Amanda LePore – The WOW Report

December 14, 1918– Jeff Chandler:

“I thought that for once I could keep my shirt on and not have to shave my chest. But today, for a man to be a hit on the screen, he has to take his shirt off.”

In that last era of true studio power, the 1950s, Universal Pictures had the strongest group of male contract players going, including Tony Curtis, Rock Hudson, and Jeff Chandler. Chandler worked in a few top productions, but mostly he found himself with jobs in B-pictures. Yet, he was still a very popular movie star with his photograph frequently featured in the fan magazines. He certainly had arresting features: 6 foot 3 inches, premature curly silver hair, dimpled chin, with warm sexy eyes. He possessed a strong low voice and a heroic quality that made him especially well-suited for Westerns and War films. Like many contract players, Chandler had little say in which projects he did and he suffered from crappy scripts even though he was a good actor.

Chandler was born Ira Gossel in Brooklyn. He studied drama at the Feagin School at Rockefeller Center and made his professional debut in The Trojan Horse at the Mill Pond Playhouse on Long Island in 1941.

Chandler enlisted in the US Army in 1942. A year later, he was a second lieutenant in an army aircraft division and spent two years stationed in the Aleutians Islands. After WW II, he was discharged from the Army in California and like a lot of hot guys just back from the war, he got himself to Hollywood. He smartly got rid of Ira Gossel and took Van Johnson’s character name from Easy To Wed (1946) after seeing it at a matinee.

Chandler appeared more than 50 times on Lux Radio Theater and other radio shows, including playing the teacher Eve Arden moons over on the popular Our Miss Brooks. He caught his lucky break when he was cast in a small role on an episode of Rogue’s Gallery starring Dick Powell. Powell’s insistence on Chandler for a part in his film won him a small role in Johnny O’Clock (1947). Chandler, on his good fortune, commented:

“Dick’s been keeping his eye on me ever since. People are always doing things for me and I’m not that nice of a guy. They’re impressed with my size.”

The Powell gig led to a 10 year contract at Universal. He was cast in Sword Of The Desert (1949) as a Jewish underground leader guiding refugees to Palestine. Universal loaned Chandler to Twentieth Century-Fox for Broken Arrow (1950), with the stipulation that he receive star billing. Chandler returned to his home studio a star.

“Fox was looking for a guy big enough physically to play the Indian warrior Cochise and weird enough to film audiences to lend authenticity to the part. I seemed to fit the bill.”

Broken Arrow is a smartly made, engrossing, action packed Western, and a rare film for the time in attempting to authentically depict Native Americans with some degree of sensitivity. Chandler received an Academy Award nomination for his performance, losing to George Sanders for All About Eve.

Chandler got top billing for the first time in Smuggler’s Island (1951) and he played Cochise for a second time in The Battle At Apache Pass (1952).

Chandler wanted to be a singer also and he made his musical debut on The Peggy Lee Show in 1952. Decca Records signed him to a contract and he started his own label, Chandler Music Company. He released popular versions of I Should Care and Lamplight, plus he composed and sang the title song for Six Bridges To Cross (1955), a Tony Curtis vehicle. Chandler packed the house with his nightclub act in Las Vegas.

Universal continued to cast Chandler as an Indian in The Great Sioux Uprising (1953) and War Arrow (1953), and as an Asian in East Of Sumatra (1953), Yankee Pasha (1954), plus as Attila T. Hun in Sign Of The Pagan (1954).

Universal gave poor Chandler a lot of junkie jobs, but thankfully the studio did give us the delicious camp classic Female On The Beach (1955), a flick I never get tired of seeing in its fully demented Joan Crawford madness. The film’s premise is so fully nutty, with dialogue that is so unintentionally funny, that every scene is memorably quotable. The casting, location, costumes, and music are insane.

Universal Pictures via YouTube

Universal Pictures, via YouTube

Crawford requested Chandler for her leading man even though she was 50-years-old and Chandler was 37. He never gets as dramatic as Crawford, but he does get to say lines like:

“I don’t hate women. I just hate the way they are.”

With his beach wardrobe, he manages to look just like “Race” Bannon, the character from the mid-1960s Saturday morning cartoon, Jonny Quest, said to be based on the prematurely-gray Chandler. I always thought it was disconcerting to have a crush on an animated character. For sheer high camp at high tide, Female On The Beach is a tasty camp confection… a must see.

Frustrated with the work offered at Universal, Chandler formed his own production company in 1959. The Plunderers (1960) was the company’s debut film and Chandler’s final Western. He produced and played the lead in The Story Of David (1960), filmed on location in Israel. Unfortunately, it leaves out the love affair between David and his buddy Jonathan .

