the boy in the
lavender room and the woman in the peach bloom suite
by Douglas Messerli
Stephen Morehouse Avery and Don Hartman
(screenplay, with uncredited contributions by Patterson McNutt, Samson
Raphaelson, and Arthur Richman), William Wyler (director) The Gay Deception
/ 1935
Given how forgotten this 1935 film made by the
already well-respected director William Wyler remains, and how insignificantly
it is still received, perhaps the “gay deception” of its title is the fact that
Wyler’s “trivial” work now reads as an absolutely delightful comic and, more
importantly, an intriguing gem from the 1930s, that ricochets nicely off of his
1953 romantic comedy Roman Holiday.
In
the earlier work the central figure is a Prince who, tired of playing his
official role, escapes for a few weeks to—an excuse the script capriciously
fabricates—"check out how hotels function.” Playing the role of a hotel
bellboy, he meets a secretary playing a hotel guest who, having won a $5,000
sweepstakes ticket, is also hiding out in the hotel in order to discover the
joys of temporary wealth. In the later movie a Princess escapes her royal
duties for a couple of days of ordinary fun on the town in Rome, meeting up
with a journalist who pretends he’s just an ordinary guy determined to see that
the young woman he accidentally encounters enjoys her stay. In this later “fairy
tale,” the Prince Alessandro (Francis Lederer) recognizes Meribel Miller
(Frances Dee) as the rube she really is, and curious to explore the life of a
commoner sticks close to her to help her enjoy her visit to the Walsdorf Plaza
hotel and New York. In Roman Holiday, Gregory Peck, recognizing the
Princess (Audrey Hepburn) for who she really is, hopes to get a story on her.
Accordingly, in most respects the two films are virtually the same
story, and both were immediately popular with their audiences of the day. But
now Roman Holiday is perceived as a classic, while The Gay Deception is
perceived as Emmanuel Levy described it in his 2012 review: “Essentially a
trifle, The Gay Deception is one of William Wyler’s least known and
least distinguished films, a Cinderella romantic comedy, featuring Francis
Lederer as a prince of mythical European kingdom, who poses as a doorman to
court a small-town secretary, played by Frances Dee.”
Granted Lederer and Dee are not in the same acting league perhaps as
Peck and Hepburn, but Lederer had previously appeared as Romeo in Max Reinhardt’s
famous production of Romeo and Juliet, had performed as a central
character, Alwa Schön, in G. W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box, and might have
been a notable Hollywood star were it not for his Hungarian accent and his
untimely death. Frances Dee, who married the very popular actor Joel McCrea,
performed in major roles in several notable 1930s and 40s films such June
Moon, Working Girls, The Silver Cord, Little Women, Becky
Sharp, Of Human Bondage, and I Walked with a Zombie. Both
actors, moreover, are quite charming and effective in this 1935 film.
Yet
most critics evidently missed out on what I experienced watching The Gay
Deception the other day as a superficially far more clever and humorous
film than Roman Holiday, and most definitely a more insidious sexual
comedy. In fact, I describe the earlier Wyler worker as a rather coded film
that most readers have read straight-forwardly as a slight screwball comedy
ending in heterosexual marriage. And in a sense, one might argue that Wyler and
his writers have all been too subtle for their own sake’s, or arguably, too
careful in exploring the darker shadows of their own creation.
Variety,
for example, saw it the work as a “pleasing light film diversion,” while even
recognizing that the acting was quite excellent and that direction was more
than adequate:
“If nothing else, Gay Deception fits
Francis Lederer better than anything he’s done. Here he’s both a bellboy and a
prince. One scene provides him with white tie for contrast. While the story is
totally fanciful, and to some extent a travesty, it has a way of going along as
a little romantic opera bouffe.
William Wyler directed and is a happy selection for this type of story
and cast. Casting has been done with a keen sense of appreciation for humor.
