room with a view
by Douglas Messerli
Betty Comden and Adolph Green (screenplay,
based on the novel by Patrick Dennis), Morton DaCosta (director) Auntie Mame
/ 1958
Almost
anyone of a certain age will recognize the 1958 film starring Rosalind Russell,
Auntie Mame, as a gay icon. Many have even cited it as the quintessential
gay camp work of the 1950s. The original book was written by Edward Everett
Tanner III (pseudonym Patrick Dennis) who was openly bisexual, and the play,
transformed into the film by the gay-friendly writing team of Betty Comden and
Adolph Green, was originally written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee,
Lawrence also a gay man (a personal friend of mine). And the film featured
gowns (an important element in this work) by the gay designer Orry-Kelly (incidentally
an early lover of Cary Grant) and the set designer—crucial to this film version—was
the highly respected George James Hopkins who had had an intimate gay
relationship with director William Desmond Taylor who was scandalously murdered
in 1922. The later musical version of Mame was helmed by a gay composer
Jerry Herman.
Although it is not fully documented, some sources have described
director Morton DaCosta (born Morton Tecosky) as being a gay man; and others
describe Coral Browne, who played Vera Charles, as a lesbian. She married gay
actor Vincent Price in 1974, and died shortly before him in 1989.
For all that, however, Auntie Mame, at least superficially, is
not at all an LGBTQ movie. Mame herself (Rosalind Russell), although clearly
unconventional—her brother has long resisted leaving his son Patrick (Jan
Handzlik) with her for that reason—is clearly heterosexual, first a regular
companion of publisher Lindsay Woolsey (Patric Knowles), before escaping the charming
arms of her literary collaborator Brian O’Bannion (Robin Hughes), and later
marrying the wealthy Southern oil magnate Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside
(Forrest Tucker).
True, Mame does seem oddly close to her bosom buddy, stage actress Vera, who stays most nights in Mame’s No. 3 Beekman Place apartment. But it
is clear, despite their deep friendship, they do not share a bed. Besides, Vera
is far too drunk by the end of each evening to ever engage in sex. Mame hints
that she “just loves little boys.”
The nephew Patrick who is placed in her care is a rather bland
heterosexual, growing up (as actor Roger Smith) into a bigoted-babbling-Babcock-like
young man ready to marry the empty headed Gloria Upson (Joanna Barnes) until
Mame corrects his course, leading him straight to the beautiful, intelligent,
and quite clever Pegeen Ryan (Pippa Scott) by the end of the film.
One
her closest friends, teacher Acacius Page (Henry Brandon) appears to be a
pedophile, but even he seems to be interested in both sexes since in his
co-educational classroom boy and girls, as well as male and female
teachers, get naked after yogurt time and play out games of heterosexual “fish”
procreation, evidently the males leaving their “sperm” in the imaginary waters
of the classroom floor to impregnate the female fish.
A
dear friend of Mame’s, who we never see, but who is clearly around often enough
to teach the young Patrick how to properly mix a martini, is Alexander
Woolcott, who appears as a gay man in George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s comedy The
Man Who Came to Dinner, but may have actually just been impotent (a result
of childhood mumps).
Yet
there is one true “fairy” in Mame Dennis’ household, Ito (Yuki Shimoda), the
Asian houseboy, who regularly flutters by with dresses in hand and greets the
terrified Norah Muldoon (Connie Gilchrist) and her young charge as they intrude
upon their first Mame Dennis party.
At that very party to which we are voyeurs,
we observe several lesbian figures, obvious in their male based attire, and
young good-looking gay men in sporty white attire; and the party conversation
to which we are not fully privy obviously includes a discussion of the rebellious
sapphic work Lysistrata, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the
political transformer Karl Marx, and the observation that someone is
“heterosexual,” since these words, among others, appear on the pages of the
notebook Mame has given Patrick to write down what he does not understand.
These “words” matched the cornerstones that I would years later consider at the
moment of coming out, issues involving religion, politics, and sexuality. For
me they came as a package deal, which perhaps Auntie Mame had already
implanted in my brain.
And, of course, in her grand operatic gestures, her larger than life
presence, and her bohemian attitudes toward living, Mame herself personifies
gay life, which is the essence of the work, and why gay men and women have so
long been attracted to this movie.
Jonny Stone, writing in the online magazine Snack sums it up: “There
are a handful of LGBTQ+ characters (mostly friends of Mame’s seen at her
parties), but remember when the film was made. There were never going to be
openly gay, well-rounded queer characters in Auntie Mame. That isn’t to
say the film is inherently straight: it tiptoes around otherness sufficiently
for a film made in 1958, and Mame actively surrounds herself with people who
reject societal norms, pride themselves on being alternative and are, in some
cases, clearly queer. A film that does so, in this era, deserves more credit
for portraying otherness (or at least embracing a liberal, open-minded
lifestyle) and celebrating what makes each of us unique.”
Paul Roen, author of High Camp expressed it more succinctly: the
best way to approach Mame is to think of her as a “disguised, transexualised
version of a very hip, urban, sophisticated male homosexual.”
In
fact, Auntie Mame goes much further than most of the other films of the
day, in that the straight-laced heterosexual world is the villain of the piece,
represented by the “bully” Dwight Babcock (Fred Clark) who pulls Patrick out of
Acacius’ “depraved” classroom and sends the boy off to a private school in
order to make him a boring and bigoted straight man. Along with the Depression,
which sends Mame into a financial spin and off to several jobs—an office
telephone operator, a minor secondary actor, and a Macy’s sales clerk—for which
she has a far too grandiose personality and behavioral traits to properly engage in simple employment;
she and her nephew are not poised to submit to the social order of the day.
