John Carey and Adam Darke | Forbidden Games: the Justin Fashanu Story / 2017

a natural man trapped by conventions

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Carey and Adam Darke (directors) Forbidden Games: the Justin Fashanu Story / 2017

 

For US citizens who are not involved in soccer, the name Justin Fashanu probably means very little, but for the British he was, and for some still is, a remarkable footballer who was the first black player to be offered a £1m fee to join the renowned Nottingham Forest team coached by the then highly respected Brian Clough.

     Fashanu, who had long been recognized as a young footballer in the county where he had grown up, Norfolk, with his younger brother John, had become famous through the British telly when he scored a nearly impossible goal against Liverpool by kicking the ball into the left corner, slipping it deftly beyond the goalie’s reach, for which he won the 1980 BBC Goal of the Season Award.

      Like dozens of other footballers, past and present, Fashanu, as Screendaily critic Fionnuala Halligan notes, “… was flash, and he liked to splash the cash, a charming, natural talent….” And like many another soccer star, once he reached the premier leagues, his scoring slowed disastrously and led to a serious knee injury that might have argued against him ever playing again. A trip to California, where he suffered through a great deal of reparative surgery and strenuous restorative exercise—the costs for which nearly bankrupted him—allowed him to begin replaying the game, but never with the aplomb of his early career.

      Meanwhile, Justin’s beloved brother John who was nearly fathered by Justin as he was growing up, far less talented that the elder, continued to work his way up the leagues, playing soccer with lesser teams, but becoming a solid scorer who came to be respected by all.

      If Justin Fashanu’s story were nothing more than this, it might have represented yet another version of the often-told stories of figures such as Norman Maine in A Star Is Born or even Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, the latter of whose elder brother asked him to throw a boxing match (Fashanu began his life as an upcoming boxer), ruining his career and life.

      Yet Fashanu’s career as a footballer is almost insignificant given all of the myriad other difficulties he and his brother John faced. First of all, when their Nigerian father left their mother Pearl to return to Africa, leaving her in near poverty and unable to raise her large family, she left the two boys at a Barnardos orphanage, while taking her other two children into her own home.

      The young boys could never comprehend nor forgive her for that act, despite the fact that they eventually became foster children to what apparently was a loving and sustaining white family, Alf and Betty Jackson, in the small Norwich village of Shropham. Throughout their growing up Pearl attempted to explain to them that what she had to offer was far less that the life they were living; yet, even as she puts it, Justin never could accept it, the facts simply not registering in his brain.

      As the only two black children for miles around, Justin and John, we can be certain in those days of institutionalized racial hatred, felt deeply isolated, to say the least, particularly living within a world that when Justin and his brother began to play soccer for Norwich filled with the air with racist epithets, along with banana skins they regularly tossed onto the playing field.

     When his career began to nosedive, moreover, Justin became a born-again Christian, preaching and proselytizing, somewhat hypocritically we can perceive in hindsight, for a religion that were he not still a kind of celebrity, might otherwise have refused him entry to their congregation. His sister, who claims she was not even a Christian, remembers Justin even trying to convert her.

     Several times throughout this film, interviewees and even the directorial narrators, suggest that Justin was simply unknowable, a person who one day could be open and personable, but the next distant and inscrutable.

     I am not at all surprised by this given the fact that underneath these numerous levels of pain and confused identity, Fashanu was also gay, not just passively or occasionally as a man who was abashedly attracted to other men, but as a kind of predator, who loved rent boys and even had affairs with an MP. Although Fashanu’s behavior was not generally known at that time, his fellow on-field players clearly knew he was gay, particularly since he often brought some of his younger lovers into the dressing rooms.

       Much of his problem at Nottingham had to do with highly respected Clough, who was also homophobic and wouldn’t even let Fashanu work out with his fellow players. As the directors also make clear through their rewinds of many of the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s speeches, she and most of her British Empire were still highly homophobic, lashing out, particularly with the advent of the AIDS epidemic, about their hatred of all things homosexual, disparaging even the idea that proper people might allow a gay man even to enter their homes. The laws, moreover, which might be said to be slightly more open than the days that even being suspected of having gay sex might have landed you in jail, still weighed unequally homosexual and heterosexual behavior. The legal age permitted for heterosexuals was 16, while it was higher for gays, and sex with someone of 16 was still subject to years of imprisonment. 

