George Cukor | Holiday / 1938

the nearest exit

by Douglas Messerli

 

Donald Ogden Stewart and Sidney Buchman (screenplay, based on the stage play by Philip Barry), George Cukor (director) Holiday / 1938

 

With gay director George Cukor behind the camera working with two of his favorite gay actors, Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, I’ve never needed much more to convince me that Holiday was an LGBTQ friendly movie. But I was never convinced that its subject matter actually had anything to do with the gay experience.

     After all, the central focus of the film whirls around Johnny Case’s (Grant) ten-day romance at Lake Placid with Julia Seton (Doris Nolan). They’ve determined to marry, and upon his return to New York, the moment after he stops by to visit the couple who have almost been his parents, Nick (Edward Everett Horton) and Susan Potter (Jean Dixon), he’s off to meet his fiancée at her home, the address of which she’s written down on a piece of paper.

     Surely the taxi, which pulls up to one of the city’s greatest mansions, has gotten the address wrong, or perhaps she works there. Just to be sure, Johnny enters through the kitchen door, only to discover that the woman he is about to marry is one of the Setons, obviously one of the wealthiest families in New York. He is both quite delighted and perturbed, since it makes everything more complex.

     Johnny, we realize by this time, is a loveable eccentric like the Potters, who when faced with any problem simply springs into the air for a somersault to clear up his mind (good thing Grant began his career as an acrobat). Although he has a rather good job as a financier, he plans that when he makes enough money, he will retire at a young age in order to determine what he really wants to do with the rest of his life. After all, like Grant himself, he has been working to support himself from an early age without any time to reflect on his own possibilities, which is also perhaps why he has never, thank heaven, fully grown up in the pejorative sense of those words.

      Given these facts, he’s sure to run into problems with Julia’s father, Edward Seton Sr. (Henry Kolker), even if Julia is certain that she can bring him around to her viewpoint. Unfortunately, Julia is also sure that she can eventually bring Johnny around to her viewpoint as well, that his idea of retiring on a long holiday is pure nonsense. Certainly a few years in his father’s firm will help him to comprehend just how rewarding business really is, especially if he adds to the millions that Setons already have in their bank accounts.

      Johnny is as so stubborn that he simply is convinced that his irregular argument is the right one for him, and being an outsider since birth, he’s not afraid of taking chances, whereas, he soon discovers, Julia most certainly is terrorized by making unusual decision, and like her father is convinced that any rational being will come to see the value of her viewpoints. As her brother Ned (Lew Ayres) later reveals to his sister Linda (Katherine Hepburn) in their adolescent room of retreat which call they “playroom,” “You know, most people, including Johnny and yourself, make a big mistake about Julia. They're taken in by her looks. At bottom, she's a very dull girl and the life she pictures for herself is the life she belongs in.”

     Given this predicament, I might have imagined that Grant would be given some other outside interest to which he might refocus his and our attentions, namely some person of the same sex, or simply a confusion about women that prevents him from ever having to marry or permits him to quickly cancel out a marriage as his writers have provided him in nearly all his movies, such as a search for a dinosaur bone and a missing leopard (Bringing Up Baby); the presence of a handsome man with whom his first wife spent several years stranded on a deserted island (My Favorite Wife); two aunts who poison strangers and bury them in their basement (Arsenic and Old Lace); or a cat burglar pretending to be him (To Catch a Thief). In this film, however, his focus simply shifts from one woman to another, except, of course, for his beloved “holiday,” which he’s more than willing to take on his own, if Julia won’t join him. It’s interesting that for all the talk about how much Grant plays the romantic hero, he seldom seems interested in women outside of the first kiss. And it is usually the woman who chase him, while his character attempts to do everything he can to escape the female embracement to which he will eventually—off screen or at the last moment—have to accept.

      But we also know that Hepburn, playing Linda, is the always the right girl for him, since she is also an eccentric intellectual outsider who defines herself as the black sheep of the family—in general, a queer bird who is Grant’s perfect foil. Consequently, we recognize from the first moment that they meet that the real question of this film, a heterosexual one, is how long it will take the two to realize that they’re the perfect couple and to rid themselves of anyone else who stands in their way.

