C e l e b r i t y S e x u a l i t y : J u d i t h An d e r s o n , M r s Danvers, Sexuality and ‘Truthfulness’ in Bi ography DESLEY DEACON Australian-born actress Judith Anderson’s portrayal of the housekeeper Mrs Danvers in Hitchcock’s 1940 film Rebecca has made her the poster girl for scholarly analyses of lesbian sexuality on film; and the plethora of books in the last few years about gays in Hollywood*scholarly and sensational*assume that Anderson was a lesbian. Yet evidence about her sexuality is highly ambiguous. This article uses Anderson’s case to examine the biographer’s problem in dealing accurately and meaningfully with their subject’s sexuality, especially that of celebrities. IF THERE IS anything feminists have contributed to biography over the last fifty years, it is the insistence on the importance of sexuality to the life story. This has become such an unspoken tenet of life writing that biographies which ignore or sideline this aspect of their subjects’ life strike us as inadequate. This article examines the evidence about the sexuality of Australian-born stage and screen star, Judith Anderson, who has become, in recent years, a lesbian icon, in order to show how difficult this task is, especially in the case of celebrities. The imperative to deal with a subject’s sexuality is starkly revealed by the reception of Anna Bemrose’s 2008 biography of dancer and choreographer Robert Helpmann, which made no mention of the sexual nature of his lifelong partnership with the producer Michael Benthall. Indeed, sex or sexuality was not mentioned at all, despite their centrality to such Helpmann works as The Display, where he explored what Dennis Altman calls ‘the homoerotics of mateship’.1 Bemrose was taken to task by her reviewers, especially because there is no lack of information and hearsay about Helpmann’s sexuality. Elizabeth Salter’s much earlier, authorized, biography, published while Helpmann was still alive, stated clearly that ‘the structure on which his life was based was his friendship with Michael Benthall’.2 A controversial London Times obituary portrayed Helpmann as ‘a homosexual of the proselytising kind’ whose influence on a company was ‘dangerous as 1 2 Anna Bemrose, Robert Helpmann: A Servant of Art. (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2008). The front flyleaf further describes the book as ‘A Career Perspective’. See reviews by Ian Britain, Australian Book Review, Dec 2008Jan 2009 and Dennis Altman, Australian, 13 December 2008. Helpmann: The Authorised Biography of Sir Robert Helpmann, CBE (Brighton, UK: Angus and Robertson, 1978), 156. ISSN 1031-461X print/1940-5049 online/12/010045-16# 2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1031461X.2011.649859 45 46 Australian Historical Studies, 43, 2012 well as stimulating’. He could, the obituary claimed, ‘turn young men on the borderline his way’.3 And Helpmann himself made it clear that sexuality was essential to his work. ‘Entertainment should include sexuality’, he contended. ‘I believe every work of art must have slightly aphrodisiac qualities, must be slightly sexually exciting’.4 But those who battle to deal accurately and meaningfully with the sexuality of their biographical subject deserve our sympathy. Sexuality is a mysterious and elusive quality that epitomises the difficulty of the biographer’s task: how do we know what really happened; and even then, how do we know what it meant to our subject? Three recent Australian biographers have come up against the enigmatic nature of their subject’s sexuality and dealt with it in different ways. In her biography of Miles Franklin, Jill Roe examined Franklin’s many romantic friendships with men, a number of them serious enough to lead to proposals of marriage, and considered that Franklin remained resolutely celibate. As Roe points out in this issue, Franklin’s apparent ‘lack’ of a sex life was one of the greatest challenges she faced as a biographer. Susan Magarey and Kerrie Round, in their biography of Dame Roma Mitchell, frustrated that they could find no one who was willing to talk about Dame Roma’s rumoured long affair with a married man, refused to accept her public celibacy and told their imaginative reconstruction of the affair as a ‘story’ and discuss their decision to do so in italics, two strategies they also use elsewhere in the book.5 Jim Davidson, in his biography of the historian W. K. Hancock, deals with Hancock’s marriage to the very interesting Theadon Brocklebank in a separate, later chapter, arguing, among other reasons, that she took little part in Hancock’s career, except to advise behind the scenes. Yet he also noted, in a later article and the book, that ‘if people knew anything about Hancock’s private life, it was that he had a difficult marriage’*surely indicating that it had a major impact on his life and career.6 The difficulties faced by Roe, Magarey and Davidson reveal the truth of Mark Twain’s observation: What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. . . . The mass of him is hidden*it and its volcanic fires that toss and boil, and never rest, night nor day. These are his life, and they are not 3 4 5 6 Wikipedia entry for Helpmann. Graeme Leech’s review of Nigel Starck, Life after Death: The Art of the Obituary (Melbourne: University Press, 2006), Australian, 26 August 2006, called this obituary a ‘turning point for editors, who have since tried to publish the full truth, safe in the knowledge that the dead can’t sue’. See also ‘Helpmann Obituary Leaves a Bad Taste’, Sydney Morning Herald, 6 October 1986. L. Hickson, Woman’s Day/Woman’s World, 21 January 1981: 623, quoted in Michael Gard, Men Who Dance: Aesthetics, Athletics & the Art of Masculinity (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 79. Susan Magarey and Kerrie Round, Roma the First: A Biography of Dame Roma Mitchell (Kent Town, SA: Wakefield Press, 2007). Jim Davidson, A Three-Cornered Life: The Historian W K Hancock (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2010), Chap. 12; and Australian Book Review, JulyAugust 2010: 425, esp. 445. See following review by Deryck Schreuder (467), who notes, without comment, that ‘Hancock lived an emotional life of triangular commitments  primarily to England, Australia and Italy’. Deacon: Judith Anderson: Sexuality and ‘Truthfulness’ in Biography 47 written, and cannot be written. . . . Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man*the biography of the man himself cannot be written.7 The difficulties of revealing those hidden ‘volcanic fires’ are multiplied when the biographical subject is a celebrity of stage and screen. Familiar to us through advertising, gossip magazines, publicity releases, and from images from plays and movies, these are creatures of our imagination, irretrievably connected in our dreams to the characters they portray. Pity the poor biographer! Can we ever find that elusive ‘truth’ we seek when we take on this task? Judith Anderson is a case in point.8 This article will explore the limits of what we know about Anderson’s sexuality and ask whether, in her case, our lack of knowledge really affects the ‘truthfulness’ of the life story we can tell about her. Anderson was born and brought up in Adelaide. She began her illustrious career in Sydney in 1915, when she was eighteen years old. She set off to try her luck in Hollywood three years later; but it was on Broadway where she made her name in the 1920s and early 1930s, playing a series of glamorous sophisticates. As she moved into her forties, she established her reputation as a major classical actress as Gertrude in Hamlet (with a young John Gielgud) in 1936, Lady Macbeth in 1941 (with Maurice Evans), and what is considered her greatest role, Medea in 1947.9 But she is indelibly impressed on the collective memory as Mrs Danvers, the mesmerising, menacing, housekeeper in Rebecca, the 1940 Academy Award-winning movie produced by David Selznick and directed by Alfred Hitchcock.10 In the plethora of books in the last few years about gays in Hollywood* scholarly and sensational*everyone is quite sure that Judith Anderson was a lesbian. This belief is usually linked to her role in Rebecca*and it is this film’s classic status that has drawn the interest of feminist and gay scholars in recent years and given Anderson a place in every encyclopedia of gay actors and every survey of gay Hollywood. Almost everyone is familiar with Rebecca and Anderson’s powerful portrayal of Mrs Danvers, which earned her an Academy Award nomination and accolades as ‘a brilliant performance’, ‘an ideal impersonation’, ‘memorable for its fine artistry’, making the movie ‘the most striking picture ever made in terms of women character players’.11 There are undertones of same-sex desire throughout the movie, but this is most explicit in the crucial scene where Mrs Danvers shows the unnamed, young second wife (played by Joan Fontaine) through the boudoir of her former, dead, mistress, the mysterious Rebecca. In a setting full of sensuality, ‘Danny’, as Rebecca had called 7 8 9 10 11 Mark Twain, Autobiograpy, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 22021. See Katharine Cornell, Judith Anderson and Ruth Gordon, Cover, Time, 21 December 1942. For Anderson’s plays see Internet Broadway Data Base. See Internet Movie Data Base. Los Angeles Times, 5 January 1941: C1; New York Times, 10 February 1941: 21; Hollywood Reporter, 21 March 1940: 3; Dr. Phelps Casts a Vote for Rebecca, clipping New York Public Library (NYPL); Daily Variety, 21 March 1940: 3; Los Angeles Times, 28 April 1940: C3. 48 Australian Historical Studies, 43, 2012 her, shows the increasingly horrified new wife, Rebecca’s furs and delicate lingerie, describing their intimate bedtime rituals.12 A recent newspaper review noted that: ‘Not only is Dame Judith Anderson’s portrayal of the cold, hostile housekeeper Mrs. Danvers quite campy in its own right, the film’s lesbian undertones that may not have been apparent to 1940 audiences (or at least not talked about) blaze to life today’.13 But the censors at the time were quite aware of the strong lesbian undertones of this scene. ‘It will be essential that there be no suggestion whatever of a perverted relationship between Mrs Danvers and Rebecca’, Production Code Administration head, Joseph Breen, wrote to producer David Selznick. ‘If any possible hint of this creeps in . . . we will . . . not be able to approve the picture. Specifically, we have in mind Mrs Danvers’ . . . handling of the various garments, particularly the night gown’.14 Yet Selznick managed to persuade Breen to allow this scene to stay*and it is the one that everyone remembers. Selznick knew what would sell to his increasingly sexually-knowing audience. Although the initial publicity for the film concentrated on the romantic couple of Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, photographs of Anderson ‘menacing’ Fontaine soon rivalled those with Olivier.15 Contemporaries agreed that what made Anderson’s role as Mrs Danvers memorable was its ‘dark hypnotic charm’ and its ‘sinister menace’.16 ‘Menace’, indeed, seems to act as a codeword for ‘lesbian’.17 The Los Angeles Times put it succinctly in an article titled ‘Rebecca Has Novel Menace’: ‘Menace consists of a night gown, lingerie, boudoir, slippers and a $25,000 fur coat’.18 And it was this part that ensured that 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 The copyright holder of Rebecca, Buena Vista Home Entertainment, a subsidiary of Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment, would not give permission for us to include a film clip of this scene. Readers not familiar with it can readily view it on YouTube. Toni Ruberto, Buffalo News, 19 October 2001: G23. Joseph I. Breen to David O. Selznick, 5 September 1939, 3, 4. Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles (MHL). Selznick was not allowed to retain the more overt statement by Mrs Danvers that Rebecca ‘despised all men. She was above all that!’ See Rhona J. Berenstein, ‘Adaptation, Censorship, and Audiences of Questionable Type: Lesbian Sightings in Rebecca (1940) and The Uninvited (1944)’, Cinema Journal (CJ) 37:3, 1998: 1637 for the politics of censorship in Rebecca; also Patricia White, Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). Rebecca premiered in Los Angeles 27 March 1940 and New York City 28 March. It was officially released 12 April Internet Movie Data Base. Compare Olivier and Fontaine in advertisement, New York Times, 31 March: 4 with advertisement with Anderson, 6 April 1940. For knowing audience see Andrea Weiss, ‘‘‘A Queer Feeling When I Look at You’’: Hollywood Stars and Lesbian Spectatorship in the 1930s’, in Stardom: Industry of Desire, ed. Christine Gledhill (New York: Routledge, 1991) 286; for lesbian identification in a later generation see White, Uninvited, xiii. Daily Variety, 21 March 1940: 3; Hollywood Reporter, 21 March 1940: 3; John Mosher, New Yorker, 30 March 1940; Boris Karloff, New York Sunday Times, 18 May 1941, clippings NYPL. For the linkage of lesbianism and horror see Berenstein, ‘Adaptation, Censorship, and Audiences of Questionable Type; ‘‘‘I’m Not the Sort of Person Men Marry’: Monsters, Queers and Hitchcock’s Rebecca’, cineACTION 29 (1992): 8296; reprinted in Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian and Queer Essays on Popular Culture, ed. Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 23961; and Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatorship in Classic Horror Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). Los Angeles Times, 24 May 1940: 28. For Haunting star Liam Neeson’s memory of being scared as a child by Anderson in Rebecca see Laura Gross, Sun Mirror (London), 15 August 1999: 19. Deacon: Judith Anderson: Sexuality and ‘Truthfulness’ in Biography 49 the film remained vital. When it was revived in 1946, the Los Angeles Times commented that ‘the enchantment of Rebecca has not weakened . . . the fanatic devotion to her dead mistress of housekeeper Danvers, . . . and her sinister influence on the young bride leave a shivery, never-to-be-forgotten impress’.19 When serious interest in Hitchcock’s work developed among British critics in the 1960s, it was this ‘sinister’ element in his movies that they emphasised.20 Robin Wood’s Hitchcock’s Films, published in 1965, wrote about their ‘suppressed underworld of psychological horror’, but dismissed Rebecca as ‘novelettish’.21 In the 1970s, however, popular and academic work influenced by the feminist and gay movements focused attention on sexuality in Hitchcock’s films and once again turned the spotlight onto Mrs Danvers.22 After Laura Mulvey published her path-breaking article, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ in 1975, applying feminist psychoanalytic theory to Hitchcock’s movies, an avalanche of articles and books made images from Rebecca iconic of the Hollywood lesbian.23 At a more popular level, Gay Activists Alliance member Vito Russo travelled throughout the United States from 1972 to 1982, delivering a lecture with film clips on Hollywood’s treatment of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender characters. In 1981 he published The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, including Rebecca in his list of films with gay characters.24 The HBO documentary of the same name, narrated by Lily Tomlin and released in 1996, placed Rebecca and Mrs Danvers at centre stage and made the boudoir scene an important part of the general public’s image of the lesbian on film.25 Rebecca itself was brought out in a deluxe edition DVD in 2001, with Anderson and Fontaine on the cover.26 Judith Anderson’s identification with this role illustrates the problems faced by the biographer in trying to find the ‘truth’ of her sexuality. She (or should I say Mrs Danvers) has become the poster girl for scholarly analyses of 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 Los Angeles Times, 25 September 1946: A7. For growth of lesbian communities during the war see M. Davis and E.L. Kennedy, ‘Oral History and the Study of Sexuality in the Lesbian Community’, Feminist Studies 12:1, 1986: 726. Armen Svadjian, ‘A Life in Film Criticism: Robin Wood at 75’. Yourflesh, 1 January 2006, http:// yourfleshmag.com/books/a-life-in-film-criticism-robin-wood-at-75/ Robin Wood, Hitchcock’s Films (New York: A. S. Barnes and Co, 1965); Svadjian, ‘A Life in Film Criticism’. For a comprehensive account of writings on Hitchcock see Jane Sloan, Alfred Hitchcock: A Filmography and Bibliography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Hans Lucas (JeanLuc Godard), Maurice Schèrer (Eric Rohmer) and others began major critical discussion of Hitchcock’s work in the French journal Cahiers du Cinéma from its first issue in 1951. The British journal Movie, which began in 1962, brought scholarly debate on Hitchcock to the Englishspeaking world. ‘Introduction (1965)’, in Robin Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 74. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16:3, 1975: 618 (written 1973). Vita Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), rev 1987. See Robin Wood, Canadian Forum, February 1982: 356. The Celluloid Closet (1995) produced and directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. See New York Times, 13 October 1995. The DVD Special Edition (Sony 2001) includes an audio commentary with the late Russo, a 1990 interview and some deleted interviews making up a second documentary, Rescued From the Closet. Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca, Criterion Collection, 2001. See Los Angeles Times, 29 November 2001: F13. 50 Australian Historical Studies, 43, 2012 Figure 1. Joan Fontaine and Judith Anderson in Rebecca (1940). # John Springer Collection/Corbis. lesbian sexuality in film. As Patricia White points out, ‘Rebecca figures as insistently in the feminist film theory as does Rebecca in the second Mrs de Winter’s psyche’.27 Two major academic books, The Women Who Knew Too Much, published in 1988, and Uninvited, published in 1999, have iconic pictures of Anderson and Fontaine on their covers*the scholarly counterpoint to the trio Garbo, Stanwyck and Deitrich on the covers or in the photographic pages of the more popular Sewing Circle: Sappho’s Leading Ladies (1995) by celebrity biographer, Axel Madsen, critic David Ehrenstein’s Open Secret: Gay Hollywood 192898 (1998) and journalist Diana McLellan’s The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood (2001). These popular books unquestioningly identify Anderson as a lesbian, usually without any attribution, following Boze Hadleigh’s dubious ‘outing’ in Hollywood Lesbians (1994).28 Peter Conrad, reviewing Open Secret in the London Observer, described the boudoir scene in Rebecca as ‘the most candid account of a lesbian seduction ever filmed’. He accused the ‘bullish’ Anderson of hypocrisy for denying knowledge that ‘such monstrous and unnatural females existed’.29 (‘Bullish’ is a common word used to describe Anderson, who was actually tiny and considered by her contemporaries as the epitome of glamour.30) An article in the Glasgow Herald