The Invisible Director Gets His Due

The late George Cukor once said, “I work through the actors, and the more successful I am, the less my work is apparent.”

Ironically, the high degree of success Cukor did achieve--in films marked by stellar performances and evocative but subtle mise en scene--may be precisely the reason he is sometimes overlooked in discussions of the great Hollywood directors of the 20th century.

Known for his deft touch with sometimes light but always literate material and for his consistency at extracting extraordinary star turns, Cukor is the focus of a new “American Masters” documentary, “On Cukor,” which will debut Wednesday on PBS. The film is patterned after onetime Cukor associate Gavin Lambert’s 1972 book of the same name, which had extensive interviews with the director in a question-and-answer format. In conjunction with the PBS production, the book has been revised, updated with a new introduction and extensively redesigned.

“This is a guy who deserves a feature-length documentary who hasn’t ever been given one,” says Robert Trachtenberg, producer, director and writer of the documentary who also edited the text and photos of the new edition of Lambert’s book (Rizzoli), which hit stores in October. The revised version is a high-quality, coffee-table tome that, while it retains the original’s Q&A; style, includes additional material and incorporates many more photos.

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Cukor, who died in 1983 at age 83, enjoyed a 50-year motion-picture career that resulted in such classics as “What Price Hollywood?” (1932), “Little Women” (1933), “Dinner at Eight” (1933), “David Copperfield” (1935), “Camille” (1936), “The Women” (1939), “The Philadelphia Story” (1940), “Gaslight” (1944), “Adam’s Rib” (1949), “Born Yesterday” (1950), the 1954 remake of “A Star Is Born,” and “My Fair Lady” (1964), and ended with 1981’s “Rich and Famous.”

Because of the highly lauded screen performances he elicited from such leading ladies as Katharine Hepburn, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Ingrid Bergman, Judy Holliday and Judy Garland, Cukor became known in the industry, and later to film scholars, as a “woman’s director”--a label that persists and one that “On Cukor” author Lambert deems unfair.

“That label was stuck on George very early,” Lambert notes, adding, “To say that he was very good with actresses ignores the fact that he was very good with actors, as well. Look at Cary Grant. George discovered the ‘Cary Grant’ in Cary Grant in ‘Sylvia Scarlett.’ Then there’s that wonderful performance by W.C. Fields in ‘David Copperfield.’ And James Mason was extraordinary in ‘A Star Is Born.’ ”

Cukor also had an impressive track record with neophyte actors, Trachtenberg says, citing outstanding performances by then-newcomers Jack Lemmon in “It Should Happen to You” (1954), and Aldo Ray in “The Marrying Kind” (1951) and “Pat and Mike” (1952).

Lambert further contends that there was an additional, hidden meaning in this particular classification: “I always felt the dubbing of him as a ‘woman’s director’ was a sort of code for him being gay, and that’s probably how it started.”

The fact that Cukor was homosexual doesn’t figure much in either the book or the documentary, both of which focus on career rather than personal life. What comes through, however, is that there wasn’t much of a personal life, at least one marked by lasting, intimate sexual relationships.

“It was his friends and his work. His friends were his personal life,” explains Trachtenberg. “People find it hard to believe, but in three years-plus of research, by all accounts this was a really, really happy guy. This was not someone who came home from the studio at midnight and sat alone in the dark.”

Lambert, a novelist and screenwriter (“The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone,” “Sons and Lovers,” “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden”) who had a friendship and professional relationship with Cukor that predated his book, says that the director “would be quite personal with me off the record, but he was not at ease about the idea of it being in a book.”

“I understood totally because he was of that generation, and in that situation, where you had to be very careful,” Lambert says. “You just couldn’t come out with it. Of course, later in life, when he had far less to lose, he rather enjoyed being quite frank and absolutely outrageous. He was suddenly liberated.”