     In this case, the biggest barrier, other than Julia’s father, is Linda’s own misguided love for a younger sister who she doesn’t really know as well as she thinks she does, as Ned’s comment, late in the game, well reveals. She is so protective of Julia, realizing that Johnny may be the best thing for her to help her escape the family mania, that she does not fully realize that Johnny is actually what she, herself, needs most in a life of failed opportunities. 

     But, of course, by this witty film’s end she is freed to accept her love for Johnny through Julia’s revelation that, much like her father, she has no real love in her heart, and Johnny has only been a good-looking opportunity, others of whom will soon surely crop up.

     That is how I remembered the film from seeing it years before when I was in college. A charming film about heterosexual love performed with a kind of wacky zest by gay actors under the helm of a friendly elderly gay man. Growing up in the 1950s, when this film and others like it from the late 1930s and 1940s had become quite popular and there were very few obvious “gay” films, one had to take what was available—particularly if one didn’t really know one was homosexual and hadn’t yet learned how to read coded films.

     What I discovered by watching this film the other day was just how witty the repartee was between the two of them, and how they were already jumping upon one another’s lines long before Howard Hawks encouraged Grant to do with Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. In this case the fast-paced dialogue demonstrates their mutual thinking and evinces their natural rapport. And finally, I perceived for the first time that Edward “Ned” Seaton was busy drinking throughout the film not just because, as a weaker being, he had been forced to “pretend” to work for his father when he might have had a wonderful career as a composer, but that he was a closeted gay man without the possibility of finding another of his kind.

     Of course, I’d read a number of comments here and there that hinted at that fact. But I had never fully been convinced. Not once does Ned ever really talk about sex or even hint that he finds another man to be attractive. Indeed, the first time he meets Johnny—certainly a good-looking hunk who any gay man would immediately notice—he doesn’t appear to respond in the slightest, mumbling on about how much his head hurts (he’s wearing a bandage after an apparent drunken fall the night before) as he hurries off to church.

     I’m still not sure that I’m completely convinced, but given the evidence I uncovered with this viewing of the film, I’m willing to argue that Cukor and his clever writer Donald Ogden Stewart were very subtle in their coding. That I need such convincing might surprise some of my readers given that I seemingly find gay men around many a cinematic frame, but I must reiterate what I already have several times: I’m very fussy about proving my gay hunches. I don’t believe in some mysterious “gaydar” and demand evidence to make a logical case—at least to myself.

     We might begin with a sort of facetious argument, but still an interesting one, and that is Cukor’s choice of actor to play the role. Although Ayres had become famous early in his career for playing the young hero, who has several close male relationships bordering on the sexual with his fellow German soldiers in All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and went on the next year to play a boxer who has a rather queer relationship with his trainer in Iron Man (1931) by 1938 he had played mostly in B movies and had moved on to work for Poverty Row’s Republic Pictures as a director since he had fallen into the second tier of actors. Yet Cukor pulled him out of his growing obscurity for this film, knowing that he’d get a good actor with a very handsome appearance that at the same time wouldn’t compete with Grant’s beauty. Indeed, through his role as Ned he was able to get a second career playing in the Dr. Kildare series.

     Cukor might have chosen anyone to play the role; indeed, his writer Stewart had played it on Broadway a decade earlier. Stewart was an extremely talented writer and wit, a member of the Algonquin Round Table, and would later write the screenplay for Cukor of The Philadelphia Story, but he was not a particularly good-looking. Meanwhile, Monroe Ownsley, a comely man (appearing at the right of the picture above), without any of Lew Ayres’ dark beauty, had played the role of Nick Potter in the 1930 film version of Barry’s play. Obviously, Cukor wanted his Ned to be someone who might appeal to another gay man, and chose carefully, rewarded by Ayres wonderful performance.s several commentators have mentioned, a wealthy drunken boy is a difficult role to play. Generally, audiences have little sympathy for them since they can easily be perceived as the kind of spoiled sons of the rich who feel dreadfully sorry for themselves as they sit around in their father’s luxurious houses. But Ayres’ Ned somehow makes us like him despite his constant inebriation, a bit the way we side with the wealthy alcoholic Arthur in the movie of that name. But whereas, Arthur chases women endlessly, Ned is alone, dreadfully alone except for his conversations with his sister Linda.

