About a year after my book The Lavender Screen was published in 1993, I received a letter from actor Cliff Gorman in New York City. “I became aware of your book thanks to Premiere magazine but did not purchase a copy. The subject matter does not interest me. An actor friend recently mentioned it in a favorable light but then informed me you devote an entire chapter to The Boys in the Band. Over the weekend I browsed through a copy in a bookstore. I did not and will not buy it.
“It may interest you to know, although I doubt it, that I’ve done many other roles, nonhomosexual, and that my performance in The Boys in the Band was just that … I am not a stranger to awards and nominations both on and off the stage, and my career was never limited to that one film you focus on.”
What Mr. Gorman, who died at sixty-five and not of AIDS in 2002, hadn’t grasped was that The Lavender Screen was intended to focus on movies featuring major gay, lesbian, or bisexual characters. Space didn’t allow for individual actors’ other credits. (In An Unmarried Woman he played—equally convincingly—an extremely sexually aggressive heterosexual opposite Jill Clayburgh.) It was Gorman who chose to do Emory in the 1968 Off-Broadway play that ran 1,000 performances and in its screen version. He also chose to play yet another flamingly gay character, a murder victim, in Justine (1969). He couldn’t have known that the much-anticipated George Cukor picture would turn out to be a costly and critically reviled flop.
A former publicist for Gorman admitted off the record, “He does regret [The Boys in the Band]. He’s done great work in so numerous things, but most people mainly remember Emory. And some still think you are what you portray.” That may be true, but why doesn’t that restriction necessarily apply to actors who play wife-beaters, rapists, gay-bashers, and murderers?
It was generally known in the business that Gorman apparently wasn’t gay. Just his luck that out of Boys’ nine-man ensemble, Emory was one of the hardest characters to forget. He had many of the best lines, and Gorman played the funny, amiable, and vulnerable role to perfection. Yet the result was bitter. His letter to me concluded, “I have had to work long and deliberately to move away from that image,” as if the issue were the quality of one’s work, rather than the overarching problems of stereotyping and homophobia.
Boys’ other most indelible character was Leonard Frey’s Harold, the birthday boy, a “pock-marked Jewish fairy” of considerable personality and menace. Frey, who’d appeared in Fiddler on the Roof, had considerably more post-Boys success than Gorman, for a while. For the screen version of Fiddler he was Oscar nominated for portraying a husband and father (Tevye’s first son-in-law), almost as if the ever-far-from-pro-gay Academy was relieved Frey could play straight—though in fact he was gay.
“When Lenny’s nomination was announced, I rang up Cliff, among others,” offered Frederick Combs (Donald), who by 1986 was a drama coach in Los Angeles, where I’d just moved. “Mis-ter Gorman was indignant, not happy for Lenny. Very close-mouthed … He knew I was gay too, and I always got the vibe that he looked down on us. I didn’t call back when Lenny didn’t win the award. In fact, I don’t think I spoke to Cliff Gorman again.”
ROBERT MOORE DIRECTED Mart Crowley’s play, which broke ground in that it featured a virtually all-gay set of characters. “The timing was very right,” recalled Moore in New York in 1980 while promoting his film Chapter Two, by Neil Simon. “It was before, during, and after Stonewall … People heard the play was daring, insofar as you had all these outspoken queers on stage. They heard there was lots of laughs and wit, and a party game to boot—the truth game, you know, on the telephone.”
Moore was not often willing to discuss The Boys in the Band. Maybe one reason was that he didn’t get picked to helm the screen version. (Almost invariably, Hollywood prefers heterosexual or “straight-seeming” directors.) Frederick Combs explained, “Bob’s being gay was common knowledge. He did try to hide with anti-gay jokes and slurs … Bob loved stars and loved acting the star. He wanted to be one, but couldn’t.” The flamboyant redhead’s few acting roles were small and stereotypical. He was Phyllis’s gay brother on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, later directing episodes of its spin-off Rhoda. In Otto Preminger’s offbeat Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon, starring a pre-Cabaret Liza Minnelli, Moore was a crippled gay man who teams with two other “misfits.” (Leonard Frey had a bit gay role in Junie Moon.)
