It seems hard to believe that F. Scott Fitzgerald, above, died 69 years ago today, on Saturday, December 21, 1940. The Winter Solstice. Fitzgerald’s obituary appeared in the New York Times on December 23, 1940, reporting that he’d had a heart attack at his Hollywood home two days before (it was actually his girlfriend, Sheilah Graham’s place). You can read it here.

Today such a delay in reporting the demise of a famous writer would be unthinkable. And I wonder if there had been an earlier edition, not included in the Times archives. It’s odd to think that Fitzgerald, who was only 44 when he died, never witnessed America’s entry into World War Two, or the dropping of the atom bomb. He was saved from the embarrassment of the McCarthy inquisition. But most of all, he mercifully did not have to witness the tragic death of his wife, Zelda, in a fire at the Highland Mental Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina eight years later. And one wonders what effect his unexpected death, so close to Christmas, must have had on his daughter Scottie.

Reading the obit now, I’m surprised by the dreary, somber tone of it. But one has to remember that in 1940 F. Scott Fitzgerald was practically forgotten. His legend was at its nadir, or to be more precise, non-existent. His best-selling first novel, This Side of Paradise, was just a fond memory, ignored by an entire generation that had followed its debut. The Great Gatsby, although critically well-received, had been a disappointment in terms of sales. The Times ended its memorial by quoting a line about a broken plate from Fitzgerald’s then-recent autobiographical essay from Esquire, entitled The Crack-Up. He was a shattered idol. A has-been. Fitzgerald famously remarked that there are no second acts in American lives. But he proved himself wrong, at least in the after-life. For it was not long after his death that people began to reconsider Fitzgerald’s legacy and his oeuvre. His unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, would be published a year later, edited by his old Princeton pal Edmund Wilson, and in time a series of biographies reappraising his art and life would create an industry unto itself. In 1949, Hollywood paid him the honor of turning The Great Gatsby into a big, splashy film noir, with Alan Ladd in the title role.

Like Abe Lincoln, or Oscar Wilde, or Jack the Ripper, Fitzgerald continues to inspire endlessly groaning shelves of books dedicated to his memory and influence. In a way, academia has abducted Fitzgerald as their own, “the great American novelist,” and turned him into a factory through which countless scholars earn their tenure. Some of these books are hardly worth the paper they are printed on. Others are so obtuse and convoluted that reading the telephone book straight through would be more entertaining. Robert Sklar’s F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Last Laocoon (Oxford, 1967) is a case in point. Here’s a sample: “A process of becoming, a principle of growth in intellect and art, creates the form for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s development from The Great Gatsby to Tender is the Night; and the process of becoming, in its most cosmic sense, was on Fitzgerald’s mind when he returned east from Hollywood early in 1927 to take up the task once more of writing fiction.” One wonders what the “process of becoming” is in its least “cosmic sense.” And how does Sklar know what was on Fitzgerald’s imaginative plate in 1927?

But every now and then a work stands out. I’ve read about a dozen tomes about the Fitzgeralds over the past year, while conducting research into the Roaring 20s for a project I’m working on about my grandfather’s ex-wife, a famous Ziegfeld Follies showgirl named Jessie Reed (she died just before Fitzgerald in September of 1940). The Fitzgeralds epitomized the age of the flapper, of which Jessie Reed was a prominent symbol, the gold-digging showgirl — a type that fascinated F. Scott Fitzgerald. He even posed as one during his Princeton schooldays, above. Both Fitzgeralds adored the Ziegfeld Follies and often attended. Fitzgerald’s neighbor in Great Neck, Ring Lardner, worked on the 1923 show in which Jessie Reed starred. I combed books on Zelda alone (Nancy Milford’s biography, Zelda, although flawed, is still the best), books on the two of them (Exiles From Paradise, by Sara Mayfield; The Romantic Egoists), the latest books on the Fitzgerald Era (The Flapper by Joshua Zeitz), and books by people who simply knew the Fitzgeralds.

One of the best of these is After the Good Gay Times by Tony Buttitta, a bookseller from Asheville who befriended Fitzgerald during one of his tortured stays there in 1935. It involves a rather poignant affair between Fitzgerald and a “mulatto” prostitute. Buttitta, a press agent who does not seem to have written many other books, captures Fitzgerald’s voice in a way that I have not found in other books, and while one wonders just how he could remember so much intimate dialogue (he claims to have kept detailed journals), the book seems closer to the truth than many of the turgid, door-stop bios that have come along since. Another enjoyable exercise was Scott Donaldson’s 1999 book Hemingway Vs. Fitzgerald: The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship, a very revealing examination of their friendship, rivalry, homoerotic stand-off, and competing mythologies.

Now with the success of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (based on a rather flimsy little short story of his), Fitzgerald is very much back in vogue. I hear a bio-pic is in the works.