     He is drinking to drown out something much larger than boredom and the incessant dominance of an uncaring father. Actually, Hollywood had already established the type earlier on in the movie of the very same year in which the stage version of Holiday premiered in the movie A Woman of Affairs. In that film a wealthy young man, Jeffrey Merrick (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) drinks heavily because he is in love with his best friend, David, a man who eventually marries Jeff’s sister. Jeffrey drinks endlessly, eventually killing himself, because there is no way that he can even talk about his love, something which seems familiar in the character of Ned. In the 1928 movie, it turns out that David, who commits suicide on his wedding night, may in fact have had sex with and contracted syphilis with Jeffrey or another gay man or simply been a terribly active heterosexual visiting the whores, none of which, of course, occurs in Holiday. My point is simply that Jeffrey is certainly similar in his wealth, his behavior, and perhaps his reasons for becoming an alcoholic to Cukor’s Ned. That 1928 film, based on Michael Arlen’s bestselling and scandalous novel, The Green Hat, would have certainly been known by both Philip Barry and George Cukor.

     As the unnamed writer of the Internet magazine The Take points out in his essay, “Queering Classic Hollywood: Why Ned Drinks—Lew Ayres in Holiday,” moreover, that although Ned doesn’t even seem aware of Johnny the first time he encounters him, soon, when Johnny joins Linda and him in the “playroom,” it’s quite clear that he likes him too, realizing that Johnny will have a hard time fitting into his sister Julia’s and his father’s expectations. It’s apparent, beyond that realization, moreover, that he enjoys being in his presence. Significantly, after the intimate scene in the playroom wherein on the stroke of midnight Johnny and Linda share a waltz before a gentle kiss on the cheek, resulting in Linda’s awareness of her own love for Johnny, Ned suddenly reappears.

     At the end of the conversation about the joys of being drunk, brought on by Linda’s query about what it feels like to be fully drunk, Ned senses her emotional state. He asks her what’s the matter, she evading the question with the word, “Nothing.” His response is telling of their intimacy: “I know,” before he adds the question, “Johnny?”

 

                        Linda: Give me some more wine, Ned

                        Ned: He’s in a spot, isn’t he?

                        Linda: Give me some, Ned. [He pours her some wine.]

                        Ned: You can tell me about it, dear.

                        Linda: I love the boy, Neddie.

                        Ned: I thought so. Great, isn’t it?

                        Linda: [chuckles] Great.

                        Ned: Here’s luck to you.

                        Linda: I don’t want any luck. [She stands and moves off.]

 

     This short conversation reveals a couple of important things about Ned, primarily his love of Linda and his deep understanding of her. But he also hints here that he knows something about love, even though he has never mentioned anyone, particularly a woman, in whom he might be and has been interested. But his comprehension of love being a “great” feeling suggests he most certainly has been in love, and given the context one cannot but imagine that it has been a secret love, unknown perhaps even to Linda, a love he is not able to talk about in the Seton house or even in the world in which he exists. 

    Linda’s rejection of his offerings of luck, we recognize, are primarily based on the fact that she knows she cannot succeed in her love without interfering with her sister’s and Johnny’s relationship. But it also might hint that she knows what can happen to a love like Ned’s, a love that could never be spoken of. That kind of love, whether it is because it works against a sister or because it is an unspeakable love that lies outside of the bounds of normality can never be “lucky” or can hope to survive. The spot that Ned realizes Johnny is in, is a “spot” he must have felt in which he has been trapped, for different reasons, many a time.

