Mark Griffin (38 page)

Kerr, who would go on to star in
The King and I
and
An Affair to Remember
, endeared herself to director, cast, and crew. Although she was the consummate professional, Kerr didn’t take herself as seriously as some of the other grandes dames on the Metro lot. Even the cluster of rising young actors playing Tom Lee’s tormentors were surprised by the leading lady’s approachability. As costar Don Burnett recalls, “Deborah Kerr used to call us ‘H.B.’s,’ which means ‘Horny Bastards.’ She’d say, ‘O.K., all you H.B.’s, come on . . .’ She would say things like that but she was so regal and wonderful. You wouldn’t dare use bad language in front of her, and then she’d come out with something like that.”
¹⁰

While Hickman found Deborah Kerr “one of the most charming, sensitive and warm coworkers,” the same could not be said of
Tea and Sympathy
’s remote director. “I don’t ever remember seeing Vincente Minnelli laugh,” says Hickman:

If one is searching for clues in Minnelli’s own films regarding how the director may have grappled with his own conflicted sexuality, one need look no further than
Tea and Sympathy
. As the only film in Vincente’s canon that openly (at least for 1956) addresses gay oppression,
Tea and Sympathy
can be “read” as Minnelli’s own confessional:
Take a look at what happened to me. I, too, was a flaming creature until Delaware, Ohio, Louis B. Mayer, and the Legion of Decency made me wash off the mascara, get married, and walk like a man.

Like the play, the film is very definitely a work of its era. On the one hand, Robert Anderson’s drama seems to be pleading for tolerance and understanding for those who are miserably lonely, misunderstood, or “off the beam.” On the other hand,
Tea and Sympathy
makes it clear that the same kind of support and compassion should not be extended to an individual if he actually is homosexual. Throughout the film, various characters assure “Sister Boy” Lee that “we can lick this thing,” as though his effeminacy were akin to heroin addiction or smallpox. It’s understood that tea and sympathy can only be offered if one is willing to conform, butch up, and sleep with the headmaster’s wife. If you get naked in the dunes with your swishy instructor and you actually enjoy it, then God help you. As Anderson himself asserted, “The crux of the whole play” was “THE BOY WAS ALL RIGHT AND GOT MARRIED.”
^ap

After a sneak preview of the film, producer Pandro Berman found himself in a dramatic showdown with the Legion of Decency over proposed prerelease alterations. In order to receive the Legion’s approval and escape the dreaded “C” (for “Condemned”) rating, MGM was being asked to excise some scenes and overdub several lines of dialogue that the Legion found especially offensive. “Am terribly disturbed at news of our capitulation on
Tea and Sympathy
,” Berman cabled Arthur Loew in MGM’s New York office. “We are being treated badly and taken advantage of. The last reel of this picture will be ridiculous and in my opinion, should be laughed at by audiences. I think we have made ourselves fair prey for all future contacts with the legion. . . . It is a sad state of affairs when they not only can tell us what to say but how to say it and can write propaganda in their language for us to disseminate for them.”
¹²

Although he was already immersed in preparations for his next effort,
Designing Woman
, Vincente applauded Berman’s uncompromising stance. “I want you to know what admiration I have for the courageous stance you have taken on
Tea and Sympathy
,” Minnelli wrote in a memo to Berman. “I know the pains that were taken to satisfy the representatives of the Code . . . and to treat this subject in a manner which would not offend their standards, while still not distorting or cheapening a fine and distinguished play.”
¹³

As the film was being readied for general release, studio executives remained nervous that
Tea and Sympathy
would be too much for audiences in
the Eisenhower era. After all, the closest moviegoers got to “sexual perversion” in the ’50s was either a Tennessee Williams adaptation or the finicky Tony Randall character in an innocuous Doris Day-Rock Hudson romp. However, as the reviews rolled in, it looked as though Minnelli had come through for Metro yet again.

“Everybody said it would be impossible to make a movie of
Tea and Sympathy
,” wrote William K. Zinsser in the
New York Herald Tribune
. “But the movie has been made—and made with good taste. It’s emphasis has been changed slightly, but the spirit of the play remains intact. . . . Vincente Minnelli’s direction is quiet and compassionate and he has caught many subtle shadings of love and pain.”
¹⁴

While generally praising the film and its performances, other critics took exception to the way Anderson’s play had been tampered with. As Justin Gilbert noted in the
Daily Mirror
, “A significant line uttered by Deborah Kerr, ‘If this is going to come out, let it come out in the open,’ which was one of the more challenging lines in the play, seems almost insignificant in the movie.” Leo Mishkin of the
New York Morning Telegraph
concluded that “the changes . . . are enough, in a sense, to destroy much of the impact of the work.”
¹⁵

Decades after the film’s release, its creators would acknowledge that the various concessions and compromises they had been forced to make had succeeded in diluting
Tea and Sympathy
’s central theme. “The picture didn’t come off as we had hoped,” Robert Anderson admitted. “We had to make too many changes for censorship. We kept fooling ourselves that we were preserving the integrity of the theme, but we lost some of it.” Of the film’s director, Deborah Kerr noted, “He was extremely sensitive to the subject. . . . The only thing that might have diffused it a little was that his great talent for making movies beautiful pictorially might have softened it and lushed it up a little.”
¹⁶

Others contend that Vincente’s pictorial effects managed to make evident aspects of the story that the Production Code and the Legion of Decency had attempted to wipe off the screen. “For Minnelli, the mise-en-scène is very significant in terms of how he gets around what can’t be said in the narrative,” says film scholar David Gerstner. “What can’t be said must be
shown
. This is how a director like Minnelli—working in Hollywood with the Production Code in effect—could still make visible whatever was hidden or had to be hidden.”
¹⁷
Gerstner points to settings, costumes, and even the use of color as key elements that Minnelli employed to smuggle the story’s taboo themes back into the movie.

