Fallen Idols: A Century of Screen Sex Scandals

Introduction

It’s a scandal! How often we use that phrase, and what a catalogue of sins it covers.Well, that is what this book is all about. It is, literally, a catalogue of sins, but committed by a very special class of culprit. They are far from being run-of-the-mill misdemeanours because they were perpetrated by some of the most celebrated names on the planet.

The transgressions crammed into this compact title all occurred during a single century when ‘star status’ was used to disguise extreme examples of moral lapses. Throughout the twentieth century, popular idols of screen and stage appeared to outdo each other in outraging public decency.The rules that the rest of us tried to live by appeared not to apply to them.

Why they behaved in this manner is, at first glance, a mystery. As media interest in them grew, superstars were constantly in the spotlight, their every action noted by show-business writers and gossip columnists. Yet movie stars and music icons were ready to risk every shred of respectability for a red-hot romance, a sensual soirée or a drug-fuelled dalliance.

They knew what they were doing.They were all adults.They were aware of the risks they took, the probable damage to their careers and the looming shame of exposure. So why did they persist in ignoring the pitfalls? The answer in the main is, of course, sex: the three-letter word that has spelled ignominy for so many in the world of showbiz.There were other causes of destroyed reputations, samples of which will be seen in the following chapters, but the common theme within this book is the cavalier attitude to danger and disclosure displayed by some of the biggest names to appear on screen and stage. Since so many of the twentieth-century’s superstars found fame in the United States, that is from where most of these stories emanate, Hollywood not only being the heart of the film world but the hub of gossip and therefore the centre of scandal.

When the biggest glamour star of all, Marilyn Monroe, was found dead in bed there, the resulting disclosures involved drugs, mental instability, Mafia conspiracies and a procession of lovers including the president of the United States.When the dubious under-age liaisons of comics like Charlie Chaplin and Woody Allen were laid bare, the resultant backlash was no laughing matter.

Other examples of forbidden love reflect an age when ‘gay’ was not necessarily a description of the joys of single-sex relationships. Leading male star Rock Hudson’s homosexuality was disguised by his studio bosses forcing him into a sham marriage and was revealed only when he contracted AIDS through gay orgies. Hudson’s co-star in the 1956 epic Giant, James Dean, melted the hearts of young girls, and many men.The fact that he slept his way to the top with the latter came to light only after his untimely death in a car crash at the age of 24. It is illuminating to examine the shock that those revelations caused at the time, yet now might be seen as evidence of sexual exploitation rather than blameworthy.

Flawed icons… James Dean (above) and Rudolph Valentino.

In just eighteen months, with just three major motion picture performances, Dean had become a cultural icon, but his sex life in the years leading up to his fame would have dented his career had he lived longer. In his early Hollywood days, near starving, he referred to his male dates as ‘free meal tickets’. He was ‘kept’ by a minor producer but slept with others in Hollywood’s hierarchy in the hope of being offered acting breaks. Complaining that this had not benefited him, Dean told a friend: ‘I’ve had my cock sucked by five of the biggest names in Hollywood, and I think it’s pretty funny because I wanted more than anything to get some little part; instead they’d invite me to fancy dinners.’ The star of East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause was bisexual and had affairs with actresses Pier Angeli and Ursula Andress but when asked if he was gay his reply was: ‘Well, I’m certainly not going to go through life with one hand tied behind my back!’

Hollywood studios much preferred to promote their male stars’ images as red-blooded hunks enjoying the charms of a string of attractive female companions. There were some, however, whose reputation was dented not by their roles as superstuds but as bedtime flops. Screen idols Errol Flynn and Clark Gable were two of those whose virility was subsequently questioned. However, the star dubbed by Hollywood as ‘The Great Lover’ probably bore the greatest misnomer of all. Rudolph Valentino’s screen image, which had women literally swooning in the aisles, was at variance with his private life, his preferred passion being for young men.

For appearance’s sake, Valentino married twice, but his first wife locked him out of his bedroom on his wedding night and the second treated him like a servant and made him call her ‘boss’. Both women had lesbian tendencies and neither marriage was thought to have been consummated. Valentino, who worked as a cabaret dancer before rocketing to stardom in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in 1921, bought a castle-like Hollywood mansion through which he strode in chinchilla-lined coats, dripping with gold jewellery and perfume. He was distraught when the American press taunted him for powdering his face, accusing him of ‘degeneration and effeminacy’. During a promotional tour to plug his 1926 movie The Son of the Sheik, he suffered appendicitis and, when peritonitis set in, the 31-year-old idol sat up in his deathbed at a New York hospital and asked his doctor: ‘Do I really act like a pink powder puff?’