     Finally, there is an even more revealing scene slightly earlier in which Ned speaks a truth that no one in the family wants to hear him say, and certainly will not comprehend why he is saying it. This time he tells his “unheard truth” to Johnny, when, on orders from Julia and her father, Johnny comes to bring Linda down and attempts to discourage Ned from drinking any further:

 

Ned: You see, Father wanted a large family so Mother promptly had Linda, but Linda was a girl   

         so Mother promptly had Julia, but Julia was a girl and the whole thing seemed hopeless.

         Then, the following year Mother had me. It was a boy and the fair name of Seton would

         flourish. [toasting] Drink to Mother, Johnny. She tried to be a Seton for a while, then gave

         up and died.

Johnny: You're talking out of your hat, Ned.

Ned: I'm not.

     Indeed, Ned is not speaking nonsense, even though, like everyone else, Johnny doesn’t understand what he is telling him. The important thing about his recounting of the family history is not simply to suggest he is the youngest, but that he was the male heir that his father was seeking. What isn’t said is that as the male heir he has been expected to marry, have a family, and carry on the Seton line. The fact that he has not, speaks volumes. It is not because he is an alcoholic, but rather that he is an alcoholic because he is the family embarrassment for not living up to his role, not being of “the marrying kind,” turning out, so he hints, to be a homosexual. To be a Seton is clearly to live up to one’s family responsibilities, something evidently even his beloved mother (loved most fully, it is made evident, by Ned and Linda, not Julia who is her father’s child*) could not live up to. “She gave up and died,” resounds with the voice of Ned as he describes himself to Linda just before the scene in which he discerns her love of Johnny:

 

Linda: What's it like to get drunk, Ned?

Ned: Well, I... how drunk?

Linda: Good and drunk!

Ned: Oh, it's wonderful. You see, you think clear as crystal. But every move, every situation is a   

     problem. It gets pretty interesting.

Linda: You get beaten in the end, though, don't you?

Ned: Sure, but that's okay.

Linda: Where do you wind up?

Ned: Where does anybody wind up? You die... that's okay, too.

Linda: Oh, Ned! that's awful!

Ned: Think so? Other things are worse.

 

    What, we wonder, could be worse than giving up living the way Ned is? We have only a clue, a possibility. When Linda finally perceives that Julia doesn’t love Johnny, and prepares to run off to join him on his overseas holiday with the Potters, she invites and then almost demands that Ned join her, silently arguing that for once in his life he take action against the Seton edicts. He refuses, she promising to come back for him—although we are certain that whenever she might, it will certainly be too late.

      Most observers of this film make the easy presumption that his refusal is only another example of his weakness, that however loveable, he does not have his sister’s strength of will free himself from his prison. But there is another possibility. One might now suspect that he himself may be somewhat in love with Johnny, and that he knows that were he to join his sister he would not only be interfering with her love, while putting himself in harm’s way, reminding himself day after day what she can have and he not. Just as Linda has attempted to save Julia through her love of Johnny, so now perhaps is Ned attempting to save Linda, to allow them to experience their love openly and in a totally pure way. As he has for many years now apparently, he will continue “to give up and die,” knowing that other things, such as putting his own desires before his sister’s, would be far worse. Instead of traveling off with Linda and Johnny to some holiday spot, Ned, as he has cautioned previously, will walk, without running, to the nearest exit—death.

     In the end, it probably doesn’t matter whether or not Ned is a homosexual. He is a man who simply can’t find his way out of the maze into which he was born to meet someone he might love more than he does his sister.

 

*The writer of the essay I mention also expressed a rather original interpretation of Julia, which partially redeems her. Noting that she is an intelligent woman who might, in fact, desire to herself take over her father’s business and successfully run it, she chooses a man as a husband who might help her at least symbolically take control. In a sense, she is a true feminist in a world in which it was still nearly possible to live out such values. Arguably, however, she will surely be able to find a man more capable of fulfilling her desires. And, in that sense, she has never been seeking someone to love, only someone to act as a substitute to her aspirations.