He’s learned the English
tradition well,
…and Harry’s very believable under amber spots.
— Will Geer
Los Angeles in the 1930s was a city still teetering between the rough frontier and the stodgy Midwest. A powerful elite exploited the land and its populace. Police chiefs quickly burned out if they were honest, and those that stayed provided cover to vice operations and gangsters. After the stock market crash, Los Angeles police chief “Strongarm” Dick Steckel, at the urging of such anti-union businessmen as Harry Chandler of the Los Angeles Times, earned Los Angeles the title “citadel of the open shop.” Early demonstrations of the unemployed were met with police violence and police broke up meetings of Leftists so routinely that L.A. Reds took their activism to neighboring cities. “Angel Town,” city of oranges and wealth, was a city of double standards between the haves and have-nots. Among the greatest have-nots were homosexuals. Moral outrage escalated because of a series of scandals that rocked Los Angeles in the Twenties, such as the murder of director William Desmond Taylor. That crime was not solved for six decades, because Taylor, one of Hollywood’s classiest film directors, was gay, and homosexuality was a greater scandal than an unprosecuted murder. In such a moral mire, gays served as the perfect scapegoats in crackdowns and arrest sweeps. Harry recalled with annoyance that before every mayoral or city council election, the parks where gay men met for midnight trysts were raided so that politicians and police could brag of “cleaning up the riffraff.” Only public decency had rights. The front page of the Times in 1930 blared that when the body of a murdered boy was found, the house of “every known deviant” was searched.
It was to this appearance-conscious, nosey city that Harry returned in September of 1932. Physically restored from eight months in the hay fields, he was also wealthy—the summer haying paid him a Depression fortune of two hundred dollars. But once home he hardly knew what to do with his life. As befits a young man of twenty, he went in many directions at once: In the early 1930s, Harry pursued writing, acting, dancing, politics and a dizzying flurry of what he called “love affairs.”
These increased through a kind of cruising that was a step up from the streetcar. He discovered it one Friday night around eleven, while waiting for a bus at Hollywood and Vine. A surprising number of handsome cars, he noticed, circled the corner. “ An almost new Cadillac sport convertible stopped right before the bus got there, and with old-fashioned courtesy, the driver asked if he could drive me home. In the course of that ride, I got to know Joe McManus, a well-to-do businessman who lived with his mother. And I learned what the other circling cars were all about.”
He visited McManus often, and met his coterie of conservative European emigre friends. But Harry was looking for zestier companions. These he found in the close-knit world of Los Angeles artists. His introduction came, ironically, from his conservative mother. Reading the Times, Margaret noticed the return from Europe of John Cage to his prominent Eagle Rock family. At her prodding, and himself curious about how his high school tutor had grown up, Harry telephoned. Cage remembered him and invited him to afternoon tea, beginning a fascinating episode.
Cage would later attain world fame as a composer, author, and iconoclastic philosopher. His renowned intellect pursued many of the 1930s experimentalist notions that old cultural forms were becoming obsolete, and the frontiers he chose to expand were of music. As a composer, he “deconstructed” music by introducing silence, “prepared” instruments, and the element of chance as the basis of many of his compositions. Acceptance of detachment in both art and life, he believed, would break down the boundaries between the two and hence was the wave of the future. Such ideas earned him a reputation as master of the American Zen gesture. Cage pioneered electronic music, composed a noteless score in which the pianist sat silently at his instrument, and for many years collaborated with choreographer Merce Cunningham on experimental dances. By the 1980s, Cage was internationally revered as the grand old man of the avant-garde arts. In 1932, at the age of nineteen, he had just dedicated his life to music. After graduating from Los Angeles, Cage went abroad to study painting and architecture, and in Paris met a young American artist named Don Sample, also known as Don St. Paul. They traveled south together to Majorca, where they lived for six months, and finally drove from New York to Los Angeles in a Model T Ford.
John invited Harry to tea at a Spanish baronial-style house in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of West Los Angeles. “It was the second house of John’s Depression-stricken parents, Milton and Crete,” he recalled. “They had put it on the market, so it was stripped of furniture, save a few tables and daybeds the boys covered with blankets and weavings they had bought in Greece and Majorca. In such a big, high-ceilinged place, the effect was very bohemian.”
His hosts were unforgettable characters. “John was at first very New England, very formal and buttoned-down in his three-piece suit and tie. His blunt face revealed very little smile and very little charm. He didn’t say much. I always had the feeling that he was afraid the bottom button of his vest would pop open and you might see his belly button, and it would give you the wrong idea—whatever that wrong idea was.”
Sample, on the other hand, was freewheeling. “Don had bright, mischievous eyes in a scholarly-looking face. He wore little glasses and had a shock of lank hair that kept falling over his lenses; he looked very boyish, pushing it back all the time.” The more secure and verbal of the two, Don fired a steady stream of cultural questions at Harry, but criticized Harry’s responses in a bewildering manner, one that “made me very aware of the mud under my shoes.” When Harry remarked, for instance, that he had enjoyed a performance of Carmen he had seen in San Francisco, Sample laughingly pronounced that opera passé. However, when Harry mentioned having seen and liked Mary Wigman, the Isadora Duncan of Germany, Sample approved. Other questions and answers followed in this cross-examination pattern. By the time he left, Harry felt “like a bug on a pin.”
During the hour-and-a-half streetcar trip home, his humiliation simmered into a resolve never to return. But when he walked in his door, Margaret was just putting the phone down, and told him insistently to call Cage. He did so diffidently, and was told, “You’ve passed the test—you’re one of us. There’s plenty of room, so when can you come back?”
When Harry returned that night, he found and Sample completely welcoming, and they made no mention of the tense tea. Over the next six weeks, a “totally sharing comradeship developed between us, to the point of swapping each other’s freshly ironed shirts.” The insatiably cultural Sample took the role of instructor. He located, for example, new buildings by Internationalist-style architects R.M. Schindler and Richard Neutra (both Austrian emigres) and the boys drove around to view them on weekends. Back home, they checked the Bauhaus catalogue Sample had brought back from Europe for commentary on furniture and design detail.
As their friendship deepened, Harry’s hosts showed him a slim portfolio of the homoerotic photographs by Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden and an edition of stories by the artfully perverse British author Ronald Firbank. At Sample’s prodding, the three friends even camped around the house with what Harry described as “merry drag performances.” Behind closed doors, Cage seemed to drop his reserve; he seemed both bonded with, and in thrall to, Sample’s adventurous spirit.
