George Cukor: A Double Life

Chapter One

C H A P T E R O N E eorge Cukor believed that his life story actually began before he was born—in genes and chromosomes, in the tangled roots of his ancestry, and in the essential traits of his immediate family. "You'd like to think you're pretty much an original," the worldfamous film director was fond of saying, in a reflective mood, "everything about yourself distinctive and individual. But it is surprising to realize to what extent you echo your family, and how, from childhood , you have been shaped and molded. . . ." Cukor made a point of surrounding himself with literary lions, the pantheon of the theater, the social elite of Hollywood, and minor European royalty. Lineage was extremely important to this director of motion pictures about rootless orphans and waifs, aristocratic gatecrashers , and nobodies transformed into somebodies by luck and love. The Cinderella/fellatheme was touched on in some of his best films: What Price Hollywood?, Dinnerat Eight, Camille, David Copperfield, Holiday , The Philadelphia Story, Born Yesterday, A Star Is Born, and My Fair Lady. The origin of the name Cukor was, among family members, a source of wry speculation. Although at times Cukor kidded about his Hungarian heritage, the film director was not uninterested in his family 's geneaology. He spent time and money tracing official records 1 g and family trees; he consulted the opinions of national experts and kept in touch with distant relatives who might provide clues to the enigma of the past. Cukor wanted to believe in a good lineage for himself, at the same time that he made jokes about coming to the United States by steerage . Although there was some opinion that in Hungary the Cukors were related to the Kallays—a family line that included parliament members and rabbis—Cukor had to accept the fact that he wasn't highborn. He settled for positioning himself as a member of the world's cultural aristocracy. At one time, in the early 1900s, his paternal grandfather, Joseph Cukor, had laboriously typed a long manuscript that purported to chart the ancient family odyssey of the Cukors. There was some doubt about the veracity of the inscribed facts, but Cukor kept and cherished the document. The film director liked its snobbish implications , deciding it conveyed "approximate accuracy." According to this questionable document, the Cukors were descended from sons of the tribe of Joseph who journeyed to India some three or four hundred years before the birth of Christ. Chukor, which was the name of an Indian hill, was the family name adopted by this bloodline that boasted not only the usual contingent of shepherds, farmers, and warriors among its relations but also orators, scholars, writers, and poets. Chukor translated as "partridge" in Hindi and Sanskrit; the family coat of arms was decorated with the image of a partridge, which was said to guide their destiny. In approximately A.D. 669, members of the family set out and resettled around the Caspian Sea. Chukor became Magyarized as Czukor sometime in the eighteenth century, and Americanized to Cukor upon family immigration to the United States in the nineteenth. Responsibility for dropping the z was claimed by grandfather Joseph Cukor , who complained that "two consonants in succession is a slavish habit." George Cukor liked to say that because of his last name he suffered amiable confusions when he directed films in the early sound era for Paramount, whose president was the phonetically kindred Adolph Zukor, also Jewish and Hungarian-born. (Though otherwise they were unrelated; perhaps, said Cukor jokingly, he would have had "an easier time" at Paramount altogether if the C had been dropped instead.) From an early age, Cukor had a powerful sense of identity. His name was pronounced CUE-kor, and he would insist on correcting that pronunciation, saying, "CUE-kor, as in CUE-cumber." That was one of Garson Kanin's pet names for him, "Mr. Cucumber," although behind his back the film director was also dubbed by Kanin "God Damn Cukor," a wordplay on his initials, GDC, and an allusion to 2 the fact that when in an irritable mood Cukor tended to scream like his partridge namesake and overflow with expletives. Cukor's great-grandfatherhad been a countrified gentleman with a landed estate in Napkov, Hungary. Some family misfortune induced his son to leave the Old World behind. Grand, humorless, exceedingly handsome, Joseph Cukor made ship passage...