One of the most interesting books about F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald is not a biography at all but a novel — Parties: Scenes of Contemporary New York Life by Carl Van Vechten, above. Published in August 1930, Parties just might be Van Vechten’s finest novel. It does not have the insouciance of Nigger Heaven, nor the literary legerdemain of Peter Whiffle, His Life and Works, both works that I feel deserve a much wider audience and much more critical acclaim. But what Parties lacks in irony or ingenuity, it more than makes up for in wit and color. Set during Prohibition, when “cocktails” were all the rage (Van Vechten’s own were legendary), Parties is based in part on Van Vechten’s volatile friendship with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. It’s a love letter to them but also a warning. And ultimately an unnerving premonition.

Hamish Wilding (the protagonist who appears to be modeled in part on Van Vechten himself) opens the novel by riding in a taxi with David Westlake (the Fitzgerald character). Both are unspeakably drunk. Westlake is telling Wilding that he’s just killed a man. Tellingly, there is blood “on his lips,” not on his hands. In the world of Parties, killing someone does not always mean murder or even manslaughter, but drowning someone in liquor. A moment later, Rilda Westlake (the Zelda character) calls to complain of having committed suicide (since she’s gotten terribly drunk.) Murder and mayhem are nothing compared to the assaults on their own sanity these characters indulge in. Van Vechten coyly captures the manic mood of the Jazz Age, and the high-flying narcissism (and alcoholism) at its core. (F. Scott Fitzgerald, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, below.)

But Parties is primarily a love story, first between David and Rilda Westlake, for whom fidelity is a curse as well as a bond (one they both take too seriously and too lightly). Everyone is jumping in and out of everyone else’s beds. But at its core, almost seeping in through the lines, is Hamish Wilding’s own erotic obsession with David Westlake: “Hamish invariably felt lost in the absence of David,” Van Vechten writes. At every turn, they are falling into each other’s arms: “David fell asleep, his head resting on Hamish’s shoulder.” Then moments later, “Hamish turned to discover David snoring at his elbow. David asleep this very early morning was not too pretty a sight. The blood had caked on his lip, his face and hands were dirty, his black, curly hair matted and untidy. Unaccountably here he was lying in Hamish’s bed, quite naked…”

David spends an awful amount of time in the nude on the pages of Parties. Van Vechten must have enjoyed picturing his pal Fitzgerald in such poses. Rilda, by contrast, is barely flesh and bones. She seems more a sylph-like spirit who demands attention and exudes ennui. In fact, Parties is a study in boredom and loneliness. This is one of those novels where everyone is “yawning petulantly.” It’s David who keeps the plot moving and who is the focus of Van Vechten’s penetrating eye.

Surrounding this star-crossed couple is a galaxy of wayward bohemians: a German Grafin who takes up with drug-addicts and goes slumming in Harlem; an eccentric hostess, Rosalie Keith, who throws the worst dinners in town; a devilish divorcée Mrs. Alonzo W. Syreno who seduces David on a transatlantic cruise; and Donald Bliss, the handsomest bootlegger in the Big Apple. In the midst of this parade of cock-eyed creatures, Van Vechten inserts an anthem to the sights and smells of Jazz Age Manhattan, a kind of “rhapsody in blue” in purple prose. It’s some of his best writing, pungent and eerily prescient.

Near the end of the novel, the gaiety takes a sobering turn. During a séance at Mrs. Syreno’s lavish apartment, a Negro clairvoyant “dressed in a blue serge tailored suit, with a blue felt hat and a beige blouse,” hisses at her hostess: “Shallow! Vain and silly. Mean little personality. No head. No heart. Nothing. Empty.” She then focuses her gaze on Hamish Wilding. “You do not know yourself,” she says to the Van Vechten character. “You don’t know where you are, or who you are, or what you are or what you want. You are not unhappy, you are miserable. You do not understand.” She seems to know more about Wilding’s feelings for David than he does, and sounds suspiciously, despite the Harlem garb, like Gertrude Stein, below, whose oracular pronouncements Van Vechten was the first to champion.

Then the seeress takes on the Westlakes. She looks at Rilda, who is studying her anxiously. The soothsayer cries out at her in a strong voice: “Fire and flame, blood. Spurs and instruments of torture. Whips and thorns. Burning at the stake is nothing to what I see. The Crucifixion is nothing to what I see. Torture for you. Torture for him. Fire and flames and knives and gutters running with blood…”  Considering that Zelda Fitzgerald would die in a horrible fire at the hospital in which she was confined in 1948, Van Vechten’s insight into the future here is uncanny. And almost too painful to read.

An acclaimed new novel, by Gilles Leroy, Alabama Song, written in French, recently won the 2007 Prix Goncourt. It delves into the courtship of Zelda by a very young F. Scott Fitzgerald at the time he was writing This Side of Paradise. I have not yet read it. And am wondering why it has not yet been released in an English edition.