One warm day in early October, the three stopped to invite a friend named Maddie to join their beach picnic. She was at the piano, practicing the accompaniment to a song called “At Dawning” by Charles Wakefield Cadman. Harry commented that he had sung that song in his high school Glee Club, and Maddie begged to hear it, which did not go over well in all quarters. “Such emotional hearth-and-home songs were exactly what those two detested, so Don quickly started picking up our bags and beach umbrella. The pleading of Maddie and then John made him relent. She started the introduction and 1 sang it. Afterwards, when Maddie was thanking me, John interrupted, “You never told us you could sing like that.’ And Don said, ‘Migawd, Honey, that’s a first-class voice. Come on, guys, we’ve got work to do!’ ‘But what about the beach and all this food?’ the others asked. ‘That was before Harry sang,’ Don said.”
Cage had scheduled a concert the following month, an experimental bill of music by Poulenc, Hindemith, and Honegger, as well as two of his own compositions. It was to Cage’s work that Sample wanted Harry to perform the vocals. One was a setting of Greek odes from The Persiansby Aeschylus, the other based on “At East and Ingredients” by Gertrude Stein; both were especially challenging. Sample rigorously coached Harry in the Greek alphabet and pronunciation, as well as in German and French for other songs. The Greek finale, about the death of Xerxes, had special effects and costumes—Greek blankets and stark makeup. Harry joked that he looked like “Diogenes just crawled out of a barrel.” He continued, “The blankets I was wearing were white, and a sort of lampshade shone colored patterns onto me.” Cage’s father, an inventor, had devised a fluorescent light source over which Sample laid a piece of vellum painted with designs in oils. “It looked very good. The thing got so hot the designs began to run, but that only made it better.” But the audience, the Santa Monica Women’s Club, seemed more challenged than impressed, and managed only strained applause. Still, somehow, the performance was engaged to be repeated the following spring. Harry called those concerts the out-of-town tryouts for Cage’s career as a composer, and surmised that he was probably the earliest stage performer of Cage’s music, a claim undisputed by Cage’s biographer, Franz Von Rossum.
Harry continued to see Cage and Sample often during the next year and a half. In the summer of 1933, Harry helped Cage prepare a series of classes in modern painting and music for the local matrons, who formed his base of support. The lectures, based on an art history text, were sold door-to-door for twenty-five cents each. Harry searched thrift shops for art prints to use as illustrations. “We could get them for a nickel that way,” he recalled. “If we didn’t have that much money, we’d just swipe them.” The next spring, Cage and Sample left Los Angeles to visit photographer Edward Weston and his wife Flora in Carmel, then went on to further travels, leaving behind Cage’s stave-written scores from the concert. Harry kept and treasured them for years.
Sample returned alone that June and was promptly arrested in Delongpre Park in Hollywood on a morals charge. After his release from jail, Harry encountered him and was appalled by Sample’s malnutrition-induced skin sores. Knowing Margaret, would insist on taking in such a waif, he brought Sample home, and indeed Margaret fed and nursed him for several weeks. Harry and Don remained friends for most of the Thirties, but the friendship with John Cage soured. When the composer returned in 1937 he brought back a wife, Xenia Kashevaroff. Harry went to the family’s home in Eagle Rock to pay a social call, but “John would not let me in and would not say why. He spoke to me at the back porch. It was very awkward, and I finally left. I could only guess I looked too—obvious.” Cage’s marriage ended in 1945 and he remained unmarried and guarded about his private life.
In May of 1933 Harry met Paul Mooney, the lover and ghostwriter of romantic explorer Richard Halliburton, and the son of anthropologist James Mooney, who coincidentally wrote an original study of the Ghost Dance religion of Wovoka. Paul Mooney was a handsome Lothario, with beautiful young men trekking up and down the hill to the house he shared with his lover in Laguna. While Harry was not his physical type, they were mentally well matched, and talked till dawn many nights. The friendship that blossomed proved important to Harry. “Paul was my first gay ‘big brother’ who seemed to understand my thinking and interests. It was during our talks that I first heard about Robert Briffault’s six-volume study called The Mothers, which was the basis of my historical materialism work a dozen years later. Paul also told me about the black ghetto nightclubs on Central Avenue, where boys could dance together.”
While Harry was looking for work that spring, sharp-eyed Margaret noticed another newspaper item: A newly arrived theater troupe would stage a dramatization of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities at the Hollywood Playhouse. Noted English actor Philip Merivale headlined George K. Arthur’s International Group Players, but local actors would be cast in minor roles. Harry immediately went to audition. “It was a cattle call of hundreds of unemployed actors,” he recalled. “All of them were gripped with the Hollywood fever: ‘I’ve got to do something on stage—someone will see me!’” The director, E.E. Clive, singled Harry out from among the throng and gave him the part of Citizen DeFarge, who, during the French Revolution, led the yells at the guillotine while his wife counted the tumbling heads by the stitches in her knitting.
The play opened as a Hollywood society event, with Clive Brook, Fredric March, and Dolores Del Rio in attendance. Harry was entranced with the company, which had most recently performed at the Copley Square Theater in Boston but had toured provincial England for years before that. The Players continued performing “well-made” drawing-room dramas to showcase themselves for the movies, and from its ranks, Laird Cregar, E.E. Clive and Arthur Treacher launched film careers.
When Treacher received a sudden call for a film role during A Tale of Two Cities, Harry got his understudy break. He was given a single afternoon to learn his part, but Laird Cregar and his boyfriend gave Harry coaching and moral support. The scene was opposite Merivale, the big star, and Harry, though terrified, exited to applause, and was later hired as the company’s male understudy. “There were about twelve men in the company and male roles were often doubled, so I was frequently employed. I had to be ready to go onstage in any one of eight men’s parts,” he said. A quick and somewhat arrogant study, he deliberately strayed from the scripts to test his improvisations—and the patience of the company. The eight years of stagework that followed barely paid for his lunches and streetcar fares, but it had a lasting effect on his ability to communicate.
If he was not already beyond caring about his son’s career, Big Harry must have been furious. The stage was never a practical career choice, and was especially bleak in those years. Several major Los Angeles theaters became casualties of the Depression while Harry was away at Stanford, and even before the crash, actors all over the country suffered cutbacks in work. Still, Harry took delight in his apprenticeship. As an eager new member of George K. Arthur’s Players, he was liked. An older actress named Elspeth Dudgeon, called “Dudgey” for short, taught him classic makeup techniques, how to place himself in the light, and how to project his voice. In roles ranging from juvenile to senile, he got typed as a character actor. Will Geer, whom Hay met later in a production, pitched him to a Universal Studios director, saying, “He’s learned the English tradition well, and Harry’s very believable under amber spots.”
