Amanda LePore – The WOW Report

July 23, 1924– Gavin Lambert

I met Gavin Lambert in autumn 1973 at a coke fueled, debauched, all-male party at the Hollywood Hills home of a famed Academy Award nominated, Tony Award winning producer. I won’t give up the name of the host, but I will tell you kids that I held the 1953 Tony statue that he received for producing the Leonard Bernstein musical Wonderful Town as he did unspeakable things to my 20 year old body. This was the only period in my life when I was considered an ingénue. I actually didn’t mind being objectified and passed around by older guys. I liked being the object of desire, and being a bit of a slut. I was feeling very democratic and especially open-minded in those days. I was hungry for experiences, and was not above putting out my crack for my crack at show business.

I had smoked a joint that had been enhanced with something extra, because I don’t remember how I ended up in bed with the handsome 50 year old gentleman. He seemed impossibly old, but I also found him to be impossibly desirable. In the early morning hours, we started in on round two, when the little strands of conversation revealed that this man had written the novel and screenplay for one of my favorite films from childhood, Inside Daisy Clover (1965). The movie featured my muse Ruth Gordon. I went absolutely nutty, stuttering and muttering:

“Oh my god, oh my god, that is my favorite movie, I love that film so much! Oh yeah, that feels so good. Tell me about working with Ruth Gordon! Oh, I can’t believe you created that film, I love it so much! Will you sign an autograph?”

I think I totally ruined the hot mood with my sudden outburst of fandom.

For 50+ years, the go-to-guy for bitchy, witty and perceptive gossip about Hollywood was screenwriter, novelist and biographer Gavin Lambert. For much of the 1950s and 1960s, he lived in Hollywood, the inspiration and setting for most of his novels, including The Goodbye People (1971), The Slide Area (1959) and of course, Inside Daisy Clover.

Tales Of the City author, Armistead Maupin wrote of him:

“Decades before it was fashionable, Gavin Lambert expertly wove characters of every sexual stripe into his lustrous tapestries of Southern California life. His elegant, stripped down prose caught the last gasp of old Hollywood in a way that has yet to be rivaled.”

Lambert wrote the biography Mainly About Lindsay Anderson (2000) about his friend and roommate at Oxford University, film and theatre director Lindsay Anderson, famous for This Sporting Life (1963), O’ Luck Man (1968), If (1973). Lambert and Anderson founded the short-lived, yet influential film journal Sequence (1949-51) while they were students at Oxford. Unlike Anderson, who was tortured throughout his entire life by guilt about his homosexuality (he always fell for happily married, heterosexual young men), Lambert was gaily gay. Lambert was able to have a series of fulfilling relationships.

He had an affair with director Nicholas Ray, whose films Bigger Than Life (1956) and Bitter Victory (1957) Lambert contributed the screenplays. His longest relationship was with Mart Crowley who wrote the influential gay themed play The Boys In The Band (1968). The couple had a home together in Hollywood.

Lambert wrote and directed the seldom seen film Another Sky (1955), shot in Morocco. This rather modest film tells the story of a young English woman who discovers her sensuality in North Africa, a reflection of Lambert’s own sexual liberation living in Tangier earlier in the decade. He lived off and on in Morocco from 1954 to 1989 on the suggestion of gay writer Paul Bowles, whom he met in LA at the home of gay author Christopher Isherwood and his partner, artist Don Bachardy.

Inside Daisy Clover was directed by Robert Mulligan. It tells the tale of how the fame and fortune of a young star, perfectly played by Natalie Wood, leads to misery and a nervous breakdown. Lambert first met Wood when he went to Hollywood as an assistant to Ray on Rebel Without A Cause (1955). The parental units took me to see it at a drive-in theatre when I was just 12 years old and it fried my little pre-teenage brain.

Lambert wrote a revealing biography of Wood, Natalie Wood: A Life (2004) admitting they had shared at least one lover. According to Lambert, 17 year old Wood had lost her virginity to Lambert’s then boyfriend Ray. Lambert’s juicy biography includes details of Wood’s relationships with Elvis Presley, Robert Wagner, Warren Beatty, Paul Mazursky and Leslie Caron. In the book, Lambert claims that Wood frequently dated gay or bisexual men, including Nick Adams, Raymond Burr, James Dean and Tab Hunter. Lambert also claims that Wood helped financially support his own lover Crowley, making it possible for him to write the infamous The Boys In The Band.

Lambert’s best screenplays were adaptations of novels with gay overtones: Sons And Lovers (1960) based on the novel by D.H. Lawrence was Oscar nominated, The Roman Spring Of Mrs. Stone (1961) was from Tennessee Williams’ novel, I Never Promised You A Rose Garden (1977), and Liberace, Behind The Music (1988).

When I first read his collection of short stories The Slide Area , I dog-eared at least two dozen pages featuring Lambert’s sort of striking writing. The Slide Area, ranks with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon and The Day Of The Locust, and anything Raymond Chandler ever wrote about the city of Los Angeles.

I own copies of his smart biographies of show biz figures: On Cukor (1972), Norma Shearer: A Life (1990), and Nazimova: A Biography (1997), the first detailed account of the private life and acting career of lesbian Alla Nazimova. He also wrote GWTW: The Making of Gone With The Wind (1973). Lambert was able to interview and gain personal remembrances of those involved with the classic 1939 film, including his friends, dismissed director George Cukor and the picture’s star Vivien Leigh.

Gay artist Don Bachardy said to his longtime partner writer Christopher Isherwood:

“Gavin has a vague way about being rich. He lets it pile up behind him but he never turns around.”