accompanying the screening of highlights of the 14th London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in 2000 is typical in its identification of Mrs Danvers’ sexuality and that of Judith Anderson: ‘The archetypal Hollywood lesbian’, it read, ‘is arguably . . . Mrs Danvers, in Rebecca. . . . Judith Anderson, who played 27 28 29 30 White, Uninvited, 67. Axel Madsen, The Sewing Circle: Sappho’s Leading Ladies (New York: Kensington Books, 1995), pb 2002, 2, 1245, 1812 (for Hadleigh); David Ehrenstein, Open Secret: Gay Hollywood 19282000 (New York: William Morrow, 1998). Updated Millennial Edition, HarperCollins (Perennial), 2000, 211; Diana McLellan, The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood (London: Robson Books, 2001); Boze Hadleigh, Hollywood Lesbians (New York: Barricade Books, 1994), 15976. London Observer, 5 November 1998: 3. Reference to ‘the bullish Anderson’ does not appear in Ehrenstein’s book. See Vincent Price in Denis Brian, Tallulah, Darling (New York: Macmillan, 1980: 90), cited in Madsen, Sewing Circle, 119. Deacon: Judith Anderson: Sexuality and ‘Truthfulness’ in Biography 51 Figure 2. Judith Anderson, by Nickolas Muray, 1927. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film # Nickolas Muray Photo Archives. her, is said to have belonged to the legendary Hollywood ‘‘sewing circle’’ of actresses who were lesbian’.31 *** The evidence for Anderson’s inclusion among Hollywood lesbians is highly ambiguous. From her early days in Sydney, she had many flirtations and love affairs with men. She married twice, first in 1937, when she was forty-years-old, and second in 1946, when she was forty-nine. But, as she herself put it, these marriages were ‘short, but far too long’.32 Anderson’s approach to sexuality was always contradictory: on the one hand she longed for a prince charming to sweep her off her feet and look after her; on the other hand, she was fiercely independent and ambitious and kept her distance from commitment. This conflicted attitude could be attributed to her abandonment as a child by her adored father;33 but it could just as well be a realistic response to 31 32 33 Glasgow Herald, 18 May 2000: 6. See also Ruberto; Conrad; Julie Burchill, Guardian, 31 March 2001: 9; Hugh Massingberd, The Mail on Sunday (London), 1 April 2001:66; David Ehrenstein, Los Angeles Times, 30 December 2001: R2. William J. Mann, Behind The Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 19101969. Viking, 2001, 1356, confesses to finding nothing ‘queer’ about Anderson’s life, but still assumes she was (317). Hadleigh, 170, quoting David Wallace, ‘Santa Barbara’, People, 24 September 1984. Anderson’s unpublished autobiography, ghost-written by Robert Wallsten 19614 is in the Wallsten (Robert) Papers, 1930s1950s, University of California, Santa Barbara Special Collections (hereafter Autobiography). 52 Australian Historical Studies, 43, 2012 the demands of her profession. She described herself ruefully as ‘flirtatious’,34 and indeed, flirtations suited her temperament and her professional life*and possibly her sexuality. During the First World War, when she was making her way in the Sydney theatre, she corresponded simultaneously with several young men in the forces overseas who considered her their sweetheart. She was unofficially engaged to one, and the evidence suggests that she was thinking seriously of marrying another, the not-so-young Oliver Hogue (‘Trooper Bluegum’), whose life was cut short by the Spanish flu soon after he was demobbed in 1919.35 Judith Anderson’s first sexual affair was with a married theatrical producer she met while touring in a stock company during her early years in the United States.36 When the relationship ended, she told a new admirer, ‘I’ve had my dream of love*it was very exquisite for a moment. I don’t think it will come again’.37 After that, her affairs were short, intense and mercurial. As she wrote in 1933 to Benjamin Lehman*the man who was to become her first husband after an on-and-off seven-year courtship: I don’t know how long it will last darling. . . . can you play with me Peter & not think of tomorrow. . . . Maybe Ill get it this time. I wont mind*the fierce white ache of yesterday was worth anything that happens. Not so deadly alive have I felt in ages. Youll never know the temptation it was to go with you*rolling along all day in the sunshine to be with you look at you touch you. . . . My arms are around you . . . & my lips are telling you through yours that no matter what was & will be at this moment I love you love you deeply & truly*my sweet.38 Anderson met Berkeley English professor, Benjamin Lehman (whom she always called ‘Peter’), in California in 1929. They conducted a sporadic but intense correspondence for seven years, rarely seeing each other as Anderson consolidated her career, appearing on Broadway and touring in Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude (192930) and Mourning Becomes Electra (1932), Pirandello’s As You Desire Me (1931), Clemence Dane’s musical fantasy Come of Age (1934) and several other less successful plays, culminating with the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Old Maid (193536) and Hamlet (193637). The correspondence reveals the conflict Anderson felt between her ambitions and her duty to her family on the one hand and her longing for a great love on the other. ‘I have made no decision yet’, she wrote to Lehman in 1933. ‘I am being urged for various reasons to stay 34 35 36 37 38 Anderson to Lehman (Peter), posted 22 June 1929; posted 18 March 1932; ca. 10 December 1933, Dame Judith Anderson Collection, 19151980s, Special Collections, University of California, Santa Barbara (hereafter UCSB). See Autobiography, 1045, 113113A, 1678; correspondence from Metre, Greg Bruer, Percy Maude and Oliver Hogue, UCSB; Sydney Morning Herald, 12 March 1919: 10:7; Anderson Diary, 523 April 1919, UCSB; Elyne Mitchell, ‘Hogue, Oliver (18801919)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 9 (Melbourne University Press, 1983), 3267. Autobiography, 17885. Anderson to Nickolas Muray, posted 27 June 1928, Muray Papers, Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Anderson to Lehman, posted 19 September 1933, UCSB. Anderson always regretted her lack of schooling and her spelling and grammar are reproduced as written. Lehman’s letters to Anderson have not been