please James Costos, Ambassador to Spain - rainhotss - rainhotss

Same-sex Partners Occupy
U. S. Ambassador's Residence

When former HBO executive James Costos (b. 1963) was named the United States Ambassador to Spain and Andorra in 2013, his partner of 15 years, interior designer Michael Smith (Ambassador Consort?), moved in with him to occupy the ambassador’s residence in Madrid. Although they became one of the first same-sex couples to make their home in an embassy, Ambassador Costos says he and Smith were welcomed as any other ambassador would be, even though Spain is overwhelmingly Catholic (93%). In spite of religious cultural influence, same sex marriage was legal in Spain (since 2005) many years before it became law in the United States.

Costos was appointed by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the United States Senate on August 1, 2013. When the Obama family spent a 3-day Father's Day weekend with Costos and Smith at their Palm Springs home last year, the press was mute. This is an indication of how much progress has been made regarding same sex couples. Imagine the hoopla that would have ensued if either the Bush or Clinton families had resided under the roof of a same sex couple.

In addition to the ambassador's residence in Madrid, Costos and Smith maintain a penthouse in New York City, a residence in Holmby Hills, CA, and a third abode in Rancho Mirage (Palm Springs). The well-heeled pair met by striking up a conversation on a commercial flight 15 years ago. They have since become an international power couple, and an invitation to their official residence in Spain is much coveted by anybody who is anybody. When they are together in Madrid, Smith refers to his partner as "the Ambassador," as in "Where is the Ambassador at the moment?"

Michael Smith (seated) and Ambassador Costos at the U.S. Ambassador's residence in Madrid, with Glenn Ligon's neon art sign, "Double America." (Photo: James Rajotte)

High-profile designer Smith, whose business is based in Los Angeles, has been the White House decorator since 2008 and is responsible for the 2010 refurbishment of the Oval Office and the Obama’s private quarters (2009). At that time Smith was also appointed to the Committee for the Preservation of the White House. He spends one week a month in Madrid with Costos and works the rest of the time at his office in California, where he oversees a staff of 40. Smith has tweaked the embassy interiors, especially with artwork and decorative accessories, which the couple plans to leave behind for subsequent ambassadors to enjoy. Much of the refurbishment and entertainment expenses have come out of their own pockets.

Costos is concentrating his efforts on Spain’s economic recovery, stressing youth entrepreneurship as a path to tackle Spain's high unemployment rates.

please George Forrest & Robert Wright - rainhotss - rainhotss

Robert Wright (1914-2005) and George Forrest (1915-1999, b. George Forrest Chichester, Jr.) were professional and life partners for over seventy years. They worked as a team writing music and lyrics for film, stage and club acts. While both men were credited equally as composer-lyricists, it was George who worked chiefly with the music. Although their specialty was providing lyrics for melodies from classical compositions, their output also included much original musical material, such as their score for Grand Hotel (1989). They worked exclusively with each other throughout their careers, and the peak of their creative output was during the late 1930s while under contract with M-G-M.

However, Wright and Forrest were best known for the 1953 Broadway musical and 1955 musical film Kismet, for which they had adapted musical themes by Alexander Borodin. Enduring songs from that show include Baubles, Bangles and Beads, Stranger In Paradise and And This Is My Beloved. The pair won a Tony award for their work on Kismet, and in 1995 they were awarded the ASCAP Foundation Richard Rodgers Award. They also received three Academy Award nominations for Best Song.

Wright and Forrest provided scores for dozens of films, chief among them After the Thin Man (1936), Boystown (1938), Marie Antoinette (1938), Our Gang Follies (1938), The Women (1939), I Married an Angel (1941) and Song of Norway (1970, adapting the music of Edvard Grieg). They wrote the hit song The Donkey Serenade (based on a musical theme by Rudolf Friml) along with composer Herbert Stothart. In total they worked together on over 50 films, 18 stage productions, and 13 TV specials, writing 2,000 songs during the course of their careers.

