Pink and Purple

Mike Connolly and the Manly Art of Hollywood Gossip. Val Holley. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003. xv + 188 pp.

Mike Connolly, the gay author of the gossip column "Rambling Reporter," which ran in the Hollywood Reporter from 1951 to 1966, was described by Newsweek as "probably the most influential columnist inside the movie colony." Liz Smith, who established her own legendary career as a gossip writer for Newsday and the New York Post, met Connolly early in the 1950s and described him otherwise. He was, in her words, a "mean shit" (108). If Val Holley paints an accurate portrait of Connolly, Smith, once again, was right on target.

Mike Connolly and the Manly Art of Hollywood Gossip of necessity treads a fine line. On the one hand, it fawns: it pays its debts, through its balance of judgment and thorough research, to those close to Connolly who provided source materials, and it declares its contributions to history, gay and Hollywood, in its attention to neglected or overlooked lives and materials. In this regard, Holley, a legislative and reference librarian in Washington, DC, celebrates, decodes, and otherwise glories in the "gay sensibility" that he asserts one can detect in Connolly's columns themselves, using them as the stuff of a de facto autobiography (xiii). On the other hand, the book is obliged morally and politically to denounce Connolly's most egregious excesses, particularly his tendency to consume prodigious amounts of booze (resulting in ghastly behavior) and to engage in messianic anti-Communist demagoguery (ghastly behavior in itself). The reader thus thrashes through thickets of information (countless names of minor Hollywood players and their mostly sexual intrigues) and likewise through Holley's ambivalent metaconclusions regarding his subject matter, of which a pop-psychological assessment of Connolly's rampant anti-Communism provides illustration: "Taken together with his 1937-1938 crusade to force Champaign, Illinois to close down its bordellos, his anti-Communism reflects the need to establish his manhood and to compensate for not being like other men, not propagating his Irish genes, and not having fought in World War II. By espousing orthodox, mainstream viewpoints as his own, Connolly the outsider would confer upon himself the insider status he craved" (103). Such explication, while perhaps true in Connolly's case (although the evidence is not entirely convincing), hardly explains why all gay people, of whatever national or gender identification, did not flock to the cause of McCarthyism; it fails to explain political and moral choices. Fortunately, this mode of exposition is frequently outweighed by straightforward information about the career of a gay man in old Hollywood, and it is this information that speaks most directly to other projects, academic and popular, of recuperating gay Hollywood history. While Connolly himself was not a regular at the brunches of the gay director George Cukor or the composer Cole Porter, he culled bons mots and morsels of scandal from stringers, such as the publicist Stanley Musgrove and the agent Bob Raison, whom he had placed throughout Hollywood (14). These men and others in his set fed to him scores of daily items for his gossip column, the best of which he fashioned into prose one would not hesitate to call purple. Among the more screaming examples:

[The screenwriter] Jay Dratler eyed a member of the Jewish loose-wrist set on Fairfax and leered, "Gefulte swish!" When Connolly asked Walter Winchell why he wore no makeup on television, Winchell said makeup made him look like "an old Shubert nance." Perhaps the most eyebrow-raising item he ever printed in this vein was, "Love the names on some of the camp's houses on [New York's] Fire Island: Sinerama, Boys Town, The Male Box, The Tulle Box, We Three, Drag-Net, etc."

(13)

In the face of censorship battles, most notoriously involving the Hollywood scandal magazine Confidential, with which he had unsavory associations, Connolly eventually toned down his "natural flamboyance" (4), making up for the lost titillation...