The Way He Is

“Faggot! Do you have to walk like a faggot? Can’t you move like a man, you faggot! Jesus Christ, just stand straight, faggot!”

No, this isn’t a Marine Corps drill sergeant cracking under the demands of “don’t ask don’t tell,” or an “ex-gay” minister whipping reluctant converts into God-fearing heterosexual shape or simply a typical ultra-macho father upbraiding a less-than-macho son. It’s Jerome Robbins rehearsing Larry Kert in “West Side Story.”

Why would one gay man attack another in this way? Isn’t the theater supposed to be a haven for gays and lesbians? And as for Robbins--who in the wake of this tirade “rubbed salt in the wound by appropriating Larry’s boyfriend”--who did he think he was kidding? Arthur Laurents doesn’t offer a simple answer to any of these questions. But “Original Story By,” his memoir of Broadway and Hollywood in which this grotesque incident is recounted, provides an explanation. In fact, 400 pages worth of explanations.

When you’re a writer whose career spans a good three-quarters of the last century, a resume highlighted by “West Side Story,” “Gypsy,” “The Way We Were” and “The Turning Point,” explication rather than explanation would appear to be the order of the day. But when your life story’s characters include Ethel Merman, Barbra Streisand, Lena Horne, Leonard Bernstein, Budd Schulberg and Harold Lang (whom Laurents calls “The best sex I’ve ever had. Desperate to be held, he went to bed with anyone who wanted him and discovered he was mad about sex--the best way to become good at it--and Harold was better than good”), a perfectly plain-wrap account would be quite sufficient. But Laurents wants to bear witness to his age. And having lived through a period that has seen same-sex orientation move from the margins of a subculture to challenge the ever-so-famous “mainstream,” Laurents is well-prepared to talk about it. At length and explicitly.

Born in 1918, Laurents grew up a Jew at a time when the world was ruled by Gentiles. He was, therefore, well aware of the fact that the stubbornly petty demand to ostracize and stigmatize one group of individuals to benefit another is the very thing that keeps the “mainstream” flowing: “I believed most Americans were prejudiced against homosexuals, Negroes and Jews, in that order,” he notes of his younger self, adding, “I still do. It’s somewhat less overt now because it’s somewhat less sanctioned, but bigotry is still alive and killing in the U.S.” Not that he’s interested--as today’s neoconservative orthodoxy would have it--in “playing the victim card” especially as regards Robbins, who, while victimizing others by naming names before the House Un-American Activities Committee, was the victim of his own bad faith. As Laurents recently pointed out in a New York Times interview, like most gay men of his class and time, Robbins “to his dying day thought people didn’t know he was gay.” Incredible? Far from it. Why should Robbins think otherwise? How could he be gay? Gays were sinful. The church said so. Gays were neurotic. Psychiatry said so. Gay lives amounted to nothing. Society said so. And he was Jerome Robbins--a very big something. So how could he be gay? Moreover, gays were disgusting. Who said so? Everyone. Even gays themselves. Even, for a time, Arthur Laurents--until he had a conversation with a brilliant, iconoclastic psychiatrist named Judd Marmor:

“ ‘I’m afraid I’m homosexual.’

“ ‘Why afraid?’

“ ‘Because I don’t want to be.’

“ ‘Why not?’

“ ‘You know, it’s dirty and disgusting.’

“ ‘I don’t know anything about it. I just believe whoever or whatever you are, what matters is that you lead your life with pride and dignity.’ ”

Laurents was extraordinarily lucky to have met a man like Marmor. Like so many other gays in the wake of the seismic upheavals of World War II (“when water was a liquid that formed ice cubes put in drinks, that inevitably led to sex”), Laurents sought psychiatric help to “change.” Prior to Marmor, he’d been seeing Dr. Theodor Reik, one of the many psychotherapists who, by promising to turn gays straight, had discovered a cash cow that, in the era of “Dr. Laura” continues to supply milk. As Laurents puts it, Reik’s formula for success was simple: “Just get it up for females, keep it down for males; piece of cake. The poor frightened boys are basically straight.” Laurents wasn’t buying.

But as “Original Story By” shows, finding an opportunity for stand-taking--even in the supposedly liberated worlds of Broadway and Hollywood--is rare. Seeing sexual orientation politically is highly problematic socially. For sexual orientation cuts across already well-established lines of race, class and gender, and the very act of acknowledging disaffection with the heterosexual “norm” is therefore disruptive. So gays stayed “in the closet,” as straights kept watch that their closet doors remained shut. But as Laurents notes: “Are there any sexual secrets anywhere? Not in Hollywood. In Hollywood, there is always someone eager to tell all.” And this in turn gave rise to the sort of paranoia producer David Merrick expressed in 1962 when Laurents was directing the musical “I Can Get It For You Wholesale” for him. “Homosexuals are taking over the theater,” Merrick announced at a press conference, only to take Laurents aside to assure him, “It’s only for publicity. I wouldn’t have anyone on my staff who wasn’t homosexual. They have no one to go home to so they work late and don’t complain.” That was supposed to be a compliment.

