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Cukor told Lambert that with a first-rate actor, a director need not give line readings. Instead, "you make a climate in which he can work and find things out for himself. Then you say, 'That's it, you've got it.'" One of the most striking examples is James Mason's scene of emotional breakdown preceding his suicide in A Star Is Born. "James is a highly talented man but a reserved, rather enigmatic person," Cukor said, "and I knew that his last scene in the picture, when he breaks down and decides to commit suicide, would be a case of letting him find out things for himself. So I let the camera stay on him for a very long time, and all his feelings came out and he became so involved, in fact, he could hardly stop."
In the same film, Judy Garland gives an equally harrowing outburst of emotion. Garland was a much more flamboyant personality than Mason, but Cukor still managed to tap into depths of feeling beyond any she had ever displayed on screen. Cukor told Lambert:
"Toward the end of shooting we had to do a scene when she's in a state of total depression after her husband's suicide. While we lined it up she just sat there, very preoccupied.... Just before the take I said to her very quietly, 'You know what this is about. You really know this.' She gave me a look, and I knew she was thinking, 'He wants me to dig into myself because I know all about this in my own life.' That was all. We did a take. If you remember the scene, she has trouble in articulating anything, she seems exhausted and dead. A friend, played by Tommy Noonan, comes to see her to try and persuade her to go to a benefit performance that night. He chides her about not giving in to herself, he even gets deliberately rough with her — and she loses her head. She gets up and screams like someone out of control, maniacal and terrifying.... She had no concern with what she looked like, she went much further than I'd expected, and I thought it was great....
"[W]hen it was over, I said to Judy, 'You really scared the hell out of me.' She was very pleased, she didn't realize what an effect she'd made. And then — she was always funny, she had this great humor — she said, 'Oh, that's nothing. Come over to my house any afternoon. I do it every afternoon.'"
George Cukor directing
Judy Garland
Bob Willoughby's superb color photograph of Cukor directing Garland is the perfectly emblematic cover image of the lavishly illustrated new edition of On Cukor. As Cukor leans toward the quizzically smiling actress, his left hand is poised confidently on his lower back, his right hand characteristically coaxing a point out of the air. The director's palpable intelligence and the actress's rapt attention convey a shared delight in the moment of artistic creation, and their electric interaction makes for an image almost sexual in its intensity. There are many such glimpses of Cukor's working method in the photographs contained in this edition, whose large format adds a greater degree of intimacy. Candid photos of Cukor working with such actresses as Katharine Hepburn, Garbo, Joan Crawford, Angela Lansbury, and Audrey Hepburn show his passionate, almost priestlike ability to inspire confessional moments of on-screen behavior.
The novelist, screenwriter, and biographer Gavin Lambert, a British expatriate who has lived in Los Angeles since the 1950s, is a keenly observant, wryly witty chronicler of Hollywood's social mores and artistic achievements. His fiction — such as The Slide Area: Scenes of Hollywood Life, Inside Daisy Clover, and The Goodby People — and his biographies of the actresses Norma Shearer and Alla Nazimova are marked by a compassion toward his dreamstruck characters and an unsentimental shrewdness in examining the processes through which they court or surmount self-destruction. As an interviewer, Lambert is subtle and discreet. On Cukor is as expressive for what transpires between the lines — sometimes implicit, sometimes conveyed by stage directions ( "bristling slightly," "the shadow of a smile," etc.) — as for what is actually stated. It was only with a man of such urbanity and diplomacy that Cukor could fully relax beside a tape recorder.
The interview material remains virtually the same in the new edition, but Lambert has written a fuller introduction, with a somewhat franker discussion of Cukor's private life: "As friends, of course, we knew about each other's sexuality, but Cukor grew up at a time when discretion was obligatory. Like his good friends Somerset Maugham and Noël Coward, and several of his Hollywood colleagues, Cukor simply kept his private life private. And although he never felt guilty about being gay, he was pragmatic; and chose to realize himself in creative work at the expense of personal fulfillment. But that's a far from exclusively homosexual choice."
Lambert discusses the subject less guardedly in his newly published book Mainly About Lindsay Anderson (Knopf). A beautifully written and often moving memoir of his fifty-five-year friendship with the late director of If ... and O Lucky Man!, it deals in depth with Lambert's own life as an openly gay man in Hollywood and includes these reflections on Cukor:
"By the time I came to know him well, George had reached a point, after being obliged to live a closeted life for so many years, when he realized that he had nothing to lose by talking about his sexuality. But not for publication, as he made clear when we began On Cukor. Later he wanted me to write his biography, but I declined when he set very definite limits on what he would reveal about his personal life. Was it so important to tell everything? he asked. Not in the tabloid sense, I said, but can you separate an artist’s sexuality from his creativity? 'It's so good of you to consider me an artist,' George said with an ambiguous smile, and an edge to his voice that I recognized as his way of closing the subject....
