Others were just plain shocked, and after the very private funeral a number of bereaved homosexuals took the Seventh Avenue subway down to Greenwich Village to commiserate at the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street. While the men drank away their sorrows, the police raided the bar, as they often did, since it was illegal in New York City to serve alcohol to homosexuals. Caught in the paddy-wagon ritual was a lesbian who, when placed in the police vehicle, tried to jump out. A cop grabbed the woman as onlookers quickly began to yell in her defense. Then people threw things at the cops, who finally had no alternative but to retreat into the Stonewall Inn until recruits from their nearby precinct could free them. The siege went on for three days.
In the beginning, the newspapers referred to it as the Sheridan Square Riots. Later, they would be known as the Stonewall Riots, the beginning of the modern-day gay rights movement.
Mart Crowley read about those riots in the New York Times. “This unpleasantness in the Village,” he recalled. “It was no big deal.” He didn’t think much about it. Besides, he was otherwise preoccupied. The film version of The Boys in the Band had just gone into production that June, and was shooting a couple dozen blocks away from Sheridan Square, at the CBS studios on West Twenty-Sixth Street in Chelsea. No one discussed the “riots” that day on the set. Not that Crowley recalled. As screenwriter and producer on the film, Crowley had bigger problems: His director, William Friedkin, had just fired his third sound operator, and the brass at CBS Films told Crowley, “You’re the producer! Act like one!”
When the cast of The Boys in the Band had returned to Manhattan from their London engagement that spring, Crowley took out actor insurance by rejecting all offers from the big studios to turn his play into a movie. Ray Stark, high off his Funny Girl success, was typical of the Hollywood need to sanitize. “We will replace the homosexuals of the play with movie stars,” said the producer. The original Boys troupe of actors laughed at that remark. What movie stars were they going to replace them with? “Rock Hudson? Roddy McDowall?” wondered Laurence Luckinbill. To keep his original cast intact, Crowley signed not with Ray Stark but Cinema Center Films, which was the movie-producing unit of CBS. (Despite that big TV entity behind it, the film’s budget came in at $1.6 million on a sixteen-week shoot, of which $250,000 went to Crowley, plus 10 percent of the gross.)
“This cast or no movie” was Crowley’s negotiating mantra. “Crowley knew the best way to treat Hollywood was to slap it in the face,” explained Luckinbill.
Crowley also insisted on being the film’s producer and screenwriter, and keeping Robert Moore as director.
The only battle he lost was his fight to keep Moore, who’d never directed a film. The studio insisted on William Friedkin, who had directed three films, including the modest hit The Night They Raided Minsky’s.
The cast nearly mutinied when they got the Friedkin-instead-of-Moore news. They talked of refusing to do the movie. But a harsh reality confronted them. Despite the play being a big hit in London and Off Broadway, where it continued to run, the actors had received virtually no offers of work onstage, much less in the movies or TV. Luckinbill was dropped from doing True cigarette commercials; he was told, “No fags smoke our fags.” Peter White lost a shaving cream ad. He considered suing the ad agency, but when he and his new agent checked into his legal standing they found he had none, since there were no antidiscrimination laws protecting homosexuals in the workplace or, for that matter, laws protecting heterosexuals who played homosexuals onstage.
The New York Times published an article on how the actors in The Boys in the Band were actually heterosexual, and profiled the cast’s two married men, Laurence Luckinbill and Cliff Gorman, and then ran out of space for an analysis of the other eight cast members’ respective private lives. Gorman, who played the super-effeminate Emory, took offense.
“There was a lot of crap in the press about my really being a he-man,” he said. “This rebound kind of reaction bothered me a lot because whether I was homosexual or not had nothing to do with my performance. I have never stressed the masculine image. . . . At no time have I gone out of my way to prove anything on that score. The people that interviewed me when I was playing Emory picked up on it because the part was so grossly effeminate. That was the basis on which they chose to write about me: ‘Holy Mackerel! Big, butch Cliff Gorman is not a homosexual! He doesn’t even mince when he walks!’ ”
If the actors suffered professionally, the play had a relatively easy time of it in New York City and London. Elsewhere, it was rougher. The French critics found it “embarrassing” and “deviant,” and likened The Boys in the Band to a visit to a “monkey house.” And down under in Sydney, Australia, the actors playing Michael and Emory were charged on four counts of using obscene language in a public place. The actor playing Donald got hit with one count.