      In 1990, desperate for money to pay off his debts, Justin Fashanu leaked the story to one of the most vicious of English tabloids, The Sun, that he was gay, making him the first British footballer then who has ever openly admitted his homosexuality.

      The terrible backlash which he might have foreseen, but claims he could not have imagined, made him later to backtrack some of his comments, claiming after that he was bisexual and, at one point, desperately in love with actress Julie Goodyear, while Justin also—in the terrible days when Prime Minister John Major was Leader of the Conservative Party at a time many of his party members were being accused of having homosexual affairs—made his own allegations against parliamentary members.

      John, by this time an honored soccer play, refused to any longer even speak to his now endlessly beleaguered brother. Although Justin continued to hope that one day the two would again sit down to have a loving conversation, John reports on screen: “The closer the blood, the bloodier the situation.”  Joining his voice with the millions of homophobes Justin had had to deal with, John added his taunts “I wouldn’t want to get changed in his vicinity.”

       Even a little empathy might help us to realize why this man was, as the directors summarize, “never at peace.” With all the levels of hate leveled against him, by the nation, his fellow players, and even his brother, with rejection to his way of thinking by his father and mother, and now the many teams for which he had since played, it must have seemed like a lovely respite when he was invited to coach youth soccer in Maryland, where, as the police where later to remind him, “Homosexual acts are illegal.”

       Fashanu, as a dear friend tells us, loved teaching, and seemed to be settling in quite nicely until a young 17-year-old, having shared with others and evening of partying at Justin’s Ellicott City apartment, reported to police that he had been raped, after probably having been drugged by the ex-soccer player. The police visited Fashanu’s home, but did not arrest him. And the film suggests that the young man in question was well-known by his peers as a habitual liar, who made stories up so often that they literally ignored him.

      Like director Roman Polanski—although under different circumstances, Polanski’s sexual partner having been only 13, while the boy Fashanu was said to have raped was 17—Justin fled back to England, where after visiting a local gay sauna, he was found dead on May 2, 1998 of strangulation in a small garage, evidently a result of suicide. He was only 37 years of age.

      While John Carey and Adam Darke’s understated telling of this sad tale asks far more questions—a bit disingenuously I suggest—that it provides answers, it may help us see through to some truths about Justin Fashanu, and is certainly a good starting place for an understanding of this complex athlete. I can only wish for something like a full tragic opera or sincere drama worthy of this man’s mostly innocent dilemmas. Not only were the “games,” both athletic and sexual forbidden this haunted man, but his existence seemed forbidden by the prejudices of the time.

 

Los Angeles, July 10, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2020).

 

Pascal Tagnati | Le fan de base (The Fan) / 2017

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Gerald McCullouch | All Male, All Nude / 2017

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Matt Tyrnauer | Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood / 2017, general US release 2018

up for anything

by Douglas Messerli

 

Matt Tyrnauer (writer and director, based on Scotty Bowers’ Full Service) Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood / 2017, general US release 2018

Scotty Bowers Full Service (New York: Grove Press, 2012)

 

I should imagine that a great many individuals who have read Full Service—Scotty Bowers revelation of the sexual proclivities of Hollywood movie stars, directors, and other workers in the film industry—or those who have seen the lesser-detailed follow-up documentary film, Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood, might see the writer and performer to be a kind of sordid hanger-on whose “shocking secrets” about the sex lives of celebrities are not only lurid but perhaps fabricated, particularly since he waited until their deaths when they could not themselves respond. Full Service was published by Grove Press in 2012, and Matt Tyrnauer’s film was released in 2017, with a general US release the following year. Bowers died in 2019 at 96 years of age, having outlived nearly everyone about whom he wrote except his wife, Lois J. Broad, who died a year before him.

