That was the first of many sexual encounters I had with Spence. Sometimes I would go to his place at five in the afternoon and sit around the kitchen table with him until two in the morning as he drank himself into a stupor. Then he would be ready for a little sex. Despite everything, he was a damn good lover. The great Spencer Tracy was another bisexual man, a fact totally concealed by the studio publicity department. That is, if they ever knew about it at all.
I met a lot of influential people through Spence. One of them was screenwriter Leonard Spigelgass, who wrote So Evil My Love, Because You’re Mine, Deep in My Heart, and Gypsy. I fixed Lenny up with many young guys. Lenny in turn introduced me to the very talented writer Dore Schary, who penned the screenplays for pictures like Broadway Melody of 1940; Young Tom Edison; Edison, the Man; The Battle of Gettysburg; and Sunrise at Campobello. Dore later became a producer, helming Westward the Women, Plymouth Adventure, Bad Day at Black Rock, and The Swan. In 1951 he took over from legendary mogul Louis B. Mayer as head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, then regarded as the crème de la crème of Hollywood studios.
GEORGE CUKOR’S HOME on Cordell Drive was a magnet for so many august and talented people. Two of them were a husband and wife who were also two of the most respected actors of their day: Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. When I met them at a small dinner at George’s in the early fifties they seemed hopelessly in love (they eventually divorced in 1961 after twenty-one years of marriage).
Olivier was forty-four, sprightly, and had been knighted by King George VI three years earlier. He could quote Shakespeare and remember entire scenes from the Bard’s plays as easily as some people remember their home address or telephone number. Despite his title he insisted that everyone, including me, call him Larry, even though the first time I met him at George’s I was helping to serve dinner, not seated as a guest at the table. He was witty, articulate, at ease, and never pompous. He didn’t need to be. He knew who he was and was deeply aware of how much people respected him. He was the doyen of the British stage and everyone knew it. He was also the life of a party. Whenever he came to dinner he led the conversation, set the mood, and maintained the pace. It was wonderful to see him and George in conversation. I so much wanted to see the two of them make a film together, but that would have to wait for more than two decades, until 1975, when George directed Larry and Kate Hepburn in the made-for-TV movie Love Among the Ruins.
Larry often came to town from his native England. Even though he was married he secretly harbored a liking for boys. He never openly admitted it but, to me, it was obvious. When he was here alone he would frequently call me up and ask me to arrange for a busty blonde and a well-hung guy to make up a threesome with him. Each time I sent a couple over to his hotel room—or wherever he was staying—he would ask for a different girl but, quite often, he would request the same guy.
“He was very nice,” Larry would say. “Make sure you send him over again next time.”
Larry’s exquisitely beautiful wife Vivien Leigh had been born in India of British parents, received a British education, and was thirty-eight years old when I met her. When she was twenty-six years old she played Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, which won her a well-deserved Academy Award for Best Actress. She first met George Cukor on that film, since he was the director before being replaced by Victor Fleming because of creative differences with producer David O. Selznick. Leigh was upset about the change in director and throughout shooting she would often secretly consult George about how to play Scarlett. She once confided in me that she felt she was getting better direction behind the scenes from George than she was getting on the set from Victor Fleming. Rumor once had it that the film’s male star, Clarke Gable, had not been happy about being directed by Cukor because he was gay.
“I don’t want that fag directing me in a goddamned Civil War movie,” Gable was reputed to have said.
But there was no truth in the rumor. Someone had planted the story in the gossip columns of the Hollywood trade papers simply to undermine George’s reputation. The real problem had to do with Selznick and George’s differing visions for the film. Victor Fleming did a fabulous job of it, but I wonder how George’s subtleties and sensitivities would have translated to the screen.
