George Cukor: A Double Life

Chapter Seven

C H A P T E R S E V E N Imost one month to the day after he was fired from Gone With the Wind (he always put it that way—-firedf), Cukor's contract with MGM took effect , and the director reported to the set of The Women. The first thing he did was pose for stills with the auspicious lineup, which included Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Paulette Goddard, Joan Fontaine, and others—largely castoffs, Hollywood wags noted, from the Gone With the Wind talent quest. One of the publicity gimmicks was that there was not a single man in the cast. Cukor and his women were photographed, arms linked, strutting on the MGM lot, a confident smile blazing on the director's face. The publicity was in keeping with MGM's narrow view of Cukor. At MGM in the 1940s, beginning with The Women, Cukor's reputation as a "woman's director" became, to some extent, a straitjacket. What Ephraim Katz, in his Film Encyclopedia, describes as the director 's period of "creative drought" was a personal and professional crisis brought on by the death of his mother and Thalberg, Cukor's arrest, Gable's ultimatum during the filming of Gone With the Wind, and, more broadly, by the changes in Hollywood from the more freewheeling decade of the 1930s to the more restrictive 1940s. As much as the studio wanted him, the paradox is MGM wasn't 155 a quite sure what to do with him. Cukor liked to joke, rather lamely, that when any outside producer asked for his services from MGM on a loan-out basis, the director was usually handed over with embarassing swiftness. It is no coincidence that most of Cukor's best, most ambitious pictures after 1939 were done for outside producers, and studios other than MGM. Few of the MGM producers were as admiring of Cukor as Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who worked with the director agreeably on his greatest MGM picture, The Philadelphia Story—a property that, in fact, came from outside the studio with all kinds of strings attached. Among most staff producers, according to Gottfried Reinhardt, Cukor had the reputation of being difficult and contrary. The director seemed to make a point of being "persnickety" (one of Cukor's favorite words). Once such an amiable collaborator with Selznick, now Cukor was thought to be anathema to some producers on the studio payroll who did not want to battle his insistent ideas about script, decor, costume, or casting. "Not every producer wanted to work with George," Reinhardt said. There were many times in the coming decade when Cukor would be in studio executive Benny Thau's office haggling with the company men over irreconciliable differences. The respected producer Arthur Hornblow, Jr., it was said, was ordered off the set of Desire Me and told by the director to make his future appointments with him in his office by phone. Partly as a result of Cukor's intractability, that film ended as a fiasco. MGM's inability to comprehend Cukor began at the top of the hierarchy, with the producer of producers, the company patriarch, Louis B. Mayer, whose behavior and attitudes informed everyone else's at the studio. Mayer had a distinctly wary attitude toward Cukor , a man whose films the critics prized (they were not Mayer's favorites ) but whom the studio head did not understand or like personally. Mayer himself had let Bill Haines go when sound was ushered in and all the obviously gay leading players purged from the screen. (Late in life, Haines gave published interviews in which he called the sanctimonious studio executive "a liar, a cheat, despicable.") Unlike his more broad-minded sons-in-law Selznick or Goetz, a staunch Democrat, Mayer, a flag-waving Republican and friend of the Roman Catholic prelate Francis J. Spellman, had little grasp or tolerance of homosexuality. Mayer was bewildered that Cukor was such good friends with both of his daughters. He didn't understand the nature of their relationship . Mayer was irritated, too, that Cukor was so much the opposite 156 of his conventional idea of a homosexual—so adamant about his point of view, so defiant and proud, so rhino-hided. In his book, Let Me Entertain You, producer David Brown tells an anecdote about a meeting between Mayer ("who was somewhat to the right of Attila the Hun") and...