found. Deacon: Judith Anderson: Sexuality and ‘Truthfulness’ in Biography 53 here [Hollywood] & that is my desire*but*career & duty are leering at me through the dark and lashing come with smiles’.39 Three months later she wrote despairingly from New York, where she was closing in the disappointing The Drums Begin and dealing with a major family crisis, ‘I am too scattered, too many loose ends, too far too many rough corners . . . I’m old raggedy Peggety’.40 Anderson finally made a spur-of-the-moment decision to marry Lehman in the spring of 1937, when she was exhausted by a long tour of The Old Maid and felt she had vindicated her long struggle to the top of her profession with her appearance in Hamlet with John Gielgud. When they married in the tiny town of Kingman, Arizona, the Los Angeles Times reported that Anderson was ‘highly excited during the ceremony, forcing [the justice of the peace] to stop once to regain her composure’ and afterwards kissing judge and bridegroom repeatedly.41 The newly-married couple was already quarrelling by the time they got to New York,42 and after a disastrous tour of Europe, parted in Paris early in October, when Anderson accepted an invitation from director Michel SaintDenis to appear at London’s Old Vic with Laurence Olivier in Macbeth.43 In letters to Lehman from London, Anderson reviewed the problems in their marriage. Proximity had brought out differences in temperament, temper, and culture, she wrote. (He had called her a ‘fishwife’; she had criticised his ‘way with a fork’). It had also brought into sharper focus the differences in their education. ‘I have never . . . been uneasy at the prospect of your conversation* or anybody elses for that matter’, she wrote angrily. ‘I have no terror at the prospect of life in Berkeley’. ‘Who wouldn’t be nervous about leaving all ones friends & way of living to take up an entirely different life among different people’. Their life together had also revealed unstated expectations on both sides: ‘I have compared the days of our marriage with my life before it*I know what I have given up & what I have adjusted to*I knew that I have & done the wifely duties the laundry & the packing*but then you were doing no more than you always had done & I was doing much more than I ever had done before’. ‘What you say about the Wife duties’, she added, ‘*about fostering in schedule the work processes*I was not aware that you were working Peter. . . . I was willing & eager to suit my day to yours so you would work’. ‘You say that you would not abdicate your way of life’, she exclaimed, ‘Do you mean that I should mine completely isn’t marriage a 5050 business’. Along with these disillusionments with marriage as a ‘5050 business’, sexual matters also intruded. In one of her few references to such matters she wrote: ‘I married you because I loved you,*not physically enough perhaps*& the new knowledge of your life with women has shocked and amazed me*& 39 40 41 42 43 Anderson to Lehman, posted 22 September 1933, UCSB. Anderson to Lehman, (ca. 10 December 1933), UCSB. Anderson’s older sister Elizabeth had a nervous breakdown. Los Angeles Times, 20 May 1937: 16. Anderson to Lehman, posted 20 October 1937, UCSB. Autobiography, 3826; Lilian Baylis to Anderson, 2 October 1937; Anderson to Lehman, 1? October 1937, UCSB. 54 Australian Historical Studies, 43, 2012 has made the sexual adjustment more difficult’. ‘I thought we had more than enough in common to give one another’, she added, ‘*to found an unshakable life of goodness & glory & I respected you’.44 She and Lehman made up their differences, however, and Anderson, ‘filled . . . with hope & courage’, returned to Berkeley and to married life.45 But the question of her ‘sexual adjustment’ was apparently serious enough for her to consult her old friend, the psychologist John Watson. ‘I lunched with John today’, she wrote to Lehman from New York, ‘& talked over every thing & he thinks I should have an examination so I shall go to Dr Elias Rosalies Dr on Monday’. ‘Im sure Im allright’, she reassured him, ‘*also I might see Dr Hannah Stone John advises also’.46 During the year Anderson spent as a faculty wife in Berkeley, there was little correspondence with Lehman, so we have no way of knowing whether ‘sexual adjustment’ was achieved. ‘When I’m not pouring at faculty teas I do a Ferdinand’, she wrote her adored producer, Guthrie McClintic, in spring 1938: ‘just sit and smell and think’.47 But by September she was restless. ‘I’ve got that sickening grease paint feeling boiling up inside me’, she wrote McClintic. ‘I’ve been back to nature and now I want a whif [sic] of a good old dirty dressing room’.48 All year she had been negotiating with Robinson Jeffers and the Theatre Guild for a production of Jeffers’ Tower Beyond Tragedy.49 By October, she was on her way to New York to seal the deal and help audition the cast.50 It is clear from her letters to Lehman that he regarded her departure as the beginning of a separation, while, for her, it was a bid for freedom within the marriage. ‘I got little comfort from your letters’, she wrote. ‘I did what I thought was right & had to be done & it was not easy’. ‘You say you love me’, she went on, ‘*love is being not demanding & so with my love for you I gave & gave up so much*& you demand more*I still love you but I cannot give you the freedom of my spirit & being. No more. Im tired & sad & lonely’.51 The Guild’s last-minute decision not to go ahead with Tower was a ‘body blow’ to Anderson;52 but she was determined to stay on in New York. Lehman’s Christmas visit gave him little ‘help and comfort’.53 When she agreed, at the end of January 1939, to play Mary, mother of Jesus, in Family Portrait, the New York 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 Anderson to Lehman, posted 20 October 1937, UCSB. Telegraphic exchanges between Anderson and Lehman, 31 December (1937)9 February 1938; letters Anderson to Lehman, 31 December 19377 February 1938, UCSB. Anderson to Lehman, posted 28 January 1938, UCSB. John Broadus Watson, best known for his research on infant behaviour, had a lifelong interest in sexual behaviour. His wife Rosalie had been a close friend of Anderson’s before her death in 1935. Dr Hannah Stone was author, with her husband Abraham, of A Marriage Manual: A Practical Guide-Book to Sex and Marriage. Anderson to McClintic, (spring 1938), Katharine