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Representing Queerness: Clifton Webb on the American Stage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 August 2011

LEONARD J. LEFF
Affiliation:
Emeritus, Department of English, Oklahoma State University. Email: leoleff@earthlink.net.

Abstract

In the American theater of the 1930s and 1940s, the designation “queer star” was an oxymoron – except when applied to Clifton Webb. The Indiana-born singer and dancer was (according to colleagues) homosexual and (according to critics and audiences) queer. He was also, after 1932, a star on Broadway and the road as well as a reliably queer presence in the gossip columns and arts pages of the daily paper. Unlike any other show business personality of his rank, he used his star text to raise the visibility of queerness in early twentieth-century entertainment culture.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

1 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, Volume I (New York, Vintage, 1980), 35.

2 Sinfield, Alan, “Private Lives, Public Theatre: Noel Coward and the Politics of Homosexual Representation,” Representations, 36 (Fall 1991), 45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Miller, D. A., “Anal Rope,” Representations, 32 (Fall 1990), 119CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On queers, queerness, and homosexuality in the first half of the twentieth century see John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); and George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994). Both authors, early on, challenged the “silence, invisibility, and isolation” (D'Emilio, 3) of gays before Stonewall.

4 Almost all book-length studies of queerness and stardom from 1900 to 1950 have focused on cinema; see (among others) Richard Dyer, Stars, new edn (New York: BFI Publishing, 1998); Steven Cohan, “ ‘Feminizing’ the Song-and-Dance Man: The Fred Astaire Star-Text: Fred Astaire and the Spectacle of Masculinity in the Hollywood Musical,” in idem, ed., Hollywood Musicals: The Film Reader (New York: Routledge, 2002), 87–101; Jeremy Butler, ed., Star Texts: Image and Performance in Film and Television (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991); Pamela Robertson Wojcik, ed., Movie Acting: The Film Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004); and William J. Mann, Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910–1969 (New York: Viking, 2001). Those studies focussed on the theater (besides those authored by Alan Sinfield and Lawrence Senelick, cited above and below) include Robert A. Schanke and Kimberly Bell Marra, eds., Passing Performances: Queer Readings of Leading Players in American Theater History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998); Robert A. Schanke and Kimberly Bell Marra, eds., Staging Desire: Queer Readings of American Theater History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002); and, more theoretical, Sue-Ellen Case, Feminist and Queer Performance: Critical Strategies (New York: Palgrave, 2009).

5 Dyer, 3.

6 On the “threat and promise” of queerness, see Patricia White, “Supporting Character: The Queer Career of Agnes Moorehead,” in Alexander Doty, ed., Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Essays on Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 96.

7 Chauncey, 357.

8 Joe, Uncle, “Child Culture” (Number 562: Webb Raum), Phrenological Journal and Science of Health, Jan. 1902, 17Google Scholar; see also Grant, Julia, “A ‘Real Boy’ and Not a Sissy: Gender, Childhood, and Masculinity, 1890–1940,” Journal of Social History, 37, 4 (2004), 831–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Parson Theatre program, n.d., “Clifton Webb Scrapbook,” Robinson Locke Collection, 1870–1920, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (NYPL), MWEZ+n.c. 23,406; basic bibliographical information for reviews in magazines and newspapers – some drawn from online archives – appears parenthetically within the text.

9 Autobiography (typescript), undated (private collection), 10 (Webb marked through the passage about his father's “deep voice and intense masculinity”), 15 and 27. The manuscript of Webb's autobiography covers in full his early years in the theater (to the mid-1920s), then skips to the 1940s. Whether a more complete version ever existed seems uncertain.