He lived backstage as much as possible, and learned to appreciate the almost tribal theater culture the other players seemed to represent. He was particularly intrigued by the second-class, “not respectable” reputation of theater folk, and their proximity to the twilight people—homosexuals. Backstage was where Harry learned to camp, which he saw as having the social responsibility of making light of a serious problem, and so gently bringing it into awareness. (Harry invariably isolated a high-minded tradition in any aspect of the gay world, and he always distinguished “camping” from “dishing,” the harsher version of gay banter.)
As a backstage name, the Britishers dubbed Harry “the Duchess.” He said on different occasions that it was shortened from the affectionate “Duchess Theodora Beara” and “the Duchess of Devonshire.” Whatever the case, it so aptly connoted the high dudgeon to which he was given that “the Duchess” became Harry’s lifelong drag name.
Acting consumed Harry for the first half of the Thirties. He even wrote to one friend that he planned to pack off to Broadway. When he perforce took other jobs, they were cultural, like carrying spears in visiting operas and reading for radio plays. His ear for languages got him work as a freelance dialogue coach among Hollywood’s foreign colony of expatriate royalty. These were mostly Hungarians, White Russians, or Czechs, dukes and countesses who scraped along as dress extras in the costume epics of Hollywood’s golden age. Harry explained, “Josphine Dillon, the other game in town, never could get Hungarians to say ‘jam and pajamas’ on radio. Of course she charged fifteen dollars a lesson and I charged only five... when I could collect in anything besides trade, which was sometimes a meal at some Ladies’ Club luncheon.”
He continued to write poetry, which occasionally got published (though never for money), and started collecting rejection notices for short stories he wrote. His steadiest work was as a screen extra, often as a stunt rider for Republic and Monogram westerns. (Riding tricks he’d learned as a teen in Nevada now paid off.) And when female impersonator Ray Bourbon performed in his Sunset Strip nightclub, Harry worked for him as a shill.1
He also sang. Through an ad, Harry joined a Latvian Choir which performed Russian Orthodox hymns in churches throughout Southern California, and he developed a novelty act by singing duet with his mother, continuing their long tradition. Hay composed arrangements for the German, English, and California-Spanish songs they sang, and devised a unique professional gimmick. “Mother and I would sing behind a screen. I would play piano or she would, but no one could tell what the combination of singers was.” Margaret’s “woman’s baritone” so matched Harry’s bass that their voices were almost identical. “It sounded like a man and another man, and when we came out from behind the screen we surprised people.” They performed for banquets of the Los Angeles Masons, and occasionally appeared on amateur talent radio shows, where an announcer once said to the gasping studio audience, “And you’d never believe this is mother and son!”
As a sophisticated bohemian and a young man new to gay life, Harry discovered a new dimension to Los Angeles. At dusk and after the theater let out, young men without cars would amble elegant Hollywood Boulevard in search of “friends.” During this leisurely street cruising, “we would stop in the best tailor shops, handling everything, buying nothing. If someone had a red tie or a lavender handkerchief, he might be—interesting.” A more secure Harry than the nervous underage pickup of Champ Simmons returned to Pershing Square and also found out the charms of Lafayette, Delongpre, and Echo parks. As Paul Mooney had directed, he found the speakeasies of Central Avenue, the Harlem of Los Angeles, where indeed, “gays were permitted to come and be easy with themselves and maybe even dance together—cautiously, to be sure, without upsetting people too much.”
In 1933, when Prohibition was repealed, speakeasies turned into nightclubs. “Before 1933, these places were raided, the patrons booked, shamed, and publicized because of the Volstead Act. After 1933, in our places, the same routine continued because it was queer! Freddie’s had a new opening about six times a year. It was Freddie’s and Jimmie’s and Johnny’s and Tessies and Bessie’s. More established places like Maxwell’s downtown would get knocked over and close down but pay off the cops and not move out.”
One night, while cruising one of the parks, he came across a familiar face. It was George, the boy he used to neck with during mass at St. Gregory’s.
“’Fancy meeting you here,’ I said. ‘I see you’ve quit the Church.’ He looked quite annoyed at me and said, ‘No. Why should I do that?’ ‘So you wouldn’t have to be a hypocrite,’ I answered. That upset him, and he said, ‘I don’t have to give up my faith because I happen to—know what I like.’ ‘What’s that? Sucking cock in the bushes?’ He turned purple and hissed, ‘Must you be so vulgar? and huffed away.”
Like many of the Depression generation, Harry lived at home until he married. While in the house he politely adhered to his parents’ rules, but as a sign of adult independence, he moved from the room he shared with Jack to the maid’s room after she was let go. Big Harry’s outrage shifted to concern. One morning at the breakfast table, he announced that he had signed a 99-year lease with the Ritz-Carlton Hotel for one of his Hollywood Boulevard properties. “We’ll have a guaranteed income for life,” he said. “And of course we’ll have to take care of Harry because he’s the dreamer and he’ll never make any money.” The Depression undid that plan, but even without a guaranteed income, Harry continued to dream.
It is hard to keep track of youthful Harry’s restless affairs. In fact, he once said that he must have had “two or three affairs a day between 1932 and 1936.” But the sexual flurry did not preclude several ongoing relationships. One lover was a blue-black Afro-Cuban man named Luis Rosado who worked as houseboy for screen actors Bebe Daniels and Ben Lyon; another was a conservative, scheming Hungarian count.
But the most important relationship of that time was with an actor he would meet backstage in an antique melodrama, The Ticket of Leave Man—or—Falsely Accused. This first production of the new Tony Pastor Theater on Sunset Boulevard, the Los Angeles branch of a famous New York house, was the pet project of producer John Decker. The entire theater was modeled after the conventions of the Nineteenth century, a beer hall with “meller-dramas” and variety artists. The 1933 handbills advertising Leave Man deadpanned: “Hitch up the old gray mare and come over and hiss the villain!” (This formula was later used to greater advantage by The Drunkard, Los Angeles’ longest-running stage production.)
