Toad Times II

The communist witch hunts of the 1950s—the "Time of the Toad," in Dalton Trumbo's memorable phrase—represented a watershed in the life of gay dramatist Arthur Laurents. By driving him out of Hollywood and overseas for a brief period, blacklisting provided him with the opportunity to disengage a writing career mostly given over until that point to working with the creative properties of others in the film industry, and gradually to move toward creating more original stories on his return. A stage play from the early 1960s, The Time of the Cuckoo (later made into the film Summertime, and still later into the musical Do I Hear a Waltz?), is perhaps the clearest evidence of this creative retooling. Nonetheless, the paranoia of the 1950s left an indelible mark on Laurents, and his screenplay for The Way We Were, like Jerome Robbins's career-ending Poppa Piece, worked a kind of demonic exorcism on him. In sharp contrast to Robbins's work, however, Laurents's film is unapologetic, particularly with respect to his Jewish identity: "Katie [Morosky, the lead character played by Barbra Streisand] could only be a Jew because of her insistence on speaking out, her outrage and injustice, her passion, her values, and because I was a Jew" (257-58).

The issue of his gay identity underlies an even more striking contrast between Laurents and Robbins. Laurents, like Robbins, was intimately involved with both men and women throughout his life—sometimes even the same women (dancer Nora Kaye and singer Lena Horne, for example). But gradually he worked through his ambivalence about his sexual orientation when his longtime relationship with film actor Farley Granger dissolved before the blacklisting, to be replaced by an even longer (and still continuing) partnership with sometime stage actor and later real estate developer Tom Hatcher. For Laurents, gay ambivalence seems never to have been a source of guilt or shame. Granger, who appears to have been the ideal partner to begin with, once remarked to Laurents that he "never thought there was anything wrong with being gay [and had] always liked it" (154), a frank admission that may explain his casting in Alfred Hitchcock's seminal postwar exploration of homosexuality, Rope (1948). Working with Hitchcock—Laurents contributed to Rope's screenplay—was fortuitous in its own way, for the famous director, according to Laurents, was happily noncommittal about the whole issue of sexuality, even as it applied to himself: "The Hitchcock who was reputedly berserk about Tippi Hedren was not the Hitchcock I knew. But then, no one knows for a certainty all the contours of someone else's sexual landscape. There were probably other Hitchcocks I didn't know" (124).

Farther down the line, similar encounters with Katharine Hepburn ("She could not be pinned down" [201]), Stephen Sondheim ("I don't think he's anything" [353]), and even La Streisand ("I think you need mystery" [226]) led Laurents, to one degree or another, to believe that "what a writer doesn't know about himself is thrilling" most of all (195). Robbins subjected himself throughout his life to Freudian analysis, which mostly meant "repressing his gay lifestyle" and "reinforc[ing] the homophobic bias of society at large."¹ By contrast, Laurents was lucky enough to receive the psychiatric ministrations of Judd Marmor, who, in response to Laurents's admission that he was "afraid" that he was a homosexual, memorably retorted: "I don't know anything about it. I just believe [that,] whoever or whatever you are, what matters is that you lead your life with pride and dignity" (90). Little wonder, then, that Laurents could candidly admit, reflecting on the 1995 New York Times interview in which Frank Rich had officially outed him as a "gay liberal," that "I wasn't bothered; I'd always assumed everyone knew" (319). As for Robbins, a "homosexual inclination"—his true demon, Leonard Bernstein surmised—was a condition that he thought he might be "cured" of one day, and until then it was nobody...