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.