The two men met as Miami High School classmates in 1929. While still a teenager Wright was working as a pianist accompanying silent films, and he conducted his own high school orchestra. He met fourteen-year-old Forrest when George auditioned for the school’s glee club, and the two soon became lovers. They later auditioned as a pair for M-G-M in the mid-1930s and moved to Hollywood for the duration of their contract, which lasted until 1942.

The Wright and Forrest relationship represents the longest-running songwriting collaboration in the history of American show business.

Alfie Boe, who starred in a 2007 revival of Kismet, sings Stranger in Paradise. For those impatient types, the music starts at the 0:45 timing mark:

please Jerome Zerbe & Lucius Beebe - rainhotss - rainhotss

Society photographer Jerome Zerbe (1904-1988) was born of privilege in Euclid, Ohio. He was an originator of a genre of photography that is now known as “celebrity paparazzi.” In the 1930s Zerbe was a pioneer of shooting photographs of famous people at play and on-the-town. However, he differed from his successors in a major way – Zerbe was of the same social class as his photographic subjects, and he arrived at high society parties with his own engraved invitation in hand. He often traveled and vacationed with the stage and film stars he photographed.

Some of his best known images were of Greta Garbo at lunch, Cary Grant helping columnist Hedda Hopper move into her new home, bodybuilder/actor Steve Reeves shaving, playwright Moss Hart climbing a tree, Howard Hughes having lunch at “21” with Janet Gaynor, Ginger Rogers flying first-class, plus legendary stars Charlie Chaplin, Gary Cooper, surrealist artist Salvador Dalí, Jean Harlow, writer Dorothy Parker, boxer Gene Tunney, author Thomas Wolfe and the fabulously wealthy Vanderbilt family.

Zerbe’s mother was Susan Eichelberger*, the child of a successful railroad lawyer in Urbana, Ohio, and his father was a prominent and prosperous businessman, owner of the Ohio and Pennsylvania Coal Company. Two of his uncles were lawyers in Urbana, another the Superintendent of West Point. Jerome’s mother was so beautiful and possessed of such a captivating voice that, while once visiting New York City,  she received a serious offer from a theatrical impresario to star in a play, and she accepted. When her parents found out, they dispatched an uncle to return her to the “safety” of Urbana. Her family’s social standing was such that they subscribed to the mandate that a woman’s name should appear in print only three times: at birth, upon marriage, and at death.

*There is a street named Eichelberger in Urbana, Ohio.

Young Jerry Zerbe was driven to public school in the family limousine, which got him beaten up by bullies. He survived well enough to make it through Yale. A supreme social networker, he gained important social prominence in New Haven, which later would serve him well in New York, London and Paris, where he studied art. Soon after graduation from university he went to Hollywood to try his hand at drawing portraits of famous film stars. He was befriended by Gary Cooper, Hedda Hopper, Cary Grant, Errol Flynn, Randolph Scott, Marion Davies and Paulette Goddard. Soon enough he picked up a camera, photographing stars in Hollywood’s Golden Age as well as mere hopefuls, who, before they became famous, would pose for him with few, if any, clothes.

He was for years the official photographer of Manhattan’s famed Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center and fabled nightspot El Morocco, the places to see and be seen at the time. Zerbe pioneered the business arrangement of getting paid by a nightclub to photograph its visitors, before giving away the photos to the gossip pages of print media. For over 40 years, Jerome Zerbe traveled the world taking pictures of celebrities, amassing an archive of over 50,000 photographs.

Below: 18-year-old Elizabeth Taylor (center) and first husband Conrad "Nicky" Hilton, Jr. (right) at El Morocco in 1950.

After taking up residence in New York City, he served as art director of Parade magazine and photographer and society editor for Town and Country. Zerbe also contributed photographs to Life and Look magazines and was a Navy photographer during World War II. He was the author of several books of photographs, including Happy Times (1973), which includes his photographs from the El Morocco years. A trip to Paris to photograph estates and country homes (and their occupants) led to a secondary career as an architectural photographer.