The Fitzgeralds inspired another roman à clef, The Last Flapper by George Zuckerman (1969). The tag line on the mass-market paperback sets the tone: “Her madness inspired the Jazz Age… Her love destroyed a great writer.” (Most recent books, many of them feminist in nature, take the other side, arguing, often shrilly, that Fitzgerald ruined Zelda’s life and career.) Nearly forgotten today, this novel was a bestseller when it first appeared. The Necco-wafer remake of The Great Gatsby, starring the hopelessly miscast Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, had not yet graced the screen. Nor had the fad for all things relating to the 20s yet taken root. No, No Nanette’s revival on Broadway with Ruby Keeler was two years off.

Zuckerman, who wrote numerous Hollywood screenplays, capably evokes the madcap escapades of his “wild, crazy, drunken” couple, Rannah and Davis O’Donnell. But not without beating us over the head with it. 90% dialogue, the book is fast-paced, blistering, bitchy, almost chaotic. The writing is less Zeldaesque than Judith Krantz meets D. H. Lawrence. Here’s young Rannah masturbating to the image of her beloved Davis: “He hurt my mouth with kisses and crushed my breasts. I held him by his prick until I could hold him no longer. Then he became the forest beast with clawed feet and he ravished me with savage thrusts. The locomotive’s whistle screamed my ecstasy.”

Luckily for us, Fitzgerald himself never wrote prose like that. He may have written some pretty lame short stories just for the money — a fact he was the first to admit — but his novels have not lost any of their fire or polish or punch. There are passages in The Great Gatsby (1949 screen cap, above) that are as fresh today as anything ever written since. Richard Yates called it “a miracle of talent…a triumph of technique.” F. Scott Fitzgerald may have epitomized the spirit of his time, but his works will always remain timeless.

Last year at this time I posted a list of my favorite ten Christmas movies of all time. You can read it by clicking here. This year I thought I might make a list of the Ten Worst Christmas movies. But there are far too many for such a short list, including about a dozen recent holiday pictures starring such lackluster TV personalities as Tim Allen. Instead this year I want to showcase a picture I think just might qualify as the worst Christmas movie ever: MGM’s 1947 film noir fiasco, Lady in the Lake, based on the novel by Raymond Chandler.

Raymond Chandler? What could a legendary, ground-breaking novel by the American master of hardboiled mysteries have to do with Christmas? That’s a good question. The answer is, nothing at all. And yet MGM in marketing the film based on it first packaged it as a holiday flick, as if it were some nice family picture. How did this happen? Well, blame it on Robert Montgomery, the actor who directed it. He chose to restyle the story giving it a nonsensical Christmas twist, below.

Chandler’s novel is set in the summer when Californians are basking in the sun-drenched lakes up in the mountains. The Lady in the Lake, which came after The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely, is one of Chandler’s best novels. In it Chandler delved deeper than ever into the dark depths of grief, despair and corruption. It evokes Dashiell Hammett’s earlier thriller Red Harvest except it relies more on stylish “set-piece” murders and oozes a ghoulish Grand Guignol glamour all its own. Chandler’s rendering of the discovery of the eponymous “Lady in the Lake”’s corpse is one of the most gruesome depictions in American literature. It sent shivers up and down my spine when I first read it.

But the 1947 MGM flick turned the seasons upside down and set the story at holiday time in Los Angeles. The opening credits are played over a sickly sweet carol. The initial scenes transpire on Christmas Eve with garish holiday ornaments and badly-decorated Christmas trees thrown in to give the whole movie a cheesy Yuletide festive mood. Throughout the film choirs can be heard singing on the soundtrack, giving the movie a clumsy, sardonic edge.

No doubt the producers thought it a clever marketing tool but the end result is that the entire picture feels like a bad joke. And I’m not even talking yet about the ultimate gimmick of the film which was Montgomery’s directorial choice to film the entire thing from a first-person perspective. We never see the actor’s face, except occasionally when it shows up in a mirror. This “break-through” camera technique also appeared in Humphrey Bogart’s Dark Passage, later that year, to greater effect. In Montgomery’s picture, it’s interesting for about five minutes, but then becomes about as enjoyable for the viewer as wearing those silly paper glasses at a 3-D picture.

It’s a device that simply doesn’t work in telling a mystery story since there’s no suspense and we don’t care about any of the characters because we only see them through the narrator’s eyes. It’s flat, two-dimensional and ultimately boxes-in the story in cheap sets designed to accommodate the film technique. On top of this, Audrey Totter, who is always a hoot, gives one of the most over-the-top performances I’ve ever seen. She seems to be mocking Montgomery with her stylized camp line readings and facial mugging. (Audrey Totter, below, courtesy of Life.)

