Bill Condon | Gods and Monsters / 1998

the peace to be himself

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bill Condon (screenplay, based on the book Father of Frankenstein by Christopher Bram, and director) Gods and Monsters / 1998

James Whale (Ian McKellen)—the often forgotten director of the highly successful World War I drama Journey’s End (1930), four of the greatest comic horror films of all time Frankenstein (1931), The Old Dark House (1932), The Invisible Man (1933), and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), and what I believe to be the best cinematic adaptation of the musical Show Boat (1936)—has just been released from the hospital after having a stroke that has left his mind with overwhelming waves of interruptive memories that permit him little sleep as well as affecting his tastebuds which make it almost unpleasant at times to eat.

    His housekeeper, Hanna (a wonderful Lynn Redgrave) who, having worked for him now for 15 years, has always been protective but now behaves like a motherly-nurse in the manner of Elsa Lanchester to Charles Laughton in Witness for the Prosecution, scolding him about his forgetfulness of taking pills, expressing her dismay for inability to properly eat, and—as he peeks out the window at the new lawn boy, Clayton Boone (Brendan Fraser) she has hired in his absence—fearing that he might regress to his old ways of hosting pool parties where he serves as voyeur to the dozens of gay boys he invites over each Sunday—a subliminal attempt, perhaps, to compete with director George Cukor’s notorious gay boy Sunday pool parties held regularly for several decades. Hanna is a devout German Roman Catholic, and is terrified that her beloved Jimmy will not be able to meet up with her in Heaven.

      Perhaps she needn’t worry. The hunky somewhat surly-looking lawn boy—endowed with Fraser’s muscular body, thick neck, and oddly proportioned head topped with a 1950s-style flat-top haircut that makes him look vaguely like Whale’s version of Mary Shelley’s monster—does not appear to be terribly friendly.

     Another fussy friend, Whale’s former lover David Lewis (David Dukes) stops by just to look in on him, reminding Whale also to live a more discreet existence and, of course, to take the pills which make him feel numb to his sensually-perceived life and, even when they are regularly ingested cannot slow down the overload of memories of his childhood, wartime, and directing days.* It also appears that despite their long relationship, an open secret in Hollywood during their time together, that Lewis has grown much more closeted and, given the current success of his film career, is terrified of being publicly outed. Clearly, it was far easier to be gay in the semi-public eye of Hollywood during the 1920s and 30s than it is in the 1950s, the fact of which Whale has not quite yet assimilated and perhaps, given his reclusive life, doesn’t care to take into account.

      Besides, he has an interview scheduled with a young nerdy horror film admirer, Edmund Kay (Jack Plotnick), a figure perhaps based on Whale’s real friend whom he met in the late 1940s, Curtis Harrington, who along with his own mutual friends Kenneth Anger, Gregory Markopoulos and others represented a new gay wave of homosexual filmmakers. It was Harrington who recovered Whale’s seemingly lost film The Old Dark House and promoted Whale’s works at time when he was largely forgotten.  

      In the film however, Kay is a creepily giggly gay boy who’s more than willing to go along with the director’s flirtatious advances, playing strip tease with him, giving up an object of his clothing for every honest question answered. By the time their interview is nearly finished—their conversation interrupted by a small medical episode which requires the sudden appearance of Hanna who speedily sends the visitor away—Whale has stripped him down to his underpants.

     Surely he knows, as do we, that the all-too compliant kid, is not the man for him. And the director turns his attentions for the rest of the film upon Clayton Boone, a slightly homophobic straight boy with an eager mind but a dumb innocence. And we know almost from the beginning, as Roger Ebert notes, that he will never completely engage in the gay sexual game that Whale willingly and sometimes unknowingly attempts to trick him into.

     It’s not that the hunky young man doesn’t fall for the most obvious of ruses. Before we can even get adjusted to the idea if their communicating with one another, Whale has already whisked the ex-marine off to his art studio to engage him in a sitting for a drawing, head only of course, assuring the dim-wit that he has utterly no interest in his body while quickly covering up a beefcake magazine on a nearby table.