Frances Dee is excellent as Mirabel, the small town girl who cashes $5,000 on a
sweepstake ticket and goes to New York to live like a queen. As Sandro, Lederer
is afforded every liberty as a light comedian by the story and the direction.”
And
even reviewers who have recognized the work as being “an overlooked romantic
comedy,” such as Matt Hinrichs, writing in DVD Talk, still focus
entirely on its surface polish rather exploring the interstices of its often
hastily stitched-together coverlet of a story:
“The Gay Deception's fluffy, at times
ludicrous plot is mitigated by colorful characters, economic storytelling, and
Wyler's precise attention to detail. The film also boasts swanky production
values (that hotel lobby!), slick photography, and likable performances by the
wide-eyed, expressive Dee and the suave Lederer. This, despite plot holes
aplenty and the portrayal of a seemingly sane woman falling for a guy who is,
for lack of a better word, a douchebag. William Wyler's touch was making it
flow, balancing intimate close-ups with nicely composed wide-shots. As
shallowly written as the characters are, the viewer winds up having a lot of
sympathy for them—especially Dee's Mirabel.”
Hinrichs is not the only writer that has somehow seen the bellboy Sandro
(the Prince in disguise) as a “douchebag” of a lover. Letterboxd
commentator Anna Imhof observes:
“Charmed me in the first few minutes (like
Wyler directing with a Lubitsch touch), but as soon as Francis Lederer meets
Frances Dee, he tells her that her favorite hat is ugly and proceeds to destroy
it right in front of her, and I knew right then that I probably wasn't gonna
find their romance very cute.
For
the rest of the film, he talks down to her, even though he is, presumably, a
bellboy, and she is, presumably, a rich hotel guest. Halfway through she tells
him that he's ‘impudent, egotistical, presumptuous and fresh.’ and proceeds to
fall in love with him.
Fifteen years ago or so I might have had more understanding for that
sort of love/hate ‘reasoning.’ but I don't anymore. Fall in love with someone
you like, or don't fall in love at all, that would be my advice! But you see,
he's not really a bellboy, but a prince, so I guess that makes it all okay.”
None of these rightful protestors bother to explore, however, what the
bellboy’s behavior truly reveals about him. It took even me a long while of
head-scratching before I could comprehend what’s wrong—or perhaps I should say,
what’s right with this Cinderella tale, which reads far more like the version
told by Stephen Sondheim in his Into the Woods.
Wyler and his team of excellent writers—the sophisticated playwrights
Samson Raphaelson, and Arthur Richman, and the female producer and stage
director Patterson McNutt among the uncredited contributors—hint quite early on
that we should be prepared for some gender manipulation in this work. Having
won the $5,000 sweepstake prize, Meribel immediately takes the check to her
local bank to cash it. But the bankers attempt to convince her the money would
mean a steady income for life. At 4% interest each week, after all, she can
receive $3.85 each week for life. At $15.40 a month that means she would
receive just $2.60 shy of her monthly salary. We can well understand her horror
in hearing that news. As she tells Mr. Mercer the banker, “You’ve never had to
wash and wear the same silk stockings every day. And cotton step-ins, now have
you?” “I should think not,” he replies, as if a bit confused by the
proposition.
Told that $5,000 would not provide her with hats, cars, clothes, and the
possibility of going to New York and staying in the most expensive hotel suite
for more than a month, she determines to refuse his “swindle” and experience a
joyous 30-day holiday rather than live out the rest of her life in penury.
A
few minutes later, in a near identical re-staging of the bellboy checkup played
out in in the 1933 film Flying Down to Rio—overseen in that film with
the obviously gay disciplinarians Eric Blore and Franklin Pangborn—Bell Captain
Paul Hurst (most famed for playing the Yankee deserter who Scarlett O’Hara
shoots in Gone with the Wind) dresses down his men as like a soldier he
demands their perfection of behavior. When he discovers Bellhop Number 14
(Sandro) is missing, he puts out a call for him, a couple of the other
bellhop’s comment “That guy 14 certainly gets around, his buddy responding,
“Yesterday I saw him making a map of the plumbing,” the first boy continuing,
“He’s probably in the basement counting coal.”
