Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of Their Entourages (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) (111 page)

Back in his office, on his desk, Gore found a badly organized script the size of a New York City telephone directory. “If that script had been shot, it would take up twenty hours of screen time. What I held in my hand was a silent movie, with miles and miles of dialogue, some of it written in a sort of poetic style, much of it stilted and too formal for the screen. Where was Cecil B. DeMille now that we needed him?”

Thoughout most of the 1950s, MGM had hired a dozen screen writers to try to re-create
Ben-Hur
as a talking picture. The script Gore was given represented the combined efforts of two popular writers, Maxwell Anderson and S.N. Behrman.

Gore had not seen either of Behrman’s two most frequently produced plays,
Biography
(1932), and
End of Summer
(1936). He’d read
Biography
, which lamented a political landscape divided between left-and right-wing extremists, leaving little space for a tolerant and humane middle ground.

Gore had seen both of Anderson’s “Tudor plays,” but only when they reached the screen—
Mary of Scotland
(1936) with Katharine Hepburn; and
The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex
(1939), starring Bette Davis and Errol Flynn.

Gore immediately discovered a loop in the plot: Ben-Hur and Messala had been intimate boyhood friends. Years later, they meet as strong-willed, testosterone-permeated adults, whose personalities and politics differ widely, even dangerously.

Initially, as adults, Heston is a land-owning, fervently patriotic Zionist Jew; Messala an aristocratic Roman officer and a ruthless and foreign conqueror. Although their reunion is affectionate, they soon after quarrel bitterly over sovereignty and politics. A mutual loathing follows, and a rivalry that leads to Messala’s death during that infamous and heart-racing chariot race.

Gore protested to both Wyler and Zimbalist that there “is no motivation for all this fury.” Consequently, he came up with a strong motivation.

He suggested that Ben-Hur and Messala had been boyhood lovers. Meeting again as adults, the more decadent and more permissive of the two, Messala, was still in love with Ben-Hur and wants to resume their sexual relationship.

Ben-Hur, however, as a virtuous, Old Testament-thumping Zionist, righteously rebuffs Messala’s advances. As for Messala, hell hath no fury like a horny Roman soldier rejected in love—and from a Jew, no less.

At first, Wyler and Zimbalist were aghast at this plot enhancement, since at that time the word homosexuality could not even be mentioned on the screen.

In his recollections, Gore said, “Without being aware of it at first, I was recycling the plot from my
The City and the Pillar
novel. Fortunately, neither Sam nor Willy had read it. For a while, they sat in stony silence, looking at me like I was some crazed pervert.”

Finally, Wyler said, “How do you propose going about depicting this…what shall I call it? A gay romp between Ben-Hur and Messala? Keep in mind, this is
Ben-Hur, a Tale of Christ
. Not ‘Boy’s Night Out at the Baths.’”

Gore assured the producer and director that the romantic love between Messala and Ben-Hur would be depicted indirectly, almost subliminally—nothing overt.

“I won’t even mention it in a single line of dialogue,” Gore promised. “The actors can use their eyes to suggest it. The average movie-goer will not get it, but gay men will. When Ben-Hur rejects Messala’s overtures—which are only suggested—and refuses to support the Roman occupation of Israel and Judea, Messala’s face can reflect not only a rejection of his political beliefs, but thwarted love as well.”

“If it’s played correctly, the love that will not dare screech its name can be subtly indicated,” Gore said. “We can show the proud, arrogant Messala abasing himself before his former love, a lowly Jew boy.”

Wyler rose to his feet. “God damn it, we’ll try it. At this point, I’ll try any scene short of actual cocksucking. We’re desperate to get some strong motivation going here!”

Wyler, Zimbalist, and Gore decided to bring the sexually sophisticated Boyd, a homosexual himself, into the loop. Wyler insisted, however, that he preferred to direct Heston’s scenes as Ben-Hur without “the Big Cornpone
[his nickname for Heston]
ever realizing what in the fuck was going on. Under no circumstances is Heston to know that the scenes he’ll be acting have a homoerotic undercurrent, subliminal or not.”

Zimbalist wondered if Wyler and Gore could pull this off. “Surely the Big Cornpone isn’t that dumb.”