10 André Soares, Beyond Paradise: The Life of Ramon Novarro (New York: Macmillan, 2002), 18. In the 1910s and 1920s the association of queerness and male dancers was commonplace. Variety (2 April 1915) characterized one dancer “midway between a male hairdresser and a youth who has been reared and spoiled in a girl's convent” (cited in Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin' Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–1930 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), 91, and see also 84 and 170), whereas Irene Castle, defending Vernon against charges she herself brought, wrote in her memoir that her husband was rare among men (especially dancers) because he could convey an interest in clothes and jewelry without “looking effeminate” (Irene Castle, Castles in the Air (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958), 44). See also Barbara Stratyner, Ned Wayburn and the Dance Routine: From Vaudeville to the Ziegfeld Follies, Studies in Dance History, No. 13 (Madison, WI: Society of Dance History Scholars, 1996), 43; Ramsay Burt, Male Dancer: Bodies, Spectacle, Sexualities (London: Routledge, 1995), 50, 69, 87; and Mann, 99.

11 “KiKi,” undated clippings, Webb clipping file, NYPL; Chauncey, passim; undated clipping, “Clifton Webb Scrapbook,” MWEZ+n.c. 23,406, and review, As You Were, Pittsburgh, 8 Feb. 1921.

12 Chauncey, 49. See also, among other sources, E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993).

13 Zeiger, Susan, “She Didn't Raise Her Boy to Be a Slacker: Motherhood, Conscription, and the Culture of the First World War,” Feminist Studies, 22, 1 (1996), 24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 City Directory, New York City, 1915, lists “Mabel Parmelee” (her birth name) and “Webb Parmelee” (her son). According to their marriage certificate, Municipal Archives, New York City, recorded 30 Nov. 1897, Green Raum and Mabel Hollenbeck (both previously divorced) wed on 24 November 1897, five days after Webb's eighth birthday; their divorce petition was filed 15 July 1912 (Municipal Archives, New York City); Autobiography, 82. Over the years, Webb told various people that he himself had been on the verge of marriage – until Mabelle intervened. He wanted to wed Jeanne Eagels, he told Haila Stoddard, his costar in Blithe Spirit, “and of course Ma Bell [Mabelle] absolutely refused. [She] did everything she could to break it up and finally did” (telephone interview, 18 Dec. 2002). He wanted to wed Libby Holman, he told Tottie Findlay, the daughter of producer Dwight Deere Wiman, and his mother “messed it up” (telephone interview, 17 Jan. 2001). He was “romantically inclined toward [Broadway star] Marilyn Miller,” he told Humphrey Bogart, but when he once took her rowing, “Mabelle was heard to scream, ‘Clifton, get out out out of those black waters.’ ” As Lauren Bacall (who told the story) added, Mabelle “interfered in everything in his life and as a result he had no relationships with women, or with men” (telephone interview, 7 Sept. 2005). The press delighted in the marital charade. For example, a squib published on 24 Aug. 1935 couched rumors of Webb and marriage in a rhetoric of incredulity: “Clifton Webb, believe it or not, is really serious in his attentions to Princess Natalie Paley … they really intend to marry and this is the truth, despite all of our ideas that this was one of Clifton's little practical jokes” (Webb clipping file, 24 Aug. 1935, Los Angeles Examiner newspaper clippings, Special Collections, University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles). In 1937 Princess Natalie wed producer John Wilson; they lived in Connecticut where, according to actor Cris Alexander, “she had her girl friends, and he had his boy friends” (telephone interview, 20 March 2003).

15 Clipping, n.d. (c.1919), “Clifton Webb Scrapbook.”

16 Clifton Webb Diary (private collection).

17 Alan Sinfield, Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theatre in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 114.

18 George Chauncey, “Christian Brotherhood or Sexual Perversion? Homosexual Identities and the Construction of Sexual Boundaries in the World War One Era,” in Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey Jr., eds., Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (New York: Meridian, 1990), 308.

19 Almost thirty-five years old, Webb was at best an aging juvenile. Like the mama's boy, the juvenile was a sexual suspect so generally thought of as effeminate that Variety praised one for having a rare asset, a “distinctly masculine appearance that carries across the lights to favorably impress the witnessing male contingent” (rev. of Sunny, 30 Sept. 1925). In the novel that inspired the movie 42nd Street (1933), the juvenile was the director's “mistress.” Bradford Ropes, 42nd Street (New York: Alfred H. King, 1932).