Cornell Papers, Box 31, New York Public Library (hereafter Cornell). Anderson to McClintic, 20 September 1938, Cornell. Una Jeffers to Anderson, (spring/summer 1938), UCSB; Fred Johnson, ‘Interlude With The Calmer Judith Anderson’, 11 September (1948), clipping UCSB. Anderson to Lehman, posted 30 October and 17 November 1938, UCSB. Anderson to Lehman, posted 14 November 1938, UCSB. New York Times, 19 November 1938: 8; and 9 December: 30; correspondence Anderson to Lehman, 18(29) November, UCSB. Anderson to Lehman, (25) January 1939; and (30) November 1938, UCSB. Deacon: Judith Anderson: Sexuality and ‘Truthfulness’ in Biography 55 Post’s joyful announcement, ‘Judith Anderson Returns’, also signalled the end of the marriage.54 Anderson’s letters to Lehman end abruptly a week later (none of his survive), and they were divorced later that year.55 Family Portrait also marked the beginning of Anderson’s movie career proper. She had appeared in 1933 in Blood Money, a drama of New York lowlife that had little success at the time but is now considered a classic.56 Her ‘compassionate and deeply understanding’ portrayal of Mary brought her to the attention of David Selznick’s New York agent, Kay Brown. The morning after Brown saw the play, she wrote to Selznick, who was looking for an actress to play Mrs Danvers in Rebecca: ‘You have long interested in this magnificent actress. . . . [She] would be marvelous . . .’57 By August 1939, as her divorce came through, Anderson was on the set of Rebecca.58 Anderson’s brief experiment with a conventional marriage made it clear to her that ‘that sickening grease paint feeling’ was stronger than any sexual passion. Her second marriage, to the aspiring theatrical producer Luther Greene, was based on another romantic dream. This time, however, it was the dream of having a producer-manager to handle her career and to provide companionship on her long tours. Since 1934, when Guthrie McClintic invited her to star in Divided by Three, she had idolised this highly successful producer-director, who directed her next two plays, The Old Maid and Hamlet, rescuing her from what she felt was career stagnation and building her into a mature star.59 McClintic was married to America’s favourite leading lady, Katharine Cornell. As John Gielgud put it in 1936, when he was starring with Anderson in Hamlet, ‘Cornell is a striking and glamourous figure but not a great actress [but] Guthrie has built this legend round her and arranges everything to set off the impression. . . . They have certainly built up some distinction and graciousness on the management side’.60 Anderson longed to have such a relationship*and the fact that McClintic and Cornell had a ‘white’ marriage (each preferred their own sex) may have made it more romantic to her*a meeting of minds rather than bodies.61 When she met the young Luther Greene early in 1946, the Theatre Guild had once more 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 New York Times, January 28, 1939: 22; Anderson to Lehman, 2 February, UCSB. Chicago Daily Tribune, 30 July: 10; Los Angeles Times, 24 August: 12. Blood Money (Twentieth Century, 1933). See Internet Movie Data Base. Katherine Brown to David O. Selznick, 9 March 1939, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin: Rebecca, Cast, Mrs Danvers, Anderson, Judith (hereafter HRHRC). David O. Selznick to Kay Brown, (14 July 1939), HRHRC; press release from Selznick International Pictures, 20 July, NYPL; New York Times, 21 July: 17. See People, 23 May 1951: 312. Anderson wrote to McClintic, (after May 2, 1951), ‘Oh, the magic of it, the wonder of great theatre, well you gave me that and I will be everlastingly grateful’. (Cornell). John Gielgud to mother, 17 January 1937, in Gielgud’s Letters, introduced and edited by Richard Mangan. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004 (Letters). Cf Anderson to Lehman, posted 20 October 1937, UCSB. See Tad Mosel, Leading Lady: The World and Theatre of Katharine Cornell (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978). 56 Australian Historical Studies, 43, 2012 let her down, this time concerning the production of Medea, which Jeffers had adapted especially for her.62 In June 1946 the New York Times announced, ‘Greene Has Plans For Trio Of Shows’. His return to Broadway after four years, the article disclosed, would include a revival of Come of Age (Anderson’s favourite play) and Jeffers’ Medea, both starring Anderson. The pair were married a month later.63 There is no evidence whether this was a ‘white’ marriage like that of McClintic and Cornell. Luther Greene, who was thirteen years younger than Anderson, was recently divorced and had two children. But after he and Anderson divorced in 1951, he seems to have become part of the New York gay community. Harlem historian, Michael Henry Adams, met Greene in 1985 as a legendary part of this community. ‘The great love of Luther Greene’s life’, Adams wrote in a recent article, ‘was a genuine royal prince, a son of exiled King Amanullah of Afghanistan. . . . born of a second wife. . . . nothing . . . from an eventful life grown quite ordinary, was ever permitted to interfere with either Hussein’s steady pursuit of muscular young men or his unfailing commitment to the steadfast Luther’.64 Whatever Anderson’s new husband’s sexual orientation, her enthusiasm for the marriage was even more short-lived than with Benjamin Lehman. ‘It Lasted Four Months’, a newspaper headline announced that November.65 Another disastrous European honeymoon, another escape by Anderson into a theatrical engagement, this time in Berlin, more bursts of temper on both sides, and Anderson had given up her dream of a husband-manager*for the time being at least. By January 1947 she had found a new producer for Medea, the young firm of Robert Whitehead and Oliver Rea. John Gielgud agreed to direct the play and Anderson spent the spring and summer preparing for the part she had been planning for since she met Jeffers in 1929.66 Despite the enormous critical and popular success of Medea in the fall of 1947 and spring of 1948 Anderson was unhappy with her lack of control over aspects of the production.67 By spring she was miserable, ill, and lonely.68 A mutual 62 63 64 65 66 67 Anderson and producer/director (and former lover) Jed Harris had been discussing a production of Medea since the early 1930s. They