Secret lovers… ‘It Girl’ Clara Bow and the young John Wayne.

The female equivalent of Valentino was Clara Bow, a superstar of the silent movies who was labelled the original ‘It Girl’ after appearing in the 1927 blockbuster It. At the age of 25, the jazz-age ‘flapper’ from a poverty-stricken and abusive New York upbringing was Hollywood’s top sex goddess, with an off-screen lifestyle far raunchier than her comparatively tame and highly-censored screen portrayals of the time. Her nemesis came in the form of her private secretary, Daisy DeVoe, whom she rightly sued for embezzling $16,000. The resultant court case rebounded when Daisy revealed Clara’s bedroom antics, including affairs with actors Gary Cooper, Eddie Cantor and Bela Lugosi. Although sentenced to jail for eighteen months, Daisy added to Clara’s torment by selling further revelations to a scandal sheet, with a description of the actress giving herself to an entire football team, including a young Marion Morrison, later to become John Wayne. Clara lost her studio contract with Paramount and had a nervous breakdown, the first of many.

The woman who replaced Clara Bow as Paramount’s leading lady was the notorious Mae West. Despite her reputation, she was discreet about the many men in her life; the scandals she caused were all well-rehearsed. Her most famous lines were: ‘I used to be Snow White but I drifted’, ‘Between two evils, I always try the one I’ve never tried before’, ‘When I’m good I’m very good but when I’m bad I’m better’ and most famously, though misquoted, ‘Come up and see me some time’. (In fact, her invitation to Cary Grant in the 1933 comedy She Done Him Wrong was: ‘Come up some time, see me.’) That film is known as a ‘Pre-Code’ movie because it was produced in the brief period between the introduction of talkies and the full enforcement of censorship on the American cinema under the aegis of chief enforcer Will Hays. Mae West’s sexual innuendo prompted Hays to depute a censor to stay on the set of her next film, Belle of the Nineties. Its original title had been It Ain’t No Sin but it had to be changed after lobbying by the Roman Catholic Church and picketing by priests with posters proclaiming: ‘Yes It Is’!

Courting controversy… magnificent Mae West.

The so-called Hays Code reflected the increasingly censorious approach to the perceived immorality and decadent influence of Hollywood.The code’s overriding principle was that ‘No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it.’ It was developed into a series of rules covering, among many others: Crimes Against The Law, Sex, Vulgarity, Obscenity, Profanity and ‘Repellent Subjects’. The code not only affected what was portrayed on screen, however. The rules laid down by Will Hays, backed by similar strictures of the influential Catholic Legion of Decency, influenced the private lives of the players themselves.

Scandalously, one of the code’s unpublicized effects was to make abortion almost a form of birth control. Hays had persuaded studios to introduce mandatory ‘morality clauses’ into stars’ contracts.Thus an unintended pregnancy would not only shame an actress, but would violate studio policy.Throughout the 1930s, stars such as Tallulah Bankhead ‘got abortions like other women got permanent waves’, according to her biographer Lee Israel. In the same decade, Jean Harlow’s romance with married co-star William Powell resulted in MGM booking her for an ‘appendectomy’ in the same private hospital into which a year later, under the name ‘Mrs Jean Carpenter’, she was again admitted ‘to get some rest’. MGM’s publicity chief Howard Strickling also handled the ‘embarrassment’ of musical star Jeanette MacDonald’s pregnancy after studio boss Louis B. Mayer told him to ‘get rid of the problem’. MacDonald was checked into hospital with an ‘ear infection’. Strickling similarly arranged a termination for Joan Crawford who, while estranged from husband Douglas Fairbanks Jr, became pregnant with what she believed was Clark Gable’s child. Crawford’s rival Bette Davis also chose to have abortions for the sake of her career.As she readily admitted late in life, having a child in 1934 would have made her ‘miss the biggest role in my life thus far’, as Mildred in Of Human Bondage.

Such was the power of the Hays Code that, in many ways, it stifled creativity in American cinema for three decades until the 1960s when a new certification was introduced by the Motion Picture Association of America. What it failed to do was prevent the off-screen activities of the actors and actresses themselves. It did, however, make the revelations of their freewheeling lifestyles appear even more scandalous if and when they were eventually exposed to public opprobrium.

Over the decades, there has been no shortage of those who would kiss-and-tell and those who would listen. More