Worst of all, the centerpiece of the novel, the discovery of the bloated water-sogged cadaver in the lake, is glossed over in expository dialogue. We never even see Marlowe up at the lake. Small wonder considering it would have been frozen solid at Christmastime. That just underscores how appalling the script changes were. There are a few good scenes. I can’t deny that. The car accident, in which Marlowe crawls his way across the screen, has a certain ingenuity to it. And the way in which the brutally murdered body of the gigolo is revealed slumped in the shower is pretty innovative and daring for its day. But the fact that this gigolo is played by Chris Lavery as an effete Southern dandy, with a phony accent, rather than as the muscle-bound Italian Stallion in the novel further proves how wrong-headed and bizarrely off-base this adaptation is. Why all these changes? They took a brilliant novel that exposed the underbelly of corruption in California society and turned it into a schlocky whodunnit with all the subtlety of a Dick Tracy comic strip.

I’m not surprised that Raymond Chandler, above, a notorious curmudgeon who was hired to write the screenplay based on his novel, was disgusted by it and took his name off the picture. Very little of his original screenplay seems to have been used. The dialogue is beyond second rate. And the wisecracks and forced similes, which were Chandler’s calling card, are several grades below his usual amusing level.

I’ve always found Robert Montgomery to be a creepy actor. He often comes across as stiff and mannered, as if he had a crick in his neck, smelly oily hair and stale cigarette breath. He seems just barely able to hold back his contempt for his fellow actors. He was notoriously right wing in real life and it’s a miracle his daughter Elizabeth Montgomery turned out as “bewitching” as she did. He was a very lazy actor. There are some films where he seems to be sleep-walking his way through the part (sometimes, I heard, because he hated the script or the director). Well, he can’t use that excuse here. He is simply awful as Philip Marlowe. (Adding insult to injury, the character’s name is erroneously spelled “Phillip Marlowe” on the window of his office: see below).

Of all the bad Philip Marlowes on screen, and there have been several (Powers Booth anyone?) Montgomery’s is the absolute nadir. He makes Elliott Gould, who mumbled his way through Altman’s quirky yet unwisely revisionist The Long Goodbye, look like a genius in comparison. Ironically Chandler was a big fan of Montgomery’s work in Night Must Fall, a grim serial killer film set in England with Rosalind Russell in an against-type, non-humorous part. It’s a nifty little suspense thriller but Montgomery is the weakest link in it.

If Santa asked me what I wanted for Christmas, I’d have to say a lavish remake of The Lady in the Lake starring George Clooney as Philip Marlowe. (Keep in mind that Chandler himself said he always envisioned Cary Grant in the role). Charlize Theron perhaps as Adrienne Fromsett. Mark Ruffalo as Lt. DeGarmot. And Nicole Kidman as Mildred Haveland, the cold-blooded femme fatale who knows more than she lets on about “the Lady in the Lake”.

Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows that I am just as passionate about actors as I am about writers. For me a good actor, either on the stage or on film, is someone who “writes” his own part by imbuing it with nuance, intelligence and an intangible connection with the audience. Intuition is key, as is inspiration. So it has always fascinated me when I stumble across an actor who later becomes a successful novelist. We don’t expect our stars to shine in other fields, but on occasion they do. A genius such as Noel Coward, above, of course, succeeded in nearly every genre, from acting and playwriting to singing and composing. He even penned a novel or two. But his flair for diversity is not the type of “double threat” surprise that I am talking about.

Think of the brilliant Dirk Bogarde, above. Here was an actor who excelled in most of the parts he played on the screen, whether essaying a matinee idol, a heartthrob doctor, a libeled baronet, a devious servant, a blackmailed homosexual, a Spanish gardener (admittedly a stretch), a dying composer, or a sadistic ex-Nazi. And yet, as Bogarde confessed at the end of his life, he was most proud of the fact that he wrote novels.

After his illustrious film career wound down, Dirk Bogarde picked up his pen and floored the cognoscenti by writing a handful of novels and a suite of memoirs, nearly all of which received surprisingly good notices. I, for one, prefer his memoirs, perhaps because they read like conversations, and one feels as if one is sitting beside Sir Dirk at dinner or over a “spot of tea” as he recounts his glamorous, but always slightly jaundiced, memories of past escapades.

His autobiographies, including A Postillion Struck By Lightning, Snakes and Ladders, An Orderly Man and Backcloth read like novels anyway. And judging by the response to them after his death, when many of his friends, family and critics openly discussed the lengths to which Bogarde hid, prevaricated or simply whitewashed his past, it’s safe to say that he used his skills as a novelist (those same ones that made him such a persuasive actor) to recreate, if not, reinvent, his life. The novels, including A Gentle Occupation, Voices in the Garden, West of Sunset and Jericho, probably won’t be read a hundred years from now, although A Period of Adjustment, which deals with AIDS, is an interesting time-capsule.

While Bogarde is clearly the best-known example of this phenomenon one might call “acthor,” there’s another person who came before him: Mary Astor, above. This elegant actress, who played so marvelously against type in The Maltese Falcon, turned to the page after a long career on celluloid. She wrote five novels and two memoirs. A friend of mine, Brad Bigelow at The Neglected Book Page has already done her justice. You can read more about her here.