     Ebert bemoans the fact that it is unlikely that the two will ever wind together in bed: “We never ever believe there's a possibility that anything physical will occur between them—and we should, I think.” But that simply reveals what I often have observed as Ebert's lack of understanding about gay life. For as any gay man of a certain age realizes, it is the witty art of verbal seduction that is far more important to someone like the central character of this movie than is their mutual ejaculation or even a good-old fashioned fuck. How close can he get to sexual contact without endangering his life is the issue at hand. Straight boys are generally more attractive than gay ones who go to bed with older men out a myriad of reasons that has nothing at to do with attraction of even the possibility of love—financial or social gain, a father compulsion, sexual compulsiveness, or simple pity—most of which would never draw someone like Clayton Boone into the fantasy of Whale’s sexual web. 

     Quite often Boone, played beautifully by the shape-shifting Fraser, has utterly no clue to what is happening. And he himself becomes fascinated with simply rubbing up with someone he might have imagined meeting in Los Angeles when he first moved there from Joplin, Missouri. And Whale, the perfect blender of pop culture and high art, is the ideal figure to attract the basically uneducated “monster.”

   Boone watches the Frankenstein films with the original wonderment and accepting humor of the early audiences as opposed to his mocking and anxiety-ridden 1950s friends who have replaced the movie’s explicit monsters with far vaguer ones such as the Communists or faggots, which Boone’s girlfriend and male drinking partners all immediately recognize Whale to be—not because they have any knowledge of him or of his films, but because anyone who is an artist seeking a male model just has to be a queer.

      Suddenly the adult child still cutting lawns for a living finds himself on the outside of his tough-talking bar friends such as his supposed girlfriend Betty (Lolita Davidovich) who suddenly rejects his sexual advances. He finds himself, for the first time, in the role of a cinema critic, attempting to speak about something of which he has never imagined he might. He still doesn’t have the words, but he’s already done some research at the local library about Whale himself. He has become a student of a world he can only grasp at, without ever fully comprehending. If he still can’t describe the art he observes, he knows what he likes. 

      Yet Whale, through his trance-like verbal expressions of his past—a poverty-stricken childhood in the British midlands, the stinking trenches of World War I, and his work on the Frankenstein films—all further engage the slow learner with a world he has never before even imagined. Particularly moving is Whale's description of his lover and his death to German shelling in the no-man’s land just a few yards away from him and fellow soldiers who are now all forced to watch his body spiked up against the barb-wired tangle for weeks before their transfer (in real life Whale was captured by the Germans and imprisoned in Holzminden Officers' Camp).

      And of course Whale is very much interested in his lawn boy’s body. Invited, surprisingly, to a lawn party by George Cukor given in honor of Princess Margaret, the director at first sees the event as nothing but a hoot, but eventually realizes that by asking Clayton to become his chauffeur he can finally best Cukor. The party is perhaps the most comic scene in the movie, moving close to camp when the Princess, standing beside Cukor, mistakes Whale for Cecil Beaton; Whale brilliantly allays her apologies by introducing her to his gardener (Clayton), suggesting that “he has never met a Princess, having known only queens,” simultaneously diminishing the Princess’ royal status while jabbing Cukor directly in the gut with evidence that he can still attract the likes of such a handsome young lad as Clayton. 

     But Cukor’s current male “secretary,” it turns out, is none other than Edmund Kay, the creepy horror fan, who in fact has been behind Whale’s invite, mostly for the opportunity a photographing Whale with both Boris Karloff and Elsa Lanchester, the creator with his monster and the bride. One can only wish that such events happened in real life!

     In the film, a sudden winter rain wipes away the Beverly Hills sun, and Whale and his still mystified driver are forced to return home, Clayton now so wet that he has no choice but to don a loose sweater from his host’s closet and remain with a towel around his waist. 

    Finally having his prey almost nude while caught up once more in his youthful memories, the creator of Frankenstein attempts to do away with his monsters by forcing Clayton once again to pose, this time in a gas mask from World War I, totally covering up what Whale has proclaimed to be the perfect head. Finding it difficult to breathe in the mask, and beginning to truly fear for Whale’s sanity, the young man demands the mask be taken off, as Whale moves in for the metaphorical kill, putting his hands upon Clayton’s naked shoulders and grabbing for his suddenly exposed cock.

   Predictably, his young friend explodes into violence pushing the old man to the floor, jumping upon him, and preparing to slug him into unconsciousness—precisely what Whale is seeking, someone to help him into death.

