Paper Trail: Great American Couple

In an exclusive excerpt from his new book, Hollywood Bohemians: Transgressive Sexuality and the Selling of the Movieland Dream, Brett L. Abrams explores the relationship between Cary Grant and Randolph Scott, who led homosexual lives right under everyone's nose.

Newspaper and magazine articles, Hollywood novels, and Hollywood movies featuring Hollywood between the late 1910s and early 1940s showed audiences homosexuals, adulterers, effeminate males, and butch females. Actress Greta Garbo defined herself as a bachelor. Screenwriter Mercedes De Acosta wore mannish attire. A trio of male heartthrobs attended a party and showed no romantic interest in women. Homosexual designers picked up men in nightclubs. The industry and the media covering Hollywood developed and disseminated these real and fictional characters, whom I call Hollywood’s bohemians.

The Hollywood bohemians appeared because they contributed significantly to the construction of the movie capital’s image. They helped forge the perspective of Hollywood as the most racy, risqué and unconventional place in the country. Hollywood was the dream factory, a place to project our fantasies and reflect our dreams, no matter how outlandish. The usual Hollywood publicity enabled audience members to develop a sense of intimacy with the celebrity so that readers could imagine themselves as having a greater understanding of the star.

Hollywood bohemian images increased the appeal to audiences’ prurient interests with sexual naughtiness. As homosexuals, adulterers, effeminate males, and butch females, the bohemians embodied the pleasures of the forbidden and the taboo. Hollywood bohemians linked the industry to exposure of (previously) guarded secrets. They played an important role in developing Hollywood’s image as a place of sexual abandon, further enhancing the Hollywood “mystique.” The brilliance of these images was that they set the bohemians at familiar Hollywood locations. The presence of the sexual “other” makes the location more exciting, and the familiar location makes the “other” less threatening.

The bohemians are the forerunners of today’s highly sexualized images. They highlighted celebrity and public figures’ personal lives, which has become the focus of extensive coverage now. They represent an early example of the media presenting culturally controversial behavior images to attract audiences.

The first publicity images containing information about Grant and Scott began after they became friends while filming the movie Hot Saturday in mid–1932. Press reports during the first two years described the actors’ shared celebrity home and domestic life through phrases including, “Hollywood’s twosome” and “the happy couple.” The innuendos provided details about the two actors’ personal lives which thrilled fans, making the actors appear to be two men sharing more than lodgings.