In 1980, Moore spoke (on the phone) under the condition that his private life not be broached. Although no longer a performer, he remained in the closet, even though partnered. Moore shed little light on The Boys in the Band or his career, and I terminated the session early. Frederick Combs: “Bob’s arrogance and queeny manner scared off movie studios. They hired William Friedkin (pre–The Exorcist), who might be straight or might be bi … He made some ambiguous comments while making Cruising,” a homophobic film picketed while on location by many gay New Yorkers and coincidentally featuring Boys’ own Keith Prentice as, what else, a gay murder victim.
Boys‘ original cast members got to reprise their roles on screen, usually a rarity but not in a time where most Hollywood actors and every star declined to play gay. (Leading or ensemble, gay roles didn’t yet yield Oscar nominations or awards.) Studio interest in the hot property cooled after no big name attached itself to the project; Marlon Brando and Rod Steiger had recently enacted gay leads in unsuccessful films (see The Lavender Screen’s updated edition). The 1970 movie of The Boys in the Band, via National General, not a major distribution company, didn’t fare well at the box office—outside a few cities, few people showed up, including gay filmgoers.
As a New York play, Boys was a significant hit with homosexual and heterosexual audiences. Despite its grim, almost warning ad line,“ The Boys in the Band … is not a musical,” the play and film deeply impressed then-closeted gays. After the 2002 passing of Cliff Gorman, critic Rex Reed wrote, “Sacred memories invade my thoughts of funny man Cliff (The Boys in the Band) Gorman,” even though the actor was not primarily a comedian.
“Yes, it was a backward and stereotypical play,” reflected gay historian Martin Greif, lamenting that its most famous line, via the mainstream media at least, was “You show me a happy homosexual and I’ll show you a gay corpse.” “But in that era, what a treat just to see gay characters, and central ones at that, and from the pen of a gay man.… Obviously, Crowley shouldn’t have made that idiotically defensive comment on the order of: There may actually be happy gay people out there, but they’re not in my play.” Greif added, “Remember, Boys came out not long after the lifting of the state law which forbade gay and lesbian characters on New York stages.”
Robert Moore remembered, “Most people, including gays, came to see the play with an attitude of horrified fascination … I think Mart’s device of using a birthday party was inspired. It reveals these guys’ world and allows them to let it all hang out. It’s a party to which the audience is invited, as voyeurs and eavesdroppers.”
But The Boys in the Band was no party for most of its cast, none of whom went on to stardom. “I think I’m the only actor who embraced the play,” said Frederick Combs. “I did it in New York and I did it in London. I can see the upside—being in a hit, being something of a role model or standard bearer—while I can also see, have known, the downside … yet I haven’t felt trapped and defeated by the curse of The Boys in the Band.”
Combs described the phases of his experience: the initial thrill of costarring in a pioneering hit play, the movie getting made “with us in it,” disappointment that the picture didn’t do better even though “It wasn’t unexpected. The so-called heartland is not New York—damn it. And then being so identified with the play and the movie, like to the point of, ‘You did play yourself, right?’ Almost having to apologize for it!”
As more than one cast member pointed out, Middle America never saw the movie—which TV still shuns—but everyone in Hollywood did: casting directors and “anyone with the power to give or deny you a job.… Back then, there was real stigma attached to being publicly known as gay, which equated to having played gay,” said Combs. “Especially if you weren’t a celebrity, someone who’d been photographed on dates with the opposite sex.… There was an enduring darkness attached to The Boys in the Band once the successful play ended and the unsuccessful movie came out. The tune was like, I told you so and it serves you right for trying to make a movie out of that.”
FREDERICK COMBS, a once-close friend of Boys movie producer-turned-author Dominick Dunne, wrote a play titled The Children’s Mass which sometime lover Sal Mineo helped produce. Combs appeared on TV’s The Young and the Restless but found acting jobs in any medium scarcer and scarcer. “It’s ironic. On Broadway in 1961 I originated Geoffrey, the gay friend of the pregnant girl in A Taste of Honey. That didn’t seem to hurt me. Possibly I drank from the same well once too often.” The handsome, talented actor was in several New York Shakespeare Festival productions and in Franco Zeffirelli’s The Lady of the Camellias and was writer-in-residence at the Edward Albee Playwriting Foundation. But in the mid-1970s, Combs moved to LA where he had more of his own plays produced.
