Broadway Babylon (32 page)

The handsomest of
The Boys in the Band
—the play title reportedly inspired by a Judy Garland reference to the band Esther Blodgett sings with in the classic 1954 George Cukor version of
A Star Is Born
—was Keith Prentice. He played Larry, who was partnered with Hank (Laurence Luckinbill, known for his long marriage to Lucille Ball’s daughter, Lucie Arnaz). Pre-Boys, Prentice was a chorus boy in
Gypsy, The Sound of Music
, and Noel Coward’s
Sail Away
. He had a bit part in the Rock Hudson—Doris Day film
Send Me No Flowers
and a non-musical role in
Take Her, She’s Mine
on Broadway.

Playing gay in
The Boys in the Band
proved a curse for his career too. Prentice worked on TV in soaps like
As the World Turns
and
Dark Shadows
, but Hollywood turned its back on him and he resorted to a tiny—and thankless—role as a gay murder victim to Al Pacino’s lethal and supposedly secretly gay cop in the controversial film
Cruising
(1980).“Keith wound up teaching drama at a boys’ school in New York City,” offered Combs. In 1982 Prentice founded the Theatre Under the Stars in Kettering, Ohio, where he directed summer stock plays. In 1992, about a week after Combs, Keith died at age fifty-two.

Some obituaries listed the cause of death as cancer, some AIDS. In London, Kenneth Nelson, who would die the following year, apprised a columnist, “I don’t care what the rags said, it was AIDS. I mean, enough with the shame!”

O
NE OF THE LEAST-KNOWN
cast members was Reuben Greene, who played Bernard, a quiet, mild gay black man. “I tried staying in touch with Reuben,” disclosed Combs, “but either he’s still genuinely shy or he wants to keep apart and put that time behind him.” Yet Greene did show up at the 1993 charity restaging of
The Boys in the Band
. His other most notable credit is Elaine May’s flop movie
Mikey and Nicky
(1976).

Peter White, the unprepossessing blond actor who played Alan (the contractually married party guest who is either the most closeted of them all or the oddball who actually turned out heterosexual), has also remained under the celebrity radar. He appeared in the bisexual-themed play
P.S. Your Cat Is Dead!
by gay James Kirkwood (during LA rehearsals for which Sal Mineo was murdered in his carport by a black robber). On screen, White had a small role as Debbie Reynolds’s boyfriend in Albert Brooks’s comedy
Mother
(1995). When the concerned son played by Brooks inquires, Mother reassures him that she and White’s character aren’t intimate or anything; they just have occasional sex.

“There’s no question,” said Frederick Combs in 1986, “that the one from our play who went furthest professionally was our director,” Robert Moore. None of the cast, gay or het, achieved name recognition. Moore, though not a name director, went surprisingly far helming stage star vehicles—typically diva-centered (aha)—for the likes of Carol Channing (
Lorelei
), Lauren Bacall (
Woman of the Year
), and Elizabeth Taylor (
The Little Foxes
, her stage bow as well as her penultimate play). By the early ’70s Moore was directing TV movies, including a 1974 NBC version of Tennessee Williams’s
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, starring Robert Wagner as Brick; his wife, Natalie Wood as Maggie the Cat; and Laurence Olivier as Big Daddy.

More surprisingly, Moore went on to direct such Hollywood films as
Murder by Death
and
The Cheap Detective
, both with glittering all-star casts. “Bob told several friends,” said Combs, “that back in the ’60s he’d supported
Lauren Bacall in
Cactus Flower
on Broadway, but then [in 1981] he directed her in
Woman of the Year
and that she won her musical Tony for Best Actress mostly thanks to him, since she was a-musical.”

Combs laughed. “Bobby was like that. A little fiction, a little selfishness, and lots of laughter and stars in his eyes.” Moore died of AIDS in 1984 at fifty-six.