The film Vivien Leigh was about to start shooting at the time I met her was the Tennessee Williams classic, A Streetcar Named Desire. She had played the character Blanche DuBois on the stage many times, but a movie is not a play. Filming is a tedious, drawn-out process. Someone once said that being an actor in a movie is like trying to beat the world record for running a mile as quickly as possible but while you have to stop every five seconds to catch your breath. Playing a role out of sequence, repeating your actions over and over again, performing for a camera and not a live audience is totally different than acting on the stage. It’s a very tough job indeed. Vivien had come to America with Larry because they both knew that doing the movie of Streetcar was going to be a tough assignment and Larry wanted to be near her. The production was going to tax her acting talents to the hilt. Nevertheless, after the film was released she would be honored with an Academy Award as well as a BAFTA Award for her superb performance in it.
Unfortunately, Vivien was a very highly strung person and suffered from what we today know as bipolar disorder, for which in those days there was little treatment besides electric shock therapy. Even at dinner parties I could see her mood swing from one extreme to the other. One thing I did know is that she fancied me, and I had the hots for her. While she was making Streetcar Larry signed to do a film called Carrie, for director William Wyler, so the couple were not consistently together, and Vivien often came around to George’s place for dinner alone. One night he had her and three or four other guests over, and because she was alone, George insisted that she spend the night in the guest room next to the swimming pool. As usual I helped serve dinner. She and I kept eyeing one another throughout the evening, trying our best to avoid being spotted by George and the other guests. For us the whole meal was one long teasing game of foreplay, and by the time we got to dessert and coffee we were both horny as hell for one another. After the other guests left I helped the maid tidy up. On my way out George and Vivien both stood at the front door. George gave me a big bear hug and a quick kiss on the forehead and Vivien gave me a light kiss on my cheek and whispered into my ear “Get your ass back over here in half an hour. I’ll leave the gate unlocked.”
I just smiled, bid them goodnight, and left.
Thirty minutes later I turned my car back onto Cordell Drive and parked it about a hundred feet away from George’s property. The gate had indeed been left unlocked by Vivien and so, quiet as a mouse, I opened it and made my way across the lawn down to the pool level and slipped into the guest room. Vivien was dressed in a robe and looked sexier than I’d ever seen her. We had to be careful. The room directly above the guest suite was called the Suede Room. George had furnished it as a sort of study-cum-sitting room. Bill Haines, the decorator, had plastered the walls with plush suedelike wallpaper. George was very proud of the room and hardly ever used it. The room to the west of that was his bedroom, and George was a very light sleeper. The slightest noise would wake him. Vivien and I looked at one another, sniggered quietly, and tried to make as few sounds as possible as we began to passionately make out. It wasn’t long before our clothes were off and we were tumbling around the big double bed engaged in various forms of foreplay. She was a hot, hot lady. She was very sexual and very excitable. Once she got going she required full and complete satisfaction. That night we screwed as though the survival of the world depended on it. Vivien could not control herself. She was loud. She would squeal and holler and laugh. She had orgasm after orgasm and each one was noisier than the last. She yelled and called out louder and louder. I tried to shush her by gently putting my finger on her lips but she wasn’t interested.
“I don’t care if George hears us,” she wailed deliriously. “I just don’t care.”
And
then she hollered in ecstasy some more. This was one of the best fucks I had ever had. I didn’t want it to end and I, too, didn’t care one iota if we woke George and the entire neighborhood. By the time we were completely spent, a couple of hours later, we collapsed on the bed, thoroughly drained and exhausted.
Vivien eventually got up the next morning, perched herself in front of her dressing table mirror, and began brushing her hair. Suddenly her weird behavior kicked in. We’d just had wonderfully intense sex, and I know we both felt good, but without even turning to face me she continued brushing her hair and said, “Why are we doing this, Scotty? This isn’t right, you know.”
“What isn’t?” I asked.
“This is all wrong. We cannot do this anymore,” she uttered. “Please leave. I don’t ever want to see you again.”
“You sure?” I asked, quite shocked at her 180-degree turnabout.
“Yes. Absolutely,” she said emphatically. “We can’t ever see each other again.”
She got up, disappeared into the bathroom, and refused to come out. Feeling more than a little hurt by being so coldly dismissed I got dressed and made for the door. But just as I was leaving Vivien flew out of the bathroom, threw herself on me and slobbered, “Oh, darling, darling boy. I’m sorry. Can you come around again tonight?”
