refusing to learn
by
Douglas Messerli
Gladys
Unger, John Collier, and Mortimer Offner (screenplay, based on the novel The
Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett by Compton Mackenzie), George
Cukor (director) Sylvia Scarlett / 1935
In
his 2012 tell-all book, Scotty Bowers—who served for years as Hollywood’s
unofficial sexual agent (without taking money for his services) for dozens of
stars over several decades—tells the story that at one of George Cukor’s
notorious gay-friendly parties, Bowers met Katherine Hepburn, with whom he
spoke to at length that afternoon, struck by her intelligence and cocksure
attitude. He describes her as appearing with a “severe short haircut, tightly
cropped and combed with a boyish side part. She was wearing a suit with
trousers and had no makeup on at all. She looked infinitely more masculine than
feminine.”
Cukor, one of her favorite directors—she
worked with him on ten films—later admits to Bowers that he was often
challenged by Hepburn to allow her to dress as she appeared at the party, which
her hairdressers, costumers, and make-up artists continual resistance.
According to Bowers, Cukor complained that Hepburn “didn’t know how to behave
in public.” “It’s not that she’s a dyke. I have no trouble with that. But the
studio does. They’ve been pleading with her not to advertise that fact in
public but she ignores them.”*
Whether or not one wants to believe Bowers who also claims to have over the years set Hepburn up
with many lesbian companions—although I’d suggest that most of the Hollywood
figures he names as being gay, lesbian, and sexually indeterminate have by now
been substantiated as being so by others—in Hepburn’s case, her friend, gossip
columnist Liz Smith and biographer William J. Mann have both confirmed Bowers’
assertions.
My point in mentioning all of this is not
to claim the great actor as a being a unsung member of the LGBTQ community, but
to simply contextualize her film from 1935, Sylvia Scarlett, in which
she most certainly did have the opportunity to wear her hair very much as
Bowers describes her wearing it years letter, along with pants, and a look that
overall is quite masculine. Indeed, in the film the young female daughter,
Sylvia trims away her braids and most of her hair, combs it into a mannish style
and dons male attire to become a boy she names Sylvester so that she might join
her criminal father, Henry (Edmund Gwenn), in his escape from their home in
Paris to his native England.
The events that befall them, both on the
boat over and their early adventures with a con-man they meet on the boat, Jimmy
Monkley (Cary Grant) are not of terrible importance. The one event that
suggests some of the innuendos that are to follow is when the always scheming Henry,
falling in almost immediately with Jimmy—a name, incidentally, which Hepburn
called herself as a tomboy growing up in Connecticut)—reveals to him that he
has lace wound around his chest as if it were a corset. Although we already
know that he is planning to sneak this lace, stolen from his last job, through
customs, his sudden decision to unbutton the bottom of his shirt to reveal that
he is wearing the lace corset, might at first suggest to anyone other than the
criminally experienced Jimmy that his new acquaintance loves to wear the common
feminine item used for trimming dresses and in underwear apparel the way that
film director Ed Wood loved to wear angora sweaters under his shirts.
But Jimmy is wise to it all and, in fact,
reports Henry to the customs’ officers so that he may get through the line
unchecked with an illegal container of jewels. Once Henry and his new-born
“son” are freed from being retained at the customs office, Jimmy repays the
price Henry expected to see from its sale, along with the fine he has had to
pay. And with that Jimmy has suddenly acquired two new partners in crime.
Their criminal attempts, however, are
stymied by the good intentions and open generosity of Sylvester, who, for example,
when they attempt to con a maid Jimmy knows, Maudie (the comedienne Dennie
Moore) of her mistresses’ pearls, ends with Sylvester demanding they give them
back so that she won’t lose her job.
Frustrated with the young boy’s behavior,
the three, along with Maudie decide upon Sylvester’s suggestion to take to the
road as traveling performers with the queer-laden moniker of The Pink Pierrots.
Singing and dancing are not their forte, and their first audience’s reaction,
led by a handsome local well-to-do painter, Michael Fane (Brian Aherne),
results mostly in laughter, for which the always impetuous Sylvester takes them
to task.
Yet even if they have little talent and
seem to take in no money on this “caper,” everyone seems to be vaguely happy once
they have moved from the city into the country, the pattern of many a pastoral
fable which Cukor’s film promises to become. Henry, having fallen for Maudie,
takes up house with her in one of the caravans, leaving Jimmy and Sylvester to
other—much to the inner Sylvia’s understandable dismay.
Accordingly, for a few moments at least
this movie settles into a lovely tale of sexual indeterminacy, as Maudie,
taking the young boy under her wing, asks him about his whiskers, helping him
to imagine his own oncoming puberty by using an eye-liner to draw a Ronald
Coleman-like mustache over his lips. Always ready for a fling with anyone in
pants, Maudie suddenly hugs Sylvester and plants a big kiss on his lips, again
making the crossdresser fairly uncomfortable.
Almost before he can escape from Maudie’s
sexual embraces, however, Sylvester must face bedding down with Jimmy, who
seems to love the idea of having the boy join him under the covers, as he
strips down to the waist, commenting “You’ll make a proper hot water bottle”—yet
another incidence of screenwriters hinting to their audiences of Grant’s sexual
preferences off screen.
