George Cukor | Camille / 1936

the all-gay movie

by Douglas Messerli

 

James Hilton, Zoë Akins, and Frances Marion (screenplay, based on La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas, fils), George Cukor (director) Camille / 1936

 

It’s somewhat odd that this highly heterosexual love tale, previously made into a film in 1921 as directed by Ray C. Smallwood and starring Alla Nazimova and Rudolf Valentino, in both versions was created and acted by mostly gay and lesbian figures. If the 1921 film was notably gay through its screenwriter June Mathis and its two bi-sexual stars, the Cukor version was, as film historian Derek W. Le Beau describes it, “was even gayer.” 

     Le Beau, referencing William I. Mann’s discussion of the film in his Behind the Scenes, continues:

“Though the film revolves around a heterosexual romance, many of the key people working both behind and in front of the camera were queer. The screenplay was co-written by Zoë Akins, who was queer. The film was directed by famed “women’s director” George Cukor, who loved a strong female lead (don’t we all!). MGM’s iconic costume designer Adrian—who worked on many other memorable productions, such as 1939’s The Wizard of Oz—created the film’s costumes. Additionally, Garbo’s friends and lovers Mercedes de Acosta and Salka Viertel are also said to have contributed to shaping the production.

     As for queer actors onscreen, we have Garbo as the courtesan Marguerite; Robert Taylor (rumored) as her love interest Armand; Laura Hope Crews as her friend Prudence; and Rex O’Malley as the queer-coded, loyal best friend Gaston.”

    Although I hate the description of Cukor as a “women’s director,” he was well known as a gay man, to which his many Sunday soirees with muscle-bound beach boys and other gay roughs brought to his after-brunch pool parties by Hollywood celebrities attested.

     And although Le Beau describes O’Malley’s Gaston as being “queer-coded,” O’Malley himself, as the Queerplaces site evidences, again quoting Mann, was Cukor’s “favorite sissy,” who played many a notable fey role in films and later lived openly from the 1940s on with radio technician David Vivian. In this film, years after the Film Production code controlled by the prudish Joseph Breen had declared it illegal to even suggest a character was a pansy, Gaston is one of the most notable queer figures of the films of the 1930s, at one point flamboyantly declaring upon the appearance of the film’s comic villain Olympe (Leonore Ulric), costumed in an outrageously campy dress featuring a flock of birds flying from her breast down her bodice to a nest of embroidered eggs near her legs: “Am I dreaming or do see a flock of birds?” Going over to Olympe, Gaston follows with his fluttering fingers the birds down her gown, yelling out “Tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet,” as he goes until he gets to the nest at the bottom: “Oh, would anyone like an omelet?” How MGM got away with this notably pansy scene is inexplicable, particularly since Breen already hated Cukor for his queer figure in the film Out Betters of 1933, one of the films that led to the tightening of the Hays Code.

 

    Le Beau’s listing also forgot to mention that Camille’s producer David Lewis, then partner to director James Whale; and that the film’s hairdresser was Sydney Guilaroff (who designed Louise Brook’s famous “bob” hairdo and later was known as the hairdresser for Marilyn Monroe, as well as Elizabeth Taylor, Judy Garland, Lana Turner, Greta Garbo, Lena Horne, Greer Garson, Debbie Reynolds, Ann-Margret, Barbara Stanwyck, Cyd Charisse, Marilyn Monroe, Katharine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Hedy Lamarr, Kathryn Grayson, Liza Minnelli, Clare Booth Luce, Ginger Rogers, Geraldine Page, Libby Holman, and Jane Fonda and such male stars as Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Fred Astaire, James Stewart, Spencer Tracy and Frank Sinatra). Notable Hollywood “sexual secretary” Scotty Bowers claims to have had sex with Guilaroff as well as setting him up with his later partner, set designer Edwin B. Wallis. And, finally, it should be noted, two years after Camille was released Guilaroff was heralded as the first single male in the US to adopt a son.

    Robert Taylor, the Brad Pitt of the day, playing the handsome lead man, Armand, who would later marry Barbara Stanywyck in what was said to be a “lavender marriage,” was rumored to be having an affair with the film’s set designer Jack Moore. Cukor’s friend Rex Evans, who later sold antiques with his partner Jim Weatherford, performed several bit parts in Camille, and Cukor also maneuvered to hire art director Cedric Gibbons, another gay man.

    I didn't include the villain of this piece in this discussion of the gays, Henry Daniell, who plays the Baron de Varville in my first version of this essay. My friend David Melville Wingrove wrote to me wondering why I had not, since, he argued, Daniell played the role "like a vindictive old queen." Daniell, I responded, was married to Ann Knox. But then I recalled that the writer and wit P.G. Woodhouse wrote of the couple: "Apparently they go down to Los Angeles and either (a) indulge in or (b) witness orgies—probably both. ...There's something pleasantly domestic about a husband and wife sitting side by side with their eyes glued to peepholes, watching the baser elements whoop it up. And what to know is—where are these orgies? I feel I've missed something."

     Is it any wonder that Hollywood gossips loved to describe the production as being “all-gay?”

    For all that, Garbo perhaps gave her best performance, convincing viewers that her character as the courtesan Marguerite Gautier was doomed by consumption and the intrusions of those of her wildly extravagant past, Armand’s father Monsieur Duval (Lionel Barrymore), and the evil machinations of her lover/patron the de Varville to be kept from the loving arms of her innocent, loyal, and utterly naïve would-be lover Armand Duval (Taylor). Garbo was nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award.

    Although her later performance of Ninotchka (1939) would be billed as her first “laugh,” Garbo smiles and laughs numerous times in Camille, particularly in the wonderful scenes in which Armand has coaxed her to live for a few months in his summer cottage, in which the noted courtesan is permitted to return to her humble roots as a farm girl. Her almost giggling girlish demeanor— alternating with sad moments of fate such as the time she and Armand, upon taking a walk, climb one more hill only to view the Baron de Varville’s chateau or after she has been convinced by Armand’s father to give up her dreams of marriage to his son—demonstrate the wide range of Garbo’s acting skills.

  And the final death scene, reshot several times with and without the character’s final speech, winnowed down the simple sentence, "Perhaps it's better if I live in your heart, where the world can't see me," and ending with the Cukor-inspired drop of her hands and sudden transformation into a corpse while Armand holds her close in dreams of their future together is one of the most poignant death scenes in all of motion pictures.

    And finally, for one of the few times in early Hollywood history, the gay and eccentric figures of the film such as the rotund cigar-chomping Prudence Duvernoy (Laura Hope Crews) and the seemingly snobby, definitely queer Gaston are not just shuffled in for a quick laugh for their being so obviously who they are, but remain throughout the film at Marguerite’s side, proving themselves in the end as two of her most loyal admirers.

     It is the heterosexual heroes of this work who suffer, and in Marguerite’s case, die, while the film’s gay characters survive to tell their story. If Breen hoped to wipe cinema clean of any taint of the queer, he certainly lost his battle almost from the beginning with the release of this memorable movie.

 

Los Angeles, September 5, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).