But apparently, he was. In his memoirs, Gore noted that “Heston was imitating Francis X. Bushman’s style and mannerisms as they’d appeared in the film’s 1925 silent screen version, tossing his head, chin held high, oblivious to what was going on from the other actors nearby. Boyd at one point winked at me. He was in character.”

Wyler thought their game was up, when Heston gained access to the rushes. “But even during his face-to-face encounters with a lovesick Boyd, Heston didn’t get it that they were playing a gay love scene.”

Based on what he said during an interview years later, in 1977, Heston appeared to have finally understood the subliminal messages a bit more clearly, appearing better informed by the gay undercurrent in
Ben-Hur
. “The story behind
Ben-Hur
isn’t really about Christ,” Heston said. “It’s certainly not a story about Ben-Hur and Esther, either. It’s a love story between Ben-Hur and Messala, and the destruction of that love and the world they had known.”

“In the wake of that destruction,” Heston continued, “there remained only hatred and revenge—it’s a vendetta story.”

Although Gore was introduced to each of the film’s supporting players, his eyes and attention were focused on the very handsome Stephen Boyd. The two men bonded. After his second night in Rome, Boyd moved into Gore’s hotel suite.

One of the actresses in
Ben-Hur
, Missouri-born Martha Scott, had dinner at a
trattoria
in Trastevere with Gore and Boyd. “If they weren’t in love, they were definitely lovers,” she later told Wyler. “It was very obvious, based on the looks they exchanged between them, and the many personal jokes and innuendos they shared.”

Gore and Boyd also dined with the English actor, Jack Hawkins, who had been assigned one of the film’s lead roles. Gore remembered that he smoked three packages of cigarettes a day, which later led to cobalt treatments and his eventual death from throat cancer. He, too, agreed that Boyd and Gore were lovers.

Years later in a pub in Dublin, near the end of Boyd’s short life, he told one of the authors of this book, “Gore and I were mature. We both knew that our affair would last just for the duration of the picture. When
Ben-Hur
was over, so were we.”

Before the end of his three-month contract, from Rome, Gore wrote to Paul Bowles in Tangier, “I am doing a fast rewrite of this mammoth epic called
Ben-Hur
. I started at the beginning, while my co-author, Chistopher Fry, a nice little man who looks like the way Shakespeare must have looked, started at the end and works toward me. It is predicted that, as writers, we shall meet at the chariot race.”

The writing credits for the movie are still protested today. Gore maintained that he wrote half the script, but the Screen Writers Guild did not agree. Nor did they credit Fry. In a final judgment, they ruled that Karl Tunberg crafted most of the script.

“Sam would have protected my interests,” Gore later said. “But he died of a stroke before the picture’s release.”

MGM’s gamble with
Ben-Hur
paid off. It was a box office bonanza, playing to capacity audiences around the world. It was nominated for a dozen Oscars, taking home eleven of them, including Best Picture, Best Director (William Wyler), Best Actor (Charlton Heston), and Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Hugh Griffith).

“Heston hated me by the end of the picture,” Gore said. “At his acceptance speech before the Academy, he thanked Fry as the writer and left out any mention of Tunberg or me.”

[Throughout most of his life, Heston managed to convey a squeaky clean image, even though he began his career as a nude model.]

***

In 2008, in the aftermath of Heston’s death, details about his private life faced exposure in the tabloids. He was “Outed” as a bisexual, his early affair with a very young Sal Mineo exposed.

During his lifetime, he came under heavy “fire” as president of the NRA (National Rifle Organization). Barbara Stanwyck mocked his performance as Moses in
The Ten Commandments
(1956). “Chuck has a bad memory. He still thinks he’s parting the Red Sea.”

In Mark Windurn’s Web blog, a site known for some of history’s most notorious recitations of Hollywood gossip, this short defining entry about the actor was worded like this:

“CHARLTON HESTON—Right-wing gun kook. Reportedly likes young girls—and, if rumors are to be believed, young boys, too. Abuser of women, Alcoholic.”

When Gore read that, he said, “I couldn’t agree more.”

Chapter Thirty-Four