Cary Grant Disturbed Bisexual' Life

Cary was straight, like me

On September 23, Cary and Randolph Scott attended the premiere of Blonde Venus at the Paramount Theater in Hollywood. Afterward, they went to the Brown Derby restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard. As they left,....Cary glanced over and noticed a pair of acquaintances, the lawyer Milton Bren and Bren's wife, Marian. A couple was standing with the Brens. The actor was a well-known, handsome young homosexual actor; with him as a "beard" was the blonde and beautiful star Virginia Gherrill. Gary knew Virginia by name: the year before, she had appeared with great success in Gharlie Ghaplin's City Lights.

Gary was fascinated with Virginia. It is illustrative of the superficial nature of his relationship with Randolph Scott that he thought nothing of calling her three days later from Paramount, to ask her out to dinner. She was living with her mother in an apartment in West Hollywood, just a couple of blocks below Sunset Boulevard. After some hesitation, she agreed to date him.

They had dated a few times, going to parties in Beverly Hills ...Virginia received an unpleasant shock. Jack Kelly came to see her and issued a serious warning. She knew him well enough to listen to him carefully. "He told me that I should be very cautious indeed before entering into a committed affair with Cary; he added that Cary was the lover of Randolph Scott and that he [Kelly] was in a position to know it. I was so young and innocent I didn't give the matter a second's thought," Virginia says.'

Cary's evenings with Virginia consisted largely of candlelit dinners in medium-priced restaurants or weekend trips to the beach with Cary's gang. Even the fact that Cary now engaged a male secretary, a former actor named Larry Starbuck, and installed him in the house on West Live Oak Drive, didn't seem to ruffle her. She found herself spending a good deal of time in what was fairly obviously a homosexual household, blissfully unaware of much that went on around her.

Cary's life was already filled with the complexities of his household relationship with Randolph Scott and his tender but quite unphysi-cal romantic friendship with Virginia.

On Christmas Day, 1932, Cary and Virginia attended a party given by Gary Gooper and Countess Dorothy di Frasso to welcome Douglas Fairbanks home from the South Pacific, ... Cary arrived not only with Virginia but with Randy, Vivian Gaye, and Sari Maritza, a bizarre group that prompted comment in the columns. The party helped Virginia professionally: M-G-M had been doing nothing with her for almost a year, . After the much-discussed evening, the studio put her into a better movie, The Nuisance...

Virginia Gherrill remembers that he often had outbursts of temper at the time; but increasingly involved with him psychologically and still blinded by her innocence, she ignored the warning signals and began to long for him to propose to her. His jealousy and possessiveness were disturbing, contrary to the picture she had of him as an easy-going character, but again she failed to heed the dangerous indications.

Appearing on the set of The Nuisance, he would glare as she enacted the love scenes; he was suspicious of the attentions of Lee Tracy, a gifted actor with an electric, driving personality, though he was by no means handsome or even attractive. These incursions into her daily work made Virginia increasingly nervous. She asked Gary to stop driving over to M-G-M to spy on her.

The result was a series of violent quarrels; Virginia might have been unworldly, but she was certainly neither weak nor submissive. Painful though it was to her, she had to hold her own

On this thread shouldn't you be Ceorge Glooney, R1?

Virginia took the train to San Francisco to shoot a couple of additional scenes of White Heat. Gary had her followed by detectives and seemed to be more irritable than ever when he found that nothing she was doing in that city gave him the slightest grounds for suspicion. She discovered she was being followed, but she was forgiving and understanding, perhaps even touched by the extent of Gary's possessiveness.

When she returned to Los Angeles, Gary was resting between pictures. He decided that as soon as Scott finished shooting a movie named Broken Dreams at Monogram, his circle of friends, including Scott and Virginia, would go to London. He wanted to introduce them to his old friends in show business. Newspapers reported an unseemly quarrel between Gary and Virginia on the Monogram set where Randy was working; more than one columnist hinted that the argument was over Scott.

On November 5, 1933, it was announced that Randolph Scott and Vivian Gave would be married before Christmas. Simultaneously, Virginia had a furious argument with Cary, their worst to date; she took off to New York without warning, finding refuge there with her friends Laurence Olivier and his wife, the actress Jill Esmond. Angry and frustrated,

Cary flew to the city in a drunken and unshaven condition, bursting into the Oliviers' apartment and demanding that Virginia return to Hollywood

Cary impulsively flew back to Hollywood, picked up Randy, and returned to New York, to sail for Southampton on the French liner Paris, departing November 23. The two men callously left Vivian Gaye behind. On board the ship, they risked untoward gossip, sharing an elaborate first-class suite supplied by Paramount.....The studio had also reserved a suite at the Savoy in London. Virginia stayed at another hotel, but apparently even the insensitive Randolph Scott found the situation a little strained; he returned to New York after only a week.

Cary was proving more difficult than ever: And his once perfect health had begun to decline; he began suffering from alarming symptoms of rectal bleeding. He also had a severe gum infection and an inflamed tooth that caused him a great deal of pain. Virginia persuaded him to see a Harley Street specialist, who gave him a proctoscopic examination.

Cary was horrified to discover that he had a precancerous condition of the rectum. An immediate operation was called for which would involve delicate surgery. Gary was admitted to a clinic in the Fulham Road. The surgery and its aftermath were very unpleasant. Virginia was constantly at the hospital, where Cary, in great distress, recovered from the operation. He was shocked to be stricken at such an early age, nervous that there might be some leak of information about his illness to the papers.

Perhaps because they felt that if they didn't now they never would, the couple decided to marry as soon as possible.

They argued day and night. Cary's jealousy reached maniacal proportions; he was jealous of everyone and everything Virginia showed an interest in—jealous, even, of her charming and quite unpossessive mother. Virginia says she continued to hope for a miracle that would save their marriage: "I knew if we went on together, we would both be destroyed."

One late afternoon, she and Cary were returning from the beach. On Sunset Boulevard, with its winding curves, a man passed them in a car and waved. Without her glasses, Virginia couldn't see who the man was, but, relaxed from the sand and the sun, always outgoing and free-spirited, she waved back. Cary flew into a violent temper and hit her with the back of his hand. She recalls that the blow was so severe it split open the inside of her mouth.

Bleeding all over her dress, she insisted that Cary drive her home; he refused. Her mother, she knew, would only scold her, disliking Cary as she did, so, sorely pressed, Virginia went to stay with a girlfriend. The next day, Cary somehow located her there and called her up as though nothing had happened and asked what she was doing there. Virginia said, "Don't you remember?" He replied, "I don't know what you're talking about. " And Virginia says she honestly doesn't believe that he did.

OP that is the most fucking confusing post of the year Cary, Gary, Scott, Randolph, Randy and Phil. I am assuming that you continually misspelled Cary with Gary, and Randolph and Scott are the same person, but couldn't you have thrown a few more names in there to make it even more confusing.