Harry was hired as the comedy lead, a part that was later cut, so he played several bit parts and worked as assistant stage manager. The cast of Leave Man, like the George K. Arthur Players, consisted mostly of performers over forty who had spent years touring. One of the younger members was particularly interesting. The guy who played Honest Bob Brierly, the lead, was a big, slightly awkward-looking man. Seeing him rehearsing, I was immediately aware of a dynamic sexual presence. He was not classically handsome, but was very arresting, with powerful, quiet eyes. Our glances met during that first meeting and held for a moment too long. My throat went dry and I knew I’d made a connection.”
This was Will Geer, known to modern audiences as “Grandpa Walton” from the famous 1970s television series. Then a thirty-year-old actor, Geer had already spent half his life on stage, with experience ranging from tent and riverboat shows to playing Shakespeare on Broadway. He had only recently arrived in Los Angeles and was seeking film work.
The two young actors made a point of avoiding each other for the six weeks of rehearsal, but shortly before the opening, Harry learned that the charismatic and urbane Geer loved nature, and invited him hiking. “I took Bill—he was not known as Will then—to White’s Park and Creek, in what used to be known as the Santa Ynez Mountains. We came in from the Valley side because the mountains in front were part of the Rindge Ranch. There were wonderful geological features to be seen in White’s Canyon. Many birds hunted there temporarily on their way south in fall; there were salamanders in the creek, and thick herbal growth along the banks.” Geer, who had a degree in botany, wasn’t familiar with many of the wild plants of the area, so they filled a knapsack with cuttings to ask about at the next ranger station. Harry stayed with Bill that night in his room at the Mountain View Inn on Hollywood Boulevard. Many days of vigorous hikes, and blissful nights, followed.
It was Will Geer who introduced Harry to the Left-wing community of Los Angeles, and eventually to its Communist Party. This started over coffee Matches between Geer and Maude Allen, an older actress who lived at the Mountain View and was also in the show with them. They hashed over the anti-socialist Palmer Raids made by the federal government in the 1920s, the Sacco and Vanzetti trials, and various strikes—fascinating stuff to this young man. Around Geer’s room lay pamphlets and leaflets similar to those the Wobblies had shown Harry in Nevada, but newer. He read them all.
Though new in town, Geer had already earned a reputation as a radical Leftist. He produced fund-raising and entertainment events on a regular basis, sometimes in conjunction with the John Reed Experimental Theater Club. In fact, the proprietor of the Mountain View was a Leftist who gave Geer a free room in exchange for political spoofs to be staged in the parlor every week. These had names such as The Siege of El Monte—or—1000 Armed Reds March on Raspberry Fields and Today We Fascist. Geer produced other skits and plays around Los Angeles, including Stevedore, which united trade union and racial struggles.
As an active Leftist, Geer often approached wealthy sympathizers for contributions to campaigns and productions. Geer mentioned to Harry two sympathetic heiresses, Kate Crane Gartz of the Chicago steel and iron fortune, and Aline Barnsdall, daughter of an oil driller. Barnsdall lived in Hollywood in a superb Frank Lloyd Wright house atop an olive-planted hill she later gave to the city as a park and museum. Around the base of her huge lot were large signboards supporting radical causes such as Free India, the Scottsboro boys, the eight-hour day and the Free Tom Mooney campaign. Harry was never taken to these private pitch meetings, but recalled that many times he trimmed the threads off Geer’s well-worn coat sleeves to make him look presentable.
Geer plunged Harry into hard-core activism: demonstrations for the benefit of the unemployed, for the wretchedly exploited field workers in the Central California Valley, for labor unions in need of lawyers. The radical young actors once even handcuffed themselves to the wrought-iron lamp posts that flanked the main entrance to the original campus of U.C.L.A. (now Los Angeles City College) to pass out leaflets for the American League Against War and Fascism. The police soon cut them down and dragged them away.
One afternoon, Geer sent Harry to the city’s downtown Bunker Hill district to observe a demonstration. It grew rough and became one of his favorite stories. The Milk Strike,” Harry recounted, “was an action called in 1933 by the wives and mothers of the poor and unemployed to make the government stop allowing surplus milk to be poured down the storm drains to keep the price up. They wanted it for the needy. A crowd of thousands turned out downtown in the shadow of the newly built City Hall.” Harry wore his best clothes that day. “If you were very well dressed in Hollywood then, you wore a very white shirt with a starched collar and tie, probably a black tie. And if you were a Hollywood actor, you wore a black silk hankie in your pocket to match your tie. Of course, I was being a bit of a nonconformist that day, and was wearing an ascot with a stickpin. Not many people wore ascots in those days. There would have been Nils Asther and David Niven—and Ray Milland—and me.”
Looking up, he saw machine guns atop nearby buildings. Violence had broken out in many cities over human needs, and the local government was prepared for the worst. He backed away from the quickly growing crowd when he saw mounted police charging through the thick of it, swinging their clubs at people’s heads. “This was a dramatic scene! Women were grabbing and shielding their children, and every so often you would see someone go down with a bloody head. The police were being absolutely brutal, without provocation. I think they may have wanted to incite a riot so they could clear the crowd.”
With his hands behind him, Harry backed up to the open door of a bookstore, where stacks of newspapers were held down by bricks. He found his hand resting on a brick. “I made no conscious decision, I just found myself heaving it and catching a policeman right in the temple. He slid off his horse and a hundred faces turned to me in amazement. No one was more amazed than I. Always before, I had been the one who threw the ball like a sissy. This ‘bull’ was my first bull’s-eye ever!”
Sympathizers murmuring in Yiddish, Portuguese and English grabbed him. He heard, “We’ve got to hide this kid before the cops get him.” Hands led him backward through a building connected to other buildings—a network of 1880s tenements that formed an interconnected casbah on the slopes of the sprawling old Bunker Hill quarter. He was pushed through rooms that immigrant women and children rarely left, across catwalks and planks, up, up, hearing the occasional reassurance, “Everything’s fine. Just don’t look down.”
Once out of the structure, near the top of the hill, he was hustled to a large Victorian house, where he found himself standing, dizzy and disoriented, in a living room full of men drinking coffee. In the center, cutting a cake, was a soft-featured man in women’s attire. The man gestured theatrically when he spoke, and everyone addressed him as Clarabelle and referred to him as her. So did Harry:
“Clarabelle had hennaed hair that was pinned up, and a blouse that was pulled down around the shoulders, gypsy style. I could tell by the condition of the skin that she was somewhere in her forties. ‘My dear,’ she said to me, ‘we saw what you did, knocking that old cop off his high horse, and it should have been done years ago. We’ll have to hide you; they’ll be after you soon. Cup of coffee first? No, no time. They’re already on their way.’”
