Amanda LePore – The WOW Report

Photo via YouTube

March 28, 1921– Derek Jules Gaspard Ulric Niven van den Bogaerde

“I love the camera and it loves me. Well, not very much sometimes. But we’re good friends.”

Dirk Bogarde was romantically linked to a line of beautiful young female actors, but his sexual focus was mostly on men.

Bogarde met fellow actor Anthony Forwood when they worked together in 1940. In the 1950s, Forwood divorced his wife, actor Glynis Johns, with whom he had a son, to move in with Bogarde and become his “manager”. The couple were inseparable until Forwood’s death from cancer in 1988.

With Forwood, 1979

Openly gay British actor John Fraser, who was working during the same era, recounts:

“They were closer than most married couples. It was abundantly clear that their relationship was deep and strong, but there was never the slightest inappropriate gesture between them. No brush of a hand, no touch of a shoulder. Even their conversation was guarded.”

In the 1950s, when homosexuality was still a criminal offense in England, Bogarde and Forwood had good reason to be reticent about exposing their relationship. Many gay men of the time were blackmailed, and Bogarde’s outing would undoubtedly have meant the end of his career.

Frasier tells this in his memoir Close Up: An Actor Telling Tales (2004):

“I visited Bogarde at his loft where he greeted me on a high-revving static Harley-Davidson motorcycle while gazing at a poster of himself clad in crotch-hugging leather trousers as a Spanish bandit in the 1961 film The Singer Not The Song. Bogarde said: ‘This is my playroom’ and he rode for 10 minutes, his expression was like the rapture on the face of a medieval saint. Afterwards, he slumped over the handlebars. Dismounting, wiping sweat from his forehead, he said: ‘Now you know’. It looked like a Narcissus fantasy come to life. Bogarde lived in a wonderland sustained by doting fans.”

“The Singer Not The Song” (1961), Rank Films via YouTube

Subtlety is hardly the word for his work in The Singer Not The Song, which delves into the relationship between Bogarde’s bandit, Anacleto (in tight black leather gear) and a priest, played by John Mills, trying to reclaim him for the Church.

Bogarde played the role of an embittered working-class manservant manipulating James Fox into sex-and-power games in the screen version of Harold Pinter‘s homoerotic The Servant (1963). He portrayed a former Nazi SS officer caught up in a sadomasochistic relationship with a woman (Charlotte Rampling) he abused when she was in a prison camp when they meet again in Vienna in 1957 in The Night Porter (1974) for director Liliana Cavani.

Especially for a closet case, he was brave in his career choices. He plays a Nazi sympathizer in The Damned (1969), written and directed by Luchino Visconti, the tale of a wealthy industrialist family who have begun doing business with the Nazi Party. It is a thinly veiled reference to the Krupp family of steel industrialists. The film portrays the 1934 Night of the Long Knives, and the subsequent executions of the Resistance leaders by the SS, as a gay orgy. He made Providence (1977) with Alain Resnais and Despair (1978) with Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

He crowned his career with Death In Venice (1971), also directed by Visconti, based on the novella by Thomas Mann, playing a man who falls fatally in love with the ideal of beauty exemplified by a beautiful boy. With almost no dialogue, the film amounts to a 125-minute reaction shot.

In the 1961 film Victim, Bogarde plays a respectable married lawyer, who also happens to be gay. His character is being blackmailed and stands to lose everything. The film highlighted the pressures that gay men faced at that time, including ruin, violence, self-hatred and suicide, because of the criminalization of homosexual acts, sort of like Alabama in our own era.

Victim became an important vehicle for changing the attitudes towards gay people in Britain in the 1960s. It is one of the first films where the word “homosexual” was uttered. I can’t recall another film in which an explicitly gay character actually stood up to fight the system that oppressed gay people. In Victim, Bogarde is filmdom’s first true gay hero. Victim came close to ending Bogarde’s career as a leading man, but it also paved the way for his rather brilliant work as a character actor later in his career.

But, even after the threat of imprisonment for being gay was long over, Bogarde still refused to admit his relationship with Forwood. He claimed in interviews to be a straight guy who had enjoyed affairs with the French performer Capucine and with Judy Garland.

Bogarde wrote seven volumes of memoirs without once mentioning that he was gay or anything about Forwood. As a matinee idol who’s adoring fans probably could not deal with their favorite actor being a queer, Bogarde kept his private life very private. Yet, he played several gay and bisexual men in films, and then spent his entire career denying his own gayness. He wanted more than anything to be noted as a straight leading man. He was called the British Rock Hudson because he was so handsome and possessed an especially appealing screen persona. The two actors had more than beauty and acting style in common. When Bogarde was making Campbell’s Kingdom (1957) in Italy, Hudson was filming A Farewell To Arms there at the same time, leaving me to wonder if they got together on a rare day off.

Even as he stayed deep in the closet, by accepting roles in films like Victim, Death In Venice, and The Night Porter, Bogarde pushed the boundaries of what a star could do in movies further than most actors of his generation. And my, oh my… he certainly was handsome!

Bogarde craved having an international film career, not one limited to British film fans. When it was a big box-office flop, he blamed everyone else involved in the making of his only Hollywood film, Song Without End (1960), where he plays Hungarian pianist/composer Franz Liszt. He blamed his agents for limiting him to British films, and he complained that he was under appreciated and underpaid.

All that from a man who as early as 1958 was the biggest draw at the British box-office, bigger than Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, Audrey Hepburn or Elvis Presley.

He remained haunted by WW II. When those nasty Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Bogarde joined the Queen’s Royal Regiment as an officer. He served in the Air Photographic Intelligence Unit, eventually becoming a Major. He was awarded seven medals in his five years of active duty. He wrote poems and painted during the war, and in 1943, a small magazine published one of his poems, Steel Cathedrals. His paintings of the war are part of the Imperial War Museum’s collection.

View From Tent, Normandy-1944

Similar to the character that he played in King And Country (1964), Bogarde was called upon to put a wounded soldier out of his misery, a tale recounted in one of his memoirs. He also took part in the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, which he said was like “looking into Dante’s Inferno”.

It is fascinating that his finest films are all somehow about him. He was a great self-portraitist and the screen persona he fashioned not only dominated its surroundings but spoke subliminally and powerfully to British movie fans about the tensions of the time, about the cruel respectability of England in the 1950s and 1960s.

Via YouTube

In September 1996, he suffered a pulmonary embolism following heart surgery. At the end of his life, Bogarde was paralyzed on one side of his body, which affected his speech and left him wheelchair bound. Still, he would finish a final volume of memoirs that explored the stroke and its effect on him. He spent most of the day before he died with his BFF, Lauren Bacall. Bogarde’s final credits rolled in London, taken by a heart attack. He was 78-years-old. He never did come out of the closet, even after Lawrence Harvey and John Gielgud did so reluctantly, and Ian McKellen did blazingly.

“Living in a tower, however secure it may feel, is hardly a social attribute.”

Bailey In Her Dressing Room, 1942. photo by Paul Henderson via Maryland Historical Society Archives

March 29, 1918 – Pearl Mae Bailey:

“I’m not a comedienne. I call myself a humorist. I tell stories to music and, thank God, in tune. I laugh at people who call me an actress.”

The Celluloid Closet’s Vito Russo named Norman…Is That You? (1976) the ”first pro-gay fag joke”. This very odd little film stars comic Redd Foxx and the iconic Pearl Bailey as an African-American couple who discover their only son is gay and that his lover is white. Adapted from a Broadway play of the same name about a Jewish family, director George Schlatter (Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In) translates Borscht-belt Gay Jewish jokes into a bunch of stereotypes about black culture. To make it more peculiar, it features appearances by Wayland Flowers and Madame. Norman…Is That You? is dated, offensive, fascinating, and yet is an early positive attempt to show a father trying to understand his gay son and acceptance of interracial relationships.

The film also features the star of Cleopatra Jones (1973), Tamara Dobson, as a hooker Norman’s father hires for him. Still, it’s not the nutty cast that makes the film interesting. The Broadway production was one of the earliest plays to deal honestly with gay men, and the film version’s producer’s decision to change the central characters to African-Americans makes it the first major film to focus on homophobia within the black community, a distinction that makes it a landmark LGBTQ film. Still, it is especially, worth seeing not just as a curiosity, but to watch pros Foxx and Bailey do what they did best.

Bailey was a Holy Roller-style revivalist preacher’s daughter who sang and danced her way from the Depression era shipbuilding town of Newport News, Virginia, to Vaudeville, to Broadway and Hollywood.

A comic, stage, film and television actor, social and political activist, author of six books, Bailey considered herself primarily a singer, but she scoffed at all labels. Bailey:

“People say, ‘Pearl, what style do you have?’ I say, ‘It’s God, not style.’ “

Among her shtick, the Social Security jokes, the dancing and the strutting, there was a voice that remains rich and warm and true. Bailey’s versions of standards Unforgettable, For Once In My Life, and Read My Mind are superb. She was a woman known for being able to move nimbly between Popular, Jazz and Blues songs. Her much-loved signature tunes included Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home, Birth Of The Blues, and That’s Good Enough For Me.

Baily made her singing debut when she was 15-years-old. Her brother Bill was beginning his own career as a tap dancer, and suggested she enter an amateur contest at the Pearl Theatre in Philadelphia. Bailey won and was offered $35 a week to perform there for two weeks. She later won a competition at Harlem’s famous Apollo Theater and she was hooked on performing.

Bailey got gigs at Philadelphia’s black nightclubs in the 1930s, and soon started performing in clubs on the East Coast. In 1941, during WW II, Bailey toured the country with the USO, performing for American troops. After the tour, she settled in NYC. Her solo success as a nightclub performer was followed by acts working with other black entertainers such as Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington. She appeared at the Village Vanguard for an extended run and then for eight months at the Blue Angel on Manhattan’s East Side. It was there she was asked by Calloway to join his show at the Strand Theatre.