     The boy, however, is no longer the ex-marine he used to be, having admitted just previously that he never served in Korea, his appendix bursting in camp, after which he was sent home. At the moment of this battle, Clayton pulls back and breaks down into the tears of a horrified child, even the slightly bruised Whale describing him as being simply a pussy-cat.

     To calm him and to help explain his situation, Whale shows him all the drawings he has “done” over the weeks of Clayton's “modeling.” The large sketching pads contain nothing but broken lines. Just as he can no longer eat or sleep, Whale can no longer draw or paint, or, most importantly, coherently think. He seeks death since nearly of the pleasures of this sensualist’s and intellect’s life have been diminished, lost in the electrical storm in his brain recreating his past.

    Clayton, like the monster, picks up his friend, his would-be creator and tucks him into bed.

    In the morning, Clayton, who has stayed the night on a living room couch, awakens to find an envelope addressed to him, inside the original drawing of Frankenstein by the head designer of the film, a gift from Whale to his beloved lawn boy.

    A few moments later, Clayton discovers Whale’s body in the swimming pool, face down, where he has apparently drowned himself in the night. Clayton attempts to rescue him, removing the body from the pool to no avail, Hanna running toward him to protest, knowing that her Jimmy in fact is dead. She suggests that Clayton leave immediately before she calls the police so that he will not become a suspect. But he observes that they will surely wonder how she got his body out of the pool.   

    Accordingly, in grand Guignol manner, they are forced to toss their Jimmy back into the water, where this time his body floats into position face up. 

      In real life, the police actually did seek out whether there might have been foul play, but ultimately listed his death as accidental. In truth, Whale had left a suicide note, but ex-lover Lewis, obviously truly nervous at this point about public scandal, withheld it, revealing the message only near his own death decades later. The note read, according to Kenneth Anger:

 

“To ALL I LOVE,

 

Do not grieve for me. My nerves are all shot and for the last year I have been in agony day and night—except when I sleep with sleeping pills—and any peace I have by day is when I am drugged by pills.

     I have had a wonderful life but it is over and my nerves get worse and I am afraid they will have to take me away. So please forgive me, all those I love and may God forgive me too, but I cannot bear the agony and it [is] best for everyone this way. The future is just old age and illness and pain. Goodbye and thank you for all your love. I must have peace and this is the only way.

 

— Jimmy”

 

    I wish this otherwise moving film might have ended with that quote instead of a scene decades later with Clayton Boone is his living room with his wife and child, the boy watching Frankenstein for the very first time before being sent off to bed. In the film, Clayton leaves the house and stomps through puddles of a rainy backstreet in the manner of Boris Karloff’s monster as if he were performing the dance without music from Singing in the Rain.

     I’d like to imagine, even if it may be unlikely, that Whale might have changed Boone’s life in ways far more significant than such a campy gesture to the still neglected giant.

    But ultimately I see this film as being not centered upon the education of a straight bumpkin nor Whale’s flirtation with him, but about a gay man who refused—no matter what the decades of his life put up as barriers before him—to lose his sense of sexual and intellectual difference. If his parents sent him off the work in a factory, he found a way to escape it through art. If the Great War, as he put it, wiped out nearly an entire generation, he found love in the trenches and survived its destruction. If the public sought out larger than life moral fables to demonstrate man’s folly in imagining himself to be a god, Whale managed to have his homosexual geniuses create monsters than revealed man’s inhumanity far more than their monstrosities. When age made him no longer as attractive to others, he brought beauty into his own backyard, enjoying it from the vantage of an unabashed voyeur. When his body began to fail him, he engaged in an imaginary romance with a man who finally did in fact hold him in something that at least gestured toward love. When there was nothing left he straightforwardly greeted death. The peace to be himself was all he ever sought.

 

*In real life Whale broke up his 22-year romance (1930-1952) with Lewis when—after a tour of European museums and visit to a Paris gay bar where he met a young gay “hustler” (as director Curtis Harrington described him), Pierre Foegel and hired him as his chauffeur—he determined to bring Foegel to the US to live with him. He did so, eventually installing Foegel as an attendant at a gas station he owned. Indeed Foegel seems very close to the character played by Brendan Fraser in Bram’s fiction and in the film.

 

Los Angeles, November 11, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).