Harry had heard of Clarabelle as one of the most powerful of the “Queen Mothers” who traditionally oversaw the temperamental comings and goings in the districts of town where they lived; Harry felt that such figures formed a regional network of salons among some pre-Stonewall gays. “Clarabelle controlled Bunker Hill and had at least a dozen ‘lieutenants’ covering stations, one called the Fruit Tank—that was our nickname for the jail cell for queers. Clarabelle was legendary, a Mary Boland type who really knew how to pin a curl while giving an order.” She ordered Harry to be hidden in her basement and a lieutenant led him down five flights of stairs to a room storing Persian rugs, concealed him in a carpeted cave, and promised him coffee and a fried-egg sandwich in due time. “After several hours, someone finally brought me the coffee. It turned out to be Clarabelle’s nephew, a cute, sort of -shaped young man who just loved sixty-nine. He stayed for hours. I never got the egg sandwich, but I didn’t much care.”
After his feat with the brick, Geer recruited Harry to help with his agitprop work. “Bill had an entire repertoire of five-minute plays, recitations, and dialogues that made Leftist propaganda points. He needed a fall guy to feed him his lines and make these things work, so I was happily drafted. To be honest, at that point, I was more interested in being around Bill than in the politics.” They performed at all the demonstrations and benefits, and most often spontaneously in the streets, which served as Harry’s next important training ground.
Throughout his long participation in the Left—indeed throughout his life—Hay kept alive Geer’s training in agitprop, as he defined it, “a responsibility for keeping spirits high at picket lines and keeping attention focused at large meetings.” Most often, they performed in the “Free Speech Zones” of Los Angeles, such as Westlake Park, where ideas could be freely expressed without risk of persecution. Geer had arranged for a van and driver. The back doors of the vehicle opened into a black-painted interior, which served as a stage. The actors entered and exited by turning flashlights on and off under their chins.
Harry shouted setup lines. “Time: From the Boom Days to the Dog Days! Place: All over the United States of America!” Their sketches discussing social reform were meant to be “sort of comforting, speaking the words of the oppressed in ways they couldn’t speak for themselves.” Over several months, “We did a whole flock of these and we got a pretty good reputation for ourselves.” At another Free Speech Zone, the old church plaza on Olvera Street, protection was regularly ignored by the police. Mindful of this, they designed the van to close up and pull out fast, but if the crowd was too dense, the actors fled on foot. “A Chinese restaurant in an alley off the plaza, Jerry’s Joynte, used to hide us. It was owned by an old Red who put us in his pantry and sent back plates of spare ribs. Once he dressed us in Chinese robes and false moustaches and hid us among the patrons!”
Harry and Bill’s relationship went through a change after about four months when Geer recommended an education class in the Hollywood section of the Communist Party. Harry found the sophisticated level of theory fascinating and bewildering, and he stuck with it mainly “out of my love for Bill.” His older, more world-wise lover, however, was often called away to work in the Central Valley and other areas, and though Harry’s involvement with the Party eventually became passionate and dedicated, it was hampered at the start by feelings of abandonment and resentment at what he called Geer’s “total immersion” method of recruitment.
These stresses made already challenging material even more difficult. “It was disorienting to sit there with urban people, mostly film workers, discussing rural worker models of Marxism,” he said. His first teacher, Lillian Asche (who later became a friendly witness to HUAC), was also intimidating. “When I asked about the recent purges of Lovestone and Muste, I was harshly criticized as a reactionary. I simply shut my face. I felt I was in an intellectual prison. I couldn’t find a link to any other theory I understood. But my imagination was caught, and I was madly in love with Bill.” Several years later, this political deadlock would break, but because of it, 1933 was “a miserable year,” even when Geer returned for weekend hikes. “I wasn’t going to tell him my bewilderment—or that I knew he couldn’t sort it all out either,” Harry said, and as they drifted apart, he determinedly completed the class and signed up for another.
Harry found more than an ideological catalyst in Will Geer. Geer provided an ideal model to which Hay could aspire. He embodied the seemingly opposite directions of culture and radical politics through a persona of self-reliant, almost transcendent optimism. (Geer once said that his greatest fear was “people who believe you can’t change human nature.”) While remaining earthy and folksy, he could be cultured and refined. Neither his gardening trowel nor his progressive politics were ever retired, and his family referred to him until his death as “the world’s oldest hippie.” As he aged, these same descriptions fit Harry.
Harry credited the final step in his radicalization to the weekend he spent with Geer in San Francisco during the General Strike of July, 1934. Centered on a maritime strike which shut down the waterfront, the action lasted two months, involved 120 local unions, and became one of the largest and most dramatic actions of the modern labor movement. Governor Frank Finley Merriam, only six weeks in office, threatened to call in the state militia. During a period when Leave Man was closed for rewriting, Hay and Geer drove up the state, stopping regularly to gather donations of food for the strikers. Once in San Francisco, Geer was in heavy demand to speak and to attend various meetings. Sometimes Harry accompanied him, but other times he was assigned to type, translate, or in some other way help with the fervid activities of the hour.
Merriam did call out the guard, which opened fire on a crowd of more than two thousand. Harry was there and remembered hearing a bullet zing past his left ear. Two men were killed, eighty-five more were hospitalized, and News-Week headlined, “Blood Flows in San Francisco Streets.” At the massive funeral procession that followed, Harry recalled, “As the two flag-covered caissons passed, drawn by horses slowly highstepping to funeral music, a posse of dock workers knocked the bowlers off the heads of bankers who refused to show respect. It was pretty damn impressive.” And it had a lasting impact. Hay told historian John D’Emilio, “You couldn’t have been a part of that and not have your life completely changed.”
Against such economic battles of hungry people versus greedy businessmen, the Communist Party exerted an urgent pull. Communists felt they were riding with the tide of history, and the Party offered a program of practical action that was global in scope. More personally, it held out a surrogate for Harry’s aloof family—chosen comrades who had similar values. Mostly, it appealed to his deep idealism. C.P. historian Joseph Starobin describes the Party as “a community that went beyond national boundaries and differences of race and creed: it was driven by the certainty that man’s sojourn on earth could be happier if only his social relations were transformed from competition to cooperation.” To hundreds of thousands of Harry’s generation, Communism represented something between opportunity and destiny to change the world for the better. At twenty-three, with his whole life ahead of him, he was caught by what he called “the siren song of Revolution.”
