PLAGUE DIARY 92: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

My Favorite Wife (1940)
It’s all very funny and very gay. Garson Kanin (director) and Leo McCarey (writer) are skilled craftsman — but you need actors who can pull it off. Cary Grant and Irene Dunne are so essentially funny and sweet that even an inept vehicle (which this is not) couldn’t miss. It’s screwball comedy; so the premise itself is ridiculous, but we don’t care. Irene Dunne, an anthropologist (okay) disappeared on a tropical island 7 years ago, and happens to appear on Grant’s door in a sailor suit the day he is about to get married again. Grant, when acting out how he might tell his new wife that he will have to annul their marriage, offers the limply inadequate ‘I’ll be fine,’ but it’s the indescribable expression — and the half-hearted proffered handshake — that give us the giggles. And when Irene Dunne threatens to run off to a south sea island with Randolph Scott it is Grant’s perplexed reaction that is both crazy and hilarious. But the heart of the movie is Dunne, who must — although she knows he loves her best from the start — still, inevitably, torture Cary Grant. That is the first gay aspect of this movie (no, I didn’t mean happy). It has a Noel Cowardesque, comedy-of-manners tone, which means this couple are so much in love — and so evenly matched —that their relationship can survive lacerating arguments and perilous games with impunity. Dunne is annoyed because her husband has married someone else in her absence (who wouldn’t be) so she puts him through hell by pretending to be in love with Randolph Scott. The woman here is in total control. (I know this  is not an accurate reflection of heterosexual life in the 40s — but it’s a fantasy of it; and one which comforted women, not so much men). But the other thing — besides Grant’s victimization at the hands of a woman— which makes this movie a frightening to men (and a joy for women) is the feminizing of Cary Grant. It doesn’t take much to do that. If Grant was before your time, think of Ryan Reynolds — certainly as handsome — and with just about as much charm. Reynolds (though straight, unlike Grant) is a threat to no one, there is something puppyish about him, and you long to see him wag his tail. But Grant’s lack of threat was related to his sexuality. After all, his first gig was as sex object for Mae West. It was to him she delivered the famous, often misquoted: “Why don’t you come up sometime and see me?” The indignities imposed on Grant in My Favorite Wife are endless, and it’s hard to imagine Clark Gable or John Wayne putting up with them. At one point his new wife can’t figure out why he won’t consummate the marriage, so she hires a psychiatrist to analyze him — who happens to catch Grant trying on a new dress and hat for Irene Dunne (who has just fallen into a hotel pool). The question here of course, is — is Grant a cross-dresser, or worse yet, gay? Now I know this is a screwball comedy, but that swimming pool is the heart of the ‘gayness’ of My Favorite Wife — in quite a literal sense. First of all, before falling into the pool, Irene Dunne eats lunch there wearing a fur hat and carrying a fur muff. (What planet are we on? Everyone else is in bathing suits!) And then there is the moment when Cary Grant goes to the pool to size-up Randolph Scott. He envies Scott’s Olympic-style diving. As Grant watches, he pats the sweat from his brow — presumably because he is intimidated by the physical prowess of his rival for Dunne’s love. (But is that the real reason?) Later Grant is on the phone and he can’t get the image of Scott’s perfect body out of his head. The truth is (and there’s no reason to disbelieve this) when those pool scenes were shot, Cary Grant and Randolph Scott were lovers. In fact they had the audacity (in 1940) to rent a room together at the hotel where the pool scenes for My Favorite Wife were filmed. So in real life Cary Grant couldn’t get Randolph Scott out of his own pool noodle, and it all had nothing to do with Irene Dunne. As legend goes, Grant and Scott were lovers from 1930 until their deaths. But they were forced to vacate the apartment they shared in 1932 and marry women in order to save their careers. I came out when I was 29 years old. Until then, I had sex only with women. Do you know what that does to you? I’m not talking about having sex with women (that was boring but doable) it’s not having sex with who you really want to have sex with, and pretending to enjoy sex with someone else  — that's what really drives you nuts. Like many gay men, I am a perpetual adolescent. Ever wonder why? Because we never had a real adolescence. When something like that is taken away it can never be replaced. I don’t want to hear anymore about how fabulous gay marriage is. Gay boys are still shamed for being gay, and take far too long to come out. Who cares if they think they can get married when they are 25? You need to be 12 years old, and have crush on someone of the same sex, and have long silly conversations on the phone with them, and then when you’re 13 or so, you start kissing the same sex guy you are in love with, and then when you are 15 you start having fumbling sex, and then when you are 18 you start doing it. That’s a somewhat ideal timeline — we all know it can happen a lot more quickly — or slowly— for heterosexuals.  But you get the idea. The point is, it’s supposed to happen like that for gays too. And if it doesn’t it scars you for life.  Why don’t we ever hear that Leo McCary, Irene Dunne and Garson Kanin either knew — or didn’t know — that My Favorite Wife was made as tongue in cheek reference to the actual life-long love affair between Cary Grant and Randolph Scott? Because to speak now of the gayness of My Favourite Wife only means it’s a happy, witty flic.  I have no doubt Grant’s sense of humour was his way of dealing with his sexuality, because it’s so much easier to laugh than to cry. Besides you can’t cry all the time. Like so many gay men, Cary Grant was a little boy who was never allowed to grow up. All gay men are thus — ’Peter Pans.’ What accompanies that condition is our much documented and misinterpreted obsession with death. And dying, for some gay men, even to this day — might seem like an ‘awfully big adventure.’ But the world is selfish. And perhaps without the pain of men like Cary Grant, we would not, alas, have as much pleasure.