Sylvia Scarlett (1935)
It’s a very odd movie and at first I didn’t know what to make of it. Then I realised it was ‘twee.’ Twee is odd too — but mostly undesirable — it involves a fantastical sentimental cuteness, a fierce attempt at charm. Great authors have been accused of ‘tweeness.’ J.M. Barrie certainly. There is much cuteness in Barrie, but Peter Pan is rife with a nightmarish attachment to childhood (often viewed as pederastical, but I do not think so). I do not know what to think of Barrie’s sad private life. Certainly he might have committed atrocities on the bodies of the four Llewelyn-Davis boys after he adopted them, but it’s much more likely he simply loved them to death (two of them committed suicide). But Barrie’s real problem was that he could not say goodbye to his own childhood, as he never had one, because he spent his early years consoling his mother over his dead brother. Why am I telling you all this? Because I write these blogs at dusk. Normally I would not notice dusk. I would be busy somewhere. Bear in mind that I simply refuse to imagine that anything COVID-19 related is a blessing; and those people who believe the pandemic will cause governments to adopt guaranteed income and end pollution are just nutty. But it’s been quite something to discover dusk again. Dusk was the time for childhood games to end. I played desperately at dusk, fiercely hoping that night would never fall. What is traumatic about adulthood is the disappearance of dusk. (Now that sentiment is somewhat ‘twee;’ Lewis Carroll said it much better — “Still she haunts me, phantomwise / Alice moving under skies / Never seen by waking eyes.”) Both Lewis Carrol and J.M. Barrie brought darkness to childhood through their unhinged longing for it, and it’s something that ultimately saves their work from ‘twee.’ Conversely, Sylvia Scarlett is trying frantically to be delightful, and I kept hoping I would be swept away, but was not. There’s something slightly Shakespearean about the proceedings, with a storm, a commedia del’arte troupe, a drowning, and Katherine Hepburn switching from a girl to a boy and back — over and over — until she finds her true love Brian Aherne. Sylvia Scarlett was a dismal failure. It almost destroyed Hepburn’s career, and launched Cary Grant’s (he takes off his shirt at one point and all I could think of was him and Randolph Scott waking up in the morning together.) Yes, it’s a very queer movie; director Cukor was a closet case, as were Grant and Hepburn. HEY calm down! When I told my mother Cary Grant was gay she acted as if I had knifed her. People still have this attitude ‘oh please don’t ruin Cary Grant for me’ — but why are these stars ruined because they are queer? Hepburn and Tracy were both flamers, their friendship was based to some degree on that bond; it all makes total sense. And they did truly love each other, simply not in the way the you think. I don’t blame anyone for not coming out; but my life has been severely crippled by closet cases. I’m going to talk about Urjo Kareda. I’ve been censored so many times, but no one is going to read this blog anyway. In case you don’t know, Kareda was the artistic director of Tarragon Theatre in Toronto for thousands of years. He hated me with a passion. I was on a radio panel with him about dramaturgy, and I happened to mention that I am considered ‘outrageous’ by some and he said “Oh you think you’re so outrageous Sky Gilbert, don’t you?” Urjo was a very fat closet case — ergo — Urjo was extremely jealous of me. But I am an out-of-the-closet-drag-queen-slut, and have certainly earned the right to call myself outrageous. Well a few years ago a woman wrote a biography of Kareda. She asked me for memories of him — as the correspondence he and I shared (the letters were not personal, but dramaturgical) were going to be published. I told her of all the people he had hurt with his closetedness. The woman was very sweet, but I was angry because she said ‘I cannot reveal that Urjo was gay, because it would hurt his family.’ With all this talk about truth and COVID-19 — when everyone is going on and on about the truth and we are steeped in lies — well I just can’t lie about Urjo anymore. I will no longer fear that the cold dead hand of some bitter old queen is going to penetrate the topsoil and wring my neck. If I have to live in a universe were people are frightened about leaving the house for no discernible reason, then I must tell my truth. Urjo Kareda was a homosexual and the reason that matters is because he hurt many young writers — and he worked as hard as he could to hurt them — and in some cases he nearly halted their careers (‘You are not a writer” was one of his favourite ‘helpful’ editorial comments). These writers were queer, or feminist, or just extremely weird ducks, and they were writing sexual material, and they came to me, because I was running a theatre that was a kind of haven for artistic misfits (mad people, really, I realise that now, all of them were insane in exactly the right way — and I am in that category too, by the bye). I spent a lot of time rehabilitating these artists after Urjo stabbed them, aesthetically speaking, in the gut. Again, it’s not Urjo’s fault, I’m not blaming him, or saying that he should have had the courage to come out, because it’s not courage, really, it’s a kind of demented sense of privilege that makes people like me think I can get away with it. I’m glad that no one will read this. But still —this is for all the writers who came to me for solace, a shoulder to cry on, and in some cases a production or two: for Pat Langner, Ann Holloway, Michael Achtman, Carol Sinclair, and John P, Moore — just to name a few. But there were many more. You see when you are a closet case it’s not just your business, it hurts those around you, because not only are you in denial about your own sexuality, but about everyone else's too. You don’t want other people to be happy, because, quite simply, you’re never going to be. That sentiment seems — like everything old — to be very new again with COVID-19. And it has has taken me far from Sylvia Scarlet, a film which was probably somewhat ahead of its time with it’s cross-dressing and mistaken gender identities. Or perhaps it was a film made by so many closeted people that it hides its own darkness — until that darkness disappears.