Another
The Boys in the Band
alumnus who died prematurely was W. Robert LaVine, costume designer for the movie version. However, he passed away in 1979, pre-AIDS (officially). Years later, Combs saw a book LaVine wrote,
In a Glamorous Fashion
, published in 1980, sitting on a coffee table at a friend’s house. Said Combs: “I examined it and was so unexpectedly pleased to see Robert’s name on it. Then I saw he’d died just before it came out, and this was right after the news about Rock Hudson being HIV-positive. It entered my head, for the very first time, ‘How many of us are going to reach our deaths way too young?’ ”

B
OYS
P
RODUCER
R
ICHARD
B
ARR
admitted a few years after the film came out, “Our play was possibly the gayest production ever seen on [Broadway]. The majority of men involved in it, actors and nonactors both, were homosexual, and most of those relatively open—that is, within our own theatrical circles.… For my part, I think Mart Crowley’s gotten a bad rap. He’s one of the younger generation of gays who, unlike most older playwrights, is willing to put a gay character or characters front and center.

“Mart’s also a realist. He presents a gay world that is true… [and] includes stereotypes as well as a diversity of men. He wrote
The Boys in the Band
with warts and all.”

Crowley was Natalie Wood’s secretary before
Boys
and post-
Boys
co-produced the TV series
Hart to Hart
, starring Robert Wagner and co-owned by Wagner and wife Natalie’s RoNa company which also had a wealthy slice of
Charlie’s Angels
. (It was a source of ongoing bitterness to Wood’s younger sister, Lana—see the chapter on Natalie vs. Lana Wood in this author’s
Celebrity Feuds!
—that the stellar couple would hire “outsiders” but not a relative for lucrative positions.)

Crowley did little theatrical writing after Boys’ success. His 1973 follow-up play,
A Breeze from the Gulf
, with one gay character out of three total, bombed. Frederick Combs felt, “It was inevitable. Audiences were turned off by Mart’s story of a strange young man and his parents, while the critics took the opportunity to punish Mart in print for his good fortune with
our
play.” (The semi-autobiographical Michael was played by Robert Drivas, probably best known for the Rod Steiger film
The Illustrated Man
, who died at fifty of AIDS.)

No more full-length plays followed, and after
Hart to Hart
Crowley seemed to fade away. He returned in 2002 with a
Boys in the Band
sequel, cleverly titled
The Men from the Boys
.

Thirty years on, it’s not a birthday party that reunites the gang at Michael’s—the still acerbic host is now on the wagon—but a memorial for Larry. Hank’s life partner, it’s clarified, did not die of AIDS (ironic, in view of the numerous deaths among the original cast members): “Gay men do die of other things.” The cast, of course, was entirely new, and the new characters all young, including a political activist. Crowley was kinder to his characters this time around, and the self-hate much less pronounced.

The Men from the Boys
opened in San Francisco to tepid critical and audience response. Intended for fine-tuning en route to Los Angeles and ultimately Broadway, it was dismissed by the
San Francisco Chronicle
as having “no more depth than the average TV sitcom,” not to mention the fact that gay characters, once the stuff of tragedy and melodrama, can now be seen nightly on TV. Several observers felt it was much too late for a sequel, which anyway couldn’t have a fraction of the impact of
Boys in the Band
, which seldom has been revived over the years due to its datedness.

In 2002, as in 1993 on the twenty-fifth birthday of the play, it was widely noted that
Boys
had attracted major publicity and sizeable audiences because there were so few gay-themed plays of any description in the late ’60s—let alone one with numerous gay characters, none of whom was killed off in the end.

Too many reviews of the sequel dwelled on the original’s negative points while overlooking its pioneering aspects, such as presenting gay men who weren’t monsters, buffoons, or pathetic victims—but who sometimes victimized themselves—and depicting a longtime gay couple, or delivering the play’s key line, “If we could just not hate ourselves so much.”
The Boys in the Band
shone a sometimes painful but needed spotlight on homophobia and how easily it becomes internalized by its targets. It finally presented a gay community in miniature, men banding together for fun, camaraderie, and solace—solace for their mutual outcast status, not for their inherent and essential nature.

