IT'S NOT GAY MARRIAGE; IT'S MARRIAGE

HOW ATTENDING MY LESBIAN SISTER'S WEDDING IN THE SMOKY MOUNTAINS IS REMINDING ME OF SMOKING JACKETS, ANGELA LANSBURY'S SMOKING ON THE SET OF "GASLIGHT," AND RUPERT EVERETT'S SMART-ASS REMARKS

(Above, Angela Lansbury and Rupert Everett when Julie Andrews visited them backstage during their Broadway run of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit in 2009.)

I am in the Smoky Mountains for the wedding of my sister to the woman she loves. It is not only bringing back many memories of our childhoods growing up in neighboring Mississippi, but also an interview I did with Rupert Everett for The Daily Beast when he ridiculed the whole concept of gay men and lesbians getting married. “Awful middle-class queens,” is what he called other gay men who wanted to get married and have children when I had an early dinner with him before his performance - this was the beginning of his smoking jacket period as an actor - portraying Charles Condomine in the 2009 Broadway revival of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit, which also starred Angela Lansbury who played the dotty medium Madam Arcati, a role created by Margaret Rutherford on London’s West End in 1941 and later that year by Mildred Natwick in its Broadway premiere.

Lansbury, who died this week at the age of 96, had her own experience with a “gay marriage” when, at the age of 19, she wed 35-year-old fellow actor Richard Cromwell in 1945. That marriage lasted less than a year when Cromwell, who was gay, left her along with the pointedly poignant note: “I can’t go on.” Lansbury, recalling her “gay marriage” rather stumblingly at first on NPR’s Fresh Air back in 2000, said, “It’s a very curious thing. I had known so many gay people in Hollywood. It just had never really sunk in … I was in love with love. It was a shock, but it wasn't a shock because I was so in love with Richard Cromwell when I married him that I was just - you know, I'd never had any kind of experience ... I had nothing to draw on ... I had had no experience sexually ... So when it turned out he was gay, I never blamed him for it in any way. And I realized that I had just made an excruciating error. An emotional error. But I don’t regret it because I learned so much during the short time we were together. I give him credit for introducing me to so much in my life I would not have known about had it not been for him. So it was a good experience. … He had an extraordinary group of friends, wonderful people in the business whom I never would have met. He was a great friend of Joan Crawford and Bill Holden and Zachary Scott and all kinds of actors and actresses of that era. He also had an incredible library of music - old 78 records in those days, before LPs and 45s. He had people like Merman on those early records so I got to listen to all kinds of performers. His whole life had been spent listening to those records. He had an enormous collection and a great, great big recording machine. You could slam down 12 records on it. We would listen to music all the time. He also had a tremendous classical repertoire of music in his collection. I learned how to sing listening to his collection - a different kind of singing. I also picked up a tremendous amount during that time working with Kay Thompson and Judy Garland at MGM. But most performers are sponges and you learn how to interpret something in a certain way. You might get it from Nina Simone or you might get it from Judy or you might get it from Merman.”

(Above: Richard Cromell and 19-year-old Angela Lansbury on their wedding day. The marriage would last a bit over a year because he was gay. They remained friends, however, until his death in 1960.)

One of the gay people Lansbury had known in Hollywood was director George Cukor, who directed her in her screen debut as Nancy in Gaslight when she was only 17 - and for which she was nominated for an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress. She also said during that Fresh Air interview that Cukor had directed her to be a “naughty rather dirty girl and, when I gave him that, he thought it was terribly funny and he encouraged me to be this snotty cocky little person who was able to dominate Charles Boyer by inference. What I implied and Boyer’s character inferred was a great deal more than what I was saying.” Lansbury turned 18 on the set and Boyer and Cukor and Ingrid Bergman threw her a party. “They were so wonderfully kind. Ingrid gave me lovely bottles of Strategy, which was a lovely smelly cologne. I had never had anything as lovely as that. We celebrated and I was able to take a cigarette out of a packet in my purse and smoke it. I had not been able to let on until then that I had been smoking since the age of about 14. I say that without any sense of pride at all. I stopped smoking 30 years ago.”

There certainly seemed to be a strategy to Everett’s remarks at our dinner back in 2009 before he joined Lansbury onstage in Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit. I found the remarks rather smelly themselves with more than a whiff of the performative about them. They certainly gained traction in the press and added to his bad-boy image at the time. I think he thought he was being poignantly pointed, but I just thought he was snotty and cocky - and yet somehow endearing in his neediness to be noticed. “Marriage and babies?” he thundered at me over his grilled artichokes. “Please. I want to be illegal. I want to live outside the mainstream. These awful middle-class queens,” he repeated, “which is what the gay movement has become—are so tiresome. It’s all Abercrombie & Fitch and strollers. Everybody has the right to do what they want to do, but still...”

He paused—artfully peeled an artichoke—then pounced once more. “And I think this surrogacy thing is crap. It is utterly hideous. I think it’s egocentric and vain. These endless IVF treatments people go through. I mean, if you are meant to have babies, then great. But this whole idea of two gay guys filling a cocktail shaker with their sperm and impregnating some grim lesbian and then it gets cut out is just really weird. If I did have the impulse to be a parent, I would adopt—or foster. But this whole thing of forcing the idea of parenthood and marriage on us gay men is so bogus.” Dear Rupert, I wanted to warn him back then, you better be careful, you’re trying just a tad too hard, your nickname in certain younger gay circles just might become Auntie Diluvian.

In fact, this weekend these lovely and lively lesbians who are surrounding me as guests of my sister here in the Smoky Mountains are anything but grim. As I type this very sentence, their laughter is lifting up toward me where I sit in a rocker in my room remembering Rupert and working on this column. Indeed, working on a column while there is laughter about sounds rather grim itself. So excuse me. Time to go join the frivolity downstairs before it all turns rather serious tomorrow when my sister and the woman she loves take their vows and our world here stands still to acknowledge their commitment and that love.

Oh, and Noel Coward? He had an opinion, of a sort, about all this. “I have sometimes thought of marriage,” he said. “But then I thought again.” I am glad my sister has never had a second thought about her own love. I am so happy for her. My heart is full.