Can we get one of our on-call Fraus in to explain OP's picture?

In desperation, Virginia went to San Francisco to consult with a psychiatrist friend of hers. Dr. Margaret Chung. Dr. Chung attributed Cary's violence to his deep emotional insecurity. Returning to Hollywood, Virginia decided to give Cary another chance; she moved back in with him at La Ronda, responding to his endless telephone pleas, in which he called her a silly, hysterical girl and begged her to forget all about what she claimed had taken place.

Cary didn't change. he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, screaming hysterically night after night at his unhappy wife. One evening, they were to go to a party given by the distinguished Danish actor and former middleweight boxing champion Carl Brisson and his wife, in whose twenty-two-year-old son, Frederick, Cary had a romantic interest.

Virginia was putting on a pale blue evening gown and doing her hair in front of the mirror, when Cary walked in and said, "You're always so goddamned late!" She replied calmly that she was ready to leave. He threw her to the floor so that she fell on the iron fender in front of the fireplace. Her face was cut, and again blood drenched her dress. He walked out and drove to the party alone.

The Brissons and other friends kept calling Virginia all evening, wondering what was wrong with her and why she hadn't come to the party. All she could say was, "Ask Cary." When he returned late that night, to find her bandaged and sobbing, he asked her what had happened to her. Had she had an accident? She realized now that he was suffering from dangerous schizophrenic symptoms.

Their tormenting relationship continued all that summer. Whenever Virginia would complain about Cary's behavior the day before, he would say, "You imagined it. Nothing like that ever took place. " Virginia walked out on Cary and returned to her mother

Cary began drinking heavily; on the set, he took alcohol from coffee cups, but he fooled few at the studio. Virginia made plans to move to England, On September 28, Virginia yielded to Cary's pleas to join him at a dinner party, but he became drunk during the meal, and when they returned to his apartment at La Ronda, he accused her of ignoring him all evening. He walked toward her, raising his hand as though to strike, and she ran out and returned home to her mother

Cary telephoned Virginia on October 4 and blurted out his longing for her to return. When she refused, he snapped, "This will ruin me! " and hung up. There was something about his voice Virginia didn't like. She telephoned back and got the Filipino houseboy, Pedro; Pedro ran upstairs to the bedroom. Cary was stretched out on the bed, dressed only in undershorts, a large bottle of sleeping tablets almost empty beside him. Pedro called for an ambulance, and Cary was rushed to the hospital, where his stomach was pumped.

Because there was some question of foul play, police surgeon Dr. C. E. Cornell was summoned to the hospital. Virginia is sure that, in his drunken stupor, Cary faked a suicide attempt to frighten her into returning to him. She was too strong to yield to this theatrical device.

Cary screamed at anyone who would listen that she had betrayed him. In December, Virginia sued for divorce on the grounds of cruelty, insisting that he give her a full share of their joint property, valued at $50,000, and $167.50 a week; and that he not contest the divorce. He refused to respond to her settlement request, and even succeeded in withdrawing all the money from their joint bank account, forcing her to pawn her engagement ring and other jewelry and to borrow money, using her automobile as collateral.

Since he's dead, long dead, it's all speculation that can never be proved one way or another.

Cary's divorce from Virginia became final on March 26, 1935. Pale, her red-rimmed eyes concealed behind dark glasses, she sat in a courtroom in downtown Los Angeles and, in response to a question by her lawyer, Milton Cohen, described her marriage. She said, , "He was very solemn and disagreeable. He refused to pay my bills. He told me to go out and work myself, and then discouraged me every time I had an opportunity. He was like this almost from the first. ... He told me he didn't care to live with me anymore, a number of times. ... He was sullen, morose, and quarrelsome in front of guests. He falsely accused me of not appreciating him or his efforts. He was inclined to drink quite a bit all during our marriage." Her mother, Blanche, confirmed the many examples of Cary's insults to Virginia. Cary did not appear in court, and within fifty minutes she was free

Virginia decided to proceed to England on April 27. Cary had been walking through another role, in Enter Madame, with Elissa Landi, and felt embittered, not only by his private life but by his career. Getting wind of Virginia's departure by train, Cary flew to New York, convinced she was having an affair with someone. But she had had more than enough of personal stress. All she wanted to do was live in a different environment and to work.

Cary's justification for being in New York was his scheduled appearance in "Adam and Eve" . Unable to reach Virginia, he lingered on in Manhattan, deciding to make the best of a bad situation. He began dating an international playgirl named Sandra Rambeau.

In her column, Edith Gwynn commented upon Cary's widely known and discussed bisexuality. Since she couldn't state it directly, she disguised the barb in an account of an imaginary party game in which the guests would come as famous movie titles. Marlene Dietrich came as Male and Female, Garbo as The Son-Daughter, and Cary, audaciously, was represented as One-Way Passage, a sly reference to his sexual inclinations.

I love these fly-on-the-wall biographies describing detailed events and conversations from 80 years ago.

Meanwhile, I can't even remember what I did last Saturday.

THANK you, dear OP.

Why was Cary jealous of a woman he didn't love?

That summer, the gossips were concentrating upon another of Cary's friendships—one that, according to witnesses, was a more personal one. Howard Hughes, then twenty-nine years old, had inherited the Hughes Tool company at eighteen and had used his oil-drill fortune to indulge his passions for moviemaking and flying.

Hughes's discovery of Randolph Scott had led to what appeared to be a brief relationship; now he was interested in Cary.

It was in the midst of this intense period of Hughes's life that he managed to break free from his obsession long enough to take Cary on a yachting voyage down the coast as far as Ensenada and then up north to San Francisco. Paramount began to panic, and the publicists called Edith Gwynn repeatedly to say that Cary's real interest was in a probably fictitious girl described as "Little Miss Moffett. "

Exactly what took place on the yacht will probably never be known, but the near-certainty is that Cary and Hughes formed, in those days at sea, a profound romantic friendship that would remain unbroken until the day of Hughes's death, almost half a century later.

That August, whether to have access to Cary or out of a genuine romantic interest in Katharine Hepburn, the ever-mysterious Howard Hughes kept turning up on location at Malibu, California, where Gary was shooting Sylvia Scarlett with Miss Hepburn.

The actor Brian Aherne recalled: One day, we were sitting down to eat when a biplane roared up and settled on the landing strip. Out stepped Howard Hughes. He was supposed to be having an affair with Kate, but I think he was more interested in Cary. He came over and sat with us, using that odd, high-pitched voice of his. Kate and Cary would tease him by whispering such words as, 'Pass the bread, please," right in front of him, and he'd wonder what was going on. He'd suspect them of romancing each other and would start to shout, and then they'd scream with laughter at his discomfiture.