Besides being a landmark play,
Boys
and its legacy have become a symbol, representing the real-life discrimination faced by gay people—certainly including actors—and the challenge posed by AIDS, which has struck the stage world harder than any other cultural or professional sector. Long live the men of
The Boys in the Band
, living and especially deceased, in collective memory and heightened awareness.

U
nlike rival Katharine Hepburn, who bowed on celluloid in 1932, Bette Davis (1908–1989) was not a stage star when she arrived in Hollywood the previous year. Between 1928 and 1930 Bette worked on the stage—not returning until 1952. She’d been rejected by Eva Le Gallienne’s theater company, which cited her as insufficiently committed to the thespic art. (Rumor had it that young Ruth Elizabeth Davis wasn’t sufficiently attracted to the lesbian Le Gallienne, whose father was a flamboyant poet reminiscent of Oscar Wilde.)

Bette worked briefly in George Cukor’s theater company, but he let her go, citing her “lack of team spirit.” Although Cukor would become Hollywood’s leading director of female stars, he never worked with Davis on the West Coast. As voiced during interviews in this author’s
Bette Davis Speaks
, she never forgot—or forgave—the sting of his dismissal. However, a year later, in 1929, Bette secured a place in actress-impresaria Blanche Yurka’s Henrik Ibsen tour.

Bette’s high point was playing Hedvig in
The Wild Duck
. In 1926 she and her hard-driving but encouraging mother, Ruthie, had attended a Blanche Yurka Company production of
The Wild Duck
in Boston that Davis later credited with inspiring her to become an actress. Peg Entwhistle had acted Hedvig,
and in her first autobiography Bette recalled the experience: “I was watching myself. There wasn’t an emotion I didn’t anticipate or share with her.… My heart almost stopped. She looked just like me.” She was describing the scene in which Hedvig breaks down after her father has left her. Bette’s own father had deserted his wife and two daughters, a major factor in the star’s lifelong mistrust of men.

Ironically, and in contrast to Bette Davis, who would become a great Hollywood survivor, Peg Entwhistle would be destroyed in part by her Tinseltown experience, when her stage stardom and acclaim didn’t translate into screen opportunity. After considerable effort and disappointment, the large-eyed Peg was given a part in
Thirteen Women
(1932), starring Irene Dunne and Myrna Loy. Before release of the racist melodrama (the villain is a vengeful Eurasian beauty), Entwhistle’s small role—one of the thirteen women—was pared down to nearly nothing. Soon after, she earned a place in Hollywood history books by jumping to her death from atop the H
OLLYWOOD
sign.

A
S FOR
B
ETTE
D
AVIS
, despite a brilliant comeback in the 1950 classic
All About Eve
, her incipient jowls and a weight gain—not to mention the decade’s preference for younger, preferably blonde, actresses—resulted in increasingly small and matronly roles. It was time to look eastward, and in 1952 she decided to star in a revue titled
Two’s Company
. On stage, Davis was big box office. Strangely, the revue showcased her less obvious talents as a singer, dancer, and “comedienne,” and she did not appear in most of the show’s numbers. She did dominate backstage, managing to intimidate choreographer Jerome Robbins, whose accelerating temperament would impact on most of his co-workers, excepting divas like Merman and Streisand and males who bullied him back.

Possibly influenced by Lucille Ball’s antics on
I Love Lucy
, Bette in one skit enacted a hillbilly with blacked-out teeth who sawed “at a bull fiddle with a crazy kind of bumpy rhythm,” according to director Joshua Logan, whom Robbins flew to an out-of-town tryout in Detroit, with Davis’s permission, to view and advise on the revue’s eclectic numbers, which weren’t jelling into a cohesive entertainment. (Bette Davis, Lucille Ball’s favorite actress, was sought by Desilu in the late ’50s to guest on its TV show; second choice Tallulah Bankhead did an unforgettable comic guest turn.)