      First of all, there is just the incredible audacity of his actions, providing boys and girls, along with himself for both sexes, often out of a trailer attached to the gas station where he worked on Hollywood Boulevard. There her “serviced” noted figures such as George Cukor, Cary Grant, Randolph Scott, Katherine Hepburn, Cecil Beaton, Tyrone Power, John Kelly (Orry-Kelly), Walter Pidgeon, Vincent Price, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Leonard Spigelgass, Laurence Olivier, Noël Coward, Spencer Tracy, Rupert Allan, Ramón Navarro, Charles Laughton, John Carradine, David Carradine, Rock Hudson, Montgomery Clift, Anthony Perkins, Roddy McDowall, Somerset Maugham, Raymond Burr, Tennessee Williams, Brian Epstein, and J. Edgar Hoover, to name only a few—these all with same-sex partners—as well as arranging women for Errol Flynn, and personally “tricking” (a word Bowers uses hundreds of times in his book) Bette Davis, Vivien Leigh, and Lana Turner, as well as Ava Gardner in a threesome.

      Although he regularly found boys for most of his homosexual clients, Bowers himself tricked many of them, in particular Spencer Tracy. On top of this, his clients included numerous Hollywood lawyers and visiting businessmen for many parts of the US. That he did this all without a fee will surely put his actions beyond the realm of belief for many.

   Others will equally find Bowers disreputable simply for “tainting” the image that for years of Hollywood front men and women as well as the celebrity magazines had burnished in order to provide Hollywood actors with a credible cover for their private sexual interests, often marrying off gossip-exposed actors such as Rock Hudson and Charles Laughton into relationships with women who were vernacularly described as “beards.” In other cases, publicists created elaborate romantic fictions for their studio favorites such as the supposedly frustrated love affair between Tracy and Hepburn, a couple who in real life often couldn’t bear to be in each other’s company. Tracy, in particular, would get drunk many a night in a cottage loaned to him by Cukor, encouraging Bowers to suck him off after hours of drunken complaint. In short, these readers and viewers argue that Bowers has taken away much of the glamour that the stars signified..

     That Bowers made life-long friendships with a great number of these figures, and was regularly invited into their homes and on trips these celebrities made to places such as Hearst Castle as a friend, and later worked with them as a bartender—his source of employment after he left the gas station—will simply seem beyond belief to some.

     And finally, there will be many who suggest that the very quantity of people he lined up for the stars and others—in the film, for example, Bowers estimates that for Hepburn alone “I fixed her up with every bit of 150 girls”—will make straight-laced normative-behaving individuals feel that he is exaggerating if nothing else.

     Even my husband Howard, when I explained to him what I was reading, said that the book sounded like loop-tape of Hedda Hopper and her ilk.

     I argue that not only do I believe nearly everything Bowers relates, both off and on screen, but highly admire someone who from childhood on—he claims that as a 14 year-old-kid he hooked up one of his lesbian teachers with a fellow girl classmate, and that he willingly allowed a neighbor to jerk him off and shared the bed of numerous priests without regret—was open to multiple forms of sexuality that was nearly inconceivable within the McCarthy era bent of uncovering Communists and sexual deviants in the period during which he primarily worked.

     As the documentary argues several times, Scotty offered an invaluable service for the real human beings behind the masks of the screen legends whose every smile and gesture was under daily scrutiny. And the fact that he did it while working as a lowly gas station attendant, a bartender, and personal friend of these figures trapped in the gaze of millions, meant that he could function in a time when the discovery of their behavior would mean the end of their careers and possible imprisonment in plain sight. He kept a little book of addresses and telephone numbers but never shared his client’s names with anyone, sometimes not even with the friends with whom he hooked them up. Even when the tabloids were about to reveal his sexual tryst with Turner and Gardner, Bowers refused the offer of money and admission of the facts. His “full service,” he recognized, depended entirely upon trust.

      Just for the perpetual doubters—and there have been a number of reputable men and women who have confirmed Bowers’ bedtime stories—most of the actors and actresses he names as homosexual, lesbian, and bisexuals come as little surprise to those in the know. As one of those “not in the know,” but who has extensively read about US cinema and those who worked in it, I knew of and had written about Grant and Scott’s longtime relationship, read extensively of or had encountered several hints about the homosexuality of Cukor, Orry-Kelly, Power, Beaton, Pidgeon, Price, Spigelgass, Olivier, Navarro, Burr, and Laughton. Most of them were Hollywood “open secrets.”