Perhaps the first actor/author I discovered on my own was Gordon Merrick, above. I remember the moment vividly. When I was a teenager in the throes of puberty, I used to have terrible headaches (probably from repressed guilt.) My father sent me to an ancient doctor in Manhattan who gave me shots of histamine. His treatments did little to alleviate my suffering, but I loved my weekly trips into the city since they allowed me to explore New York and to shop in its bustling bookstores. One day, in Penn Station while waiting for a train, I found a paperback entitled The Lord Won’t Mind. No doubt it was the cover art which drew me to it: a shirtless blond boy with a come-hither look (this was the first paperback edition before the better-known Gadino cover came out.)

I bought the book and read it guiltily under the covers at night when I got home. The story of two young men summering in New Jersey who fall in love and have a clandestine gay affair (with a lot of turgid sex) was truly shocking for its time. The book created a sensation and was on the New York Times bestseller list for 5 months in hardcover (a feat unmatched by any other gay novel, I suspect, since then.) Reading Gordon Merrick at the ripe age of fifteen, I was transported into a louche realm of sensuality I only dreamed about. I was determined to read everything I could find by this unusual author.

What I soon discovered is that Gordon Merrick, above, had started out his career as a scrawny young actor on Broadway. While still a student at Princeton in 1939, Merrick dropped out (à la F. Scott Fitzgerald), moved to New York and found a job in a Broadway show called The American Way with Fredric March and Florence Eldridge. Perhaps it was here that Merrick first met Moss Hart (husband of Kitty Carlisle) who was rumored to be his lover. Hart, who wrote the show with George S. Kaufman, soon helped cast Merrick as Richard Stanley in their next show, The Man Who Came to Dinner. He played the restless son who is eager to leave home. The reasons are never fully explained. Even in the film version with Monty Woolley, when the part was played by Russell Arms, one gets the impression this young man needs to spread his wings a bit and that Sheridan Whiteside, who eyes him affectionately, wouldn’t mind helping him out. Merrick stayed with the show for most of its run but perhaps because of this lengthy commitment he soon grew weary of the theater.

He turned his attention to journalism instead and found jobs at the New York Post and the Baltimore Evening Sun. During World War II he served in the OSS and wrote a novel about his experiences, The Strumpet Wind, that garnered a lot of attention, and was repackaged as The Night and the Naked. He followed this up with more pulpy potboilers: The Demon of Noon, The Vallency Tradition and The Hot Season (all of which are completely forgotten today). He also adapted James Purdy’s novel The Nephew for BBC Television. But in 1970, after having lived in Hydra, the South of France and eventually Ceylon, where he maintained a home, he wrote the book that made his name: The Lord Won’t Mind. The title is the moral at the end posited by the black maid who says “So long as it’s love, the lord won’t mind.” It was one of the first gay novels that was unapologetically positive.

Merrick followed this up with two more books in a trilogy about Charlie and Peter: One For the Gods and Forth Into Light. Then came a series of equally erotic tomes, including The Quirk (about his experiences on the stage), Now Let’s Talk About Music, and Perfect Freedom. Gadino’s brilliant beefcake cover art did a lot to guarantee their success. Merrick’s later works suffered from a tendency to overplay the lurid, and the focus on the size of a character’s sexual equipment rather than plot undermined their credibility. He died of cancer in 1988. A posthumous novel, The Good Life, based loosely on the infamous Wayne Lonergan murder case, above, was finished by his longtime lover Charles G. Hulse (author of the excellent gay novel In Tall Cotton).

The stage produced two more of my favorite novelists. The first, at least in terms of age, was James Kirkwood, Jr., above. Born in 1924, Kirkwood was the son of the famous Hollywood figures James Kirkwood, Sr., (best known for his films with D. W. Griffith) and silent screen star Lila Lee. His first real gig on Broadway was in Junior Miss, a play directed by the ubiquitous Moss Hart. In 1950, Kirkwood wrote sketches for and appeared in a revue, Dance Me A Song, along with Wally Cox and Joan McCracken (who had been married to the dancer/novelist Jack Dunphy, later Truman Capote’s lover.) The revue lasted only 35 performances. Kirkwood’s next role was as the grown-up Patrick Dennis in Auntie Mame but according to the Internet Broadway Database, he was replaced in rehearsals. He later toured with leading ladies Tallulah Bankhead, Martha Raye, Kaye Ballard, and Elaine Stritch, all of which ended up being fodder for his later show Legends. Kirkwood, who must have felt it difficult to live up to his parents’s notoriety, fared better in the burgeoning field of television. Throughout the 50s, he appeared on such hit TV shows as Valiant Lady, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Lawman, and Perry Mason.

