New ‘Tales’ Picks Up Where ‘70s Left Off

Last July, Armistead Maupin was holed up in a sound stage on the outskirts of Montreal, signing copies of his forthcoming novel “The Night Listener.” He was relaxed and in his element, presiding over the production of “Armistead Maupin’s Further Tales of the City,” adapted from stories Maupin began weaving in 1976 as serialized tales of gay life published in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Those stories were a watershed for Maupin’s career and for the depiction of gay life in contemporary literature, as the writer turned a Victorian boardinghouse in the city into a tableau of San Francisco life in the ‘70s and ‘80s, featuring a melting pot of characters, gay and straight, sex-changed and not, from the socially conservative Mary Ann Singleton to the ultraliberal earth mother (and former man) Anna Madrigal.

This is the third time Maupin’s “Tales,” which have also filled six novels, have been brought to television (the four-hour miniseries debuts Sunday at 10 p.m. on Showtime). In 1993, the first “Tales” miniseries was broadcast on Britain’s Channel 4, then was shown on PBS the following year. Despite good ratings, PBS balked at funding a sequel, caving in, Maupin felt, to pressure from right-wing interest groups. At the time, PBS said publicly it was a financial issue. Enter Showtime, a pay cable network where “Tales” hasn’t hit such roadblocks.

In the last decade, as viewers have been alternately emboldened and shocked by the miniseries’ “Yes-we’re-going-to-show-you-that” depiction of gay relationships, Maupin has become a willing spokesman for the evolution of gays and lesbians in America and gay characters on TV.

Through it all, Maupin, who adapted “Further Tales” with James Lecesne, has been consistent--show what you can show on television and don’t hide from the truth, whenever possible (though even Showtime, with its promotional tag of “No Limits,” has its limits, Maupin discovered).

During shooting in Canada, the Toronto Globe and Mail interviewed Maupin about a particular segment of “Further Tales” in which Michael Tolliver, Maupin’s sexually active but commitment-hungry gay protagonist, has a brief Hollywood fling with a closeted, fading movie star named Cage Tyler. The relationship, Maupin says, is a veiled version of his own experience with Rock Hudson, whom he met in the late 1970s; Maupin, in fact, later took heat from some in the gay community for outing Hudson when the actor was suffering from AIDS.

The Cage Tyler segment is only a fragment of the intrigue in “Further Tales”; likewise, in real life, Maupin says his relationship with Hudson is “part of my history, but I don’t want it to be part of my routine.”

“The press, including the L.A. Times, I might add, depicted Rock as a man who led a deeply secretive life,” he says. “He didn’t lead a deeply secretive life, he was protected by the industry around him and the journalism establishment around him. He wasn’t worried that somebody was going to break into one of those all-boy parties he held up on Beverly Crest. That was simply his entitlement as a movie star. The thing I hate hearing the most is stars and industry people who are still quoted as saying, ‘I knew Rock but I didn’t know about his private life.’ Believe me, if you knew Rock you knew about his private life.”

Later, on the subject of how the Hollywood closet has evolved, Maupin, who wrote the narration for the HBO documentary “The Celluloid Closet,” says: “The new system is, you get a wife and kids but you still go to the [Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation] Awards to show that you’re supportive of gay people. . . . The press is still avoiding the subject [of a gay star] when they know it to be the case.”

True to a labor of love, the actors from previous “Tales” adaptations reprise their roles--including Olympia Dukakis as den mother-landlord Anna Madrigal, Laura Linney as Mary Ann Singleton, Paul Hopkins as Michael Tolliver, Jackie Burroughs as Mother Mucca and Billy Campbell as Dr. Jon Fielding.

In Montreal, Linney was a year removed from shooting the acclaimed film “You Can Count on Me” but still several months away from that film’s release and the attendant rise in her profile, including an Academy Award nomination for best actress for the film.

By contrast, when Linney landed the role of Mary Ann in “Tales,” it was her first leading part on television after several years spent onstage and in small movie roles. “I must admit to feeling smug in that we’ve known we had something special for a long time now,” Maupin now says of the actress, whom he accompanied to the Oscars this year.

Linney says that playing the naive transplant Mary Ann was daunting, because she had only recently graduated from the Juilliard School in New York and wasn’t entirely sure she could handle an acting career.

“I didn’t know if I’d be up to it. I didn’t know if I’d enjoy it,” she says. “I was very intimidated by all of it. And it was the first time ever that I went, ‘Oh, OK, I think maybe I can do this.’ The first [‘Tales’] was a magic, magic time. You don’t forget those experiences.”

“Further Tales” is set in 1981, just before AIDS changed everything. Michael is balancing sexual dalliances with a committed relationship and a yearning for his exlover Jon, and Mary Ann, now an aspiring TV reporter, is involved with upstairs neighbor Brian (Whip Hubley)--not to mention DeDe Halcyon Day (Barbara Garrick), who has just returned from mass death in Guyana, a refugee from Jim Jones’ San Francisco-based Peoples Temple cult.

For Maupin, 56, “Further Tales” is a departure from previous books because this “was the first time I realized I could sink my teeth into a black-comedy Hitchcockian story and have some fun with it, using the modern-day bogeyman of San Francisco, Jim Jones.

“He was in many ways an embarrassment to the city because he was a left-wing monster, he wasn’t your traditional right-wing monster,” Maupin says. “He had the support of a lot of people in the city, including the mayor.”

Though Maupin feels no certainty that Showtime will underwrite adaptations of the remaining “Tales” books, he says he’s in final talks with the Goodman Theater in Chicago about turning the first two books into a musical.

Those “Tales” ended just as the 1970s did. “Further Tales” begins a new epoch, and for Maupin it was a time of transition, even if he didn’t necessarily realize it at the time.

“It’s always a mistake to think that the mores change at the crack of a decade. We were beginning to see the first signs of the end of banality and surface worship that characterized the decade. It was also the last truly innocent moment sexually, because AIDS had not yet made its terror known. So I look back on that time with greater poignancy than most.”