     Others such as Perkins, Hudson, Clift, McDowall, Maugham, Epstein, Williams, and Hoover, along with friends Bowers mentions (Bill Haines, Sascha Brastoff, etc.) have been outed for years through Hollywood histories, biographies, and memoirs.

     The only surprises to me were Hepburn and Tracy, but even here I had heard rumors. I’m sorry for those in Boise, Dubuque, and Fair Haven who are hearing about this for the very first time; but also, I’m pleased, finally, that the genie-in-a-bottle has escaped. Artists of all mediums seem to be particularly inclined to LGBTQ activities. And actors, in general, are well represented by the rainbow. And if that rubs some of the sheen of what some define as “glamour,” we’re better off. If the glamorous can only be limited to heterosexuality, then I want no part of it. Indeed, it seems rather homophobic to me to describe “normative” sex as something more intriguing than LGBTQ sexuality, as well as simply not being true. I’ll take Ramón Novarro, Cary Grant, and Montgomery Clift any day over Clark Gable (who had the original Gone with the Wind director, Cukor, fired because he couldn’t work with a fag; but who, it is rumored, was perfectly happy to share the beds of gay directors and producers in his early, hardscrabble days), John Wayne, or even Brad Pitt. I’m sorry, Rhett, but I don’t give a damn. But then what do I know? I like gay men. Nonetheless, I’m certainly glad to hear that Hepburn wasn’t mooning all those years over the sexually dissatisfied, already-married Tracy.

       As for the sheer inexhaustibility of both Bowers and his clients’ sexual appetites, I don’t have an answer except to recall that during my time as a young gay man in New York City I should imagine that I had sex one or two times with different folks daily for a year. Of course, as I aged that slowed down, as I am sure it did for Bowers’ celebrities as well. He claims to have stopped serving the community after Hudson’s death of AIDS, suddenly fearful that he might be connecting up individuals for sexual encounters that may lead to their deaths. But one might also suggest that many of his best friends and customers were simply dying of age and that with the gradual change of sexual attitudes younger actors didn’t fear the judicial system even if they might still worry about the fans. Moreover, Bowers brought his own wife, Lisa, to the house on Kew Drive he inherited from his former male lover, Beech Dickerson, signifying perhaps that he was ready to retire from active service.

      Lisa, clearly still in love with Bowers in the movie version, seems gutsy if a bit puritanical in her morals, not at all sure that she might have married Scotty if she had knew of his sexual past, and somewhat nonplused by the fact that she has been asked in her old age to sing—Bowers met her a club in which she was performing as a singer—in a gay bar. 

     Bowers himself remains utterly unapologetic for what Matt Tyrnauer and commentators such as Peter Bart, Tony Charmoli, Stephen Fry, Robert Hofler, David Kuhn, and others describe as Scotty’s “pansexuality.” Scotty, himself, summarizes his sexual plurality in his declaration: “You know me. I’m up for anything...anytime.” As Godfrey Cheshire adds in his review on the Roger Ebert site: [Scott was] “Also, perhaps, hypersexual: Scotty estimates he turned two or three tricks a day, seven days a week, for nearly 40 years. No wonder Dr. Alfred Kinsey discovered and used him in researching male and female sexuality (Scotty says he took the good doc to some Hollywood orgies and could tell he was turned on).”

      In the end Tyrnauer’s documentary spends far too much time on book signings for Full Service and parties for Scotty’s 90th birthday in 2013. The fact that Bowers deeply regrets his inattention to his first wife (to whom he was never legally married) and the death through a botched abortion of his beloved daughter is almost ignored in the movie version, while it is repeatedly mentioned in his own memoir. Indeed, Tyrnauer uses the family home to which Scotty seldom returned merely as a location where Bowers picks up phone calls and piles up some of the debris he has since accumulated in that house, several garages, and his Kew Drive cottage, having become late in his life a genuine packrat.