She is saved by the kindly, mamma’s boy
Southerner Beauregard Burnside, who finally finds someone in Mame who can stand
up both to his dominating mother and the rapacious home-town girl Sally Cato
MacDougall (Brook Byron), determined to make him her unhappy husband to what
her little brother describes as “the meanest filly in all the South.”
What Mame evidently sees in Beauregard is both his confusion and
sweet-hearted charm, which is enough along with his wealth to make him
desirable. But otherwise, Beauregard is mostly an observer of life, a man determined
to photograph all he sees, as opposed to a man of assimilated experience, and
accordingly, he is whisked away from the story by falling to his death in the
alps as soon as possible so that Mame can continue into the next phase of her
life, centered on saving her boy from the hands of the Babcocks of the world.
She does so by pretense, charming her way
into their empty, small-minded lives by throwing a pre-wedding party where she
serves up e eccentric hors d'oeuvres and an exotic drink, by redecorating her
apartment in a moderne manner similar to what made French comic
filmmaker Jacques Tati so uncomfortable in Mon Oncle (released the very
same year as Auntie Mame the movie), and trotting out first her new assistant,
Pegeen to tantalize Patrick of what a woman might be beyond one whose favorite
talking point is about how she and her girl friends squashed a ping-pong ball
and couldn’t continue their game* and who thinks that books are awfully
decorative.
She then brings on her former seemingly unmarried secretary Agnes Gooch
(Peggy Cass), now heavily pregnant with Brian O’Bannion’s child, followed by
her long time friends Vera and Lindsay, the latter of whom carries with him the
galleys of Mame’s new tell-all autobiography, to which
she hands out chapters to Patrick and others, who reading them recall the truly
wonderful times they have experienced in her presence.
Finally, she announces her action—which totally abrogates all the plans
the Upsons have had to buy the next-door property for Patrick and their
daughter, creating a kind of patio-to-patio sympatico—of purchasing that
property and dedicating her royalties to
a home for refugee Jewish children to be built adjoining the Upson’s home in
Mountebank.
By evening’s end she has so thoroughly reminded Patrick of what his life
was like before meeting Dwight Babcock and so totally offended the entire
Upson tribe that the marriage is over, leaving the unwanted guests no choice but to
grandly exit, utterly offended by the whole affair.
Once again, Mame has had her way and revenge, breaking through another
version of Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt mentality, and carving out a new world of
eccentric difference that can only be compared with the far later Rainbow coalition.
Mame is about inclusiveness and diversity, while the Babcock-Upson world is about the
straight and narrow world of exclusivity and exclusion signified by the
1950-1954 activities of Joseph McCarthy, his attacks on anyone with even casual
leftist (all defined as communism by his followers) ties and torturing the LGBT
world with the “lavender scare.”
It is useful to remember that Edward R. Murrow’s memorable attack on
McCarthy which killed McCarthyism occurred in 1954, only two years before the
original stage production of Auntie Mame in 1956, also starring Rosalind
Russell and featuring Jan Handzlik, Yuki Shimoda, and Peggy Cass. And McCarthy
himself died, of undetermined causes but obviously helped along by the
diminishment of his powers, only one year before the movie.
No one in the movie industry could be blind to the fact that Mame Dennis
stood against all that McCarthy and those who supported his years of terror
stood for. And in that sense, this play/motion picture became almost a symbol
of a possible new liberation, certainly for young viewers such as me,
who all suddenly wished we had an aunt like Mame. I don’t think my grandmother
was perhaps as open-minded as Mame, and she certainly wasn’t as well-do-to or
traveled, but in my willful imagination she became for me a kind of Mame
Dennis, opening up new worlds never before imagined, as Mame declares she will
for Patrick and Pegeen’s son, who she is determined to whisk away on yet
another voyage around the world.
I wanted to believe in someone like Mame, and that was all the play and
movie required, a desire to live in an alternative space from the patriarchal and
heteronormative world that the late 1950s and early 1960s had become. If I
dreamt of a world outside of my already 11-year old sense of despair in facing
4 long years before I might escape to the possibility of college or university
offered, Auntie Mame helped to get there by serving as a glimpse into a
world the people I knew never talked about.
How I now wish I could have communicated just how much this work had subliminally
affected me to the author, Jerry Lawrence or perhaps even the actor Jan
Handzlik who I later met at the Algonquin Hotel party I gave to celebrate Lawrence’s
career, at which Jerry Herman also sang and played the piano.
Not
only the character, but the film and play itself offered so many budding queers
such as me a room with a view unavailable to most ordinary American citizens.
*Gloria’s entire comment is fascinating
in its brilliant recreation of total emptiness: “Bunny Bixler and I were in the
semi-finals - the very semi-finals, mind you - of the ping-pong tournament at
the club and this ghastly thing happened. We were both playing way over our
heads and the score was 29-28. And we had this really terrific volley and I
stepped back to get this really terrific shot. And I stepped on the ping-pong
ball! I just squashed it to bits. And then Bunny and I ran to the closet of the
game room to get another ping-pong ball and the closet was locked! Imagine? We
had to call the whole thing off. Well, it was ghastly. Well, it was just
ghastly.” From Mame and her gang she gets none of the laughs and sympathy the Upsons readily offer up.
Los Angeles, January 24, 2026
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January
2026).
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