commissioned Californian poet Robinson Jeffers to do the translation in 1945, but negotiations broke down and Harris withdrew. The Theatre Guild took up the option but decided not to go ahead. See Autobiography, 492503; New York Times, 4 January 1946: 28 and 11 February: 36; 14 June: 17; Los Angeles Times, 3 June: A2. Anderson and Greene were married 11 July 1946. See Hedda Hopper, Los Angeles Times, 19 July: 6. Michael Henry Adams, ‘‘‘No Homo’’: More Queers in the Mirror’, Huffington Post, posted 9 July 2009; accessed 29 August 2010. Amānullāh Khān was ruler of the Emirate of Afghanistan 1919 29. Soraya Tarzi, his liberated and influential wife, was his only wife (Wikipedia). ‘It Lasted Four Months’, News? 30 November 1946, clipping NYPL. See also Toby Rowland to Angna Enters, (late November 1946); Greene to Enters, 11 December (1946); and (9 March 1947), Enters Papers, NYPL (hereafter Enters); Los Angeles Times, 13 December 1946: A3; 24 January 1947: A7; and 30 January: A2. New York Times, 22 January 1947; 9 February: X1 and 11 February: 36; 14 March: 27; 26 April: 10; Los Angeles Times, 2 February: cover, F4; 17 February: A2; John Gielgud to mother, 29 April, Letters. Autobiography, 50314. For problems see correspondence Gielgud, Anderson, Jeffers, and Lawrence Langer, UCSB. For reception see New York Times, 21 October, 1947: 27; and 26 October: X1. Deacon: Judith Anderson: Sexuality and ‘Truthfulness’ in Biography 57 Figure 3. Judith Anderson with Guthrie McClintic after a performance of Medea in Paris, 1951. Alice B. Toklas is behind her. Courtesy of University of California, Santa Barbara, Special Collections. friend bought her back together with Luther, and, whispering ‘a prayer for our life’, she resolved to give their marriage another chance.69 In September 1948 she set off on a year’s tour of Medea, this time produced by Guthrie McClintic, with Luther accompanying her as her manager.70 The nine-month tour was a happy one, with McClintic’s smooth operation in charge of arrangements and Anderson surrounded by many of her theatrical ‘family’. Marian Seldes, who played First Woman of Corinth on tour, recalls Anderson and Greene ‘antiquing’ and working together on a hooked rug.71 Anderson herself remembers their companionability; but there were quarrels, mainly over money, and when Medea closed in May 1949, the marriage was once more failing.72 Missing the communal life of the tour company, she decided to buy an avocado ranch outside Santa Barbara, and to bring her brother and his family from postwar England to manage it, along with her ailing mother, who had been living with 68 69 70 71 72 Autobiography, 48792, 5279; Diary, 28 January 1948, UCSB; New York Times, 29 January 1948: 29 and 31 January: 14; 6 March: 9; 26 March: 26; Johnson, ‘Interlude With The Calmer Judith Anderson’; John Gielgud to Mrs Robinson Jeffers, 12 September, Letters. For Robert Whitehead’s later account see ‘A Theatregoer’s Notebook’, Playbill, May 1982. Autobiography, 530. Autobiography, 52931. For arrangements with McClintic see Diary, 12 March11 August 1948, UCSB; Anderson Medea Lobero, Santa Barbara 2 and 4 September, Cornell. For reunion see postcard Rowland to Enters, 17 April 1948; Greene to Enters, (July), Enters; Diary, 4, 5 May; Los Angeles Times, 16 June: 19. Interview with author, 2004. Autobiography, 549. 58 Australian Historical Studies, 43, 2012 them.73 She and Luther began building a luxurious house on the ranch, on which Luther spent lavishly.74 Luther’s attempts to manage Anderson’s career were correspondingly ambitious, but they were unsuccessful until he arranged for her to appear in Tower Beyond Tragedy at New York’s City Center at the end of 1950*a prestigious venue, but not a money-making one.75 Despite Brooks Atkinson’s accolades in the New York Times*‘no one should ever ask to see tragedy acted more magnificently’*Luther did not manage to have it transferred to a commercial theatre or to take it on tour.76 Exhausted and grieving deeply at her mother’s death on the play’s opening night, Anderson took to her bed until two weeks later she wrote in the diary, ‘L leaves’.77 From that date, Anderson told Boze Hadleigh in 1990, when she was ninetythree years old, she never gave marriage another thought.78 Throughout her life she had many close and enduring friendships with women and men, straight and gay, and in the post-1950 years, when she abjured marriage, her closest friendships were with lesbian couples and gay men closely associated with the arts. In Santa Barbara, where she lived until her death in 1992, her closest friends were the enormously rich aesthete Wright Ludington, the worldrenowned soprano Lotte Lehmann and her partner Frances Holden, and the art curator Ala Story and her partner Margaret Mallory.79 Another important friendship formed during these years was with our own Maie Casey, well-known for her love of women.80 The only hint of a same-sex relationship*or a failed attempt at one*in the written record, is a letter from Jane Bowles after Anderson had appeared in Bowles’s play In the Summer House in 1954. Jane Bowles was married to the gay composer Paul Bowles and had herself a long series of female lovers. ‘Darling Judith, I shall never forget anything about you’, she declared, going on to remember a ‘terrible evening’ when Anderson told her ‘it never could have worked’, referring to what she called their ‘marriage’*presumably the 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 Autobiography, 54960; Ellie (Greene Martin) to Enters, (ca. end August 1949), Enters; Los Angeles Times, 8 October: 15. Jessie Anderson arrived in New York 22 March 1950 with her daughter-in-law Laura, Susan aged 10, Judith, 8, David, 6 and Jenifer, 5. Frank Anderson did not arrive until 1951 because of visa problems. New York Herald Tribune, 21 March 1950, clipping NYPL. New York Times, 27 November: 38. The Tower Beyond Tragedy ANTA Playhouse November 26 December 22, 1950 Internet Broadway Data Base. Autobiography, 565; New York Times, 24 December 1950: 41; Gielgud to mother, 1 January 1951, Letters. Diary, 18 January27 April 1951, UCSB. Los Angeles Times, 28 May: B3. For death of mother see People, 23 May: 312. Hadleigh, 160. Art collector Wright Ludington was a founder of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, vice president in 1940 and president in 1951. See Jean Lipman, ed. The Collector