Bailey made her Broadway debut in St. Louis Woman (1946), a musical with songs by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, based upon Arna Bontemps’ novel God Sends Sunday (1931). It was designed for the talents of Lena Horne. Although Arlen and Mercer created an exceptional score, the musical had a troubled production. The N.A.A.C.P. was critical, stating that show “was offering roles that detract from the dignity of our race”. Horne agreed and refused to star in the show. When it eventually opened there were protests by African-Americans outside the theatre, which negatively affected sales. It ran for only 113 performances. Yet, for her performance, Bailey won a Donaldson Award as the best Broadway newcomer and stopped the show nightly with her version of A Woman’s Prerogative.

In the early 1950s Truman Capote was approached about adapting his recent story House Of Flowers to a Broadway musical with Harold Arlen doing music and lyrics. The show opened on Broadway at the end of 1954 and played for 165 performances. The director was Peter Brook. The amazing cast included Bailey, Diahann Carroll, Juanita Hall, Carmen de Lavallade, Alvin Ailey and Geoffrey Holder (who also provided a section of choreography). The musical received mixed reviews, but raves for Bailey and the cast, and the dance-rhythm infused score was praised for its mix of blues and calypso, two genres not associated with musical theatre.

Her appeal translated to films, and she appeared in the musicals Carmen Jones (1954), St. Louis Blues (1958), Porgy And Bess (1959), and dramas All The Fine Young Cannibals and The Landlord (1970).

Bailey then went on tour, did summer stock, and recorded albums.

The very height of her long, successful career was in 1967 when she was selected by producer David Merrick to play Dolly Levi in an all-black version of Hello, Dolly!.

It was the era of the Vietnam war and protests, and racism and hate. To take a white show and use an African-American cast seemed revolutionary.

The score and the book were exactly the same as for the previous Hello, Dolly!s but Bailey brought her own personality, and added a “child” or a “honey” her and there. Her rich, inimitable voice proved perfect for the role. It was sometimes hard to tell where Dolly Levi ended and Bailey began, and she was quite aware of that. She became noted for her “third act” after the curtain call, when the company would stand on stage behind Bailey and Calloway as they continued to entertain the audience.

Photo from Tams Whitmark

Clive Barnes, the tough theatre critic for The NY Times wrote:

“For Miss Bailey, this was a Broadway triumph for the history books. She took the whole musical in her hands and swung it around her neck as easily as if it were a feather boa. Her timing was exquisite, with asides tossed away as languidly as one might tap ash from a cigarette, and her singing had that deep throaty rumble that is always so oddly stirring. The audience would have elected her governor if she’d only named the state.”

Delighted with the accolades and with the role, for which she won a special Tony Award, Bailey said:

“All this has been worth waiting for. At last I can sing, dance, say intelligent words on stage, love and be loved and deliver what God gave me, and I’m dressed up besides.”

I was so fortunate to see Bailey in Hello, Dolly! in a 1975 revival in Los Angeles, and it was perfection. I remember a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times from a theatergoer who called it “The Pearl Bailey Show” and wrote disapprovingly of Bailey’s asides to the audience and felt the show suffered because of them. Yet, her greatest loves had always been singing and telling her humorous stories on stage, so who could blame her?

Among her humorous and inspirational books are Hurry Up, America And Spit (1976) and her memoirs The Raw Pearl (1968), Talking To Myself (1971) and Between You And Me (1976).

Bailey’s heart problems began in the early 1960s, and she joked about her “heart strain”:

“Singing does bring out the soreness . . . but when I get on the floor, baby, you know nothing hurts.”

It was not unusual for her to collapse after an early nightclub show, be given oxygen, and then resume singing more songs for a second show.

In 1970, President Richard M. Nixon named her America’s “ambassador of love” to the world. In 1975, President Gerald R. Ford named her special adviser to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. She also served in that role under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush.

Bailey who dropped out of high school for a career in showbiz, enrolled as a freshman at Washington University and graduated in 1985 with degree in Theology.

Noting that she belonged to no organization except “humanity,” Bailey broke down barriers to blacks in the entertainment world and lent her voice for the cause of Civil Rights. Bailey:

“People ask me why don’t I march. I say I march every day in my heart. When I walk in the street with humanity, I am marching, and you know, my feet are killing me all the way.”

Bailey was an especially good friend of Joan Crawford and sang a hymn at her funeral in 1977.

Bailey was married at least three times, no one is sure, but she married Louie Bellson, the talented white drummer with Duke Ellington’s Orchestra in 1952. They married in London because interracial marriage was mostly illegal in the USA. It proved a happy and enduring marriage of 38 years, until her final bow in1990, taken by heart disease.