The Women, Little Women, but not The Marrying Kind

G. Cabrera Infante

GEORGE CUKOR: A DOUBLE LIFE by Patrick McGilligan Faber, £16.99, pp.392 Hollywood branded George Cukor as a woman's director forever as if he were the wan and only. Other directors (like the epicenely elegant Mitchell Leisen, the camera-crazy Max Ophuls and Marlene Dietrich's puppeteer Joseph von Stern- berg) deserved the epithet better. But only Cukor suffered the humiliation of being fired from his position as ringmaster in Gone With the Wind, that Deep-Southern circus owned by the Barnum of the hour, David 0 Selznick — whose middle 0 appropriately signified nothing. Selznick wanted Cukor. The lovely, beautiful Vivien Leigh needed Cukor around more than she needed her soon-to-be-husband, Laurence Olivier. Even Leslie Howard, the only Hungarian Jew ever to play a Southern gentleman, found Cukor more necessary L.S. Lowry meets iVialcolm Lowry„„

than his voice coach.

But somehow Clark Gable, who had obviously agreed to Cukor being his direc- tor, found out rather late (three weeks into principal photography, in fact) that Cukor was homosexual. Any old rent boy in town could have spared him the shock of recog- nition, but Gable, on the set, during a take, stopped the camera to shout: 'I won't be directed by a fairy! I have to work with a real man!' He demanded in fact a more vir- ile master of ceremonies. Hard-drinking, womanising, hunting partner Victor Flem- ing would do nicely — and he did: he signed the blockbuster GWTW as his.

From that moment on Cukor became the soul of discretion but the wags and gossip-mongers of Hollywood did not.

George, they claimed, was the man who could caress women with his camera but wouldn't make love to them, as was cus- tomary with he-man directors, off the set and into the bedroom. Cukor, a man not easily daunted, came back with a

vengeance and that very same year directed The Women, a movie with an all-female

cast of stars and literally not a single man

in sight! The Women became a huge box- office success even before Gone With the Wind was finished. But Cukor didn't forget

his humiliation at the hands of his former friend Selznick and never worked with him again. Though he used to call himself in derision the man who was fired from the greatest show on earth.

It is of course a moot point whether Cukor was a woman's director (can such a thing be?) but it is a well-known fact that he was homosexual. According to this exhaustive biography, Cukor's sexual life was so active and promiscuous as to be one-track minded in private, though many of his lovers found a nice niche in his movies. Cukor, by the way, even went to jail for homosexual activities in public. Only the usually derided Louis B Mayer saved him from the fact becoming news. Otherwise his life would have been love among the ruins of his career.

This is certainly an unusual book, even by Hollywood standards of male and female behaviour. Authorised biographies of public figures deal mainly in flattering anecdotes. A dead man's biography is an authorised biography by other means: the subject's lips are sealed, but not those of his friends and foes who outlive him. But the facts in the long life (New York 1899- Hollywood 1983) of the late George Cukor have a queer tendency to become gossip. We all know that gossip is, since Herodotus, the fodder of history. Biogra- phy, as demonstrated very early by Plutarch, always pays tribute to the god of gossip — or is it a goddess? That could explain why this biography reads so inti- mately. That is part of its fascination, natu- rally, but most of its allure is unnaturally called Hollywood. This is attested by more than one authorised biography of movie stars and even by such a repulsive all-out

confession as You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, a mimetic emetic. Like any Cukor movie, A Double Life is always entertaining, even though it talks not about a double life but of an obsessive single per- son: a man who was always manic but never depressed.

George Cukor was a distinctively versa- tile film director in a profession where ver- satile men last longer. But unlike many other versatile directors (Michael Curtiz, W.S. Van Dyke, Henry King), Cukor always caught the eye of the critics. The others rarely did. Casablanca is a case in point. The movie to out-cult all modern cults, but hardly anybody mentions its director, Curtiz. Curiously, the best critics of Cukor's oeuvre were not women but men. Lucky really that Gable was not a film critic, not even a reviewer.

He nevertheless remained throughout his very long career (from What Price Holly- wood? in 1932 to Rich and Famous in 1981) a highbrow among the lowest brows. But sometimes some critics found him a stooge of the big studios — which apparently is worse than being a stooge of the small stu- dios. It is true that he was seldom his own man but there are singular symmetries in his career. He worked from his first films with Katharine Hepburn, a shining star in his firmament and a perennial guest at his Hollywood house. There was a falling out, though, somewhere, but he made his almost last two movies with her — the aptly called Love Among the Ruins and The Corn is Green. He enjoyed a rare, intimate friendship with Garbo, and at her peak he directed her best movie, Camille. But he suffered the indelible stigma of ending Garbo's career with Two-Faced Woman, a dud nobody wanted to father.

In person, George Cukor was fussy, modest, with a mordant wit and incredibly generous. These personal traits became his trade mark as a director. Though short and fat and short-sighted there was something formidable about him — perhaps his resemblance to Selznick. But I think it had to do with his awkward mouth, that gave him the looks of a Charles V of Hollywood: an emperor who survived his own funeral. One could see in his alarmingly protruding jaw the commanding will of the film direc- tor, dictators all, great or small. I met him in 1970 in Hollywood and I saw him again in 1980, directing a sequence

for Rich and Famous (a title that suited

him well) in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel. He slept through the shooting of it in his cosy corner — where he was proba- bly dreaming of another pet project he never made. This could have been his extreme junction. Or just senility in the place of creation. Old film directors never die — they just fade out.

G. Cabrera Infante's books include Holy Smoke, Infante's Inferno, Three Trapped Tigers, and A Twentieth Century Job, published by Faber.