Chandler also did Twentieth Century-Fox’s sequel to their highly successful Peyton Place (1957), Return To Peyton Place (1961) directed by Jose Ferrer. He also produced Merrill’s Marauders (1962), which got terrific reviews for Samuel Fuller’s taut direction and Chandler’s performance. During filming in the Philippines, Chandler sustained a back injury so severe that he was admitted to a Manilla hospital to receive morphine shots in order to continue filming. After the movie was completed, Chandler returned to Los Angeles and entered a hospital to undergo surgery for a ruptured spinal disc, a seven-hour operation that required transfusions of 55 pints of blood. A week later there was a second surgery, but a few days later, Chandler’s final credits rolled, gone under very mysterious circumstances at just 42-years-old.

Chandler’s ex-wife and their children sued his surgeon and the hospital for malpractice, assault and battery, and wrongful death. The Screen Actors Guild brought an actors’ petition demanding an official investigation. The California State Bureau Of Hospitals’ investigation absolved the hospital of charges of negligence, but discovered 27 counts of non-compliance. The hospital paid out $233,358.42 in a settlement to avoid bad press.

Tid-bits: When his pal Sammy Davis, Jr. lost an eye in an accident, Chandler offered to give Davis one of his own eyes, an act of kindness that so moved Davis that it led to his conversion to Judaism.

Chandler had an affair with wet star Esther Williams. She claimed in her 1999 memoir, Million Dollar Mermaid, that Chandler was a crossdresser and that was why she broke off the relationship.

Chandler had the looks and the body that was popular in the male physique magazines of his era. He also looked like one of the Biblical heroes on the mural in my Sunday school class. He had that yummy Jewishness that I always went for. He was just impossibly handsome. His real name may have been Ira Grossel but his screen-name got it exactly right.

Photo from BBC, via YouTube

December 16, 1899– Noël Coward:

“It is discouraging how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.”

I don’t recall why or how, as a youth, that I came to know and understand that Noël Coward was gay. I do know that as I came out to myself at around 12-years-old I researched everything I could find about homosexuality and the news was never good. At the public library, all the information and listings included the words “invert” and “perversion”.

As a teenager, I latched onto the idea that Coward would be a fine role model for dealing with the realization that I was gay. He was after all, fascinating, fabulous, famous, well-loved and he moved in a circle with the most talented artists of the day. I read everything by and about him, an avocation that lasts to this day.

I eventually played Elyot in Coward’s Private Lives in 1974. The director of that piece told me recently on The Facebook, that I reminded her of “a young Peter O’Toole” at the time we were doing this play. God, I hope that was true. Unfortunately, I would go on to ape many of O’Toole’s worst behaviors later in life. I loved doing Private Lives, which I think is a perfect piece of theatre, with not a wasted bit of dialogue or a false moment. I have seen it several times. My favorite production was directed by John Gielgud, and starred Maggie Smith and her husband at the time, Robert Stephens, at the Ahmenson Theatre in Los Angeles in 1975.

In the summer of 1978, I had the good fortune to play Simon in an elegant, enticing and exquisite production of Hay Fever, which was designed (sets, lights and costumes) and directed by the man that would eventually become my husband (at the time we were simply colleagues). It was a very happy summer living in Coward’s witty, wicked world, but I was starting to fall in love with my director.

Coward has been a major player in my life and helped shaped the man I am today. Known for his wit and elegance, Coward defined the post-WW I era. Although regarded as an ultimate Gay Icon now, he was never completely open about his gayness during his lifetime.

Coward had his first sexual experience with another boy at-13 years-old, but his closest friends were girls, including his BFF and fellow child actor, Gertrude Lawrence.

By 15-years-old, Coward was already a famous actor and had begun writing plays and composing songs for the theatre. He produced and starred in his first full length play, I Leave It To You, when he was just 21-years-old. Four years later, The Vortex, a controversial work about sex and drugs among the British upper-class, was a smash hit and made the young Coward a considerable celebrity.

By his mid-30s, Coward had written and produced some of his best-known plays, including Hay Fever (1924), Private Lives (1930), Design For Living (1932) and Cavalcade (1931). During his long career, he wrote and appeared more than 50 plays and composed at least 300 songs, plus he starred in 25 films.

Coward once said that to create successful work:

“An artist must consider the public. Coax it, charm it, interest it, shock it now and then if you must, make it laugh, make it cry, make it think, but above all never, never, never bore the living hell out of it.”