Lest you imagine their words were a metaphor for some Don Juan-like
behavior, Wyler’s camera quickly shifts to the linen pantry where several women
are gathered to fill their carts with bedding.
1st maid: “Number
14, that’s the new boy, the foreigner.
2nd maid: “Oh him.
Did I tell you about him?”
Others: “What?” “No.”
2nd maid: “The
other day I was alone in the bedroom of
the lavender suite.
Number 14 came in. He said show
me how to make a bed.
So I showed him.
3rd maid: “So
what?”
2nd maid: “So he
made the bed.”
3rd maid: “And
then what did he do?”
2nd maid: “Thanked
me and left. That’s all”
3rd maid: “He must
be cuckoo.”
2nd maid: “That’s
what I’m trying to tell you.”
These women are shocked, quite obviously, that
Number 14 has not attempted to be a young Don Juan, has not even hinted at
molesting the 2nd maid. Something is clearly wrong with the boy in the Lavender
room. He is most certainly cuckoo or one of its synonyms, “queer.”
This certainly explains, soon after, his first meeting with Meribel
Miller hinted at in the comments above. As Meribel checks in to the hotel,
several bellboys accompany her to the Peach Bloom suite (the Pink suite having
been available since that is where Miss Cordelia Channing is staying), laying
out her luggage and hat boxes, and each receiving a nice tip. But Sandro,
hiding, stays on to witness Meribel checking out the bed and bouncing up and
down in girlish delight—Sandro’s first clue that Meribel is new to the lavish
life style she has just entered.
He
makes his presence known by asking if he might help her unpack, what a newcomer
might even expect of the hotel staff. In unpacking her hats, he takes out the
first about which he comments, “Oh beautiful, like Springtime.” The second hat
is only “very nice,” when she asks what’s wrong with it, Sandro suggesting
“It’s just a hat.” But it is the third hat, Meribel’s favorite—evidently the
$19.95 special she has long been saving up for in the window of a local Greenville
store—that he reacts to with the words, “This is not a hat, this is a mistake,”
that completely nonpluses her and eventually more than little annoys her. “But
if Madame would permit to suggest…” She is quite furious, in response, as moves
toward her with an even more outrageous statement, “Oh but sometimes we don’t
know what’s best for ourselves.
She
puts on the hat and demands that he say he likes the hat. But he still refuses,
“Madame may have me boiled in oil, but I could still not say I liked that hat.”
Finally, he does the unthinkable, removing the hat from her head, throwing away
the flower, pulling of the rhinestone decoration, and ripping away it’s small
veil before handing back to her as something she might possibly wear.
She is understandably outraged at what he has done to her “beautiful
hat.” At that moment the floorwalker Squires (Ferdinand Gottschalk) rings,
delivering the registration card. Meribel expresses her anger for what the
bellboy has done to her hat, while Sandro not only refuses to back down, but to
attempt to prove the point using Squires’ own judgment, describing the hat it
terms
of its simple angle and line. Even Squires is
forced to agree that the hat is better without the flower, but obviously
apologizes to his guest and moments later, in the elevator with Sandro,
commenting on the fact that secretly “all women’s hats are monstrosities,”
before firing the bellboy.
Of
least importance in this crucial cinematic scene, Sandro has been
linked—despite the inevitable loss of his job, which we quickly discover is
only a temporary inconvenience—with the film’s only obvious queer figure, a man
who spends most of the movie walking around the lobby with decorative objects
such as large floral arrangements, sculptural depictions, and fish for a
presumed aquarium.