In 1988 Jerome Zerbe died at age 85 at his New York City apartment on Sutton Place. Oh, I forgot to mention that Jerome was credited with having invented the vodka martini.

Below: Lovers Cary Grant and Randolph Scott photographed "at home" by Zerbe (1933):

Romantically, Zerbe’s most significant relationship was with syndicated society columnist and writer Lucius Beebe (1902-1966), who made almost embarrassingly frequent and flattering references to Jerome in his newspaper column “This New York,” read by millions each morning. Beebe was so wealthy and possessed of such a confident personality that he became one of the first members of high society who lived as an openly gay man. When questioned about his sexual orientation, Beebe (photo below) could slam down his drink and shout, “Go to hell,” and that would be the end of it.

Beebe also wrote 35 books, and I just now got around to reading one that's been on my Kindle for well over a year: The Big Spenders: The Epic Story of the Rich Rich, the Grandees of America and the Magnificoes, and How They Spent Their Fortunes (1966)

Written in florid, effusively dated language, this was Beebe’s last (35th) book, detailing how über-rich Americans blew through their vast fortunes in rather eccentric ways. Part of the fun of reading this is being introduced to characters now long forgotten. We all know the peccadillos of the Astors and Vanderbilts, but Beebe introduced me to Mrs. Kate Moore (1846-1917), an heiress from Pittsburgh, who became one of the leading figures in Paris high society, especially among the expatiate Americans. She entertained lavishly, and she commissioned the great society portraitist John Singer Sargent to paint her several times. Sargent wrote to Henry James about her in 1884, “I am dreadfully tired of the people here and of my present work, a certain majestic portrait of an ugly woman [Mrs Kate Moore]. She is like a great frigate under full sail with homeward-bound steamers flying.”

Beebe’s comment about this inveterate social climber, who bought her way into society, “(she) departed from life as she would from the Ritz, handing out tips to everyone.”

Then there’s Spencer “Spec” Penrose (1865-1939, owner of Colorado Springs’ Broadmoor Hotel), who  maintained active membership in the Pacific Union, San Francisco’s most exclusive and expensive gentlemen’s club on the top of Nob Hill, as long as he lived. When asked why he remained a member of a club he never used, he replied, “My God, man. I might want a drink out there.” The idea of drinking in a public premises never occurred to him, and the thought that he might not want a drink at any place, any time, was equally unthinkable.

After graduating last in his class at Harvard, he was enticed to Colorado in the 1890s by his Philadelphia neighbor Charles Tutt, and Spec was soon engaged working in Tutt’s real estate offices in Cripple Creek. He and Tutt went on to make unfathomable fortunes in gold, copper and mineral milling. So flush with cash, Penrose once left himself a note on his bedside table not to spend more than a million dollars the next day. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

“Penrose made a personal assay of Cripple Creek, a howling wilderness and suburb of hell whose Myers Avenue was the widest-open red-light district anywhere outside Butte, Montana, and whose three booming railroads were daily rolling up the hill with palace cars filled with additional girls, madams, hard-rock miners, anarchists, three-card monte men, tippers of the keno goose, whiskey salesmen, confidence-game artists, eastern capitalists, newspaper reporters, and real estate speculators. Penrose liked what he saw.”

Once he had left Philadelphia and resettled to Colorado in 1892, “the only criticism anybody had was of Spec’s clothes. He wore beautifully tailored riding breeches and English boots that cost $100 a pair. Apprised that the community considered him a dude in some respects, Penrose at once sent East for a suit of evening tails and a half dozen opera hats and started dressing for dinner. There were a few catcalls at first, but most of the roughnecks who took exception to his attire were out of the hospital as good as new in two or three weeks.”

After being rebuked by the management of the fabled Antlers hotel in Colorado Springs for riding his saddle horse up the front steps and into the lobby bar, Penrose’s gesture of retaliation was to build the Broadmoor Hotel in 1918 (at the then cost of $3,000,000), all the while stealing from The Antlers the hotel manager and its chef de cuisine, paying them double the salary they had been making at their former employ.

