George Cukor: A Double Life

Afterword

A F T E R W O R D riting a biography of George Cukor has proven a tremendous challenge. I knew it would be difficult; that was half the appeal. But I couldn't have guessed how difficult it would be to probe his life story, to try to find the arc and drama of it, and to tell it within bounds. People tried to encourage as well as discourage me. Sometimes I wasn't sure which they were doing. "I feel sorry for you, in a way," Garson Kanin said, "because I don't think there is a book in George." Katharine Hepburn put it in a different, if equally daunting, way. "A book about George," she told me, "would be hundreds and hundreds of pages. Very thin, fine paper. Very small black type." I met Cukor only once. This was just before the release of The Blue Bird, when I interviewed him at one of those posh Beverly Hills hotels . He was in a cranky mood. I couldn't have impressed him with my long hair, informal clothes, and nasal Wisconsin questions. Though he treated me contemptuously, I remember feeling as sorry for him as for me, thinking that here was a great director at the sad end of his long career. I'm not sure I wrote up the interview. Certainly I didn't use a word of it for this book. Cukor's name came up again when St. Martin's Press asked me to do a biography of another motion-picture director, to follow up my book about Robert Altman—this time, someone from Hollywood's Golden Age. Names were bandied about. When trying to decide on 345 W whom to focus, I telephoned Todd McCarthy, who was working on a biography of Howard Hawks. Todd reminded me of Cukor, who had eluded biographers. In some ways Altman and Cukor were opposites . The more I thought about Cukor as a possible subject, the more I was intrigued. I knew that Cukor's private life—that is, his life off the set—was, except for anecdotes about elegant dinner parties, a blank page. (One might say that of all the famous directors; it was as if they did not exist off the set.) In his lifetime, there had been a lot of rumors about Cukor's lifestyle. In recent years, especially after his death in 1983, some of that speculation had crept into print in various books. In a sense, the new labels (Bruce Babington and Peter William Evans, the authors of the recent Affairs to Remember: The Hollywood Comedy of the Sexes, categorize Cukor's films as "products of a homosexual sensibility") seemed to be versions of the old one—Cukor as the woman's director—just drawn forth out of the closet. Even though both variations can be interpreted richly and complexly, they can also be construed narrowly and to exclude richness of meaning. My credo, with a book such as this, is that a deeper knowledge of a man's life facilitates a deeper appreciation of his work. Understanding Cukor the human being would put me in a better position to understand Cukor the filmmaker. At the outset I knew my job was going to be tough. I knew little about Cukor that had not been fed to the press. I had little real understanding of his pre-Hollywood years—the all-important formative period of his youth and early stage career. I had no idea whether his life was any more or less than the wonderful success story that, on the surface, it appeared to be. To be honest, I had no inside track on his homosexuality. I could hardly say with certainty that Cukor was homosexual; interestingly, that's the first bit of juicy gossip you hear about everyone in Hollywood . AHfacets of his life interested me; but obviously, his homosexuality loomed as something that set him apart, at least among the first-echelon studio directors. I felt, instinctively, that it must have figured into the pattern and themes of his life. Unlike the Altman book, I spent almost as much time in libraries —reading clippings, correspondence, oral histories, and studio production files—as I did talking to people. But I did talk to many people, not only those listed on the following pages but many more who chose to remain anonymous or off the record. There was a lot of luck involved in my task, and I was lucky...