I have reason to believe that before he left this world in 2005, Lambert was working on a book The Greatest Sex In Hollywood: The 1970s, where I am the subject of the chapter Live Fast And Fly High, but I was probably just as a footnote. Lambert was every inch the gentleman to me. He would have been 92 years old today. I would have like to have taken him out for a nice lunch with a toast of Champagne to those zany 1970s.

Photograph from Focus Features

July 24, 1952– Gus Van Sant‘s own words, spoken by Matt Dillon as Bob in the film Drugstore Cowboy (1989)

“Fate sucks. I swear.”

In early spring 1989, if I had been somewhat clairvoyant while on the set of the film Drugstore Cowboy, I would have realized that in the 21st century I would be living in Portland, Oregon, in fact, residing in a house just a mile from where we were filming. I most likely would have dismissed the entire notion as being the result of too much caffeine and candy from crafts services. I loved living in Seattle; I had the best agent in town and would never have dreamed of leaving that great city. Yet, here I am, living in the same city as Van Sant.

I had been fortunate enough to have acting work in films , on several television series, and a whole lot of commercials and voice-overs, but the Gus Van Sant project was very exciting for me. I was thrilled to be working with the talented director of Mala Noche, a film I really admired that had received an enthusiastic reception at The Seattle Film Festival in 1985. I just thought it was so cool to have booked this film. Plus, my scenes were with dreamy Matt Dillon.

The very soft spoken Van Sant creates an extremely creative atmosphere for working. Many of the actors that have done films with Van Sant have remarked on how great he is to work with and how conducive to creativity the conditions are on the set of his films. He is not big on rehearsing, but with me he would ask for something completely different out of each take. Dillon (who I have worked with twice) was such a nice gentleman. He would stay and read his lines back to me for our reverse shots. Dillon was a real “regular” guy. He would eat lunch, sitting at a long table, with the rest of the cast, crew and grips, and he spent very little time in his trailer. The rest of the cast were fun and friendly: Kelly Lynch, James LeGros, Anthony George Catalano and Heather Graham. I did not get to meet fellow cast-member William S. Burroughs, my only regret from this experience.

I was invited to the premiere of Drugstore Cowboy, but I did not attend because I was performing in a play at the time… and the event was in Berlin. It went on to receive rave reviews. It won the 1990 Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay for Van Sant and Daniel Yost, plus Best Cinematography, Best Actor for Dillon, and Best Supporting Actor for Max Perlich. It won Best Screenplay awards from the LA Film Critics Association, the National Society Of Film Critics and the NY Film Critics Circle, along with Best Film at the Berlin International Film Festival. At the film’s Seattle premiere, The Husband turned to me half-way through the viewing and whispered:

“Oh. My. God. Stephen, you are finally in a really GOOD movie!”

Van Sant’s other films have ranged from Academy Award winning studio fare: Good Will Hunting (1997) and Finding Forrester (2000) to very experimental: Gerry (2002) and Last Days (2005); Indies: Elephant (2003) and Paranoid Park (2007); noble, brave, baffling experiments like the shot by shot re-make of Psycho (1998) and Even Cowgirls Get The Blues (1993). He has directed four films that I love a whole bunch: Drugstore Cowboy (of course), My Own Private Idaho (1991) To Die For (1995), and Milk (2008).

In 2002, shortly after relocating to Portland after 20 years in Seattle, I was standing with some dear friends from Seattle on a street in Portland’s Peal District. One pal uttered: “Oh my God, look! That is Gus Van Sant!” The Husband replied: “Yeah, he lives in this neighborhood. Stephen knows him”. Our little group mumbled some: “yeah, sure, uh-huhs”” As Van Sant walked past us, he looked up, and said in his singular soft manner:

“Hello… there… Stephen. I haven’t seen you in a while… strange… your head looks bigger…”

And then he went on his way. My friends looked baffled and everyone wanted to know what he meant. I had no idea. What could he have meant? I told them that it was an industry term: good screen actors have heads that were proportionately too large for their bodies. It was my Gus Van Sant moment.

Van Sant executive produced and directed the first two episodes of ABC’s docudrama When We Rise which aired this past February. The eight-part miniseries was written by Dustin Lance Black, who did the screenplay for Milk. It chronicles the personal and political struggles, set-backs, and triumphs of a diverse group of LGBTQ folks who helped bring about the Gay Rights Movement from the Stonewall Riots to today.

Van Sant is currently shooting Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot, a biopic about the late Portland cartoonist John Callahan. Van Sant wrote the screenplay and it stars Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara, Jonah Hill, and Jack Black.

Van Sant is indeed, a Portland resident. Besides directing and writing films of all kinds, he is an author, musician, occasional actor, photographer and painter of considerable skill. He claims that he has always been openly gay. Portland is quite the town. Other queer artists who live here include: filmmaker Todd Haynes, k.d.lang, writer Chuck Palahniuk, musicians Courtney Love and Logan Lynn, painters Stephen O’Donnell, Grace Weston and Matthew Dennison, author Tom Spanbauer, and Carrie Brownstein. But, Van Sant is Portland’s Andy Warhol.

In the mid-aughts, I again met with Van Sant on a Portland sidewalk. I was surprised that he would remember me by name, but he called out to me. He is not much for idle chatter, but trying to act nonchalant, I did ask what project he was working on. He did inquire as to my well-being. When he discovered that I resided in Portland, he emphatically stated that he wished that I had read for his film Elephant, that there had been a role that I would have been particularly well-suited. I shrugged and said that my new Portland agent had neglected to send me out for the audition. Van Sant:

“That makes me sad, Stephen. I thought of you as I was writing that role. You would have brought a lot to the part. I wish we had known you were in town. Darn.”

I left the twice Oscar nominated director on the sidewalk, walked straight to the agent’s office, yelled at her while I was in tears, quit the agency and walked away from showbiz.