For Harry, this passionate political enlightenment also marked the start of a protracted alienation: The Party strictly prohibited homosexuals from joining and did not acknowledge homosexuality as anything more than the degenerate phase of a decadent system. They were not a group who could have rights. Harry naively brought up his idea of a “team of brothers” to Geer, who would not consider it. “I said I’d wanted to get a society of ‘just us’ together. Bill argued that that was the theater.” Harry countered that the theater milieu did not involve political discussion. “But what’s to talk about?” Geer asked, exasperated. The only person who encouraged Harry’s idea of organizing homosexuals was old Maude Allen. While Harry once argued the notion to Geer, she broke in that “this was possible, but you might have to start it yourself.” Over the next twenty years as he occasionally proposed the concept of a gay political identity, Harry rarely got any more encouragement than that.
Still, for a spirit like Harry’s, the Party was the future. “We were involved in organizing the unorganized; the CIO [Congress of Industrial Organizations] had a wide open field on the West Coast. Along with the waterfront, the newspaper guilds began to organize, as did the department stores.” It was a dangerous and circumscribed world, which added to the thrill. “We were automatically afoul of the law. The Los Angeles Police Department’s Red Squad was always ferreting out the agitators to see if they could expose them.” Oppression was so intense, Harry recalled, that people who went to the one progressive bookstore in Los Angeles would barely look at each other for fear of provoking an undercover policeman. The Red underground demanded extreme discretion. False names were often used. Over the years, Harry would ponder how in the gay world many of the same practices were necessary.
While his underground radical life flowered, Harry busily developed his paying careers. Hazel Harvey, an aspiring Hollywood photographer who rented a studio from his father, recognized Harry as another temperamental type, and they met regularly to drink coffee and trade studio gossip. She took a number of soulful acting portraits of Harry which emphasize his cleft chin, broad jaw, and high forehead with the deep wrinkle he called “the dent.” They also show a remarkable resemblance to the popular Thirties actor Charles Bickford, whom he hoped to understudy. Harry did get frequent studio calls, but only to act as a nameless extra.
Besides acting, another promising avenue in movies was writing. He had gained some experience working with Ole Ness rewriting the outdated material in Leave Man, but his film opportunity arose when a man who picked him up at Hollywood and Vine talked about a problem he was having in a movie scene he was writing. “I made some stage business suggestions, and between the two of us, we completely readjusted the sequence. From then on he almost always had some script hot-spot that needed operating on. For these ghostwriting tussles he would give me fifteen to twenty-five dollars a hit.”
Harry’s new friend was George Oppenheimer, a writer-director at MGM whose screen credits included No More Ladies and A Night At The Opera. An urbane New Yorker, he mixed business and pleasure and sent late-night taxis for their private dates. Occasionally, he introduced Harry to the lavender network in the film industry, about which John Darrow had spoken earlier. But the entree was severely limited, and Harry learned that ghostwriters were among Hollywood’s faceless, and were never publicly acknowledged.
The industry had many positions suited to the talents of gay people, and many had come West to fill them. “There were hundreds you would know—or sort of know—once you were inside the gate,” Harry said. But staying for more than a short visit was difficult, and this network was by no means “out.” Discretion was the byword, and exclusive cliques the rule.
In the mid-1930s, Harry’s sometimes-clique was a group of chorus boy types. Evenings, they cruised quietly around the fresh art deco facades of Hollywood Boulevard and weekend mornings they met for coffee at its open-air cafes. There they gossiped about the “stables” of George Cukor and others, and snickered at “movie people parading in their Daimlers and Packards with exotic white panthers in the back seats.” Of course they went to films together.
“Once we all went together to see the new Fred Astaire movie called Flying Down to Rio at the Egyptian Theater. We sat in the tenth row center and just screamed when we recognized friends. Lots of ‘We know that one,’ and ‘Get her; and so on.” On Mondays they scanned “Hedda and Lolly” (Hopper and Parsons) to see who had been censured in blind items for appearing in queer company over the weekend. Inhibitions were stronger in the Thirties than in previous decades, since scandals and marketing strategies forced the private lives of film actors to fit narrow standards. Hollywood institutions that were later refined, like the publicity date and the “beard” marriage, were in those years just starting to be enforced.
In times of trouble, the network might offer help. Harry recalled hearing, for example, that costume designer Walter Plunkett often provided bail money when unfortunates were entrapped on morals charges. Friendships among industry gays were often lifelong and helped many people get their start and remain employed in the competetive, conservative industry. George Oppenheimer told Harry about a dinner party for MGM’s wunderkind producer Irving Thalberg, who numbered the discreet Oppenheimer among his “bachelor company.” Hay was thrilled at the possibility of meeting Hollywood’s most powerful producer, but Oppenheimer regretfully nixed the plan. “I’m sorry,” he told Harry, “but you’re too obvious.”
Harry could scream with his mouth shut. He often wore the crimson peasant shirt he had acquired for the Latvian choir while strolling Hollywood Boulevard. The attention it attracted was not executive, but it could be well worthwhile. Harry had flings both short- and long-term with various aspiring matinee idols. Among them were Willy Wakewell, Phillip Ann, and Hans Von Twardowski, a handsome German emigre. Harry felt very strongly for blond, green-eyed Roy Rattibaugh, renamed Richard Cromwell for films, who was briefly married to Angela Lansbury and committed suicide in the 1940s. From a night at a bar that would turn into a weekend affair, or a crowded party that would turn into an evening’s duet, Harry saw the inside of many Hollywood bedrooms.
Even among the largely apolitical society of actors, Harry persisted in discussing a gay Utopia. At one party when he broached the subject, his date cut him dead with the remark: “My God, you are degenerate!” But at another party, at the Santa Monica Canyon home of stage manager Tom Turner, Harry’s notion fared better. He and the host “got to talking about dreams of what we wanted in our lives. And I must have talked about some of my dreams of a team of men like us.
“Following up on the writings of Edward Carpenter, I wanted to discover who gay people were, and what we had contributed, and what we were for. I wanted a way for us to show ‘the others’ how beautiful our dreams really were. Several of the most hardened, experienced queens started to laugh and taunt me. Suddenly Tommy stood up and said, ‘Stop it, all of you. Because of his dreams this boy has a long, hard, and rocky road ahead of him. We all had dreams like his once, too. We’ve lost them, traded them away for trash, or even betrayed them. So leave him alone. Be glad he’s got his dreams. Maybe someday, if he’s lucky and brave, something will come of it. Something good for all of us.’”