Later, Michael not only repeats his
fascination but imagines that his fascination with what his mistress, Lily, has
described as “such a pretty boy, has something to do with his own art, which
apparently does not simply include applying paint to canvas but seducing those
who sit for him: “I know what it is that gives me a queer feeling when I look
at you . . . There’s something in you to be painted.”
Time went so far as to
insist that the film “reveals the interesting fact that Katharine Hepburn is
better looking as a boy than as a woman.”
Although this might have been meant as
an absolute put down of the actor and the film in general, their comment
demonstrates that if Cukor and his writers had been able to continue to amble
down this lane instead of veering off to the road laid out by the Hays Code and
studio notions of what the general public should be allowed to see, they might
have created an absolutely splendid movie.
But before you can even blink, the
former feisty Sylvester, who has immediately fallen in love with her would-be Pygmalion,
steals a woman swimmer’s summer frock and appears for her sitting with Michael
as Sylvia, the woman underneath her more fascinating previous persona.
Michael, in relief for his inexplicable
attraction to a boy, now laughs it off and, as any male assured of his
dominance might, proceeds to tell his new-born woman how to attract the
opposite sex. When Lily, who has stomped out of the party the night before
after being slapped in the face by Sylvester for abusing his drunken father,
gets a look at her lover’s new guest, realizes that she too has been “tricked,”
now kisses the girl in a fake-show of feminine bonding. Perceiving finally that
now even as a pretty young woman she is once again being humiliated by both
Michael and his Russian lover, Sylvia returns to the little circus she has
helped to create, perhaps even regretting her attempt to enter the heterosexual world.
In this world also—as Maudie runs away
with another man from the love-stricken Henry, who on a stormy night goes in
search of her to bring her back—women are punished for the very frailties that
the men so admire. In this instance, however, it is Sylvia’s father who is
destroyed in the process, falling to his death in the dark from a nearby cliff.
There are now only the two, Jimmy and
Sylvia left, and Jimmy, seemingly just as attracted to her in her new costume
as before—probably realizing that she might serve as good of a hot-water
bottle—suggests they move on together as a duo. Jimmy’s offer of their pairing
quickly leads her to openly note, as she might equally have to Michael’s
attempt to mansplain her own sexuality, “You’ve got the mind of a pig.”
“It’s a pig’s world,” he immediately
responds.
Indeed, in a world dominated by men such
as Michael and Jimmy, it is. Hearing the cry of a drowning woman calling out
for Michael to save her, Sylvia (and the movie itself) quickly zigzags back
into Sylvester mode, as the Hepburn character throws off her female shoes and
athletically jumps into the roiling waters to save Lily, who she presumes has
attempted suicide over her and Michael’s rocky relationship.
As soon as the reborn Sylvester has
deposited her former rival into a bed in the remaining caravan, returning to
life as Sylvia, she runs off to report the event to Michael, who jumps into his
car with her in tow to redeem his actions. But when they arrive at the camp
they see the caravan has disappeared. The true opportunists, Jimmy and Lily,
have run off together, and the chase is on, pausing only for a few moments at a
fork in the road, where Michael explores the terrain to the right and Sylvia
the route to the left. There, she, temporarily at least, toggles her way back
to gender confusion which had once made this movie so interesting—but now
simply serves as source of confusion—when the very first person she encounters
just happens to be the bather from whom she had stolen the dress.
Now forcibly re-attired in male dress
again, the now thoroughly torn Sylvia/Sylvester goes speeding away with Michael,
this time with the mad Sylvester at the wheel—since Sylvia has accidently
slammed her fellow traveler’s fingers in the door—each of them apparently
attempting to return the other to his/her proper heterosexual partner.
Michael is certain that Lily will insist
upon returning with her new lover to Paris, so the traveling detectives follow.
On the train that is destined to speed Sylvia/Sylvester back to home country,
she spots the fleeing villains but refuses to tell Michael of her discovery. A
few moments later, he witnesses them together in the dining car, also keeping
the truth from his friend.
Recognizing that perhaps it no longer
matters whether or not it is Sylvia he loves or her inner Sylvester, he pulls
the train’s emergency chord, halting their voyage just long enough so that they
can slip back into nature and return to the place from where they started—he
hopefully no longer needing to explain to her about how to become a woman and
she without the need to even identify her gender.
In this “happy” yet more traditional
ending, however, we still know that something important is missing, namely the
earlier mystery behind their sexual beings and desires that had so electrified
them. And the future, given the society which they must now embrace, looks
fairly bleak.
It is no wonder that audiences of the
day were confounded by this film, which lost over $363,000, an astounding
amount in those early Depression years. Cukor never worked with the film’s
studio, RKO again, and Hepburn henceforth was described as “box office poison”
until she made the very heterosexual movie with Cukor at MGM, The
Philadelphia Story for which she had purchased the rights.
We now might better comprehend why Cukor
would describe Hepburn to Bowers, soon after that successful movie’s release, as
a person who “doesn’t know how to behave in public.” It seems that she was
still Sylvester instead of being Tracy Lord.
*Bowers
also quotes Spencer Tracy as insisting that the stories about his and Hepburn’s
secret love affair were all a product of the studio publicity department, and
he resented the fact that, at times, Hepburn seemed to really believe it,
wishing that she might just leave him alone.
Los
Angeles, September 18, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review and My Queer Cinema (September 2020).
No comments:
Post a Comment