“Once in the 1930s Spec stopped briefly in Philadelphia to see a friend and visit his birthplace at 1331 Spruce Street. It had not been occupied for years, and not a piece of furniture had been moved in over a half century. An ancient butler met the master at the door as though he had only left that morning. A venerable cook appeared to get her orders for dinner. Penrose had kept it that way as a sort of family shrine, a memorial to his youth impervious to the hostile winds of change.”

Upon his death in 1939, Penrose’s $125,000,000 fortune was the largest sum ever filed for probate in the Rocky Mountain region.

If you are fascinated by this sort of thing, this is your book. Available in e-reader formats.

please Maurice Ravel - rainhotss - rainhotss

Best remembered today for Bolero, Ravel (1875-1937) was a popular classical composer during his lifetime. Born in the Basque village of Ciboure, practically on the border with Spain, he grew up in Paris, where he gave his first public piano recital at age 14. Many speculate that he carried on affairs with Spanish pianist Ricardo Viñes and Spanish composer Manuel de Falla, although he did not flaunt his homosexuality in public. Viñes, known as the teacher of gay composer Francis Poulenc, championed the piano compositions of Ravel, performing the premieres of many of them.

Ravel collected books about bizarre sexual practices and hid a secret stash of pornography. He would sometimes entertain the members of the all-male “Les Apaches”(hooligans) society by dressing as a ballerina, complete with tutu and falsies, while dancing on pointe. Still, there is no evidence that he had a lasting personal relationship with anyone of either sex. Several biographers claim that his sole emotional relationship was with his mother.

Extremely closeted, Ravel was somewhat shy, dignified and retiring in public, always carefully observing the men dancing together at Le Boeuf sur le Toit, a Parisian cabaret-bar, but never joining in himself. Jean Cocteau and Francis Poulenc were regulars there. Friends say that Ravel had a prized collection of gay pornography, which he amassed after his service in the French Army during WW I.

Although handsome, Ravel was sensitive about his short physical stature (5'2" tall on a good day), and was often teased for dressing like a dandy. He shared a sharp and keen wit with his close companions, although he had the reputation of a somewhat snobbish intellectual. Ravel studied composition with Gabriel Fauré at the Paris Conservatory, abandoning a career as a concert pianist, but he was a poor student and was subsequently dismissed. One of his major musical talents was as an orchestrator, and he became known for compositions depicting Spanish landscapes and folk melodies. Igor Stravinsky called Ravel’s ballet music for Daphnis et Chloé "one of the most beautiful products of all French music", and other critics claimed it was Ravel's “most impressive single achievement, as it is his most opulent and confident orchestral score". The work is notable for its rhythmic diversity, lyricism, and evocations of nature.

With Claude Debussy’s death, Ravel became the foremost composer of French classical music. As Fauré stated in a letter to Ravel in October 1922, “I am happier than you can imagine about the solid position which you occupy and which you have acquired so brilliantly and so rapidly. It is a source of joy and pride for your old professor.” Around that time Ravel completed his famous orchestral arrangement of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, and its widespread popularity brought Ravel great fame and substantial profit.

Jeux d’eau (Fountains), a landmark piano composition. Its influence on Poulenc is obvious, even to an untrained ear. Martha Argerich is the pianist.



In 1928 Ravel made a wildly successful four-month conducting tour of 25 U.S. cities, where he was greeted with standing ovations and much adulation, in pointed contrast to his rather tepid reception at his premieres in Paris. The solid success of this American tour cemented Ravel’s international reputation as a serious composer. While in NYC he met American composer George Gershwin. There is a story that when Gershwin met Ravel, he mentioned that he would like to study with the French composer. According to Gershwin, the Frenchman retorted, "Why do you want to become a second-rate Ravel when you are already a first-rate Gershwin?" Ravel asked Gershwin how much money he made. Upon hearing Gershwin's reply, Ravel suggested that maybe he should study with Gershwin. In the jazz clubs of Harlem and New Orleans Ravel soaked up the sounds of jazz, which he incorporated into later compositions, particularly the pianos concertos.

Upon his return to France, Ravel was bemused by the change in his reception by the French public and critics (all for the better). He began recording or supervising the recording of his major works, so today we have a direct link to the composer’s intentions. He wrote Bolero, his most famous composition, in 1928, immediately after his American tour. He intended it as ballet music, and intentionally meant for there to be no musical development, just a protracted crescendo of a single theme repeated to great effect. It was a tour de force of orchestration, distinctive in its incorporation of saxophones in a symphony orchestra.

Four years later Ravel received a blow to the head in a taxi accident, which he brushed off as not serious at the time. However, symptoms of absentmindedness and difficulty with speaking and communicating soon became evident. Five years after the 1932 accident he consented to experimental brain surgery, because he was no longer able to write down his musical ideas. Tragically, he died from complications from the surgery.

In this excerpt from his Piano Concerto in G (Movement 1), Leonard Bernstein conducts from the keyboard. By the 1:35 mark, the influence of Gershwin is undeniable, both rhythmically and harmonically.

please Prince Johannes von Thurn und Taxis - rainhotss - rainhotss

Dateline 1979, Bavaria. Openly bisexual Prince Johannes von Thurn und Taxis (1926-1990) was the richest man in Germany and its largest land owner. His fortune cast a web of banks, breweries, enormous land holdings in Brazil, vast private forest lands (80,000 acres) in Germany, extensive fine art collections and eleven palaces and castles. The 53-year-old bachelor prince resided in his 500-room St. Emmeram Palace in Regensburg, some 60 miles northeast of Munich, where his family had lived since 1748.

In the fifteenth century his ancestors had developed a European postal system that earned them a great fortune. Soon the postal coaches began accepting paying passengers, so we get the term “taxi” from the family enterprise. For over 300 years the family held a monopoly on the postal system of the Holy Roman Empire.

The 12th-century Italian Dukes de la torre, based near Bergamo, were the ancestors of the Thurn und Taxis dynasty. Emperor Ferdinand III recognized the Thurn und Taxis line as successors to the Torriani dukes. The Italian word Torre (tower) became Thurn, and Tasso (badger) became Taxis, and their family tree dates back to 1445.

During WW II Prince Johannes served in German intelligence and was imprisoned by the British from 1945 to 1947. For the next 35 post-war years he kept a relatively low profile among his royal and noble peers. But after the death of his father in 1982, the prince became head of the Thurn und Taxis family as full inheritor, and he began to spend money like a Vanderbilt. His 210,000 sq. ft. palace was furnished with 400 clocks, maintained by a full-time servant whose only task was to wind them in perpetual rotation. All the windows were washed weekly. Johannes retained 70 liveried footmen and parked 20 cars in his garage. But his idea of a fun night out was to troll the gay bars in Munich.

Imagine then the surprise when he announced he was ready to settle down with an impoverished  distant aristocratic cousin, Countess Gloria Schönburg-Glachau, a high school dropout and onetime waitress some 34 years his junior. Upon their marriage she was 20 years old and three months pregnant with their first daughter. A second daughter arrived two years later, but Prince Johannes could not breathe a sigh of relief until Albert, their only son, arrived the next year.

Prior to the birth of a son, Johannes had a pressing inheritance problem. According to tradition, his wife had to be a noble descendant of the Holy Roman Empire who would bear him a son. Otherwise his fortune would be splintered into numerous fractions of its $2.5 billion value. When the prince ran into his distant cousin Gloria in a Munich café, a lightbulb went off. Gloria not only fit the bill of proper lineage, she was willing to accept his sexual preference for men. It was a win-win; she was rescued from poverty, and he would be able to keep his vast estate intact. Young Prince Albert II would be full-inheritor.

The couple lived a life of debauchery, a wild, hedonistic jet-set lifestyle. Gloria drove around town on a lipstick red Harley-Davidson. She sported outrageous clothing, makeup and hairdos, and she proudly bore the moniker “Princess T-N-T.”

Encouraged by her husband, Princess Gloria enjoyed a lifestyle of extreme decadence. In 1986 she spent $20 million on a three-day 60th birthday party for Johannes, crowned by a costume ball held at their St. Emmeram palace, where Gloria appeared as Marie-Antoinette.  She ordered a birthday cake lit by 60 pink, phallus-shaped candles, a not-so-subtle hint at her husband’s sexual preference. 500 guests had been flown in on private jets to enjoy days of over-the-top debauchery. Mick Jagger, J. Paul Getty Jr. and Saudi Arabian businessman Adnan Khashoggi were among the guests.

Prince Albert II was just seven years old when his father died of complications following two heart surgeries in late 1990. That day Albert became the 12th Prince of Thurn und Taxis and the youngest billionaire in the world. The 6'4" tall bachelor Prince Albert II turned 32 years old a few days ago, on June 23. He is an extraordinarily rich business man and professional race car driver (he has crashed a Lamborghini or two). Albert became full-inheritor of the Thurn und Taxis fortune on his 18th birthday in 2001.

Princess Gloria stands above her two daughters and son Prince Albert.

Prince Albert today makes his home at the ancestral Schloss St. Emmeram (below). At 500 rooms, it is the largest home in Europe still maintained by a princely family. It even contains a throne room and a riding hall for the practice and performance of extreme dressage.

 

Sources: Gloria, die Fürstin (Peter Seewald, 2004), Wikipedia & Tim Allis for People Magazine (1991)

please Bill Tilden, Tennis Champion - rainhotss - rainhotss

In 1920 Bill Tilden, who made no effort to hide his homosexuality, won the men’s singles title at Wimbledon. He was the first American to compete at Wimbledon and went on to win two more Wimbledon titles, in addition to seven U.S. championships. As well, he led U.S. teams to seven Davis Cup victories. From 1920 to 1934, Tilden was generally considered the world's greatest tennis player. In 1925, Tilden won an astonishing 57 matches in a row. Although Tilden lost part of his finger in an accident in 1922, he simply modified his grip and continued to play at the same level as before the injury. He won the moniker “Big Bill Tilden,” since he was tall and had a vast reach. His extraordinary serve was so powerful it was often compared to a cannonball.

A 1950 survey of sportswriters named Tilden the greatest tennis player of the half-century. Historically he is generally considered above the caliber of later champions such as Björn Borg, Pete Sampras and Roger Federer.

There was also an aura of scandal around Tilden, because of his sexual orientation. In Vladimir Nabokov’s novel “Lolita,’ Tilden is depicted as a has-been tennis champion with “a harem of ball boys,” whom Humbert Humbert hires to coach Lolita, knowing that the coach will not try to seduce her, due to his homosexuality. Nabokov told editor Alfred Appel that the novel’s anonymous tennis coach was actually a real person who had won three Wimbledon championships, was born in 1893, and died in 1953. Tilden is the only person who fits this description. The name of Nabokov's character is "Ned Litam", which is “Ma Tilden” spelled backwards.

Tilden incurred two scandalous arrests for sexual misbehavior with teenage boys in the late 1940s, and his career suffered because of it. He began traveling with hand-picked teenaged ball boys, and many clubs would not allow him on the courts. However, in 1945 Tilden and long-time doubles partner Vinnie Richards won the professional doubles championship; Tilden was 52 years old at the time.

Tilden was a devout believer in sportsmanship above all other aspects of the game, including the final score; he would readily (and dramatically) cede points to his opponent if he thought the umpire had miscalled a shot in Tilden's favor. He still remains the only known professional tennis player (perhaps the only professional at any sport) to have refunded money to a promoter when the gate was not as good as it should have been and it appeared the promoter was going to lose money.

He loved the glamour of movie stars. Tilden moved to Hollywood and coached Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn, and Tallulah Bankhead. He also became a good friend of Charlie Chaplin. Tilden played at Chaplin’s tennis parties, where he coached Errol Flynn, Joseph Cotten, Montgomery Clift, Spencer Tracy, and Olivia deHavilland.

He fashioned himself a master of genres outside the world of sports, never to successful ends. He wrote short stories and novels about misunderstood but sportsman-like tennis players, and dreamed of being a star on Broadway and in Hollywood. He appeared on stage as well as off, as a producer. Much of his vast earnings were invested in these pursuits, with failure the invariable result. He was also a contract bridge champ, musicologist and playwright. He was once quoted as saying. "If I had to choose between music and tennis, I'd choose music."

In 1953 he was preparing to leave Los Angeles for the U.S. Professional Championship tournament in Cleveland, Ohio, when he died of a stroke at age 60. He was buried at Ivy Hill Cemetery in his home town of Philadelphia, where he had been born into wealth and privilege. At the time of his death Tilden was living in a rented apartment in Hollywood with $288 in the bank, a tragic end to a great life. Tilden was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1959.

In 2004, a play titled “Big Bill,” based on the life of Bill Tilden, played at Lincoln Center in NYC. The playwright was acclaimed dramatist A. R. Gurney. Frank Deford's biography, "Big Bill Tilden: the Triumphs and the Tragedy" has been optioned for a film.

Fashion note: During the early part of the 20th century male tennis players dressed virtually indistinguishably from cricket players. Men wore cuffed white flannel trousers and white shirts, sometimes with v-neck or cable-knit sweaters to add an element of style. Bill Tilden is generally regarded as having been the first male tennis fashion icon, transforming the image of men’s tennis from a sport played by wealthy, leisured young men unable to handle the physical demands of team sports, into a man’s game played by the toughest athletes. Tilden’s enormous fame led many to emulate his style of dress, which included long shirts rolled up to the elbows, cuffed trousers and a selection of elegant sweaters.

please Cary Grant & Randolph Scott - Part I - rainhotss - rainhotss

Deeply closeted Hollywood Lovers

Cary Grant and Randolph Scott

Cary Grant & Randolph Scot share an intimate moment outside their Santa Monica beach house (1930s).

Though he married women five times, movie star Cary Grant (1904-1986) enjoyed many gay relationships during his early career in New York and Hollywood. His most famous same-sex romance was with fellow actor Randolph Scott (1898-1987), the rugged star of numerous westerns.

Grant and Scott met at Paramount Studios in 1932 and were immediately attracted to each other. Soon after, they moved in together, sharing a house at 2177 W. Live Oak Drive near Griffith Park in Hollywood. The arrangement was explained away by studio public relations agents as a way for two young actors to “cut costs and share expenses,” even though both men could easily afford their own homes. Even after Grant’s marriage to Virginia Cherrill, the two men continued co-habiting. Cherrill simply moved into the house with the two lovers for the duration of her 13-month marriage. In her 1935 divorce settlement from Grant, she received $50,000, which was equivalent to 50% of their community property at the time.

Randolph Scott

Randolph Scott (above), beyond handsome.

Between liaisons with other men and women, Grant and Scott’s relationship endured, well known to their colleagues in the industry. In the late 1930s, Grant and Scott occupied a Santa Monica beach house at 1019 Ocean Front (since renumbered – now 1039). In fan magazines, they were  photographed together in domestic bliss, wearing aprons and cavorting pool side or on the patio. According to Grant’s biographer, they believed their public openness and flamboyance would raise them above suspicion of homosexuality. The public bought it, and Grant enjoyed a screen career as a suave ladies’ man for the next three decades, while Randolph Scott made popular westerns, always playing rugged, masculine characters.

Don’t miss My Favorite Wife (1940 - available from NetFlix), a film featuring Grant and Scott as co-stars in a screwball comedy. In this trailer for the movie, Scott appears with Cary Grant at the 1:45 mark.