Aherne said that Cary was relaxed and charming during the work, very much at ease with everyone. But there was one sequence in the film at which he balked. The actress Natalie Paley was swimming and had gotten out of her depth. She began waving and calling for help.

Cukor said, "Go on in, Cary. Natalie's drowning," and Cary replied, "I won't. It's too goddamned cold!" As everyone stared at him, Hepburn laughed and dove into the sea. She pulled Natalie Paley out, and the first thing Natalie said to her was, 'Why did you have to do this! I was hoping to be carried out in Cary Grant's arms!"

By now, Edith Gwynn was beginning to make more overt innuendos in her column. She talked of "a long-haired town for males," including on her short and deadly list Cary Cooper, James , Cary, and Randy, with special mention for Scott's newly acquired curls. Cary responded by appearing at the Trocadero on September 30 with Scott as his date. Apparently, RKO objected, because Cary's next appearance, at the same night spot, was with Betty Furness

Is the OP going to post an entire book????

One night at the Trocadero, Phyllis Brooks was entertaining a friend from New York, when Cary stopped by the table to remind Phyllis of their previous meetings...........

Randolph Scott returned from Virginia , His wife had settled several million dollars on him, and he had taken a beach house at 1019 Ocean Front,* Santa Monica. Cary soon moved in.

Phyllis was apparently quite unaware that this was the home of two men of ambiguous sexuality. The only surprise she experienced was that Cary was attracted to her. Cheerful and detached as ever, Randolph Scott seems to have cared no more about Cary's interest in Phyllis than he did for his own wife, who seldom came to visit him from Virginia. He went on to make Go West, Young Man with Mae West, acting out the comic quasi-sexual scenes with what seemed to be total conviction.

Not since the heyday of his marriage to Virginia Gherrill had Cary felt so warm an interest in any woman. All thoughts of Mary Brian were forgotten as he and Phyllis began dancing up a storm at nightclub after nightclub, rapidly becoming the most talked-about couple in Hollywood.

Life continued at the beach house Cary shared with Scott. Marion duPont was uneasy when she visited, unhappy, out of place in Hollywood, probably only too keenly aware of what was going on between her husband and his housemate, who, for appearance sake, moved temporarily into the house next door. She spent most of her days at the racetrack, trying to suppress her disappointment. But it didn't work: she returned to her home in Virginia that spring and never came back.

She didn't even mention Randolph Scott in her memoirs. Cary moved in again, and he and Scott seemed quite content to be photographed for fan magazines in and around the swimming pool, playing beach ball, cooking in matching aprons in the kitchen, washing the dishes together, and fooling around on the patio in a manner that left little to the imagination.

They continued to be confident that the public would never suspect anything and (presumably) that the more they flaunted their relationship, the more everyone would think that if they had anything to hide they would not allow themselves to be pictured or written about in their habitat. During Scott's prolonged absence on location that summer, shooting High, Wide and Handsome, Cary continued to see Phyllis, who often motored down to the beach house.

Even the columnist Hedda Hopper, a homophobe who hated Cary, could not bring herself to speak of how he and Randolph Scott turned up at the Santa Monica costume party Marion Davies gave in honor of her lover, William Randolph Hearst, on April 29, 1937: they were dressed as identical circus acrobats, and neither Mrs. Scott nor Phyllis Brooks accompanied them

Phyllis Brooks often dropped by during the shooting to watch the antics of the stars; as she watched Cary work, her love for him was enhanced by an intense professional admiration. She longed to marry him. Yet he was still skittish and uncommitted; she kept ignoring the rumors about his relationship with Scott.

The platonic romance continued, conducted largely in public, unruffled by the quarrels that had marred Cary's earlier relationships. In the fall of 1939, Cary's relationship with Phyllis Brooks began to cool. He made the mistake of having a lawyer draw up a premarital contract, which provided that in the event of a divorce, he and Phyllis would make no demands on each other; it further stated that Phyllis's mother—called "very disruptive"—must never enter the Grants' home; and implied that it was time Phyllis gave up her career.

Mrs. Steiller was furious. "She screamed for four days," Miss Brooks says. "It was a sad and dreadful time." There was no way that she could forbid her own mother to enter her house. Despite her protests, Cary wouldn't withdraw the agreement or relent in his attitude to Mrs. Steiller. Both Gary and Phyllis seemed to realize that they were making a dreadful mistake; there appeared to be no chance of a solution. Miss Brooks says:

I have sympathy for Cary in this matter, and I have sympathy for me as well. The prenuptial agreement undoubtedly did us in. Cary said to me, "I had one great love in my life, Virginia, then I found you. I knew that if anything ever happened to us I would be done. Most people never find one great love. I've had two. You are young enough to find another. I never will. See how all these threads knit together? I do."

He was imperfect, as are all we mortals, but he was my love. He was careful, gentle, kind, tender, and fatherly to me. So far as I knew, he was a loving and passionate heterosexual. He had a very strict moral code as to loyalty, fidelity and lived by them when I knew him..

You got a problem wit dat, R19? Get along, little pony.

Clifford Odets, a reigning playwright of the American stage, fascinated Cary . He was the first serious intellectual with whom Cary had come in touch. Odets would remain the one human being who reached into Cary's soul and understood it. Clifford Odet's son Walt comments upon his father's relationship with Cary. In conversation, he told Charles Higham:

Although I do not believe they had a physical relationship, I think I am right in saying that they had an intense love for each other. My father was also bisexual, and I know he and Cary discussed this. Also, it tortured both of them. Yet at the same time, whereas my father was extremely repressed in private, never revealing anything of the other side of his nature, Cary often acted quite overtly effeminate in our home, startling me and my sister. Of course, I'm talking about years later; I wasn't born until the late 1940s.

Both men seem to have been quite conflicted and pained about . . . private parts of themselves. This was one of the reasons their friendship was often difficult; each was especially sensitive to the other's expectations, because those expectations also came from within. Even though their politics were in opposition. Odets was a creature of the traditional left, Cary still a died-in-the-wool Republican

Unreadable.

As an older gay, I deeply appreciate your threads, OP.

This book was released in 1989, The author Charles Higham interviewed many close friends of Cary who were still alive in 1989

On December 3, 1941, Cary gave Barbara Hutton a large diamond ring........On March 12, he and Barbara had a quarrel; apparently, she was determined to pin him down to marriage and he was again proving skittish. She flew suddenly to New York and had a nervous breakdown. In Hollywood, Cary also had a temporary rift with Randolph Scott, who took off for a long stay in Virginia. It was clear that if Cary did marry Barbara, Scott would finally have to move out

Cary and Barbara were at last married on July 8, 1942, at Frank Vincent's Lake Arrowhead summer residence. He and Barbara signed documents waiving all interest in each other's property. (This was the agreement that had so greatly distressed Phyllis Brooks's mother.) The service lasted only six minutes. Some friends of Barbara insist that the marriage was not consummated.