in America (New York: A Studio Book/The Viking Press, 1971). Ala Story was director of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art 1952 57. For Lehmann see Michael H. Kater, Never Sang for Hitler: The Life and Times of Lotte Lehmann (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); for Holden, Los Angeles Times, 25 August 1996: 30. Diane Langmore, Glittering Surfaces: A Life of Maie Casey (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1997). There is an extensive correspondence from Casey in the Anderson Papers, UCSB. Deacon: Judith Anderson: Sexuality and ‘Truthfulness’ in Biography 59 possibility of an affair.81 New York gossip Leo Lerman noted of another party around that time: ‘lesbians in hordes . . . Jane Bowles yearning at [Judith Anderson]’.82 And this, I think, is the closest I can get to Judith Anderson’s sexual preferences*that she was highly attractive to women*they ‘yearned’ for her, but she remained distant sexually. At the same time, she longed for a ‘big love’. ‘Larry [Olivier] and Vivien [Leigh] visited me once’, she told a reporter in 1970. ‘They were so beautiful and they loved each other so much. They couldn’t be together enough. . . . I’ve never had what you could call a marriage in the true sense of the word. . . . I’ve had some wonderful romances, but never a marriage’.83 It seems clear that ‘the facts’ of Judith Anderson’s sexuality are not as obvious as an array of recent commentators would like to think*or as amenable to the biographer’s determination to find the ‘truth’. As Peter Conrad has written, ‘Film is the chosen hiding place of sexual fantasy. . . . Stars are alluringly indefinite creatures whose appeal must spill over the strict boundaries of gender’. ‘No wonder that the objects of our pining affection are so ambiguous’,84 Conrad remarks. It is no surprise, therefore, that Anderson the actor has spilled over into Anderson the lesbian icon. She herself appears to have paid little attention to such gossip, most of which took its public form when she was in her eighties and early nineties. She considered herself a grand dramatic actress, and saw her movie work*even Rebecca*as merely sources of income that allowed her to pursue her theatrical career. The only time she was asked openly about Mrs Danvers’ sexuality, by the sensationalist, Boze Hadleigh, for what became his book, Hollywood Lesbians, she replied: I know that an increasing number of Hitchcock’s films are coming under scrutiny. I know he had several secretly gay characters, and I believe he had his own struggles. But he doesn’t seem to have been interested in lesbian characters, and I feel that Mrs Danvers was spiteful and sexless. A frank sadist. She couldn’t stand poor phony little Joan Fontaine, and I don’t blame her. When Hadleigh ventured to ask her, ‘Dame Judith, would it bother you, being thought lesbian?’ she acknowledged that ‘Many people already do’, but ended the interview declaring, ‘I do not associate with anyone*group or individual . . . I don’t owe anyone any explanations. . . . I live my own life, and good luck to them, but leave me alone’. But then*does it matter if Judith Anderson’s sexual preferences remain ambiguous, as they did for Boze Hadleigh? Before I embarked on her biography, I would have said, of course*I can’t know who this person is until I know the secrets of her sexuality. But I formerly wrote biographies of women whose central intellectual and personal interest was gender and sexuality. Judith 81 82 83 84 Jane Bowles to Anderson, after 14 February 1954; see also Diary, 8 and 9 February, UCSB. Leo Lerman, 15 February 1954, in The Grand Surprise: The Journals of Leo Lerman (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2007), 1556. Los Angeles Times, 27 September 1970: 30, 40. Conrad, The Observer, 15 November 1998. 60 Australian Historical Studies, 43, 2012 Anderson was different. She was an actress, totally devoted to her craft, and ruthless in discarding anything, including husbands and lovers, who got in the way of her work. Writers on sexuality often remark that sex is mostly in the head, and this seems to be the case with Anderson. She was a woman of vivid imagination*imagination that made her the greatest emotional actress of her generation, but left her with little taste for the longuers of actual sexual relationships. As producer Margaret Webster wrote, ‘She runs on emotion, heightened by a superb sense of theatre’.85 The novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, talking with Anita Barraud on Radio National in Australia, spoke of seeking ‘truthfulness’ in life stories rather than the unattainable ‘truth’.86 In reviewing the evidence about Anderson’s sexuality, it is clear that the art of acting*not sexuality*was central to Anderson’s life. As she proclaimed proudly to Boze Hadleigh when asked about her ability to play roles of varying sexualities, ‘I am an actress. One of the leading actress of my generation’.87 This is what, in Twain’s terms, made up ‘the volcanic fires’ in her head. But that does not mean that love was not important. She was devoted to her mother, who accompanied her to the United States in 1918. She financially helped and supported her brothers and sister, bringing her brother, Frank, and his family to live near her from 1950, and involving herself closely in the lives of his five children. She had many close friends, male and female, that she kept for life. And above all, she had her theatre ‘family’ of producers, directors, and actors, whom she tried to incorporate into her working life throughout her career. These various ‘families’, it seems to me, were more important to her than any sexual partner, and it is her relationships with them, as well as the imperatives of her career, that were central to the emotional life whose truthfulness I, as her biographer, have to convey to the reader.88 85 86 87 88 Margaret Webster produced and directed Family Portrait and directed Anderson and Maurice Evans in Macbeth in 1941. See Milly S. Barranger, Margaret Webster: A Life in the Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). The Book Show, Radio National, 23 September 2011. Hadleigh, 169. See Deacon, ‘Shallow Roots? Judith Anderson and Her Transnational Families’, History Program Seminar, RSSS, ANU, 20 August 2009. Copyright of Australian Historical Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.