She was as impossibly unpredictable as they come, but she was quite a gal. I saw her often after that. You seldom get a roll in the hay the way you did with Vivien Leigh.
18
Bar Service
My bartending life was flourishing. I was beginning to work just about every night of the week. I was pouring drinks and serving at dinners at private homes for old friends and new ones: Tyrone Power, Walter Pidgeon, Ed Willis, Syd Guilaroff, Randy Scott, Cary Grant, Errol Flynn, Spencer Tracy, William Holden, Bob Hope, and a host of others.
Bob Hope was a very nice man and always discreet about his extramarital affairs. He liked older women, not the younger ones who were originally part of my gas station brigade. I fixed him up with a lot of hookers, many of them high class, expensive ladies. His favorite was a very well-known ex-actress by the name of Barbara Payton. For many years she was regarded as the number one hooker in town. She had class and she had style. She also had looks and a great body. And she had great technique, and charged accordingly. However, earlier on she had lived quite frugally in one of the apartment buildings where Betty and I lived before we got our house. Barbara and I had sex together a few times and I have to say that a half hour with her was like two hours with someone else. She was electrifyingly sexy and made a man feel totally and wholly satisfied. There were quite a few occasions when Bob Hope came over to see her. Once or twice she let me hide in the closet in her bedroom and peek at them. Bob didn’t take his time over anything, including sex. He’d be in and out of her apartment within twenty to thirty minutes. He never wasted any time—or money—on drinks or dinner or gifts or small talk. It was simply a matter of arriving, getting straight to business, and then leaving. He just wanted to get his rocks off, pure and simple.
Bob was totally straight and loved the ladies a lot. He and his wife Dolores lived in Toluca Lake, and I’m not sure whether she knew that he saw hookers periodically. He was a smart, funny, jovial guy. And in the course of his work, especially during the war when he was entertaining the troops, he always had a lot of pretty girls around him. As a result of his wartime experience Bob knew a lot of important people on Capitol Hill, in the Pentagon, and in the military. He would frequently call me up and say, “Scotty, I’ve got a captain friend coming into town. Do you have a nice girl for him?”
I would arrange things accordingly, often driving the lady myself to wherever the guy was staying, sometimes at a military base, usually at a downtown hotel, but never at Bob’s place in Toluca Lake because he didn’t want Dolores to find out about these little liaisons.
I USED TO BARTEND and serve dinner regularly for the actor Franklin Pangborn. He was very aloof, prissy, and amusing, and usually cast in the role of a maître d’ or a hotel clerk or restaurant manager. He had appeared in a bunch of forgettable movies that included Stage Door, Topper Takes a Trip, Bachelor Daddy, Two Weeks to Live, and My Best Gal, but he also appeared in Now, Voyager and Hail the Conquering Hero. Frank saw himself as something of a socialite and was fond of throwing glittering get-togethers at his home in Beverly Hills. One day at about three in the morning, after working at one of his parties, I was leaving his house in my two-door white Chrysler 300 when a cop stopped me. Beverly Hills had its own police force and even though the cops were generally a little friendlier and less threatening than those in the employ of the city of Los Angeles I immediately panicked. Nothing untoward had transpired at Frank’s party but most of his guests were gay and in those days the vice squad was always on the prowl for gay people. I pulled over to the side of the road as a large officer came striding up to my side window and tapped on it. I was scared.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded.
“Well, officer,” I replied, slightly stuttering, “I’m coming from a party.”
“At this time of the morning?” he asked.
“Well, yes,” I squeaked.
Cocking his head to one side he asked me what kind of a party it was. I was hesitant to tell him that it was a gay party. By now I was certain that whatever I said would get me into a load of trouble. The cops were generally homophobic. They didn’t like anyone who was different, especially folks who were involved with the movies or the arts. I suspected he would be only too keen to find the slightest reason to arrest me for something I hadn’t even done. I told him that it was a gathering of friends, just a bunch of guys celebrating the fact that one of their buddies had just got a part in a new movie. Well, that did it.