.... As filming dragged on, Cary would come home late at night after a grueling shoot, almost too tired to speak. When Barbara had friends over, to keep her company, he would sometimes disappear upstairs, too exhausted for small talk and uninterested in the doings of his wife.

Cary Grant's marriage to Barbara Hutton was in every way unsatisfactory. The British actress Binnie Barnes, who had known Cary since England in the 1920s, observes :

"It wasn't a very happy union. I don't know why they got married at all. He was an impetuous man; he sort of went into hibernation with all of his wives. I think he had a terrible time with most of them, to tell you the truth. I think they all found out after they were married that he was gay".....

At Christmas, Barbara would be lavishly generous, giving the help gifts of four-hundred-dollar watches presenting the maids with designer jewelry. She handed over her used dresses, sometimes worn only once, to a maid she particularly liked. Once, Barbara gave Dudley Walker a set of expensive cufflinks; Cary grabbed them and put them in his pocket and handed Walker a cheap pair, which had been given to Cary by Bugsy Siegel. Walker added:

He would sit at dinner and eat and put his fingers in his mouth and suck his fingers. He would eat very heavily, and Barbara would barely touch her food. And he was a bad drinker. He would really get nasty and cold. He would become sadistic. He could be a terrible bastard, that one.

Barbara Hutton's headaches worsened; she plunged deeper and deeper into depression and began drinking heavily. When Cary locked the liquor away, she was so desperate for something to drink that she once downed half a bottle of white vinegar. She was also on drugs. Separately housed in her own bedroom, she would not sleep with Cary, and there was no indication that he was eager to remedy the situation.

Will there be a quiz on this later?

........Ray Austin, Grant' personal assistant for many years in the 1960s, remembers Cary's references to this 1942 trip :

He told me about the spy thing....... Cary went to Switzerland, I think, he and another actor.' They went and brought back a lot of information in their personal clothing..... Goldwyn sent him to Switzerland. Goldwyn was the head of the spy ring [in Hollywood]. Cary went into Europe under Nazi domination, and he could have been put away for it...... He had to learn to crack safes, to get information. The government owed him so much that strings were pulled for him in an incident involving a sailor. . . .

The "incident," confirmed by other close associates of Grant, involved his arrest, at some stage just before his trip to Europe, for a sexual act with a young man in a men's room. Grant was dropped off, and another actor, who was paid a substantial sum, was arrested in his place. Fingerprinted and docketed, the man was released soon afterward, on the understandable ground that there was insufficient evidence to convict him...

A new friendship was formed in 1949. Cary got to know the handsome and dashing, fiery and opinionated young British star Stewart Granger.......Granger says:

" I was fitting clothes for King Solomon's Mines and was testing for the leading role in Quo Vadis, a part which later went to Robert Taylor. As I entered the M-G-M commissary, Cary was paying his bill. He gave me a warm smile. He said, without any preamble, "Would you like to come and have lunch with me?" I knew he was sexually attracted to me. He never laid a hand on me. But I knew "

Instead of lunch in the commissary, Granger was surprised to find himself enjoying midday meals at Beverly Grove Drive. He mentioned the severe rationing of postwar England, of which, of course, Cary was aware. He asked, naively, how much butter, sugar, beef, lamb, bacon, and eggs he would be allowed in the United States. Cary laughingly informed him there was no such thing as rationing in America, and hadn't been, except in a very minimal sense, during the war.

Granger remembers how Betsy Drake was always concocting extremely complex dinners from a variet of gourmet cookbooks. * When all three went out to dinner, sometimes with Granger's girlfriend, Jean Simmons, and with another friend, the twenty-three-year-old actor Richard Anderson, Cary displayed his niggardliness to an astonishing degree. Granger recalls:

One evening, as we finished dinner, I called for the check. Cary demurred. I insisted; but he wouldn' t take no for an answer. He took up the check himself. I thought. These stories about him are wrong. He's going to pay. He examined the check carefully. And then, instead of taking out the money, he said to me, "Well, you had the wine and such-and-such a dish, " trying to figure what my separate payment would be. I was furious, and I dragged the check out of his hand and paid for everyone. He was very upset indeed

The shooting of The Pride and the Passion, It was arduous for all concerned. Cary suddenly experienced another recurrence of hepatitis;. Scenes had to be shot around him. Yet he failed to send for Betsy; who was concerned when she heard of his condition. According to Melville Shavelson, Cary had become romantically interested in a young male Spaniard; their relationship continued throughout the shooting.

Cary had little rapport with Frank Sinatra. Frank was at his worst at the time, his nervous, volatile temperament annoying to everyone. He insisted on calling Cary "Mother Cary"; he refused to drive in a chauffeured Mercedes but insisted that his Thunderbird be flown in from Hollywood, a request that was finally refused; he threatened to urinate on Kramer if the director would not get him back to his hotel before midnight.

Stanley Kramer remembers that Sinatra "had an eye on Sophia, maybe not actually, but jokingly. " Kramer adds: Frank always said, in the vernacular, which Sophia didn't understand, "Sophia, you're going to get yours." It was pretty obvious what he meant. He meant she was going to get Frank Sinatra.

Finally, Sophia asked someone, "What means this, get yours'?" and they explained to her..... Sinatra had had a few drinks, and he yelled out, "Sophia, you're going to get yours!" Now she was ready for him, and she stood up and said, "Not from you, you Italian son of a bitch!"

Cary hated this unprofessional behavior. He tended to ignore the temperamental star, and instead he focused upon Sophia Loren. Betsy, reading the gossip items in Hollywood, must have suffered intensely. Despite the fact that Sophia was dating the producer Carlo Ponti and was close to becoming engaged to him, she couldn't resist Cary Grant. He began using her as a kind of psychiatrist, talking of the fact that, in her words, "he had never had a really sustained relationship in his life."

He displayed his self-doubts, probably revealing to her his sexual problems. She knew that he wanted to be open and honest with her, and yet "not make himself vulnerable. Of course, one cannot have it both ways. " She reported in her memoirs that as he grew to trust her, he no longer bothered wearing his mask; she was referring to his false image, so carefully sustained, of unequivocal masculinity and strong emotional security. They compared notes on their unhappy childhoods and they visited romantic restaurants in the hills, listening to the guitars and the high, piercing sounds of the flamenco singers. And, Miss Loren declared, they fell in love.

Gosh. This just like having a Kindle.

Didn't his daughter deny any homosexual behavior?

Yet there is no evidence that the relationship between Cary and Sophia Loren was physically consummated. The candles and the flamenco and the flower-scented evenings in obscure hideaways went on and on, the discussions focusing on Cary's emotional problems,, However, he offered her the starring role in Houseboat, thus ruthlessly ditching Betsy. She accepted, not knowing Betsy had been cast.