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For someone working in the highest echelon of Hollywood during the early and middle parts of the 20th century, to come out publicly as a homosexual was believed tantamount to career suicide. But, according to Lambert, Cukor made the best of his precarious position despite the sacrifices he had to make. “I asked him once, ‘Did you feel because of the social taboos that it was difficult for you to have a permanent relationship with another man?’ He said, ‘Well, I guess so, but doesn’t everybody in love suffer? And haven’t I made a great many movies about that and don’t you like those movies?’ So he deflected it in a very eloquent way. He was very pragmatic about it--he accepted the situation and lived accordingly.”

“He had this great philosophy of ‘Get on with it, get over it, don’t malinger,’ ” Trachtenberg adds. “After all, he was fired from ‘Gone With the Wind’--that would have put most anyone under. But for him it was, ‘Pick yourself up and forge ahead.’ He even graciously sent a telegram to the premiere of the film in Atlanta.”

That resiliency and work ethic was a main reason Trachtenberg was drawn to Cukor as a documentary subject, the filmmaker says. “People have a real fascination with alcoholics and drug addicts--they’re drawn to the dark side of people’s personalities. But it’s much more difficult to get up and go to work every day for 50 years, with all the [knocks] you’re going to take, and be a sober, sane, happy person.”

As Trachtenberg sees it, Cukor’s non-defeatist attitude was one of the reasons he got along so well with Hepburn, with whom he worked on nearly a dozen projects over a 47-year period, from 1932’s “A Bill of Divorcement” to the 1979 TV movie version of “The Corn Is Green.” “She was a New England WASP and he was a Hungarian Jew from Manhattan, but they shared a similar outlook,” Trachtenberg says.

While poor health precluded Hepburn’s participation in the 90-minute documentary, there are new interviews with Lemmon, Angela Lansbury, Shelley Winters, Claire Bloom, director Peter Bogdanovich and Cukor’s goddaughter, Mia Farrow, as well as old interview footage of Cukor (portions of Lambert’s original audio interview tapes are also utilized). Jean Simmons, who starred in the director’s 1953 film “The Actress,” narrates.

Because of Cukor’s prowess with performances--and perhaps owing to his origins as a New York stage director--his technical facility as a filmmaker has never attracted much comment. Much more reverence has been paid to contemporaries with more pronounced styles, such as Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Orson Welles and Frank Capra. But the documentary points out a number of Cukor’s creative innovations, some as far back as 1930, such as an elaborate tracking shot in “The Royal Family of Broadway,” the director’s third film.

“Another canard about George is that he didn’t understand the camera. But he did a lot of daring things,” Lambert says. “ ‘Adam’s Rib,’ which had a lot of location shooting on the New York streets, was quite revolutionary for the time. But no fuss was made about it. And of course “A Star Is Born” [one of the first CinemaScope films] is extraordinary. Incredibly inventive.”

The author observes that part of the problem may have been Cukor’s acute disdain for self-promotion, one of the key cogs in the machinery that creates celebrated Hollywood careers. “George never drew attention to himself. He was an extremely modest man. He never gave an interview and said, ‘Look what I’ve done.’ That, I think, is part of the reason he was underrated for so long.”

But not underrated at all were the performances of his stars, in roles that garnered Oscars for Bergman, Holliday, James Stewart, Ronald Colman and Rex Harrison, and nominations for many others, including Garbo, Hepburn, Garland and Lansbury, in her screen debut. And Cukor himself, after many nominations, finally won the Oscar toward the end of his career for “My Fair Lady,” an irony to many observers because of all his films, that was a rather literal stage adaptation that least bore the director’s imprint.

But it was a fact that didn’t bother Cukor, as his “get-on-with-it” attitude once again came into play. “He had, in my opinion, been nominated for work that was better than his work on ‘My Fair Lady,’ ” Peter Bogdanovich explains in the documentary. “He kind of really didn’t like that whole conversation when I nailed him to that. It was all too complicated for George, he didn’t want to hear about that. He was perfectly happy to get the Oscar, and that he deserved it.”

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* The “American Masters” documentary “On Cukor” can be seen Wednesday at 9:30 p.m. on KCET-TV.

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