“We are living in a time when new art works should shoot bullets,” wrote Clifford Odets of the 1930s. In 1935, at the age of twenty-eight, Odets wrote a machine gun of play about unionization called Waiting For Lefty. It was immediately performed by the Group Theater of New York, and its dramatic muscle and timely demand for a living wage drew a fabulous critical success, and led to Odets’s Hollywood screenwriting career. Lefty was the most militant attraction of the Leftist theater movement, and its powerhouse ending had audiences on their feet nightly, joining with the actors to shout, “Strike! Strike! Strike!”
The same year Lefty premiered, the Hollywood Theater Guild assembled on the West Coast to produce it. Harry recalled, “Bill Watts, the director, Scott and Georgia Landers, Don Sample, and I put that organization together to perform Lefty for trade union groups and strike line entertainments.” Harry volunteered to search for a headquarters and found a mansion for rent on Harold Way in Hollywood, which had belonged to Lloyd Pantages, son of the legendary theater owner. The Guild included actors Peter Brocco and Marc Lawrence, Who later succeeded in films, and Will Geer, who returned to town and couldn’t resist getting involved.
Because Odets’s play was a success in New York, Geer found a New York “angel,” Jay Kaufman, to put up the $35,000 needed for the West Coast productions. Harry recalled Kaufman as “fat and sad—sad because he already knew this wasn’t going to be the box office hit it was back East.” Nevertheless, the show went on, and everyone in the cast became a member of the Guild. The villain of Lefty is a corrupt union official named Harry Fatt who needs an armed guard to protect him from the union he purports to represent. Those members who rebel against their substandard wages are Red-baited by Fatt, but a series of dramatic sketches reveals the injuries caused by “the Bosses.” In the end, every man becomes a militant, and the union triumphs.
Harry played Dr. Barnes, an old hospital administrator who resists supporting socialized medicine, then endorses it after admitting the human debris left in the wake of the medical bosses. Since Lefty lasted only about an hour, it was coupled with another short Odets play, the anti-Nazi Till the Day I Die. In that, Harry played Adolph, a Nazi soldier who is homosexual. The part was written as a broad villain—Adolph helps an S.S. officer (“a man like Goering,” say the stage directions) to torture Communists. Later, he cries after the S.S. man rejects his advances. Though the part exploited the stereotype of homosexuals as sadistic degenerates, Harry always considered it a backhanded honor to have given an openly gay stage portrayal so early. One reason that he got the role was that no one else in the Guild would touch it, less because of the Nazism than the queerness.
The production played out of town at first, in San Diego, Santa Barbara, and Laguna, where it was threatened with closure. “John Law and the American Legion threatened to break up the show and throw the cast in jug,” reported the March, 1935, New York Weekly Variety. Right-wing Legionnaires “demanded the deletion of the Communist propaganda and police ordered the profanity in the play eliminated.”
Opposition escalated just before the play opened at the Hollywood Playhouse, when Will Geer was attacked. His swollen face, bandaged and grimacing from a hospital bed, appeared in local newspapers with the caption “U.S. Nazis Try Hitler Methods.” Geer’s attackers were members of the Friends of the New Germany, Los Angeles Nazis upset about the final scene of Till the Day I Die, in which a picture of Hitler is ripped from the wall. The day Geer was beaten, they posted at the theater a note marked with swastikas and skulls which warned: “manager—you know what we do to the enemies of the new germany—if you open f.n.g.”
Peter Brocco, who got the best reviews in Lefty, recalled the intense pressure from all sides. “I got a telegram from my union telling me to get out of that Communist play. Then Geer came around with that bandage on his head. On opening night, it was pretty scary going on.” Geer’s injuries from the beating kept him from continuing to direct, so a film director from Universal Studios was brought in to help tighten up the plays before opening.
A small, loyal audience of brave film industry progressives could not counterbalance the weak reviews, and the show ran only four weeks at the Hollywood Playhouse. For Harry, the highlight of the Hollywood run was the night Edward G. Robinson, known for his patronage of progressive artists, came backstage. “He told me that a middle-aged actor named Roman Bohnen was playing the part of old Doctor Barnes in the New York production of Lefty, which he had just seen. And he told me that I, at twenty-three, had done it better. I was so pleased.”
The perfect clubhouse for Harry sprang up across the street from the Hollywood Theater Guild, when devotees of the new camera arts formed an organization called the Hollywood Film and Foto League. Part Left, part art, part commune, the League documented demonstrations and social unrest on film and had a counterpart in New York. Like modern video activists, they used their footage to defend progressives victimized in police riots, and to inspire public campaigns for social redress. To keep afloat, the Film and Foto League rented studio space and living quarters in a large complex of buildings which included a main house, a carriage house, and a barn.
The main house had a huge dance floor and a stage. It had previously been a White Russian nightclub, with murals of giant flowers in Russian folk decor style. These were whitewashed so that experimental films—such as Sergei Eisenstein’s Ten Days That Shook the World—could be projected on the walls each weekend. More than a dozen dancers, sculptors, and other artists pooled their relief checks for rent and communal meals. Some identified as Reds, but many were completely apolitical. One tenant, a sculptor, was unable to raise his rent, so he camped under a tree in the yard.
Whenever people got jobs, the house went untended; when they were out of work it was clean but they were hungry. Its nickname, hence, was the Filth and Famine League. Harold Way became Harry’s home away from home, and he frequently escaped the stuffy air of Windsor Boulevard to spend his free hours there, talking politics, enrolled in classes the dancers offered, or simply hanging around. The Film and Foto League was not necessarily Communist or “temperamental,” but plenty of such people could be found there without much looking, and it was here that he met many of his best friends for the next fifteen years. Among them were photographer Roger Barlow, dancer Bruce Burroughs, sound engineer Burton Perry, and a vivacious young dancer named Helen Johnson.
Johnson described the anything-goes ambiance: “In those days, in the circles in which I moved, gays and straights were not so separated. A lot of people at that place swung a bit both ways. It was taken for granted that Communists were around; they were scattered in the Filth and Famine League like raisins in a cake. There was a woman named Adele whom we thought was a Communist agent because she never mixed with anybody. Bea, an older lady who ran the place, was always looking to lay the younger men who were there. There was a Hungarian who we found was stealing typewriters and reselling them; he also taught fencing to famous Hollywood people. I had a room over an old stable, next to a guy who gathered rusty old files and tools and soaked them in a big vat of acid to clean them up for resale—he always shook them in the middle of the night!”