In his novel Lualda, Melville Shavelson is anxious to point out that the central character, an ambitious Italian actress, is not based on Miss Loren. Yet Shavelson confirms that the portrait of Bart Howard —described as "America's Number One screen lover, who offered to make Lualda an international superstar in return for her making him a man"—was based upon Cary Grant. Bart Howard, the handsome idol of millions of women, is a secret homosexual who is privately insecure and nervous, and feels forced to "make love to women when the whole sex repulsed him. "

Howard confesses to Lualda that he is gay, and that his emotional condition is at the root of his mental stress and temper tantrums. At one stage, Howard explains to Lualda how easily anything can be learned while one is asleep. Lualda snaps at him. Then why don't you learn how to fuck girls?" He replies, "I've tried. You'd think being able to have such complete control over my body would be enough. But you see, that's where the God you mentioned has been able to laugh at me. He put the control of that function not in the body, but in the mind. Sex is a mental process." Later he goes to bed with Lualda.

Shavelson believes that if there were in fact any physical union between Miss Loren and Grant, it did not take place until considerably later, when Cary had begun experimenting with lysergic acid

OP

Fascinating.

Thanks.

I knew there were rumors, but this is pretty convincing. The daughter must've been lying to herself.

I know I'm a cunt, but DL is not the place to post entire passages from books.

The shooting of Houseboat began on August 8, 1957. Sophia's magic reasserted its power, and he decided once more that only she could unlock his sexual problems and make a complete man of him. He went to her dressing room to make peace. She shook hands with him, and would have been happy to leave the matter there. But to her horror, Cary proposed that she leave Ponti once and for all and marry him. She must have known that Gary's sexual insecurity would make her life a torment, and that his challenge to her to cure him was no basis for a proposal.

As she told more than one reporter, she felt much safer with an ugly man (she seemed unaware of her brutal insult of Ponti, her inference being that most women would want Cary Grant, but how many would want Carlo Ponti?)

In this ghastly circumstance. Houseboat continued. Cary refused to take no for an answer. Shavelson recalls that Sophia would come to him in tears, crying, "This man is married. Now he's starting again with me. He doesn't know that Italian girls are different and I am looking for a proper husband, not a glamour man." Shavelson did his best to soothe her.

Cary was by now completely out of control. He went to see Carlo Ponti and offered to do four movies for him for virtually nothing (an assurance of several million dollars in profits) if Ponti would give Sophia up. Disgusted, feeling that Cary was less than a man, Ponti refused.

After that, Shavelson says, "It was murder on the set. Cary made things very, very difficult for everybody, because he was in such a bad temper, having to kiss, to hold, to play love scenes with a woman who not only had turned him down but was living with her lover. ' Cary complained about the daily rushes. He hated the very camera work of veteran Harry Stradling. Charging Stradling with making him look as though he had a double chin, he forced the out of shape cameraman to climb up ladders to shoot him from above, so that a shadow would conceal the fleshiness under his jaw. For all his careful exercise and his dietary regimen, middle age was catching up with him.

Cary took over the direction, giving orders to both Miss Loren and the children in the cast. He screamed at Martha Hyer persistently. Determined to destroy Sophia Loren, he accused her of having an affair with the virile and handsome Harry Guardino, a member of the cast, and sent a detective to spy on the actor's house.

There was no basis for his suspicion; Miss Loren was incapable of being unfaithful to Ponti. But even when the detective reported that Guardino was having an affair with another woman, Cary wasn't satisfied. He called the man a liar, fired him and hired another detective, who issued an identical report. Guardino, who had been a fan of Cary Grant, learned that Cary was having him followed. Now he had to go on the set and play scenes with Cary, concealing his fury.

In November, Gary acquired a new assistant, the burly, twenty-one-year-old Ray Austin, who doubled as chauffeur and secretary....Ray was intelligent, charming, and reliable; he was not homosexual, and thus provided a good cover for Cary: a gay assistant would have drawn untoward gossip. A cockney, with an accent similar to Cary's ..... Cary again assumed a Professor Higgins role. He began training Austin to modify his accent, to talk more slowly, and not to swallow his words as so many English people do. Austin says:

I told him I was proud of my accent. He said that no one in America would understand me. So I gradually began to adapt my speaking until I finally sounded exactly like him! When were alone together in the car, we would sing old cockney songs.

Austin soon found out that Cary was bisexual. He says: "Cary was gay, but nothing that would ever disturb anyone at all. Cary would purposely play being gay, way over the top. " At a party, there would be some attractive women with their husbands, and Cary, according to Austin, would deliberately make a great fuss over the husbands until they were uncomfortable. Later, he would phone a husband and invite himself over; the man would suggest that he visit the wife instead. When people would say to the husband, "How-could you leave Cary Grant with that gorgeous wife of yours?" he would reply, "Don't worry; he's gay. Didn't you know?"

Ray Austin was attracted to Betsy Drake from the start. He found her wistful, delicate charm appealing.. Because of his respect for her, and for Cary, he didn't at first reveal his feelings, which later turned into love.

These whole book posts are getting tiresome,

Yoko & John (zzzzzzzz) Steve McQueen's' first wife and now this.

More input and less cut & paste please.

The filming of North by Northwest started in Manhattan, in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel. Cary had to get out of an elevator crowded mostly with women, as two men were following him. Ray Austin was present during the scene. Hitchcock was heard to observe rudely as Cary walked across the lobby with Austin, "Here comes Mr. Grant and his man. " Austin says:

Twenty years later, I was at Universal Studios. I called Hitchcock's name when I saw him filming a sequence. He ignored me. So I went to his office, and he said, "Lord love a duck. What are you doing here?" He added that he had been watching my career (I was a director by then). And as we sat down and talked, he said, right out of the blue, "I owe you an apology. I always thought you and Cary were . . . you know."

While shooting proceeded aboard, Cary had an interesting visitor at Key West. Joe Hyams— a tough, skillful Hollywood insider reporter, Cary agreed to see him, to discuss his career for a series of articles that would appear in the New York Herald Tribune. Seemingly hypnotized, Cary, opened himself up to Hyams as he never had before. He described his experience with LSD, saying, according to Hyams:

Now I know that I hurt every woman I loved. I was an utter fake, a self-opinionated bore, a know-all who knew very little. Once you realize that you have all things inside you, love and hate alike.....He told Hyams that in his early days he had despised himself; He said he was a bad-tempered man but hid it—a barefaced lie Hyams had no way of seeing through. Ignoring his physical cruelty to Virginia Cherrill, he said, "I was very aggressive, but without the courage to be physically aggressive.".......

He added as a footnote the curious fact that he wore women's nylon panties: they were easy to drip dry when one was traveling, he said.