20 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 51.

21 Tex McCrary and Jinx Falkenburg, “New York Close-Up,” 24 Dec. 1950, New York Tribune morgue, Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin; Brooks Atkinson, “Revivals and Revues,” New York Times, 12 May 1929; Doris Hering, ed., 25 Years of American Dance (New York: Orthwine, 1951), 60; Marshall Winslow Stearns and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 160–61; John Martin, “The Dance: When Jazz Becomes Art,” New York Times, 14 July 1929; see Chauncey, Gay New York, on dress (53–54) and on the axiom that theatrical events “were the site of multiple audiences and productive of multiple cultural meanings, many of them [but not all] obscure to the class that nominally dominated them” (351).

22 O. O. McIntyre, American Periodical Series Online, 24 May 1929; to hear “Moanin' Low,” apparently recorded contemporaneously with the show's run, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Flo2pcFQKfQ&feature=related, last accessed 5 July 2011. Though the fop in drama before the twentieth century was not necessarily queer or homosexual (Senelick, Lawrence, “Mollies or Men of Mode? Sodomy and the Eighteenth-Century London Stage,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, 1, 1 (July 1990), 67Google ScholarPubMed), the aftermath of the Oscar Wilde trials in the early twentieth century made the fop appear to be both, as O. O. McIntyre suggests.

23 Bailey, Amanda, “ ‘Monstrous Manner’: Style and the Early Modern Theater,” Criticism, 43, 3 (2001), 275CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 See, for example, Robert S. McElvaine, The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941 (New York: Times Books/Random House, 1984).

25 Webb, “Easter Parade,” Leo Reisman and his Orchestra, Victor 24418, recorded 3 Oct. 1933. Also of interest, from Three's A Crowd: Webb, Clifton, “A Rainy Day,” JJA Presents the Music of Arthur Schwartz, JJA Records, Vol. 1Google Scholar, n.d.

26 Allen to Mark Leddy, Dec. 1931, in Robert Taylor, Fred Allen: His Life and Wit (New York: Little, Brown, 1989), 179; Buddy Ebsen, The Other Side of Oz (Newport Beach, CA: Donovan, 1993), 101; Sidney Skolsky, “Times Square Tintypes,” 1 Dec. 1930, “Clifton Webb,” C & L Brown Collection, NYPL. According to Cris Alexander, who appeared in Present Laughter, Webb “had a really hilarious rapport” with his long-time black dresser and valet, who during intermissions (according to Skolsky) gave Webb massages. Webb, Alexander continued, was “very campy with him,” and “would say, ‘Stop that, Walter, or I'm going to cut your bowser off’ ” (telephone interview, 20 March 2003).

27 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet, 2nd edn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). For more on the movies in this period, see Lugowski, David M., “Queering the (New) Deal: Lesbian and Gay Representation and the Depression-Era Cultural Politics of Hollywood's Production Code,” Cinema Journal, 38, 2 (1999), 3–35Google Scholar.

28 In the most provocative of these dramas, The Silver Cord, which deals in the psychological theories discussed above, Sidney Howard shows how a widow's obsession with her two sons has warped them. Christina, the wife of the older son, calls her mother-in-law a “son-devouring tigress, with unmentionable proclivities suppressed on the side” (Burns Mantle, ed., The Best Plays of 1926–27 (New York: Arno Press, 1975), 251). The younger son, meanwhile, tells his mother, “I wonder if I'm the marrying kind – failing the possibility of marrying you” (229). His mother drives away his fiancée, and, knowing his interest in arranging flowers, plans for him a career in interior decorating. Reviewers were even more explicit about the implications. Robert “had the leanings of an interior decorator, whatever they may be,” wrote Larry Boretto (The Bookman, March 1927); it was best (according to Robert Benchley) that he (Robert) did not marry, “being what he was” (Life, 6 Jan. 1927).