Kirkwood’s literary breakthrough came in 1960 when he wrote his first novel (as “Jim Kirkwood) There Must Be A Pony!, a thinly veiled account of his life growing up with his mad-as-a-hatter mother. In the novel she’s called Rita Cydney and the boy named Josh becomes embroiled in a murder mystery when his mother’s fiancé, who had taken a paternal interest in him, winds up dead. The story is as precocious, outrageous and funny as the young boy who tells it. He worries that he’s a sissy. “When people keep telling you you’re a sissy you start believing them,” he says. But he’s a cute sissy with an attractive “sensitive face.” Sometimes it gets him into trouble. “I’ve also been exposed to a lot of weird stuff because of the way I look,” Josh adds. “I mean if there’s a bona fide homosexual within a thousand miles, you can bet he’ll find me and make a pass.” Kirkwood dedicated the book to his parents “with love and shingles.” Recently a biography called Riding James Kirkwood’s Pony by William Russo was printed, purporting to reveal the true story of the murder of Lila Lee’s fiancé. The novel had legs. Elizabeth Taylor and Robert Wagner, below, starred in the 1986 TV adaptation by Mart Crowley (of Boys in the Band fame). Chad Lowe played the boy.

But it was his second novel, Good Times/Bad Times (1968) that firmly established Kirkwood as a writer to reckon with. The riveting tale of a lonely boy at a prep school, accused of murdering its sadistic headmaster, the novel has some autobiographical overtones. The boy, Peter Kilburn, is the son of a down-on-his-luck actor, and soon finds “a warm friend” in Jordan Legier, “a frail, but charismatic young man.” Good Times is a more explicit spin on A Separate Peace, with echoes of Tea and Sympathy as well. The sexually-charged massage scenes between Peter and Mr. Hoyt, the closeted headmaster, give the novel a decidedly pre-Stonewall air of homophobia, but the writing is strong enough that such political incorrectness seems irrelevant. The ever-respectable Cleveland Amory called it “the best young novel by the best young novelist we’ve read since J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.”

James Kirkwood, of course, went on to even greater triumphs. He wrote plays, memoirs, toured in a comedy show, and even wrote a non-fiction account of the Clay Shaw-Jim Garrison scandal surrounding the Kennedy assassination, American Grotesque. His novel P.S Your Cat is Dead, about a gay burglar, was made into a film with Steve Guttenburg. Some Kind of a Hero was bowdlerized in a screen adaptation for Richard Pryor.

His comedic Legends has had several lives since it debuted with Carol Channing and Mary Martin in 1987. He wrote a memoir of his experiences with that show, Diary of a Mad Playwright. Kirkwood is best-known, however, for co-writing A Chorus Line in 1976. He won the Tony, the Drama Desk award, and the Pulitzer Prize for that work. He died in 1989 from spinal cancer. His work will always be remembered for its wit, honesty, and willingness to take risks.

Kirkwood’s contemporary James Leo Herlihy, above, had an equally varied career. Born in 1927 into a working class family in Detroit, Herlihy enlisted in the Navy during WWII. Afterward, he studied at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, known as a think tank for artists such as Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and Willem de Kooning. Herlihy studied acting and toured for several years in California and later in Boston where he starred in Edward Albee’s A Zoo Story. He would continue to act for years afterward, both on stage and on screen.

But starting in the 50s, Herlihy found his true voice as a writer. He penned his first play Blue Denim (with William Noble) about an affair between a young boy and a girl who end up having a baby. It opened on Broadway in 1958 with Carol Lynley in the lead. She recreated the role in the 1959 film, above, also starring Brandon de Wilde. The latter would end up starring in John Frankenheimer’s All Fall Down (1962), based on Herlihy’s acclaimed first novel. The poignant story of a young boy who is enamored of his wild and unpredictable playboy brother, All Fall Down is a novel which deserves a much wider audience today. The film version made a star out of Warren Beatty at the height of his “impossibly beautiful” phase. The paperback version also sported a compelling cover by Victor Gadino.

In 1959, Herlihy had published a book of acclaimed short stories, The Sleep of Baby Filbertson, with a cover illustration by Tom Keogh, husband of the writer Theodora Keogh whom I’ve covered here a few times. The collection is clearly inspired by Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, and contains a telling little tale entitled “Miguel” about a young gay hustler from Uruguay who works his way across the United States from New Orleans to San Francisco, taking advantage of what Tennessee Williams had called “the kindness of strangers.” It ends on a note of ambivalence. Has he committed murder, killing the one man he loved? Or is he just drifting from one bed to the next, unable to make a life for himself, never finding true love? It is merely a sketch but one can see how Herlihy developed these dark themes later in his more mature work.

Meanwhile, Herlihy was still acting, appearing in Route 66 in an episode about a novelist who is shot and killed. He played a newspaper reporter. In 1963 he appeared in the now-cult Jean Seberg movie, In the French Style. But most of his acting was on the stage. He also taught acting and playwriting.

Herlihy, of course, achieved lasting literary fame by writing the modern classic Midnight Cowboy, about a hopelessly misguided hustler from Texas who befriends a down-and-out grifter in Manhattan. The film, which came out in 1970, directed by John Schlesinger, won the Oscar as Best Picture of the Year — the only X-rated film ever to do so, although the X-rating seems superfluous today. Season of the Witch (1971) followed. A tale of drifters in the psychedelic 60s, it is a novel that is nearly forgotten today, but which is much underrated. It has no connection to the film of the same name by George Romero. (Herlihy, below, with Tallulah Bankhead, whom he directed in 1959’s Crazy October. Courtesy of Tom Sutpen’s website.)