Hyams was excited by these revelations, but Gary asked him not to publish them, at least for the time being

"I love these fly-on-the-wall biographies describing detailed events and conversations from 80 years ago.'

Yes, isn't it miraculous how these celebrity biographers know exactly what was going in the bedrooms of celebrities who have been dead for many decades? Why, you would think they were right under the bed!

Hyams wrote his articles on Gary for the Herald Tribune. The editor was delighted with these revealing pieces.. Cary took this as a breach of his arrangement with Hyams, and demanded that he instantly cancel the series. Hyams told him it was out of the question; there was no way he could interfere with the newspaper's plans. Still angrier, Cary threatened that unless the articles were withdrawn, he would discredit Hyams by saying he had never seen him. Hyams told Gary that was absurd, but Gary snapped, "It's your word against mine! And you know who they'll believe! "

Cary immediately called his lawyer, Stanley Fox, who demanded Hyams's cooperation.........There surely was sufficient evidence that Cary was lying. But even when Hyams's lawyer, Arthur Growley, advised Stanley Fox that this piece of crucial evidence had surfaced, Cary rashly refused to drop the case. Fox subjected Hyams to twenty-four hours of deposition testimony and the following curious exchange took place

Hyams: I chose not to say that Gary wore women's panties.

Fox: Why?

Hyams: If I wrote it, some people might think it unmasculine.

Hyams produced the Key West tapes; Fox did not respond to this conclusive evidence, When it was time for Cary to give his deposition to Growley, he panicked. But then Cary finally realized he dared not. Fox offered Hyams a compromise: Cary would drop the lawsuit and would work with Hyams on an autobiographical series. Hyams could keep all the money.

Hyams was not particularly impressed by the so-called settlement. He knew Cary Grant well enough by now to know that he might dodge his responsibility and give a meaningless interview.

Keep on posting, OP. Anybody who doesn't like it can scroll on by, and anybody who wants to add input isn't being prevented from doing so.

Early one night in 1961, Gary sat alone in his house in Beverly Hills, watching television, as he would do before retiring, sometime around ten. In an episode of an uninspired television series, he noted a striking girl in her early twenties. Her name was Dyan Gannon.

Obsessive as ever, Cary, like Alfred Hitchcock, who behaved similarly in the matter of Tippi Hedren, called everyone imaginable to find out where Dyan Cannon was. He discovered to his annoyance that she was in Rome and made it known to her agent that he wanted her to test for a part in a picture, which in fact didn't exist..........When she had completed work on an obscure film, she returned to America and went to see Cary at Universal. She made the screen test, suspecting the real reason she had been asked there. Perhaps sensing that for all his charm, Cary was essentially self-absorbed, and that to become involved with him might lead to disaster, she shied away. Again and again, she would break their dinner dates. Sometimes she would just not turn up, which exasperated the punctilious Grant. But of course, her behavior augmented his interest. She told the author Henry Cris {Coronet, March 1971):

Ours was a Pygmalion-Galatea relationship. I was like a sponge. I soaked up everything. I did anything he said, but then Cary has an incredible mind and I was very, very naive. He wanted me to accept his befiefs, and I came to accept them as gospel truth. Until the rebel in me finally began to say. Oh, no, that doesn't make sense. That's not good for me

he had to remold her, changing her hairstyle, her makeup, her clothing, even her behavior, until she satisfied his requirements and became the woman he wanted for his wife. How soon their physical relationship began is uncertain, but what is clear is that, despite his frequent cruelty and his domination, Miss Cannon was unable to break with him. He had a hypnotic influence over her, and even compelled her against her will to get into two LSD treatments, which made her ill and severely affected her sense of well-being.

Although Cary had given some support to Dyan in her career when she went on the stage in How to Succeed, he now assumed the Victorian attitude that, as a mother, she was never to leave the house. Once, when she announced she was going to an acting class, he ran after her down the entrance hall, demanding that she not leave.

She broke free from his grasp and drove off. On more than one occasion, he hid her car keys, and she was forced to walk to the acting school. " after a row had broken out. Grant pursued his wife into the bathroom, locked the door, and could be heard to be spanking her. A few minutes later, the bathroom window was flung open and Dyan scrambled through to make her way back down the canyon and into the city.

As Dyan would charge in their divorce hearing in 1967, Cary would "beat me with his fists" and "laugh when I cringed in fear. " On one occasion, he locked her in her room. On another, he struck her to the ground because he didn't like her wearing a miniskirt. His relationship with her resembled that with Virginia Cherrill in its brutality and harshness. Yet, perhaps because she loved him, perhaps because he was Cary Grant, and perhaps because the couple had many happy times together, Dyan forgave everything.

She took up health foods, homeopathic medicine, hypnotism— almost anything that might possibly help her depression. Yet the pain remained, and to this day she is unable to talk about Cary Grant. She once told her friend Corinne Introtter, "My life with Gary was hell. It was like The Diary of a Mad Housewife." in that novel, the heroine was made to suffer from domineering behavior of her husband, who constantly and rudely criticized her hair, her makeup, her clothes, her figure, her deportment, her ability to reason, and her common sense.

Years later, Dyan told a reporter: "I'm telling you, if I'd stayed in that marriage I'd be dead today. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Really dead! In a grave! Dead! I don't want to talk about him. He's a real pain.

Dyan made two trips to New York in 1966. One of them was recalled by Tom Stout, then a TWA representative at Los Angeles airport. Dyan had decided to take Jennifer to Manhattan. She told Stout that only she and her baby would be traveling. No sooner had Stout seen mother and daughter to the VIP lounge than he got a message to go to the curbside, where Cary sat in his chauffeur-driven car.

Cary told Stout that he would be going to New York with Dyan and Jennifer. Stout said the flight was full. Cary jumped out of the car and ran to the airport and, locating the gate number from the monitor screen, dashed to the gate as the passengers boarded. Stout was just behind him. Despite the fact that he didn't have a ticket, Cary pushed past the checker and forced his way through the plane door, joining the silent and embarrassed Dyan.

Challenged, he shouted, "I will not leave this plane! I am traveling to New York with my wife and baby!" Passengers and attendants were stupefied. A woman who knew Cary spoiled everything for Dyan by offering to give up her seat and take another flight. The last thing Stout saw was Cary flopping into the vacated first-class seat, arguing vigorously with Dyan..

On August 22, 1967, Dyan sued Gary for divorce, stating that he had treated her in "an inhuman manner."' Meanwhile, In her testimony, Dyan omitted a great many of the more unpleasant details, but she stated that Cary had driven her to the verge of a nervous breakdown, urged her to take LSD, and had been in numerous ways heartless and cruel.