He also directed, for instance Harvey Fierstein’s International Stud. In lieu of acting assignments, Combs worked as a dialogue coach and acting teacher, founding the Los Angeles/Actor’s Lab in 1979. He did minor roles in made-for-TV movies and didn’t hide his gayness. In the late ’70s, he gave a candid interview to gay In Touch magazine.
“Do I regret playing Donald in Boys?” he repeated my question. “No. Of course not. Not in and of itself. I regret the aftermath.”
In 1992, Frederick Combs died of AIDS, at fifty-seven.
KENNETH NELSON CHEATED THE ROLE of the Boy in The Fantasticks in 1960 and perhaps went further professionally than any other Boys cast member. Leonard Frey reminisced, “It was such a beautiful moment … Ken singing ‘Soon It’s Gonna Rain’ in The Fantasticks. He was so much younger then. The stage life can really age and harden you. Me, I was always sort of enveloped in humor, but Ken had leading man potential.” In the play and film of The Boys in the Band, Nelson had the role closest to being the lead—as Michael, the party host who’s a guilt-ridden, alcoholic Catholic.
A talented singer-actor, Nelson had taken over from Anthony Newley in Stop the World—I Want to Get Off (1961). “It feels like I’ve done it all, flops, hits, misses, everything in between,” he looked back in British Photoplay. “Maybe I should have worked my way west.… In movies, they remember you.” Nelson’s biggest disappointment and final Broadway effort was the much-heralded musical of the popular ’50s film The Teahouse of the August Moon, retitled Lovely Ladies, Kind Gentlemen (1970). He starred as the Okinawan Sakini, enacted on screen by Marlon Brando. Disgusted by the sixteen-performance run of the show, which closed in January 1971, Nelson moved to London where he felt theater was taken more seriously and he wouldn’t be typed as Michael nor associated with a big money-losing musical. In the West End he appeared in a revival of Show Boat.
Post-Boys, he tried to steer clear of gay roles. When a twenty-five-year-anniversary restaging of The Boys in the Band was done as a benefit to fight AIDS, Kenneth Nelson was one of two surviving cast members who said thanks but no thanks—the other, of course, being Cliff Gorman. The participants were Laurence Luckinbill (Hank), Peter White (Alan), and Reuben Greene (Bernard).
“Kenneth did have his career hurt by being so prominent in The Boys in the Band,” stated Combs. “To be honest, though, if Michael hadn’t been the biggest role, I’m not sure Ken would have taken it. Among us all, he thought he was the star. The Fantasticks, et cetera. He had star attitude.” After Boys Nelson endured small and shrinking roles on television, as in Reilly, Ace of Spies, The Trials of Lee Harvey Oswald, and Lace II. He eventually landed the smallest of bit parts in a Pia Zadora vehicle, The Lonely Lady, as a fey beautician—a fleeting gay stereotype. His final assignment was in Tales from the Crypt. He died in London of AIDS in 1993 at sixty-three.
“I REMEMBER HOW SURPRISED I WAS when I saw [the 1969 movie] The Magic Christian,” said Frederick Combs, “with Leonard Frey in what amounted to a cameo as a gay vampire. I stayed to read the credits, and for Lenny’s character it said ‘Laurence Faggot,’ right above Laurence Harvey [who played Hamlet], a very unpopular actor according to anything I’ve heard. At first I thought, ‘What a nothing, demeaning role.’ And that word, the f-word, it was almost like a slap in the face—to us all—when I read it.”
By inclination and via stereotyping, Frey chose a thankless post-Boys (the play) gay role. He was likely tempted by The Magic Christian’s big names (Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr) and big budget. “When you’ve been part of an ensemble cast and your background’s the real work and humility of the theatre,” clarified Combs, “you tend to jump at the chance to be in a film. Any film. A little role? Just think of it as ‘ensemble’ acting. Think how much money you’ll get for so little work. You won’t know till the thing’s released how much or nearly all of you they’ve left on the cutting room floor.”