Crowley spent his Boys largesse by buying Boris Karloff’s co-op in the historic Dakota apartment building, which brought him closer to fellow Dakota resident Rex Reed, who’d written a glowing profile of him in the New York Times not long after Boys opened Off Broadway. Crowley also splurged on a summer house on Fire Island, an overgrown sandbar off the southern coast of Long Island. Since Friedkin was directing a movie about homosexuals, Crowley thought he ought to do some research on the subject, and invited him for a weekend in the homosexual community of the Pines, where the gossip was much less about Judy Garland and the Stonewall Riots than it was Teddy Kennedy, the late Mary Jo Kopechne, and a little bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts.
It must have been a memorable visit to the Pines that summer for the heterosexual director, because he recalled that excursion into “the meat rack in the Pines” in thrilling detail. “It’s a gigantic pit with 200 to 300 guys in a daisy chain balling each other in the ass,” he said. “One guy started to cruise me. When he got close, though, I retreated.” Many years later, in his 2013 memoir, Friedkin remembered the Pines visit with greater poignancy, writing, “As a straight man in a gay world, I got a sense of what it was like to be an outsider.”
On the set of The Boys in the Band, Friedkin ingratiated himself with cast and crew by wielding a big cigar, which the actors found laughable. Was he gay? Was he straight? There were also comments from him in the press that the cast “had gotten bored” with their roles after doing the play in New York and London, and how he’d made them “go deeper into the characters” and how “we’ve tried not to make it consciously fag.”
The Boys in the Band had only entered its second year Off Broadway, but already a shift in the mind-set of New Yorkers had taken place with regard to the city’s homosexual population—a shift due, in part, to the play’s success. While homosexuality had once been a rarely broached subject in the press, the publicity surrounding The Boys in the Band movie was “enormous,” noted Crowley. Esteemed photographer Irving Penn did portraits of each cast member for Look magazine. A feature in New York magazine detailed Friedkin’s approach to bringing the play to the screen. “I want the faces of the characters to look like the photographs of Marie Cosindas,” said the filmmaker, referring to an American photographer best known for her still lifes and portraits. Friedkin wanted the first third of the film to have an “ordered, conventional look,” while the final reel would be “hot and kind of cinema verité,” he said, “the Walpurgisnacht.”
That kind of reverence for the project, however, did not extend to the New York Times, which, in one of its recurring anti-homosexual tirades, wondered in print if there was any audience for a film like The Boys in the Band. A play is one thing, a movie another. “Is the country ready for ‘Boys’? Will they stand in line in Omaha?” wrote Times reporter Katie Kelly. “Face it: These are not the all-American boys who made America great. This is not the stuff of which football captains and fraternity boys are made.”
Crowley suffered the positive press, as well as the negative questions, as best he could. Regarding the film’s chances for success, “Who can predict what the hell is g
oing to happen?” he told the Times. He also presaged the criticism that was to come and, in fact, had been there ever since Edward Albee first read and hated the play.
“I’ve gotten a lot of criticism about not showing homosexuals in their best light or having a happy ending,” he said. “I hope there are happy homosexuals—they just don’t happen to be at this party.”
While the press fretted about The Boys in the Band making it to the screen, William Friedkin wrestled with ways to make the movie version even more provocative than the play. His solution came to be known as the Kiss.
Onstage, the play’s two characters who are lovers—the macho basketball player Hank and the promiscuous photographer Larry—leave the birthday party to repair their tattered relationship in a scene played offstage. Friedkin wanted the camera to follow them to the bedroom to show the two actors, Laurence Luckinbill and Keith Prentice, as they embrace and kiss. That bit of graphic play “was the bane of my existence throughout the filming,” said Friedkin.