She described his spanking her, spoke of his jumping up and down on the bed and screaming at the television set during the Academy Awards, insulting the honorees. She repeated earlier charges:

He started to hit me. He screamed. He was laughing as he hit me. He screamed for the help to come and see what he was doing. I was frightened because he was laughing, and I went to call the police. He stopped me by pointing out how damaging the publicity would be. When we were planning our trip to Bristol, he would not let me take Jennifer's baby food. He said the English cows were as good as American ones.

As Cary would say to his friend, "Berri, I have a little place in Connecticut. If everything goes wrong, you and I will go there, and we'll get some girls and just make babies." I'll never forget that. Another of his quotes to me was: "The hand that rocks the cradle fucks the world." He accused Dyan of using her child as a tool, and talked about how mothers "fuck up your mind as a child " . . . screw you around, make you afraid of life, how a lot of men are ruined by their mothers. There was a direct reference to Elsie here.

We never talked about the gay situation. Just things that I saw ... I think gayness was just another escape, a way out.

In the early 1970s, Cary became involved with a British photojournalist named Maureen Donaldson. ....By 1972, their relationship had deepened, according to her, into a serious love affair. When she told him that she had once been a nanny, he apparently thought her an eligible stepmother for Jennifer.

Unlike Dyan Cannon, Maureen didn't fight Cary when he objected to her wearing shorts or jeans, T-shirts and sweaters. He worked hard on molding her into an elegant young woman. Once more, his paternal instincts were at work: Maureen was not yet thirty.

Cary's relationship with Maureen Donaldson began to decline in the mid-1970s. Tim Barry, a popular tennis pro, witnessed the deterioration. He recalls that in late 1974, Barry received a telephone call from Cary Grant's manager who stated that Mr. Grant would like his daughter, Jennifer, to have some tennis lessons. At the time, Cary had Monday visitation rights. Barry still remembers the time, 4:00 p.m., when a large blue automobile stopped at the Malibu tennis court and five people stepped out:Cary' manager, a black maid; Jennifer, now about eleven years old, and looking beautiful; a girlfriend Lisa Lennon; and finally Cary himself.

Cary had brought a movie camera, to film Jennifer at her lesson. Maureen Donaldson turned up for lessons later; Cary wanted her to be a tennis mate for Jennifer,

Maureen remembered her having met Barry at the bar and, as her lessons continued, talked more and more about the difficulties in her relationship with Cary , He had treated her so cruelly. It came out that he had been sleeping with men. I didn't want to get into the Juicy details. I said, "Oh, poor Maureen, you've got to deal with this" and I would Just kind of pat her on the shoulder. And I'd say, as I patted her on the shoulder, "Okay, let's get on with the tennis lesson, okay?" She said, "Sometimes he can be so nice, and other times a devil." She was very distressed. He would yell and call her terrible. He would get mad at her, she said. It was very painful

I suspected Grant was a closeted homosexual, but I had no idea he was a mentally deranged, alcoholic wife beater and all-around freak show! He sounds like a real jerk off!

Shortly before Christmas, 1974, Jennifer brought Tim Barry a package in Christmas paper. It was marked "From Cary to Tim." He opened it excitedly, only to find that it contained a Faberge gift package with Brut cologne. Barry was tickled, by the fact that Cary was giving out his own samples as presents.

As time went on, Jennifer at last became proficient at tennis, and she began confiding in him. Barry says:

She told me how uncomfortable it was when Cary and his friend were around and the two of them would be carrying on like a couple of girls. Even if she knew her father was gay, she still loved him.

Finally, Jennifer changed schools and couldn't get out to Malibu on Mondays. She wanted to train at night, but Barry didn't have a lighted court he could use, so he says, "We all just parted. And Maureen just faded into the woodwork. I always felt stupid, not having gotten an autographed picture.

Randolph Scott, happily married, apparently had preserved a sentimental feehng for Cary. In the 1970s, Cary and Scott would turn up at the Beverly Hillcrest Hotel late at night, after the other diners had gone, and in the near darkness of their table at the back of the restaurant, the maitre d' would see the two old men surreptitiously holding hands

As if his life was not complicated enough in the mid-1970s, Gary became embroiled in yet another love affair when he was seventy years old. This new relationship proved to be as ill-fated as the others.

Her friend Ann Louise Bardach, who later co-wrote her biography, recalls that Vicki knew of Cary's bisexuality, and her specialty was gays. "She loved to prove that there was no man that wasn't at least something of a man, and wouldn't respond to her physical beauty." But, like others before her with the same attitude, she was disappointed. Instead of taking her to bed, Cary suggested she sleep in the guest room. According to another friend, Vicki displayed herself in negligees or even walked nude through the house, trying to excite Cary; every effort failed. His motivation seems incomprehensible.

The relationship, devoid of meaning or substance, dragged on lor much of a year. Cary was as stern with her as with other women, refusing to allow her to dress casually on the occasions when they went to a private party or a restaurant. She had to put on heavy jewelry and magnificent gowns—usually bought by Bloomingdale— to satisfy him.

Apart from her excitement at having a platonic relationship with Gary Grant, there was little or no advantage for Vicki Morgan in this empty haison. Except, as Miss Bardach points out, in persisting in her attempt to overcome his sexual reluctance. Meanwhile, she continued her ugly relationship with Bloomingdale. Her attempts at being an actress, studying with Lee Strasberg, came to nothing.

Finally, and we have to take Vicki Morgan's word for this, Gary consummated their relationship, but only once. She, at last realizing that he would never pay her money, not even for costume jewelry, left him, extremely disillusioned. By 1976, he had also parted from Maureen Donaldson, who understandably had had enough.

Ok, the argument for grant's homosexuality is clearly made. The most noticeable thing though are that all the stories are about his heterosexual relationships. And they give perspectives from both grant and the women. Whereas Randolph Scott, who is meant to be grant's great love, comes across as a cipher. They lived together for years and in the stories shared here, Scott just shuffles in and out their home in between grant's relationships with women.

Her name was Barbara Harris. She was in her twenties, Cary enjoyed driving with Barbara through small English villages and drinking glasses of beer in pubs.

Yet even now he was not destined to enjoy complete happiness. His heart had been weakened, and his cardiovascular problems became increasingly severe; he began to suffer from high blood pressure. At last, even his muscles began to soften.

He was upset that NBC was going to film Sophia Loren memoirs and sought an injunction against the network

There was more serious trouble with NBC in Novemher 1980. Chevy Chase appeared as a guest on Tom Snyder's show. Cary, who admired Chase, , made a special point of watching that night. He was horrified when, after Snyder asked Chase what he felt about Cary Grant, Chase said, "He really was a great physical comic, and I understand he was a homo. What a gal!" Chase accompanied the statement, delivered in a lisping, effeminate voice, with a limp-wristed gesture.'