Leonard Frey did work almost continuously after Boys until his death. He’d been on Broadway in Knock, Knock, The Royal Family, and earned a Tony nomination for The National Health. After, he joined the all-star cast of Ellis Rabb’s production of The Man Who Came to Dinner (the crypto-gay title role has been essayed by myriad gay actors, from Alec Woollcott and Monty Woolley to Clifton Webb and Nathan Lane).
“Like most actors, Lenny yearned for movie fame, and his Oscar [nomination] only whetted his appetite,” said Combs. “Eventually Hollywood must have figured out—I mean, at least three gay roles—that he wasn’t straight, and they dropped him, even for secondary roles.” Frey had a recurring part in the TV series Best of the West and guested on shows like Murder, She Wrote. “When he came to England to do Magic Christian, which I cowrote,” explained Graham Chapman, “he was aloof. Whether he knew or guessed my sexuality, I can’t say. But he became even less friendly as time went by.” Chapman wouldn’t confirm whether he was behind the f-word labeling of Frey’s bit role or whether it was aimed at the unpopular and closeted Laurence Harvey. The only deceased member of Monty Python (from cancer), Chapman cowrote and costarred in several films, most notably The Life of Brian.
“Lenny could be chilly if he didn’t know you,” said Combs. “He was shy at first. After the Fiddler [nomination], he got very cautious. For a long time he had high hopes, and the grapevine said he wouldn’t talk about The Boys in the Band or anything gay related.” Frey died in New York City of AIDS in 1988 at forty-nine.
“Not many outsiders know that Lenny based his Harold persona on our producer Richard Barr,” revealed Combs. Barr, an actor turned prominent stage producer (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Sweeney Todd), had been mentored by Orson Welles and was an apprentice member of the fabled Mercury Theatre. In Citizen Kane, it was Barr’s character who asked, “Rosebud? What’s Rosebud?” Barr died of AIDS in 1989 at age seventy-one.
The youngest cast member of Boys to die was Robert La Tourneaux, “Cowboy,” the requisite beefcake and “birthday present” for Harold (Leonard Frey). The movie’s initial print ad featured a headshot of Harold in sunglasses, cigarette dangling from his mouth, with the caption “Today is Harold’s birthday.” To the right, a headshot of La Tourneaux, with a sexy smile and tousled hair, and a kerchief round his neck. That caption read “This is his present.” Most American newspapers banned the ad. Had he been heterosexual, or pretended, La Tourneaux, with his Travolta-ish looks and not-too-bright-yet-likeable manner, might have hit it big on the screen.
He’d made his Broadway bow in Ilya Darling, the 1967 musical of the hit film Never On Sunday. After The Boys in the Band he got only one more movie role. “Yeah, Boys was a kiss of death for me,” he acknowledged. “I went from that to a token part on stage” as Serving Man in director Ellis Rabb’s The Merchant of Venice. William Como, editor of the crypto-gay New York entertainment magazine After Dark,” said, “Bobby did an interview for us. Much too frank.
“He named some of his lovers, including Calvin Culver (who starred in an X-rated flick titled The Boys in the Sand) and a married bisexual actor who’d been on stage and later got a supporting Academy Award and [was] featured in the never fully explained death at sea of a female movie star with whose bisexual husband he was allegedly having an affair—though of course the media deliberately switched genders and hinted at an affair between the actress and the actor who wasn’t her actor husband.
“But we did include Bobby [in the magazine] in ’73,” added Como. “We felt he was up and coming.” However, after signing to costar in Tennessee Williams’s Vieux Carré, La Tourneaux was fired before the play opened. In 1978 he was quoted in Quentin Crisp’s Book of Quotations: “Charles Laughton played every kind of part but never a homosexual. People knew he was gay, but his public image [which included a wife] never betrayed his private reality. So he was safe. I wasn’t safe.”