Distinguished European musicians who happened to be Leftists were among those who gave concerts at the building when films were not being shown. Visitors covered the social spectrum, and one of the more glamorous was Richard Buhlig, a renowned Viennese pianist who was a teacher to John Cage. Buhlig invited the young people from Harold Way to his own house in Los Feliz. “Buhlig’s big distinction was that he had an affair with Isadora Duncan,” recalled Helen Johnson. “He was gay, but I guess she was just too good or too famous to pass up. He had a wonderful large house with a front room that was completely unfurnished except for his grand piano. I remember his playing, and Harry and I would dance together. That was something. Harry was a very good ballroom dancer, and with Buhlig playing, it was glorious.”
Sometimes the kids from the Filth and Famine League would go hear Harry play the organ for the Los Angeles lodge of the Order of the Eastern Temple, or O.T.O., Aleister Crowley’s notorious anti-Christian spiritual group. Based on the Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society concerned with the use of ritual sex in magic, Crowley’s society was not so secret and was known to have created homosexual sex-magic rituals. The O.T.O. motto, “Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be the Whole of the Law,” inspired the name of its mother church, the Abbey of Thelema, which in Greek means “will.” The original Abbey was in Sicily, but the Los Angeles chapter also called their meeting place Thelema, although the smallish quarters were in the attic of a four-story house in Hollywood.
Regina Kahl, with whom Harry had acted, was high priestess of O.T.O., and she hired Harry to play the organ at services. In keeping with the times, no one was openly gay, but the lodge was run by a frail man named Wilfred Smith, who often performed “exorcisms” on attractive young men. Kahl, whom Harry described as “the biggest lez you ever saw,” and two older women known as the Wolfe sisters were priestesses. The Wolfe sisters wistfully hinted that sex-magic rituals would be nice if enough people ever joined the Los Angeles Temple—but enough never did.
When the services were to start, remembered Harry, “a gong sounded and we’d get to the chapel by ladder. The congregation sat in pews facing a sarcophagus behind a gauze curtain. Regina, in a flowing robe, slit the veil with a sword and out came Wilfred wearing a snake diadem and a red velvet cape made from a theater curtain. ‘I am a man among men,’ he would say. Then, taking Regina, who towered above him, he’d say, ‘Come thou virgin, pure and without spot.’” Many visitors had trouble keeping a straight face. Harry mischievously slipped “Barnacle Bill the Sailor” or “Yes, We Have No Bananas!” slowed to dirge tempo, into the contrapuntal themes he was hired to play. Frequently, he dropped into his former Catholic church to play a mass earlier in the day—just to balance his sacrilege.
In late 1935, Harry landed a good part in Clean Beds, an American adaptation of the Gogol play which was directed by a Russian emigre named Vadim Uranieff. The drama was staged at the Holly Town theater, owned by Mae West’s long-time manager James Timony. The lead was played by young Anthony Quinn, whose sex appeal, Harry recalled, “nailed you to the wall, but he was so hetero it hurt!” As second lead, Harry’s portrayal of an impoverished newlywed pleased the crowd, and one night it brought backstage an admirer whose interest increased once he saw Harry out of makeup. Stanley Mills Haggart was nearly as tall as Harry, with curly blond hair and an open, handsome flower-face. Harry fell for him instantly “with a chemistry the like of which had never happened before.” It seemed immediately to Harry “very likely that our relationship could become permanent.”
He faced, however, a formidable barrier: Stanley’s mother. Jane Lawrence Haggart reminded everyone that hers was the premiere family of Lawrence, Kansas, even after she moved to California. Helen Johnson, also a friend of Stanley, described Mrs. Haggart as a variation of Margaret Hay, “beautifully mannered but a real pain-in-the-ass.” Stanley and his mother had a business of buying, refurbishing, and selling houses. (Eventually she pioneered the tour book series Europe on Five Dollars a Day and bequeathed the publishing contract to Stanley.) She was also involved with the British-based Oxford Group, which was concerned with morality and meditation but is often remembered for its pre-war dealings with Adolf Hitler.
Stanley suggested that he and Harry move in together at one of the properties they were restoring. Mrs. Haggart was as displeased as her son was happy, and shortcut his plans by suggesting that she and Stanley move to England to join up with the inner circle of the Oxford Group. A skirmish of letters between Stanley, Harry, and Mrs. Haggart in the spring of 1936 tells of the growing strains. On March 23, 1936 Mrs. Haggart wrote to Harry, “Stanley is not strong, and goes much of the time on nervous energy and the long and continuous late hours with you have been very hard on him... I don’t mind admitting to you that I have felt a growing resentment for you on this account.”
In late April, six months after meeting Harry, Stanley disappeared. He sent Harry a letter from Central California in which he spelled out his capitulation to his mother’s position: “Our close contact in early youth has cemented a bound [sic] not broken by our seemingly different views and aims in life. [But] you have gone a way which neither I nor my associates who know you approve... Physical relationships that are not normal make me have a repulsion toward you.” Something drastic had happened, for during their last visits, Stanley had been anything but repulsed.
Mrs. Haggart assured Harry that Stanley would return to Los Angeles soon, then shortly afterwards, she left town herself. Harry wrote dozens of letters and received no reply. Certain that the Oxford Group would be able to fix her son’s “problem,” Jane Haggart took him to its bosom. Harry jokingly referred to himself as a “bereaved widow,” but Stanley’s departure was probably as difficult for him as a death, and seems to have significantly damaged his hopes of finding happiness in love. The following October, he would receive a parchment invitation to Stanley’s wedding, in England, to a Miss Phyllis Ward. Taking no chances, Mrs. Haggart posted it a safe two weeks after the ceremony had taken place. Emotionally thwarted, Harry fell deeper into politics.
1. This campy, outrageous comedian traveled the vaudeville circuit in the Twenties and Thirties, then starred in Mae West’s stage shows in the Forties. In the 1950s, he became known as “Rae” by undergoing one of the first sex-change surgeries, immortalized on the record album Let Me Tell You About My Operation Johnny’s and Tessie’s and Bessie’s. More established places like Maxwell’s downtown would get knocked over and close down but pay off the cops and not move out.”