Luckinbill and Prentice resisted. “It was considered to be a career breaker. Both [actors] came to me to talk me out of it,” said Friedkin. And it didn’t end there. “I got phone calls from agents and lawyers. ‘Don’t have the kiss!’ ”
Friedkin thought the kiss would make “a powerful statement about two men.” Finally, he compromised: “Let’s shoot it and if we think it’s not working, we won’t use it.”
The kiss wasn’t rehearsed. Luckinbill told Friedkin, “We’ll do it ourselves and improvise.” In the end, the two actors kissed in the presence of their director, who operated the camera, and no one else. Not even Mart Crowley was present on set.
Friedkin thought the kiss would give a deeper understanding of the characters’ relationship. But there in the editing room, he decided it wasn’t necessary—or it was too much for the times. “Today, I’d probably leave it in,” he said three decades later. “I don’t know how much damage was done to the actors by The Boys in the Band. The attitude at the time: You play a gay character, that’s how you’re going to be perceived by the idiots who run the studios. It was a time when the audience had no idea how many actors playing macho men were gay.”
THAT SUMMER, OH! CALCUTTA! enjoyed its world premiere in New York City without interference from the police. The California authorities, however, turned prude when the show replicated itself in San Francisco and Los Angeles later that year. Kenneth Tynan’s timing couldn’t have been worse. In San Francisco, the raid came a week before election day, and since some city fathers had made pornography-bashing the focus of their reelection campaigns the show closed after a few performances. Farther down the California coast, in Los Angeles, the actors hit a wall of resistance from a public that didn’t buy the show’s premise of “let it all hang out” in the aftermath of Sharon Tate and four others being murdered in Benedict Canyon at the hands of the Charles Manson “family.”
The police were also having none of it. They arrested the Oh! Calcutta! actors, then released each of them on $625 bail. The cast could have made the evening curtain but canceled due to “emotional strain,” said a spokesman. In both cities, the police claimed that illegal “genital contact” took place, even though a six-inch-by-eight-inch cloth (never used in the New York production) separated the two actors’ groins in the Masters and Johnson send-up, “Was It Good for You, Too?”
In Los Angeles, where Hair had opened earlier that year, Gerome Ragni and James Rado had already challenged the city’s restrictive laws regarding nudity, and while the Los Angeles police didn’t raid the Hair production, the management did suspend Ragni and Rado from performing in their own musical. The two lovers had traveled west with the show, where it took up residence in the old Earl Carroll Theatre, former home to The Earl Carroll Vanities, as well as TV’s Queen for a Day and Hullabaloo. In honor of its new flower-age tenant, the venue was renamed the Aquarius Theatre, and it was there that Ragni and Rado decided to expand on the show’s theme of liberation. On more than one occasion, they took to running up and down the aisles naked at the end of act one. Fortunately, the two men possessed a sixth sense that allowed them to detect the presence of the police before they broke the law.
When the two lovers returned to New York City, they fully expected to go back into the Broadway company of Hair and incorporate some of their new ideas, engendered not only by their Los Angeles theater stint but their movie debut with French film director Agnès Varda.
Varda had come to the City of Angels and fallen in love with its warm weather and Mediterranean-style hills. She rented a manse there among the bougainvillea and sliding mud, and over a period of a few days and at a cost of $250,000 she improvised a ménage à trois tale involving Rado, Ragni, and Viva, who would end up spending much of their time naked, in bed, and watching TV. When they weren’t sleeping together and watching Bobby Kennedy being assassinated on the tube, the trio journeyed out to the backyard, where they turned the bottom of an empty pool into a stage and acted out scenes from Michael McClure’s much-banned play The Beard, in which Billy the Kid and Jean Harlow perform oral sex on each other. A photograph of Rado, Ragni, and Viva naked in the film, called Lions Love, even ended up on the cover of the premiere issue of Andy Warhol’s inter/VIEW, published that September. The magazine was Warhol’s effort to combine the appeal of Jann Wenner’s Rolling Stone and Al Goldstein’s Screw, and do for the movies what those two super-successful publications had done for rock ’n’ roll and sex, respectively.
