetly produced a large body of homoerotic images that he kept for himself or distributed to a carefully selected circle of friends. For many years after his death, it was thought that he had destroyed all his prints and negatives of male nudes, but it turns out that most of them had found their way into the archives of the Kinsey Institute (Indiana), which now possesses the largest collection of male nudes by Lynes to be found anywhere. 

During the 1930s, Lynes was commissioned as a fashion photographer for magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. After relocating from NYC to Los Angeles, he became Hollywood’s acclaimed celebrity portraitist. During this time he was also pursuing a personal body of black and white photographs of male nudes and homoerotic images that he kept private, fearing they would harm his reputation and business in a homophobic society. While his earlier nudes depicted idealized youthful bodies, such as a young Yul Brynner, he moved towards a rougher and more sexualized aesthetic in his later work. As a pioneer in masculine erotic photography, George Platt Lynes also helped forge Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s research on homosexuality.

Bill Miller (1953) by George Platt Lynes

Lynes was born in 1907 in East Orange, New Jersey, but a life-changing event came with his relocation to Paris in 1925, a move meant to prepare him for college. While in Paris he forged friendships among the artistic elite and was never seen without his camera. Once again stateside, he opened a photographic studio in NYC and began a private series of photographs that interpreted characters and stories from Greek mythology, but it was portraiture that brought financial stability. Today he is best known for his portraits of artists such as W.H. Auden, Jean Cocteau, Colette, Aldous Huxley, Igor Stravinsky and Thomas Mann. After he moved to Hollywood in 1946, he photographed Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell, Gloria Swanson, and Orson Welles. In 1948 he moved back to NYC, where he remained until his early death from lung cancer in 1955.

Gordon Hansen (1954)

Robert McVoy by George Platt Lynes 

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”

Manuel Puig

Argentinean writer Manuel Puig (1932-1990) was rescued from literary obscurity in 1985 when his novel Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976) was made into a sensational film starring William Hurt as a gay window dresser sharing a Buenos Aires jail cell with political prisoner Raul Julia. The two men, with nothing in common, develop a strong relationship through retelling romantic plots of old movies, and eventually they make love. Hurt won an Oscar for Best Actor (1986), marking the first time an Academy Award went to an actor in an openly gay role. A 1992 Broadway musical version of this same novel starred Chita Rivera. With music by Kander and Ebb, book by Terrence McNally and direction by Harold Prince, this production won the 1993 Tony Award for Best Musical. When Vanessa Williams replaced Chita Rivera, her performance was so strong that a second cast album was recorded, a Broadway rarity.

Although the film and musical brought him international fame, Puig thought the movie was far too conservative, failing to capture the spirt of the novel, and he declared the musical version a “massacre” of his novel, whose original Spanish language title is El Beso de la Mujer Araña. Puig hated Hurt’s film performance, and he snidely commented, “La Hurt is so bad she probably will win an Oscar” – and that’s exactly what came to pass.

Puig came to be a novelist after failed attempts at other careers. Born in Buenos Aires, he spent most of his life in exile, frustrated by lack of success in having film scripts produced or finding work as a director. He lived and worked in Italy, New York, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City and Cuernavaca. Eventually he began writing for himself, composing an autobiographical text based on his childhood memories of the tales he had seen in the movie houses of General Villegas, a small town on the Argentine pampas, where he grew up. Over the years the text evolved into his first novel, ''Betrayed by Rita Hayworth'' (1968).

His eight novels found their inspiration in cheap romance novels, soap operas and melodramas, gossip columns and tabloid scandals. Perhaps the greatest influence on his literary work was the pseudo reality of the plots, characters and dreams of films, which provided a lifeline of escape during his formative years growing up on a ranch near Buenos Aires. A sensitive child, real life was a harsh, continual trial in a culture saturated with machismo and savage prejudices, and his homosexuality condemned him to hostility, violence and ridicule from classmates and acquaintances, not to mention contempt from his own family. He was assaulted at school when it was discovered that he liked to dress up as a girl, but he found solace by devoting most of his time, energy and imagination to the escapist world of movies.

Puig spent a lifetime looking for a partner, with no success. His romantic life was a series of one night stands or relationships that lasted a few weeks or months, at the most. When Yul Brynner (see post in sidebar) was in Paris making the film, Once More With Feeling, Puig was working as an assistant on the set in 1959. The two men had a brief sexual affair, and Puig bragged about Brynner’s generous endowment. Puig also has a sexual relationship with British stage and screen actor Stanley Baker.

Puig died in 1990, from complications from AIDS, according to his friend, the writer Jaime Manrique. Residing in Cuernavaca, Mexico, at the time, Puig was 57 years old when he died. Manrique relates that there was a cover-up about the cause of Puig’s death, which was officially listed as cardiac arrest following complications from gall bladder surgery.