Eventually the still hunky “Cowboy” did nude photospreads and appeared in the altogether at the Ramrod, a Manhattan male-strip theater. He contracted AIDS and made the tabloids when his landlord tried to evict him for allowing his caregiver to live with him. La Tourneaux sued and won the case, but died soon after, at forty-four in 1986.
The handsomest of The Boys in the Band—the play title reportedly inspired by a Judy Garland reference to the band Esther Blodgett sings with in the classic 1954 George Cukor version of A Star Is Born—was Keith Prentice. He played Larry, who was partnered with Hank (Laurence Luckinbill, known for his long marriage to Lucille Ball’s daughter, Lucie Arnaz). Pre-Boys, Prentice was a chorus boy in Gypsy, The Sound of Music, and Noel Coward’s Sail Away. He had a bit part in the Rock Hudson—Doris Day film Send Me No Flowers and a non-musical role in Take Her, She’s Mine on Broadway.
Playing gay in The Boys in the Band proved a curse for his career too. Prentice worked on TV in soaps like As the World Turns and Dark Shadows, but Hollywood turned its back on him and he resorted to a tiny—and thankless—role as a gay murder victim to Al Pacino’s lethal and supposedly secretly gay cop in the controversial film Cruising (1980).“Keith wound up teaching drama at a boys’ school in New York City,” offered Combs. In 1982 Prentice founded the Theatre Under the Stars in Kettering, Ohio, where he directed summer stock plays. In 1992, about a week after Combs, Keith died at age fifty-two.
Some obituaries listed the cause of death as cancer, some AIDS. In London, Kenneth Nelson, who would die the following year, apprised a columnist, “I don’t care what the rags said, it was AIDS. I mean, enough with the shame!”
ONE OF THE LEAST-KNOWN cast members was Reuben Greene, who played Bernard, a quiet, mild gay black man. “I tried staying in touch with Reuben,” disclosed Combs, “but either he’s still genuinely shy or he wants to keep apart and put that time behind him.” Yet Greene did show up at the 1993 charity restaging of The Boys in the Band. His other most notable credit is Elaine May’s flop movie Mikey and Nicky (1976).
Peter White, the unprepossessing blond actor who played Alan (the contractually married party guest who is either the most closeted of them all or the oddball who actually turned out heterosexual), has also remained under the celebrity radar. He appeared in the bisexual-themed play P.S. Your Cat Is Dead! by gay James Kirkwood (during LA rehearsals for which Sal Mineo was murdered in his carport by a black robber). On screen, White had a small role as Debbie Reynolds’s boyfriend in Albert Brooks’s comedy Mother (1995). When the concerned son played by Brooks inquires, Mother reassures him that she and White’s character aren’t intimate or anything; they just have occasional sex.
“There’s no question,” said Frederick Combs in 1986, “that the one from our play who went furthest professionally was our director,” Robert Moore. None of the cast, gay or het, achieved name recognition. Moore, though not a name director, went surprisingly far helming stage star vehicles—typically diva-centered (aha)—for the likes of Carol Channing (Lorelei), Lauren Bacall (Woman of the Year), and Elizabeth Taylor (The Little Foxes, her stage bow as well as her penultimate play). By the early ’70s Moore was directing TV movies, including a 1974 NBC version of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, starring Robert Wagner as Brick; his wife, Natalie Wood as Maggie the Cat; and Laurence Olivier as Big Daddy.
More surprisingly, Moore went on to direct such Hollywood films as Murder by Death and The Cheap Detective, both with glittering all-star casts. “Bob told several friends,” said Combs, “that back in the ’60s he’d supported Lauren Bacall in Cactus Flower on Broadway, but then [in 1981] he directed her in Woman of the Year and that she won her musical Tony for Best Actress mostly thanks to him, since she was a-musical.”
Combs laughed. “Bobby was like that. A little fiction, a little selfishness, and lots of laughter and stars in his eyes.” Moore died of AIDS in 1984 at fifty-six.