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More than a decade later, in 1973, while bringing Laurents’ “The Way We Were” to the screen, director Sydney Pollack informed him, “You don’t know how everybody in Hollywood is amazed by you.” And why was that? “Because you’ve written the best love story in years and you’re a homosexual.” That too was intended as a compliment. Gays weren’t supposed to know anything about love. Just sex. And Laurents might well have agreed with Pollack in the 1940s. Then Laurents (who declines to describe himself as bisexual at any point in the text) found himself having simultaneous affairs with dancers Nora Kaye (later the wife of director Herbert Ross) and Lang. “As Marmor pointed out, I separated sex and love like church and state. With Nora, it was love without the need for sex; with Harold Lang, it was affection, even candlelit romance, but wonderfully abandoned sex without love to get in the way.”

And then as that decade ended, Laurents met Farley Granger at an otherwise dull Hollywood party. “We touched once by accident and reacted as though it was foreplay.” The next day Laurents gave Granger a phone call and found “[i]t was as though he had been waiting for the signal, all he needed to jump into his car and come barreling across the canyon. I barely had enough time to shower and shave before there he was, running through the door, and then, there we were, rolling on the floor. On the shag rug in the living room of a sublet on the wrong side of Doheny Drive in midafternoon, me and my movie star. Oh frabjous day!”

But while Granger was gung-ho, Laurents was alarmed: “I was afraid that Farley moving in would be announcing I was gay. Whatever people might think, they didn’t know. Now they would.” For right on top of this, Laurents had been hired by Alfred Hitchcock to write the screenplay of “Rope,” an Americanized version of Patrick Hamilton’s London-set play about a pair of gay Leopold and Loeb-style thrill killers--one of whom was to be played by Granger.

In Hollywood back then, “homosexuality was unmentionable, known only as ‘it.’ ‘It’ wasn’t in the picture, no character was ‘one.’ ” But of course they “were,” and so “in my effort to Americanize English homosexuality”--and make “Rope” viable to U.S. audiences--Laurents created characters based on a gay group he “had met briefly in New York who played squash and were raunchy after dinner”--upper-crust precursors of “The Boys in the Band.” The Hays office, however, with its industry’s self-appointed guardians of the nation’s morality, was so unhinged by a few British turns-of-phrase in the dialogue, it returned the script with these words “furiously blue-penciled and marked HOMOSEXUAL DIALOGUE exclamation point.” Hitchcock, by contrast, was fearless--and supremely playful. “It tickled him that Farley was playing a homosexual in a movie written by me, another homosexual; that we were lovers; that we had a secret he knew; that I knew he knew--the permutations were endless, all titillating to him, not out of malice or a feeling of power but because they added a slightly kinky touch and kink was a quality devoutly to be desired.”

But what Hitchcock desired, the rest of Hollywood tolerated in a curious way, as Laurents came to discover in what is arguably the most fascinating anecdote in the entire book. For Frances Goldwyn--wife of producer Sam--took Laurents aside one day to talk about Granger. “Would I, could I do them a favor? Gladly. Good! Well--the cake is homemade, try it--if Farley felt it necessary to take a girl with him when he went out in public, would he please take Ann Blyth instead of Shelley Winters? Miss Winters was too brassy, too blowzy and too old for his image,” Laurents recalls. And so, we have the wife of the studio head consulting with the lover of one of its major stars as to the proper beard the star should be seen with in public. Frances Goldwyn was, of course, well-versed in all of this. For the love of her life was director George Cukor. In fact she made arrangements for Cukor to be buried alongside her in the Goldwyn family plot--playing “Grace” to his “Will,” as it were, in the afterlife. Laurents, who first met Cukor when they served together in the Army signal corps, came to despair the fact that the director “had decided that if he was grand enough--as the years went by, his ‘A’s,’ like Swifty Lazar’s, got broader and broader--he would rise above being an unattractive Jewish queer by becoming an elegant silver-and-china queen and a Republican.”

But Cukor was better Hollywood company than a straight man like Gene Kelly, whom, one afternoon, he beat in a team tennis match. “ ‘Faggots!’ he shrieked and, like Rumpelstiltskin, stamped down so hard on the doorsill that he broke his ankle. And that, dear cineastes, was why Fred Astaire replaced Gene Kelly in the leading role in ‘Easter Parade,’ which was scheduled to start shooting the next day,” Laurents writes. This proved to be a felicitous alteration.

Laurents can’t say the same of some experiences he had--losing his screenplay credit for “The Snake Pit,” having key scenes cut from “The Way We Were” (included in the new DVD version) and having the gayness sanitized out of “The Turning Point” because director Herbert Ross decreed, “Nobody in the ballet is gay anymore.” This radical surgery echoed the film version of “Home of the Brave,” in which anti-Semitism was changed to racism (integrating the U.S. military in movie fantasy years before it was done in corporeal reality) because, according to producer Stanley Kramer, “Jews have been done.”

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What hasn’t “been done” is a show business memoir like this one, whose key is an anecdote about Laurents, his long-time love Tom Hatcher and Stephen Sondheim--who was about to write “A Funny Thing Happened On the Way To the Forum” featuring Larry Gelbart and Burt Shevelove.

“ ‘One thing about your friend. . . .’ I began when he quickly interrupted, ‘I know what you’re going to say: he’s homosexual. Well, he’s not.’

“I hadn’t been about to say anything of the kind. I didn’t know Burt Shevelove but at that moment I knew he was homosexual and the subject was distasteful to Steve.

“Tom asked whether Steve was gay and I had answered: ‘I don’t think he’s anything.’

“ ‘Nobody does nothing,’ Tom said.”

Thank goodness Arthur Laurents knows how to make something out of “nothing.” *