In the “walk like a man” sequence, for example, Minnelli places Tom Lee and his roommate Al in their school’s music room, which is something of an aesthetic refuge for Tom. Surrounded by musical instruments and busts of classical composers, Al attempts to show Tom how to act more manly. He even offers a demonstration of his hyper-masculine locker-room swagger. “It is at this moment in the film that masculine anxiety, confronted with its own ridiculous construction, can no longer support itself,” notes Gerstner. “Al, pressed within and against the mise-en-scène of the Minnellian text and finally caught in the vestiges of masculinity, can’t understand why walking a particular way is more manly than any other.”
¹⁸

Years after its initial release,
Tea and Sympathy
would resurface in theatrical resissues and on television. Many of Minnelli’s fans were curious to know whether the director thought his once controversial melodrama still had something meaningful to say to audiences in a post-Stonewall world. While fielding questions from journalists at the Athens International Film Festival in 1978, Minnelli announced to the press corps: “I made the first homosexual picture while I was at MGM. That was
Tea and Sympathy
.”
¹⁹
And he said it with what sounded like enormous pride.

IF MGM’S PUBLICIST, Howard Strickling, was the keeper of the studio’s darkest secrets, Metro’s house designer, Helen Rose, was privy to what many leading ladies considered far more privileged information. Rose, who had costumed Minnelli’s
Father of the Bride
and
The Bad and the Beautiful
, knew which bras required significant padding or if an Oscar-winning waistline had suddenly expanded. From three-piece suits to birthday suits, Rose had certainly seen it all. As film historian David Chierichetti recalls, “Helen said Cyd Charisse was the only woman who looked as good naked as she did dressed.”
¹

Like her better-known rival, Edith Head, Rose had a talent for accentuating nature’s gifts and downplaying the defects. In 1953, the two-time Oscar winner put down her measuring tape long enough to submit a simple yet irresistible scenario for a movie: Fashion maven weds sportswriter. Although Rose’s
Designing Woman
seemed to bear more than a passing resemblance to the Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy vehicle
Woman of the Year
, studio chief Dore Schary was so taken with the concept that he decided to produce the movie himself. Metro executives agreed that a lighthearted comedy would offer a refreshing change of pace from Schary’s deadly earnest, socially conscious “message pictures,” such as
The Red Badge of Courage
and
The Next Voice You Hear
.

Screenwriter George Wells fashioned a slickly witty script from Rose’s original scenario. The paper-thin plot concerned the connubial collision of
chic fashionista Marilla Brown (caught up with her fittings and fall collections) and avid sportsman Mike Hagen (whose Runyonesque world is populated by punch-drunk middleweights and guys with names like “Charlie the Sneak”).

In terms of casting, Schary’s initial idea was to reunite the stars of Hitchcock’s
Rear Window
—Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly—as the squabbling newlyweds. Joshua Logan was slated to direct. However, when Kelly abdicated her Hollywood throne in favor of the real thing by marrying the Prince of Monaco, Schary’s production was suddenly without its
Designing Woman
. Minus her majesty, the project didn’t seem as appealing to either Stewart or Logan and both bowed out. The directorial chores were then shifted to Minnelli, fresh from
Tea and Sympathy
. It seemed that the director couldn’t completely shake his high-minded exploration of gender roles, though, and some of that “sister boy” stuff would spill over into
Designing Woman
’s riotous battle of the sexes.

Gregory Peck, who inherited the role of the newspaperman, had contractual approval over his costar. He green-lighted Minnelli’s choice: Lauren Bacall. Though Humphrey Bogart’s better half had displayed her comedic abilities in
How to Marry a Millionaire
, the sultry star usually found herself cast in dramatic roles. There had been a string of hard-boiled, noirish dramas at Warner Brothers. But by the mid-’50s, even those were hard to come by. “My career had come to a dead stop,” Bacall remembers. “No one offered me anything. . . . So I called Dore, told him I could play it, wanted to, and when I cut my salary in half, he finally said yes.”
²

The supporting cast would include two
Kismet
survivors: Dolores Gray as Peck’s brassy former paramour Lori Shannon, and choreographer Jack Cole, in a rare before-the-cameras turn, as dancer Randy Owen, a flamboyant friend of Bacall’s uptown girl. The initially reticent Cole was persuaded to take the role by his analyst. “He told me this might help bring me out of myself,” Cole said.
³

Shooting began in September 1956 and both leads eagerly threw themselves into their work. Since
Roman Holiday
, Peck had subsisted on a steady diet of somber dramas (
Night People
,
The Purple Plain
,
The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit
). The stalwart leading man relished the opportunity to flex his comedy muscles and he marveled at Minnelli’s “wonderful sense of pacing . . . of not letting things get boring, keeping it dancing along.”
⁴

Bacall was coping with the failing health of her real-life husband, Humphrey Bogart (who would die of throat cancer the following year). The virtually carefree set of
Designing Woman
proved to be the perfect refuge. “The whole experience for me was absolute heaven,” Bacall says: