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In 1930 William Haines was Hollywoods #1 box-office draw - a talented, handsome, wisecracking romantic lead. Offscreen, protected by a careful collaboration between studio and press, he was openly gay with reporters and studio chiefs alike. Here is Haines's virtually unknown story - rich with detail, revelations, and scandal - about silent movies and talkies; his lover Jimmie Shields, and the fifty-year relationship (Joan Crawford, their best friend, called them "The happiest married couple in Hollywood") and the enforcement of the Production Code and the establishment of the Hollywood closet, which led to the blacklisting that ultimately doomed Haimes's film career.Wisecracker sweeps from gay pool parties to the excitement of early talkies to Haines's infamous encounter with gay-bashing white supremicists in 1936. He survived the scandal to emerge as a top interior decorator to the stars and to such clients as Nancy Reagan and Walter Annenberg, who employed him for the American Embassy in London. With a cast of characters running from Tallulah Bankhead to Betsy Bloomingdale, from Clark Gable to William Randolph Hearst, Wisecracker is an astounding peice of newly discovered gay history, a chronicle of high Hollywood, and - at it's heart - a great and enduring love story.… (more)
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Haines is a complicated man. Born in a rural Virginia town, he was bullied as effeminate from an early age, and grew up in the shadow of his Confederate-hero grandfather. He ran away from home--with a boyfriend--as a young teen, and after a brief return home, went to New York City, where he relished in the sexual freedoms of Greenwich Village. His beautiful face garnered him a ticket to Los Angeles and a movie contract, but he had to first learn how to act. Once he did, though, he began to repeatedly play a certain type, an arrogant man who eventually humbles and gets the girl. He also soon fell for a former sailor, Jimmie Shields, and began to enjoy the wild night life the city offered, much to the chagrin of producer Louis B. Mayer. Other gay stars were willing to at least marry a woman or pretend an interest in the other sex, but Billy wisecracked, dodging the issue by making jokes. This strategy could only last for so long.
I read this for research, and I found an incredible amount of useful material. Mann did an amazing amount of research on his book; it came out in 1998, and he had the benefit of speaking to a few people still alive who knew Billy well. Do be aware that there is a lot of sexual discussion in this book, some quite graphic, as Billy and Jimmy treated their exploits as something of an avocation for much of their lives. They were together for almost 50 years. There is one particular matter in their lives that remains vague, though, and that is what truly happened in El Porto, California, where Jimmie was accused of molesting a young boy and a mob descended on the two party houses of gay men and ran them out of town; the details there are particularly disturbing, in regards to the inciting incident and the almost-lynch mob afterward.
If people are reading this for the Hollywood gossip a century after the fact, there's a lot of that, but I also found the details about his interior designing career to be interesting. His work with the Reagans--their politically duplicitous nature, and Ronald Reagan's small show of humanity after Billy's death--were insightful. Really, Mann explores human psychology with a deft touch. You really feel for the people he writes about, like Cary Grant, who does what Billy does not and sells his soul to have his career, and ends up a lonely, bitter man.