"'During all those years in the closet,'" I asked, 'did you suffer very much when you realized that you could never have a complete, out-in-the-open love affair?' After thinking this over, George supposed that 'many of us suffered.' But when there's no choice, he pointed out, you either make the best of it or suffer even more. And during any affair, out-in-the-open or secret for whatever reason, same or opposite sex, didn't lovers always suffer? 'I certainly hope so,' George said with the same deflecting smile. 'After all, it's what many of my pictures that you like so much are about.'"
 Cukor and Mia Farrow at the 50th Academy Awards  |
The tension that accompanied the aging Cukor's growing interest in self-revelation can be seen in his tentative, somewhat frustrating interchange with Lambert about the scandal caused by Sylvia Scarlett:
LAMBERT: I wonder why there was such a terrific controversy over something very charming and very lightweight.
CUKOR: I'm not putting Sylvia Scarlett in the same class, but when Carmen was first done at the Opéra Comique they picked up their chairs and threw them at the stage.... I'd always liked the book [by Compton Mackenzie], and it struck me that Kate had that quality they used to call garçonne, and I thought it would be a perfect part for her.... It seemed an impertinent thing to do, but I didn't realize how daring.... (His manner wavers between affection and regret.) But then we got John Collier for the script, and he was a daring kind of writer, so I suppose I must have been thinking in that way....
LAMBERT: I like very much the way you played on the sexual misunderstandings. When Brian Aherne is attracted to Hepburn as a boy and worried about it, he says, 'There's something very queer going on here.'
CUKOR: I don't remember that. It’s funny.
LAMBERT: And then the maid finds Hepburn a very attractive boy and makes love to her.
CUKOR: I remember that. All that kind of thing is in the classical tradition, of course.
LAMBERT: Do you think moments like that shocked people when the picture first came out?
CUKOR: No. They just didn't think it was funny.
Cukor eventually "came out" to a greater degree with other interviewers, particularly in an interview toward the end of his life with the gay magazine The Advocate. In those later interviews, Cukor often used more candid language than he had with Lambert, whose elegant manner tended to discourage Cukor's penchant for coarseness. Always fond of bawdy language, Cukor used it more openly as he aged and felt more liberated from the restraints of his public image. A prime example came when I once asked Cukor what he thought of Hollywood extras. His pithy reply: "Pricks and cunts." It's notable that one of the modern films Cukor most enjoyed was Paul Morrissey's 1968 film for the Andy Warhol factory about a heroin-addicted male hustler, Flesh. In a comment used as an advertising blurb, Cukor hailed Flesh as "an authentic whiff from the gutter." Such earthiness may have surprised those who had pigeonholed Cukor as a gentleman of the old school, missing the fierceness and tenacity that enabled him to survive in the Hollywood jungle as a working filmmaker for more than half a century.
Cukor prevailed not by pretentious self-dramatization but with humor and unquenchable enthusiasm for his profession. I experienced those qualities firsthand while having lunch with him in 1975 at the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel. I was interviewing him for the Directors Guild of America magazine, Action!, about one of his most trying experiences, the disastrous Russian-American coproduction of The Blue Bird. When I asked how he had coped with the strain of that experience, he replied: "First of all, to go into the theater or the movies is folly and madness. But there is something that urges us to go and do it, and if that urge is strong enough it should sustain us. I don’t go on about things; I don't luxuriate in suffering. You can't. People are nattering at you, they bring their problems to you, and you have to very charmingly say, 'Fuck that.' ... I think sour, disillusioned people are just bores."
At one point in our lunch, I asked Cukor what it felt like to be fired from a picture. (What I had in mind was his departure from the 1947 MGM film Desire Me, from which I mistakenly assumed he had been fired. Cukor quit the troubled production.)
Cukor touched my forearm lightly with his right hand, leaned over toward his publicist, and said, "Notice with what finesse he avoids mentioning the title Gone With the Wind."
April 2001 | Issue 32
Copyright © 2001 by Joseph McBride
Joseph McBride is the film columnist for Irish America magazine and the author of such books as Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, Steven Spielberg: A Biography, Orson Welles, Hawks on Hawks, The Book of Movie Lists, and the forthcoming biography Searching for John Ford, which will be published in June 2001 by St. Martin's Press and Faber and Faber (U.K.). His screenwriting credits include the cult classic movie Rock 'n' Roll High School and five American Film Institute Life Achievement Award specials on CBS-TV, honoring James Stewart, Fred Astaire, Frank Capra, John Huston, and Lillian Gish. He has received the Writers Guild of America Award for The American Film Institute Salute to John Huston (1983), four other WGA nominations, and two Emmy nominations. He is an adjunct professor of film and literature in the Irish studies program at New College of California in San Francisco.
ACCESS: Thank goodness most of Cukor’s work — with a few sad exceptions like the camp classic Our Betters — is readily available either on video or television (most frequently on Turner Classic Movies).
ALSO: More director profiles
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