29 Skolsky, “Clifton Webb,” C & L Brown Collection, NYPL; John Lahr, Notes on a Cowardly Lion: The Biography of Bert Lahr (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 131–32; Don Herold, “Going to the Theatre,” Life, Nov. 1933.

30 When people think of Webb, they think of “the foppishly polished dandy,” McIntyre wrote (9 Feb. 1934); unlike Fred Allen, McIntyre publicly depicted Webb in fem colors: see, for instance, the nexus of fashions, “sissy,” and Webb in one of the writer's many pop stream-of-consciousness miscellanies (“O, sole mia – purple velvet pajamas. Can't find black pumpernickel in this town. It is all blonde sissy stuff. Clifton Webb's pleated pants” (21 Nov. 1930)). On “yoo-hoo” see Allan Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (New York: Plume, 1991), 62; and (re Franklin Pangborn yoo-hooing and thus disgusting W. C. Fields in International House (1933)) Henry Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 228. Cole Porter's “After You, Who?” (The Gay Divorce, 1932) may have been a coded jest for gay audiences. And by the 1930s Sutton Place, once called by gossip magazines an “Amazon enclave” (Paul Russell, The Gay 100 (New York: Kensington, 2002), 249), was apparently fully “integrated.”

31 Webb to Mabelle Webb, 25 Aug. 1931 (private collection).

32 Webb to Mabelle Webb, 5 and 2 Sept. 1931 (private collection).

33 Webb clipping file, 1 May and 24 April 1935, Examiner newspaper clippings, Special Collections, USC, Los Angeles.

34 Breen to Will H. Hays, 29 Aug. 1931, Will Hays Papers, Part II, ed. Douglas Gomery, University Publications of America, original italics. See also Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons, Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians (New York: Basic Books, 2006).

35 Observations on Webb's performance were based on his Lux Radio Theater broadcast (27 March 1950) of The Man Who Came to Dinner.

36 Catholic World, March 1939, 730; The Nation, 28 Oct. 1939, 475; The Man Who Came to Dinner (New York: Random House, 1939), 111–12; Gerald Gardner, The Censorship Papers: Movie Censorship Letters from the Hays Office, 1934 to 1968 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1987), 153–54; Steven Bach, Dazzler: The Life and Times of Moss Hart (New York: Knopf, 2001), 201.

37 Sinfield, “Private Lives, Public Theatre,” 51; see also Sinfield, Out on Stage.

38 Sinfield, “Private Lives, Public Theatre,” 67.

39 Undated clipping (referring to Webb in You Never Know), “Clifton Webb,” C & L Brown Collection, NYPL. Variety, though more generally, echoed Atkinson: “Half the first-nighters were not as amused as the other …” (12 Nov. 1941).

40 The Letters of Noël Coward, ed. Barry Day (New York: Knopf, 2007), 459.

41 “[U]nusual threesome” in Louis Sobol, “New York Cavalcade,” 4 Aug. 1942, Webb clipping file, NYPL; “French toilet water” in Leonard Lyons, “The Lyons Den,” Dallas Morning News, 13 Dec. 1942. On Richman as “sexually eccentric” see Chauncey, Gay New York, 54. Further apropos of Coward and Webb, when Lyons went abroad after the war, he carried letters from Ruth Gordon to her husband, Captain Garson Kanin, and “Love to dear Noël from Clifton Webb” (Dallas Morning News, 6 June 1945). Sheilah Graham reported a decade later from the red-carpet premiere of The Man with the Golden Arm that “Noël Coward twoed with Clifton Webb” (Dallas Morning News, 2 Jan. 1956). See also Sinfield, “Private Lives, Public Theatre,” 51; Philip Hoare, Noel Coward: A Biography (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995), 319; and Mary Morris, “Song-Dance-and-Party Man,” P.M., 11 Nov. 1945.