Warhol put Lions Love on the cover of his first issue, but that didn’t mean Varda’s movie got a good review on the inside. Taylor Mead was assigned to review. He represented a bit of a conflict, since he’d played Viva’s nurse in Lonesome Cowboys and counted Rado and Ragni as friends. Nonetheless, he panned Lions Love, writing, “They don’t even dare show the cocks and balls they cut off and one coy nude shot of the boys is quaintly from the back—real daring shit Agnes—what the fuck are you afraid of—Money??????”
It was a momentous debut issue for other reasons as well. A famous film critic ended up being called a “drag queen” in print, and to avoid a libel lawsuit, Andy Warhol, Paul Morrissey, and a few editorial minions were forced to go through every issue and cross out the word “drag” with a black felt pen. Morrissey vowed, “I will never call him a drag queen again. I will never call him a drag queen again.”
That bit of censorship aside, the first issue of inter/VIEW (soon to be retitled Andy Warhol’s Interview) proved revolutionary for Rado and Ragni. When they returned to New York City and the Broadway production of Hair, they were more liberated than ever.
“Jerry got totally out of hand and was running up and down the orchestra with a red feather up his ass,” said producer Michael Butler. “And Jimmy would just follow Jerry around.”
No less an authority than the mayor of New York City put out a warning to Butler. “You’ve got to do something or we’ll have to close you down,” John Lindsay threatened.
The producer saw no choice but to fire Rado and Ragni for “deviating from the standard performance in violation of the Equity production contract.” They were canned for about two weeks, and while they filed countercharges with the Dramatists Guild, a rapprochement was soon brokered by La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart, the doyenne of the Off-Off-Broadway theater. With great fanfare, the two parties settled their differences in a peace meeting held, appropriately enough, in the Sheep Meadow of Central Park. It wasn’t quite so easy to keep the show up and running elsewhere, however. Hair was officially banned in Boston, and in the years to come, Michael Butler estimated that he kept a dozen lawyers on retainer to keep Hair in performance across America.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Autumn 1969, Trauma
The New York Film Festival that September eschewed its usual choice of small-budget foreign-language films, and instead chose to open its sixth-annual confab with a movie from a Hollywood studio. Columbia Pictures even paid for the lavish opening-night dinner at the Footlight Café in Philharmon
ic Hall. There, 180 guests dined on seafood Newburg and boeuf bourguignon before seeing that night’s big movie, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. Columbia also paid for the fancy after-party on the promenade at the nearby New York State Theater. News of the impending back-to-back fetes unleashed a number of newspaper reports that lambasted the festival, which in its previous five years had opened with films like Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville and Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers. There were accusations of the formerly avant-garde festival selling out to the Hollywood establishment.
The director of Bob & Carol defended his film. “The directors of the festival knew they had something unique, different,” said Paul Mazursky. And festival director Richard Roud explained, somewhat unconvincingly, that “I’ve always thought we should have a kind of festive or cheerful opening night film.”
Cheerful or merely festive, the Columbia execs knew Bob & Carol had something different even before it played the festival. At producer Mike Frankovich’s insistence, they’d screened an extended scene from the film at the North American Theater Owners convention. It was Frankovich’s favorite moment in the movie, the one between Ted and Alice, played by Elliott Gould and Dyan Cannon, where they argue in bed about having or not having sex. He wants it, she doesn’t. Finally, Alice asks, “Would you want me to do it just like that, with no feeling on my part? Would you, Ted? Would you, darling?”
“Yeah,” says Ted.
Frankovich loved that scene. “This’ll give those boys a hard-on for our movie,” he said of the distributors.
The Lincoln Center crowd also liked it. At least that’s what the film’s director thought. “The audience went nuts,” said Mazursky.
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