       If that does not exactly detract from my admiration for him as an early facilitator for open sex, it seems as beside the point as his descriptions in Full Service of Hepburn’s terrible complexion and his comments on certain of his clients’ interest in S&M, “golden showers,” or performing as “doo-doo queens”—although I must admit that I found it fascinating that during his sex with the august head of the FBI, Hoover was dressed in drag.  But then these facts also reveal, as Kinsey argued, just how diverse we are as sexual beings, and that such desires which to some may seem as deviant and perverse are perfectly natural to a wide range of our species.

      The documentary also doesn’t name all those men and women Scotty names in his book. But it does show some of the handsome young ex-marine’s friends who he hooked up with his Hollywood acquaintances. And at one point we see a brief porn tape of Scotty receiving fellatio—a sight to behold. Tyrnauer also nicely mixes in appropriate clips from Hollywood films when referencing some of Scotty’s clients.

      Still, I’d suggest anyone visiting this documentary for the first time should read Scotty Bowers’ Full Service beforehand. There’s rumor of a full movie in the making, to be directed by Luca Guadagnino. It will be interesting how the Hollywood of today comes to terms with its own history.

      After all, Bowers opened the book rather widely so that we might be able to better access the needs and desires of those who the studio heads hired to pretend they were just like everyone else. Maybe they were, but even today too few people want to admit what normality might include instead of excluding.

 

Los Angeles, November 21, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (November 2020).

 

 

 

 

Mark Gasper | An Empty Bed / 1988

no other way

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mark Gasper (screenwriter and director) An Empty Bed / 1988

Mark Gasper’s hour-long film An Empty Bed begins with the evocative strains of composer Glen Roven’s score and a long tracking shot moving from a disheveled bed in which an old man, Bill Frayne (John Wylie) awakens, while in the background we hear news and weather in a radio along with the endless ticking of a clock. The camera sweeps quickly through another room where we see many antique photographs, obviously of another generation of the time when the man was still a child, before the camera moves back into the bedroom as Bill slowly sits up, has a coughing fit, stands, staggers to the living room, and takes out a cigarette—obviously the cause of his coughing

     Suddenly, as if from an echo chamber we hear a voice—who we later in the film come to realize is Pete’s wife, Corinne (Harriet Bass) saying “I think it’s great that the two of you were roommates”—followed by heavy laughter in the same in which a much younger version of himself (Mark Clifford Smith) is sitting with his even younger lover Peter (Conan McCarthy) who presents him with a housewarming gift, since they apparently have just moved in, of a lovely green-glass ashtray, Peter saying “This is our apartment now. We’re going to keep it neat.”

     As the camera pans quickly across the room we recognize that it is now not kept so very neat the elderly Bill picking up the same ashtray and taking it into the kitchen where it empties it into the trash. He lifts a bottle of whisky and carefully marks the line of what is left it the bottle. We can guess that his doctor has ordered that he delimit his alcoholic intake, and we later discover that he has a couple of years earlier had a heart attack.

     Accordingly, we perceive what will be the structure of this bittersweet tale that joggles us between the empty present and a more joyful past, forcing us to adjust to the obvious changes that have occurred in this old man’s life.

     I describe Bill as an old man with some consternation since, having been forced to retire early only a couple of years earlier, as we are later told, the character is probably a few years younger than I am today, watching this film at the age of a few months shy of 74. And I was struck by this film, for that very reason, in a way I might not have been just a few years earlier. This is the story of a man who is nearing the end of his life in total contemplation of how he has ended the lonely cocoon in which he exists. How did that joyfully shared moment of intimate laughter and the passionate sexual pleasures of Bill and Peter result in the carcass of a lonely man crawling each morning out of bed to walk around New York’s Greenwich Village in search of answers to that very question.

      In our COVID-quarantined days of early 2021 I cannot even easily walk the streets, and certainly in the vast stretches of Los Angeles would find little to remind me of friends and events in my own and husband’s life. My contemplations of the past are almost all limited now to what I am just doing, watching films and writing about them. But fortunately, unlike the figure in Gasper’s An Empty Bed, my lover sits just a few feet away from me on our somewhat neatly kept couch and shares our bed.