42 Mark Barron, review of Blithe Spirit, Dallas Morning News, 9 Nov. 1941, V1.

43 Webb to Mabelle Webb, 8 Feb. 1944 and 14 Oct. 1943 (private collection); “Blithe Spirit clippings,” NYPL; observations on Webb's performance were based on his Theater Guild of the Air broadcast (23 Feb. 1947) of Blithe Spirit.

44 Otto Preminger, Preminger: An Autobiography (Garden City: Doubleday, 1977), 73. For more about Webb on screen – where he remains much better-known today – see Leff, Leonard, “Becoming Clifton Webb: A Queer Star in Mid-century Hollywood,” Cinema Journal, 47, 3 (2008), 3–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 Webb to Mabelle Webb, 20 March 1944 (gentleman murderer); 28 Feb. 1944 (face too old); and 20 March 1944 (stayed up with me til 2) (private collection); “Peter Bogdanovich Interviews Otto Preminger,” On Film, 1.0 (1970), 50–51.

46 John Rosenfield, rev. of Laura, Dallas News, 9 Dec. 1944; Manny Farber, rev. of Laura, New Republic, 30 Oct. 1944, 568; Hedda Hopper, Chicago Tribune, 4 June 1944, Webb clipping file, USC; Louella Parsons, Los Angeles Examiner, 8 June 1947, Webb clipping file, USC; Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 141; Fontaine, telephone interview, 4 March 2001. For Fontaine and others, the connection of “looks and behavior,” queer mannerisms and homosexuality, was understood. According to Glen Boles, who also knew Webb socially, “In those days all of us (I as an actor) had to hide the fact that we were gay, and he [Clifton] never cared about hiding” (telephone interview, 30 Jan. 2003). Robert Wheaton met Webb through Cukor. “Everybody in Hollywood knew it [that Clifton was gay]. His behavior certainly showed it up to anybody who knew anything” (telephone interview, 23 Jan. 2003).

47 See Sinfield, “Private Lives, Public Theatre,” 47–48.

48 Alexander, telephone interview.

49 “The Theater: The Mixture as Before,” Time, 10 May 1943, 65.

50 Journal American review and others from New York Theatre Critics' Reviews (New York: Critics' Theatre Reviews Inc., 1946); undated clipping, “Clifton Webb Scrapbook,” NYPL.

51 Cited in Sinfield, “Private Lives, Public Theatre,” 47–48.

52 Wilson to Webb, 23 June 1947 (letter offered for sale on eBay, 22 Oct. 2005), italics in original.

53 Benshoff, Harry, “Vincent Price and Me: Imagining the Queer Male Diva,” Camera Obscura, 23, 1 (2008), 146–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 One example of Webb's post-Broadway queer persona must suffice. During the scripted curtain-call repartee of the radio broadcast of Sitting Pretty (1948), the motion picture that made him a star, Webb said, as “himself,” touting Mr. Belvedere Goes to College (1949), “Imagine me in college. The All-American Tackle of 1949. I'll probably wind up in the Rose Bowl.” “Playing tackle?” Belvedere costar Robert Young asked. “No. Picking roses.” Lux Radio Theatre, 14 Feb. 1949.

55 Rev. of By Jupiter (1942), cited in Charles Kaiser, The Gay Metropolis (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997), 16.

56 Esther Newton, Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in America's First Gay and Lesbian Town (Boston: Beacon, 1993), 39–40.

57 On safe zones see Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (London: Routledge, 1993); Sinfield, Out on Stage, 107.

58 Boles, telephone interview.

59 The word “homosexual,” used here advisedly, may not have affronted Webb. In the 1950s, when a Hollywood director asked him, “Are you a homosexual?” the actor was not ruffled. “Clifton draws to his full height. ‘Devout, my boy – Devout’ ” (typescript notes, undated, unpaged, Three Coins in the Fountain file, Jean Negulesco Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA). The anecdote – perhaps apocryphal – nonetheless hints once more at a truth about perceptions of Webb in the decades before he went to Hollywood: queer onstage, even queerer off.

60 Foucault, History, 43.