"Dropping Beads" | Douglas Messerli [essay]

dropping beads

by Douglas Messerli

Samuel and Bella Spewack

    I first wrote this short essay in regard to Cary Grant’s The Awful Truth (1937), Bringing Up Baby (1938), and My Favorite Wife (1940). It was a time after the fall of the axe in 1934, when finally screenwriters, directors, and sometimes even studio executives had learned to move around the tyrannical limitations imposed upon their art by The Motion Picture Production Code and the heavy breath over their shoulders of Joseph Breen. The stubborn and witty writers the film industry so abused over the years, and the equally talented directors such as Howard Hawks, Garson Kanin, and Leo McCarey, among many others had discovered that if you simply satisfied the basic narrative strictures of never mentioning homosexuality or other alternative modes of sexual behavior, that you might hint of them through subliminal visual and linguistic clues, in the end positing a kind of trace-story about something very different from what most of the audience perceived the movie as being. Since many filmgoers were primarily interested in the way the characters ended up, the way the plot “turned out,” so to speak,” audiences would hardly notice or be quite forgiving of the various aberrations in the life of the film’s characters along the way. One could, side by side, so to speak, tell two stories, one a perfectly normative heterosexual story and also tell a fragmented, under the radar tale of some sexual deviance. If nothing else, it was a lot more fun than to simply lay out a yet other straight-forward romance. It allowed wit and subtlety back into the motion picture world, often without rustling any feathers. It wasn’t that Breen and his soldiers were dumb, and simply couldn’t imagine what else might be going on, but as long as the censors could justify that their requirements were met, they might overlook them and, yes, at times even be duped by the clever actors, writers, and directors.

Howard Hawks

     I might add that through this process, the film industry over a two and half-decade process, beginning in the late 1930s and moving through the 1950s began to slowly open up the discourse of what was possible to express within a film. And by the 1960s, particularly through the influence of the European and Asian film industries, things had begun to radically shift. Breen became the kind of dinosaur to which Cary Grant felt he needed to attend to in the early part of his liberating film, Bringing Up Baby.

       I have written elsewhere about reading coded movies, but I also feel the process of writing them has its roots in how for many long decades gay men and women needed, when meeting new people to almost play a game in which they might determine the new person’s readiness to permit or even engage with their own hidden sexuality. That process was called “dropping beads,” and in the following paragraphs I describe the process and meaning of the activity.

       Long before today’s more liberated views of sexual behavior (the present being a time when, presumably, young men or women are able—but probably are still terrified—to speak openly of their sexual preferences) gay men and lesbians were often forced to speak in a kind of coded language. Particularly when meeting attractive people for the first time, gays might subtly weave into their sentences words that suggested their sexual proclivities. This linguistic activity—now apparently a lost language—was generally described as “dropping beads,” a metaphor I find particularly fitting since it calls up images of what, in a humorous exaggeration of the stereotype, the male might be wearing or wishing to wear underneath his masculine attire (a woman’s costume replete with beaded dress or necklace), but also suggests the words that, picked up by a sensitive and like-minded fellow, could be linked and strung together in order to (borrowing another phrase from that now near-forgotten tongue) “know the score.” To the unknowing heterosexual male these suggestive words would simply have no significance, would fall into empty space, so to speak, their lack of resonance indicating to the speaker that, as attractive as the other may be, it would be dangerous to go any further into sexual matters. If, on the other hand, the second person “picked up” on some of these clues, it might suggest that he accepted the other’s sexual orientation. Obviously, the more deftly and subtly one handled these “beads,” the more cleverly one employed these indicative words, the safer he might be from hostile reactions by the unsuspecting and unsympathetic male; a less skillful linguist—who might even “drop bead’s” by accident—was more likely to get hurt, while the accidental dropping might suggest that he was more outrageous, more sexually flamboyant in his behavior. The same language might also indicate to knowing women that the male with whom she was speaking was “off limits.”

     Applying this technique to a popular culture activity such as filmmaking, particularly in the context of studio-made comedies that often employ larger-then-life situations and character types, would be nearly impossible to pull off; subtlety is not one of the traits of American films. Yet, some comic scriptwriters were able to create a sort of subliminal message through language and plot that for knowing and interested audience members humorously toyed with other sexual behavior. I am not suggesting that these subterranean messages were inaccessible to other theater-goers; they may have even generated an aura of sexual excitement around a plot delimited by the Hays Code restrictions. But I don’t think that many viewers consciously followed these “beads” back to a trail emanating from the off-screen sexual behavior of the stars. The studio’s publicists worked hard to keep the private lives of their actors—when they varied from the societal norm—out of the public consciousness; it would have been nearly impossible, accordingly, to produce a film that undercut those attempts to keep homosexuality and other oddities a secret. Yet, as I describe below, writers such as Dudley Nichols, Hagar Wilde, and Sam and Bella Spewack, some directors and actors themselves often purposely “dropped beads,” hinting at other sexual realities—perhaps just for the fun of it! In hindsight, however, it often appears as if many American films contain two works in one, the first for a general audience, the second for seemingly prurient viewers such as me. Frankly, I prefer the privatized world of double-entendres and coded acts that I discern in these works as opposed to the well-made locomotives of Hollywood-inspired farce.

 

Los Angeles, December 31, 2006