After the immense success of Midnight Cowboy, Herlihy seems to have drifted in and out of teaching jobs as well as a final acting appearance in the film Four Friends. Little is known about his private life. He apparently committed suicide at his home in Los Angeles in 1993 by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.

Less depressing is the story of Bennington-born Carleton Carpenter, above, one of the bright stars of MGM’s second-wind era of musical-making. Sort of a blond Tommy Tune type, his gangly good looks and effervescent charm landed him a number of key parts on film. He appeared in Summer Stock, along with Judy Garland and Gene Kelly, and the Debbie Reynolds’s film, Two Weeks in Love.

Prior to all of that, he’d made his mark on Broadway in shows such as Bright Boy, Three To Make Ready and Hotel Paradiso. Most of his acting, however, was on television where he was cast in shows as diverse as The Shirley Temple Storybook and The Rifleman. He preferred writing songs and is credited with the tune “Christmas Eve.” According to IMDB, he wrote special material for Debbie Reynolds, Kaye Ballard, Marlene Dietrich and Hermione Gingold. His acting career fizzled, however, for reasons that are unknown. He appeared in a few later films, most notably the underground gay cult film, Some of My Best Friends Are (1971) and the particularly gruesome slasher film, The Prowler (1985).

But I first knew of Carleton Carpenter by reading one of his wacky mystery novels, Dead Head, which I had found at a paperback trader in New Haven. Starting in the 70s, when he could let his hair down, Carpenter scribbled clever mystery novels set in trendy demimondes, such as Only Her Hairdresser Knew, Cat Got Your Tongue, and Games Murderers Play. I read them more for the bitchy humor than the plots which often were too convoluted to follow. Dead Head, set in the theater world, was supposedly turned into a Broadway musical, although it does not show up on IBDB. During the 80s, he wrote for Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen magazines.

Eagle-eyed collectors are always on the lookout for his Gothic romance Pinecastle by Ivy Manchester, one of his female pseudonyms. It was later reissued as Stumped under his real name. Carpenter, unlike the other “acthors” discussed here, is still alive.

Another matinee idol who became a novelist, quite to the surprise of his aging fans, was George Nader, above. One of the beefcake heartthrobs of the 50s and 60s, and part of the notorious Henry Willson stable of young stars, George Nader did not have a particularly distinguished film career. He was always being shown off in tight trunks. His big break came in 1953 when he starred in a sci-fi B-movie Robot Monster.

He also appeared as the pilot in the Bette Davis film Phone Call from a Stranger. In 1954 he was cast in the notorious stinker, Sins of Jezebel, with Paulette Goddard. Two years later he starred opposite Esther Williams in The Unguarded Moment. But he found more consistent work in television, including his own detective series Shannon. Rumors of his homosexuality dogged his career. He moved to Europe with his partner Mark Miller and starred in a few flicks there. But basically his acting career was over, especially after a car accident damaged his eyes.

In 1978, having returned to the States, Nader amazed everyone by writing a science fiction novel, Chrome. It is considered by many to be the first homosexual sci-fi story, but that it not technically true since the love affair is between a robot and a man. The twist is that neither character, Chrome nor his lover Vortex, knows which one is the robot. Perhaps Nader was inspired by his earlier film, Robot Monster. Critics were mystified, but kind. The London Sunday Times columnist, Patrick Campbell, described it as “a laser-dazzling work of the imagination.” Chrome was published in hardcover by Putnam, then reissued in paperback several times. It is basically a metaphorical attack on the hypocrisy and repressive nature of modern America. Nader had planned it to be part of a trilogy but due to poor health, he never completed it. He died in 2001 after years of persistent health problems.

One of Chrome’s champions was cinematic hunk Thomas Tryon, above, who called it “a first-rate story, a futuristic page-turner.” As one of the most renowned “acthors” himself, that is not surprising. And like Nader, Thomas Tryon had appeared in a campy sci-fi film, I Married A Monster From Outer Space.

Born in 1926 in Hartford, the son of a clothier, Tryon trod the boards on Broadway, most notably in Wish You Were Here, the long-running 1952 musical starring Florence Henderson and Jack Cassidy. He went to Hollywood and was cast in several films, including Moon Pilot, The Longest Day and In Harm’s Way. He appeared often on television. His rugged good-looks and masculine demeanor typecast him however as a matinee idol and Tryon bristled at the lack of good acting roles. Today he is best known as the star of The Cardinal, a role which garnered him a Golden Globe. But he fought often with the director Otto Preminger who seemed to take sadistic delight in humiliating Tryon on the set.