Far
more evidently, it establishes Sandro as an effete, a man interested in the
look and design of ladies’ hats, a role that anyone knowledgeable of 1930s
films to date would usually have been assigned to male milliners such as
Franklin Pangborn plays in Mitchell Leisen’s Easy Living even a couple
of years later, after the “sissy” characters had been long-banned, or a subject
mentioned by any number of designers, interior decorators, butlers, or hotel
clerks such as Squires in dozens of Hollywood Pre-Code movies who speak as
"pansies.
Presumably, Wyler and his team got away with it in this case by simply
assuming that most viewers, like the angered commentator in Letterboxd, might
imagine that is how a Prince behaves, even though we don’t yet even formerly
know that he is a Prince at this point in the movie. But let us imagine we
might suspect that he is royalty and therefore privileged with a knowledge of
design and proper dress codes. Certainly, he would still never tell the woman
directly to her face that her hat looks as cheap as its price. When later we
encounter the wealthy Cordelia Channing (Benita Hume) and Lord Clewe (Alan
Mowbray), we perceive that they most certainly might have spoken about her
outré taste behind her back, but never to her face.
Rather, like Cary Grant in Suspicion (1941), who in attempting to
redo Joan Fontaine’s outmoded hairdo describes himself as suddenly becoming a
“mad hairdresser”—Hitchcock’s code for the character’s queerness which puts him
under suspicion for the rest of the movie for having married Fontaine’s
character for money instead of love—it’s clear that Sandro simply could not
contain himself, becoming for the moment a male milliner, a prissy arbiter of
proper dress that by this time has become a central cinema stereotype of a gay
man.
As
if to prove to the viewer that this behavior is not simply about hats, soon
after, rehired as a waiter, Sandro finds himself at odds once more with “the
casaba queen” (what the hotel clerks have determined to be the source of her
wealth). When Mirabel attempts to an order an Alexander, he insists that she
select a dry martini; and when she attempts to order the fried chicken, that
she choose instead the Pigonnet (squab). Given her insistence on fried chicken,
he is once more fired.
What is clear is that Sandro’s refined sensibility will never jibe with
Meribel’s simple tastes. Her heterosexual desires force him to abandon his
pretended identity time and again.
If
we might have begun the film imagining that Meribel is the gay deceiver, an
exuberant deception to allow her a moment in the sun before she returns to her
typewriter, it is Sandro’s pretense of truly caring for Meribel that is the
actual “gay deception” of the movie, perhaps even a self-deception of a gay man
hoping for normalcy in a world that will not permit it in his “royalty.”
At
still another dinner, this time at a restaurant where the menu is in Italian,
he refuses to suggest anything at time when she truly needs him to lead,
Mirabel accordingly ending up attempting to order “Pastroni,” the proprietor of
the restaurant, Pastor’s. Finally, she can laugh at her own gauche
behavior, recognizing that she cannot order up another human being for her
delights.
By
this time, however, she has fallen in love with the man determined to show her
a wonderful night. Subplot events—his capture by the Consul so that he may
reenter the country in a formal shipboard manner—prevent him from continuing
what might have been a joyful evening together, just as his later admission
that he has stolen all his clothing in order to accompany her to a gala
celebration as the Prince he truly is, is interrupted by his arrestment for
impersonating himself. In this world, where Meribel keeps imagining that
everyone has gone mad, the truth cannot be revealed, just as the movie’s
revelation of the character’s sexuality cannot truly be revealed: from her
point view, in fact everyone is crazy, no one being, given her naivete,
who she supposes them to really be.
The
normative plot must move forward to a final recognition of who Sandro truly is,
a reconciliation to the two, and the possibility of marriage—even while we
finally realize if we have broken the code, just as in Wyler’s Roman Holiday
a journalist and a Princess cannot really wed, this Cinderella cannot marry her
Prince, and a young man in a lavender room more interested in making a bed than
laying with a woman upon it and in remaking a hat than in lying about how
lovely it looks upon the head a female acquaintance, cannot really marry an
everyday casaba queen, even if he hates being the Prince and she dislikes
casaba melons.
Los Angeles, March 28, 2023
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March
2023).
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