WW II brought major changes in Coward’s life, which up to that point, had been busy, but breezy. He briefly worked as an undercover intelligence agent, a job for which he proved to be too well-known. He then devoted himself to entertaining the Allied troops around the globe. After the war, he continued to write and perform, but his style fell out of favor and his work was criticized as being frivolous and outdated.

In the 1950s, when many considered Coward to be washed up, he reinvented himself as a cabaret performer, drawing sold out crowds and terrific accolades for his act in Las Vegas.

To avoid Britain’s high taxes, Coward took up residence in Jamaica and Switzerland. His friends would come to visit and they were among the most famous artists of the 20th century: Cole Porter, Laurence Olivier, Marlene Dietrich, Errol Flynn, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, Daphne du Maurier, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, Joan Sutherland, David Niven, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Julie Andrews and Blake Edwards, Ian Fleming, and most of the British Royal Family.

Coward had sexual and romantic relationships with many men throughout his life. His first serious gay affair ended in tragedy. The passionate affair was with Queen Elizabeth II’s uncle, the incredibly handsome, notoriously randy, cocaine sniffing Prince George, The Duke Of Kent. He was the brother of King George VI, famous as the subject of the Academy Award winning film The King’s Speech (2010). Although two of his brothers would become King of England, Prince George was the most interesting, intelligent and yummiest member of his the British Royal Family until our own Prince Harry. Their affair began in 1923 and lasted for two decades, until the Prince died in an airplane crash under mysterious circumstances during the war. He was just 39-years-old.

Jack Wilson, an American stockbroker, was Coward’s lover and business manager for a decade beginning in the mid-1920s. After WW II, Coward fell in love with South African actor Graham Payne. They were a couple until Coward left this world in 1973. Payne took his final bow in 2005, at 85, at the home in Switzerland he had shared with Coward.

Coward was always circumspect about his same-sex relationships, as were most gay men of that era, a time when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain. He enjoyed assignations with composer Ned Rorem, and actors Michael Redgrave, Olivier, and Dirk Bogarde. Later in life he had a penchant for hunky rent boys who would receive round trip airline tickets to Jamaica for a visit.

Although never publicly adopting an openly gay identity, Coward sometimes addressed gayness metaphorically in his work, which often dealt with hidden longing, society’s hypocrisies, and the battle against conventional moral restrictions. 1932’s Design For Living, depicts a ménage a trois between two men and a woman. It starred Coward and his famous friends Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontaine, both of whom were gay, but married to each other in a special modern relationship. The play sold out every night of its yearlong Broadway run. In 1966, Coward wrote and starred in Song At Twilight, about of an ageing gay author who fears he will be exposed. This is his only work to deal explicitly with being gay.

Coward was knighted by The Queen in 1970. In January 1973, he went out with longtime friend Marlene Dietrich to a performance of the Off-Broadway revue of his work, Oh Coward! It would be his last public appearance. He died at his home in Jamaica, Firefly, two months later.

Photograph from BBC, via YouTube

In 1984 a memorial stone was unveiled in Westminster Abbey bearing words from one of his songs:

“I believe that since my life began, the most I’ve had is just a talent to amuse.”

I still love to pick up my volume of The Collected Letters Of Noël Coward, opening it up to a random page. Having just done so, this is what I found. In 1949, Coward wrote to his childhood friend Esme Wynne, who was trying to get him to find God:

“My philosophy is as simple as ever. I love smoking, drinking, moderate sexual intercourse on a diminishing scale, reading and writing (not arithmetic). I have a selfless absorption in the well-being and achievements of Noël Coward… In spite of my unregenerate spiritual attitude, I am jolly kind to everybody and still attentive and devoted to my dear old Mother.”

If you don’t know Cowards work, you really should, and you can start with the recent bouncy Broadway revival of his Present Laughter. A combination of artifice and rue is the essence of Coward, who played the lead role of Garry Essendine in the original London production in 1942 and admitted: “Garry Essendine is me”. Pulling off a great Coward performance is no easy task for an actor, but the physical comic actor Kevin Kline blissfully plies his witty athleticism and perfect timing that won him two Tony Awards (On The 20th Century, The Pirates Of Penzance) and an Oscar (A Fish Called Wanda) when he was young. He is matched by a surprisingly sly Cobie Smulders, dressed to kill in Susan Hilferty’s slinky period gowns and a terrific Kate Burton, all adept at bandying the dialogue, which remains priceless. Kline won a third Tony Award for his performance, and it is magnificent. Present Laughter is currently streaming on PBS.