Cary exploded, called his lawyer in the middle of the night, and slapped a ten-million-dollar slander suit on Chase. Chase's agent, Jasper Vance, said that Chase would not respond. And, sensibly, Cary failed to pursue the suit; it could have led him into a disastrous situation. More than one friend recommended that he present whatever money he might gain from a victory in court to gay liberation, and in a characteristic switch, he laughingly agreed. Chase finally commented, "I shouldn't have said that, because it's been such a pain in the neck.

He now entered the only really happy time of his life. Dyan Cannon had grown more mellow, and now that Jennifer was well into her teens, with a strong and well-balanced personality of her own, the extreme tensions between her parents lessened. It seemed time to consolidate his joy at last. On April 15, 1981, Cary and Barbara were married in the living room of the Beverly Grove Drive house, with Jennifer, Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Fox, and two members of the domestic staff as witnesses.

The newly weds were guests ten days later at the twenty fifth wedding anniversary party of Princess Grace and Prince Rainier, with Frank Sinatra as host

Cary apparently had no homosexual inclinations by this time. And it is reasonably certain that Barbara never accepted that aspect of his past history.

I like these book threads. Thanks Op. But what's the deal with all the "Gary's" for Cary?

[quote] In an episode of an uninspired television series, he noted a striking girl in her early twenties. Her name was Dyan Gannon.

And Gannon for Cannon? The keys aren't THAT close.

As for the uninspiring television show, looking it up that most likely was Bat Masterson. And yeah that was pretty poor television.

[quote]Ok, the argument for grant's homosexuality is clearly made.

But there's no proof, nothing in his handwriting, nothing in pictures, nothing but stories. Big deal, people have shit for memories THAT is proven.

I'm not saying Grant was or was not homosexual, but he's dead and it was so long ago that nothing can be proved that he was.

I enjoy Charles Higham's Hollywood Bio's. He does a lot of research. Thanks OP, I really enjoyed this.

R4 I've never laughed so hard in my life. I was rereading paragraphs thinking I was having a stroke. "Who's this GARY???"

[quote]Why was Cary jealous of a woman he didn't love?

Who cares? It's Gary I'm wondering about.

R60 yeaaa tell me more about this Gary you speak of, OP... ps. Garlie Ghaplin

I loved when Gary Gooper made an appearance.

I've been anxiously waiting since R11 to read more about Pedro the Filipino houseboy Grant and Scott apparently shared.

Thanks a lot OP

As a credible biographer Charles Higham is one step up from Darwin Porter.

We were a few feet from Miss G once and she seemed an unpleasant ancient queen

I was wondering that myself R56. I was thinking he might have scanned the pages rather than cut and pasted them from a digital copy and the software confused the c's and g's

But that's all I got.

Do I still need to buy the book?

I love Gharlie Ghaplin

R37 Thank you...These queens are delusional.

I wonder if DL responds to DCMA notices because this is ripe for a take down notice...

r71 You can't libel the dead.

DMCA is copyright now slander/libel. And, FYI, the estate of dead person can bring a defamation claim. I'm a lawyer BTW...

R73 NOT not NOW

r73 Well honey, give me a case example, otherwise I call bullshit.

R75 There are entire chapters in case books over the Elvis estate litigation - go to law school idiot.

r76 Well asshole, it doesn't hold water here.

Is this the 'Gary' of which the OP speaks?

Oh, fuck all of you whining pompous assholes.

Post the fucking book. The DL can deal with it if Muriel wants. If not, quite playing hall monitor.

Go after the Trump propagandists and fascist homophobes and straight trolling fraus here, you shits.

And fuck you for your brittleness.

r79 Get some help.

If you don't like the thread, why not exit quietly? Thank you, OP. Most appreciated.

Cary's last marriage was to a much younger woman who was his caretaker. This was common thing to do among bisexual men in Hollywood in his day. Two others that come to mind were Gene Kelly and Groucho Marx.

Groucho was bisexual?

"I suspected Grant was a closeted homosexual, but I had no idea he was a mentally deranged, alcoholic wife beater and all-around freak show! He sounds like a real jerk off!'

You mean you actually BELIEVE all this shit? You must be one of those people who thinks "if it's written in a biography it must be true!" That's not very bright.

"Groucho was bisexual?"

No , he wasn't. He was just a lonely old man who was prey to a conniving woman who got her hooks in him, one Erin Fleming. She was crazy, but he loved her, the poor man. He mentioned her in his Oscar speech; he said she "makes my life worth living." Actually, she abused him and enjoyed the perks of being his mistress. After his death, she went into a decline without his money and prestige; she ended up a bag lady. It was a sad, sordid tale all the way around.

Thanks, R85.

Seems there was a lot of self-loathing, due to the time, and that he would have been happier staying with Scott, not trying to have a straight relationship.

Ever time we've talked about Grant and Scott, the Scott side of the equation is a black hole. He also married, maintained a successful Hollywood career, and apparently kept his sexuality hidden for decades.

Isn't there any dirt on him (separate from his connection to Grant)? He was married twice, once to a DuPont--was that a lavender marriage?

To the attorneys present on this thread:

I always thought you could write freely about the dead in a way you couldn't about the living.

Is that false? Or do you have to cross a line of some heavy kind to empower the estate to sue?

[quote]quite playing hall monitor.

Yes indeed, he is quite the hall monitor.

Omg.

Surely the biggest evidence of Randolph Scott's homosexuality was his monumental gayface?

Gary Cooper is still totally straight on Wikipedia. Not the merest mention of Anderson Lawler. The old fan farts who patrol the article won't allow it.

I've been reading about Erin Fleming on wikapedia. What a sad and miserable end. In and out of mental institutions and arrested on a weapons charge. Finally ending up sleeping rough around Beverly Hills.

[quote]he was suspicious of the attentions of Lee Tracy, a gifted actor with an electric, driving personality, though he was by no means handsome or even attractive.

Fuck you!

I wasn't THAT bad!

OP, please ignore the jerks and post more excerpts from ANY book you may choose.

[quote]He was married twice, once to a DuPont--was that a lavender marriage?

Certainly not! They spent long happy evenings together: Marion duPont cracking walnuts between her thighs.

OP, do you happen to have a tell-all about any other H'wood gays/closet cases?

Marion duPont was a role model! A strong womyn with a sturdy cane!

Randolph had a second marriage that lasted decades. He and his wife adopted two children.

Ha ! Good thing for Grant that Marion Dupont was married to Scott and not him. At the slightest sign of violence from him, she would have broken her cane on his head!

R101 "At the slightest sign of violence from him, she would have broken her cane on his head!"

Hilarious!

R52 Gary Grant? His name was Cary Grant, and it's not some secret he was actually bisexual. I don't think he was in very good health in his 70s though, and Vicki Morgan might as well just be called what she was: a prostitute.

Wasn't he incredibly cheap? That would be a turn off.