Another The Boys in the Band alumnus who died prematurely was W. Robert LaVine, costume designer for the movie version. However, he passed away in 1979, pre-AIDS (officially). Years later, Combs saw a book LaVine wrote, In a Glamorous Fashion, published in 1980, sitting on a coffee table at a friend’s house. Said Combs: “I examined it and was so unexpectedly pleased to see Robert’s name on it. Then I saw he’d died just before it came out, and this was right after the news about Rock Hudson being HIV-positive. It entered my head, for the very first time, ‘How many of us are going to reach our deaths way too young?’ ”
BOYS PRODUCER RICHARD BARR admitted a few years after the film came out, “Our play was possibly the gayest production ever seen on [Broadway]. The majority of men involved in it, actors and nonactors both, were homosexual, and most of those relatively open—that is, within our own theatrical circles.… For my part, I think Mart Crowley’s gotten a bad rap. He’s one of the younger generation of gays who, unlike most older playwrights, is willing to put a gay character or characters front and center.
“Mart’s also a realist. He presents a gay world that is true… [and] includes stereotypes as well as a diversity of men. He wrote The Boys in the Band with warts and all.”
Crowley was Natalie Wood’s secretary before Boys and post-Boys co-produced the TV series Hart to Hart, starring Robert Wagner and co-owned by Wagner and wife Natalie’s RoNa company which also had a wealthy slice of Charlie’s Angels. (It was a source of ongoing bitterness to Wood’s younger sister, Lana—see the chapter on Natalie vs. Lana Wood in this author’s Celebrity Feuds!—that the stellar couple would hire “outsiders” but not a relative for lucrative positions.)
Crowley did little theatrical writing after Boys’ success. His 1973 follow-up play, A Breeze from the Gulf, with one gay character out of three total, bombed. Frederick Combs felt, “It was inevitable. Audiences were turned off by Mart’s story of a strange young man and his parents, while the critics took the opportunity to punish Mart in print for his good fortune with our play.” (The semi-autobiographical Michael was played by Robert Drivas, probably best known for the Rod Steiger film The Illustrated Man, who died at fifty of AIDS.)
No more full-length plays followed, and after Hart to Hart Crowley seemed to fade away. He returned in 2002 with a Boys in the Band sequel, cleverly titled The Men from the Boys.
Thirty years on, it’s not a birthday party that reunites the gang at Michael’s—the still acerbic host is now on the wagon—but a memorial for Larry. Hank’s life partner, it’s clarified, did not die of AIDS (ironic, in view of the numerous deaths among the original cast members): “Gay men do die of other things.” The cast, of course, was entirely new, and the new characters all young, including a political activist. Crowley was kinder to his characters this time around, and the self-hate much less pronounced.
The Men from the Boys opened in San Francisco to tepid critical and audience response. Intended for fine-tuning en route to Los Angeles and ultimately Broadway, it was dismissed by the San Francisco Chronicle as having “no more depth than the average TV sitcom,” not to mention the fact that gay characters, once the stuff of tragedy and melodrama, can now be seen nightly on TV. Several observers felt it was much too late for a sequel, which anyway couldn’t have a fraction of the impact of Boys in the Band, which seldom has been revived over the years due to its datedness.
In 2002, as in 1993 on the twenty-fifth birthday of the play, it was widely noted that Boys had attracted major publicity and sizeable audiences because there were so few gay-themed plays of any description in the late ’60s—let alone one with numerous gay characters, none of whom was killed off in the end.
Too many reviews of the sequel dwelled on the original’s negative points while overlooking its pioneering aspects, such as presenting gay men who weren’t monsters, buffoons, or pathetic victims—but who sometimes victimized themselves—and depicting a longtime gay couple, or delivering the play’s key line, “If we could just not hate ourselves so much.” The Boys in the Band shone a sometimes painful but needed spotlight on homophobia and how easily it becomes internalized by its targets. It finally presented a gay community in miniature, men banding together for fun, camaraderie, and solace—solace for their mutual outcast status, not for their inherent and essential nature.
Besides being a landmark play, Boys and its legacy have become a symbol, representing the real-life discrimination faced by gay people—certainly including actors—and the challenge posed by AIDS, which has struck the stage world harder than any other cultural or professional sector. Long live the men of The Boys in the Band, living and especially deceased, in collective memory and heightened awareness.