“Guys?” he asked. “Only guys?”
I couldn’t lie, so I nodded. I felt guilt written all over my face.
“Step out of the car, please,” he said. “Bring your driver’s license and insurance papers with you.”
I opened the glove compartment, took out my insurance papers, got out of the car, and pulled my driver’s license from my wallet. He eyed my every move. Taking my documents he looked at them under the light of a small flashlight that he had detached from his belt. Without so much as glancing at me he said, “I’ve seen your car around here quite a bit in recent weeks.”
“Yes,” I responded, getting more nervous by the second. “I get around a lot and this guy’s a good friend of mine.”
“You must be pretty popular,” the cop said, handing me back my license and insurance papers. “Who’s your friend, the party giver?”
“Pangborn,” I said. ”Franklin Pangborn.”
“The movie star?” he asked.
“The very one,” I said.
He stared at me for a moment or two, not saying a word. “Get back in your car and follow me,” he ordered.
I nervously got back into my car, started it up, and began following him as he drove off. We went about two blocks before he turned down a dark side street. Then he pulled into a driveway of a large unlit mansion and drove around to the back. I obediently followed. He motioned to me to turn off my engine and get into his car.
As I slid into the seat next to him he leaned back, sighed, and, without looking at me he explained that the owners of the house were away and that they had paid him to keep an eye on the place. He said he went to check on it twice every night. Then he looked at me.
“There’s not a soul here,” he said.
Before I knew it the big cop was all over me. He put one hand on my knee, unbuttoned my fly with the other hand, leaned over, and began sucking on my cock. I couldn’t believe this was happening but settled back and let him have his way with me. When it was all over his entire personality changed. He told me he was married, had kids, lived in faraway Covina and that his life was more frustrating than he could bear. In the next half hour he gave me his whole life story, spilled his deepest secrets, bared his soul. I hard
ly had a chance to say a word, so I just listened. And then listened some more. When he had finished what he had to say he thanked me for listening and said I could leave.
But not before he asked, “Can I see you again?”
I nodded. I felt for the guy. I sensed his pain, his frustration, his difficulty living a life in which he could not reveal his true self. I saw him periodically during the next two to three years. He often stopped me on the streets of Beverly Hills at night. He recognized my license plate, which had no numerals on it, only the word DONNA, after my daughter. After some time he just seemed to disappear. I never heard from him again and never found out what happened to him. I hope he found happiness.
LIFE WENT ON. Parties came and went.
One evening at a function where my friends Peter Bull and Brian Desmond Hurst were guests—it was sometime during the late fifties, I think—I was introduced to one of the most interesting Englishmen I had ever met. He was the highly acclaimed author and playwright Somerset Maugham. He was in his seventies and was in town working on an outline for a screenplay or a television script, I cannot remember which. His best-known novel was Of Human Bondage, published in 1915, yet he’d also written The Moon and Sixpence, The Trembling of a Leaf, East of Suez, The Constant Wife, and the brilliant antiwar play, For Services Rendered, by the time I met him. His later writings included The Razor’s Edge, Catalina, and Quartet. He was utterly charming, suave, and dignified. He was seldom dressed in anything but the finest, tailored double-breasted suit and tie but there were occasions when he was informally attired in a cashmere sweater, shirt, and cravat. The studio or production company that had been responsible for bringing him over from England for the writing assignment had put him up at the Beverly Hills Hotel. It wasn’t a suite but a regular-sized room and he was sharing it with his boyfriend-cum-secretary, Alan Searle. Because I was tricking the manager of the Beverly Hills Hotel, I was able to persuade him to arrange a nice larger bungalow for Maugham and Searle, where they would be more comfortable and private. Maugham’s full name was William Somerset Maugham so, once you got to know him well enough, you called him Willie. Already too old to serve in World War II he had spent the war years in Hollywood and the Deep South. Because he was bisexual he had quite a few affairs with women and was married from 1917 to 1928. An extramarital affair with the woman who became his wife produced a daughter, Liza.
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