That debacle led Tryon to basically forgo his acting career in favor of writing novels. His first, The Other (1971), a spooky thriller about a pair of evil twins, was a phenomenal bestseller and soon became a film by Richard Mulligan starring Uta Hagen in a rare film appearance. Tryon followed this up with Harvest Home, another haunting tale similar in spirit to Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, that was made into a rather campy TV mini-series starring Bette Davis. His book Crowned Heads featured a story, “Fedora,” a thinly-disguised tale of Greta Garbo, that was made into a 1978 film by Billy Wilder with an all-star cast, including William Holden and Marthe Keller. Some consider Lady to be Tryon’s best novel, but I have a soft spot for Night of the Moonbow (1989), about a young kid at camp who snaps after being harassed by his fellow cabin mates. Tryon’s best work revolved around boys, and the mischief they can do.

The fact that Tryon was struggling with his sexuality throughout his career did not become generally known until later when he had an affair with Calvin Culver, aka Casey Donovan, the famous gay porn star. Tryon also was lovers with Clive Clark, a dancer from A Chorus Line. But Tryon never wrote explicitly about homosexuality. He was never part of the gay scene. His feelings on the matter are hidden, however, in between the lines of his strange, moody works. He died in 1991 from stomach cancer.

Perhaps you noticed that everyone I’ve mentioned above has been gay (with apologies to Mary Astor). This is not a coincidence. I could have included William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, above, both of whom are actors who have written novels (most likely ghost-written). But those are spin-offs of their TV shows. Peter Ustinov certainly counts as an actor who went on to great success on the page. But, like Noel Coward, Ustinov was a Renaissance man, not an “acthor.” Steve Martin has managed to do both quite well, thank you, but I don’t think of him as an actor so much as a comedian.

There is one actor who was straight who does fit my parameters: Gardner McKay, above. Like his hunky cohorts, Gardner McKay was a creation of the Hollywood factory. Born in New York City in 1932, McKay attended Cornell where he excelled at sports. At 6′, 5″, 200 pounds of muscle, he was a world-class sailor who crossed the Atlantic 18 times. He graced the cover of Life magazine before he had really accomplished anything besides being incredibly handsome.

In time he made the rounds of TV studios. He landed a few roles but it wasn’t until he caught the eye of television producer Dominick Dunne (yes, the same guy who became a noted novelist himself) that fate beckoned. Dunne saw something in McKay and got him cast in a new series Adventures in Paradise, which was based on the South Seas experiences of writer James Michener. The show was a hit and ran for over three years.

I first laid eyes on McKay in the film The Pleasure Seekers, which is a camp classic starring Ann-Margret. His sultry good looks nearly stole the picture from her and co-star Anthony Franciosa. A popular playboy, McKay dated screen sirens Julie Newmar and Joan Collins. But McKay seems to have grown bored with acting, and took up photography, sculpture and writing. He became a film critic for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and wrote several plays.

In 1999, he published the novel, Toyer, a strange crime story about a demented serial sadist who tortures his victims rather than kills them. The book later made publishing history since it was reprinted with twelve different front covers, featuring each of his victims. I have not read the novel, but it got very good reviews and was made into a play that opened in London not so long ago. McKay, who had retired to Hawaii with his family, died two years later of prostate cancer. His memoirs Journey Without a Map were published after his death. An obit mentioned four other novels but I’ve not been able to find any of them on various internet book selling sites and I wonder if they ever saw the light of day.

So where does all this leave us? Are actors who write as rare a creature as I surmise? I suppose I could wax poetic about Ethan Hawke, the former teen idol, whose novel The Hottest State was a surprise to many of his fans, and to talk show hosts who were literally speechless when it came out in 1997. The same with Ash Wednesday in 2002 which I had a hard time selling even to college students when I still had my book store. In my mind, Hawke, below, simply does not have that je ne sais quoi of the men I’ve mentioned here.

Perhaps he lacks that sense of gravitas one finds in Dirk Bogarde, whose film work as well as his books are timeless and profoundly moving. Nor do such wunderkinds exude the rich heritage implicit in the oeuvres of veteran actors such as Herlihy and Kirkwood. When I look at the stylish novels of Carleton Carpenter and Thomas Tryon, I also see a reaction against the past, the need to find a new voice, a new medium, to express what demons lurked inside. And then I go back to read one of Gordon Merrick’s hilariously over-the-top gay romances and I scratch my head and wonder, why did he do it? Was it just for the money? Or did he know that the world was changing and that the kind of sleaze he was writing would soon be the norm? (Merrick, below, as captured by Hulse.)

Actually when you think about the reverse, writers who have become actors, the numbers are practically non-existent. I can only think of Gore Vidal whose star-turn in Bob Roberts generated a heap of hype. Perhaps there is something left unsaid by actors that needs to find new meaning on the page. I find it fascinating that these larger-than-life personas, who once graced the screen and the stage, collaborating with crowds of co-workers, chose to reinvent themselves as authors. Writing is a solitary art. And perhaps these troubled souls found in it the solace they were seeking.