      Back in the late 1940s and 1950s in which Bill and Peter’s early days seem to be located, gay life was far more difficult not only because of societal strictures and general homophobia, but because of how young men and women had been conditioned to define and express themselves. Young college boys like the Bill we encounter in one of the old man’s memories were not only “expected” to marry and procreate by the parents and societies with whom and in which they lived but because of their own definitions of themselves. Bill comes home each summer from Boston University to spend pleasant picnicking days with his girlfriend Patty (Lenore Andriel), who cannot understand why he keeps returning to Boston when he might remain home, marry her, and attend the local State college. Bill assures her of his love but expresses his enjoyment also of Boston, and we can only suspect that despite the conservative traditions of that city, he is exploring there something he might not be able to at home. What we do eventually perceive is that the next summer, after graduation, he does return to Patty.

      But even when he meets Peter in New York, they date not in a gay bar but in a sort of Beat Club, which has a back open terrace in which to perform poetry and smoke dope, and several side rooms where both heterosexual and homosexual couples can explore their love. They shared their meals in local diners such as the Gus’ local Greek diner, where Bill still eats, ordering up favorites with far less fat and salt that he and Peter shared in their hearty celebrations of consumption.

      We get only a few glimpses of their life together, but we surmise that their friendship was not as easy one, attempting a monogamous relationship at a time when gay couples had few other shared models. Their age difference, Peter obviously the younger man who is unemployed and Bill working for a talent agency, creates tensions. On Bank Street, standing outside the Waverly Inn, he recalls a dinner in which Peter expressed his feeling of having no connection to his lover’s life. “You lie to your mother. No one at the agency even knows that I exist.” Feeling trapped in domesticity, he wonders, with Bill paying all his costs, whether he is simply someone to keep his companion warm at night, characterizing himself as being something close to a gigolo.

      In the elder Bill’s flashes of memory we gather, near the end, Peter had gotten deeply involved in drugs, now needing his partner’s money in order to feed his habit, money that Bill often no longer had or wanted to give him.

      Yet their love, despite its rocky times, seemed to abide which the old man’s stare through a restaurant window at a handsome young man, who clearly reminds him of young lover, reveals. Evidently, however, Peter finally demanded his freedom. And unlike today in which it might mean him taking up with another gay acquaintance or pickup, it ends in a heterosexual marriage, a move to Florida, and children, with whom Bill forlornly is kept abreast, the couple visiting him on a trip to New York which occasioned the comment by Peter’s wife that we heard in the first few frame of the film. Obviously, Peter has felt no need to tell her of the real nature of their “roommate” days.

      As the older Bill shuffles slowly through the Village streets we realize gradually that he has no longer any existence except in that temporarily glorious past, even if he realizes that it might have been worse. Running into an old friend Elmer (Thomas Hill) he discovers that since leaving the agency to represent his own clients Elmer has now suffered bankruptcy—as Bill perceives when his former friend checks his balance he has only $13.00 left in his account—and must continue to work in the hopes of finding enough money just to survive. He has apparently been divorced by his wife.

       Later, coincidentally, he runs into an elder version of his early girlfriend Patty (Dorothy Stinnette) who long ago married, has grown children, and is now teaching again. She declares that her life has been a happy one, that her husband is a fine father and that “she couldn’t ask for a better man.” Yet we also see in her face that she might have imagined herself happier if she had married her first love, Bill. “Sometimes I wonder, what did I do, huh, what didn’t I do? You came back that summer and you changed so. It was like you were a completely different person.”

       “I’m glad you married Al. He’s a good man,” he hesitatingly responds.

       “I got tired of waiting.”

       “I know.”

       She asks the important question of this film, “Are you satisfied with the way your life has gone?”

       “For the most part.” He continues with the most profound statement of the movie, “Believe me, there was no other way.”

       She gives him a gentle kiss on the cheek and is off to finish her shopping.

       Suddenly, in Bill’s statement of acceptance and reconciliation with his gay identity we no longer feel sorry for him. He returns home, hardly able to walk the stairway three floors up to his apartment. And that night we know he will drink another measured portion of the scotch he has left. The next morning he will rise up slowly, have a smoke, and walk the streets where everything reminds him of the choices he has made. But he is no one to be pitied. He has lived a full life defined by who is knew he was and is.

 

Los Angeles, January 13, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (January 2021).